level20mallow
level20mallow
Love isn't decent. Love is glorious and shameless.
-Elizabeth Von Arnim
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peachy keen, jelly bean!
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Another star spirit, inhabiting a porcelain doll and calling herself Celeste, comes down to the surface to seek answers about the Star Road her kin will not offer her. Her discovery of a star-warrior sent down to find the Road's pieces, along with his merry band, is a pleasant surprise.
This fic was literally written by both me and Lilbluebox! She wrote the beginning scene, then we literally just shared a doc and wrote the rest of the fic together, it was great fun!
Here we're introducing Celeste into the mix, as well as diving a bit deeper into Geno's thoughts and history, and bits of Star Road culture!
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I think there’s something wrong with my copy of Mario rpg
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Often, what would have been considered the most brutal treatment when done to a slave is lauded, even fiercely and forcefully demanded when done to a child. Most adults think of children as lower than the lowest slave.
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Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart
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Well, it's about goddamn time a Democrat actually used Republican tactics against them
If they all did that 10, 20 years ago, we wouldn't be in this mess.
It was a mundane, unanimously supported bill on liquor taxation that saw state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh take to the mic on the Nebraska Legislature floor last week. She offered her support, then spent the next three days discussing everything but the bill, including her favorite Girl Scout cookies, Omaha’s best doughnuts and the plot of the animated movie “Madagascar.”
She also spent that time railing against an unrelated bill that would outlaw gender-affirming therapies for those 18 and younger. It was the advancement of that bill out of committee that led Cavanaugh to promise three weeks ago to filibuster every bill that comes before the Legislature this year — even the ones she supports.
“If this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful — painful for everyone,” the Omaha married mother of three said. “I will burn the session to the ground over this bill.”
True to her word, Cavanaugh has slowed the business of passing laws to a crawl by introducing amendment after amendment to every bill that makes it to the state Senate floor and taking up all eight debate hours allowed by the rules — even during the week she was suffering from strep throat. Wednesday marks the halfway point of this year’s 90-day session, and not a single bill will have passed thanks to Cavanaugh’s relentless filibustering.
Clerk of the Legislature Brandon Metzler said a delay like this has happened only a couple of times in the past 10 years.
“But what is really uncommon is the lack of bills that have advanced,” Metzler said. “Usually, we’re a lot further along the line than we’re seeing now.”
In fact, only 26 bills have advanced from the first of three rounds of debate required to pass a bill in Nebraska. There would normally be two to three times that number by mid-March, Metzler said. In the last three weeks since Cavanaugh began her bill blockade, only three bills have advanced.
The Nebraska bill and another that would ban trans people from using bathrooms and locker rooms or playing on sports teams that don’t align with the gender listed on their birth certificates are among roughly 150 bills targeting transgender people that have been introduced in state legislatures this year. Bans on gender-affirming care for minors have already been enacted this year in some Republican-led states, including South Dakota and Utah, and Republican Governors in Tennessee and Mississippi are expected to sign similar bans into law. And Arkansas and Alabama have bans that were temporarily blocked by federal judges.
Cavanaugh’s effort has drawn the gratitude of the LGBTQ community, said Abbi Swatsworth, executive director of LGBTQ advocacy group OutNebraska. The organization has been encouraging members and others to inundate state lawmakers with calls and emails to support Cavanaugh’s effort and oppose bills targeting transgender people.
“We really see it as a heroic effort,” Swatsworth said of the filibuster. “It is extremely meaningful when an ally does more than pay lip service to allyship. She really is leading this charge.”
Both Cavanaugh and the conservative Omaha lawmaker who introduced the trans bill, state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, said they’re seeking to protect children. Cavanaugh cited a 2021 survey by The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQ youth, that found that 58% of transgender and nonbinary youth in Nebraska seriously considered suicide in the previous year, and more than 1 in 5 reported that they had attempted it.
“This is a bill that attacks trans children,” Cavanaugh said. “It is legislating hate. It is legislating meanness. The children of Nebraska deserve to have somebody stand up and fight for them.”
Kauth said she’s trying to protect children from undertaking gender-affirming treatments that they might later regret as adults. She has characterized treatments such as hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery as medically unproven and potentially dangerous in the long term — although the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association all support gender-affirming care for youths.
Cavanaugh and other lawmakers who support her filibuster effort “don’t want to acknowledge the support I have for this bill,” Kauth said.
“We should be allowed to debate this,” she said. “What this is doing is taking the ball and going home.”
Nebraska’s unique single-chamber Legislature is officially nonpartisan, but it is dominated by members who are registered Republicans. Although bills can win approval with a simple majority in the 49-seat body, it takes 33 votes to overcome a filibuster. The Legislature is currently made up of 32 registered Republicans and 17 registered Democrats, but the slim margin means that the defection of a single Democrat could allow Republicans to pass whatever laws they want.
Democrats have had some success in using filibusters, which burn valuable time from the session, delay votes on other issues and force lawmakers to work longer days. Last year, conservative lawmakers were unable to overcome Democratic filibusters to pass an abortion ban or a law that would have allowed people to carry concealed guns without a permit.
Cavanaugh said she has taken a page from the playbook of Ernie Chambers — a left-leaning former legislator from Omaha who was the longest-serving lawmaker in state history. He mastered the use of the filibuster to try to tank bills he opposed and force support for bills he backed.
“But I’m not aware of anyone carrying out a filibuster to this extent,” Cavanaugh said. “I know it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating for me. But there is a way to put an end to — just put a stop to this hateful bill.”
Chambers praised Cavanaugh’s “perseverance, gumption and stamina to fight as hard as she can using the rules” to stand up for the marginalized, adding, “I would be right there fighting with her if I were still there.”
Speaker John Arch has taken steps to try to speed the process, such as sometimes scheduling the Legislature to work through lunch to tick off another hour on the debate clock. And he noted that the Legislature will soon be moving to all-day debate once committee hearings on bills come to an end later this month.
But even with frustration growing over the hobbled process, the Republican speaker defended Cavanaugh’s use of the filibuster.
“The rules allow her to do this, and those rules are there to protect the voice of the minority,” Arch said. “We may find that we’re passing fewer bills, but the bills we do pass will be bigger bills we care about.”
Chambers said this is a sign that Cavanaugh’s efforts are working. Typically, the Speaker will step in and seek to postpone the bill causing the delay to allow more pressing legislation such as tax cuts or budget items to move forward.
“I think you’re going to start to see some of that happen,” Chambers said. “I think if (Cavanaugh) has the physical stamina, she can do it. I don’t think she shoots blanks.”
#us politics#news#nbc news#nebraska#Machaela Cavanaugh#filibuster#trans healthcare ban#trans healthcare#trans rights#transgender#lgbtqia+ rights#lgbtqia+#lgbtqia+ representation#Nebraska Legislature#Brandon Metzler#2023#Abbi Swatsworth#OutNebraska#Kathleen Kauth#hormone therapy#gender reassignment surgery#Ernie Chambers#John Arch
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Abuse is incompatible with happiness. it's incompatible with life, bonds, family, trust and safety. Often, it is incompatible even with survival. Abuse does not bring anything worth having into your life. Nobody needs abuse to be strong.
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I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
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If you genuinely feel this way, don't waste my time talking to me at all. I don't want to waste time on people who are pretending to care to get something out of me. I want those who are genuinely interested in what I have to say.
#we know you don't care by the way#we are talking because it's part of maintaining social relationships#if what we have to say bores you then you should interact with someone else
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People are going full mask-off and showing us how deeply authoritarian and closed minded human beings actually are, and I argue that's a good thing.
I'd rather they stop hiding so I know for sure who is terrible and who is not. Anyone who has a long DNI list is usually one of those terrible people, so unless I know them in real life, I block and ignore them in kind.
oh hey, someone put that thing i was mad about yesterday into words!
#the authoritarian bent everyone has been on as of late has certainly shown us all who we truly are#but what if the truth is that we're all bad?#what do we do then?
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Without the abuse, I wouldn't have been this scared in every human interaction. I wouldn't feel like my life depends on saying the right thing and finding my way out of this situation safely. I wouldn't be this timid, this cagey, reluctant, imagining every worst scenario that can come out of a social situation. I wouldn't have images of torture in my mind when attempting to say no. I wouldn't find it this hard to refuse being useful to others when it violates my freedom.
I would be able to speak my mind. I'd be able to be honest in my own way, instead of finding reasons and reasons why I have to be as pleasant and non-demanding as possible. I wouldn't be afraid to ask for information when I want it. I wouldn't be scared to check what my options are.
Abuse forces me to walk the thinnest line of being convenient and nothing else. I don't get to have a personality, there's only fear. I'm different when I'm alone, I'm not afraid, I know what I want. But if you put another human being next to me, all of my convictions are overwritten by survival instinct to appease and escape.
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me, contemplating building a social connection: I'm just too demanding and I need too much understanding and compassion from people... nobody would ever be able to give me as much as I need :/ it would never be enough for me
me, upon getting someone's bare minimum: ...this is the best thing I ever got in the world I can't believe someone would go this far for me, this is the dream also if I lose this I'm gonna implode
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Skip Google for Research
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
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And in other news, the U.S. is going full mask-off in terms of being a horrifying hellhole
A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.
Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.
Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.
The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages filed as part of the complaint seem to show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived. A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home. The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.
Silva’s wife filed for divorce in May 2022, court records show, two months before the alleged abortion. The divorce was finalized in February. They share two daughters, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit relies heavily on screenshots from a group chat the ex-wife had with two friends seemingly seeking to help her terminate her pregnancy. Her friends expressed concern that Silva would “snake his way into your head.”
“I know either way he will use it against me,” the pregnant woman said, according to text messages attached to the complaint. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”
“Delete all conversations from today,” one of the women later told her. “You don’t want him looking through it.”
The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.
The legality of abortion in Texas in July 2022 is murky. The state’s trigger law, which makes performing abortion a crime punishable by up to life in prison, did not go into effect until August. But conservative state leaders, including Cain and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have claimed that the state’s pre-Roe abortion bans, which punish anyone who performs or “furnishes the means” for an abortion by up to five years in prison, went back into effect the day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June.
The legal status of these pre-Roe statutes remains a contentious question. In 2004, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those laws were “repealed by implication,” which U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman reaffirmed in a recent ruling. But Cain and others have repeatedly argued that the Legislature restored those laws into effect with recent abortion legislation. This issue went before the Texas Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed before a final ruling.
In 2021, the Legislature passed a law making it a state jail felony to provide abortion-inducing medication except under extremely specific circumstances.
Joanna Grossman, a law professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, said this lawsuit is “absurd and inflammatory.” Since the pregnant patient is protected from prosecution, there is no underlying cause of action to bring a wrongful death suit in a self-managed abortion, she said.
“But this is going to cause such fear and chilling that it doesn’t matter whether [Mitchell] is right," Grossman said. “Who is going to want to help a friend find an abortion if there is some chance that their text messages are going to end up in the news? And maybe they’re going to get sued, and maybe they’re going to get arrested, and it’s going to get dropped eventually, but in the meantime, they will have been terrified.”
But it’s possible this lawsuit could get traction, said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a law professor at South Texas College of Law.
“It’s scary to think that you can be sued for significant damages for helping a friend undertake acts that help her have even a self-medicated abortion,” Rhodes said. “Obviously, the allegations would have to be proven, but there is potentially merit to this suit under Texas’ abortion laws as they exist now.”
Mitchell and Cain intend to also name the manufacturer of the abortion pill as a defendant, once it is identified. “Anyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,” Cain said in a statement. Silva is asking a Galveston judge to award him more than $1 million in damages and an injunction stopping the defendants from distributing abortion pills in Texas.
#shit like this makes me think i ought to immigrate to canada#or anywhere you can buy abortion pills of all things without hassle#this bullshit is a genocidal act against women#and i do mean women because women are being targeted by this not us trans/non-binary folk#the shit cis men do to cis women is disgusting#it's literally terrifying to see#especially as a genderfluid person and not really male or female necessarily#this is not really about me aside from the fact that i am afab#but from the outside looking in it is terrifying
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Congress really needs to outlaw Daylight Savings Time.
#i know the u.s. is a banana republic and they never will#but it still needs to go away fast#it's not just annoying it's bad for your health#ban daylight savings time
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Happy Mar10 everyone
Also go check out the official Mario Brothers movie website because they added a few plot-specific things
You can only reblog this today.
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