sabrebash:

trilllizard420:

trilllizard420:

dear-tumb1r:

fullhalalalchemist:

fullhalalalchemist:

here’s my question……………if an animal was extremely endangered, like borderline almost extinct…..could beast boy……y’know…..

you all ignored this so im bringing it back

Yes. He could.

yeah, he can turn into fucking dinosaurs so of course he can turn into near extinct animals. fuck kinda question is this?

wait a minute.

WAI-

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that this actually happened. Just with a guy in the DC Wanderers series that could turn into birds who had to save some dinosaurs.

We were all sorry to have witnessed it.

writing-prompt-s:

air-jupiter:

writing-prompt-s:

What’s the most valuable lesson that you have learned this year?

I used to convince myself that because my feelings didn’t cloud my judgement, I was always acting on my judgement.

Recently I’ve broken it down into three major components: logic, disordered logic, and emotions. Although I’m perfectly capable of differentiating the difference between my logic and my disordered logic, my disordered logic still makes me feel the same way my logic does, and my feelings may not cloud my judgement but they tend to overpower it.

To combat that, I have to learn how be confident in my ability to handle my emotional state and prioritise logic, but that’s a bit hard due to my… crippling depression 👌

I’m working through it though. It’s a step by step process, and although I’m not confident in my abilities now I know that the solution is to just keep strengthening them. It won’t happen in a day, I’m sure I’ll have my good days and my bad days, but recovery isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

All I know is that I’ll be okay.

Your ability to reflect honestly on yourself and your own flaws..now that’s what I call strength, amigo. Respect.

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
[…]

People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…]

That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

zenosanalytic:

erratticusfinch:

That lots of fascists and other reactionaries appear “dumb,” in that their views and positions have no relationship with historical/biological/sociological reality, doesn’t mean they have no political savvy. If anything that’s what makes them a danger, not having to remain grounded in the rules of the game that is rational public discourse. They’ve cottoned to the fact that liberal society will let them play that game without fuss anyway, even if their contribution is “there is a race war between white people and the Jews and we’ll stop at nothing to see our side win.”

I was talking with a group a few weeks ago about how fascist ideology (and right-wing ideology more broadly) is deliberately anti-rational – it appeals to cults of action and war, mythical depictions of a glorious past, and emotional manipulation through patriarchal affirmations and racial scapegoating. And then someone replied by saying “well, I agree that fascism is a dumb ideology,” which is precisely the opposite of what I was saying. Some of its adherents might be dumb but as a political strategy, it is very, very clever.

That’s the threat they pose. There are some who will actually be dumb saps and some who will just be playing the part to sneak their way into the mainstream, as they have already done; either way it’s to our detriment not to take them seriously, or to not take the steps to dismantle even the potential for them to gain any more ground than they have.

Apropos:

  1. Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream from Buzzfeed
  2. We Snuck into Seattle’s Super Secret White Nationalist Convention from The Stranger          
           

     

vampireapologist:

glumshoe:

mybrilliantusername:

glumshoe:

A reminder that it’s illegal in the USA to collect or sell the feathers of wild birds (and their eggs, bodies, and nests) even if you find them lying on the ground, unless you have a permit to do so. As in, actually illegal, not “outdated law everyone has forgotten about and is no longer enforced”. Eagle parts are extra illegal.

How about bones?? Not like bird specifically just animal bones in general. Also why is it illegal?? There so many birds ergo so many feathers no ones gonna miss em

The specifics depend on your state, the situation, and whether the species is a game animal, but usually, it’s illegal unless you are licensed (ex for educational purposes).

There really aren’t “so many birds”. The populations of many species are rapidly declining due to habitat loss and pollution. I’ve seen birds of prey autopsied and their insides are often coated in plastics. Pesticides and rodenticides wipe out truly horrifying numbers of larger birds – please only ever use mechanical traps for mice and rats, not poisons.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 was passed four years after the last passenger pigeon died. It discourages the personal and commercial collection of bird parts for very good reason.

Oh, Ship! Tag me in on this one, I’m ready!

So, the history of Wildlife law in the United States goes way back, actually, to the history of wildlife law in Great Britain.

See, in Ye Olden Days, the King was in charge of deciding who was and wasn’t legally allowed to hunt. This was a Big Deal, because many people needed to hunt to feed and clothe themselves and their families. If the King said “you can’t hunt anywhere near where you live because those are My Deer,” you were, well, fucked.

Eventually, this power of wildlife ownership was technically redelegated to parliment, but hunting often remained super inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy, privileged few.

So when people started coming here from there, it was a total free-for-all. You could hunt anywhere, anything! There were things to shoot in the US that had been extinct in the British aisles for centuries, even!

So not only were people hunting for food, clothing, to drive out unwanted animals (see: wolves), but also for the hell of it because they were allowed!

For a while though, hunting was still very much an “I need to eat” business. Can’t fault ‘em for eating, ya know?

But once Europeans became really established here, with cities and leisure time and fashion, things got way out of hand.

There were pretty much No laws dictating how many animals a person could take, or when and from where they could take them.

What’s more is, suddenly, it wasn’t just for food, it was for MASS PRODUCTION! You know what women REALLY wanted? Hats With Feathers. Lots Of Feathers.

People were already killing Many Birds, but not Enough. “We need to kill WAY MORE BIRDS and FASTER,” they said. So they made These Big Guns.

image

They were made for mounting on boats, and who gave a damn about ammo? ANYTHING that could presumably maim a duck was a go. They loaded them with pieces of tin, metal, shards of broken glass, ya know. The usual.

Then, at night, during Mating season, they’d go out onto the water, shine a light so that all the ducks raised their heads to investigate, fire the gun, and instantly decapitate hundreds of ducks a shot. It was wild.

So this was happening

image

And the REASON this was happening was there was a demand for these ducks, feathers, mainly. Meat second.

The demand is what’s imperative here. It didn’t matter if you had the means to kill 100 or 1000 birds in a night. If you shot ‘em, someone would pay for ‘em.

You can see where this started going wrong, however. Eventually, there were like, uh, no birds left to shoot.

So now everyone’s starting to say, “well, what the hell…it seems that shooting All Of The Birds At Once has somehow wiped them out. Maybe we should do something about this.”

NOW, that was NOT a popular move. People were really loving the whole “I can kill anything any time I want” thing going on. They argued that limiting their take would violate their rights and freedoms (never mind the hypocrisy of claiming any rights to the wildlife of this land that had been taken from the indigenous peoples they’d killed and driven out).

But responsible hunters knew that wildlife and hunting laws were imperative to the continued existence of wildlife.

This wasn’t a new concept, mind you. Responsible Wildlife laws are even in the damn Old Testament:

“If you come across a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young.” Deuteronomy 22:6

Makes sense, right? Eat the eggs but make sure the mother remains to lay more. 

And more than a century before, John Quincey Adams is quoted in reference to the issue:

“I went with my gun down upon the marshes, but had no sport. Game laws are said to be directly opposed to the liberties of the subject; I am well persuaded that they may be carried to far, and that they really are in most parts of Europe. But it is equally certain that where there are none, there is never any game; so that the difference between the country where laws of this kind exist and …where they are unknown must be that in the former very few individuals will enjoy the privilege of hunting and eating venison, and in the latter this privilege will be enjoyed by nobody.”

ANYWAY. Point was, people were realizing that if things didn’t change fast, there’d be nothing left to hunt, to eat, or to use for Fancy Hats.

So we got the Lacey Act of 1900, the first federal wildlife law.

“I have always been a lover of birds, and I always been a hunter as well, for today there is no friend that the birds have like a sportsman-the man who enjoys legitimate sport. He protects them out of season; he kills them with moderation in season.”  John Lacey.

It limited market-hunting and commercial wildlife trafficking. People with Super Duck Guns were especially unhappy about this. However, if ducks understood federal laws, they would’ve been thrilled.

The problem was, there was still a HUGE demand for feathers, for meat, and absurdly, for specimen for people’s private collections. “I don’t CARE if that’s the last known living Auk. I want it.”

So they had it.

What we needed to do was to destroy the demand for bird products. And to destroy the demand, we had to stop products from being made. If no one is walking down the street wearing a Fancy Bird Hat, no one else is going to say “oh! I want one too,” and no one is going to pay a Fancy Hat Maker to pay a Big Duck Gun owner to shoot 1,000 birds.

So we got the Migratory Bird Treat of 1918, which made it almost totally across the board illegal to own Any bird parts (excluding legal game birds, but laws about when and how many you could hunt were forming to protect them).

 There is a misnomer that taking something off the legal market will increase demand because people love what they can’t have. That’s proven untrue in this case. Very few people are actually willing to break Actual Federal Law in order to own a hat they can’t wear in public. The issue was larger society and for the most part law-abiding citizens who wore this stuff while it was legal but moved on once it wasn’t.

The reason it still exists is to keep the demand for bird parts non-existent, and it’s WHY you can’t legally collect feathers even when they fall off a bird naturally.

Because hey, YOU may live in an area with a healthy golden eagle population. Or a Blue Jay population. Or Red headed woodpeckers. YOU find their feathers all the time! They just fall off, no harm done.

So you pick them up, make them into cool jewelry and art, and post them on your etsy and pinterest.

They’re super popular! People love them!

Now I want in on that business!

But there aren’t many golden eagles, blue jays, or woodpeckers around me, so I don’t find their feathers often. But you know what’s way easier than looking for one, fallen feather? Shooting a bird and getting a lot at once.

And thus an innocent market has once again created an unsustainable demand that will threaten bird populations.

And that’s why it’s just flat out against Federal US law to own, collect, or sell almost any wild bird parts!

And MAKE NO MISTAKE! This law is Very Enforced. Wildlife officers Do pay attention to people talking about collected bird parts, and they Will throw the book at you. The fines are wild. Don’t risk it.

THANKS FOR READING THIS LONG-ASS EXPLANATION!

zenosanalytic:

magpiedminx:

wetwareproblem:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

legally-bitchtastic:

tatspiercings-blackrose:

targuzzler:

jbvonhemp:

targuzzler:

Oh no what a fucking tragedy

Why don’t you Google average wait times to receive a medical procedure. There are Canadians that come to the U.S. to get medical care rather than wait over a month to get it done in Canada.

I had cancer and im canadian dumbass i know full well what the wait times are like and its only long if its shit that can wait. Im sorry but im ok with waiting with a non life threatening injury if no one gets turned away from healthcare because they’re poor. The only canadians that go to the united states are rich enough that they are willing to spend the money to save a few hours waiting

Except people with life threatening injuries have to wait as well. My father had to go to the ER because the screws in his knee busted making his stitches rip open and my parents waited for hours before finally leaving when they noticed an elderly woman with a head injury and broken leg waiting at least four hours BEFORE my parents arrived.

 http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/death-after-34-hour-er-wait-was-preventable-judge-1.2144671

Brian Sinclair’s death was completely preventable, yet he waited 34 HOURS in the ER for treatment that would have taken 30 minutes to an hour at most.

There are pros and cons to Canada’s healthcare, and if people want to spend extra money for arguably better treatment and shorter wait lines, I’m personally going to support them any way I can.

Yeah, that happens in the US too though. Literally every single day. Go into any ER in the country at like 9:30 pm and you will see dozens of people with painful injuries waiting hours to see a doctor. People die in the US waiting to see a doctor. The only difference is that it costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.

I had to wait six months to see an endocrinologist in the US and when I wanted to switch doctors I had to wait another six months to see somebody else, who are these people in the US who don’t have wait times?

You know what the Canadian system has that the US system doesn’t? Actual in-depth documentation of actual wait times. Here are the 50/90 numbers for my tiny-ass chronically underfunded province. Here they are for a populous and well-funded one. You’ll notice that the general trends of those numbers are either flat or downward – which is not the case in the US, from what I can find. You’ll also notice that the 30-day benchmark cited in that paper is… not very far at all from most of Ontario’s 90s.

(Brian Sinclair’s death, by the way? It’s a terrible tragedy… but the problem there was not that health care resources are spread too thin. It was racism. They saw a native man and assumed he was homeless and drunk, not in distress. As the study I cited above shows, racism is also a factor in US health care.)

So basically, you’re paying a lot more, at both the end-user and governmental levels… but you’re not actually getting a lot more.

Finally: You know what else Canada has that the US doesn’t? Wait time guarantees that require offering a faster alternative if they’re blown.

All those stories of Canadians coming to the US? Yeah, they’re basically made up. Even the highly shady right-wing think tank that Fuckface von Clownstick got the story from, trying to make the best possible case for privatization, only found that 1% of Canadian patients received health care abroad. One. percent. And that’s not “went to the US for health care,” that’s “received health care literally anywhere else for any reason, including just happening to be in another country when we got sick or injured.”

The actual numbers? Well, this study is old, but… out of a pool of 18 000 respondents, they found twenty who went to the US specifically for care.

Twenty. 0.11%.

They found that this data was consistent with Canadian payment records and US border region hospital data, so… yeah. It basically doesn’t happen. And when it does? Frequently that’s because there is an issue with the normal procedures in Canada… so the provincial government covers the cost of getting the patient to the US and treating them there.

I’ll take that over “you must be this rich to live” any day of the week.

It was also found Canadians who are treated in the States are far morely to be there because they became sick or injured while on vacation or are snow birds rather than they purposefully crossed the border.

‘Cause let me tell ya, as someone with a few chronic issues, if my choice is a 20 minute trip to the local hospital in bad traffic, where I’ll at least get coping treatment while I wait or an hour trip, plus border wait, to the States? Yeah, I’ll go local every time. The whole not having to shell out money thing is nice.

I also live near the second busiest hospital in BC. (Possibly Western Canada) Longest I have EVER waited is two hours.. and that was for a shot of toradol for pain treatment.

Another thing the liars above leave out is the huge number of working people in the US who just… don’t go to the doctor when they get injured. Because they know they can’t afford either the cost or the time away from work to get treatment and let it do its work. The US is filled with manual laborers -from roofers to bartenders to painters to stockers- with chronic pain conditions, un- or poorly healed injuries. How do they live with it? Every advil/tylenol/aspirin commericial tells you how. The importance of pain-meds to Pharma profits and easy availability of blackmarket opiates suggests an alternate answer.

The US is 300million people largely self-medicating their pain-management because they don’t want to lose their jobs, can’t afford to see a doctor for it, and don’t trust doctors because of previous bad past experiences caused by the private healthcare system. These people are, effectively, stuck in life-long wait-times, yet conservative defenders of our broken system always seem to forget to mention them when the subject of public healthcare arises.