cephalopod at hearts

Dawn Lewis, Pool Table, 1987

So do you think the plan is for Big Dog to take over Nad’s seat? Or for there to be a bunch of by-elections that the Tories then lose, triggering a no-confidence vote for Sunak and bringing Big Dog back to the big house? Or a secret third option?

Nah, probably not. I just like the ridiculousness of the idea. That would be the Maximum Chaos option. I suspect he'll be out for six months or so at least - there's no rule to say he can't immediately stand in a by-election, but given that he's just been found guilty by the Privileges Committee, he'll probably want to let that die down a little first.

I absolutely think he's going to try again, though. Even now, he still believes he did nothing wrong.

HOWEVER here is another fun What If scenario to ponder:

That honours list is frankly appalling, but the honours are actually granted by the monarch. And we have a new one! King Prince Charles is now on the throne, and painfully aware that no one likes him, because we keep telling him that we don't like him.

I don't think it's ever happened before, but theoretically, in principle, TECHNICALLY, he could just... refuse to grant them. He could do that. He could just... not.

Because here's the thing: loads of those people are specifically guilty of Partygate bullshit, including the party held before Prince Philip's funeral - the one that really turned the tide of public opinion, because even the Tory rags ran the photo of Queen Lizzie Two sitting isolated in a mask in the church with the headline "Tories party while the Queen is forced to grieve alone". If King Prince Charles were to make a big emotional declaration about how these people held parties on the night of his father's funeral, forcing his poor elderly beloved mother to be alone and weeping while they all shovelled fois gras into their mouths and fucked each other bareback against their glass office walls; if he were to stand before the press and hide his weird fingers and talk of his incredible grief and sorrow and disappointment and all the pain caused to his mother and himself; if he were to carefully leave Camilla at home and then somehow keep a straight face as he decries them all as unworthy of honours in the name of Queen Lizzie Two, and that as a principled man of morality he could not possibly grant these...

Not only does that absolutely kneecap Boris Johnson (and block a lot of honours), it would also go a long way to improving the Crown's reputation. He is VERY unpopular. That would boost his profile tremendously.

He won't. But, you know, it's fun to imagine.

The Saturday Update

Not a lot to add, not a lot, but a few fun extra things! One of which is likely setting the stage for Things To Come!

Let's start with what Notable Scum Rag the Daily Star ran on their front page:

God IMAGINE the Daily Star managing to claim a moral high ground over you fuck ME Christ on a bike "shamed clown" is right. The Daily Star. I almost want to open it and see if the sexy ladies inside are all posing coyly next to clown shoes and giving surprisingly satirical quotes about by-elections. It's a classy paper, obvs.

Anyway! The news! Well, I have two major pieces, under the cut for length:

I feel inadequate adding anything to this, but I feel I have to at least make reference to the Honourable (?) Member for the 18th century's comments.

Mr (soon to be Sir, concidentally enough) Rees Mogg has, with his usual dash of Demon Headmaster sinister-ness, told the completely unbiased Mail on Sunday that

"I would most strongly warn Conservative Party managers against any attempt to block Boris if he seeks the party nomination in another seat.

Any attempt to do so would shatter our fragile party unity and plunge the Conservatives into civil war."

Oh irony thy name is outdated twat in a double-breasted suit.

(I'd link to the article but would never dream of inflicted the Mail on Sunday on anyone unawares, and feel the need for a long shower just looking at it to check the quote's wording)

Important addition from my newsdesk colleague here

New fave pride memory is going to support a small town’s pride event. I prep for the worst, bring a gear bag just in case, especially with this current climate. Fortunately don’t need anything and am so incredibly moved that moms and dads in tshirts marshalled without any formal planning. Just stood at intersections blocking cars. Walked on the street side of their kids. Slowed down with me when we passed houses that could be a problem. A local cafe let everyone know we could stop in if anything was a problem. Just insanely proud of that community for what they accomplished and the safety they ensured for each other. No cops, just friends, family, and people who through smiles made sure everyone got home okay.

Going again this year and very very excited. I remember the first time I saw cishet allies in self-made “mom hug” “dad hug” shirts going around telling people they were proud of them at a big city pride event. Now I see those shirts available in stores because more and more people will wear them. I remember the first time I saw obvious families attending together. “I love my gay son” signs. It was lifechanging then.

I would wager over half of the attendees at this small town pride event were cishet. Maybe even 2/3. So many kids’ parents. Aunts uncles grandparents. The kids’ TEACHERS were there. I couldn’t begin to tell you what it would have done for me to see adults I looked up to at a pride event. I sure as shit wasn’t out as anything in high school. At this small town event there were teens with pride flags and pronoun pins. So proud and standing next to protective and proud adults.

All the adults weren’t just there to support either. They were there to defend. A guy with a trump flag on his porch came out to fold his arms and look at us angrily. I slowed down. So did 4 dads and a mom. I didn’t expect to have backup if something went down but EVERY adult understood the weight of what we were doing. How important it was so support and celebrate and cut loose but those allies never lose sight of the risk of being here. They were prepared to step in to let their kids celebrate uninterrupted.

The love and courage and commitment of those allies is so dear to me now. It felt more like pride than any bank float parade flanked by cops I can tell you that much.

We keep us safe.

Correct. The company is not your friend. You may be friends with your colleagues, with your boss, and that’s fine. The reason I’ve stayed at my company for a long time is the people I get to work with. But the corporate entity is not your friend.

I get tasked with finding savings every goddamn quarter. And we’re not talking staples and printer paper. More quarters than not, I have to work out how to make our revised cost targets. If I’m lucky, we have vacancies we can freeze or shut down. If I’m not, it’s colleagues who need to be made redundant. Because market analysts say that we should have a higher margin to be market competitive. So you get taskings from finance to squeeze out ever single dollar saving you can. And it’s the same at every other company, no matter the happy clappy “we’re so chill” marketing.

Your employer is. Not. Your. Friend.

Know your rights. Unionise.

Honestly idk anymore what I want to do bottom surgery wise and I am not particularly in a hurry to figure it out because I want top and hysto before anything HOWEVER I do find that a lot of negative opinions about phallo dicks are, um, a bit unrealistic in their expectations for how natal dicks are supposed to be.

I know a lot of these folks are fairly young and stuff like trouble getting it up and not ejaculating/orgasming tends to happen with age but also. Cis dicks do that stuff too. There's a reason boner pills are available pretty much everywhere and it's because a lot, and I do mean a LOT of cis guys are really embarassed about this and struggle in silence because they'd rather die than admit their dick sometimes decides not to comply.

seeing this always cracks me up bc cis queer women will be like “queer men having their own spaces is misogynistic!!!!!!!! why do they need their own space away from women?????????” then cry and throw up and pee their pants when they force themselves into those queer men’s spaces and those queer men are talking about anal sex and dicks a lot. like. girl what did you think a group of people who mostly have dicks and like to fuck each other with them are going to talk about??????? and tbh this discomfort with queer men’s sexuality is just boring old homophobia, this “ewww anal sex!!!!! two penises interacting!!!!! gross!!!!!!!” is just standard anti-gay bigotry, but they think because they’re queer it doesn’t count. but it very much does! :)

Unrelated but related. I remember when Nathan Foad posted this during Pride and the same cis women who loved saying “I’d rather die than date a man” lost their minds and claimed he was misogynistic

fellas is it misogynistic to be gay?????????????????????????

#this is what we mean when we say this “all men are trash” shit ends w homophobia#if you see men inherently bad & women as inherently good you end up saying classic homophobic shit to queer men under the guise of feminism#bc how dare they prefer the Bad People over the Good People!!!#(or how dare they prefer being a Bad Person instead of a Good Person!!)#sorry queer spaces MUST be loving towards men and those who prefer them (including bi women) or they are completely utterly useless

THANK you genderkoolaid for saying what has been on my mind constantly lately. i’m a genderfluid guy but “men are trash” feminist circles made my guilt around liking other men so intense. it really does just turn back into garden variety homophobia

another unrelated but related:

the erasure of queer men in the conversation about women not being centered in shipping content Absolutely crosses over with queer men being presented as misogynistic for their queerness.

something I’ve been absolutely Haunted By for years was an incident in a discord server I run where someone said, point blank, that the queer men were posting about their attraction to the men characters Too Much and that there needed to be a server wide effort to “fix” that and talk about women more.

no amount of me pointing out the fact that it was, in fact, gay and bi trans men talking in a private server that explicitly caters to queer people expressing their sexuality could dissuade them from fully believing that this discrepancy was caused solely by misogyny. that no matter how queer a man happens to be it Must be internalized misogyny that causes them to talk about their attraction to men more than women.

and I Could make the point that the fandom in general and this server in particular has absolutely no shortage of love for its women characters, a fact which made the issue all the more ridiculous and headache inducing at the time, but that literally Should Not Matter in this instance. 

we lost the plot when the conversation shifted from discussing the outright vitriol that women characters get compared to men with similar traits across the board and instead started insisting that people are morally obligated to consume fandom content about women lest they be perpetrators of misogyny, not just de-centering gay men from the conversation but erasing them entirely. the fact that we can have people vilifying gay men for their attraction to men and labeling that the progressive stance is literal insanity.

there’s Also something to be said about how a common insult pointed towards trans men is that they’re fujoshis fetishizing gay men by Being gay themselves. how the demonization of gay love between men is combined with transphobia to present normal people as disgusting and dirty for engaging with fandom spaces or Having Boyfriends.

this combined with the discourse surrounding “yaoi” a few years back that presented it as fetishistic and oppressive by nature. completely erasing gay men from the conversation, flatting any conversation to be had about it being some people’s first exposure to queer media in the 2000s and early 2010s to insist that it has no value and that anyone who consumed it did so because they are fetishizers.

all while the conversation about yuri was, largely, about how it’s Good And Pure Actually. with none of the nuance about the homophobia, fetishism, or commodification of queer media intended for a straight audience that exists within the genre that yaoi is lambasted for.

and I’m not the person that’s about to try to rehabilitate the yaoi genre in 2023, we’ve long moved past that culturally. especially when the issue of straight fetishization was and is Very Much So A Thing.

but I Remember being 12 years old and seeing boys kissing online for the first time and having it Click that I thought I’d be happy dating men if I could be a man too. because loving men never felt Right until I saw the love between queer men presented as an option. and I know for a fact that I’m not the only person who had this experience.

and even now, kids don’t have many options that show them the love between gay men in media intended for them. most kids are going to have the same revelation that I did on twitter or tumblr or ao3.

and these things just, Do Not Feel Separate.

good morning, I see we’re all being normal today

Ok, but can we agree that ‘i will suffocate them with my gay ass’ is a hilarious threat?

reblogging this again for pride month. if y’all are not normal abt queer men this month i WILL suffocate u with my gay ass.

We need a digital archive of LGBTQ+ works of art, science, and every other conceivable work we can share between each other because we are beyond the genocide warning level in most countries in the west and they're already trying to purge us from libraries.

If other people are interested I'll make this a priority

Speaking as someone with a background in archives, stuff like this does already exist. No need to reinvent the wheel. Creating an archive and making sure it's accessible and searchable and actually preserves things for the long time (especially digital things) is actually a huge undertaking. Show some love to these already existing collections and maybe even consider contributing. There's the Digital Transgender Archive off the top of my head. I know more I just have to think.

The History Project, based in Boston, is an LGBTQ+ community archive that's existed for decades. Many of their collections are digitized.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives, based in Brooklyn, is similar.

The Digital Public Library of America covers a great many topics, but they also have LGBTQ+ stuff.

I'd also recommend searching "lgbtq+" and "libguide" in your preferred search engine. Many universities list helpful resources and databases, some of which are freely accessible.

Many public and academic libraries in the US and Canada (not sure where you're writing from) subscribe to the Gale Archives of Sexuality and Gender. If you have a library card or are a student at a given library, you can access it for free.

In general, I'd really recommend searching around to see how you can support existing museums, community archives, college and university archives, etc that specialize in LGBTQ+ history and media local to you, whether that's in your same town or regionally.

You are not alone! People are working on this and some of them have institutional budgets!

But also kind of looping back to the first post: you personally might have relevant records. Photos of Pride or protests you've been to, journals, a blog full of trans headcanons even. That's all part of queer history and that's the stuff these archives and museums are made of.

Label your stuff carefully, make backup copies, and get to know your local organizations!

We're also working on building an open access archive and actively looking for content contributions! https://about.jstor.org/revealdigital/hiv-aids-the-arts/

i need all the weird neo-puritans of tumblr and toktok and twitter to realize that people have been having fun casual sex for literally all of human existence and that’s a good thing

you think our ancestors weren’t making sexy eyes at each other over a mug of mead and fucking nasty behind the tavern??? you think cavepeople weren’t having fun animalistic sex??? pull your head out of your ass

the people of pompeii: *openly have brothels and dicks on the floors and picture sex menus*

2023 twitter user: people are only having casual sex because their brains are rotted by porn and capitali- what’s that? yes i was raised catholic why do you ask?

Genuinely fuckin hate having my period. Idk why but no matter how good I am the rest of the time, how recovered I feel, the first few days are always just. Manic or depressive episode. That can't be normal. I can be so good for a whole goddamn month and then I periodically just. Hardcore revert, and it fucking sucks.

Thank you. It honestly just. If it was only the depressive episodes, I could cope. It's the manic stuff followed by depressive stuff that's twice as bad because I've 'acted out' that's genuinely impossible to deal with. I really want a way to get this shit managed so I can not deal with it, because it honestly feels unfair.

I honestly believe the whole “adults require less sleep” thing is honest to god probably a myth created by capitalism

It is.

i honestly believe that sleep deprivation is the biggest ignored/neglected root cause of health dangers that prematurely kill adults

ask me sometime about the role of sleep in the leptin ghrelin cycle and how its interruption destabilizes weight homeostasis

or about the new research showing that heart disease is not caused by fat, like we thought for years, but by inflammation in the circulatory system whose root cause is unknown but one of the prime suspects is, you guessed it, sleep deprivation

but nobody wants to hear that lack of sleep is killing people. employers don’t want to hear it. and god knows that having sold their waking hours to capitalism to survive workers don’t want to lose the only time they have left to them to live their lives, mostly stolen from sleep

i mean even i don’t want to do anything about it and i love  sleep, i just love overwatch more

this this this this this

our society places almost zero value on sleep

on enough sleep

on uninterrupted sleep

on regular, predictable, cycling sleep

all the evidence we have suggests sleep is really, really, really important to the processes of the human body, including both mental and physical health, and yet when was the last time you heard somebody suggest that people had a *right* to sufficient, regular sleep?

Reminder that 

- Humans are not meant to sleep for extended periods of uninterrupted sleep. 

By this I don’t mean “humans shouldn’t have 8+ hours of sleep a night”; I mean that we are supposed to sleep for four to five hours (ish), then get up and do something relaxing like reading for a half hour to an hour, then get another bout of four to five hours. This is what our bodies were designed for. 

Sleeping the whole night through was a fad started with the advent of the lightbulb. Sleeping the whole night through is so recent (and artificial) that First Sleep and Second Sleep are mentioned in Dickens’ novels.

- Lack of sleep for even a single night severely compromises your immune system.

If you’re planning on getting little sleep or pulling an all-nighter, make sure to eat lots of fruit and veggies/take vitamins that day. Or even better, get yourself some bee propolis. It’s a natural remedy used for thousands of years in Latin America and is insanely good for boosting up compromised immune systems (if you get the drop kind, put 3 to 4 drops in a spoonful of honey and mix well with a 2nd spoon to mask the strong taste). It has no side effects and is all but impossible to overdose on.

- According to several government bodies around the world, chronic lack of sleep is literally tied for 1st place as the worst kind of torture (the other is solitary isolation)

- Expecting a teen to get up for 8:30 classes is the equivalent of expecting an adult to be at work at 4 am.

After babies, teens are the age group that needs the most amount of sleep. Puberty is exhausting, and the body needs time to recharge. Ideally, a teen should be getting between 10 to 12 hours of sleep at the bare minimum. Most teens are lucky if they manage to get 8. And that’s a gigantic problem; not only does lack of sleep affect mood (which is extra significant when your hormones are already riding a rollercoaster to begin with), but also has massive effects on growth, which is kinda what the whole puberty thing is supposed to be about.

- According to research “starting work before 10 a.m. is tantamount to torture and is making staff sick and stressed”

- Humans were not designed to have the same sleep cycle across the species. Much the opposite in fact.

Night owls and morning people are an actual thing. Because we’re pack creatures, Nature came up with a clever way for our ancestors to always have someone on the lookout for predators and threats: make people naturally alert at varying times so that there’s always someone alert to keep watch. 

Forcing night owls to follow morning people’s sleep cycle means night owls live with what researchers have referred to as “permanent jetlag”.

“ First Sleep and Second Sleep are mentioned in Dickens’ novels”

this is how hobbits can have two breakfasts

“permanent jet lag” sounds about right. No idea how to fix this.

I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”

You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.

And ONE MORE THING—listen. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factors—factors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollution—there is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studied—and many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. You’re not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeister’s work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) You’re fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they don’t care if you die.

So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Don’t wait until you’re thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) it’s okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.

Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.

Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.

We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.

i think as adults it's our responsibility to be nice to kids and treat them with the respect we wish we got at that age and im not kidding or exaggerating in the least

Genuinely fuckin hate having my period. Idk why but no matter how good I am the rest of the time, how recovered I feel, the first few days are always just. Manic or depressive episode. That can't be normal. I can be so good for a whole goddamn month and then I periodically just. Hardcore revert, and it fucking sucks.

Genuinely wondering if I can get my doctor to just. Consider giving me full time hormonal birth control (no break for menstruation) to keep my hormone levels stable. It would kinda fuck with any eventual transition shit but frankly that's half a decade off at this rate so. Not super relevant rn.

Everyone else talked about outdoor cats, it's time for me to talk about offleash dogs

Reasons not to have your dog offleash at a public park:

1) roads (this one is self-explanatory)

2) it makes the park inaccessible to like, entire swathes of the population. If you have experience with police dogs or guard dogs in your neighborhood, or you're a new immigrant from somewhere with a large population of feral dogs, it sucks ass going to the park and having someone's massive lab bound up to you!

3) If, for example, you are in a protected wetland area plastered with friendly signs asking you to please leash your dog to avoid causing an ecological impact, having your dog offleash might cause an ecological impact! "Oh no, my dog is well-behaved, they would never bother the wildlife" wrong! your dog is in the pond trying to eat the endangered Blandings' turtles!

4) Non-zero chance of a jokerified park guide (me) just clipping your dog to a leash and stealing them

5) “Oh but my dog is friendly!” If your unleashed “friendly” dog runs up to my leashed UNFRIENDLY dog, and my dog bites yours, guess who’s getting the blame despite doing everything right?

6) people are afraid of dogs. dogs love running up to people. dont let your dog run up to a person who is scared of it

7) even outside of the example above, people might have had bad experiences with dogs, which means that even the cuddliest friendliest dog in the universe is not going to be a good experience for them

8) Don't Let Your Dog Eat Things It's Not Supposed To Or So Help Me

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hlep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you ask for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hlep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hlep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it helps reinforce the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hleper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

It's incredibly frustrating when someone does this. My mother used to be awful for it before I moved out; with the best will in the world she would constantly undermine me in exactly this way and then get indignant when I dared to point out that she wasn't really helping me at all. It wasn't until I started using kid gloves to explain things to her that the situation improved at all and thankfully I have managed to teach her that yes, doing exactly as I say when I ask her for help is the best way to support me, and because I know she loves me, I also know that she would want to be told how to help me in the correct way. It's not criticism of her as a person, just me explaining to her the best way to help me, which is information that she wants because she loves me and wants to do right by me.

Should I have had to explain that to her? No! Was it enormously tiring to have to teach her something on top of everything else, when I was already in need of help? Yes! But it's done now, and it's better.

Anyway, if you love a disabled person, listen to us and help us as we ask instead of second guessing us. Thanks. ( b ._.)b

"The sleeping giant of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stirred.

In the past month, an avalanche of anti-pollution rules, targeting everything from toxic drinking water to planet-heating gases in the atmosphere, have been issued by the agency. Belatedly, the sizable weight of the US federal government is being thrown at longstanding environmental crises, including the climate emergency.

On Thursday [May 18, 2023], the EPA’s month of frenzied activity was crowned by the toughest ever limits upon carbon pollution from America’s power sector, with large, existing coal and gas plants told they must slash their emissions by 90% or face being shut down.

The measure will, the EPA says, wipe out more than 600m tons of carbon emissions over the next two decades, about double what the entire UK emits each year. But even this wasn’t the biggest pollution reduction announced in recent weeks.

In April, new emissions standards for cars and trucks will eliminate an expected 9bn tons of CO2 by the mid-point of the century, while separate rules issued late last year aim to slash hydrofluorocarbons, planet-heating gases used widely in refrigeration and air conditioning, by 4.6bn tons in the same timeframe. Methane, another highly potent greenhouse gas, will be curtailed by 810m tons over the next decade in another EPA edict.

In just a few short months the EPA, diminished and demoralized under Donald Trump, has flexed its regulatory muscles to the extent that 15bn tons of greenhouse gases – equivalent to about three times the US’s carbon pollution, or nearly half of the entire world’s annual fossil fuel emissions – are set to be prevented, transforming the power basis of Americans’ cars and homes in the process...

If last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), with its $370bn in clean energy subsidies and enticements for electric car buyers, was the carrot to reducing emissions, the EPA now appears to be bringing a hefty stick.

The IRA should help reduce US emissions by about 40% this decade but the cut needs to be deeper, up to half of 2005 levels, to give the world a chance of avoiding catastrophic heatwaves, wildfires, drought and other climate calamities. The new rules suddenly put America, after years of delay and political rancor, tantalizingly within reach of this...

“It’s clear we’ve reached a pivotal point in human history and it’s on all of us to act right now to protect our future,” said Michael Regan, the administrator of the EPA, in a speech last week at the University of Maryland. The venue was chosen in a nod to the young, climate-concerned voters Joe Biden hopes to court in next year’s presidential election, and who have been dismayed by Biden’s acquiescence to large-scale oil and gas drilling.

“Folks, this is our future we are talking about, and we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity for real climate action,” [Michael Regan, the administrator of the EPA], added. “Failure is not an option, indifference is not an option, inaction is not an option.” ...

It’s not just climate the EPA has acted upon in recent months. There are new standards for chemical plants, such as those that blight the so-called "Cancer Alley" the US, from emitting cancer-causing toxins such as benzene, ethylene oxide and vinyl chloride. New rules curbing mercury, arsenic and lead from industrial facilities have been released, as have tighter limits on emissions of soot and the first ever regulations targeting the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkylsubstances (or PFAS) in drinking water.” ...

For those inside the agency, the breakneck pace has been enervating. “It’s definitely a race against time,” said one senior EPA official, who asked not to be named. “The clock is ticking. It is a sprint through a marathon and it is exhausting.” ...

“We know the work to confront the climate crisis doesn’t stop at strong carbon pollution standards,” said Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club.

“The continued use or expansion of fossil power plants is incompatible with a livable future. Simply put, we must not merely limit the use of fossil fuel electricity – we must end it entirely.”"

-via The Guardian (US), 5/16/23