#i just put a lot of weirdly poetic effort into the first part

[kate-apologist]

hey guys!! i wrote a kate stewart/ace mcshane fic and you should go read it! 

[parksprout]

Sprout Journal 11/19/24

Heya! Yesterday was a pretty okay day! Truth be told, not a ton happened? It was a relatively mundane day with not a bunch to talk about from it. I went to work as usual, the only thing different about it was that I wasn't allowed to use the parking spot I usually do because of construction :T the zoo has been under construction since I was a kid and tbh I don't really understand how that's even possible!!! They've been working on stuff for the entire time I've been there, but simultaneous to the constant work is a lack of anything actually progressing. They were supposed to finish this bear exhibit they started working on in 2021 a full year ago, but it won't be ready to open until next year. How in the heck is that even possible. Also :( I miss seeing bears. We don't have any now </3 I miss them. Anyways! Work was pretty easy yesterday. The zoo was basically dead. I spent a long time working on my journal from yesterday, which I'm weirdly proud of? The reality is that getting my thoughts out in this format has been highly therapeutic for me. Additionally, it's been the bulk of my daily writing ever since the start of the fall semester. I'm thinking that maybe daily journaling can slowly help me reinvigorate my interest in writing - especially when I use more poetic language, insert images, and take my time with them. Today I'm not really taking my time with this entry though, yesterday was an almost nothing day.

Yesterday after work I crammed down some leftover pasta because I didn't eat anything alllllll day, then got dressed and head to the gym! I didn't work nearly as hard yesterday as I had the day before, kinda ending things after my run. I did set another personal best and hope I'll continue to do so!

As I was finishing my workouts my friend Sammy called me! We talked while I walked home, but tbh after an hour or so I was wayyyy too exhausted to keep going so I ended up leaving my night pretty much at that ToT I was NOT very productive at home and I felt very boring alskjdfasdf

As always, below the image is me yappin about love n' stuff

Days like yesterday with them are what I want while we continue to figure out what we're gonna be in the future. We talked a lot, didn't have any awkward moments and.. I continued with my effort to treat them better. There was a moment where I had to check myself. I sent them some messages before they woke up in the morning and they said they'd check them out eventually, and they never got around to it! A part of me wanted to be like "heya! remember to look at the stuff I sent :3" or at least ask about it... but that's one of the ways that I think I failed as a partner in the first place is harassing them to respond to every single little thing I ever said to them. So I just took a beat, reminded myself that it's okay if they don't have something to say about every little message i've ever said. I know for a fact that I used to annoy them by asking them to respond all of the time, so... growing in that way as a person is really important to me as I continue to become someone who could be the best partner possible for them. But I'm enjoying this casual part of our relationship. I think that.. if I ask them out someday and they say yes, I want our days to look much more like this than like they did before. I wanna continue to be a relaxed, light hearted, patient person who they talk to because they want to not because they know if they don't I'll be sad

I continued to get more stuff done getting ready for their present, too :) I'm very excited to send it to them ugh. I hope that they think it's as special getting something from me as I think it is giving them something. I'm writing them a letter and .. it's probably the most effort I've ever put into something like this ever. I hope it's not all too much for them but .. I wanna give them a taste of the partner I never really got to be, I wanna show them that .. even when I was at my best with them it was only a part of who I could be as their other half.

I love them bunches. I really miss their face today. I think I'll ask them for selfies if they're okay with it, and if not then that's okay too I think. I gotta be okay with them not wanting to do stuff.

Anywayz I'm gonna add a little final thought after this fog :)

They asked me a while ago if I'd be okay if they moved on,

I told them no

I wouldn't be okay ! Because I love them a lot, and I wanna give us another go. I would be more hurt if they moved on without us trying one more time. I think a lot about what they said afterwards. They'd be scared to try again because... They don't want to hurt me again. I wish they wouldn't be so protective of me! They said they'd only try if they were incredibly serious about it but... Sometimes, I think it's better to take risks. I'm okay risking getting hurt again for a chance to be a better partner. I feel like .. we've both learned enough during this breakup, that we wouldn't let ourselves get to that point again without genuinely talking about what's going wrong first. I think about their statement a lot. I want you to risk hurting me, honestly, because there's no relationship that's not a risk of pain. If they take a risk, I wanna take it with them.

That's all Tumblr! Thank you for reading this y'all. I love ya!! Byeeee

[courtneytincher]

To Take Down Trump, Take to the Streets

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastPARIS—From Algeria to Hong Kong, Sudan to Puerto Rico, people all over the world have been turning out in the streets this year to confront policies and regimes that previously seemed all but invulnerable. And through relentless, largely peaceful protests they’ve had amazing success.There is a lesson here. Americans disgusted by Donald J. Trump, disheartened by his control over the Senate and Supreme Court, demoralized by the consistent support he enjoys from two-fifths of the population, and appalled by his incitement of gun-toting racists, might want to take note. The examples of mass demonstrations that have taken on, and in some cases taken down, terrible leaders show there are formulas that can be applied in many places, including the mainland of the United States of America. There’s even an illustrative equation.In a study published this month by the scientific journal Nature, Erica Chenoweth and Margherita Belgioioso look at what they call “the physics of dissent” drawing on the simple law that momentum equals mass times velocity (p=mv). “When movements maintain mass and velocity, they maintain momentum,” the authors tell us, and momentum is what’s required to achieve results. They cite the example of Sudan. There, Omar al-Bashir had been in power for 30 years—and had lasted for a decade even after allegations of genocide in the Darfur region led to his indictment by the International Criminal Court for mass killing, rape and pillage. Nothing seemed able to bring him down. But as Chenoweth and Belgioioso point out in a blog post, Sudan’s opposition “used a combination of protests, marches, general strikes, and other forms of non-cooperation” to oust Bashir in April.In Algeria, a nation with a proud history of rebellions, gruesome experience with terrorism, and a fearsome record of repression, demonstrations followed a pattern similar to Sudan’s. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets for peaceful protests—the Smile Revolution, it’s been called—and they ended the 20-year rule of the decrepit 82-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, in a matter of weeks after leaked text messages exposed Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s vengeful approach to partisan politics, as well as his sexist and homophobic slurs, mounting protests led to threatened impeachment and finally his resignation.In Russia, where activists opposed to President Vladimir Putin are routinely jailed and often murdered, cops beat protesters with grim savagery. Now they are threatening to separate arrested protesters from their children, and to jail opposition leaders for years on specious charges of corruption. Yet the protests keep growing, and Putin’s grip on power begins to be the subject of speculation.And in Hong Kong, the public rebellion against Beijing with mass protests week after week poses a growing threat to the authority there of Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose representative has been humiliated and forced to withdraw a controversial extradition law. To push back against the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, as many as two million people—a quarter of Hong Kong’s population—went onto the streets in a single march.Again, there’s a formula. Not only are Hongkongers showing an instinctive understanding of “the physics of dissent,” they’ve added a bit of Kung Fu philosophy from the late martial arts icon Bruce Lee. When facing authority, “be water,” flowing where the power is weak or absent. The most active protesters tell each other, rather poetically, “Be strong as ice, be fluid like water, gather like dew, scatter like mist.”Why have we not seen this kind of concerted, continuous combination of mass and velocity in the United States?Maybe the American opposition to the Trump regime really isn’t as impassioned as many rants on Twitter might suggest. Or maybe those are just onanistic ends in themselves. There’s been a lot of obvious passivity: waiting for Robert Mueller to take care of everything, or pretending that the symbolic act of impeachment will squeeze the sleaze out of office.Certainly, by comparison with the demonstrators in other parts of the world there’s a hint of sloth and even of cowardice. When I broached some of these ideas on Twitter (where else?) one tweep complained impotently that “we” couldn’t even get Twitter to take down the president’s account, as if that would solve anything. More than one suggested fear of Trump supporters with guns acts as a deterrent.And another said things really aren’t so bad under Trump, and most people don’t see any reason to remove him, which suggests why his whining opposition doesn’t take to the streets in massive numbers.But of course that’s not quite right. There have been huge demonstrations since Trump’s election—some of the biggest in American history. Although, weirdly, the National Park Service is not allowed to count, the Women’s Marches of 2017 and 2018 and the March for our Lives after the Parkland school shooting all reportedly drew well over a million people. But, to go back to the physics of dissent, the momentum that changes things requires not only mass, but velocity. That’s what’s been missing. The protests have to be big, and they have to keep coming again and again–preferably weekly, even daily. Such demonstrations have changed the course of American history before, notably when the anti-Vietnam War protests of 1967 and ‘68 pushed President Lyndon Johnson to give up his bid for reelection.And since then we might also have learned some important lessons about mass demonstrations that go astray, because that happens, too.  Back in the 1960s, the same movement that persuaded LBJ to stand down wound up ushering Richard Nixon into the White House. As White House insider Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, “Beneath their wild flurry of activity … the young dissenters lacked the sustained involvement of a radical cadre. Their dissent was coopted as the revolutionary leaders willingly sat on evening talk shows, and as participants in marches left early to look for themselves on the 6 p.m. news.”The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 lost its focus and its impact amid constant internal disputes, and what is fatal in the American consciousness, a dearth of novelty.Here in France we have seen the way a popular movement that started out with  a reasonable cause, the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, was quickly hijacked and eventually discredited by anarchists and vandals. Paris Riots Strike Home: Yellow Vests, Vandals — and Jihadists —Thrive on Such ChaosThe Arab Spring of 2011 saw the popular victories of the unorganized masses exploited by the organized Muslim Brotherhood, then taken away entirely by the cynical military. In Sudan and Algeria the struggle to keep that from happening continues, while in Hong Kong the threat of intervention by China’s army is poised above the protests like the sword of Damocles, and in Russia, Putin wants everyone to know that as bad as he’s done, he can do much worse. Nobody said nonviolent revolution is easy, and nobody should believe that the fall of a single person resolves the problems in a society that may have put him or her in power in the first place.But as things stand right now, if the economy’s sugar high continues through November of next year, Trump probably will be re-elected. No Democratic candidate has found an effective way to deal with the most fundamental truism of presidential politics: “It’s the economy, stupid!”Trump’s assaults on the fundamentals of American democracy—including language that inspires white nationalist terrorism and defends possession of assault rifles—will appear “vindicated” in the electoral college even if, once again, the will of the American majority is thwarted. And if that happens we will be more than halfway to the end of what we used to think of as truth, justice, and the American way. Any effort to remove Trump from office after reelection will be infinitely more difficult and dangerous. Tweets won’t avert that outcome. Nor by itself will the flaccid exercise of impeachment proceedings in the House.But p=mv, the E=mc2 of protest, might just do the trick.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastPARIS—From Algeria to Hong Kong, Sudan to Puerto Rico, people all over the world have been turning out in the streets this year to confront policies and regimes that previously seemed all but invulnerable. And through relentless, largely peaceful protests they’ve had amazing success.There is a lesson here. Americans disgusted by Donald J. Trump, disheartened by his control over the Senate and Supreme Court, demoralized by the consistent support he enjoys from two-fifths of the population, and appalled by his incitement of gun-toting racists, might want to take note. The examples of mass demonstrations that have taken on, and in some cases taken down, terrible leaders show there are formulas that can be applied in many places, including the mainland of the United States of America. There’s even an illustrative equation.In a study published this month by the scientific journal Nature, Erica Chenoweth and Margherita Belgioioso look at what they call “the physics of dissent” drawing on the simple law that momentum equals mass times velocity (p=mv). “When movements maintain mass and velocity, they maintain momentum,” the authors tell us, and momentum is what’s required to achieve results. They cite the example of Sudan. There, Omar al-Bashir had been in power for 30 years—and had lasted for a decade even after allegations of genocide in the Darfur region led to his indictment by the International Criminal Court for mass killing, rape and pillage. Nothing seemed able to bring him down. But as Chenoweth and Belgioioso point out in a blog post, Sudan’s opposition “used a combination of protests, marches, general strikes, and other forms of non-cooperation” to oust Bashir in April.In Algeria, a nation with a proud history of rebellions, gruesome experience with terrorism, and a fearsome record of repression, demonstrations followed a pattern similar to Sudan’s. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets for peaceful protests—the Smile Revolution, it’s been called—and they ended the 20-year rule of the decrepit 82-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, in a matter of weeks after leaked text messages exposed Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s vengeful approach to partisan politics, as well as his sexist and homophobic slurs, mounting protests led to threatened impeachment and finally his resignation.In Russia, where activists opposed to President Vladimir Putin are routinely jailed and often murdered, cops beat protesters with grim savagery. Now they are threatening to separate arrested protesters from their children, and to jail opposition leaders for years on specious charges of corruption. Yet the protests keep growing, and Putin’s grip on power begins to be the subject of speculation.And in Hong Kong, the public rebellion against Beijing with mass protests week after week poses a growing threat to the authority there of Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose representative has been humiliated and forced to withdraw a controversial extradition law. To push back against the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, as many as two million people—a quarter of Hong Kong’s population—went onto the streets in a single march.Again, there’s a formula. Not only are Hongkongers showing an instinctive understanding of “the physics of dissent,” they’ve added a bit of Kung Fu philosophy from the late martial arts icon Bruce Lee. When facing authority, “be water,” flowing where the power is weak or absent. The most active protesters tell each other, rather poetically, “Be strong as ice, be fluid like water, gather like dew, scatter like mist.”Why have we not seen this kind of concerted, continuous combination of mass and velocity in the United States?Maybe the American opposition to the Trump regime really isn’t as impassioned as many rants on Twitter might suggest. Or maybe those are just onanistic ends in themselves. There’s been a lot of obvious passivity: waiting for Robert Mueller to take care of everything, or pretending that the symbolic act of impeachment will squeeze the sleaze out of office.Certainly, by comparison with the demonstrators in other parts of the world there’s a hint of sloth and even of cowardice. When I broached some of these ideas on Twitter (where else?) one tweep complained impotently that “we” couldn’t even get Twitter to take down the president’s account, as if that would solve anything. More than one suggested fear of Trump supporters with guns acts as a deterrent.And another said things really aren’t so bad under Trump, and most people don’t see any reason to remove him, which suggests why his whining opposition doesn’t take to the streets in massive numbers.But of course that’s not quite right. There have been huge demonstrations since Trump’s election—some of the biggest in American history. Although, weirdly, the National Park Service is not allowed to count, the Women’s Marches of 2017 and 2018 and the March for our Lives after the Parkland school shooting all reportedly drew well over a million people. But, to go back to the physics of dissent, the momentum that changes things requires not only mass, but velocity. That’s what’s been missing. The protests have to be big, and they have to keep coming again and again–preferably weekly, even daily. Such demonstrations have changed the course of American history before, notably when the anti-Vietnam War protests of 1967 and ‘68 pushed President Lyndon Johnson to give up his bid for reelection.And since then we might also have learned some important lessons about mass demonstrations that go astray, because that happens, too.  Back in the 1960s, the same movement that persuaded LBJ to stand down wound up ushering Richard Nixon into the White House. As White House insider Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, “Beneath their wild flurry of activity … the young dissenters lacked the sustained involvement of a radical cadre. Their dissent was coopted as the revolutionary leaders willingly sat on evening talk shows, and as participants in marches left early to look for themselves on the 6 p.m. news.”The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 lost its focus and its impact amid constant internal disputes, and what is fatal in the American consciousness, a dearth of novelty.Here in France we have seen the way a popular movement that started out with  a reasonable cause, the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, was quickly hijacked and eventually discredited by anarchists and vandals. Paris Riots Strike Home: Yellow Vests, Vandals — and Jihadists —Thrive on Such ChaosThe Arab Spring of 2011 saw the popular victories of the unorganized masses exploited by the organized Muslim Brotherhood, then taken away entirely by the cynical military. In Sudan and Algeria the struggle to keep that from happening continues, while in Hong Kong the threat of intervention by China’s army is poised above the protests like the sword of Damocles, and in Russia, Putin wants everyone to know that as bad as he’s done, he can do much worse. Nobody said nonviolent revolution is easy, and nobody should believe that the fall of a single person resolves the problems in a society that may have put him or her in power in the first place.But as things stand right now, if the economy’s sugar high continues through November of next year, Trump probably will be re-elected. No Democratic candidate has found an effective way to deal with the most fundamental truism of presidential politics: “It’s the economy, stupid!”Trump’s assaults on the fundamentals of American democracy—including language that inspires white nationalist terrorism and defends possession of assault rifles—will appear “vindicated” in the electoral college even if, once again, the will of the American majority is thwarted. And if that happens we will be more than halfway to the end of what we used to think of as truth, justice, and the American way. Any effort to remove Trump from office after reelection will be infinitely more difficult and dangerous. Tweets won’t avert that outcome. Nor by itself will the flaccid exercise of impeachment proceedings in the House.But p=mv, the E=mc2 of protest, might just do the trick.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

August 11, 2019 at 10:37AM via IFTTT