House Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson is making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to ceremonially kiss Donald Trump's butt. This is another example of how the Republican Party is now nothing more than a cult which worships the Orange One.

Johnson is hoping that his record on election denial will impress Trump and will encourage the latter to support Johnson against Marjorie Taylor Greene's challenge to his leadership.

Of course Trump demands total loyalty from everybody but gives it to nobody. Ask Kevin McCarthy if you don't believe me.

davidsuzukifdn

Just one more reason to switch to 100% renewables. We're on the brink of a massive win for renewables in Canada 

All I can think about recently is that there are three main career options for Grishaverse main characters:

A) Child soldier

B) Criminal

C) ✨Both✨

letters from his Spellbinder

"But beyond all my pain, there was you"

Narilamb designs: @runningwithscizzorz

here's an alt version of Narinder without the veil!! :D

I refuse to call government assistance programs “welfare” or “benefits”.

I’ve been on government assistance programs my whole life. I have never lived above the poverty line.

It’s a system that doesn’t care about my wellbeing, they care about doing the bare minimum to keep people alive enough to function and work, and if you’re disabled and cannot work, they give significantly less of a fuck.

And benefits?? What benefits?

Food stamps that run out within two weeks because I am budgeting with 8$ a day with literally dozens of dietary restrictions? Or do you mean the housing voucher that I have to never even have a gift card, penny to my name, Sams club membership, phone bill, literally anything that could be “income” in order to qualify? That same housing voucher system that if I mess up even once with I not only lose all government aid for at least 5 years, it’s also mandatory PRISON time for 1 year?? “Oh but they would never do that, right?” Nope! I have several friends who are now felons for minor lease violations and unhoused as a result! Oh maybe you mean the state health insurance that doesn’t cover most treatments, specialists, and testing I need and if I tried to make a gofundme to cover, I would lose aforementioned housing? Oh and we can’t forget all the money I get for being disabled, which is exactly 0$. I’m still fighting for SSI and have been for 6 years! That’s over 6 years with absolutely zero income. ZERO. And guess what, whenever I *do* get on SSI, I will lose my housing voucher. And I won’t be able to afford my current apartment because even in subsidized low income housing it’s too expensive for the maximum SSI “benefit” amount. And on SSI you can’t have savings over 2000$. Oh and they do make housing for people who are low income where you pay 30% of your income but I can’t even be on the waitlist since I don’t have any income. And on top of all this, I can never get married because I’ll lose all of the programs.

I could keep going. That’s not even half of the programs I’m a part of.

• None of them give me cash in hand. Even for vouchers I have to provide receipts for everything.

• Food stamps just straight up won’t even cover ineligible items. Which includes hot foods.

• I genuinely don’t believe that there’s a way to “game the system” and why would you? You would gain literally nothing.

• It’s designed to keep people poor. Once you make over a certain amount, you lose all or almost all benefits. There’s no way to slowly transition out of the programs, if you’re someone who’s able to. It’s all in or all out.

• All of these barriers are made significantly worse while unhoused/homeless. I’ve been homeless for over half of my life and there’s so many fucked up rules. If I missed one night staying in the shelter, I lost my housing voucher because I no longer was “verified as homeless” even if I was sleeping outside still.

Undereage Superheroes On The Rise: A Morally and Ethically Cause of Concern?

It's supposed to be another clickbait news but it comes at the time when the existence of ghost was recently proved factual at a small town in Illinois along witha its dead teenage superhero, when the heroes of Paris and by large France accidentally revealed they weren't adults at all, not even close, when Spiderman was unmasked to be 16-year-old Peter Parker, when the Young Justice was wounded in a large scale attack.

Most of the people involved and not involved are not having fun.

(This is inspired by the Miraculous fanfic The Growing Pains of Child Soldiers by BloodWolf13, a fic which I recommend you read since it is very, very good. Hits all my whump and angst points)

dp x dc prompt #32!

Danny moves to Gotham, but instead of his ghostliness unsettling people and drawing attention to him, it’s the fact that he’s so openly nice to people.

He’s helping people in a way that most people have been too scared to do for a very long time, and people definitely take notice when nothing immediately bad happens, and he keeps up the same as he always has with no foul schemes in sight.

Danny’s handed out food to people that needed it, stepped into disputes before they even got violent, picked up strays off the streets and taken them to places they could live better, stopped various muggings single handedly, and even assisted the paramedics and evac teams during large scale disasters.

While the bats didn’t have a real reason to investigate this force of uncontained kindness, they did strike up conversations when they happened across the same trouble, and were very fond of the teenager that seemed to wander the streets at all hours.

So of course everyone notices when the unconventionally friendly kid disappears, with the evidence linking him to a shadowy branch of the government.

my luck is so fucking balanced i had the WORST afternoon getting puked on and cleaning aforementioned puke for an insane amount of time and it happening AGAIN IMMEDIATELY but i just found out i got maximum pell grant ayeeeee

Eat the rich!

Overworked Heroes

I love a good overworked hero. So tired but still trying to keep that public eye image of themselves strong.

But, I don’t mean just tired.

I mean staying up till 4 AM only to wake up at 5 to start more paperwork or commute to their day job. Or setting that alarm for 30 minutes, just in desperate need of a nap, because they didn’t sleep at all, there just isn’t the time with all of the hero work they keep getting.

Heroes who are just living off of coffee and energy drinks and yet it ceases to help. Thief hands are constantly jittering from the boosts of caffeine and yet they’re still so tired.

Heroes that can’t even go to bed, only making it as far as the couch. Better yet, falling asleep at their desk or after driving home about to get out of the car and just passing out until they’re waking up to phone notifications from the hero agency.

Heroes who desperately need sleep. And it’s not even one particular villain’s fault. If anything it’s the government and their poor treatment of heroes.

There’s a post with over 25,000 notes that is an extremely excited reaction to a bill that’s being introduced, the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, that would increase the asset limit for recipients of SSI from the $2,000 that it has been for the last 39 years to $10,000 with automatic increases keyed to inflation.

This is of course a good thing. Disabled people shouldn’t have to sell every asset other than their home and car before they can get assistance, and should be permitted to save money for future needs or emergencies without penalty.

Here’s my problem: in the press release for this bill itself, it acknowledges that the average SSI recipient gets only $585 per month and the majority have no additional income. And there’s no reason why anyone on SSI would have additional income, besides being disabled, every dollar of income over $65 that a recipient earns is met with a 50¢ decrease from their next month’s SSI payment, so if someone earns $400 a month, they lose $167.50 of SSI benefit.

So riddle me this: how in the hell is anybody supposed to procure assets or savings of $10, let alone $10,000, when they are receiving an income so low it is only 48% of the federal poverty threshold? (That’s based on the average monthly payment, the maximum benefit is still below the poverty level.)

I will be excited when this group of senators, with all of their great concern for disabled people reliant on SSI, are ready to introduce a bill that raises the minimum benefit to at least 125% (and ideally 150%) of the federal poverty level, with automatic increases keyed to inflation, and larger benefits for people who have children who don’t qualify for non-time limited benefits of their own.

Raising the asset limit while maintaining punitively low benefits is like a host promising a lovely dessert after dinner is finished, then only serving a couple of one bite hors d’oeuvres and pretending like their guests are too stuffed for the sweets.

Rich vs poor

Ok sooo, I can’t stop thinking about the line from this post [here] by @swordfright , “Sam is a builder and dream is the ultimate engineering project: challenging (psychologically taxing to guard), important (to the stability of the server), rewarding (on those sporadic occasions when dream obeys him without question), and ceaseless (because the ideal prisoner always needs a warden to keep them in line.)” Because the idea that Dream is Sam’s “ultimate engineering project” really got me thinking about the definition of the duties of an engineer as per the Code of Ethics, which I studied in college.

As an engineer it is basically our responsibility to maintain sustainable development, which The National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) defines [here] in the Code of Ethics as, “meeting human needs for natural resources, industrial products, energy, food, transportation, shelter, and effective waste management while conserving and protecting environmental quality and the natural resource base essential for future development.” Even further, as a civil engineer (which I am and Sam is as a primary builder) it is our job to help provide the infrastructure and necessities to life, (shelter, water and by extension food +) with civil engineering encompassing the engineering fields of Structural (bridges, buildings, dams… etc), Utilities (power, gas, water, waste water… etc), Geotechnical (analyze and maintain that the ground can support projects), Environmental (protecting the stability of the environment like for example protecting the habitat of an endangered species), Transportation (roads for cars, train tracks, airplane runways… etc). Pretty much the necessities of civilization (lol hence civil). And I found this interesting because it is Sam’s job as the warden to provide the fundamental and basic necessities of Dream’s life in every way. So, in this way Dream would actually be the society Sam’s engineering is meant to benefit from and depends on (which he obviously denies and uses to abuse.)

But on the other side, interestingly a 2004 definition, [found here] of civil engineering based on Thomas Tredgold’s 1828 original is, “the art of working with the great sources of power in nature for the use and benefit of society”. And oh, the use of power here could very well be a good representation of Dream, making him actually the engineering project. Further, The NSPE Code of Ethics states, “Engineering has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people. Accordingly, the services provided by engineers require honesty, impartiality, fairness, and equity, and must be dedicated to the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare.” In this sense, Sam’s position as the warden was dedicated to the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare, which by keeping Dream locked up, weakening him physically and mentally he was in essence trying to protect the server as well as working to strip the sources of power Dream had over everyone. And when his methods didn’t work, he let Quackity in, which funnily enough goes along with one of the The Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISS)’s summarizing stated [here] fundamental canons, “Engineers shall perform services only in the areas of their competence.” And clearly Sam was not competent in getting the book from Dream, so he teams up with Quackity, his contractor, to finish the project as is typical in the engineering industry.

All this to say, that Sam as an engineer, while not sworn to follow a defined of code ethics still followed the general defined duties of engineering and strived to work for the betterment of the server. A personality and behavior, that Dream saw in him as they grew as friends and worked to build the prison - Sam’s passion for helping, to provide for and develop the necessities of society. His passion for wanting to use his skills to improve the world and help people. His strong principles of dependability, efficiency, justice, work ethic. If Sam was given a job to help people he was going to see it through to the best of his ability. He would not abandon his post, he would protect and serve the common good. - His strong engineering attitude made him a good choice in Dream’s mind for the warden, because of these qualities, which makes sense. What Dream did not realize is that he was not included in the society and all people Sam felt obligated to serve and provide for.

Instead, Dream was but a resource of power - the revival book - needing to be made efficient and accessible, so that everyone could benefit and share that power. Dream thought he’d be provided for and taken care of, but he was the project instead. Sam’s “ultimate engineering project” he deemed too damaged like a bumpy road or crumbling building that wasn’t worthy of patching and filling in the cracks or reinforcing, that’s too eroded to be fixed and preserved. So, Sam strived to tear him down to the bedrock so he could remake, remold, and reengineer Dream according to his design for the common safety, public health and well-fair. He was such a good engineer just like Dream knew he would be, he just forgot the whole teeny weeny ethics part of being an engineer that kind of comes with the job description… Oh well. ;)

.