#it would have been So Easy for Flint to prevent all of the problems before they happened | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

leenukeath · 3 years

Text

Fog before Sunrise (Darkest Dungeon fic)

(I had posted this a while ago but since it went unnoticed I decided to delete it. However since @migi-the-right-hand seemed to enjoy the first chapter, I figured I’d give it another shot, so here it is)

Abom/Leper romantic fic by Leenu

Everything hurt, everything smelled, everything was covered in blood. But they were victorious. And on the verge of a mental breakdown.

Junia was still bashing her mace over the broken remains of the Swine King’s crown while Milicent’s hands kept shaking. Her bandages dropped over and over again as she tried to close an open wound on Bigby’s shoulder. He was holding relatively well, but he had been close to breaking down before the fight ended, he had to return back to his human form and perform some prayers before he could completely lose his mind. Thankfully Baldwin had covered him and landed the final hit on the grotesque mass of flesh calling itself royalty. The little one however had been more trouble than it was worth, dodging the Leper's swipes left and right with mocking squeals. Only when Bigby stunned it with his chains was Junia able to crush its skull with her mace. She must have been too irrational to notice it however since she hadn’t stopped beating the dead flesh around her, all Milicent could suggest for this situation was for the Vestal to “let it out of her systems”.

Baldwin himself could feel that he was not all well after the battle, the torchlight had reduced greatly and the screams of the swine folk around him was gradually pushing him towards an edge he did not want to fall over. At least they now could leave this wretched place, all they needed to do … was walk … back to the Hamlet… he could handle that. He kept saying it to himself as he lit the last torch of their pack, its shaking light faintly illuminating the bloodied map of the place, trying to find the shortest way out. Bigby noticed it took Baldwin a few more tries than usual with the flint to set the torch alight, he kept a close eye on him as they started their walk out.

~~~~~~~~ Nothing was ever easy in this region. Barely a few dozen meters away from the exit, a bunch of maggots blocked their way out. Normally these would not have been a problem for the team, but the abusive Junia kept insisting on rushing the enemy in battle, forcing the Leper to hold back his swipes, lest he accidentally hit her with a misplaced strike. That’s when one of them launched itself on his back and tried to bite his neck, his mask was pushed downwards and he flailed, trying to push the creature off him before he felt it getting tossed away. As he looked back up, he saw a rageful Bigby slamming down the maggot and stepping on it with a sickening crunch before whipping his chains around. Baldwin’s vision however started to blur, his back was still crawling with the sensation of the carrion eater upon him, and it started to spread over his entire body. The brush of their chitinous legs running all over him, under his skin, under his bandages… he ripped off the cloth on his arm. He had to get them out, they were in him, feeding on his rotting muscles. “Not like this! Not like this!” he screamed as he tried to tear off his crawling flesh.

“...-in … ald- … BALDWIN!” Something pulled his hand off his arm and forced him to look forward to the worried face of Bigby, firmly holding his head: “It’s not real. It’s. not. real. Look at me Baldwin”, the Abomination spoke in a smooth but firm tone, keeping a firm grip on the Leper’s head, “Please, stay focused, we’re almost back home.” His response was shaky: “I … I don’t know if I ca-”, “You can and you will.” finished Bigby as he hoisted Baldwin up on his feet and passed one of his arms over his shoulder, helping him walk out of the Warrens, away from the ever growing squeals of the swine folk.

~~~~~~~~ The walk back to the Hamlet was not calm. Bigby had to keep his grip on Baldwin’s arms strong to prevent him from tearing himself apart, even calling for the Beast’s strength by the end. But what was more unbearable to him was to see the Leper’s tears flowing from beneath his mask, and being unable to wipe them off, to wipe away the source that broke this man.

Once at the Hamlet, it was clear that Baldwin could not be left alone to calm down, so he was brought to the Sanatorium. The only treatment they could unfortunately suggest was to “tie him down and wait for it to pass”. Milicent had to accompany Junia to the Abbey, thankfully once her mace had been confiscated she had been easier to guide. Which left Bigby alone as he watched Baldwin getting rolled away tied to a table by thick leather straps as he screamed about the carrion eating bugs devouring him from the inside. At that moment, the Abomination realized he had never felt this powerless. The Beast within could do nothing against this foe, and it must have known it, Bigby could feel it pacing back and forth inside, growling and whining, wanting to plant its teeth into more of the maggots and tear them apart. The human knew this was a poor idea and opted to go to the tavern instead.

~~~~~~~~ It wasn’t good enough. After his third glass Bigby felt that the Beast had calmed down, or at least wanted less to tear everything down, but now the world around him started to sound muffled. The light was either too bright or too low to see anything clearly and the voices surrounding him seemed spoken through a thick layer of fog. After finishing his first bottle, he did not know if it was he or the Beast that made him stand and walk outside. He only vaguely remembered his march to the sanatorium and must have passed out next to the door that kept screaming.

The next day, Bigby woke up with a pounding headache on the cold stone floor, he wasn’t sure if it was because of the drinks, the “bed” he fell upon or the wails next to him that had died down by the time he awoke. Now they had reduced to wracking sobs. The Abomination pulled himself back up and sat on the bench next to the metal door, he thought he could stay for a few minutes to clear his head out, but every time he tried to stand up, something forced him to sit and stay. Oddly enough the Beast sounded quiet here. Listening to the cries of Baldwin however did stir something within Bigby, a strong desire to go inside, hold the Leper’s tied hand and tell him that he would be well, that he would keep protecting him and stay by his side. For now, all he could do was sit and wait… for him.

~~~~~~~~ Baldwin did not know for how long he had been delirious, he couldn’t even remember getting strapped down in the first place. He was awoken by the loud click of a key in the heavy metal door letting the healer enter to assess his state. Holding a piece of parchment, she wrote down a few notes before approaching him with a familiar syringe. He turned his wrist upward in a familiar motion, he had done this several times, though not with the restraints, this was a first. Her expression was unfazed as usual as she gave him his treatment before removing the straps: “You are clear, please make room, there are other patients waiting.”. Quick and to the point, yes Baldwin was back to this familiar reality of coldness and sterility. An improvement to his past hallucinations, but not by that much. He readjusted his mask as he walked out before noticing a familiar shape next to the door: a sleeping Bigby. The Leper briefly paused in his tracks, wondering what had happened to his companion, did he require treatment as well? For what? His train of thought was interrupted as the nurse walked out, noticing the sleeping form and asking Baldwin to move him out of the facility, this was no place for wanderers.

He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the huddled man and opted to move him to the barracks. As he lifted him, he was surprised to feel how light he was, without those heavy bounds weighing him down, he probably would barely notice him on his back. Each step back to quarters brought a familiar rattle of chains, Baldwin wondered if this was how Bigby lived every day of his life, surrounded by cold restraints and only warmed by the meager cloth on his back. His train of thoughts was paused when he felt the gentle warmth of another body spreading over his back alongside the caress of his chest rising and falling with each breath. And then there was his heartbeat. Slow but powerful, a soothing rhythm of life that accompanied Baldwin’s steps to the barracks. Once there, he noticed that all beds but his were occupied, he remembered that Bigby didn’t sleep there, opting instead for the hay in the stables, but the Leper did not want to leave him in the cold outside and instead gently set him on his own cot. There was a slight grip that tried to hold on to Baldwin when he put the smaller man down on the sheets, trying to stay close to the soothing warmth. He put the covers over him and quietly walked out to the Abbey.

~~~~~~~~ He realized he did not need meditation after a few minutes of trying to soothe his mind in the cloister, it was not the crawl of the creatures under his skin that kept running through his mind, but instead the firm grip of scarred hands upon his face. A voice that kept trying to pull him out of the pit of madness. He needed air, and a longer walk.

The outskirts of the Hamlet were safe enough to wander through, but he had kept his sword just in case, bandits were always a risk in this place. There was no one out like him at this time, it was no surprise, these roads were deserted a long time ago, the poisoned earth only grew twisted weeds and toxic fungi. Nothing good could ever come from a wretched place as this one. Or so he thought.

In the corner of his eye, he spotted an unusual blur, something that contrasted with the graying flora around him. Walking closer, he was able to make it out: a flower. How could something like this grow in a blighted land as the one he stood upon? How much longer did it have to survive surrounded by the poison that ran through the earth? He did not know, but what he was sure of, was that this was no place for something as innocent as it was. Cautiously digging around it, he pulled out the dirt holding the roots of the small plant, careful to break as little as possible. Cradling the little handful of soil, Baldwin cautiously made his way back to the Hamlet.

~~~~~~~~ Bigby did not understand how he felt at first, his eyes were staying closed but the sensations around him were unfamiliar. His chains were still there, but they were warm, and he didn’t feel the itch of the hay around him, or the scent of the horses he slept next to. Slowly blinking, he awoke to an unfamiliar place, surrounded by beds. He figured this was the barracks, but he was confused as to how he came here, his last memories were of pressing his back against the Sanatorium’s walls and closing his eyes in exhaustion. Taking a look around, he noticed a familiar piece of white cloth on the end of the cot, Bigby recognized it as Baldwin’s spare hood. Did this mean he was in his bed? The Abomination was not quite sure what to do with this knowledge, but the redness rising to his face made him understand how his body felt. Trying to focus on his rational mind, he got up and looked for some clean sheets. He figured that he could do Baldwin this favor for letting him lay there, if the Leper was even the one who put him there.

He had finished replacing the old fabric with clean ones and walked out with the bundle in his arms to drop off at the tubs used by the washerwomen when he spotted a familiar mask walking out of the Abbey with something in hand. Bigby hurried to deposit his bundle before rushing to see the Leper, something in him was pushing him towards Baldwin, he wasn’t sure if the Beast was becoming territorial or if it was something else entirely, but the Abomination took note of it as his feet made their way to his companion.

~~~~~~~~ Baldwin was just done setting the plant into a pot, with some hopefully clean soil from the cloister’s inner garden, he didn’t want to plant it there, there was not enough light for it to survive. As he stepped out of the Abbey, he heard a familiar sound, the unmistakable ringing of chains, a slightly quicker pace … the Abomination was running. Looking up, the Leper was greeted by the sight of Bigby scuttling towards him, only slowing down once he noticed that he was being watched. As he got close enough to speak, his mouth opened for a brief second before closing, then opening once more to try and say something. But nothing was said. Baldwin felt his heart wanting to speak as well, but did not find the words for it. Instead, Bigby asked: “Are you well?”, the Leper answered with a nod: “Yes. I must thank you for your aid, I …”, he tried to find his words as he felt once more the ghost of those hands upon his skin, “I don’t know if I would have been able to make it without you.”. The Abomination smiled, Baldwin was always surprised when it happened, it seemed so out of place on that scarred face, yet radiating a long sought warmth, he almost didn’t hear him speak: “I am … happy to know that. I was very scared for you back there.”. “Did you wait for me at the Sanatorium?” asked the Leper, Bigby nodded before clutching his cloak a little closer to him: “I didn’t really think about it to be honest… but I must thank you for letting me sleep in your cot. I … I already changed the linens, so you don’t have to worry for that.”. There was no need for it, but Baldwin didn’t have the heart to tell him that, Bigby’s eyes lowered to the plant in his hands. Without thinking, he handed it over to him.

The genuine look of surprise on the Abomination’s face was enough to let a small smile grow on the corner of Baldwin’s lips, as his chained hands reached out to take the gift, their fingers brushed for a second. Despite losing a lot of his sense of touch, the Leper could swear he could feel the tingling rush making its way all up his arm and throughout his back, a long lost feeling he needed to experience once more. Bigby, despite not seeing Baldwin’s eyes, could feel the look he was receiving. Their silence spoke between them as he tentatively took hold of the bandaged hand in front of him, lightly pulling him to a hidden haven in the Hamlet.

The Leper followed him, running behind him with a renewed sense of youth.

~~~~~~~~ Bigby was familiar with this deserted corner, only the Survivalist occasionally came there, and today she was nowhere to be seen. He carefully set down the flower in the meager rays of sunlight that broke through the heavy clouds before turning back to Baldwin, hands carefully moving towards his mask. He gently took hold of it before slowly taking it off, he opposed no resistance. He blinked for a few seconds as the light briefly blinded him without his mask on, before looking back up to Bigby who had once more set his hand on his face, gently caressing with his thumb as he smiled. His bandaged hands moved towards the Abomination’s shoulder, slowly pulling him closer until their faces were but a breath away. He then pulled and buried his face into the nape of his neck, hands holding over his back, to feel him, to feel his warmth, to feel his heart, to feel his life. Bigby could feel the cloth on his shoulder growing slightly damp, he didn’t mind it as he caressed Baldwin’s back and head, his beating heart was too happy to care that his own eyes were wet with joy.

As they slowly pulled back, they shared a look before moving closer once more. Their lips brushed against each other for a second before joining themselves. They were together, they were alive. That was all that mattered to them for now.

#darkest dungeon #Leper #Abomination #ficlet #BigWin

20 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years

Text

Youtube vs 5G arsonists

There are plenty of things wrong with 5G.

It's incredibly insecure:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/01/china_isnt_the_.html

And easy for law-enforcement to spy on:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/5g-protocol-may-still-be-vulnerable-imsi-catchers

It's a smokescreen for underinvestment in fiber by monopolistic, awful telcos, and its promised benefits will not materialized without fiber backhaul:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g

On the bullshit scale of lies, damned lies, and telcoms lies, 5G represents a kind of peak bullshit:

https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/2019-the-year-telecom-went-doolally-about-5g/a/d-id/756184

But 5G doesn't give you cancer. It won't make you sick. And...god, I am getting stupider just thinking about typing this, coronavirus is not a false-flag op to disguise the illnesses that 5G is secretly creating.

The reason I have to mention that is that the conspiracyverse is full of that specific theory, and it's inspiring people to COMMIT ARSON and torch 5G towers.

No, seriously.

In the wake of multiple attacks on 5G towers, Youtube has announced changes to its moderation guidelines. It will allow 5G conspiracy theories, just not ones that (oh god my fingers are seizing up from the stupid) link 5G with coronavirus.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/05/youtube-to-suppress-content-spreading-coronavirus-5g-conspiracy-theory

Youtube gets blamed for spreading conspiracies but that's not the whole story. Youtube - Big Tech in general - is a machine for finding people, much more than it is a machine for convincing people. Youtube is not a mind-control ray that bypasses viewers' critical faculties.

5G conspiracy theories are new, but Flat Earth conspiracies are not, nor is antivax. These have been around for a long, long time. Even a cursory perusal of the arguments for these conspiracies reveals that they have not gotten better, even as they've gained traction.

If the same arguments are attracting more adherents, then one of two things is going on. Either:

1. Youtube is a mind-control ray that can turn rational people into believers in facially absurd ideas that have failed for decades, or

2. The number of people to whom these ideas seem plausible has grown and/or Youtube has made it more efficient to reach those people.

I think it's 2. I think that the rise of conspiratorial thinking is connected most closely to a rise in actual conspiracies.

Not elaborate flying saucer conspiracies, but everyday ones, like the Sacklers conspiring to get rich by lying about the safety of opioids, or prosecutors and lawmakers covering up for their pals like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.

Conspiracies to ignore the evidence about Flint's water, or the failures of Universal Credit in the UK, or to pretend that private equity funds are anything but engines for turning productive companies into mangled wreckages while enriching plutes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

Why do people believe in public health conspiracies, from antivax to 5G? Well, maybe because public health authorities spent two decades ignoring the opioid crisis in order to protect ultrarich opioid profiteers.

Maybe they doubt journal articles because major journal publishers have repeatedly published fake journals through their marketing divisions that allowed pharma companies to pay to publish unsubstantiated studies.

https://bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/shame-on-elsevier/

Maybe they don't believe in their doctors' advice because their doctors accept a continuous stream of payments from pharma companies, and then prescribe in ways that fatten their bottom lines.

https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/

Maybe they don't trust regulators because they sign off on procedures that kill people, despite a lack of evidence for their safety AND a wealth of evidence about their risks:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-bleeding-edge-review-20180726-story.html

One of the best books I read in 2019 was Anna Merlan's Republic of Lies, a history of conspiratorial thinking in America and a look at the rise of conspiracism in the 21st century:

https://boingboing.net/2019/09/21/from-opioids-to-antivax.html

Merlan describes how conspiracists aren't ignorant, but rather lavishly misinformed. UFO conspiracists can go chapter-and-verse on aerospace conspiracies, of which there are so. many. including, most recently, the 737 Max scandal.

Antivaxers know tons about opioid coverups and other medical malpractice. People who believe that the levees were dynamited during Katrina to drown black neighborhoods and spare white ones know all about when that actually happened in Tupelo, MS.

Susceptibility to conspiratorialism arises when someone is exposed to actual conspiracies, and trauma. And while both have been abundant during the neoliberal era, coronavirus is peak trauma and peak conspiracy.

Just think of the spectacle of official inaction, combined with official calls for all the old people to die, combined with the annihilation of huge swathes of the economy, combined with a stream of revelations about corruption and profiteering in the response.

No wonder so many people are primed to believe in conspiracies at this moment, and so maddened with grief and anxiety that they take rash - and foolish - action.

Which brings me back to what Youtube is doing.

Youtube is not a mind-control ray, it's a people-finding machine. That's because advertisers need people-finding machines. The median person buys <1 fridge/lifetime, so it's really hard to find people thinking of buying fridges.

That's why fridge ads appear on highways near airports: "People who fly have money, people need money to buy fridges." Those ads have 0.00000000000000000001% conversion rates.

Targeting ads to people who've searched for refrigerator reviews can make them thousands of times more effective, and even if the new rate is only 0.000000000001%, that's massive improvement for fridge advertisers. YT is ad-supported so it is good at finding people.

Ad-tech companies make two claims, though: the first is that they know where to find your customers. The second is that they can convince them of things that are otherwise unsupportable.

This was Cambridge Analytica's pitch: not that they would find racists and tell them about Trump, but that they would make decent people into Trump voters.

There's some narrow truth to this Running ads that tell lies (especially harmful ones) is often illegal. At the very least, it can mire you in scandal. Targeting allows you to place secret ads: ads whose content is only seen by people who won't narc you out. That gives targeted ads a persuasive advantage that billboards can't have.

Finding people who want to believe lies and lying to them is not mind-control.

It's fraud.

Because everyone in the entire history of the world who'd claimed to have invented a mind-control ray was a fraud, from NLPers and PUAs, to Mkultra and the Cultural Revolution.

Back to conspiracies, Youtube, secrecy and people-finding.

There are lots of things wrong with Youtube (spying, monopolization, and its hospitality to copyfraud and censorship), but people-finding and spying are both double-edged swords.

People-finding is how fringe ideas accumulate adherents, yes. Some of those are terrible, like "scientific racism." Some are laudable, like the rise of trans identity.

Privacy is how lies are spun, but it's also how truths are whispered before they can be spoken aloud.

Secrets like "I believe interracial marriage should be legal" or "cannabis isn't harmful" or "gender is not a binary."

There are lots of things we should do to fix Youtube and tech, but on balance, finding people who share your ideas is a force for good.

Debunking false conspiratorial beliefs is important, but not as important as ending actual conspiracies among wealthy and powerful people to corrupt our political and economic system to enrich themselves regardless of the consequences to the rest of us.

Fighting conspiracism is like fighting a wildfire. When the town is on fire, you have to put it out. But if you want to keep your town from catching fire again, you have to eliminate the fuel that causes it to burn, clear out the brush.

The problem with locating the problem with Youtube - instead of seeing Youtube and its monopoly as a consequence of policies that promote inequality and monopolism - is that it's just fighting blazes, not preventing them.

#pluralistic

36 notes · View notes

neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 48

It’s like reading a reaction-gif summary of the previous chapter except every gif is just pain and also made of words instead. With bonus prophecy.

Chapter 48: Reading the Commentary

Min sat in Cadsuane’s small room, waiting—with the others—to hear the result of Rand’s meeting with his father.

Yeah about that.

A low fire burned in the fireplace

And a much less low (bale)fire burned in Rand’s hands…

Mix that with Min’s discomfort around Rand lately

The fact that even Min feels ‘discomfort’ around Rand is uh. Telling.

Though perhaps, just maybe, he turned a corner of sorts in that last chapter. Via attempted patricide, but whatever works.

Then again, maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part and he’s gone off to incinerate someone else instead.

But the pattern of the narrative points more towards the former, I think.

Min’s uncomfortable about Rand, and a very different sort of uncomfortable about Cadsuane—or perhaps ‘ambivalent’ is a better word. Cadsuane does not make for an easy ally, but she does have her talents, and their aims do align even if just about everything else about them differs.

So Cadsuane’s planning and Min’s reading commentaries on the Prophecies of the Dragon. This ought to be interesting.

One line in [the Commentary] teased at her, a sentence mostly ignored by those who had written commentary. He shall hold a blade of light in his hands, and the three shall be one.

OH OKAY PROPHECY INTERPRETATION TIME. HERE WE GO.

The blade of light seems like it has to be Callandor, especially given Rand’s own musings about it last chapter.

And the three shall be one…the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that Callandor can only safely be used in a circle of three. Which Rand currently sees as a box, as strings tied to him, as a trap…but flip that around and it’s an image of balance and unity and trust. So that’s definitely an option.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely; maybe the ‘blade of light’ is another reference to ‘he shall slay his people with the sword of peace’ and the three that shall be one are…maybe the three major groups of people? The Aiel, the Seanchan, and the ‘wetlands’? That feels like a bit of a reach; the three people in a circle to use Callandor safely seems more likely.

Though apparently various scholars fall more on the nations side of things and tend to think it’s about three major cities or kingdoms. In that case I’d side with my own choice of three rather than just three wetland nations, but either way if that’s given as the default opinion in the text it’s almost certainly wrong, so I guess we can throw that one out.

Min, no, you’re not useless.

And what of Min’s own relationship with Rand? She was still welcome in his presence; that hadn’t changed. But there was something wrong, something off. He put up walls when she was near—not to keep her out, but to keep the real him in. As if he was afraid of what the real him would do, or could do, to those he loved…

Rand, fix this. Min Farshaw deserves better.

But now he has been brought directly to that point of crisis, to looking down at his own father and weaving the balefire that would erase him from existence, and thinking, truthfully, that it is no more than I’ve done before. His own fear of that exact fate brought him to that point—so was he right to be afraid? Or is it the fear that made it into a near-reality, as he fought so hard to deny it or prevent it that he ended up in a war with himself that made it into not just a possibility but a near-inevitability?

It’s perceptive of Min, though, to recognise that he’s not keeping her out but trying to hold himself in. Even Rand can’t quite see it that way, because he is in effect locking himself into a box of his own making and calling it liberation.

And it would be so easy for Min to be hurt by it and think it was directed at her, think that he was indeed trying to wall her out; that’s a pretty common response from anyone who’s being kept at a distance by someone they care about. But Min is Min, by which I mean she’s fucking incredible, and so she sees past that and to the truth: that this isn’t about her; it’s a war of Rand against himself and she is a casualty, not a cause. And not just that, but she sees the reason why, and sees much closer to the truth of what it’s doing to him, and instead of being angry or offended she’s trying to find any way she can to help him.

Again, Rand, Min deserves better and you should thank her profusely when you uh…sort some of your shit out.

He’s in pain again, she thought, feeling him through the bond. Such anger. What was going on?

Do you really want to know?

Still, it’s more than the flat nothingness he’s felt when committing atrocities in the past. Because that’s what that last scene was: a shattering of the ice, and a point of collision of everything Rand’s tried to hold at bay, a collapse of all those walls and barriers and a flood of the feelings he’s tried to suppress. But hopefully it’s an implosion rather than an explosion; Rand’s been externalising his pain without really…acknowledging that he’s doing it for so long, when what he needs to do is actually deal with it and with everything else about himself he’s been trying to ignore or suppress.

She had to trust in Cadsuane’s plan. It was a good one.

The sad thing is that it really is a good plan. By which I mean it has—on paper—a good chance of succeeding at Cadsuane’s goal of getting Rand to re-learn laughter and tears (well, a better chance than just about anything else at this point), but it also is simply good for Rand himself. He needed to see Tam, and Tam is someone who can offer him the kind of help and support and love he so desperately needs but can’t ask for. And Tam, as his father, is going to see him as Rand, the boy he raised, rather than as the Dragon Reborn who owes salvation to the world. It’s a good plan because while there is of course a motive outside of simple concern for Rand’s wellbeing, it’s not a trick or a trap even if Rand sees it as such. It’s just…something good for him. Something he and Tam both want and need and should get to have.

And the fact that it fails precisely because it’s Cadsuane’s plan is sort of a cruel twist and yet at the same time a fitting case of catastrophic consequences.

Cadsuane and Rand get along like oil and water. Or perhaps like flint and steel, striking sparks when they interact simply because of who they are.

Cadsuane’s intentions are good—she wants to save the world and she has, at a few points, actually said out loud (and she cannot lie) that she is trying to do what is good for Rand, not for her or for the White Tower or anyone else. She’s trying, in the best way she knows how. And she’s right about so many things: that he needs to relearn laughter and tears, that he cannot face the Last Battle as he is now, that in many ways he still is just a boy and he’s lost and without direction or guidance, that like it or not he carries the task of saving the world, that he’s becoming too cold, that balefire is dangerous, that he needs to see his father.

Her aims are good, and even some of her reasoning for how to accomplish them is fairly solid. She tries putting Rand off-balance and making it clear that she is not going to be cowed by the simple fact of who he is…which again comes very close to being exactly what he needs. If she fears him he will not respect her, and if she doesn’t push him he will never listen to her.

But it falls apart when it comes to her specific methods. She means well, and her follow-through is almost what he needs…and then veers off in the opposite direction. It’s part of why I appreciate her so much as a character, I think, because that’s such a fascinating dynamic to watch. And it’s a fascinating way to show absolute failure: by anchoring it in very good reasoning and insight and perception and logic, and letting it come very close to something that will work, and then just…swerving away at the last second. It’s frustrating and agonising at times and yet feels so much more real than if she were just hopelessly misguided from the start.

Instead, it comes down to personality and communication and trust, as so many parts of this series do. It’s a conflict of personality and a misunderstanding of motive and a lack of communication; two strong personalities shouting at each other across a room and refusing to budge, rather than taking a step towards where the other stands and meeting somewhere in the middle.

So when she fails it doesn’t feel like the cheap failure of a plan that was stupid and doomed from the start, the way you often see in fiction. Instead, it feels like the frustrating failure of an intelligent, capable woman who tried her best and executed a plan that could have worked but that fell apart because of a chance word and a clash of personalities and a problem of methods.

Though I wonder.

Did she fail? I’m framing it as if she had, but in a way…she was right that Tam was, probably, exactly the person Rand needed most to see. The one person who might be able to get through to him, and force him out of the mindset he’s in one way or another. And…well, he sort of did, I think. Could anything else have brought Rand to that point? Would anyone else have survived that moment where he came closer to that last line, to repeating Lews Therin’s last deed? Would anyone else, watching Rand weave balefire in terror, have caused him to question, and at the last moment make a different choice?

It’s certainly not the precise outcome Cadsuane might have intended or expected or hoped for, but…was it really a failure?

And the other side of the question is: if this does work, and if the result of all of this is somehow Rand coming back to himself (or some version thereof), does it really matter who gets the credit? Would it be Cadsuane, for orchestrating this, or Tam, for being exactly who Rand needed and also just an all-around excellent father, or Rand himself, for holding back, or anyone else all the way along the chain of causality?

In the end, can any one person take credit for what ultimately has to be one man’s choice?

I guess we’ll just need to see what the actual aftermath of that last chapter looks like. After all, Rand made…I think…the right choice in that moment but what comes next? Does the collapse continue, and can he pull some of himself out of it intact? Or will he turn away again and drag those walls up again and set another city on fire? Personally I lean towards the former but we’ll see.

What were Rand and Tam discussing? Would Rand’s father be able to turn him?

That’s…still an open question at this point, I think. But it looks like maybe yes. Kind of. Perhaps. Just about. Indirectly. By way of balefire and internal crisis and memory of the worst moment of his last life. You know, as you do.

“Cadsuane,” Min said, holding up the book. “I think the interpretation of this phrase is wrong.”

Round of applause for Min! Imposter syndrome who?

Seriously, stating outright disagreement with the opinions of a well-respected scholar when you’re the equivalent of an undergrad is hard. Especially when your audience is Cadsuane.

Beldeine seems to take the standard view that Min is an undergrad and therefore has no idea what she’s talking about. Well, Beldeine, unfortunately for you Min is on the protagonist side of the narrative so she’s probably right.

Nobody could humiliate one more soundly than an Aes Sedai, for they did it without malice. Moiraine had explained it to Min once in simple terms.

That alone is astonishing: an Aes Sedai explaining anything in simple terms is practically unheard-of.

Aes Sedai would be very good at the icily professional business email of shame.

“And why,” Cadsuane said, “is it that you think you know more than a respected scholar of the prophecies?”

“Because,” Min said, bristling, “the theory doesn’t make sense. Rand only really holds one crown. There might have been a good argument here if he hadn’t given away Tear to Darlin. But the theory doesn’t hold any longer. I think the passage refers to some way he has to use Callandor.”

“I see,” Cadsuane said, turning yet another page in her own book. “That is a very unconventional interpretation.” Beldeine smiled thinly, turning back to her embroidery. “Of course,” Cadsuane added, “you are quite right.”

So while we’re on the topic of Cadsuane’s methods…

It’s a harsh challenge to Min, especially as it plays directly into what she must know are Min’s insecurities about her position as a young self-taught scholar. At the same time…actually, I think the main reason I don’t have any problem at all with this is because I’ve had professors like this. The ones who push you in precisely the places where you’re most uncertain because they want to see if you can create a strong argument against the exact challenges you’d get from the field as a whole. It’s a case of ‘this is what you’re going to face if you publish this, so you’d better be prepared for it and have a sound argument’.

Does Cadsuane have to say it the way she does? No. But in a way, this is her giving Min a fighting chance to prove herself. Cadsuane is old and competent and walks a line between highly confident and arrogant, but she does listen to young people and unconventional ideas when she genuinely thinks they have merit. It isn’t always easy, and she absolutely has her biases that prevent her from being fully open-minded, but she is capable of changing her mind. So she’s giving Min a chance here, because she believes in giving people what they deserve. She’s not going to dismiss Min on the same basis Beldeine did; she’s going to credit or dismiss Min based on how sound her ideas are.

Cadsuane’s methods often centre on challenging people, and pushing them in directions that make them uncomfortable, and yeah there are all kinds of problems with that and she sometimes comes down on the wrong side of it. But at other times there’s value in the way she does it. It’s just that, like anything else, taken to extreme or excess it’s a problem, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, and she’s a flawed person like most people so sometimes she fucks up by letting her own confidence/arrogance carry her across the line from challenging and somewhat abrasive into unnecessarily harsh and somewhat abusive.

Anyway, Min seems to have acquitted herself well in this mini thesis defence here, but…it makes me wonder if it’s too simple a win to actually be correct.

“Through a great deal of searching I discovered that the sword could only be used properly in a circle of three. That is likely the ultimate meaning of the passage.”

As soon as a character says ‘that’s probably what it really means’, I begin to doubt. Especially because there’s sort of a rule of threes, here. We get the first explanation from the scholars’ interpretation, which is there to be proven wrong. Then you get the protagonists’ first interpretation, which is usually closer but ultimately also either wrong or incomplete. And then at some stage you get the third and ‘true’ explanation, in which everything comes together.

Sanderson holds to this particular rule of threes in his other work, so the pattern seems especially…likely, here.

So what else do we have three of? Past, present, future would be an interesting one. There’s the trio of Elayne, Min, and Aviendha but that doesn’t seem to fit here. There are far more than three people in Rand’s head at this point or else I’d have posited an outside guess at Rand, Lews Therin, and Moridin.

There are a lot of dualities in this series, but fewer trios than one might expect from epic fantasy. I blame the gender binary.

But seriously, there are so many opposing or balanced pairs—Light and Shadow, Creator and Dark One, saidin and saidar, salvation and destruction, White Tower and Black Tower, men and women, what hand shelters, what hand slays?, chaos and order, Rand and Lews Therin…it’s a series that deals with this idea of balance, and of what happens when one side of a balanced system is thrown off, and of how to find that balance between opposing or antagonistic forces without erasing one or the other. Which is fascinating and all, but right now I need sets of three.

I guess there’s technically the True Power along with saidin and saidar.

Okay actually that’s interesting. Rand has channelled the True Power, after all. And according to Lews Therin, his attempt last Age failed because ‘we used saidin, but we touched it to the Dark One. It was the only way! Something has to touch him, something to close the gap, but he was able to taint it.’

And Rand touching the True Power, while it certainly served to turn that scene into…*waves hands wildly in the direction of everything That Scene is*…that, seems like yet another of those things, like Callandor, that should have some further purpose. What good does dragging your character to that point of absolute horror do, if it can’t then be flipped around later into some kind of key?

Well, I mean, it causes great pain and suffering for the character and thus for the readers, which really is plenty of purpose in and of itself and I’m sure as hell not complaining, but. My point is. That right there is a loose end that, used correctly, could be part of a really satisfying twist or tying-off.

But then how does that relate to Callandor? Unless it’s just that he needs to be in a circle of three, and thus allowing flows of saidin and saidar to be controlled, and then he separately but alongside that channels the True Power as well? Hmm. When I try to put it all together it doesn’t fit as well as I thought it would. So either I’m wrong or I’m still missing something.

But it would fit with the rule of threes I was playing with earlier (first answer characters come to is wrong, second is closer but incomplete or slightly incorrect, third is a late realisation that brings it all together) in that it would allow Min and Casuane to be partially but not completely right: Rand needs to be in a circle but there’s more to it somehow.

Maybe.

Nynaeve is in the room as well, being Nynaeve. In case anyone was wondering.

And…what was that vision that was suddenly hovering above Nynaeve’s head? She was kneeling over someone’s corpse in a posture of grief.

Min was just thinking about Lan so that seems like the connection we’re supposed to make here, which of course makes me doubt it. I also am still holding on to my certainty that Lan is going to live (denial? What are you talking about?). And the fact that this is appearing suddenly, given that we know exactly what’s happening in another part of the palace, suggests that it’s related to something Rand has just done or decided, something that has tipped the future towards this outcome.

And that makes me think of Egwene’s own dreams, and Min’s other viewings, of Rand and corpses and funeral biers or pyres, and mourners. Which of course brings us back to that whole question of what happens to Rand? Thanks, Aelfinn, for your clear-as-mud answer on that topic.

At one point, when all the Forsaken were coming back in different bodies, I thought maybe Rand had a chance of something similar, especially as there are definitely some lines that seem to point in that direction…but so far that seems like the Dark One’s domain, so now I’m not so sure. Maybe to live, you must die really does just mean he has to die in order to be part of the cycle of rebirth again. Or maybe he could be reborn immediately, and given a chance to live in peace in the world he has bought with his sacrifice? Or, with Egwene’s dream of a funeral pyre, some sort of phoenix-like death-and-rebirth healing or renewal of body and soul? It would fit the Fisher King theme we’re working with: the land renewed and changed and maybe healed, and so the Dragon getting the same, through some kind of cleansing fire type thing. Rising from his own death, finally healed of the wounds he has carried and thus taking part in the renewal, but no longer recognisable as who he once was, because this will be a different Age and the man who had to play that role is effectively dead (at peace), allowing Rand al’Thor to have a life?

I don’t know. I predict metaphysical fuckery, and beyond that I give up.

“Cadsuane,” she said. “This is still wrong. There’s more here. Something we haven’t discovered.”

“About Callandor?” the woman asked.

Min nodded.

“I suspect so as well,” Cadsuane replied.

Well at least they agree with my little rule of threes.

Oh hi Tam.

“What have you done to him?” he demanded.

Cadsuane lowered her book. “I have done nothing to the boy, other than to encourage him toward civility. Something, it seems, other members of the family could learn as well.”

“Watch your tongue, Aes Sedai,” Tam snarled. “Have you seen him? The enitre room seemed to grow darker when he entered. And that face—I’ve seen more emotion in the eyes of a corpse! What has happened to my son?”

Oh, Tam.

He’s furious here, and it’s directed at Cadsuane, and perhaps rightly so…but I think there’s another layer to this, which is that he has just seen his son, who seems barely alive and is surrounded by darkness and Tam had to stand there and talk to him and still feel powerless to help. He’s grieving.

And it’s an excellent counterpoint to the Tam we saw last chapter, because it’s a way to almost watch the scene again through his eyes. We saw him filtered through Rand’s, and we saw him careful and gentle and offering anything he thought Rand might take. He pushed Rand a bit, towards the end, but even then he was absolutely the father trying to help his wounded child.

Here, though, we see Tam’s side of it. We get his impression of Rand, we get his shock at the darkness that surrounds him—a shock he absolutely could not let Rand see.

We see his pain now, when he tried so hard to hide it in that last scene for Rand’s sake.

Tam al’Thor is a good parent and this hurts.

And I also really like how the love that pushes Rand to this breaking point, to the point of repeating but then rejecting Lews Therin’s past, is the love between parent and child rather than, say, the love he feels for Min or Elayne or Aviendha. And it’s not even the second cliché of a mother’s love; it’s the bond between an adoptive father and his son. I mean sure, that comes up plenty in the genre as well, but it’s just nice that that’s the tipping point. It’s something a little different and it’s lovely.

Tam took a deep breath, and the anger seemed to suddenly flow out of him. He was still firm, his eyes displeased, but the rage was gone.

Tam was the one who taught Rand the trick of the flame and the void, after all. And he’s using it here because now he’s feeling more than he can deal with; it’s all too much all at once. But he knows, too, how to steady himself.

“He tried to kill me,” Tam said in a level voice. “My own son. Once he was as gentle and faithful a lad as a father could hope for. Tonight, he channelled the One Power and turned it against me.”

I am emotionally compromised.

And he’s not even angry at Rand for that, because it’s all so wrong, and so instead it’s just pain. Pain for Rand’s own pain, shock at what Rand has become, grief for the boy he was who—by his own words and Tam’s acceptance—may as well be dead now, and something almost like disbelief that they could have come to this. I think he even knows that it’s not really personal, but that doesn’t make it better. This is his son except he’s so lost and broken that Tam doesn’t know how to bring him back.

Because at this point Rand is the only one who can do that. If he chooses to.

The words brought back memories of Rand looming over her, trying to kill her.

But that hadn’t been him! It had been Semirhage. Hadn’t it? Oh, Rand, she thought, understanding the pain she’d felt through the bond. What have you done?

This is precisely the distinction I tried to make last chapter, but it gets harder and harder to hold those things separate, and now Min has to wrestle with that and face what Rand has just done of his own volition, and that’s twice now that he’s almost killed those he loves most, and the first time he was controlled by Semirhage, but what does it mean that he almost did the same now?

Does it help, Min, that he’s asking himself that exact same question? What am I DOING?

There’s so much pain in these chapters it’s overflowing the book and I’m FINE.

Of course Tam went immediately off-script. That feels like a genuine flaw in Cadsuane’s plan; she shouldn’t have given him a script at all. She should have known that wouldn’t help, that Tam and Rand needed to be able to just…talk.

“I don’t know what you did to him, woman, but I recognise hatred when I see it. You have a lot to explain to—”

On the one hand, Tam does certainly have cause to be angry with Cadsuane. On the other hand, Rand’s state of mind is not Cadsuane’s doing, any more than it’s any single person’s doing. It’s the result of two years of torment and responsibility and trying to endure the unendurable.

But then, can you fault Tam for being angry, and looking to any target he can find? This is his son, and what he’s just seen is horrific, and he has to do something.

In short, we’re all emotionally compromised.

Except Rand, who has simply compromised his emotions.

Cadsuane calling Tam ‘boy’ is…grating. Though she does have several centuries on him. Still.

“Cadsuane!” Nynaeve said. “You don’t need to—”

“It’s all right, Wisdom,” Tam said.

HE CALLS HER ‘WISDOM’. I mean, with a second or so to think about it, of course he does. But given all she’s struggled with, and her entire character arc of growing beyond Wisdom of Emond’s Field and finding her strength and authority in a world so much larger than her village, and learning to make her place and claim respect in her own right…it’s just really lovely for her to get this nod from Tam. To him, she is still Wisdom, and he accords her that respect without even a moment’s hesitation.

It’s like Rand said: Tam is one person who hasn’t changed. He’s a fixed point in a world where so much is uncertain and so much is shifting.

Tam stared [Cadsuane] in the eyes. “I’ve known men who, when challenged, always turn to their fists for answers. I’ve never liked Aes Sedai; I was happy to be rid of them when I returned to my farm. A bully is a bully, whether she uses the strength of her arm or other means.”

…fair enough.

And it’s good to see someone challenging Cadsuane on that point, especially someone like Tam who can sustain that challenge. He’s like Gareth Bryne that way: he’s damn near unflappable, and she can’t get a reaction out of him through her usual tactics. It’s the sort of thing a character like her needs to run into sometimes, because the thing with Cadsuane is that she’s been on top for so long, and in the Aes Sedai power structure that means no one challenges her. And so there’s no check on arrogance that can so easily creep in to what once was simply confidence, no pushback when she takes something too far. That’s not good for anyone.

“Didn’t we warn you that Rand had grown unstable?”

“Unstable?” Tam asked. “Nynaeve, that boy is right near insane. What has happened to him? I understand what battle can do to a man, but…”

Ow ow ow this hurts.

(I feel like the whole second half of this book, and especially the last several chapters, have been basically just…[not pictured: me, trying to walk quickly across hot sand sprinkled liberally with broken glass and burning coals, mostly failing and going ‘ow’ a lot]).

One thing that stands out here is how differently Tam responds to Rand’s…‘instability’…than so many other characters do, or would. Because once again, he responds entirely as a parent, above all else. He doesn’t shiver in fear of what this might mean for the world, or simply stop at stating that Rand hardly seems sane as if that’s all that needs to be said, or suggest a course of action. No, he just asks, calmly but with this undercurrent still of loss and something like desperation, what has happened. He hasn’t seen Rand in years and now he sees this, and he wants to know what has hurt his child.

It stands out especially given that Cadsuane’s next statement is to tell him that’s irrelevant. Because she is one who looks to the world first, and the person second. (And I’ve said this before, but her viewpoint absolutely has its place as well, but it’s that as well that’s important. You also need people like Tam or Nynaeve who look to the person first).

Tam knows what PTSD looks like and this is something else, and he’s angry, yes, but mostly I think everything about his response in this whole scene is just a manifestation of…shock and grief and confusion and pain at seeing his son hurt in a way that he doesn’t even know how to identify, much less help.

I am not a parent, so I could be completely off-base about all of this, but this seems like it has to be right up there with a parent’s worst nightmare: to see their child so hurt and so far gone and to be helpless to do anything at all to save them. I mean, Rand outright said that the Rand Tam knew, the Rand Tam raised, was dead. And Tam just had to stand there and take that, and again I’m not a parent but even I know that no parent should have to bury their child, much less stand there and watch him bury himself.

And that feels like the root of Tam’s responses here: his gentleness with Rand; his pushback when he thought he had just enough of Rand’s attention that maybe, maybe Rand would listen; his horror at watching Rand weave balefire because I think he was just as afraid for Rand as of him in that moment; his uncontrolled anger at Cadsuane when there’s no other way to release what he’s feeling; his shock and confusion now as he tries to figure out what has happened to his son.

This is not Tam al’Thor’s best day, is what I’m getting at here. He rescued an infant from the slopes of Dragonmount, only to find that some part of that child never truly left that mountain and everythign hurts and nothing is okay and I would like ten million more chapters of this please.

“If you’d explained to me how he regarded you,” Tam said, “it might have gone differently.”

He’s probably right, there. That’s one she really should have been more open about.

But she has a point, too: there’s no use going over the woulds and shoulds and maybes. And…I have to wonder if there was really any way for that conversation to end other than it did. If it hadn’t been the mention of Cadsuane, it could just as easily have been something else that set Rand off. A rage in him fit to burn the world, and he holds it by a hair. That’s more true now than it was even when Cadsuane first said it; he is unstable for all that he thinks he is cold and controlled, and he has almost no limits on what he is willing to do (except perhaps one), and that whole conversation was, in retrospect, a time bomb.

Because at this point, given how far he has gone, I don’t think anyone could truly just…call Rand back in a single conversation. I think it has to come from him; and I think with all the walls he’s built and all the damage he’s done to himself, with this war he’s been fighting against himself as much as on the field, a violent moment of crisis might really have been inevitable, and possibly the only way to force him to face that.

So passing blame around like a hot-potato is…an understandable part of the process, because they’re human (silly mortals), but ultimately probably not going to accomplish anything.

“This is what we all get,” Min said, “for assuming we can make him do what we want.”

The room fell still.

Okay so.

On the one hand, this is a great line, and to a certain extent I agree…

But. On the other hand, it feels a bit…I don’t know. Cheap? Simplistic? Not quite true? Because at least three of the people in this room are among those very very few who do actually look at Rand as a person, as the person he was, rather than as the Dragon Reborn, saviour and destroyer of the world. Nynaeve followed him out of Emond’s Field, with the others, and followed him into a dream battle and said ‘at least let me heal you’ because there was nothing else she could do. Min has stood by Rand through most of the series purely because she loves him, and when so many other people’s perceptions of him were changing, she told him ‘I see you, Rand. I see you.’ Tam al’Thor is Rand’s father, and hasn’t had a chance to do much for him directly, but he hiked to Tar Valon to try to find him, and then specifically stayed out of his way because he thought that was the best thing he could do for him.

These are not people who have been trying all along to manipulate Rand into doing what they wanted.

And even this…this is an intervention, more than anything else. When your friend, lover, son, former babysittee, whatever is willing to annihilate cities, I think it’s fair to step in.

What help would they be to him if they just stood by and watched his descent this entire time? What good would it do anyone—Rand included—for them to never push back when they thought he was going too far, to never question his decisions? It’s like I was just saying above regarding Cadsuane: it’s not good for anyone to live unquestioned and unchallenged, especially if they hold that kind of power, authority, or influence.

And when talking to someone stops working, when reasoning with them stops working, when begging them stops working, and when, again, they’re ready to annihilate entire cities…yeah, you’re going to have to look at other options.

But none of them started at that point, and they’re some of the few who really haven’t been manipulating him to their own ends in general, and so this feels a bit…unfair, I guess.

I love Min, but I’m not sure I completely agree with her here. It would be a very true and very fair statement if made in just about any other company, but to Nynaeve and Tam? Not sure I buy it.

That said, in light of everything happening, I think everyone’s entitled to a bit of unfairness and anger and shock and all the other emotions flying around because hell, I’m emotionally compromised and I’m just the reader.

“He opened one of those gateways right on the balcony. Left me alive, though I could have sworn—looking in his eyes—that he meant to kill me.”

It has to mean something that he stopped himself. That has to be the turning point we’ve been waiting for. It’s too perfect a mirror/inversion of The Last That Could Be Done for it not to be…right?

Also someone please just sit Tam down with a giant mug of hot chocolate. This genre is not easy on parents even when they survive the first chapter, as it turns out.

“I’ve seen that look in the eyes of men before, and one of the two of us always ended up bleeding on the floor.”

Wow, okay, uh, sure, that’s…a line. Damn. There’s a whole conversation to be had here about swords and ploughshares and men who have seen too much and yet find a peaceful life for themselves in the aftermath but I don’t have much more than an ‘in this essay I will…’ for that so I’ll leave it for now.

But I think, in that exchange, it’s Rand who is left bleeding.

That moment tore open the wound he’s been trying to stifle and ignore, the gaping wound in his past life that led him to his own suicide once and that he is now forced to remember but has never been able to process. How the hell do you even begin to process something you never did, except a past you did do it, and suddenly you get that just…dropped into your brain and it’s yours but not yours and is it any surprise Rand has ended up where he is?

It tore that wide open by forcing Rand to face it head-on (no more than I’ve done before) and face it as himself rather than as a memory of a past existence that he can try to shove away. And it tore down his walls and threw emotions like knives at the shields he’s been trying to hold up and even if he’s not bleeding physically, he is absolutely bleeding.

And so is Tam, if we’re talking metaphorically here. That conversation was not without casualties.

“Ebou Dar,” Min said, surprising them all. “He’s gone to destroy the Seanchan. Just as he told the Maidens he would.”

But that would mean closing down anything that might have come of that conversation and realisation, shoving it all away back behind those walls of ice, and I’m no more a therapist than I am a parent but I’m pretty sure genocide is not a recommended coping mechanism for…uh…anything.

“Light preserve us,” Corele whispered.

Rand’s been evoking that reaction a lot, lately. It’s become something of a repeated chapter ending the way ‘Tarmon Gai’don’ echoed throughout Knife of Dreams.

Next (TGS ch 49) Previous (TGS ch 47)

#someone give Tam a hug #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

39 notes · View notes

tinysaurus-rex · 6 years

Text

Want to rescue battery hens?

Before I go into this, let me premise by saying I absolutely am NOT saying that roosters deserve life more than hens. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t rescue battery hens or focus on their welfare- we absolutely should!

See, the thing about battery hens is, well, the average person isn’t cut out for caring for these chickens. They require someone who is trained in rehabilitation and can handle the emotional turmoil. They require more than free ranging in sunlight with grass and bugs to eat and dirt to bathe in- they often need expansive medical attention and care. You can’t just toss them into freedom. It is a major time, financial, and emotional commitment to prepare them for a normal life and you need to remember that these hens will generally only live another year or two. The extreme amounts of eggs they produce means that no matter how much you give them, the damage has already been done. Even if they’re spayed to prevent more egg laying it has still taken a toll on their body.

The other thing is demand..these birds don’t come into rescues very often; there isn’t some animal welfare group busting battery hens out of prison every week. They’re actually very hard to find! Most actually end up going to farm animal sanctuaries and not pet homes because they usually have the skill to rehabilitate them. So, even if someone DID have all the resources necessary to help battery hens, it would be a while before they actually got any.

Now that I’ve got that out if the way, onto my point:

Why roosters?

And no, I don’t mean cock fighters. Nope, not broilers (meat birds). Just plain, normal, backyard roosters. Like this guy, Phillipe:

Well, okay, his situation was unique and he did require extensive experience with chickens. Known as Chet at the rescue, he was found with many others in tiny cages...not cock fighters. Likely just an animal hoarding situation. He went over a year at the rescue without interacting with any other chickens so it took some time to teach him how to be social that may not be best for the average person. But what about this lovely kid?

I got this cockerel and his brothers (unrelated cochin bantam and silkie who may actually be a pullet) from someone who couldn’t keep roosters where they live. There are LOTS of birds in this situation. Flint is a perfect gentlemen, he and his brothers required no rehabilitation or extra skills, easy peasy. I’m actually friends with his old owners now, they love their chickens but live in the city and can’t keep roosters!

And the most common situation? the fellow above. People end up with “too many” roosters and need to get rid of them! Luckily Razz came from a nice place that actually cares about their birds, the problem with him was primarily limited space (and silkie chickens are kind of dummies).

Roosters are EVERYWHERE. There is a constant demand for homes for cocks (adults) and cockerels (juveniles). And no one wants to give them a home! Why? Well a lot of it is the stigma against roosters, that they’re mean and don’t get along well with other boys. When you have hens this can be true, but a bachelor pad of cocks is just WONDERFUL! They make cuddly, sweet, healthy pets! Yep, no egg problems in these bad boys. Years of (generally) care free hugs and kisses to come when you adopt a rooster!

If you want to help chickens by adopting but don’t have the means to rescue battery hens, then just set up a bachelor pad- a coop only for roosters! Without hens you usually don’t have to worry about fighting or attacking you. And should you have issues, tethers work wonders- I have a cochin boy on a tether and it works out great. He’s very horny and wants to fight everything, so putting him on a tether lets other birds still interact with him freely but get away if he’s naughty. We’ve tethered several boys with excellent results, usually they can free roam after a few weeks- some do have a hormonal imbalance like my cochin boy (he’s happy on his tether, so no worries! it gets taken off in the evening after the others have gone to bed to let him run around).

Many of the roosters available are hand-reared pets that LOVE people and will make great companions. Now, they won’t lay eggs, but you shouldn’t expect that with battery hens anyways. You can often get fun and funky breeds, lots of different shapes, colors, and sizes! They all have a different crow and will amaze you with their dancing and singing skills. Roosters truly are wonderful pets that just don’t get a lot of credit.

If you’re interested, you can start by looking in your local classifieds (aka Craigslist in the US) where, depending on location, you’re bound to find a rooster in need. You can also check local shelters and farm rescues.

#chickens #chickenblr #rescue #ex battery hens #roosters #rescue roosters #bird care #rescue chickens

872 notes · View notes

berniesrevolution · 5 years

Photo

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Labor movements emerge from class conditions. This seems easy enough to accept but too general to provide solutions to US labor’s problems. If we turn to history, it would be hard to argue that major advances or retreats were caused by just one factor — be it economic, political, or organizational — rather than many. Most important labor histories, from E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class to Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, center on the idea of multiple causality, or what Louis Althusser called “overdetermination.” These authors drill down beneath quantitative indices of social change to the qualitative dimensions of everyday life. They find — again and again — that cultural practices, such as “blue Monday” among nineteenth-century craftsmen, or “disco sucks” events in the 1970s, helped accelerate or inhibit working-class action.

So far, however, most of our contemporary thinking on union decline and renewal has sidestepped this question (with notable exceptions, like the work of Paul Buhle). We focus heavily on unions’ internal structures and organizing strategies while integrating accounts of political economy, labor law, and worker demographics. A common, unstated assumption is that if only the right organizing model, legislative reform, or economic conjuncture presented itself, workers would burst forth in a new wave of membership and militancy. What is left unexamined are the ways precarious employment and the rise of a host of substitute activities have reshaped workers’ practices, identities, and their willingness to take collective action.

In 2015, I went to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, with these questions in mind. It was a storied center of textile production in the early twentieth century and of militant, social-democratic unionism in the 1930s and 1940s. But it had fallen on hard times, suffering the ravages of deindustrialization and failed attempts at renewal, though over a longer time frame than Flint or Detroit.

My visit was not purely academic. During my teens, I had lived in a neighboring town where people looked down on Woonsocket. Earlier, growing up near Lowell, Massachusetts, I spent almost every school trip touring its textile museum’s sanitized version of mill life. And before that, my grandfather and his generation had worked in Rhode Island mills. Though decades removed, his family’s culture still bears the marks of hardship, solidarity, and relative gender equality imprinted by that first wave of industrial capitalism.

When I walked Woonsocket’s largely empty Main Street with its iconic “Bienvenu” sign and scattered former factories, therefore, it was with more than a detached analytic gaze. I spoke with many residents — sixty, so far — and asked them about things I knew: work, wages, unions, politics. Everyone had something to say.

Artie, a forty-eight-year-old out-of-work carpenter told me, “These are hard times, bro. I’ve probably built a million houses, I’ve been a productive part of society, and for what? Some fucking asshole up in Boca Raton?”

Theresa, a forty-two-year-old single mother who had escaped an abusive relationship only to find a cold shoulder on the job market relayed her experience: “I filled out an application and they weren’t hiring anybody who didn’t have a college degree. They wanted people who are ‘future-oriented,’ they don’t want riff-raffs.’’

And Amanda, a mom in her twenties who had moved from Massachusetts for the cheap rent, recounted similar struggles applying for aid: “They denied me every single time saying that I make too much money. But when I open my fridge, I have no milk — like, I can’t afford to get it. I feel like I am always stuck under something. I’m stuck under the things that I can’t have.”

Deprivation was not hard to find. Nor were expressions of resistance and favorable views of unions. But beneath economics lay a deeper source of suffering that I was ill-equipped to understand. It provided both joy and pain in ever-shifting doses, and though more private in practice than union or political activism, it had clear social dimensions. I am speaking, of course, of opioid addiction.

Artie, who came from a “drug addict family” and said, “I do drugs and smoke weed,” was also adamant that “I’m not a heroin head; I’m not a fucking junkie.”

Theresa, who was on methadone when we spoke, found that heroin “helped me do what I’ve got to do. It gets me get through the day. If I could afford it, I would still be doing it.”

And as Kevin, a twenty-nine-year-old former convict and meat-packer explained it: “A few of my friends passed away this year because of the dope. Everybody is doing it — everybody. It’s the culture.”

Drug use and abuse were pervasive in the lives of Woonsocketers — their own, their friends’, their families’. It was a practice more immediate than wage exploitation and the struggle against it more salient than that against employers or the state.

At the level of culture, where identity is formed socially through channeling desire, substance dependence seemed to have replaced wage dependence, and recovery to have replaced unionism. This dynamic, buttressed by the confluence of union decline and overdose death at the national level, confounds most approaches to union renewal. It suggests that workers’ loss of power is no longer simply a deficiency to be corrected, but a problem that has bred its own answers. Responding to these answers in a way that overcomes shame while tapping the moral energy of recovery should be a central task of union activists.

Figure 1: Union Decline and Overdose Death Rates in the US, 1973–2016

Figure 2: Union Decline (1983–2016) and Overdose Death Rate (2016) by US State

Pearson’s coefficient = 0.33; p-value = 0.017 Sources: Hirsch and Macpherson 2018; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2017.

Precarious Work, Distant Unions

When one thinks of New England labor, Woonsocket doesn’t usually come to mind. Places like Lawrence, Lowell, or Fall River might come first, followed by Manchester, Worcester, or Providence. Indeed, Woonsocket is diminutive compared to these peers: its population peak of 50,000 in 1950 was less than half of theirs.

But its primary industry — woolen and worsted textiles — had a longer, skill-dependent shelf-life than cotton-centered production. While those better-known cities’ labor movements were hobbled by the early flight of cotton in the 1920s and experienced the 1934 textile strike as a rearguard defeat, for Woonsocket it inaugurated an impressive rise of worker power under the Independent Textile Union (ITU).

The wolf finally came for woolen and worsted too, as employers headed south in the 1950s. But the intervening years allowed Woonsocket’s mostly French-Canadian working class to take part in the CIO upsurge and taste its material gains.

“[T]hese workers,” argues Gary Gerstle in his seminal history, “made the city … into what Fall River and then Lawrence had once been — the bastion of organized labor in New England.”

Under the leadership of Franco-Belgian socialist Joseph Schmetz and American-born Lawrence Spitz, the ITU organized 84 percent of Woonsocket’s workforce, achieved record wage gains, and sought to wrest control of daily life from employers and the clergy with an ambitious cultural program that Gerstle calls “working-class Americanism.” Though delayed by ethnic insularity and church-enforced piety, class, in something close to its Marxian form, happened in Woonsocket.

And class has continued to happen there, in ways less liberating. Unions have largely evaporated and work, for many, has become intermittent and low-wage. Jobs were something subjects endured and were compelled to constantly seek but were not a stable source of bonding or identity. Even more so unions: none were current members and only a handful had ever been, though many had relatives who were.

The unifying experience of work, once central to the formation of union consciousness, was broken if not absent entirely.

April’s history was illustrative. “I dropped out in ninth grade,” she told me, “and from there I’ve done all kinds of small tedious jobs like babysitting, mostly retail and customer service. That pretty much sums it up, that’s my life. Most of it has always been short term.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #prescription drugs #class oppression #poverty

18 notes · View notes

jaybug-jabbers · 3 years

Text

Bug Run 4: The Final Reckoning

So, here’s the thing. I wanted to go into this last gauntlet as low-levelled as possible.

So I tried several times. I’ll give some recaps of those warm-ups. But in the end, I did find I needed to level up on levels on par with Cynthia in order to properly face her. I do want to include the warm-ups, however, because those lower Elite fights become quite trivial at higher levels. So I feel like the warm-ups do cast an important light on the merits of the team.

Just as a quick refesher on the rules:

1.) no healing items during battle unless the foe uses them first, and then I can only match the items one-for-one.

2.) no entering the Elite four at levels higher than the highest-level pokemon in the Elites/Champion.

Warm-Up One

With this first warm-up, my team was all at levels 55. Honestly, they did surprisingly well, all things considered. The first few Elites, specializing in Bug and Ground, were not any trouble. After all, ROFLCOPTER’s Ancient Power/Air Slash could just sweep the bug team, and I had plenty of ways of handling the ground team as well. (In fact, Maestro took out Rhyperior all on his own– which I am so proud of. The power of Screech and Brick Break, and Rhyperior missing one of his Megahorns, heh.)

The true challenge was Flint.

One of only two Elites who specialize in the Fire type, surely this was the true test of a bug team’s mettle.

I started off with my Drapion, as you can imagine his typing and his Earthquake were pretty important for this match. Sadly I fall JUST short of a 1HKO on Houndoom. The dog gets Sunny Day up, which is … really, really bad. Then Flint heals. I take out Houndoom the next time, but that’s the least of my concerns. Infernape is next up, and I send out Yanmega, because I’m certain it will outspeed Drapion. After a little Protect just in case, I Air Slash, which juuuuuuust barely falls short of killing. Fortunately Infernape Flare Blitzes and takes us both out. My Black Fang is back out again, squaring off against Flareon. Sadly, my EQ doesn’t one-shot, so I get an Overheat straight to the face. I finally bring Flareon down, but next up is the scary horse that is Very Fast. I revive my dragonfly (potion was used on Houndoom) and send him out. While Rapidash spends a turn getting Sunny Day back up, I throw some rocks. Another turn of rocks and it goes down, but then the major problem hits.

It’s Magmortar. In the sun, no less.

My Ancient Power hardly even phases him, depressingly. Once ROFL goes down, that’s it. Magmortar outspeeds everyone in a giant ball of fire.

Warm-Up Two

So, no real surprise that Magmortar presented a bit of a problem for us. My second warm-up had my team all at levels 57 when I started out. This is the level of Flint’s ace poke. These higher levels made things a lot easier: Black Fang took Houndoom out in one hit, preventing Sunny Day. ROFL’s Air Slash on Infernape took him out clean this time. Fang’s EQ could also clean out Flareon in one hit. Rapidash was the first to not fall to one hit: he took one Ancient Power, just barely. However, ROFL somehow survived the Flare Blitz and Rapidash fell to recoil.

I’m sad to say ROFL’s rocks still barely put a dent in Magmortar; and Magmortar still outsped nearly everyone on my team still. Except for one– Black Fang. Thankfully, EQ killed, letting us squeak on by.

The last Elite member was a Psychic specialist. As you can imagine, for a full-bug team, this wasn’t too terrifying a prospect. I sent Maestro out first, 1HKOing the Mr. Mime. Gallade was the ace, and pretty damn tough. I decide to send Fang out to get a couple Scary Faces off, because his speed terrifies me. Then I smash away with Poison Jabs, poisoning him in the process. I’m almost home free until (of course) Full Restore rains on my parade. So I continue the process, stabbing away with Poison Jab, but my foe decides to be clever and switch Bronzong in. I try using Crunch on it just to see, but it’s not really worth much; I drop to Extrasensory and probably shouldn’t have wasted Drapion like that.

That said, Maestro goes in and has this covered for me. I’ve spent many an hour beating up Bronzongs in Victory Road and know that one Screech and the bell falls to my X-Scissors, despite the bulk and the resistances. No worries.

Gallade returns from his break, so I send ROFL in. I proect on what I think is his last Stone Edge before Air Slashing him to death.

Last is Alakazam. Air Slash puts him at 1 HP, which is quite annoying, because of course Full Restore is next. Yes, I don’t have Bug Buzz on ROFL. I know, that’s a bit silly, but I wanted to pack a bunch of coverage moves on him. Anyway, I bring Fiberglass in and smash away with Iron Heads as plan B. I take 2 Focus Blasts to the face easily and immerge victorious.

Easy peasy.

But truth be told, despite how far we had gotten, we just weren’t ready for a particular pokemon to come.

Cynthia’s opeing Spiritomb is easy enough. I used Cleo to toxic it and healed heavily, and swooped in with Attack Order when the time was ripe.

Togekiss was out next, which … is pretty scary. I had equipped Black Fang with Rock Slide, but Togekiss is still bulky as fuck. Plus, Air Slash did a LOT to Fang, even though it wasn’t super effective. I got lucky with the flinches, simply put (even after one full restore from our champion). Somehow, against a Togekiss, this seems fitting, though.

Luck wasn’t going to carry us through Garchomp, though. The run ended there, once again in flames. It was just too high-levelled and too strong.

Warm-Up Three

I spent some time grinding more, getting the team up to levels 60-62. I also bought and grabbed a few extra HMs and items. I would need to be careful and incredibly precise with this battle.

This fight came so incredibly close. It certainly confirmed I was on the right track.

I opened with Fiberglass, setting down my Stealth Rock. I bashed away at Spiritomb with Iron Head, which was around a four or five hit kill. That sounds slow, but Fiberglass resisted the Dark Pulses and Shadow Balls that it threw at me, so it was quite reasonable. I did get some bad luck with a Special Defense drop on a Shadow Ball, though. This means when Cynthia stopped to potion up, I did too. Eventually Spiritomb fell, though.

Next was Garchomp. She was going right to the big guns this time. I had a plan for this, though. I sent out my Drapion, equipped with a Focus Sash. The plan was Scary Face. I absolutely needed to drop its terrible speed. Lacking any paralyzing moves whatsoever, Scary Face was all I had. Earthquake brought me down to 2 HP (which was hilarious, not even consuming the sash) and I got the Scary Face off; then I pondered my next move. I decided to risk swapping Cleopatra in.

She switched in on an Earthquake as I had hoped, and then was able to Toxic. She tanked Garchomp’s Flamethrower damn admirably, and was able to heal off the damage several times. Then a critical hit catches her and she goes down. Still, it felt like holding back an ocean tide, and I was impressed she managed to do it as long as she did.

Then I sent Maestro in.

“A fucking Kricketune against a Garchomp?” you ask. “Are you mad?”

But this Kricketune had a Pomeg berry and that weird move Natural Gift. As most of you probably don’t remember this weird-ass move introduced in gen IV, the move’s power and typing changes depending on the berry you hold. It’s kind of like Hidden Power, but easier to manipulate … but can only be done once, as it consumes the berry.

Pomeg berry translates to a base 70 Ice attack. And it worked, taking the Garchomp down. It was deeply satisfying.

Next was Togekiss. I had hoped Fiberglass could do a little chip damage but her health was just too low and she went down immediately. Somehow, I manage to take Togekiss out with 2 Ancient Powers from ROFL, though (after surviving an Air Slash).

Milotic is out next, and I’m fully aware how tanky this beast is. I send out Sparkler to try a Bug Buzz, and get a very lucky critical hit– sending the HP down to 1/3. Ice beam then takes us out, but ROFL can easily revenge with Air Slash.

Lucario is next! I try Air Slash, and it brings him down to less then ½ health, which is great! But what’s not so great is Lucario has Stone Edge. Another bug drops.

Maestro manages to get the kill with Brick Break– surviving a Stone Edge to do so. It feels fantastic, but we’re in deep trouble now. I’m down to just two pokemon; Maestro and Black Fang, and they’re both in the low red.

It’s just not quite enough. She outspeeds Maestro and so he’s gone.

And that’s it. The run stops here. I know Fang can’t 1HKO.

We came so close, though. So ridiculously close. What if our luck had been just a little bit better? Or what if … what if I put the Focus Sash on Sparkler? I’d already seen Fang could just barely survive one hit.

What would happen then?

One More Fight

The rematch is very, very similar to before, with only a few small differences.

This time round, Fiberglass got through Spiritomb a little more easily. I didn’t need to use a potion to get through it when Cynthia potioned it; I just plugged away and brought the ghost down.

The fight with Garchomp went pretty similarly. I got a Scary Face off with Drapion, swapped Cleo in, did some toxic stalling … although once Garchomp’s health gets into the red and I choose “Toxic” again, anticipating the Full Restore, for some odd reason it never comes. Garchomp Dragon Rushes instead– which misses, and toxic of course fails. The following turn, Garchomp goes down. I have no idea why Cynthia didn’t Full Restore that time, but in the long run, it didn’t make a difference, as you will see.

Next up was Togekiss, and I send Fiberglass back in, but potion up Drapion this time– using the potion I was owed that Cynthia used before on her Spiritomb. Fiberglass goes down to a critical Air Slash, and Drapion goes out to tough it out again with Rock Slides. Once again, Cynthia potioning up and I need to Rock Slide through another round, but manage to not fall victom to Rock Slide misses. I’m thankful.

Milotic is next again, and Sparkler Bug Buzzes. He does not score a crit this time, and I see just how pitiful the damage is when it’s not a crit. Oof. My sash is consumed and I get one more hit off, which helps, but Milotic is not as low as before. When I send ROFL in, Air Slash does not kill.

Oddly, Milotic decides to Mirror Coat instead of Ice Beam. I take heavy damage but don’t die. I try to Giga Drain, now confused over what Milotic was doing, and thinking the HP might help me survive a non-ice hit. It brings Milotic down into the red but she still doesn’t DIE, and Cynthia potions back up.

This wasn’t going good. I attack more, finally go down to an Ice Beam, and bring Fang in to revenge-kill with a Poison Jab, which thankfully does the job.

Lucario is out next. I swap in Cleo, who’s in the low red. I use the chance to do one thing: potion Drapion back up again. Cleo goes down, and Drapion can kill with one EQ.

Finally, Roserade. I’m back to the same scenario as before– with Maestro and Fang the last ones standing– but both are at full health this time.

Two Poison Jabs take Roserade down, and that’s that.

This is a repost on a new blog. The original post was on Dec 14, 2018.

#pokemon #bugrun #bugrun4 #mycontent #pokemon playthroughs

0 notes

phroyd · 7 years

Text

Scott Pruitt Is Carrying Out His E.P.A. Agenda in Secret, Critics Say.

The Environmental Protection Agency has become more secretive under the leadership of Scott Pruitt.Credit - Tom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When career employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is, according to interviews with employees of the federal agency.

Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to have an escort to gain entrance.

Some employees say they are also told to leave behind their cellphones when they meet with Mr. Pruitt, and are sometimes told not to take notes.

Mr. Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is accompanied, even at E.P.A. headquarters, by armed guards, the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.

A former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the E.P.A., and whose LinkedIn profile still describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Mr. Pruitt has made it clear that he sees his mission to be dismantling the agency’s policies — and even portions of the institution itself.

But as he works to roll back regulations, close offices and eliminate staff at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health, Mr. Pruitt is taking extraordinary measures to conceal his actions, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former agency employees.

Together with a small group of political appointees, many with backgrounds, like his, in Oklahoma politics, and with advice from industry lobbyists, Mr. Pruitt has taken aim at an agency whose policies have been developed and enforced by thousands of the E.P.A.’s career scientists and policy experts, many of whom work in the same building.

“There’s a feeling of paranoia in the agency — employees feel like there’s been a hostile takeover and the guy in charge is treating them like enemies,” said Christopher Sellers, an expert in environmental history at Stony Brook University, who this spring conducted aninterview survey with about 40 E.P.A. employees.

Such tensions are not unusual in federal agencies when an election leads to a change in the party in control of the White House. But they seem particularly bitter at the E.P.A.

Allies of Mr. Pruitt say he is justified in his measures to ramp up his secrecy and physical protection, given that his agenda and politics clash so fiercely with those of so many of the 15,000 employees at the agency he heads.

“E.P.A. is legendary for being stocked with leftists,” said Steven J. Milloy, a member of Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. transition team and author of the book “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the E.P.A.” “If you work in a hostile environment, you’re not the one that’s paranoid.”

Mr. Pruitt’s penchant for secrecy is reflected not just in his inaccessibility and concern for security. He has terminated a decades-long practice of publicly posting his appointments calendar and that of all the top agency aides, and he has evaded oversight questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to the Democratic senators who posed the questions.

His aides recently asked career employees to make major changes in a rule regulating water quality in the United States — without any records of the changes they were being ordered to make. And the E.P.A. under Mr. Pruitt has moved to curb certain public information, shutting down data collection of emissions from oil and gas companies, and taking down more than 1,900 agency webpages on topics like climate change, according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, which did a Freedom of Information request on these terminated pages.

William D. Ruckelshaus, who served as E.P.A. director under two Republican presidents and once wrote a memo directing agency employees to operate “in a fishbowl,” said such secrecy is antithetical to the mission of the agency.

“Reforming the regulatory system would be a good thing if there were an honest, open process,” he said. “But it appears that what is happening now is taking a meat ax to the protections of public health and environment and then hiding it.”

Mr. Ruckelshaus said such secrecy could pave the way toward, or exacerbate, another disaster like the contamination of public drinking water in Flint, Mich., or the 2014 chemical spill into the public water supply in Charleston, W.Va. — while leading to a dearth of information when such events happen.

“Something will happen, like Flint, and the public will realize they can’t get any information about what happened or why,” he said.

But Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., categorically denied the accounts employees interviewed for this article gave of the secrecy surrounding Mr. Pruitt.

“None of this is true,” she said. “It’s all rumors.”

She added, in an emailed statement, “It’s very disappointing, yet not surprising, to learn that you would solicit leaks, and collude with union officials in an effort to distract from the work we are doing to implement the president’s agenda.”

Mr. Pruitt’s efforts to undo a major water protection rule are one example of his moves to quickly and stealthily dismantle regulations.

The rule, known as Waters of the United States, and enacted by the Obama administration, was designed to take existing federal protections on large water bodies such as the Chesapeake Bay and Mississippi River and expand them to include the wetlands and small tributaries that flow into those larger waters.

It was fiercely opposed by farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers.

The original estimate concluded that the water protections would indeed come at an economic cost to those groups — between $236 million and $465 million annually.

But it also concluded, in an 87-page analysis, that the economic benefits of preventing water pollution would be greater: between $555 million and $572 million.

E.P.A. employees say that in mid-June, as Mr. Pruitt prepared a proposal to reverse the rule, they were told by his deputies to produce a new analysis of the rule — one that stripped away the half-billion-dollar economic benefits associated with protecting wetlands.

“On June 13, my economists were verbally told to produce a new study that changed the wetlands benefit,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who retired last month from a 30-year career at the E.P.A., most recently as a senior official in the agency’s water office.

“On June 16, they did what they were told,” Ms. Southerland said. “They produced a new cost-benefit analysis that showed no quantifiable benefit to preserving wetlands.”

Ms. Southerland and other experts in federal rule-making said such a sudden shift was highly unusual — particularly since studies that estimate the economic impact of regulations can take months or even years to produce, and are often accompanied by reams of paperwork documenting the process.

“Typically there are huge written records, weighing in on the scientific facts, the technology facts and the economic facts,” she said. “Everything’s in writing. This repeal process is political staff giving verbal directions to get the outcome they want, essentially overnight.”

Jeffrey Ruchs, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization representing government employees in environmental fields, said the E.P.A. could not allow changes like this to take place, or expect its employees to follow such directives.

“This is a huge change, and they made it over a few days, with almost no record, no documentation,” Mr. Ruchs said, adding, “It wasn’t so much cooking the books, it was throwing out the books.”

Experts in administrative law say such practices skate up to the edge of legality.

While federal records laws prohibit senior officials from destroying records, they could evade public scrutiny of their decision-making by simply not creating them in the first place.

“The mere fact they are telling people not to write things down shows they are trying to keep things hidden,” said Jeffrey Lubbers, a professor of administrative law at American University.

Mr. Pruitt had a reputation for being secretive before he ever came to the E.P.A.

While serving as Oklahoma’s attorney general, he came under criticism for maintaining at least three separate email accounts, including one private account that he at times used for state government business.

During his Senate confirmation, he was asked about these multiple accounts, providing what some senators considered a misleading answer.

A subsequent lawsuit resulted in the release of some of these other emails, which Mr. Pruitt had asserted did not exist.

“He’s got a serious problem because of his emails down in Oklahoma — he’s burned himself,” said David Schnare, who worked at the agency from 1978 to 2011 and then on the Trump administration’s E.P.A. transition team. “He doesn’t want to take any risks.”

Mr. Schnare, a conservative Republican who has backed President Trump’s broader agenda, had taken on what was expected to be a more permanent role at the E.P.A.

But he resigned last month in protest of what he said is Mr. Pruitt’s mismanagement of the agency.

Mr. Schnare noted that some previous E.P.A. administrators had been secretive — during the Obama administration, for example, Lisa Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, came under criticism for using an email alias, “Richard Windsor,” to conduct official business.

But Mr. Schnare said that Mr. Pruitt’s methods stood out from all of his predecessors.

“My view was that under this administration we would be good at transparency, particularly in the regulatory area,” he said. “But these guys aren’t doing that.”

Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the committee overseeing federal government operations, has criticized Mr. Pruitt for embracing what he calls “a culture of secrecy around everything from his schedule to the way the agency makes scientific determinations.”

Mr. Carper and other Senate Democrats have a dozen outstanding requests awaiting a response from Mr. Pruitt, and when responses do come, Mr. Carper said, they referred lawmakers to printouts of news releases instead of answering questions.

An E.P.A. spokesman disputed Mr. Carper’s criticisms.

“Administrator Pruitt has responded to 14 of the 27 oversight letters, which often contain numerous in-depth questions and it takes time to provide an extensive and through response,” he said, adding that he “has been incredibly responsive to Congress.”

Mr. Pruitt and his staff are also subject to intense scrutiny from the public and the news media: The E.P.A., just in the last two months, has received more than 2,000 Freedom of Information requests, many of them focused on Mr. Pruitt, asking for every possible record related to his tenure, including text messages, telephone records and even his web browsing history.

Yet for E.P.A. employees, information about Mr. Pruitt’s activities can be hard to obtain.

In April, for example, he traveled to Chicago to visit an E.P.A.-designated hazardous waste site.

But E.P.A. employees at the agency’s Chicago office said they had no idea he was there — nor did he visit the Chicago branch of the agency, or meet with staff members.

“He won’t meet with us or talk to us to make decisions about policy, and we don’t even know when he’s in town,” said Nicole Cantello, a lawyer in the E.P.A.’s Chicago office and a leader of the employee union.

[Source]

Phroyd

#epa #secrecy #pruitt

15 notes · View notes

berniesandersniece · 4 years

Text

Climate Change: Next Steps

Olivia Johnson

1The Human Planet: How we Created the Anthroposcene

The conversation on climate change is often dominated by the latest technologies, products, and methods created to combat the degradation and destruction human activities are inflicting upon our earth. While these are certainly necessary in cleaning up the mess we have caused with our unsustainable actions, there is a much more difficult conversation that needs to be had. Ultimately, our philosophy of the earth and how we see ourselves in relation to nature determines if we will truly be able to prevent our species and many others from impending doom. An adequate, lasting solution to climate change and other environmental problems requires a change of lifestyle and mindset, a challenge which, although necessary, is certainly not an easy goal to accomplish. Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin’s work The Human Planet: How we Created the Anthropocene discusses these complex tasks for humanity, and offers equally as complex solutions. Chapter 11, “Can Homo dominatus become Wise?” examines how climate change could lead to a mass collapse of societies, our current efforts to prevent this, and what changes are required by humanity in order to address this. The authors argue that what is ultimately needed is a complete restructuring of social systems worldwide. They state, “It is under this scenario that it is possible to envisage a near-future network of civilizations developing that is considered thoughtful and wise in our relations to each other and our home planet.”2 One factor that is currently preventing this is capitalism; while it does have its strengths and has led to a decrease in poverty and increase in human lifespan, capitalism has also created extreme inequality, alienation, and an unhealthy focus on competition instead of cooperation. Capitalism has arguably imposed socially and environmentally destructive effects on the entire planet, and there it is necessary that people acknowledge this if we are going to successfully curb our deadly impact on the earth. While humanity also faces threats of nuclear war and bioterrorism, the authors state, “...the central, pressing, existential threat to human civilization results from a core contradiction in today’s mode of living: it is powered by energy sources that are undermining the ability of today’s globally integrated network of cultures to persist.”3 It is quite alarming to consider the breakdown of society by its own hands, and even more terrifying to see global leaders and the general public fail to acknowledge just how devastating the effects of climate change will be.

The current efforts to combat climate change are largely based on the Paris Agreement, which set a goal to limit global warming “well below” 2°C and “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5°C; however, there are not clear penalties for violating the pledge, and even if it was fully implemented, it would not be enough to stop emission from rising. The global fossil fuel industry is an extremely lucrative business, and the United States alone pours $5 trillion into the market annually in subsidies. As many more-developed countries are making sincere efforts to curb their emissions and even reduce them to net zero, many less-developed countries do not have the infrastructure to do this, and also see this as an obstacle to building a stable economy. This of course is not because these nations do not feel a need to address climate change, but because they have been suppressed for so long by more-developed nations while the latter has polluted the earth at an ungodly rate. Equality is something that must be addressed while combating climate change; it would be extremely unfair for more-developed countries to impose these same conditions on less-developed after they essentially got rich from plunder the rest of the world and using up most of the world’s global carbon budget. A third of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere came from the United States alone. To address this, the authors state, “The West therefore owes the rest for its historical debt, and has a clear obligation to pay for the future damage that its emissions will cause.”4 A failure to accept this and deal with the consequences is one of the basic problems that has slowed climate talks for over two decades.

The ravenous cycle of consumer capitalism must be slowed. Lewis and Maslin state, “Growth matters. This is the path, which at some stage, ensures environmental breakdown as an ever greater fraction of humanity follow it with vigour. Could this cycle end before it is too late?” 5There is a need for change in the current standard mode of living for nations consuming unsustainably. Human needs must take priority over the greatest financial profit on investments, something much easier said than done. However, the authors remind their audience that there is hope; the fossil fuel market is proving to be a bad long-term investment, a large scale implementation of clean energy sources is quickly becoming viable, and some countries have made sincere efforts with already promising results. Lewis and Maslin propose two critical and complex ideas that could hold possible solutions to climate change. The first concerns how the need to sell our labor produces a dependency relationship, and results in inequality and sometimes outright abuse. To reduce and even eliminate this, they argue, people should receive a Universal Basic Income, a financial payment to every citizen without an obligation to work, which would result in increased autonomy and reduced consumption and environmental impacts. The second big idea is Half-Earth rewilding; originally proposed by biologist E. O. Wilson, this would allocate half the Earth’s surface primarily for the benefit of other species, while letting humans have the other half. The authors state, “Radical changes in society tend to change our views on nature, aesthetics, and our relationship with the natural world.”6 If these changes are implemented, the society that could potentially result from these changes could establish a beautiful relationship with nature and each other.

A concept I found particularly interesting in this chapter was Lewis and Maslin’s connection between climate change and other social injustices. A change in how we treat our environment would mean, they state, “...to see and deal with the domination of men over women, old over young, one class over another, and of people over the rest of nature, which may as well all be linked.”7 In our capitalistic society, our current view of our relationship was largely formed during the Industrial Revolution, which exacerbated racism, sexism, inequality, and abuses to our environment. This explains why injustices, such as the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that seriously threatens the Standing Rock Sioux and the Flint Water Crisis that has seriously harmed communities of color, continue to happen. Profit trumps people, and this facet of capitalism is largely why environmental degradation has continued to occur despite concrete scientific evidence that it will harm us. In order to address climate change, we must address how we treat each other, and how our unsustainable actions are not only detrimental to the earth, but to many vulnerable populations throughout the world that are suffering as a result of our selfishness. Although our society is seriously ill, I am hopeful that change will continue to happen if the efforts of grassroots campaigns and other individuals who continue to fight are seen and heard.

Question: The Industrial Revolution led to the period of Romanticism; what social movement will come out of this time, or already is being developed?

Words: 1236

1Lewis, Simon, and Mark Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene: a Pelican Book. London: Pelican, 2018.

2Lewis, 371.

3Lewis, 378.

4Lewis, 389.

5Lewis, 399.

6Lewis, 410

7Lewis, 404.

0 notes

addictionfreedom · 5 years

Text

Addiction Treatment Grand Rapids Mi

Contents

Pine rest campus). grand

Vicar general bishop

Centers … evidence-based

Samhsa.gov. grand rapids

Treatment strategies main page. jerry holds

Buprenorphine Opioid Treatment Doctors in Grand Rapids, Michigan. While these treatments have been available for many years, there is a stigma to relying on these medications to help fight addiction rather than the traditional willpower and community approach of a 12-step program.

Top Grand Rapids, Addiction Recovery Centers: Reviews and Ratings. When you are putting money into a family member's health, future and happiness, you'll need to make sure you're making the best possible decision for your Grand Rapids alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation clinic.

Crack Movie Wiki Akshay Kumar Crack Movie 2018 – MT Wiki providing Latest Star cast and crew, release date MT Wiki: Upcoming Movie, Hindi TV Shows, Serials TRP, Bollywood Box Office: Crack 2018: Movie Full… Logan and Noah Miller have written the film based on the true story of Rick Wershe Jr who was 15 when he was

Even using the Flint River water, the City of Flint could have prevented the corrosion of its copper and lead pipes relatively inexpensively: Marc Edwards, a professor at Virginia Tech who has been te…

Addiction Services in Northern Michigan. Treatment for Depression. Inpatient care is short-term, intensive treatment provided in safe and secure units designed for individuals who are experiencing significant behavioral health issues, the severity of Postma Center at Pine Rest, Grand Rapids MI.

As the leading professional organization representing physicians involved in cancer treatment and research, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) is dedicated to the prevention and treatmen…

Sanford House in Grand Rapids, Michigan is a drug and alcohol rehab and recovery center. We offer residential and non-residential treatment options for both men and women Because our proven drug and alcohol addiction treatment, comprehensive as it may be, is just the beginning of a life in recovery.

Get help finding Long Term Alcohol and Drug Rehab Centers in Grand Rapids, MI that are unique to your individual needs. Addiction treatment professionals …

… provides counseling at Leonard Street Counseling Center in Grand Rapids. … to provide behavioral health care treatment and medical treatment for persons with … This event is West Michigan's largest celebration of recovery from substance …

Find the best drug and alcohol rehab centers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. AddictionResource provides a list of inpatient and outpatient addiction recovery …

April 5, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — An innovative, genomics-based pilot program to study opioid abuse and addiction was launched in Kalamazoo … for chronic pain and medication-assisted treatmen…

I have provided therapy and counseling services for adults, children, couples and families in Grand Rapids, MI, for the last three years. I have extensive… Welcome! You will already know from what y…

Treatment is provided using a multidisciplinary team of physicians, psychiatrists, nurses and masters prepared counselors who are certified in addictions. (pine rest campus). grand Rapids, MI 49548. Phone: 616.258.7467. When visiting our campus, the Retreat Center is the 1st building on the left, just…

Salvation Army is a addiction treatment service located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We have info about their rehab specialties and location. Search the rehab …

"Busy doctors sign papers quickly, so it’s easy for a substitution to sneak through," says Robert Reneker, MD, urgent care physician at Spectrum Health, a hospital system in Grand Rapids, MI. Ask: Wil…

His two-armed business counsels individuals, including those with anxiety, depression and alcohol or drug addiction issues … Counseling Center and the Elk Rapids School District. He is past presiden…

Residential Treatment, Outpatient Treatment, Gender Specific Treatment, Intervention, Aftercare, Drug Addiction, Alcohol Addiction Offers Individualized Treatment and Integrated Therapies – Provides Evidence-Based Treatment Programs – Serves in Three Locations within Grand Rapids, MI…

Find private, inpatient rehabs in Grand Rapids, Michigan including some of the Nation's … We can assist you in discovering drug and alcohol addiction treatment …

Offers drug and alcohol assessments and treatment in Grand Rapids in an intimate and caring environment. Community Living & outpatient therapy.

Aug 21, 2018 … Grand Rapids doctor working to expand access to addiction treatment in rural Michigan. "This is the largest man-made epidemic in the history …

"There was no treatment for them." Wunsch is a director and founder of the American Board of Addiction Medicine and a co-editor of the Journal of Addiction Medicine. She said the board came together a…

Treatment Centers Directory of Grand Rapids, MI. Treatment Center Directory.com is the premier destination for locating alcohol treatment, drug addiction rehab centers and detox programs in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dr. Joel Wood is an anesthesiologist in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received his medical degree from University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and has been in practice between 3-5 ye…

vicar general bishop Edmond Carmody, has filled in for Strickland during the absence. Bishop Strickland is feeling much better now and is responding to medical treatment.The diocese asks the community …

Suboxone Treatment Doctors At our addiction center, we have developed a treatment program centered on the medication naltrexone. Unlike suboxone and met… As the only doctor between Missoula and Kalispell certified … because of the way long-term addiction can alter the brain. Suboxone must be taken every day. At the beginning of treatment, patients of… His expertise would

The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, has many different rehab centers, all top of the line. These include Arbor Circle Corporation, Courage, Hope The Arbor Circle – Grand Rapids is an outpatient drug and alcohol addiction and dependence treatment center, rehabilitation program, and recovery…

225 Commerce Avenue Southwest Grand Rapids, MI 49506. Getting Addiction Treatment Help. Substance use disorder is characterized by a compulsion to continue using drugs or alcohol despite harmful consequences such as physical and mental health problems, financial hardship, legal troubles…

Born in Chicago, IL in 1918, Elizabeth Ann Bloomer would grow to be a lover of dance and work as a fashion model in efforts to finance her study of the art in New York City before returning home to he…

Students examine family dynamics with an emphasis on the effects of substance addiction on families. Topics of discussion include the impact of mood-altering substances and their related behaviors, in…

Alcoholism Treatment – Grand Rapids, MI.49534. Safe Home Addiction Treatment. Serving Your Area, Grand Rapids, MI 49534 Map & Directions.

Alcoholism at Alcohol Drug Treatment Grand Rapids is characterized by compulsive behaviors and the uncontrolled consumption of alcohol. This over-consumption results in consequences to health and relationships. Alcohol addiction is a medical disease that requires alcoholism treatment.

Grand Rapids Treatment Centers. Find rehab in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Michigan, or detox and treatment programs. Get the right help for drug and alcohol …

Wedgwood's Services. As one of Michigan's most highly regarded medical diagnosis experts helping at-risk youth and families since 1960, Wedgwood Christian Services is …

Grand Rapids, MI drug and alcohol rehab centers can help you beat withdrawal symptoms and overcome your addiction. Find some of the top addiction …

Serenity Rehab offers private, confidential addiction treatment to individuals who suffer with substance abuse with different drugs or alcohol. Serenity Rehab is an inpatient, residential, drug and alcohol addiction, dependence treatment center, detoxification facility, rehabilitation program, and recovery…

Dr. Ayse Cemeroglu is a pediatric endocrinologist in Grand Rapids, Michigan and is affiliated with Spectrum Health-Butterworth and Blodgett Hospitals. She received her medical degree from Hacettepe Un…

Those requirements include the mandate all health plans cover 10 essential health benefits: including maternity and newborn care, prescription drugs, and mental health and addiction treatment. The act…

Whether Martin or any executive seeks counseling because they believe they have a problem — or simply want to appease superiors — treatment can still be a … from 2005 near Grand Rapids, and she sa…

The clinic is located at 5500 Division Avenue S, Suite A, Kentwood, MI. MedMark Treatment centers … evidence-based methadone and buprenorphine treatment centers. MedMark programs also provide addict…

A professional Grand Rapids interventionist can help you get the message through to your addicted loved one. Contact the top intervention services in About Intervention Services in Grand Rapids. Holding an intervention is the first step to addiction treatment. Long-term sobriety can only be…

Nov 29, 2016 … Sanford House is a gender-specific addiction treatment program for women, 18 years and older, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in April …

Call now 1-800-304-2219. The following article is a list of Grand Rapids treatments for drug and alcohol addiction in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Grand Rapids Michigan Psychiatrist Doctors physician directory – Bipolar disorder, or manic depression, causes symptoms of mania and depression. A certification by the Board of Psychiatry & Neurology; practitioners are skilled in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of mental, addictive…

A follow-up study of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who participated in an earlier … of the Van Andel Research Institute, Grand Rapids, MI. Writing in the same issue, they warn however that: …

Alternatives to finding addiction treatment or learning about substance: SAMHSA Treatment Finder at samhsa.gov. grand rapids, MI, 49507. Time to Make a Difference. Finding the right help for yourself or a loved one can be an overwhelming and stressful process.

Treatment Addiction Help Line. Serving the Grand Rapids area. (855) 267-2072. Show Banner Hide Banner. Grand Rapids Contractor. Mental Health Services – 30% off.

SARAH JESSIP MATIAS is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan – Real Rehab Reviews and Professional Contact Details for Addiction Treatment Services. SARAH JESSIP MATIAS has an office in Grand Rapids, Michigan and provides counseling and/or therapy for their clientele.

At Drug Treatment Centers Michigan (800) 603-1067, the goal is to provide more than just access to the top addiction and rehabilitation centers in Warren MORE DETAILS badpoorregulargoodvery good Our Hope Association | Grand Rapids, MI 2016-04-27 14-03-53 Our Hope Association – Grand…

We provide personalized treatment, group and one-on-one support, and education for individuals, families and communities in Ottawa and Allegan Counties, and throughout West Michigan. At OAR, we focus on the disease of addiction.

Since then, additional women have come forward to accuse the producer of abuse and mistreatment. Weinstein has said he will seek treatment for a sex addiction. He has denied many of the women’s allega…

Mid-Michigan Modern: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Googie by Susan J. Bandes (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI) Twelve Twenty-Five: The Life and Times of a Steam Locomotive by Kevin P. K…

Treatment for Professionals at our Rehab Center in Grand Rapids, MI. Professionals seeking addiction treatment sometimes have difficulty integrating into a drug rehab community, but our specialized programs ease these difficult transitions so our clients get the most out of their treatment.

Unit Citation Recipients Grand Rapids, MI, letter carriers James McKay and Evelyn Woodward, who provided CPR to a postal clerk who had fallen face-first on the lobby floor, was convulsing in a pool of …

Addiction Treatment Strategies Edwardsville Il Videos by addiction treatment strategies in Edwardsville. Therapeutically Based, Medically Assisted Alcohol and Drug Addiction Help. Click to enable sound. Go to Addiction treatment strategies main page. jerry holds a B.S. in construction management from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Christopher Kentra focuses his trial and litigation practice on complex commercial and construction litiga… The grant

Providing residential, inpatient and outpatient services in Michigan for drug and alcohol addiction. Integrated mental health treatment. … Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services Grand Rapids, MI …. Addiction Treatment at Pine Rest.

Recalling an IPS panelist who had offended Hess by claiming to speak for the “forces of history,” Raskin commended his late friend for always remembering that “those who tried to make history with gra…

Grand Rapids, Michigan is suffering from an epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction. If you or someone you love can't get sober in Grand Rapids, you can still find help. Talk to a compassionate treatment professional today to find out what rehab options are available to you.

Addiction Treatment Marketing marketing addiction treatment services can be nearly as hard as providing help to break addictions. The people who need your services most are likely to be in denial or ashamed of their problem. The Addiction Web Marketing Pros Redefine "Web Success" for the Private-Pay & PPO Segments Utilizing our vast expertise in the fields of

0 notes

asktheguardians · 6 years

Text

Ch.8 Volcanic Burst!

Years pass due to the volcano losing it’s magma energy and Kens recovery from the first day. Phoenix came to his room to bring him lunch but he wasn’t in bed again. Outside of the village Ken pull a vine like rope which release boulders from the hill to roll down towards him as he unsheathe his now sword made by the villagers. It’s heavier than his last sword but this raw material made from the molten boulder from the first day is stronger and more durable meaning it won’t be easy to shatter. He swing it full force colliding with the rock turning it to pebbles with the sword ringing giving some pain to Ken arms from the vibration.

Phoenix: You know doing that too much will turn your bones to dusts...

Ken: It’s not a problem. I would say Ace and Shadow must of handle it well with their weapons too. This is only just a tiny vibration so it doesn’t bother me.

Distracted from the conversation the last boulder was about to collide behind his back. Phoenix in a blink of an eye pull her sword out quick cutting the boulder in half as both side fall with Ken eyes shocked.

Phoenix: You should pay attention...If you lose focus you might get stab in the back... Also it’s lunch time so lets get going!

Ken: Um...ok I guess i could eat something now...And Phoenix um...

Phoenix: Yes Ken...

Ken: I never ask this but... can you probably teach me?

She stop for a second till she turn around and pull her sword out and come at him with a strike which both their blades clash and sparks are coming from Ken blade. She did the same technique once again to Ken which he backs off and try blocking each strike which became faster each on every hit. He then try to mimic her move but from the weight of his sword shown that it was little too slow to do the technique. The more swing he does the more it overheat his body which he stop and breath for air with Phoenix putting her sword back.

Ken: I don’t... get how,, you do that? It looks like something from a movie or something like you treat it like one of those kung fu sticks.

Phoenix: With more practices and training than you can do it too but I bet you’re having trouble with the weight am I right?

Ken: Yeah...just yours look heavy too I don’t get it?

Phoenix: Well to tell you it’s not about the strength like flexing or using drugs. The way I do this I use the gravity and the weight. Yes it does feel heavy but once you get use to the weight of it you’ll see that it’s not heavy.

Ken a little confuse but look back to his new sword just thinking about what she is saying. Phoenix pat his back and bring him back to the village for lunch. Night fly by and Ken is back at the same area where his sword is stab to the ground and boulder are rolling down at him again but decided to move through the tight spots to dodge the boulders. He’s doing perfectly fine but later get more difficult as he got scratches from the boulders and almost got rolled over. He walk down to the lake breathing and splashing the cold water to his face. He grab his sword and try to do Phoenix technique but each swing he did is almost his death wish as the blade also cut his body and limbs. He try to use the weight but it feel so off and just not his style of using it. He just think that Shadow would do something like this but it just feel weird to him. He try one more time and it’s going good as the weight feels more lighter and suddenly faster. The blade is about to collide his waist but as it’s about to come right at him he suddenly jump with his rocket and did an overhead smash to the water causing a huge splash which villages can see the huge splash from the far distance. He breaths heavily with his head feel light and dizzy form a huge surprise that he can do that. From that he shoot his rocket and let out a huge excitement “ALRIGHT!!!” that echo the valley.

Months pass more and Ken been training with her each day trying to perfect his technique over and over. Till on the final day...

Phoenix: You seem to getting use of this are you? I never seen someone do this well a long time. I was usually the only one to use a technique in my army.

Ken: Really? I thought there would be like alot of train soldiers who can do something like this?

Phoenix: Well yeah but they use spears which I just kind of train with them just to improve my skills which surprises the general alot he made me second in command.

Ken: That’s really good!

He than notice the two rings that are on each of her finger which are wedding rings. He look back at her and thinking that maybe Phoenix and the general were a wedding couple. He stop and about ask her an important question. But that was stop when the volcano shake the ground and then exploded once again. Flint appeared once again as he let out a huge roar like battle cry meaning he’s ready to began the test one again with his spirit lifted making him excited.

Flint: I HOPE YOUR READY KEN CAUSE THIS TIME WILL BE YOUR FINAL AND LAST HOPE TO RETURN HOME! AND I HOPE YOU’RE READY CAUSE I WILL MAKE YOU FEEL THE FIRE OF HELL ITSELF!!!

The eruption blast out the lava boulders that crashes to the ground from the sky. Phoenix clenches the handle of her sword and began to run ahead of Ken faster than the first day they first met. Ken grab his sword too and run behind as she is long far head but boulders are rolling down. He remember his training and began dodging and hot striking the boulders which more came and became more difficult along the path. The heat grew more making it harder to breath but Ken just keep going with the help of his rocket to help him push him further and go faster. The test seems to be easy so far in his thoughts but he felt like something is off till he finally got to the top of the mountain seeing Phoenix and Flint together.

Ken: Phoenix what you waiting for you gonna kill him?

Phoenix: You know for my next generation you got good skills and tricks too. But if you think I will kill this guy right here then that would be a problem too.

Ken: What you talking abou-

Before he finish asking his question Flint threw his chains right at him tying him up as it burning his body from the heat of the metal.

Flint: Guess you didn’t know a thing about us do you? Guess the princess forgot to tell you that I was too part of the Guardians too with Phoenix here.

Ken: W-what...but you’re a demon how are you the Guardian!?

Phoenix: That is cause of me...turns out if I hunt about twelve demons I’m then curse with the last open I kill will join my body making my half demon. Which This bead I have here only have about eleven beads to prevent that from happening. Which he’s now like my partner over the year...but aside from that you still have to test your skills with me...

She unsheathe her sword which then her eye turn from white to black with the sword glow with flames out of the sword. Ken break out of the chain from Phoenix with Flint cut him out the chain as he pull his sword out and began to collide with her with their sword clash and sparking. She pushes him back and swing the blade to his chest but he dodge last second which only cut the clothes. She comes at him more faster which became more difficult so much. Each swing is cutting his skin and clothes alot which is difficult to block or reflect the strike. The lose of blood with heat rising higher temperature making it harder to breath and concentrate which Ken felt tired from all of that which is like his body will shut down any moment.

Phoenix/Flint: You think you can beat Lord Metal like this after all that training we just did? You’re having trouble with us more then that tin can. So slow and so weak right now. I’m proud that you can master my technique but you still can’t face me still...so Ken...you..have fail my test...

She stab her sword to his chest which leak out blood which sizzle on the surface of the volcanic heat. He shocked and look down as he grab the blade trying to pull it out but he felt weak to pull it out. She move him to the volcano lava pool which he hang on the sword still and try to get out. He then felt nothing which he then close his eyes with his arm now fall from the blade. She lay her sword down with his body slide off her blade and drop into the lava as his body sunken into it.

Ken: I...I can’t..die..n-not y-yet...I..I still got to....beat her...

As he try to struggle he heard a voice that is nice and calm. A light shine bright showing a women with long black hair and a white dress floating above him.

???: Tell me young knight...why are you accepting your life here...

Ken: ... I fail my test...Too be honest I never known why I was chosen as a Guardian. If I stop here then I fail everyone...

???: Then why you think you have fail?

Ken: Don’t you see I’m in the lava probably disintegrating here. I’m no match for her and Flint...They’re too strong and fast... I was the wrong person to be chosen...

The women in black hair came close to hug him relaxing his soul.

???: You’re not ready to go yet young warrior...You still gotta beat her test if you’re gonna save everyone outside of this realm! Never give up and never think of failure too! Ok?

She smile happily with a giggle at him with his face confused but shake it off making a game face meaning he’s ready for round two. But one thing catch his mind is that she said “my wife” but as he about to ask her she disappeared and is back to life in the lava. But it feels different the lava now felt cold and feels like water too? On the surface Flint think that maybe Phoenix probably went too far but she doesn’t care as she let her arm out to retrieved her gem back but it’s not coming back? The lava pool is bubbling up like boiling water now which is confusing both Flint and Phoenix which they back away from the lava which is about to explode. The eruption splashes out lava on the side and the eruption has lower down and stop shaking but the dark smoky cloud are still out. They run back to the top and they see the lava is all gone and it’s now a hollow like arena. But in the middle of the arena is a fire lime figure wielding the sword which the flames blown away and reveal that Ken has return from the dead with his face that showing him that he’s filled with determination.

Ken: I am here for my rematch! For I am ready!

Phoenix surprised with a smile on her face and Flint feel so pump up which he enter in Phoenix body which make her more stronger as she enter the arena.

Phoenix: Thought you be burning alive in the lava this whole time but I guess I was wrong. I’ll just finish you here right now...but tell me...what spark the fire in you to keep going...

Ken has no answer to that question neither not knowing why he still alive and why he keep coming back.

Ken: I never knew why I came back...I never knew why I was chosen in the first place but...all I know that I must keep going no matter what or how high the obstacle is I must get back and help my friends to defeat Lord Metal! And That’s is what I’m Gonna Do!!!

He let out his limit break but instead he’s letting out even more which doing more can damage the body badly which can cause high risk of death but he just letting it all out more harder. The fire rocket on his back shoot out from bis back which burns the ground too and his gem glowing brighter too. One last cry out of his lung let him unleashed a new power that he now unlock. Phoenix is more surprises that she began clashing him with her sword over and over but he use his sword to which he clashes back faster. It seems so different right now then before but Ken now is going all out onto Phoenix. She then shoot the flames out from her blade which Ken rocket jump out of the range attack. He pull his sword to his back and he comes in full force spinning fast to Phoenix which she’s gonna block the attack but the impact of the sword causes her sword to shatter in half and cause a huge explosion when collided to the ground. The dust of ashes flow in the winds and Phoenix on her knee to the ground with blood leaking out on her right side of her body.

Phoenix: H-hehe...you finally pass the test....you’re skills have improve and...you finally think something other than strength itself...go now young man...beat that son of a bitch to hell...

When she finish she reveal the bright light which is the exit door to bring him back. Ken walk away thanking her but as he turn back he then see the same white black hair women holding Phoenix hand as they both kiss. Ken left the realm and back to his world stretching and letting out air as he feel the cold breeze to his face.

Ken: where is everybody?

Aura: He just flew off without us like at the speed of light. Sarah just hanging around and I told Ace to find a lake to wash himself off...and coming from you...meh you’re fine...nevermind go to the lake...

Ch. 9.2 Consume by Darkness

#vol 2 #story #The Guardians

0 notes

ntrending · 6 years

Text

How to test your tap water for lead

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/how-to-test-your-tap-water-for-lead/

How to test your tap water for lead

People don’t trust the water that comes out of their tap, and not just in places without adequate sanitation. A 2016 survey by The Meyocks Group, an Iowa-based marketing firm, found that 43 percent of Americans either believe their tap water is unsafe to drink or are unsure of its safety.

In the wake of the Flint water crisis, that fear isn’t wholly unexpected. The city’s troubles began when the state switched the water supply from Lake Huron to the notoriously polluted Flint River, failing to properly treat it to kill pathogens and prevent lead pipe erosion. But the mistrust came when—as residents complained of foul water, disease, and even death—the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality continued to claim that the water was safe.

Luckily, homeowners who suspect that their drinking water might be contaminated have more options than ever before. In New York, for instance, folks can order a free at-home testing kit. And most hardware stores offer a similar system for purchase. We pitted those up against a new product called Tap Score to see just how accurate—and easy to understand—the results are.

How good is New York City tap water?

Most NYC locals claim to guzzle some of the best water in the country. To hear them talk, you would think the city’s soft water begins in a mythical land known as “upstate,” where it’s filtered through pristine forests and a unicorn’s mane before it descends onto the city, via a canal of pure angelic light, to create the best bagels, pizza, and drinking water known to human kind.

An Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of 100 municipal tap water systems found that New York City had six contaminants at levels above the health guidelines established by either a federal or state authority (though lead wasn’t among them). EWG, it should be noted, has been criticized in the past for overstating chemical risks, especially those related to food and drink. That said, EGW’s overall assessment of New York City’s tap water as compared to the rest of the country is… well, it falls short of the fantasy set by locals, but the tap is just fine.

How good is our water, really?

Popular Science’s commerce editor Billy Cadden lives in an older part of the city than I do, where buildings are more likely to use lead somewhere in their plumbing system—it’s been phased out ever since scientists confirmed how dangerous the metal can be.

“Even though the town might say, look, there’s no lead in the water, they then put it into a distribution system,” says Mark Burns, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. “That distribution system goes through many different pipes, across many different joints—that are connected by many different materials—and then it gets to your glass.”

So Billy opened his home (and his taps) to three tests.

Our results

Testing for lead in New York City

Using the free service from New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection proved pretty straightforward. First, you abstain from water use in your home for 12 hours—there’s generally more lead in the liquid if your pipes have settled a bit. You then fill collection bottle one (the yellow bottle) and let the pipes flush for one to two minutes before filling bottle two (the red one). You bundle the whole thing up in a package and mail it back. We got the results about three weeks later.

The city found that the first draw had 1 microgram of lead per liter, well below the federal action level of 15 micrograms per liter. The second draw, after Billy had let the water flow for a bit, had no detectable lead at all. The test was reassuring, though the results were in a form letter that wasn’t exactly user-friendly.

But in the wake of Flint, many people are understandably distrusting of reassurances from government agencies. How could we know the test was accurate? Then there’s the fact that the test only looks for lead; it may be a hot-button contaminant right now, but there are certainly other things that could make your tap water unsafe.

Home Testing

Our second round used a “First Alert” home test (sold online and in many hardware stores) that promised to detect not only lead, but also bacteria, pesticides, nitrates, chlorine, hardness, and pH. If you have lead pipes, acidic water can cause the lead to leach out. That’s essentially what happened in Flint. Because water managers failed to add an anti-corrosive agent (as a cost-cutting measure), water from the Flint River ate away at the pipes and pulled lead into the drinking supply.

Contaminants are broken down into individual tests, each requiring a separate vial of water or testing strip. Like the test done by the city, we were in the clear for lead. We also came up either negative or within normal range for everything else, which certainly suggests that Billy can continue to happily drink his tap water.

This test certainly gets points for immediate gratification. With the exception of the bacterial test, which took 48 hours, we didn’t have to wait more than 10 minutes for any result. For less than $15 on Amazon, it’s a good option for someone looking for quick reassurance.

Tap Score

Of the three tests that we took, Tap Score was the easiest. It also had the most comprehensive results, including measurements for things like copper (which only makes you sick at very high levels, but can kill your goldfish at a much lower threshold), hexachlorobutadiene (which can affect the kidneys), and isopropylbenzene (which may increase risk of cancer). But Billy did not dig the delayed gratification.

With Tap Score, you have to fill two vials—much smaller than the ones the city had sent—mail them off, and wait for them to get back to you. Still, it was fun getting a cheerful email telling us that our water ranked in the 99th percentile for tap water quality.

“You’re living in the best possible scenario,” says John Pujol, who created Tap Score with his company Simplewater. “You have this fantastic water system in New York City, a big, rich, dense population where people are actively on top of problems. That’s a luxury. But for 20 to 30 percent of Americans that live in communities that are much smaller, either these issues never emerge—so the water system doesn’t feel the heat to solve problems—or it does emerge, and you have a water system that knows it has a problem but doesn’t have the funding to fix it.”

The goal of Tap Score isn’t really to test water like New York’s, but for small municipal systems and the 40 to 50 million people who are on wells, and maybe wouldn’t ordinarily get their water tested—or know what to do with the results.

“It’s really the interpretation of the water that other tests lack that sets Tap Score apart,” says Pujol. “If it’s a municipality, they’re only going to test your water for certain controlled substances that are managed by the EPA, but those are by no means the full set of parameters anymore. It’s been around 10 years since the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has introduced any new standards.”

In the interim, companies have introduced thousands of new potential contaminants.

“So, what we seek to do is not just test for those regulated contaminants, but go a little bit further and test for pharmaceutical compounds,” says Pujol. “We test for unregulated but potentially dangerous compounds that are on the contaminate candidate list. These are contaminants which the EPA is looking at, but it’s going to take them 10 years to come to any decision.”

If your test turns up positive, Tap Score offers you potential solutions. But it also costs at least a hundred bucks, and prices are higher for the most comprehensive tests.

Should I test my water for lead?

If you’re at all uncertain of your water’s safety—and you live in New York State—nabbing a free testing kit is a no-brainer. If your state doesn’t offer testing for free, consider investing in a $15 kit to ease your mind. The redundancies between our three results certainly suggest that all of the options we tried are fairly accurate, so if spending 100-200 dollars on a testing kit sounds like overkill, it probably is. But if you live in a town where municipal testing is infrequent—or if you get your water from a well you’ve never tested—it might be worth upgrading to a test that’s as comprehensive and user-friendly as Tap Score.

Written By Kendra Pierre-Louis

#DIY

0 notes

bikechatter · 7 years

Text

Beyond freeway expansion, here’s how local streets would change with I-5 Rose Quarter project

A visual summary by ODOT of the surface-street changes proposed in the I-5 Rose Quarter Project. (Images: ODOT and Google Street View)

When they explain their support for spending hundreds of millions to add two new on/off freeway lanes and freeway shoulders to Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter, Portland city leaders have a go-to answer: better surface streets.

It’s true, Mayor Ted Wheeler conceded last month, that more freeway throughput at this interchange would do “very little to arrest congestion.” Instead, more driving is likely to fill any new space that might open up on the freeway, ultimately leaving cars and trucks as jammed as before (though possibly elsewhere on the road system).

Instead, Wheeler said, from Portland’s perspective the $450 million Rose Quarter project is “mostly a bicycle and pedestrian play.”

OK, we wanted to know. So what, exactly, are taxpayers getting in this location that would improve biking and walking?

“We think it has the potential to do a lot of great things for the central city and to reconnect neighborhoods… Improvements that the city almost certainly could not afford to do on our own.” — Dylan Rivera, PBOT spokesman

“We think it has the potential to do a lot of great things for the central city and to reconnect neighborhoods that were disconnected by the original construction of I-5,” city transportation spokesman Dylan Rivera said in an interview last week. “Improvements that the city almost certainly could not afford to do on our own.”

We’d asked Rivera and Oregon Department of Transportation project manager Megan Channell to shine some light specifically on what would happen to all the bikeways in this area — arguably the single most important biking crossroads in the city. Four of the five intersections with the city’s highest bike counts are in the project area: Vancouver/Russell, Interstate/Lloyd/Oregon, Williams/Russell and NE Multnomah/Wheeler.

Here’s what they said the city would get.

A southbound connection to Broadway that’s closer to the Broadway Bridge

The Flint-Broadway-Wheeler intersection has been a major trouble spot for years due to Broadway’s blind-spot-enhancing curve, the number of bikes, the number of trucks, and political pressure to preserve access for everybody. The worst of this problem was mitigated in 2012 after then-Mayor Sam Adams personally backed an end to right turns onto Wheeler.

The state and city say they’ve got a new fix for this problem: redirect the thousands of bikes coming south from Vancouver Avenue each weekday off that curving stretch of Broadway.

Instead of sending people heading down Vancouver to the Broadway Bridge right onto Russell just south of Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, then left onto Flint and finally right onto Broadway, the new project would have people stay on Vancouver for a while, then use a new right turn onto Hancock just before the crossing of I-5. (A new traffic diverter at Williams and Hancock would prevent major east-west auto traffic on the new bridge, Channell said.)

Across the freeway, Hancock would become Dixon Street:

Dixon Street (Image: Google Street View)

“The new connection provides an alternate route to keep you out of the Broadway-Weidler interchange with I-5,” Channell said. From Dixon, she said, “there could be any number of connections down that would get you to Broadway.”

A new biking-walking bridge northeast of the Moda Center

The bridge in question is the purple curve in this image.

This would join a gap in the grid created by the freeway by connecting Clackamas Street, east of I-5, to the street west of I-5 and just north of the Moda Center that’s currently called “Winning Way” but due to be renamed “Ramsay Way.”

Clackamas isn’t currently a major biking or walking route because it currently T-intersections into a parking garage a few blocks to the east, but if this bridge were built and that parking garage eventually redevelops — it’s owned by the same folks who recently developed Hassalo on Eighth — this Clackamas-Ramsay bridge could create a useful connection to the Moda Center area that doesn’t require going north to Broadway or downhill on Multnomah and then back uphill. It might also make the Moda Center itself, and the nearby blocks, a more attractive place to live or open a shop, which could bring more activity to this close-in neighborhood at all hours of the day.

The state and city have heard active interest about building in this area if these new connections were built and the freeway caps were to reduce traffic noise somewhat, Channell said.

“There are a number of interested developers for properties within and adjacent to those properties,” she said.

Here’s ODOT’s conceptual cross-section of a new bike-walk bridge here:

“This is also the current route for the Green Loop project, so this would solve a major crossing for the Green Loop,” said Rivera, referring to a proposed series of protected bikeways and walking investments that would join the Park Blocks, redeveloped Post Office site, Broadway Bridge, Central Eastside and Tilikum Crossing. “And like the rest of the Green Loop, this segment has not been designed, we don’t know what kind of structure it would be, etc.”

The freeway caps would allow wider sidewalks and bike lanes without the need to remove space from cars

Broadway and Weidler Street are important east-west routes for biking and could become much more important if the bike lanes on this corridor are ever upgraded downtown and/or through inner Northeast Portland. But Channell and Rivera say the bridges across I-5 (which are ODOT-controlled because they cross the freeway) create pinchpoints that prevent bike lanes and sidewalks from being widened and/or protected.

Rivera said a steel or concrete roof over the freeway between Broadway and Weidler (that is, the block to the left of the image above) would create room to shift the roadway over, making “more width for modern bike facilities.”

“The city would be looking for some sort of protection or at minimum a buffer,” he said.

The sidewalks, too, could be widened and better lit, Channell said. And the caps would reduce the noise and smell from I-5.

Today, she said, “as you’re biking or walking across, it feels very much like you’re crossing an interstate. The highway covers would make it feel like you’re just crossing a city block.”

A more comfortable bike route from the Rose Quarter to Williams Avenue

Channell said the southernmost block of Williams Avenue, between Wheeler and Weidler streets, would be converted to a “woonerf,” a Dutch word for a street where motor vehicles are guests, biking is welcomed and people walking have the right of way everywhere.

As you can see in the green-tinged rendering of the freeway caps above, there is some concept that the new Clackamas-Ramsay bike-walk bridge, which would land at the south end of this block, could integrate smoothly with a northbound bike route on this block.

In fact, Channell said, the only motor vehicles allowed at all would be northbound buses. (TriMet’s 4 and 44 buses currently run up this street nine times per hour in the weekday peak.)

Transportation advocates raise concerns

(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

As we’ve been reporting, a coalition of advocates for better transportation, climate reduction and social justice loudly oppose the project. Oregon Walks, the Community Cycling Center, OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, BikeLoudPDX, anti-climate-change group 350 PDX, the Portland branch of the NAACP, the Irvington and Eliot neighborhood associations and the east Portland-based Rosewood Initiative are all among the groups that signed a letter from the No More Freeways coalition opposing this project. So have more than 400 individuals (including, for full disclosure, me — see note at end of story).

City Planning Commissioner Chris Smith, a convener of the coalition, has argued that even if the investments described above (including the longer, less crash-prone on- and off-ramps) are improvements, the region could find fairer and more cost-effective ways to spend $450 million.

For comparison’s sake, that sum is seven times larger than the citywide Fixing Our Streets maintenance and safety program approved by city voters last year — enough to keep that program going at its current dollar level until 2048.

Aaron Brown, a spokesman for the No More Freeways campaign, raised various concerns in an email specifically about the bikeways:

The Hancock-Dixon crossing would have a steep slope for people heading east. “Yes, it’ll be a more comfortable ride going west,” Channell confirmed, noting that most bike traffic here would be heading west on the way from Vancouver to Broadway.

The Clackamas-Ramsay bridge would be “essentially not functional for modern bike transportation planning” because of the climb required to get over a new I-5 onramp. Channell said she’s unsure of the necessary height of this bridge, but that on its east side it “will be hitting at grade with Clackamas.” “Yes, there will be a touchdown on the west side of I-5, so we’re looking at different options there to make sure it’s an easy and usable connection,” she said. “I don’t think that it would be unusable.”

“At no point in the process did the committee or engineers consider how to make service improvements on the existing infrastructure and the existing crossings.” — Steve Bozzone, stakeholder committee member

With four-lane streets on both sides and a six-lane freeway below, the Broadway-Weidler caps “will be the most expensive, unpleasant, under utilized park spaces in the city.” Channell said the caps would probably be more important as ways to create new bikeway and walkway space than as parks. “It’s too early to say whether there’s grass, if there’s an active use there, food carts, a plaza,” added Rivera. “That’s one good question for the public.”

Doug Klotz, a founder of Oregon Walks and influential pedestrian design advocate who signed the No More Freeways letter, added a critique of his own in an email. According to the poster shared at a project open house last week, many of the street corners created by the project are expected to be rounded off, a design that allows easier turns for semi trucks but also encourages fast-turning cars and makes pedestrian crossings more dangerous.

Here’s the Broadway-Weidler freeway cap area, with north to the right and red arrows by Klotz:

The project’s “design phase” has barely begun, so details like those corners are the sort of thing that might change due to public pressure. But they’re an indication of how ODOT’s staff has been thinking about the project so far.

Steve Bozzone, an Oregon Walks board member and Boise neighborhood resident who served on the Rose Quarter project’s stakeholder committee in 2012 and was one of the few to vote against the project then, said in an interview this week that it was clear throughout that early process that auto movement was ODOT’s priority.

“At no point in the process did the committee or engineers consider how to make service improvements on the existing infrastructure and the existing crossings,” he said. “It was always assumed that ODOT would be allowed to bulldoze all of the bridges and we’d start from scratch. … What we never did as part of the process was look at things starting from the pedestrian perspective, saying, ‘What do we need here?’ The process hasn’t been guided by pedestrian access, pedestrian mobility. It’s been an add-on to a freeway expansion project.”

Want to speak with project staff and see the plan in person? ODOT announced this week that it’ll lead a walk and bike ride through the area at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning. Want to comment directly to ODOT? You can let them know what you think here. The comment deadline is today.

— Michael Andersen: (503) 333-7824, @andersem on Twitter and [email protected]

Disclosure: Last month, I signed the No More Freeway Expansions petition in my personal capacity because I think any amount of money spent on urban freeway travel can’t be morally justified: climate change will do too much damage to our children’s lives to spend money on almost anything that further encourages urban driving. That said, I also believe the public deserves a fair view of the tradeoffs here.

Never miss a story. Sign-up for the daily BP Headlines email.

BikePortland needs your support.

The post Beyond freeway expansion, here’s how local streets would change with I-5 Rose Quarter project appeared first on BikePortland.org.

via bikechatter http://ift.tt/2fQEBYE

#IFTTT #bikechatter

0 notes

thecoroutfitters · 7 years

Link

Written by Guest Contributor on The Prepper Journal.

Editor’s Note: This post is another entry in the Prepper Writing Contest from Chevyguy. If you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly win a $300 Amazon Gift Card to purchase your own prepping supplies, enter today.

The more articles and prepping books I read and the YouTube Videos I watch I find a very obvious question that I don’t think people are asking themselves. The more I start to question if these people have anything valuable to say or worthwhile to show. What is this huge imposing question? Are these preppers being honest with themselves?

Now I realize in the Survival lifestyle there is a lot of ways to break it down. From bugging in or out, which kind of food storage to have, how to defend yourself, which weapons to own the lists can go on and on. But the word Survive itself is where I think people are completely missing the point. Survival! It’s not a TV show, it’s not a video game, there are no restarts and no second chances. You do or die, make the right call or fail, eat or starve. It’s not glamorous it’s not pretty and if it happens to you, it won’t be the Hollywood version you have seen on movies. With these thoughts in mind, I have compiled a selected few topics I think people should reevaluate in their lives and make and give yourself a prepping reality check.

Why are you prepping anyway?

First and foremost what in the hell are you prepping for and why? Do you live in area prone to floods or hurricane alley? Is your home in a place that has regularly harsh winters or some other kind of recurring natural disasters? If so, then you have an easy to envision goal to strive for. When part of your normal life could be that you’re snowed in and can’t get out for two months, its nice to have food, water and heat that you can provide for yourself. If you live in flood zones its nice to have sand bags handy that are all ready filled and ready to go and other natural methods of water diversion. But then I read of people who prepare for this TEOTWAWKI and I take a step back and wonder what that means to them.

For my wife, the end of the world as we know it is a world without Facebook. To a guy at work it’s no TV and no way to charge his vape batteries. To others it’s a nuclear holocaust as is portrayed in the Fallout video games. Before you start prepping, you need to have a vision of something realistic that you are preparing for. I find it easy to think of a certain problem, for example how will I stay warm, and go forth from there. Find a simple problem and then find several different ways to fix that particular problem. Keep your problems small and you can tackle them more easily. Don’t start with how to heat your house, focus instead on how am I going to stay warm – how am I going to keep my safe room warm? Because honestly you don’t need your whole house to be warm. You don’t even need your room to be warm, all you need is your body to be warm to survive.

Once you start breaking basic problems down you’ll see that you are a lot better off and better prepared to face your challenges. This is also great for somebody who is just starting out in prepping or maybe have been doing it for a while but feels like they are missing something or there is a giant hole in their supplies. Focus on the little things because you start adding a bunch of little things up and they become a very big thing. Would it be cool to have NBC gear and gas masks for Nuclear Fallout, to have full body armor and a diverse array of weaponry at your disposal? Sure it would be but that’s all it would be, cool. For most people, it would not be practical. When you’re wearing all that cool gear starving or dying from dehydration you will wish you would have used that money to prepare for something that could have been used not something tacticool.

Your supplies won’t last forever.

Second, realize that everything you hoard will run out, it’s not a lifeline, it’s a buffer. There is no way the average person has enough room and space, let alone money to stockpile roughly 50 years of food and water nor have the ability to move it around if needed. The most common responses I get from people when asked what they’ll do in an emergency is, ‘we have rice and beans well be fine’, or ‘we’ll just garden we won’t need the grocery store’. The problem with these people is that they don’t consider the amount of water for rice and beans or the amount of time food takes to grow.

The one, single, solitary thing that will keep you alive are skills. Having a stockpile is great and I myself am working on creating one, but you must have the skills and the materials to replenish that stockpile before it’s all gone. Many people who garden, rarely stockpile plain empty canning jars and lids or know of or have the skills to persevere garden harvests from spoiling. Folks who plan to hunt either haven’t done it in a while or only know how to use a firearm. They’ve never used or considered a bow, traps, snares or other methods. They are just planning on being able to go hunt and survive. They don’t consider how skilled (and lucky) you have to be to even see game, let alone how much competition from other people trying to survive they will encounter.

Another huge problem with stockpiling is people become targets to looters. Chances are someone has seen you unloading your massive amounts of beans and rice at one point or another. Or someone you know is aware of that root cellar you have outside. When you have so much crap that you can’t easily hide it, others are going to look at you as their lifeline or their target. Last note on stockpiling is stop stockpiling crap. Will a hundred empty peanut butter jars be helpful, probably not as much as you think because there going to be so many other empty peanut butter jars out there. Will a hundred cheap flashlights from the dollar store be the cure-all for lights? Good reliable gear is not cheap. I am not saying you have to spend a million dollars to have decent gear as a lot of it is way over priced but have something that’s quality built not just crap. You will appreciate it one day.

How much is too much?

Good reliable gear brings us into our third topic, don’t be a gear whore. Is having some back up gear nice to have, yes, but don’t we all get that momentary high from getting new things? All that gear you have stocked away is great but do you know how to use it? What good does it do you to have an AR and all the ammo in the world if you don’t know how to shoot it? Can you properly tear it down, clean and lube it? What usefulness does a fully loaded medic bag do if you don’t even know basic wound care, CPR or even what’s in the bag?

I find a lot of people will buy these “ultimate anything bags” and throw em in the corner and think they are good to go without ever really knowing what’s in them. They have never used any of the supplies before, hell sometimes they haven’t even unwrapped some of the components inside. The best way for gear to assist you is if you have the skills to use it properly. You want a sure-fire way of knowing what gear you need for a 72 hour bag? Throw in some minor stuff and go survive out of it for 72 hours. Try and build a shelter by testing out that weirdo from YouTube’s latest and greatest shelter design. Try and build a solar still and see how much water you get. Live in an urban environment? Pack a bag and try to leave the city. See how fast and how far you can get each day on foot. Find safe places to hole up for the night.

There is a reason why highly skilled military operatives go through so many mock training courses, because that is the only way you’ll know how you will react in that situation. You train over and over and then reflect back on the experience. It builds muscle memory. Do you really need that 400-dollar ultra light tent or is a tarp that much better to use? Sure flint and steel are a good idea but should I have some matches to use too? Only by going out and trying out your gear will you know if it fits your plan of action and if it actually works for you. Most of you will probably be pretty disappointed.

What shape are you in?

You don’t want to have your health working against you in an emergency.

Now lets talk about physical fitness levels. I work on my feet for 8-10 hours a day -eat like a typical mid twenty year old and weigh 150 pounds. Can I throw on an extra 20-pound bag and walk for 15 miles a day, then sleep on the cold ground and eat crappy food and walk another 15 miles the next day? The answer is no, and if you asked yourself that question, your answers still probably the same. Everyone has the crazy idea of running to the mountains and living like the old school mountain men. The problem is that most mountains are a few hours if you are lucky in a vehicle and a few weeks by foot. Can you make that distance?

I’m not saying that you need to spend 8 hours a day in a gym working out getting ready for SHTF but a few hours a week is probably not a bad idea for anyone. Getting to know your body’s physical limits is a good idea but pushing them is even better. Once you think you know how much you can take, it allows you to start breaking down those mental barriers that are preventing you from achieving more.

A part of overall fitness is physical health as well. This is especially important to those of you who are dependent on medications to survive. I am not talking about medications to just make life a little easier or lower risks of certain types of things but to physically stay alive. In a survival situation there is no drug stores, no pharmacy and there will be no way to renew that medication. If your health is dependent on these medications, in the short-term you die. Everything you have stockpiled will be of no help to you. I’m sorry but the laws of nature and natural selection are what a survival situation really comes down to. The strong survive and reproduce. The weak die off and the ones who have bad traits die off. There is no way around this problem. Now for those who take a blood pressure medicine to prevent risk of heart attack. You’ll probably die of a heart attack once your meds run out and you’re in a high stress situation. But you can still go on, still fight and survive because you are not dependent upon your meds to stay breathing. For those people who are in that category you need to seriously reevaluate your plans and your expectations as you’ll have the hardest and shortest of times.

It’s time for some to have a reality check

Last I want to talk about some people’s grand plans and ideas they have to survive a SHTF scenario. I’ll break this up into two sections bugging in and out.

Bugging Out

Lighter is always smarter.

Lets start with bugging out. A 72 hour bag, bug out bag is supposed to get you to a well supplied location within a 72 hour walking distance. It’s not meant to live out of for the rest of your life. It’s not meant to stock your bug out location. Its to get you from your home to your bug out location or some other safer location. People over complicate the hell out of a bug out bag. Light and fast should be the motto when building a bug out bag.

A lot of people will argue against this idea and try to pack as much prepping supplies as they can carry. If that’s you, then you don’t have a 72 hour bag you have a INCH bag (I’m Never Coming Home) bag were you will need extra things to survive because you do not have a survival stash location. Your plan is that you are heading out the door and you will be forced to survive with everything on your back. Another question I hear frequently is ‘what if your location isn’t 72 hours away – what if its five or six days away?’ Well then you need to have a resupply location in between your home and your location, a temporary bug out location if you will that some people call a cache. A survial cache is a place that you have another fully loaded 72-hour bag ready to go, or at least additional items to resupply what you have used already. If at all possible, this cache location is also a place where you can rest for a little while and regain some strength and stamina. People might wonder why this is necessary and the answer to that is weight. If you have a resupply location, you can carry only the items you need to get you to that point. You don’t have to add-on the extra 3 days worth of water and food. Instead of having a 60-pound pack you can now have a nice 25 pound pack that you’ll be able to travel a lot faster with. Obviously stashing a pack takes some planning and thought process but its much easier on the back if the mind does all the work. Seriously reconsider what your bug out plan is I realize that sometimes 72 hours away isn’t far enough distance away from a problem so plan ahead of time.

Bugging In

Now lets cover bugging in. I like bugging in because it doesn’t involve as much walking plus there are softer beds to be slept in. But the thing with bugging in is security from a number of aspects. First, when you are on the road in a survival situation, you’re a target. Some loser will think he can come and take what you have and you will need to be ready to take a life if it’s required unless you want to jeopardize your safety or your supplies.

The Second risk is a theft situation, you and your supplies need to be locked up tight from anyone trying to break in which means a better built door and windows to start with. Whatever it takes to keep people locked out. Third is a smoked out situation, in the old days people would die from being trapped in a house because looters or a mob burned it down and they were trapped inside. The solution isn’t to have a secret escape route out of the house its to have a fire-proof house. They make metal roofs and concrete siding all of which are fireproof and if enough money is spent on windows not even small arms fire can get through them. Bunkers are nice but unpractical as the cost of construction and they pose their own set of problems with airflow and sanitation. Consider the construction of your house to determine the safety of your house, remember the home is your castle and that’s what needs defending and they sure didn’t build em out of wood back in the day. Maybe go back through the house and analyze how you would survive your firefight or a Molotov cocktail incident.

To conclude I just want to bring reality back to people. I myself get caught up with having a huge stockpile of stuff. The best gear I can afford in my BOB, and planning for a highly unlikely scenario when there’s a more probable one to plan and prepare for. I want people to be able to take away something positive from this article that will help improve their chances of life in a terrible situation. It’s easy to get caught up in all the hype and the latest and greatest survival gear but ultimately it comes down to you and your skills, mental ability and your planning that will let you see another day. If you take the time to go back through your check lists and evaluate with an honest heart, how well you have things together and have prepared I promise, you wont regret it.

The post Being Honest with Yourself: A Prepping Reality Check appeared first on The Prepper Journal.

from The Prepper Journal Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

#SHTF #TEOTWAWKI #MARTIALLAW #BUGOUT #PREPPERBAG #USAF #USSOCOM #ARMY #NAVY #SurvivalFirestarter #Sur

0 notes

ongames · 7 years

Text

Lead Poisons Children In L.A. Neighborhoods Rich And Poor

With its century-old Spanish-style homes tucked behind immaculately trimmed hedges, San Marino, California, is among the most coveted spots to live in the Los Angeles area.

Its public schools rank top in the state, attracting families affiliated with CalTech, the elite university blocks away. The city’s zoning rules promote a healthy lifestyle, barring fast food chains.

Home values in L.A. County census tract 4641, in the heart of San Marino and 20 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, can rival those in Beverly Hills. The current average listing price: $2.9 million.

But the area has another, unsettling distinction, unknown to residents and city leaders until now: More than 17 percent of small children tested here have shown elevated levels of lead in their blood, according to previously undisclosed L.A. County health data.

That far exceeds the 5 percent rate of children who tested high for lead in Flint, Michigan, during the peak of that city’s water contamination crisis.

The local blood test data, obtained through a records request from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, shows two neighboring San Marino census tracts are among the hotspots for childhood lead exposure in the L.A. area.

San Marino is hardly alone. Across sprawling L.A. County, more than 15,000 children under age 6 tested high for lead between 2011 and 2015. In all, Reuters identified 323 neighborhood areas where the rate of elevated tests was at least as high as in Flint. In 26 of them – including the two in San Marino, and some in economically stressed areas – the rate was at least twice Flint’s.

The data stunned San Marino Mayor Richard Sun, who said he wasn’t aware of any poisoning cases in the community.

“This is a very serious matter, and as the mayor, I really want to further explore it,” Sun said upon reviewing the numbers presented by Reuters. During an interview at City Hall, he directed city officials to investigate potential sources of exposure.

THOUSANDS OF U.S. LEAD HOTSPOTS

The L.A.-area findings are part of an ongoing Reuters examination of hidden lead hazards nationwide. Since last year, the news agency has identified more than 3,300 U.S. neighborhood areas with documented childhood lead poisoning rates double those found in Flint. Studies based on previously available data, surveying broad child populations across entire states or counties, usually couldn’t pinpoint these communities.

Despite decades of U.S. progress in curbing lead poisoning, millions of children remain at risk. Flint’s disaster is just one example of a preventable public health crisis that continues in hotspots coast to coast, Reuters has found.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s threshold for elevated lead is 5 micrograms per deciliter of blood. Children who test at or above that threshold warrant a public health response, the agency says. Even a slight elevation can reduce IQ and stunt childhood development. There’s no safe level of lead in children’s bodies.

In San Marino, old lead-based paint is likely the main source of exposure, county health officials said, but they added that imported food, medicine or pottery from China could also be a factor. About 80 percent of San Marino homes were built before 1960, and the community has a large Asian population, U.S. Census data show.

Exposure from old paint, drinking water and soil are widely researched. Other risks – including some candies, ceramics, spices or remedies containing lead from China, Mexico, India and other countries – are less known.

The L.A. blood data covers nearly 1,550 census tracts, or county subdivisions, each with an average population around 4,000. It shows the number of small children tested in each tract, and how many tested high.

In California, the exposure risks children face can vary wildly by neighborhood. Many L.A. areas have little or no documented lead poisoning. Countywide, 2 percent of children tested high. But in hundreds of areas, the rate is far higher. Reuters crunched the data, and neighborhood-level results can be explored on an interactive map.

In the trouble areas, old housing is commonplace. Nearly half of L.A. County’s homes were built before 1960. Lead was banned from household paint in 1978, but old paint can peel, chip, or pulverize into toxic dust.

Children are often exposed in decrepit housing. But in some U.S. areas, nearly a third of lead poisoning cases can be linked to home renovation projects, said Mary Jean Brown, a public health specialist at Harvard University and former director of the CDC’s lead prevention program.

San Marino residents take pride in preserving their historic homes. Among the measures Mayor Sun wants to consider: An ordinance to ensure safe practices any time home repairs or renovations could disturb lead paint.

Poverty is another predictor of lead poisoning, and many of L.A.’s danger zones are concentrated in low-income or gentrifying areas near downtown and on the city’s densely populated South Side.

In one low-income area of South L.A., Reuters met with the family of Kendra Nicole Rojas, a three-year-old recently diagnosed with lead poisoning, only to find that 63 other small children living within a six block radius have also tested high.

“A lot of people don’t even think of the West Coast as a place where kids get poisoned,” said Linda Kite, executive director at L.A.-based Healthy Homes Collaborative. “The biggest problem we have is medical apathy. Many doctors don’t test children for lead.”

The findings highlight a need for greater medical surveillance, abatement and awareness in the health-conscious county of 10 million, public health specialists said.

The county and city of Los Angeles have dedicated lead prevention programs that work with at-risk families. When a child’s blood levels persist above 10 micrograms per deciliter – double the CDC threshold – the family receives a home inspection, nurse visits and follow-up.

The effects of lead poisoning are irreversible, and the programs’ broader goal is to prevent any exposure. But success hinges on many actors, and assistance from agencies such as the CDC, the department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency. Like other regions, L.A. faces a looming hurdle in attacking hazards: President Donald Trump’s federal budget proposals would sharply cut funds for many lead-related programs.

“We’re aware of lots of areas where homes or soil contain significant levels of lead, and those can represent an urgent need to act,” said Maurice Pantoja, chief environmental health specialist for the county program. “Any fewer resources toward poisoning prevention would be a tragedy.”

A POISONED HOME

Just a few miles west of San Marino, in South Pasadena, one boy’s poisoning serves as a cautionary tale.

In an old, pastel-colored home on Hope Street, an infant named Connor was exposed to lead paint and dust in 2012.

The property is owned by California’s Department of Transportation, Caltrans, which had plans to expand a freeway in the area. Its floors were coated in chipping lead paint. During a bathroom repair, a crew showed up in “hazmat suits,” said tenant Cynthia Wright, Connor’s grandmother.

But as the crew worked, stripping toxic paint from walls and fixtures and unleashing plumes of dust, they told the family there was no need to leave the home, Wright said.

That was an unfortunate lapse, the state agency acknowledged. “There were errors in handling communications regarding this property and Caltrans has revised its business practices,” spokeswoman Lauren Wonder said, leading to “greater vigilance.”

Connor continued crawling around the floors. At age one, he began missing developmental milestones. Suddenly, he lost the ability to use the few words he could say.

When his mother, Heather Nolan, had him tested for lead, the result was almost five-fold the CDC threshold. Lead levels often peak among children ages one to two, when they are increasingly mobile and have hand-to-mouth behaviors.

Now six, Connor needs speech and occupational therapy up to five times a week. He hasn’t been able to integrate in a mainstream classroom.

“It’s not an easy road,” his grandmother said. “I would tell anyone in an old home, you really need to be aware of the risks.”

In 2015, the family settled a landmark lawsuit against Caltrans for $10 million. Wright still lives in the home, which has been remediated.

POOR PROSPECTS

Amid an affordable housing crisis in Los Angeles, many renters don’t confront landlords to fix lead paint hazards, fearing eviction if they raise the alarm, said Kite, the healthy homes advocate. That helps explain why so many children in south and central L.A. test high.

Karla Rojas, 26, was living with her extended family on 30th Street in a low-income area of South L.A. last year when her toddler, Kendra, started getting chronic bouts of illness.

Mother and daughter slept on the floor, near a bookshelf where an inspector later found flaking lead paint. Tested at the local St. John’s Well Child & Family Center, Kendra’s result came back at several times the CDC threshold.

Once county officials got involved, the landlord repainted the shelf and other areas where lead was found. Still, terrified her daughter’s exposure would continue, Rojas moved out.

“When you read about what lead can do, it makes me fear for her future,” said Rojas, watching three-year-old Kendra play with two new pet rabbits.

Exposure is common in the area, said Jeff Sanchez, a consultant at public health research firm Impact Assessment, which works with L.A.’s prevention program. Around the neighborhood, code inspectors have cited at least 35 percent of residential properties for chipping or peeling paint violations over a four-year period.

Paint isn’t the only peril. A mile and a half east, in Vernon, the now shuttered Exide Technologies battery-recycling plant spewed noxious emissions for decades, polluting soil in thousands of properties with lead residue. A planned $175 million cleanup will rely in part on children’s blood tests to determine which properties should be sanitized first. Past testing has shown that children living close to the plant are at heightened risk.

Yet California, like Michigan, doesn’t require lead screening for all children, leaving many untested.

Prompted in part by Reuters’ previous coverage, California cities and lawmakers are pushing new initiatives to protect children.

Bill Quirk, chair of the state legislature’s Committee on Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials, recently introduced a bill to require screening for all small children.

“I strongly support blood lead testing,” said U.S. Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard, who represents part of L.A. County. “It’s important that residents have information about the threats they may face in their communities.”

‘DON’T WORRY, HE’S NOT AT RISK’

California’s current policy is to test children with known risk factors, including those enrolled in government assistance programs for the poor like Medicaid. The protocol, applied unevenly by healthcare providers, can miss poisoned kids.

In 2013, when apparel designer Amanda Gries and her husband, a Hollywood film editor, rented a home in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood, she was pregnant with son Wyatt, now 3. The century-old mansion was in a rapidly gentrifying area south of downtown, near landmarks such as the Staples Center and the University of Southern California.

Gries, concerned about peeling paint and dust in the home, urged a pediatrician to screen Wyatt before his first birthday.

“The doctor didn’t want to test,” Gries said. “The message was, ‘Don’t worry, he’s not at risk.’ It was like he didn’t fit the profile.”

Gries insisted, and her fears were confirmed when Wyatt tested at nearly double the CDC’s elevated threshold. An inspection found lead in dust on the floor of Wyatt’s bedroom at 30 times the federal hazard level.

The family moved out quickly and searched citywide before settling into a home on L.A.’s west side, chosen because no lead was detected inside. Wyatt is bright and energetic, Gries said, but has impulsive behaviors. He needs occupational therapy for sensory issues, at nearly $200 per session.

Keeping Wyatt away from lead hazards and feeding him a special diet are part of the Gries’ daily routine. Poor nutrition can worsen lead poisoning, allowing children’s bodies to absorb more of the heavy metal.

“All we can do is hope he’s okay,” said Gries.

(Additional reporting by M.B. Pell)

(Editing by Ronnie Greene)

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Lead Poisons Children In L.A. Neighborhoods Rich And Poor published first on http://ift.tt/2lnpciY

0 notes