#New Hampshire Will Forms

[crimeronan]

just burst into tears in a post office and immediately the entire world opened up to me. easy criers must have the best lives what the fuck. i should stop taking my prozac Immediately.

[jenovacomplete]

a failed update from billion-dollar cybersecurity firm crowdstrike has crashed windows machines worldwide today (july 19th 2024), leaving everything from airport terminals to checkout machines to delivery apps to banks stuck with a blue screen of death. here's a screenshot from downdetector (au) to illustrate:

the issue appears to be with crowdstrike falcon, a form of antivirus software widely used in the corporate world -- with emphasis on the world. there have been reports from the us, uk, australia, germany, india, france, japan and more. places affected include (but are not limited to) supermarkets, banks, basically every airline, public transport networks, major broadcasters, emergency services, corporate offices, healthcare providers and stock exchanges.

(woolies pic via archiestaines9 on twitter; s3pirion; akothari. yes that is masahiro sakurai of smash bros fame)

emergency service lines are currently experiencing problems within the american states of alaska, arizona, indiana, minnesota, new hampshire and ohio. similar problems likely plague other areas of the world, they just haven't been reported on yet. australian emergency services are operating, and critical infrastructure remains stable. be sure to check in with the local news stations still online for more updates.

welcome to y2k............................. 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[tvxcue]

is it time for me to say that i don’t see the austin hype.................................

[fatehbaz]

Good question:

In the United States, many jails and prisons can and will charge you money for every single night that you spend imprisoned, for the entire duration of your incarceration, as if you were being billed for staying at a hotel. Even if you are incarcerated for years. Adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. What happens when you’re released?

In response to this:

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So.

You’re getting charged, like, ten dollars every time you even submit a request form to possibly be seen by a doctor or dentist.

You’re getting charged maybe five dollars for ten minutes on the phone.

Any time a friend or family tries to send you like five dollars so that you can buy some toothpaste or lotion, or maybe a snack from the commissary since you’re diabetic and the “meals” have left you malnourished, maybe half of that money gets taken as a “service fee” by the corporate contractor that the prison uses to manage your pre-paid debit card. So you’re already losing money every day just by being there.

What happens if you can’t pay?

In some places, after serving just a couple of years for drugs charges, almost 20 years after being released, the state can still hunt you down for over $80,000 that you “owe” as if it were a per-night room-and-board accommodations charge, like this recent highly-publicized case in Connecticut:

Excerpt:

Two decades after her release from prison, [TB] feels she is still being punished. When her mother died two years ago, the state of Connecticut put a lien on the Stamford home she and her siblings inherited. It said she owed $83,762 to cover the cost of her 2 1/2 year imprisonment for drug crimes. [...] “I’m about to be homeless,” said [TB], 58, who in March [2022] became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state law that charges prisoners $249 a day for the cost of their incarceration. [...] All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars [...]. Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by putting former inmates in debt for life. Efforts have been underway in some places to scale back or eliminate such policies. Two states — Illinois and New Hampshire — have repealed their laws since 2019. [...] Pay-to-stay laws were put into place in many areas during the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s, said Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern California who is leading a study of the practice. [...] Connecticut used to collect prison debt by attaching an automatic lien to every inmate, claiming half of any financial windfall they might receive for up to 20 years after they are released from prison [...].

Text by: Pat Eaton-Robb. “At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt.” AP News / The Associated Press. 27 August 2022.

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Look at this:

To help her son, Cindy started depositing between $50 to $100 a week into Matthew’s account, money he could use to buy food from the prison commissary, such as packaged ramen noodles, cookies, or peanut butter and jelly to make sandwiches. Cindy said sending that money wasn’t necessarily an expense she could afford. “No one can,” she said. So far in the past month, she estimates she sent Matthew close to $300. But in reality, he only received half of that amount. The balance goes straight to the prison to pay off the $1,000 in “rent” that the prison charged Matthew for his prior incarceration. [...] A PA Post examination of six county budgets (Crawford, Dauphin, Lebanon, Lehigh, Venango and Indiana) showed that those counties’ prisons have collected more than $15 million from inmates — almost half is for daily room and board fees that are meant to cover at least a portion of the costs with housing and food. Prisoners who don’t work are still expected to pay. If they don’t, their bills are sent to collections agencies, which can report the debts to credit bureaus. [...] Between 2014 and 2017, the Indiana County Prison — which has an average inmate population of 87 people — collected nearly $3 million from its prisoners. In the past five years, Lebanon’s jail collected just over $2 million in housing and processing fees.

Text by: Joseph Darius Jaafari. “Paying rent to your jailers: Inmates are billed millions of dollars for their stays in Pa. prisons.” WHYY (PBS). 10 December 2019. Originally published at PA Post.

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Pay-to-stay, the practice of charging people to pay for their own jail or prison confinement, is being enforced unfairly by using criminal, civil and administrative law, according to a new Rutgers University-New Brunswick led study. The study [...] finds that charging pay-to-stay fees is triggered by criminal justice contact but possible due to the co-opting of civil and administrative institutions, like social service agencies and state treasuries that oversee benefits, which are outside the realm of criminal justice. “A person can be charged $20 to $80 a day for their incarceration,” said author Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of Rutgers' criminal justice program. “That per diem rate can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees when a person gets out of prison. To recoup fees, states use civil means such as lawsuits and wage garnishment against currently and formerly incarcerated people, and regularly use administrative means such as seizing employment pensions, tax refunds and public benefits to satisfy the debt.” [...] Civil penalties are enacted on family members if the defendant cannot pay and in states such as Florida, Nevada and Idaho can occur even after the original defendant is deceased. [...]

Text by: Megan Schumann. “States Unfairly Burdening Incarcerated People With “Pay-to-Stay” Fees.” Rutgers press release. 20 November 2020.

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So, to pay for your own imprisonment, states can:

-- hunt you down for decades (track you down 20 years later, charge you tens of thousands of dollars, and take your house away)

-- put a lien on your vehicle, house

-- garnish your paycheck/wages

-- seize your tax refund

-- send collections agencies after you

-- take your public assistance benefits

-- sue you in civil court

-- take money from your family even after you’re dead

[tittyinfinity]

If you're disabled in the US and have medicaid, you might be able to get approved for free home care services through your state's Home & Community Based Services! You can have someone come by and help you with chores and/or nursing care once or more every week for FREE! I've had it for 2 years and it's been life changing. Someone comes by to do chores for me twice a week, saving me from constantly feeling bad not being able to clean. You can select form a list of approved companies, or you can even have someone you know get paid by the state to help you out!

Here's where you can find more information about it!

Alabama

Alaska

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Florida

Georgia

Hawaii

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

Kentucky

Louisiana

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota(1) (2)

Mississippi

Missouri

Montana

Nebraska

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Mexico

New York

North Carolina

North Dakota

Ohio

Oklahoma

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

South Carolina

South Dakota

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

Vermont

Virginia

Washington

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Wyoming

Please reblog so that it can reach anyone who might need it!

[phoenixyfriend]

Michigan just gave us the rhetorical weapon that could push Biden and the DNC to turn their backs on Israel.

Okay so this is amazing news. Michigan was going to be a key state in the push to get Biden, and the DNC as a whole, to start pressuring Israel, and they have just proven that they have that power.

Background: Michigan is a swing state, and it has 16 votes in the electoral college. Winning Michigan was a major factor in Biden's win back in 2020, and much of that rested on the Arab-American vote. It was also a major factor in Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in 2016. She lost the state by ten thousand, seven hundred votes.

Praxis: For obvious reasons, Arab-Americans are incredibly upset with Biden's support for Israel, and support in that demographic has gone from 59% in the 2020 election to less than 17% now. As a form of protest, Arab-Americans in Michigan started a campaign to get voters to check "uncommitted" in the Democratic primary. This is an actual box that can be checked, though some less-organized pushes also suggested writing in 'ceasefire' like New Hampshire primary voters did.

The goal was to get at least 10,000 'uncommitted' votes, as that is how many Hillary lost by.

As Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, the first Arab mayor of this majority-Arab city, said:

"We're not sizable enough to make a candidate win, but we're sizable enough to make a candidate lose."

(Source: NPR, 2/25/24)

Result:

As of 10:49 PM EST, 2/27, there are thirty-nine thousand uncommitted votes, according to CNN, which is doing live coverage.

NPR was reporting 30k at 10:14.

As a caveat, New York Times is saying that each of the last three Michigan Dem Primaries had about 20k uncommitted votes, so the 35k isn't all the push for pro-Palestine stances in Congress, but that's still a jump of almost 20k, which is way, way more than the goal.

And they aren't done counting the votes yet. Barely 30% of votes are in. The goal has been blown out of the water.

Other states are reaching out for advice on how to replicate the results.

This is big news.

So can we relax?

Fuck no.

Do what Michigan did. Vote in the Dem primary, and vote uncommitted or write in "ceasefire."

But on a more daily basis, if you have a Democratic candidate, lean on this.

Tell them it will be repeated elsewhere.

This could very well lose the election for Biden and more. The Democrats can't afford another four years of Trump, and they know it. The loss of Michigan can and will tank this election for them, especially since other states that helped Biden win, like Georgia, were also won on demographics that are growing increasingly upset by the situation in Gaza.

Go to the Michigan section of this post and use that in your calls and emails.

But remember. Call your reps. Call your senators. Call your governor, if you'd like. And if they're a Democrat, you bring this up. Be polite, the staffer isn't making these decisions. They might just be an intern. But bring it up and tell them that we are going to lose the presidency if we do not sanction Israel and actually pressure them into not only pulling out of Gaza and the West Bank, but paying reparations.

[darkwood-sleddog]

Do you have any information on the Seppala sled dogs? I've seen some breeders claiming to have them but idk. The most "legit" kennel I saw apparently stopped their program a long time ago and let their dogs age out according ti their website. Their dogs looked lankier and leaner compared to Siberian huskies and had taller, close-set ears, they looked pretty neat. How much did they differ from their Sibe cousins & Chukchi laika ancestors? Are any of them still around today? Did they get absorbed into the Alaskan husky population, like the native Alaskan village dogs?

It's not my breed of choice so I probably don't have the most nuanced information, but they're basically just another breed of working sled dog.

After the Serum Run, Leonard Seppala toured with his dogs in the lower 48. It is during this time that we start seeing the beginnings of the modern Alaskan Malamute, the Siberian Husky, and the Seppala Siberian Sled Dog as all three programs owe some or much of their foundation from dogs Seppala brought with him.

You see, while the Siberian Husky and Seppala people like to think that Leonard Seppala had some sort of strict vision or plan of what he wanted to breed because he was amongst the first to import dogs from Siberia (and is certainly responsible for their fame as racers), many of his dogs were of mixed heritage. Togo himself was a quarter malamute (lower case here to indicate 'malamute' as it was prior to Kennel Club registration, a catch all name for indigenous coastal sled dogs at the time) and so were many of Seppala's dogs:

Seppala even gifted Yukon Jad, the father of the first registered litter of Alaskan Malamutes, to Eva Seeley at the time. The Seeley's owned Chinook Kennels in New Hampshire and here is where things start getting complex. Chinook Kennels bred both Alaskan Malamutes (Seeley's pet project, breeding dogs for Antarctic expeditions), as well as Siberian Huskies from additional stock she had acquired from Seppala. There is a rumor, with some truth behind it, that she would classify a dog as a 'malamute' if it had brown eyes, and a Siberian Husky if it had blue eyes.

Meanwhile Seppala went on to partner with Elizabeth Ricker in Poland Springs, Maine (who was Togo's final owner before his death) to form a different kennel. This one focused strictly on racing dogs. Again, descended from the dogs Seppala had brought to the lower 48. When this kennel disbanded, several of the dogs in Maine went to Harry Wheeler in Quebec who kept them in an extremely closed gene pool until the 1950s (descended from 9 dogs total yikes...). It is around this time that things start dispersing. There begins to be some crossover with the Seppala and Working Siberian Husky gene pools at this time (if you want to get really thick in the weeds read this). Many Working Siberians have Seppala heritage and vice versa because of this. Non-working bloodlines also have crossover to the Poland Springs dogs as well, but less often. There are a TON of Siberian Husky, Working Siberian Husky, and Seppala Siberian Sled Dog bloodlines, some of different percentage of mixture. But does it matter that much when all three breeds have origins in the exact same small group of dogs?

Ultimately the answer of why it matters to some comes down to breed politics and the way kennels clubs are structured, often failing to prioritize working aptitude over physical appearance. There were disagreements over how dogs descendent from the Seppala dogs should continue or how to best uphold, what Seppala wanted out of his dogs (which was to win races, but i digress...), and a lot of MASSIVE hatred for Eva Seeley (like they hate the idea that malamute might be in dogs from her kennel but Seppala himself was crossing Siberians and Malamutes before this time period...). Ultimately, Seppala Siberian Sled Dog people conclude that a Seppala is ONLY a Seppala if it descends only from dogs of Leonard Seppala OR dogs imported from Russia (there are major differences between Indigenous Russian sled dogs and Seppala Siberian Sled Dogs imo, but I won't get into that here in too much detail bc I'm glad they're outcrossing as the SSSD is very in need of genetic diversity). They usually have a big focus on working their dogs and eschew traditional kennel clubs (The Seppala Siberian Sled Dog is registered as a breed only with the Continental Kennel Club, the same 'Kennel Club' that will register anything with four legs as a breed so...).

Now I think a LOT of SSSD people place a huge amount of energy into what "looks" like an SSSD compared to a working Siberian Husky and vice-versa, which is funny considering their attitudes on conformation showing as well as their willingness to outcross to unrelated dogs. They love making the 'cookie cutter show dog' argument against conformation bred Siberians while also having a breed of dog ultimately descended from the same stock, that has been intensely inbred in its history (even though they will bemoan the registered Siberian's lack of genetic diversity...i would be interested in seeing COI comparisons honestly) and has a very distinct look. Again, so much of this comes down to early breeder's historical beef with Siberian Husky folks which I think would be much better for both sides to let go of because really what this is is breed split at the most granular. I can guarantee Russian sled dogs folks that don't use registered breeds specifically do not care to get this fucking specific. Does it work well? Cool, it's sled dog.

(Half Yakutian Laika/Seppala dog on the left, full Seppala dog on the right for comparison, but god forbid a registered Siberian Husky is bred into the bloodlines despite...everything).

Anyways here are some actual indigenous russian sled dogs:

And Leonard Seppala's Dogs:

(SSSD folk will often wax poetical about their dogs resemblance to Scotty, but notice how unusual Scotty looks compared to the other siberian imports Seppala owned (he did have an import Dam, but father? who knows).)

Some Alaskan Husky lines do have Seppala in their heritage (I believe the Hedlund Husky project uses them infrequently as outcrosses), but the Seppala Siberian Sled Dog is pretty insular within itself and the people still breeding it. There are not a lot of breeders, but there are def some of them doing really interesting stuff with their dogs (despite my beef for the attitude and breed split i still have a deep respect when people are doing cool stuff and open to outcrossing etc.). Poland Springs Seppalas is in Alaska right now doing a recreation of the original serum run to celebrate the serum run's 100th year. I think that's pretty darn cool.

[thoughtportal]

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears)

PublicAffairs, 288 pp., $28.00

But don’t worry—it almost never comes to this. As one park service PSA noted this summer, bears “usually just want to be left alone. Don’t we all?” In other words, if you encounter a black bear, try to look big, back slowly away, and trust in the creature’s inner libertarian. Unless, that is, the bear in question hails from certain wilds of western New Hampshire. Because, as Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s new book suggests, that unfortunate animal may have a far more aggressive disposition, and relate to libertarianism first and foremost as a flavor of human cuisine.

Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) sees him traversing rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.

None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its “discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed.

“In a country known for fussy states with streaks of independence,” Hongoltz-Hetling observes, “New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest.” New Hampshire is, after all, the Live Free or Die state, imposing neither an income nor a sales tax, and boasting, among other things, the highest per capita rate of machine gun ownership. In the case of Grafton, the history of Living Free—so to speak—has deep roots. The town’s Colonial-era settlers started out by ignoring “centuries of traditional Abenaki law by purchasing land from founding father John Hancock and other speculators.” Next, they ran off Royalist law enforcement, come to collect lumber for the king, and soon discovered their most enduring pursuit: the avoidance of taxes. As early as 1777, Grafton’s citizens were asking their government to be spared taxes and, when they were not, just stopped paying them.

Nearly two and a half centuries later, Grafton has become something of a magnet for seekers and quirky types, from adherents of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to hippie burnouts and more. Particularly important for the story is one John Babiarz, a software designer with a Krusty the Klown laugh, who decamped from Big-Government-Friendly Connecticut in the 1990s to homestead in New Hampshire with his equally freedom-loving wife, Rosalie. Entering a sylvan world that was, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, “almost as if they had driven through a time warp and into New England’s revolutionary days, when freedom outweighed fealty and trees outnumbered taxes,” the two built a new life for themselves, with John eventually coming to head Grafton’s volunteer fire department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for governor on the libertarian ticket.

Although John’s bids for high office failed, his ambitions remained undimmed, and in 2004 he and Rosalie connected with a small group of libertarian activists. Might not Grafton, with its lack of zoning laws and low levels of civic participation, be the perfect place to create an intentional community based on Logic and Free Market Principles? After all, in a town with fewer than 800 registered voters, and plenty of property for sale, it would not take much for a committed group of transplants to establish a foothold, and then win dominance of municipal governance. And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom��� entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism.” (“Logic is a strange thing,” observes Hongoltz-Hetling.)

While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free Town Project remained undeterred. Soon, they convinced themselves that, evidence and reactions to Pendarvis notwithstanding, the Project must actually enjoy the support of a silent majority of freedom-loving Graftonites. How could it not? This was Freedom, after all. And so the libertarians keep coming, even as Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents, overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns.

Hongoltz-Hetling profiles many newcomers, all of them larger-than-life, yet quite real. The people who joined the Free Town Project in its first five years were, as he describes, “free radicals”—men with “either too much money or not enough,” with either capital to burn or nothing to lose. There’s John Connell of Massachusetts, who arrived on a mission from God, liquidated his savings, and bought the historic Grafton Center Meetinghouse, transforming it into the “Peaceful Assembly Church,” an endeavor that mixed garish folk art, strange rants from its new pastor (Connell himself), and a quixotic quest to secure tax exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it. There’s Adam Franz, a self-described anti-capitalist who set up a tent city to serve as “a planned community of survivalists,” even though no one who joined it had any real bushcraft skills. There’s Richard Angell, an anti-circumcision activist known as “Dick Angel.” And so on. As Hongoltz-Hetling makes clear, libertarianism can indeed have a certain big-tent character, especially when the scene is a new landscape of freedom-lovers making “homes out of yurts and RVs, trailers and tents, geodesic domes and shipping containers.”

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.

Black bears, it should be stressed, are generally a pretty chill bunch. The woods of North America are home to some three-quarters of a million of them; on average, there is at most one human fatality from a black bear attack per year, even as bears and humans increasingly come into contact in expanding suburbs and on hiking trails. But tracking headlines on human-bear encounters in New England in his capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears. Singularly “bold,” they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them, and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and trying to enter homes.

Combining wry description with evocative bits of scientific fact, Hongoltz-Hetling’s portrayal of the bears moves from comical if foreboding to downright terrifying. These are animals that can scent food seven times farther than a trained bloodhound, that can flip 300-pound stones with ease, and that can, when necessary, run in bursts of speed rivaling a deer’s. When the bears finally start mauling humans—attacking two women in their homes—Hongoltz-Hetling’s relation of the scenes is nightmarish. “If you look at their eyes, you understand,” one survivor tells him, “that they are completely alien to us.”

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem.

Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal, merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.

Meanwhile, the dreams of numerous libertarians came to ends variously dramatic and quiet. A real estate development venture known as Grafton Gulch, in homage to the dissident enclave in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, went belly-up. After losing a last-ditch effort to secure tax exemption, a financially ruined Connell found himself unable to keep the heat on at the Meetinghouse; in the midst of a brutal winter, he waxed apocalyptic and then died in a fire. Franz quit his survivalist commune, which soon walled itself off into a prisonlike compound, the better to enjoy freedom. And John Babiarz, the erstwhile inaugurator of the Project, became the target of relentless vilification by his former ideological cohorts, who did not appreciate his refusal to let them enjoy unsecured blazes on high-wildfire–risk afternoons. When another, higher-profile libertarian social engineering enterprise, the Free State Project, received national attention by promoting a mass influx to New Hampshire in general (as opposed to just Grafton), the Free Town Project’s fate was sealed. Grafton became “just another town in a state with many options,” options that did not have the same problem with bears.

Or at least—not yet. Statewide, a perverse synergy between conservationist and austerity impulses in New Hampshire governance has translated into an approach to “bear management” policy that could accurately be described as laissez-faire. When Graftonites sought help from New Hampshire Fish and Game officials, they received little more than reminders that killing bears without a license is illegal, and plenty of highly dubious victim-blaming to boot. Had not the woman savaged by a bear been cooking a pot roast at the time? No? Well, nevertheless. Even when the state has tried to rein in the population with culls, it has been too late. Between 1998 and 2013, the number of bears doubled in the wildlife management region that includes Grafton. “Something’s Bruin in New Hampshire—Learn to Live with Bears,” the state’s literature advises.

The bear problem, in other words, is much bigger than individual libertarian cranks refusing to secure their garbage. It is a problem born of years of neglect and mismanagement by legislators, and, arguably, indifference from New Hampshire taxpayers in general, who have proved reluctant to step up and allocate resources to Fish and Game, even as the agency’s traditional source of funding—income from hunting licenses—has dwindled. Exceptions like Doughnut Lady aside, no one wants bears in their backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either. Whether such indifference and complacency gets laundered into rhetoric of fiscal prudence, half-baked environmentalism, or individual responsibility, the end result is the same: The bears abide—and multiply.

Their prosperity also appears to be linked to man-made disasters that have played out on a national and global scale—patterns of unsustainable construction and land use, and the climate crisis. More than once, Hongoltz-Hetling flags the fact that upticks in bear activity unfold alongside apparently ever more frequent droughts. Drier summers may well be robbing bears of traditional plant and animal sources of food, even as hotter winters are disrupting or even ending their capacity to hibernate. Meanwhile, human garbage, replete with high-calorie artificial ingredients, piles up, offering especially enticing treats, even in the dead of winter—particularly in places with zoning and waste management practices as chaotic as those in Grafton, but also in areas where suburban sprawl is reaching farther into the habitats of wild animals. The result may be a new kind of bear, one “torn between the unique dangers and caloric payloads that humans provide—they are more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more desperate, and more twitchy than the bear that nature produced.” Ever-hungry for new frontiers in personal autonomy and market emancipation, human beings have altered the environment with the unintended result of empowering newly ravenous bears to boot.

Ignoring institutional failure and mounting crises does not make them go away. But some may take refuge in confidence that, when the metaphorical chickens (or, rather, bears) finally come home to roost, the effects are never felt equally. When bears show up in higher-income communities like Hanover (home to Dartmouth College), Hongoltz-Hetling notes, they get parody Twitter accounts and are promptly evacuated to wildernesses in the north; poorer rural locales are left to fend for themselves, and the residents blamed for doing what they can. In other words, the “unintended natural selection of the bears that are trying to survive alongside modern humans” is unfolding along with competition among human beings amid failing infrastructure and scarce resources, a struggle with Social Darwinist dynamics of its own.

The distinction between a municipality of eccentric libertarians and a state whose response to crisis is, in so many words, “Learn to Live With It” may well be a matter of degree rather than kind. Whether it be assaults by bears, imperceptible toxoplasmosis parasites, or a way of life where the freedom of markets ultimately trumps individual freedom, even the most cocksure of Grafton’s inhabitants must inevitably face something beyond and bigger than them. In that, they are hardly alone. Clearly, when it comes to certain kinds of problems, the response must be collective, supported by public effort, and dominated by something other than too-tidy-by-half invocations of market rationality and the maximization of individual personal freedom. If not, well, then we had all best get some practice in learning when and how to play dead, and hope for the best.

[monbons]

Stitches and Sentences Roundup 2024

Thanks for the tags on your writing round ups @run-for-chamo-miles, @drowninginships, and @emeryhall! I just got back from a weeklong trip and instead of doing laundry, I'm joining in on the roundup fun.

FIC I moved from lurker to active fandom participant this year with a bang. I posted my first fic ever for EGF and have basically been writing or posting non-stop since then. I wrote/co-wrote 5 fics this year and clocked in at 101, 725 words.

Kill Em With Kindness - rated T, 6.5k, Watford-Era, getting together fic

When no one seems to care that Baz is sad, Simon steps in to help. The only reasonable explanation for all Simon's kindness is that he's trying to kill Baz, right? (My most popular fic as measured by kudos.)

Knock Your Socks Off - rated T, 4k, Watford-Era, 7th year fic

Baz steals Simon's socks. Simon blames the sock monster. Chaos ensues.

The Eternal Life of Baz Pitch - rated M, 42k, Addie LaRue AU, a truly epic romance

Told in two alternating timelines that span from 1700s Hampshire all the way to early 2000's Washington, DC, this fic follows Baz as he spends centuries searching for the love of all his lives. (This was the fic that convinced me I could write long and holds a very special place in my heart. Is it angsty? Yes. Is it some of the most beautiful prose I've ever written? Also yes.)

The Boy Next Door - rated M, 47k, and they were neighbors AU, a coming of age romance

When Simon moves in with his gran, he decides to befriend the mysterious boy next door. He changes both their lives in the process. (My most popular fic by literally every other measure.)

The Reason for The Season - rated T, 1.6k, text fic, co-written with @thewholelemon

Dev and Niall make a list. Holiday hijinks abound. (A bday gift for @mooncello)

ART I do not currently have a great way to track my dolls and searched my Instagram to do the math, only to realize I hadn't posted every doll I made either! (If anyone has a good art tracking system, I'm open to ideas.) If my count is correct, I clocked in at a grand total of 35 dolls this year, including:

10 Simons

15 Bazzes

2 Pennys

2 Nialls

2 Devs

1 Mage

1 Fiona

1 Agatha

1 Shep

The picture below shows my earliest dolls, where I was still experimenting with style and form. As you can see, many of them are quite flat. (Fun fact: All of these dolls--including their clothing--were made before I owned a sewing machine.)

Going 3D was actually an accident, but we have the Watford Baz and Simon below to thank for it! After committing to 3D dolls, I kept evolving my pattern---improving joints, proportions, and adding details like ears!---until we reached my most current iterations.

Now every doll has their own special pattern that takes into account their canon proportions, where available. Notice Baz is tall and slender where Simon is extra fluffy!

I did not include any of the dolls I created for COC 2024 since I assume everyone has seen them already, but I linked the master post in case you missed a day.

Finally, in addition to dolls, I also created 2 plushies (a merwolf and a bunbaz) plus 12 finger puppets this year.

It's hard to quantify dolls like fics, especially since almost every doll before COC did not have a dedicated tumblr post. However, here are some fun art stats:

Most Popular Art Post: The Watford Map

Most Popular Doll: FIONA!

Second Most Popular Doll: Felt Smut (Look @emeryhall! Dragonboy Simon is indeed the sexiest given that this is my duplicate of your doll!)

I also had three art collaborations this year:

Baz and The Prophecy - Doll and Tapestry, a COTTA collaboration with @iamamythologicalcreature

Ballet Baz and Disco Simon - a CORB collaboration with @melodysmash (Read the fic she wrote--Body Language. It is as adorable as these dolls!)

Watford Advent Map - a tapestry made for COC 2024 with help from @rimeswithpurple

While it has definitely been a fabulously productive year, I think my greatest achievement has been all the new friendships I've fostered because of fandom. Y'all bring me so much joy, and I am so happy I found this little corner of the internet.

I am currently drained of all creative energy (I can't imagine why!), so you may not hear from me for a while. However, I promise I am still around---likely catching up on all the fic and art I've missed while being a literal word and doll factory. With all that said, if you have an idea and wanna collab in the new year, I'm all ears and tons of fun!

Hellos and high-fives for the last time in 2024! @alexalexinii, @argumentativeantitheticalg, @aristocratic-otter, @arthurkko, @artsyunderstudy

@best--dress, @blackberrysummerblog, @brilla-brilla-estrellita, @bookish-bogwitch, @confused-bi-queer

@cutestkilla, @emeryhall, @facewithoutheart, @harrie-leithillustration, @hushed-chorus

@ic3que3n, @ileadacharmedlife, @katatsumuli, @larkral, @letraspal

@martsonmars, @messofthejess, @mooncello, @noblecorgi, @orange-peony

@raenestee, @rbkzz, @roomwithanopenfire, @shrekgogurt, @skeedelvee

@stitchyqueer, @supercutedinosaurs, @talentpiper11, @twinkle-twinkle-up-above, @theimpossibledemon

@valeffelees, @whatevertheweather, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe, @youarenevertooold

[hrtsdevils]

you made me love the number forty-three | fall to me au

summary: a close-knit bond is formed between luke hughes and y/n l/n throughout the years. they have their ups and downs, but they’ll always be there for one another.

pairing: platonic luke hughes x family friend!reader

wc: 1564

warnings: fuck ass bob

a/n this is based off of abby by gracie abrams, and it’s very dear to my heart! pretend that luke wasn’t committed to umich 2 years before he graduated… for the plot! sorry jack’s kind of a meanie, i love him!!! i swear!! it just fits w the lyrics <3 enjoy and thanks for reading!

tell me your secrets, ask every question. my door is open twenty-four/seven. think you were made from something in heaven. you made me love the number eleven forty-three.

october 2008-september 2010

Your family had known the Hughes family for as long as you could remember. Your mother had played soccer at the University of New Hampshire with Ellen, and she was the first person to cheer her on once hockey season started. This allowed them to form a close bond over their four years of eligibility. The Hughes family travelled a bit around the country due to the careers of Ellen and Jim, but as soon as they settled in Toronto with their seven, five, and three-year-old sons, your mother followed suit with five-year-old you and your eight-year-old older brother.

The older two boys in each family started hockey, and Jack was soon to follow. This left you and little Luke to hang out in the care of Ellen, and occasionally your mom. At first, you loved him, he was like your personal baby doll that you could drag around, dress up, and have tea parties with. Luke didn’t usually object, except for that one incident where you tried to make him wear “clip-clops”, as you called them, to which he had a temper tantrum about the sheer idea of putting them on his feet.

As you grew older, Luke wanted less to do with you and your girly things and more to do with hockey, along with whatever else the boys were doing. Although normal of him, you still felt betrayed. What can you say; you were seven years old. To try and make you fit in, Luke took craft scissors to your long, wavy hair and cut it to look like the boys. Maybe you’d have looked better if you had a pixie cut done by a professional salon, however, he was slightly less than and you came out with the same shaggy haircut as the five-year-old. You ran to your mom immediately, about to cry of embarrassment.

“Mommy, something bad happened!” You screeched, interrupting her conversation with Ellen and catching the attention of the three boys.

Covering her mouth slightly, Ellen was the first to speak, “Oh, sweetie.. what happened?” She reached out to touch your now chin-length locks and brushed a few stray longer hairs out of your eyes.

“Luke cut it, so I could play hockey with them.” You gesture towards the boys, “And now I... I look like him!” You exclaimed out of horror, finally realizing the drastic nature of your actions.

You started to tear up before your mother cut in, “Baby, you both look adorable! It’ll grow out soon, don’t worry about it.”

You were still seething for the rest of the day, and you were plotting your revenge plan on Luke for weeks. You wanted to kill him, and had been ignoring him since that very moment.

You figured your life was over, and what better way to spend your final moments pretending Luke didn’t exist after what he’d done to you. You decided that he was public enemy #1, or at least that’s what he was until you looked in the mirror, albeit a month or two later, and your hair had grown out into a short bob, framing your sweet features beautifully. You started to feel better about it.

Later that day, you went up to your mom and curled up in her lap. “Do you think Luke and I will ever get along again?” You asked while she was reading a book.

Your mother sighed and smiled at you, “You and the boys just have different interests. When you get older, things will be different and you’ll be even closer.”

december 2015

Your mom was right, although you and Luke were pretty far in age, he was practically your baby brother and best friend. You were close, despite differing interests and he would confide in you on a regular basis. One particular night, Luke rode his bike down the sidewalk in the cold, snowy winter and knocked on the window to your first-story bedroom.

You immediately let him in, then asked him what was wrong. Ten-year-old Luke pulled you into a hug and started spilling out his feelings and secrets. “Jack’s so rude!” He exclaimed into your shoulder, “He thinks he’s so much better at everything! Hockey, Mario Kart, basketball, all of it.”

“And?” You inquired, “Just ignore him, Lukey.”

He sniffed some more and released himself from your arms, “He keeps excluding me from his friends and stuff, they’re over and he pretends I don’t exist because I’m not good.” He wiped his nose and sat on the carpeted floor by your bed, “Quinn’s not home, he’s at a tournament with Mom.” He attempted to clarify why Quinn couldn’t stop, although you already knew because your brother was with them.

You frowned, “That’s not cool of him.” You quickly shot a text message to Jim saying Luke came over here to hang out, so nobody got worried. “Are you hungry?”

He nodded, and you offered to make some Kraft mac and cheese. “Feel free to listen to music or something, love you.” You slipped out the door and went to make him some dinner.

Since you were little, you knew for certain that you’d always be there for him and now you knew you’d always look out for him, whenever he needed it. Even if one day he’d be more able to protect himself than you ever could, today you would refrain from marching over to the Hughes residence and getting in a physical fight with Jack.

march 2020

It was almost your eighteenth birthday, so you were visiting home to hang out with your parents, the Hughes’, and a few other hometown friends. You entered the front door to your house after catching up with your friend over coffee to see your parents and the Hughes’ bent over Luke and his laptop. “What’s up?” You question, hanging up your big, puffy jacket.

“We’re waiting for my UMich college acceptance letter, they sent them out today.” He said, nervously. You could tell by the shakiness of his voice.

You joined them at the table, “Don’t be silly, Lukey. You know that they’ve already expressed interest in you and your game.” He smiled a little as you ruffled his hair, and sat down at the chair to the right of him.

“I wish Jack and Quinn were here.” Luke sighed and scratched his head, “Jack promised he’d call, but I think he’s busy.”

You frowned for him, you knew how much closer he and Jack had become in the last few years, but they’d drifted again when Jack moved to New Jersey last year. A part of you wished Jack had gone to college and stayed closer, but you and Luke knew he was too good for the NHL to wait on. “I’m sure he’ll call soon, bub. Give it a little bit.”

After about twenty minutes of refreshing and chatting, the letter from the University of Michigan popped up. It was nerve-wracking. Luke had already been accepted into a few safety schools that wanted him on their hockey teams, but he really wanted to follow in Quinn’s footsteps and go to Michigan. Luke’s cursor hovered over the email for a few moments before clicking it, and to nobody’s surprise, it was an acceptance letter. Everybody cheered, but you seemed the most excited (besides Luke, of course.)

“Luke!” You squealed, hugging the boy from the side as tight as possible, “You did it!”

He hugged you back, “Thanks for supporting me, and letting me sleep on your floor.. and buying me food all the time.” He chuckled, “Couldn’t have done it without you, sissy.”

present day

It was Luke and Jack’s day off, as they had zero games scheduled for the next few days. You had come to visit them to watch a few games, and you were staying at their apartment. It wasn’t a rare occurrence that you came and watched their games, stayed in the guest bedroom of their Hoboken apartment, and hung out with their team and whatever WAGs were joining them. But today it was just you and Luke, chilling on the couch and watching ‘Elf’.

“Remember last November when we went to New York?” You recalled while watching Buddy run through the city. Luke turned the TV down and grinned.

He nodded, “Yeah, good times. And we ate so much chocolate that you almost threw up.”

“That wasn’t because of the chocolate,” you objected, “it was because you were making me laugh so hard my organs hurt.”

Luke snorted as he remembered the vacation and the hotel room you guys stayed in. It was a spontaneous trip on a week when he was injured to try and cheer him up. You guys sat all night judging random music albums and your boyfriend at the time. It was all just a part of a collection of memories you loved to revisit, a photo album in your head.

“God, I can’t believe how old we’re getting.” You said, a tone of sadness. “You used to fit on my shoulders, and now I think you might break them if I tried to give you another piggyback ride.” You laughed softly.

“I’m grateful that our moms raised us two houses down.” Luke threw a piece of popcorn at your face.

You threw it back, “I’m grateful I get to know you.” You stated, a smile gracing your features.

i’m right here. fall to me, to me. fill your head with sweet dreams, sweet dreams. you’d never hurt a thing, nothing. i hope you know to talk to me.

end

[bogleech]

I think the only thing that still gets to me in horror writing these days is anything unexplainably going wrong with someone's health in a way that skirts a good line between the believable and the paranormal. I enjoy over the top weird ones but they're *scary* when they're still at the point of "this could be some scientifically unidentified form of poisoning."

Like that absolutely harrowing ghastly creepypasta with the slow motion lightning and the forest littered with stillborn deer. "diary found while hiking in new Hampshire" I think it was called.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Max Flugrath for Zeteo:

“In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.” That’s what Donald Trump told a crowd in 2024. If we didn’t know what he meant then, we do now. One of his latest executive orders is a lawless power grab to seize control of elections and silence voters. The order reads like a MAGA fever dream – giving unprecedented and likely unlawful powers to the president, and bulldozing our Constitution. It requires showing documents like passports or Real IDs to use the federal voter registration form – things many don’t have or would have to pay for – despite courts ruling this is illegal. Even conservative legal experts are calling it an unlawful overreach. This would impact at least 21 million eligible Americans’ voter registrations. With Black, Latino, rural, low-income, and naturalized voters most impacted – folks who already face systemic voting barriers. New Hampshire lawmakers passed a similar citizenship-document law, and voters were turned away from a recent local election. Giving Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) power to comb through state voter rolls may be the most dangerous part. Trump wants an unelected oligarch – with roots in apartheid South Africa – to help him decide who’s American enough to vote. DOGE’s weaponized incompetence is a recipe for mass database errors and thousands – maybe millions – of Americans’ voter registrations being wrongly canceled. Here’s MAGA’s likely plan: DOGE stirs up chaos, then Trump points to the mess as proof of election law violations – and uses it to block eligible voters. States that count mail ballots after Election Day could lose federal funds under Trump’s order. That means overseas and military ballots could be tossed – even if mailed on time. The newly-corrupted Justice Department is being told to enforce this gross and “bonkers” misinterpretation of federal law. The DOJ was also told to prioritize investigations of votes that violate election law and Trump’s order proclaimed the agency has “failed to prioritize and devote sufficient resources” to stop voting by people who aren’t citizens. Data going back to 2002 from the Heritage Foundation (the right-wing group behind Project 2025) found just 85 examples. But facts don’t matter under the Project 2025 playbook.

Bypassing Congress and the Courts

This executive order is how Trump plans to get what Congress and the courts haven’t yet handed him: control over who gets to vote. With a massive voter suppression bill up for discussion in the House Rules Committee this week, but facing steep odds in the US Senate, this order takes its most dangerous provisions and makes the documentation aspects worse. It echoes North Carolina’s 2013 voter ID law – struck down for targeting Black voters “with almost surgical precision” by choosing ID types they’re less likely to have. This whole scheme reads like a follow-up to the infamous call where Trump demanded Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes he didn’t earn. That call featured one of this order’s likely architects, Cleta Mitchell – who helped Trump plot to seize voting machines in 2020. [...]

Time to Organize

We can’t sit by and count on the courts to save us. We are the check. That means speaking up, organizing, and showing up in local and state elections. The Constitution is clear: Congress and the states run elections. MAGA knows it. That’s why Musk dumped massive donations behind the MAGA candidate in the fast-approaching and crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Demand that Congress do its job and rein in this rambling, maniacal wannabe king. Urge your governor not to comply. Push your election officials to stand up.

Fair Fight's Max Flugrath wrote in Zeteo that the Trump/Musk co-presidency is following the Project 2025 and DOGE playbooks in dismantling what is left of our nation’s democracy.

[anonymousaccount1015]

2026 Senate elections

Very early impressions for the 2026 Senate elections are that Ossoff (D) in Georgia, Collins (R) in Maine, and Tillis (R) in North Carolina will be the closest contested seats. If Senate Democrats are able to sweep all three, this won’t immediately win them the Senate back (it would go 49-51 best case scenario, assuming no other flips).

Here are states that we have to retain.

Peters (D) in Michigan is retiring which leaves a vacant Democratic seat in a state that Trump won. Peters (D) in Michigan, as well as Smith (D) in Minnesota, had very underwhelming performances the last time their seats were up. Peters (D) kind of leaves office partly disgraced, given he oversaw the unfortunate circumstances on the Senate map in 2024 (particularly regional upsets in Ohio, with Sherrod Brown, and especially Pennsylvania).

I’m unsure who runs to replace Peters, though I feel pretty optimistic about the field that’s forming to replace Smith, especially current Lieutenant Governor Flanagan.

Hassan (D) in New Hampshire is the third confirmed Democratic retirement. This was a state which Harris still managed to carry but was unexpectedly close (given the national conditions). She’s likely made the political calculation that her reelection would be kind of an uphill battle.

[thoughtlessarse]

The US could be plunged back into an era of toxic acid rain, an environmental problem thought to have been solved decades ago, due to the Donald Trump administration’s rollback of pollution protections, the scientist who discovered the existence of acid rain in North America has warned. A blitzkrieg launched by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on clean air and water regulations could revert the US to a time when cities were routinely shrouded in smog and even help usher back acid rain, according to Gene Likens, whose experiments helped identify acidic rainwater in the 1960s. While drastic improvements in America’s air quality have seemingly consigned acid rain to a problem belonging to a bygone era, Likens said if rules curbing toxic emissions from power plants, cars and trucks are aggressively scaled back, the specter of acid rain could again haunt the US. “I’m very worried that might happen, it’s certainly not impossible that it could happen,” Likens, 90, told the Guardian. Likens is still involved in a long-term monitoring project, stretching back to 1976, to sample rainwater for acidity but this program has just had its funding cut by the Trump administration. “I hope we don’t go back to the old days, so these rollbacks are very alarming,” Likens said. “I care about the health of my children and grandchildren, I want them to have clean air to breathe. I care about clean water and clean and healthy soil, I want them to have that too.” It was in 1963 when Likens, as a young scientist, sampled rainwater in the Hubbard Brook Experimental forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and found that it was 100 times more acidic than expected. “That was really an ‘a-ha!’ moment that led us to question what was happening,” he said. Years of subsequent study by Likens and other scientists ascertained that pollution wafting from coal-fired power plants in the American midwest was being transported by the wind, primarily to the eastern US and Canada. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the pollution reacted with water and oxygen to form sulfuric and nitric acids, combining with water to fall to the ground as acid rain. By 1980, the average rainfall in the US was 10 times more acidic than normal, with a devastating environmental impact. Lakes and streams became too acidic to support fish and amphibians, nutrients were stripped from soil and the rain damaged plants, trees and even buildings.

continue reading

[splatoonpolls]

I am using the ultra beast entries because listen, they are basically just an invasive species of pokemon, from another dimension. I am doing this due to the lions vs pokemon debate ignoring the ultra beasts. Like they only focus on the fire snail and the legendaries.

Nihilego

Buzzwole

Pheramosa

Xurkitree

Celesteela

Kartana

Guzzlord

Naganadel

Stakataka

Blacephalon

Sogaleo (yes i will count the box legendaries, did i complain about them being the main focus, yeah, but they are a bit TOO similar to an ultra beasts to ignore)

Lunala

Necrozma (all forms btw, just one of each though)

Pokedex entries if you want to read them.

Btw, if you are from New Hampshire. I picked your state at random. But you can't call for help from like a nearby state. Just like how the ultra beasts can't make an SOS call to call another Pokemon.

[confettimafia]

Hey you, yeah you!

Procrastinated something voting related and think you can’t vote? You have a weird circumstance and aren’t sure? You are registered but haven’t checked recently?

This is the post for you! I’m gonna go through a few different options, links, and definitions for people so you can ensure that if you are eligible, that you can vote. (Yes, this repeats some links for convenience.)

I think I am registered but I haven’t checked: You should. There are many legal battles going on right now trying to purge voting rolls and such. Also mistakes happen. CHECK HERE. REGISTER HERE.

I have not registered to vote but I will be eligible otherwise: Many states have a late registration deadline, it might still be possible, sometimes even online! CHECK HERE. REGISTER HERE.

I have not registered to vote, I will be eligible otherwise, and the voter registration deadline has passed: Some states allow voting by affidavit or casting a provisional ballot. This means you take an extra step to sign a thing that documents that you are eligible to vote and after the fact this is verified. More people need to know about this. This covers a lot of weird circumstances. “As of March 2024, Idaho and Minnesota did not provide for provisional voting. New Hampshire provides for provisional balloting only when a voter does not provide the required documentation at the time of registration, and North Dakota provides for provisional balloting only in the event of a court order extending polling hours.” To be safe, if you don’t know and this is your only option, you should go to your polling place and ask if they do this. FIND YOUR POLLING PLACE HERE.

I won’t be home for Election Day but I can vote: Some states have early voting right now. CHECK HERE. Some states are still accepting absentee ballot applications. CHECK HERE.

I will be at college during election day: you can either get absentee ballot or early voting at home OR you can register to vote where you go to college. Generally speaking you spend enough time at both places as a college student it’s allowed to register at either location, you can switch you’re registration to college if you’ve met the standards of living there long enough etc. See above for absentee and early voting, but I will relink the registration link HERE.

I will reemphasize affidavit voting. I personally have used this after relocating within a state and forgetting to change registrations. It was a simple form. If you are 18 or will be on Election Day, a citizen, and haven’t had your voting rights stripped from you via felony or something PLEASE check and make absolutely sure you can’t vote. I guarantee you there are thousands if not millions of people who are not going to vote simply because they do not know they can. It’s confusing and annoying, and people have paid a lot of money to keep it that way. Don’t let them take your vote away.

Yes especially get this out to peeps in swing states BUT REMEMBER. Everything down ballot is also incredibly important with slim margins. Even if you are not in a swing state there is so much else you can do with your vote.

(Some more affidavit voting reasons for New York as an example, though these vary per state:

* “If the voter has been issued an absentee, military or special ballot, but wishes to vote in person during early voting or on election day,

* If the voter is voting for the first time and is unable to provide identification,

* If the voter’s name does not appear in the poll records

* If in a primary election, the voter is listed as being a member of one party but wishes to vote as a member of a different party (Does not apply in November)”)

After all this, you are absolutely positive you can’t vote in this election but could in the future: Register now! Then it will be taken care of for the future until it needs to be updated again. This stuff won’t suddenly stop being important and literally life and death at times. REGISTER HERE.

All of this has been incredibly anxiety inducing, but sharing stuff like this to get the word out to frankly a large young left leaning audience here on tumblr is helpful. It helps to do something actionable. For those of you who can’t vote, encouraging people like this helps in its own way too.