#in which theyre told that their visions are from disorders

[prettyciggy]

your schizo is showing are you doing okay?

[libidomechanica]

Untitled # 10941

A curtal sonnet sequence

               1

Upon the Guide-books, rhymes, and think on. Leant to each other thee,—cresses that dare equal with the heart, and all things rushed like a miser counts his golden hair. This morning sunny, for Gothic ruin and a contradiction; the unblunted dart of Eros: but though t is true, you don’t they know not where it shall be firm? Who sees his love, nor shepehearde more. The key to every little tent of blue which you can’t complain of?

               2

Touching upon the sun-clouds that tear! That God who gave it! The bat, the game of theyr cote. We’re not just buying time wakes a draught— young Semele such richness never yet betoken’d wrack to the bars, and me wonder’d at midnight blast, in swells unmitigated, still hems him round the self-same way, for none is the timorous yelping of the clear stream came of purple throat. But even now upon the blue slips on the spouse too kind.

               3

And with much empressement: ’-the lamps of Western kings of which I have been a dead so soon grow cold. I pass my evenings in her stations, exulting swift delight in silence let fall, most Women have no dædale heart: why is easy to determine: although publicly important outwork of the pale sky, gone under twenty thousand years; it is nothing bright eye. Not at all; my music the harmonious theory.

               4

Judging by his foly one did fall, the tocsin of the same door their tryst. Of the earth we are! Name let’s get some time, and, neither know not; but huge houses dwell the caique was brought hers gave, because in sweet seals in fiction. At which I doubt extremely pale, pale as snowdrops blowing, so prime, so swell, so nutty, and his wrath fierce, and huge tombs worse—mankind, who is the strange tradition; and thus Pope quotes the porch, they grew of years ago.

               5

’ Nay, ’ quoth she, behold two Adons dead! Historians, heroes, kings, fanning they do not go gentle squeezed himself in Stella see, that was of a fascinating hesitation,—fair flower enough to deem no worse. A soft air, or proudlier prancing wings, and strangers in my face is full of couetise, and could bear not: t will transpire, no doubt the bravest cowers checkered with the monstrous swell of vision went in wing’d St.

               6

And goodnes taken in forest-fruits, and threw warm gules on Madeline: to scare thee to my cotage thou wouldst hunt the wall, I will permit my memory of dreaming sun. Biting my trewand pen, beating with holy voice! Disorder breeds by heating Toies, your real Griefs, and write rhymes, and die of nothing else he brands with marks of sin on your mom did not fall asleep just after night, alone, I marry the bed. She catches.

               7

This narration of payment ere the Dublin shouts—and London when the Beadsman, after sun; love’s the first the damp grass myriads bade adieu to all. Call him a cheat. The grass. ’ Baba eyed Juan, puzzled all in vain he heard, that not a shame to see such logic will lead to loss without the circumstances which still it was! And a few leaves an infant plays. Which he leant, wretched Hens about me on the Dunghill. One difficult.

               8

Forgetting in the burning eye did hotly overlook them, outstripping wall is high, so it was, she has told, I joy; but the old negro told him like his Delphic lyre; her kisses buys my heart is all truths must, the morrow-day; but still are many a lover with a butcher’d in an amber. And robes sweet and square fast flashing chariot, rolling what you will say what you do than what you see. And as she treats all the truth.

               9

Now will come on its either side lay kill’d was melted like a spiritual and clear; and not thine may live when they thus sprang from those who love to curl round run as it may be easier done than smile of beauty glide, like antique gold, devouring all mankind their proud the whole world had the sacks, we broke the season, upon thy verge it is that I want the power that is already spent: for as the shade. To give maiden Aunt.

               10

And near him; nor, as we once thought of the men who love to curl round run as it may, and look’d so dreamingly. Had not rain’d; then ask’d her girdle, as the fleet-foot roe that’s her warmed jewels to wear! He had made her freight. Beware! The frail one’s advocate, there’s my gentlemen in any thing, however, this body to the ways. Catch, ere she endure—impossible, because the night or might have been told in you, twenty times cry so.

               11

Or who is but bringing things, until preferment, coming would spoil much good philosophic passion you disdain; throwing to do, save a proud rider on so proudly eyed: fortune plainly made to bow, she clepes him king of the king him mulberries saw. What dilettante, delicate-handed priests, to put a fact and no poetic fable—just as a friar may accuse his vow, or as the sisters live and love of sway.

               12

Tis dark: the iced gusts still for the use, herbs for the painting I fell in silvery and weariness or delicacy; all so nice, that made and beat: awake! Of thy fair head, and in the deadest things for very few financiers, though below his wings, two fan-like foule wagmoires ouergrast, that als we mought be inly knowe. A mere quiet air Proud Maisie is in his car, aloft, young a partner in the Nymphes doe bathe.

               13

And filled the enumeration—gave her fair immortal, those unbelievers, but no less—the voice of your infant laughers mimicking them find out others bound, and so I kisses such a face of Doom. And in each features; the moss is growing water upon her bed. She trampled what then? Who watched wight. Colossus’ legs, and down into the follow’d through the parties to taste. Thy vows are all his great master, and strayen abroad.

               14

In self-defence: this made his bloody drops of dew exhal’d to Phoebus, for a hundred swords to scare thee, where, like phantom-woman in their crimes; factitious passionless, but a bad graced our shore, young, handsome; and then a purer soul reflect the imagination shakes, which turn’d to their queen, ’ quoth Adon, you will! Who madest him thy choir, and eyes; false in legs, a heavy, yet unheard; his garments only a movie you saw.

               15

That if I love their sleeping those eyes that dies with happy freedom, and comes by cause, ’-is what they long had touched her face a-washin; but Willie’s wife is new, commence with five slugs; and look’d at Juan was my wine; that loue she did; that is told.—His heart by night; still is large, I could wrench aught out of door hath taken tea in small-eyed China’s crockery ware and unencumber with furniture an exquisitely spired, snail- paced lives.

               16

Height again, as from a shell-fish or from his mystic heaven wide scatter’d through as wide as if from their talk was of Caiaphas. Poor soul! In silence, and performance and tears, and outside lawn; scenes they lay the lash to Baba: but her colours do the knee might find the steam, as one that are young, and fire, through glitterand gold, mought they gang in more serious, threw herself at strife, which it enters to surprise, saw two fair creature wear!

               17

Before our forest haunts, why left To give at evening, my sweet, like many clouds and winding sigh? Nature which drew all eyes may see, when they St. Lord Henry, link’d with care, averted half your parents, albeit they had not avow’d it had stirr’d him, and Gods great worth, of knights, half-legend, half- historic, counts his golden arrows of the timmer o’ yon rotten peaches on Orcas Island there ready for to thy native land!

               18

In our soft sex and age-bent, sore distress of lackeys usher to thy tongue shall o’er the good old man selfe had been moved to such mought please, or did I see of leaves an infant’s heart. With words went echoing dismally through the gate, and, falling out from her wallet to her husbandship. Rob thy nest and no wave along the fair Fitz-Fulke! Some look’d, and clos’d the brink of such profusion in the argent revelry, with jealousy, down!

               19

Whom Ida hyll dyd beare, that with fears, for men will that my trust and besides there. Since age is cold and quickly gone? Thy cheek begins to burn, then it wont, all for her! And in hand: about, and try to comfort dare complain of, or reproved; and this slippery pranck, ere Roffy could really shoulders in a rosy silk, that somewhat both without a name? To quench them with sober seemlihed gave utterance as he entered: Ha!

               20

We needs must follow’d my advice! When we should hoist my blue Peter, ’ and proper home of every morning insects that doth appal. For oak and elm have plainly made for the unhappy climes is not dead: her heart is not for me. And there only my own soul conspiracy of an improper frame; spoilt, but burst into the yielding prey, and unobserved star, with buds, and budded Tyrian vest dyed purple, none distinguish me!

               21

Go sleep, when life is o’er, and soon her woes the beauteous region of my mind, and all men, she wondered if each could bear; and as the ravenous hawk? Of the price would he quit his king in the woe, what dilettante, delicate your love of pleasures of true Truth would strike such puny doubters dumb as the sceptics who would novels gain by the sideboard’s stand—yet, like most meet for all askance of weariness and pitchy night and day.

               22

But seeing at his elbow in a trice. Shape of your own thought of thought themselves most fearful, cautious, be not what we covet most; and besides the Westerne coste? Within some thousand living shoulders in anger, or in the end in lowliness of a sudden growth weigh’d on him she cast, my hat and gloves still be soon: there is a different far that men build is built with buds, and yellow sunbeam: near him, here, there not for these Cantos.

               23

—But, pale and so I kisses from each lamp and shining rails: could seize the ridicules of peace or war; and the typing of the envier? As for his pay, he was wont of your vows, your lily-white hand, lass, in mine, then stood stone still. Not the lesson taught is still beheld, who nails him down upon a child of her infant joy! Their steps are brief. But the world its veterans rewards of continence, this poem will be thy saving any?

[olivyh]

TWST CHARACTER HC PT 2: Octavinelle and Scarabia

TW: Eating disorders, assassination attempts, absent parents, general twst boy trauma

Octavinelle:

Azul:

-Mommas boy 100%

-Cannot take good pictures to save his life. Whenever he sends a picture of a new dish to Jade and Floyd its so blurry neither of them can tell what it is

-Also is the kind of guy to ask “has anyone seen my glasses?” when they’re on top of his head

-Same thing with his pen, which is almost always still in his hand

-Has a hard time getting out of his businessman persona, and often just gives up completely and carries it on through every aspect of his life

-He has a hard time showing affection due to this

-Gets nightmares from when he was a kid, and they lead to him making an even stricter diet and studying despite his brain and body literally shutting down. The tweels have to step in before it gets too bad

-Before the bullying started, he genuinely loved his merform because he grew up watching his mother be able to do multiple things at once with her tentacles

-He doesn’t talk to his biological father anymore, and often times talks himself out of contacting him

-He didn’t discover his UM, he developed it after his parents marriage! He looks up to his stepfather a lot, which led to him trying to mimic his own lawyer contracts (is that a thing? it sounds like a thing. lawyers pls confirm)

-Is a huge blanket hog, can and will steal every blanket in the vicinity

-Cant watch horror movies at all, he gets too freaked out

-Will nonstop talk when hes scared

-Has the hardest time walking out of the Octatrio, and often relies on his cane or broom to help him get around

-Also doesnt know how to dress himself, he has to look it up online and match models in the magazines he keeps in his office

-Idk if this is canon or not, i think it was just mentioned, but he doesnt actually need his glasses because his vision is bad. (Just looked it up, it is cannon!) They do, however, protect his eyes from the light hes not used to at the bottom of the ocean

-He has stretch marks, even in his human form. In his merform theyre a lighter purple than his torso!

-Sings when he cooks

-Has more moles all over his body! Theyre like the one on his face, but all over!

-Despite his efforts, he still has somewhat of a baby face (only somewhat!!), he cant figure out how to change it

Jade:

-Gets very upset and sulks when people don’t indulge in his interests

-He also tends to be pushed to the back behind Floyd most of the time, seeing as he’s the introverted twin. He never thought it bothered him until people would recognize his brother before him. They used to be called “Floyd and Jade”, and Floyd was the one who told them to switch the names around to make his brother feel better

-He gets very panicky when he’s on hikes by himself, especially when he goes into the mountains and he looks down. When this happens, he either calls someone or brings them with him

-He chokes a lot. Just, a silly little thought, since drinking underwater is nonexistent, he doesn’t quite understand how to, so it goes down the wrong pipe almost all the time

-Whenhe genuinely laughs, he snorts. His brother makes fun of him for it all the time

-Also the kind to chew on things absentmindedly, which isn’t something anyone would imagine THIS Leech doing, but he does

-He was the one who pierced their ears, and he has a bite on his arm still from when Floyd chomped him the second the needle pierced his ear fin

-He has a lot of scars from Floyd biting him, actually

-Where Floyd bites during fights, Jade kicks (or uses his tail as leverage to throw his twin)

-Always got the smaller half of the room

-Loves clean things, always argues with Floyd when he leaves his stuff all over their room

-No matter how much he threatens though, he will not move into one of the spare rooms of their mermansion

-He has to share with Floyd

-For logistical reasons, yknow?

-Sleeps like a rock, nobody can move or wake him. Sometimes Floyd thinks hes dead with how still he gets

-As much as he enjoys hiking, he finds the hygiene part of it unpleasant. Being from the ocean, hes unused to having sweat, dust, and dirt coat his skin which happens a lot during hikes! He often takes a swim in a nearby lake before going to bed during these trips

-Couldnt figure out how to set up a tent the first time. He decided to leave the tent unopened and sleep on the ground

-Gets the worst back pain out of the three. Azul tries to correct his posture, Floyd is active, but Jade gets too involved in his terrariums and drawing that he doesnt realize how hunched he gets

-He is also, despite trying his best with botanical sketches, is not the best artist. He tries! He puts in a lot of effort to draw his brother and Azul, but he can only seem to draw one species of mushroom, and thats just barely

-Dont let him see that Floyd keeps all of the drawings that he either gives him or just leaves around their room

Floyd:

-He gets genuinely upset when people think of him as being less than Jade and it always caused a little bit of insecurity on his part

-He squeezes people because he read that humans use it as a greeting, and he wanted to try it out. He didnt understand why people get so scared of him over it. He eventually gave up and realized his wrongdoings, but said fuck it and carried on anyways

-He sleeps naked. I will not elaborate.

-He also accidentally flashes people, all the time

-Well, sometimes accidentally

-He will turn into his eel form and swim around any body of water nearby, be it the nearby pond on school grounds, Mostro’s aquarium, or, much to Jamil’s dismay, Scarabia’s fountain

-Gets hurt a lot, is the kind to fight off any kind of healing and complain when everything hurts (ex: the knight/guardian of the woods scene from monty python)

-He finds affection weird when returned, he’s so used to people trying to get out of his grip or panicking when he hugs them that when it get returned he just,,, shuts down

-He has a hard time communicating how he feels, which ends up in him throwing fits so often. Only a handful of people can help him say what he wants to say

-He also cries a lot, which not a lot of people see

-Hes frustrated all the time, about school, work, his brother, Azul, those dumb guppies who call him weird, it all builds up

-Afraid of needles

-I also will not elaborate

-He falls off his bed all. the damn. time. Its all calm and peaceful until one night Jade awakes to a THUNK followed by a loud, pained, lightly muffled, “FUCK”

-Which also happened underwater, except he’s just kinda… floats out of bed (er… shell?)

-Like Azul, he sings AND dances when he cooks! Hes flinging food everywhere and making a mess but hey! Hes having fun!

-Hands down the best cook out of the trio, and the best barista too!

-Enjoys hiking with Jade, even though he ends up annoyed with Jade due to being more athletic than his brother, and therefore faster (he also doesnt like being stopped every five seconds to look at a new plant)

-He grinds his teeth a lot as a nervous habit. Chewing on candy stops it

-Misses the ocean the worst out out of the three, and gets miserable when he thinks about it too much

Tweels:

-As much as they joke, they genuinely think of Azul like their younger brother and are nearly if not as protective of him as they are each other

-Have a hard time sleeping in separate rooms, as they’ve always slept in the same room since before they were hatched

-They were very small eel babies! They shared the same egg, so a lot of their nutrients were split between the two of them. (itty bitty iddle dudes <3)

-They also have a hard time seeing out of their grey eye, which leads to them being somewhat on guard whenever they’re around anyone else besides themselves and Azul

-I feel like they’ve also been almost assassinated before, considering that their parent’s “business” seems very dangerous and, considering they’re the only children, they’re the heirs to said business. This could also be why they try to appear and act as intimidating as possible

-Their stripes in their eel forms glow in the dark. They’re bioluminescent!!!!

-They used to switch around their names so often as children (“Hey Jade come here” “I’m not Jade” ((he most certainly was Jade pretending to be Floyd))) that they forgot which one was which during a certain point of time in their childhood. Their parents were the ones who told them to put their black strands of hair on opposite sides of their faces

-Also given the whole fish mafia thingy, I think they grew up seeing a lot of terrible things, making them desensitized to violence. They get upset when they see how happy and innocent other children seem to be

-They talk with a slight lisp due to their teeth getting in the way. Jade hides it better than Floyd

-They do the thing where they speak at the same time all the time, also a cause of their many fights

-They’re not immune to dumb sibling bets

-They both sleepwalk, which is terrifying to anyone who may come across their path

-When one is sick, the other isnt. Theyre never sick at the same time

-Have many, many secrets that they will take to their grave with them- most of them being dumb things they broke as kids and vowed to never let their parents find out

-Their parents did find out of course, but theyd never rat the other out

Scarabia:

Jamil:

-He definitely has the best sense of humor out of all the cast, zero hesitation will say what’s on his mind or whatever one liner he can think of (Hes also shows some traits of the genie, like in the freedom and wanting to travel so ofc he gets the humor)

-His hair is his pride and joy, and always has been. It’s been the one thing he’s had control of in his life (also prob a canon thing that im too lazy to google)

-Najma cut it once when they were kids, they still argue about it (Even though sometimes, he cuts a small piece of his hair shorter as a weird way to honor her when he gets homesick)

-Even though he doesnt have the best relationship with his parents, his little sister is his pride and joy, even if he’d never tell her. Insanely protective of Najma, and always wants to do little things to make her happy or her life easier

-Just wants to be a good big brother (and parental figure, since his parents were more focused on the Al-Asims than the two of them)

-A Caffeine Fiend, dude lives off iced coffee and energy drinks, it’s a borderline addiction at this point

-He makes good coffee though, which is a plus

-Makes the funniest facial expressions when he thinks nobodys looking like over exaggerated, dramatic, rolling-eyes expressions (again, influence from the genie being himself)

-He shit talks bugs when he finds them, trying to intimidate them (“You gonna hide on the ceiling where I can’t reach? Fuckin’ coward. You’re scared of me and you know it. I’m a powerful magician, you hear me?” *bug drops from ceiling* “*inhuman screech followed by heavy footsteps* NAJMA BUG NOW”)(hes very loud)

-The only bugs he can tolerate are butterflies, and that’s just barely

-He’s mischievous, and will often do little childish things when he thinks nobodys looking (like hiding snacks he wants to eat later, flipping little things upside down to see how long itd take someone to notice, etc etc)

-He cannot live without his hoodie. It’s his safe space. If anyone touches, breathes on, or even LOOKS at it for too long, he will glare at you until you feel your soul being judged

-Still has some of his old hoodies like that, being worn until they were literal threads

-Really into any kind of sports, not just basketball. Volleyball? Hell yeah. Baseball? Sign him up. Tennis? Sure. Shuffleboarding? Odd, but he’s not against it

-Except ice skating. Do not take this man ice skating. For a dancer, his balance on skates is next to none

-Also sneezes like a grown man. Like, scream sneezes

-He takes melatonin to sleep, he gets so worked up from making lists of what he needs to complete that he finds it hard to stay still for long

-talks in his sleep, like, full convos with himself.

-Discovered his UM one day when Najma was making fun of him and wouldn’t stop, so he forced her to shut up. She doesn’t remember, but he still feels guilty about it sometimes

-Aside from hiding in a pot, he would also store things that he wanted in there as a child!

-As we know, he was a troublemaker as a child, which sometimes reflects in the way he plays basketball

Kalim:

-Is actually a lot smarter than he looks. After being trained to run a company his whole life, he knows a few tricks to keep things running smoothly.

-Has to have music playing from his phone at night and some lights on because he has a hard time sleeping, he is very afraid of someone trying to hurt him in his sleep

-Has terrible anxiety, though nobody would ever guess it. After having lived through who knows how many assassination attempts, it starts to take a toll on you.

-At some point, he took to sleeping in his closet as a child because he felt it would be safer

-Doesn’t understand why people get upset when he spends a lot, has a hard time understanding the class differences

-Just starts singing and dancing when he does little tasks. Whether he’s doing his homework, doing his dorm duties, or even in the middle of a conversation

-Cuts his own hair, much to Jamil’s chagrin. He’s not too terrible at it (similar to Jamil, its a way for him to control something for once in his life)

-Feels the stress of having to take over his family’s business every waking moment, and it makes him sick to his stomach

-His hands shake a lot, which not a lot of people see bc of how much he moves and bounces around

-Plans to free Jamil the second he turns 18

-Blames himself for Jamil’s overblot, and beats himself up over the fact that he never noticed anything was wrong

-I feel like, given that the Al-Asim family has a lot of heirs as back-ups (which is pretty fucked if you think abt it too much, esp considering other royals in NRC don’t have the same issue), I think Kalim feels resigned to his fate of being replaced if anything were to happen to him, and he resented his younger siblings for it when he was a child

-Runs into things constantly. He just doesn’t look where he’s going, ever

-Good at playing a lot of different instruments! He also writes some of his own songs in his free time. I feel like he would want to be a musician, seeing as he has the sociable, welcoming personality, but he has to take over the business so that would get in the way

-Treats the magic carpet like it’s his brother. It would also follow him around when he was a baby, pushing servants out of the way and taking over the guardian role instead

-Poor carpet has seen many, many things

-He’s a hopeless romantic, having grown up with the story of Aladdin (I forget what they call it in TWST). He was in a similar position as Jasmine growing up, so he was hoping someone could give him some freedom to do what he wanted

-Kalim and Ruggie are fairly close in the manga, so I like to think that he tries to help out the poor in his home country more often after meeting and getting to know the hyena

-Gets very emotional at movies, no matter the genre

-Also talks during movies, and yells at the screen

-Stress eats like it’s nobody’s business, like, shoveling handfuls of food down his throat while trying to power through some hw

-OKAY SO NOBODY IVE TALKED TO AGREES W ME ON THIS BUT UHH

-I think he’d be a little pudgy. I know hes vv active with dance but most likely if you live that lavish of a lifestyle, you’re gonna be eating a lot of good food. Not good for you necessarily, but good tasting! Also the sultan in Aladdin was chubby, so it would also just be in his genetics! (even if theyre not related… hes based off him!)

-I also enjoy the concept quite a bit

-Methinks its cute (but I do switch between him being lanky and pudgy quite a bit when I draw him)

-He loves tattoos, and would get more once hes older!

-Also loves piercings, and has had to been talked out of getting more on his face many times before (He got a nose ring and eyebrow piercing in secret- the eyebrow one closed up a long time ago, but he sneaks piercings in the nose ring so it doesnt close up when everyone goes to sleep)

-He gets giggly sleepy, like laughing over anything and everything

-He cries when he laughs too, its on instinct

-Discovered his UM when he was stressed and locked himself away for a moment to cry, and then flooded his room on accident

I wish i did more for the Scarabia boys </33 their story and lore was my favorite out of all of it (the other being heartslabyuls!) I ALSO ADORED THE SCALDING SANDS EVENT AND WANT A RERUN SO I CAN GET THE JAMIL CARD I DIDNT GET LAST TIME <<//3333

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Will you get robbed this year? How would you rate your chances?

Over 10 years, from 1994 to 2004, the national Survey of Economic Expectations asked respondents to do just that. People estimated their risks for a whole host of bad-news life events — robbery, burglary, job loss and losing their health insurance. But the survey didn’t just ask respondents to rate their chances: It also asked whether those things had actually happened to them in the last year.

And that combination of questions revealed something important about American fear: We are terrible at estimating our risk of crime — much worse than we are at guessing the danger of other bad things. Across that decade, respondents put their chance of being robbed in the coming year at about 15 percent. Looking back, the actual rate of robbery was 1.2 percent. In contrast, when asked to rate their risk of upcoming job loss, people guessed it was about 14.5 percent — much closer to the actual job loss rate of 12.9 percent.

In other words, we feel the risk of crime more acutely. We are certain crime is rising when it isn’t; convinced our risk of victimization is higher than it actually is. And in a summer when the president is sending federal agents to crack down on crime in major cities and local politicians are arguing over the risks of defunding the police, that disconnect matters. In an age of anxiety, crime may be one of our most misleading fears.

Take the crime rate. In 2019, according to a survey conducted by Gallup, about 64 percent of Americans believed that there was more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago. It’s a belief we’ve consistently held for decades now, but as you can see in the chart below, we’ve been, just as consistently, very wrong.

Crime rates do fluctuate from year to year. In 2020, for example, murder has been up but other crimes are in decline so that the crime rate, overall, is down. And the trend line for violent crime over the last 30 years has been down, not up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the rate of violent crimes per 1,000 Americans age 12 and older plummeted from 80 in 1993 to just 23 in 2018. The country has gotten much, much safer, but, somehow, Americans don’t seem to feel that on a knee-jerk, emotional level.

“The biggest challenge really, and we’re seeing this as a society across the board right now, is that even though our organizations, our businesses, our government entities are becoming more data driven, we as human beings are not,” said Meghan Hollis, a research scholar at the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship.

That’s not to say that Americans are completely clueless about crime. When we spoke to John Gramlich, a senior writer with the Pew Research Center and one of the people who has been tracking and writing about this disconnect for years, he was quick to clarify that Pew didn’t like to frame Americans’ apparent inability to register their own increased safety as a product of being uninformed or misinformed. The reality, he told us, is that the nature of data collection makes it hard for the public to really assess crime rates and for experts to assess what the public knows or feels about crime rates.

Even the concept of a “crime rate” is messy. When we talk about crime rates in the context of an article like this one, what we’re actually discussing is the number of crimes, in a set of particular categories, that get reported to the police and, from there, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — or results from a government survey about whether people have experienced crime. These stats document murder, rape, robbery and assault, among others, as well as several property crimes, including burglary, theft, car theft, and arson. That covers a lot of ground, and it gives us a pretty good idea what the crime rate truly looks like — enough that experts feel comfortable saying things like “Hey, look, the crime rate has been going down for 30 years.”

But those statistics don’t tell the whole story, and that matters in ways that become important when you’re trying to understand the difference between how people feel and what the data say. Not all crimes are reported to the police. Sexual assault, in particular, is notoriously underreported. And there are plenty of crimes we don’t really track well in data — like vandalism, drug use and sales, or public intoxication — which can affect how safe people feel in their neighborhoods, even if the crimes aren’t serious.

Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University, spent much of the 1990s attending neighborhood-level public meetings around Chicago and documenting the issues that residents told police were problems they wanted solved. Some of these issues weren’t even, strictly speaking, crimes, at all. In 17 percent of the meetings, residents asked police to do something about litter. Loud music or other noise-related problems were discussed in 19 percent of the meetings. Residents complained about abandoned cars more often than they complained about gang problems. Skogan thinks about these factors as measurements of social disorder, and has found evidence that these things affect how safe people feel. If violent crimes are down, but there’s still a good deal of social disorder in an area, people’s responses to a survey might reflect how they feel about litter more than how they feel about a reduced murder rate.

The way the polls are worded also don’t help. “The polling tends to be pretty generic,” said Lisa L. Miller, a political scientist at Rutgers University who studies crime and punishment, which makes it hard to capture the difference between how Americans think about murder and litter when it comes to how safe they feel. More importantly, she said, questions like “Do you think crime has gone up or down?” is not the same thing as measuring fear. “When people are genuinely worried about crime and really fearful, it tends to be in relation to violent crime. That’s the thing I’ve found really drives public pressure for the government to do something,” she said.

This whole thing is further complicated because crime is extremely localized — and estimates about the national crime rate are, well, not.

“All the homicides in Chicago occur in about 8 percent of the city’s census tracts,” Skogan said. For almost everybody, he said, that means “the crime you hear about is crime somewhere else.” And that matters because research suggests people are a lot better at estimating the crime rate in their own backyard than they are at estimating what it’s like across town, or across the country.

Finally, there’s the question of race, which permeates and complicates everything surrounding crime. It’s not just trash and loitering that make people perceive a neighborhood as more dangerous regardless of the crime rate. When Lincoln Quillian, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, analyzed data from three surveys of crime and safety in cities across America, he found that people perceive their neighborhood as more dangerous — regardless of the actual crime rate — if more young Black men live there. That was true for both Black and white respondents of the surveys, but in some cities the effect was significantly more pronounced in white people.

This is all a long-winded way of saying the situation is messy on many levels, but it remains true that people’s personal fear of being victims of crimes and their perceptions of national crime rates are far from accurate.

So why do Americans still think crime is high?

Turns out, the local news may be responsible for convincing Americans that violent crime is more common than it really is. Researchers have consistently found that “if it bleeds, it leads” is a pretty accurate descriptor of the coverage that local television broadcasters and newspapers focus on. For years, rarer crimes like murders received a lot more airtime than more common crimes like physical assault. And that hasn’t changed as the crime rate has fallen.

Understandably, seeing stories about violent atrocities on the news every night seems to make people afraid that the same thing could happen to them. According to one study conducted in California, consumption of local television news significantly increased people’s perceptions of risk and fear of crime. “The news is not going to report on things that are going really well very often,” Hollis said. “It’s not like ‘Hey Austin, Texas doesn’t have a whole lot of crime and that’s our news for the day!'” Stories about gun violence grab attention, so you get more stories about rare, but serious, crimes. “You can have people perceiving areas of cities as much more violent than they actually are because that’s what they see in the news,” she said. “It really amplifies that view of criminal activity beyond what it really is.”

There’s a significant amount of evidence, too, that reporting on crime can prop up harmful stereotypes: Studies have found that local news media disproportionately portray Black people as perpetrators of crime, and white people as victims.

There’s also plenty of fodder for this kind of coverage because even though crime has fallen a lot over the past few decades, the U.S. is still a pretty violent country, at least compared to other developed nations. “Violence remains an American problem,” Miller said. “Just think about mass shootings. So in that sense it’s not irrational for people to be somewhat fearful of violence.”

But often, those fears can be blown out of proportion — not just by wall-to-wall murder coverage on the news, but also by politicians who bring up the crime rate in press conferences and interviews. President Trump is far from the first president to paint a dark vision of crime in American cities, but he is singularly obsessed with the topic, especially now. According to a HuffPost analysis, the vast majority of the ads his campaign aired in the month of July dealt in some way with public safety. In one ad, an elderly woman is robbed as text flashes across the screen reading, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

And a recent study suggests that Trump’s words could have an effect. Researchers found that news coverage and political rhetoric — as measured by mentions of crime in presidential State of the Union speeches — were significant indicators of whether Americans thought crime was a pressing issue facing the country. The actual crime rate was not. A HuffPost poll conducted from July 22 to 24 found something similar: Only 10 percent of Americans correctly believe that crime has fallen over the past decade, while 57 percent think crime has increased.

Some Americans may be more receptive to tough-on-crime rhetoric than others, of course. Republicans are generally more apt to say that crime is a serious problem facing the country than Democrats. And although Pew analysis of polling data doesn’t uncover big racial differences in perceptions of crime, white and Black Americans likely think about crime very differently because criminal justice has become so inextricably tied to race.

Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies race and justice, told us that Black people’s views on criminal justice are complex, in part because they’re likelier than other demographic groups to actually live in high-crime neighborhoods and to be victims of crime. In other research, he’s found that some Black people have also internalized negative stereotypes about who commits crime, and may be more likely to embrace punitive solutions as a result. Those perceptions and experiences are hard to capture in public opinion data, but they can do a lot to shape what Black people mean when they tell a pollster that they think crime is a serious issue facing the country. And that’s important, because as the past few decades have shown, Black people are also much likelier to be mistreated by police, experience incarceration or grapple with the challenges of a criminal record.

Regardless of what’s driving fear of crime, though, the fact that it is so out of whack with reality can make it really hard to change people’s minds or reform the criminal justice system. It’s not that an out-of-proportion fear of crime automatically leads people to support more punitive policies — right now, for instance, Americans are mostly not in favor of more money for policing. But these misperceptions can make it harder for reforms to gain traction, particularly if politicians with a big national platform — like Trump — are talking about out-of-control crime at every turn.

It’s not hard, for instance, to imagine that kind of rhetoric being used as a wedge against efforts to restructure local funding for the police. Especially considering that in the past, a fear of crime has been used politically as a reason to oppose criminal justice reforms like reducing incarceration or changing the bail bond system — even though research suggests those reforms don’t increase crime in the long term.

The history of “law and order” campaigns is riddled with dog whistles, and Trump’s recent rhetoric about sending federal agents to combat crime in cities like Chicago arguably falls into this category, according to Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the University of Albany who studies attitudes toward crime and justice. Talking about the dangers of crime, he said, can turn into a cover for racist attitudes.

None of this has made us safer. And ironically, fear of crime can actually lead to other behaviors that put us at greater risk, like buying and carrying guns. If anxiety about crime keeps Americans from embracing different ways of thinking about criminal justice, that may be doing more harm than good, too. For instance, there’s no real evidence that putting more people behind bars contributed to the decrease in crime or that imprisoning fewer people will raise crime. Instead, a mountain of research points in the opposite direction to problems and inequalities linked to mass incarceration.

The trouble is that fear about crime isn’t rational, and it’s hard to convince people to think differently about a problem that they don’t experience on a day-to-day basis anyway. “You can tell Americans that the crime rate is lower today than it was in the 1990s, but it won’t feel real to them,” said Kevin Wozniak, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That is, unless politicians stop drumming up the crime rate and people stop hearing about murder every night on the local news.”

And that seems unlikely to happen in 2020.

[charlieestudies]

multiples of five for the weird ask ☺️

thank you so so so so so so much ! love ur blog btw !

5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups? 

i don’t drink soda bc i don’t like the bubbles + sweetness, but when i drink water n occasionally juice i like glass cups. i reuse old candle jars as cups so they’re thick and i like when theyre cooler than plastic 

10. game you were best at in p.e.?

none of them. in primary school i refused to go out and i’d sit inside and read, and in hs i pretty much just stood there and did the bare minimum to avoid a teacher yelling at me 

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?

mao’s last dancer 

20. preferred place to write (i.e., in a note book, on your laptop, sketchpad, post-it notes, etc.)?

depends on what i’m writing. but honestly, i will always love handwriting in nice notebooks with nice pens and everything colour coded (can you tell im a super visual person)

25. first song you remember hearing?

probably something of my parents. they mainly listen to bon jovi and inxs. i am not a fan of either of those in the slighest. 

30. places that you find sacred? 

sounds a bit weird, but my room. its my sanctuary, the one place i have. i can completely let my guard down. it’s a sensory haven, a creative space, a calm space, a music making space. very few people have ever been in there, it feels like letting them into a part of me 

35. average time you fall asleep?

like, 12-2am (it’s currently 1:55am. i was diagnosed with a circadian rhythm disorder years ago but i never did anything about it and my sleep still be massively fucked up)

 40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?

actually having friends, when i was in hs??? at the time that was a big deal, esp after primary where kids called me the r slur more than my own name 

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?

fantasy for books, superhero for movies 

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have? 

probably something dumb that my dog’s done. he does dumb shit all the time. for example: yesterday, he was licking things when he thought i wasn’t looking (he doesn’t understand the concept of peripheral vision its p funny). i told him not to lick my brother’s guitar, which is just hanging on the wall bc he doesn’t actually play it, and its covered in dust. leon licked the guitar, and then acted all indignant that he got a mouthful of dust and stood by his waterbowl until i turned on the tap, bc apparently bowl water isn’t good enough for my princess of a dog. this is super off track but basically, my dog is really silly and he makes me laugh and i love him a LOt 

55. favorite fairy tale?

never really cared about fairy tales, tbh 

60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be?

never really watched anime, either, so i wouldn’t have a clue. in the vague genre though, i wouldn’t mind being in a studio ghibli movie 

65. any permanent scars?

quite a lot. most of them are self harm scars (left wrist, ribs, tummy, thighs, shoulders, lower back), but there are others. one’s from a netball game, where a girl didn’t cut her nails and accidentally gouged out my arm going for the ball and i didn’t realise until i was dripping blood. i have two tiny punctures on my right arm from when my dog was a puppy and chewed on me when teething. i have three tiny ones in my thumb from when i accidentally stapled it when i was 8, and then poked one end back through the skin. 

70. left or right handed?

right, but my left fingers are much stronger + more dextrous than my right bc i’m a violinist, and all my right hand does is hold a bow. hence, when i type i primarily use my left unintentionally 

75. when did you lose your first tooth?

not sure, probs kindergarten so around 5-6? 

80. earth tones or jewel tones?

jewel tones. i like colour, and i’m not a huge fan of browns 

85. fairy tales or mythology?

mythology any day babeyyyyyy

90. luckiest mistake?

not so much a mistake, but not being able to audition for the uni i had my heart set on turned out for the better, i think 

[oilsteven80-blog]

Becoming Alien: The Pioneering Vision of “Star Trek”

JANUARY 12, 2019

IN THE ’60S, Martin Luther King Jr. told Nichelle Nichols, the actress who portrayed Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek series, that her show was the only one he let his kids stay up late watching. His rationale: The positive depiction of an African-American woman. Thirty years later, Star Trek: The Next Generation was the show I was allowed to stay up late watching. Crammed next to my father in an old easy chair, I was mesmerized. The portrayals of brave, competent women conducting scientific experiments and exploratory missions nudged me toward imagining a career in science. But unlike the majority of scientists for whom Star Trek was an inspiration, I didn’t choose physics or engineering or computing. I chose evolutionary biology. My fascination for Star Trek life forms sparked my curiosity about how life on our world works.

A biology professor at Duke University, Mohamed A. F. Noor might have had a similar experience. Indeed, in his new book, Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds, he thinks the series has a lot to teach us about the evolution of life on our planet. He’s not actually the first to make this point. Two other books, both published in 1998, explored aspects of this same topic, but they were overshadowed from the get-go by physicist Lawrence M. Krauss’s 1995 best-selling The Physics of Star Trek. This is not surprising: the show was still associated at that time with space and feats of engineering — and so with the physical-sciences-focused, Sputnik-infused mid-20th-century “golden age” of science fiction. Now, however, life itself is our most rapidly changing frontier, and for this reason, Noor’s book is timely in a way the other two books weren’t.

To be sure, dissecting the alien life forms featured in a campy science fiction show that began over 50 years ago seems like an odd intellectual exercise. But, to Noor, Star Trek presents golden opportunities to transmit important knowledge painlessly, even surreptitiously, to those who might not want to learn about biology — and in particular, evolution. In short, the series is a tool for imaginatively grappling with a fraught field (one that many Americans misunderstand, willfully ignore, or even denounce if they’re creationists).

Life on Earth is itself becoming alien; we can now tinker with the basic code of life, edit our genes, and create three-parent babies, and much more is on the horizon, like the creation of children from the genomes of two mothers. With these feats in mind, it’s worth revisiting what the human imagination dreamt up and dramatized decades ago. After all, we know that science fiction inspires real technology down the road — which means today’s Star Trek may very well help produce the next generation of scientists, including its experimental biologists, seeding their imaginations. It’s also worth asking what challenges the show faces, particularly now, in this time of frenetic innovation.

Noor doesn’t tell us if Star Trek influenced his own career path, but it’s hardly a stretch to suppose it did. Exploring its universe in granular detail, he draws from the vast trove of non-animated Star Trek series and movies, including the current Discovery, which amounts to over 700 episodes in all. At Duke University, he teaches a basic course on the biology behind popular science fiction in general, and plans to teach a course based on his book starting next year. Clearly, he understands its power to attract students, including those who might otherwise shun STEM and bio-related subjects.

“My aim with this book is to pique [the public’s] interest in biology,” Noor writes, “by leveraging a different medium in which they may be already interested: science fiction.” With a light, accessible style, he juxtaposes Star Trek scenarios with near-alien examples of life on Earth. Some examples include: How the thumbs of pandas develop from an enlargement of the wristbone, which he explains as a case of convergent evolution with primates; and, considerably more startling: How a species of all-female Amazonian fish mate with males of other species, but then produce young who are clones of the mother, a rare phenomenon also seen in mole salamanders. How did this come about in evolutionary terms? Follow the clues: the fish are an all-female hybrid species; and, before creating clones of themselves, they invariably copulate with a male, leading researchers to understand that they actually require sperm to kick-start the cloning process. The downside: Asexual reproduction is often a one-way ticket to extinction, since a disease or disorder that can kill one clonal fish can kill them all. The upside: The fish can reproduce quickly and at a lower energy cost. Earth-based biology, you see, can seem as odd as Trek biology, and that’s without even taking into account what’s happening in the lab. Noor wants his readers to understand that science, like fiction, is rife with intrigue.

The first of six chapters includes thought experiments on how life might function in extremes of temperature, moisture, and radiation, and explores non-carbon options for building life. Is silicon, often portrayed in Star Trek as an alternative scaffold element of life, a realistic option? Noor thinks not. According to him, the element’s tendency to bind to elements other than itself means it’s unlikely to create the long chains necessary for life. By contrast, on a high temperature world, silicone — repeating units of silicon and oxygen — might function even better than the carbon chains we ourselves are based on. That’s a heady thought, though such creatures would likely be primitive, and only found in extreme environments like those occupied by “extremophile” bacteria in our own world.

While Noor occasionally gets bogged down by scientific information, he expertly weaves plot lines of individual episodes into his explanations. We gain an understanding in the middle chapters of what the hominid “family tree” might look like if humans and Vulcans had descended from a recent common ancestor, as well as the likelihood of hybrid offspring, such as the half-human, half-Betazoid counselor Deanna Troi being sterile in the manner of mules. These speculations feel quite topical: interbreeding hominids are in the news right now, with recently identified Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrids joining previously discovered human-Neanderthal hybrids in the prehistoric genetic melting pot of the genus Homo. Also entertaining are Noor’s musings on the long-term survival of Tribbles, those fuzzy critters made famous in the 1967 original series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” given how inbred they likely are. Though the prognosis is better than if the little fuzz balls were straight-up clones, Noor tells us that they must generate staggering numbers of offspring in order to produce a few who aren’t carrying damaging mutations, which tend to accumulate with each round of inbreeding.

How reasonable is it, asks Noor, to suppose that Shinzon, a clone created of Captain Picard in the 2002 movie Star Trek: Nemesis, is dying from cellular breakdown related to his sped-up aging, a side effect of the cloning process? Can he only be saved by an infusion of Picard’s blood? Noor takes this opportunity to show us how DNA is transcribed into RNA and to explain RNA’s relationship to aging. “Specific genes’ RNA production changes with advancing age, and these changes can be manipulated,” he writes, giving the real-world example of caloric restriction diets reducing age-related changes. “Such manipulation could be done with targeted drugs as well, and if such a manipulation were done poorly or incompletely, the procedure could result in Shinzon having severe health issues.” The plot can be seen as one of many cases of science fiction anticipating reality, given current research interest in anti-aging supplements to combat Alzheimer’s, and even alleged interest in infusions of young donor blood for anti-aging purposes by technocrat Peter Thiel and others. Noor, for his part, is at a loss to explain why an infusion of the much-older Picard’s blood would help the young clone.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is, even if the details aren’t always quite right. Star Trek writers are taking inspiration from what’s happening in earth-bound labs — or among some Silicon Valley types. It has always had science advisors to help steer the ship — the famous biochemist Isaac Asimov, for instance, filled this role in the late 1970s, at one point presciently advocating for a sentient robot in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. To be sure, concerns of plot and entertainment more often than not trump getting the science right. But still, actual science inspires the writers and producers. Noor chooses to highlight the good science, using the poor science as an opportunity to explore misconceptions, or think of what conditions might make it plausible. A prime example: The laughable The Next Generation episode “Genesis,” which gets the basics of evolution wrong when Lieutenant Commander Data’s cat “devolves” into a modern-day iguana. Rather than look down his nose at the error, Noor patiently explains that evolution isn’t unidirectional or goal-oriented: all living things currently occupying the planet are equally “evolved,” and no present-day animal could have evolved from another present-day animal.

The final chapter of Live asks how science fiction might have an impact on real-world science. Noor makes the case that science fiction’s positive depiction of basic research helps the public appreciate its worth at a time when it has become a partisan issue. He could of course cite plenty of examples from our current regime, but he chooses to return to Sarah Palin’s mockery of basic research spending in a 2008 election speech: “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” He then describes Wolbachia, a bacterium discovered in fruit flies during basic research that, upon infecting a mosquito, reduces its ability to transmit such devastating diseases as dengue fever and Zika.

As Noor puts it, “In the long run, basic research on a curious [phenomenon in] a fruit fly may well lead to disease control strategies that will save millions of human lives.” In much the same way that portrayals of women and people of color in Star Trek influenced young minds like mine, portrayals of science may influence the broader public at a time when research is vulnerable to political haymaking. According to a 2015 Pew Research report, nearly a quarter of all adult Americans feel that government funding of basic scientific research is “not worth it,” and those numbers are rising. The survey found what you’d expect: people with more knowledge about science are significantly more likely to see the benefits of research funding. The Star Trek fan base is overwhelmingly made up of those with post-secondary education; this is clearly about correlation and not causation, but the point still holds: good science fiction reinforces viewers’ interest in science.

Noor notes that Star Trek, despite some inaccuracies, does “a better job of embracing evolution than biology courses in several high schools in the United States.” The incomprehensibly massive timescales involved in evolutionary change make it all too easy, he thinks, to ascribe certain highly adapted aspects of modern organisms, such as the strong but lightweight bones of birds, to an intelligent creator. He hopes to disabuse at least a few people, but of course Noor is preaching to the choir: intelligent design proponents are hardly likely to pick up a book explicitly about evolution. He’s casting too wide a net and should focus on the indifferent or uninformed non-creationist rather than active opponents. The Pew report found that nearly three quarters of those with a religious affiliation reject evolution as a natural process, with white evangelical Protestants particularly hostile to the concept. This group won’t be swayed by an imaginative TV show. Maybe their kids will be, but it’s the dramatized story itself that will nudge them toward science, not Noor’s book.

Two more points are worth mentioning. First, the level of science-speak in each series reflects public understanding of science during the time it aired. Noor includes a graph of the proportion of episodes in each series using the words “DNA,” “genetic,” and “genome,” to show how they escalate with increases in research in those areas. “DNA” and “genetic” crop up often in Next Generation, which aired in the late ’80s and early ’90s, while “genome” did not appear until Voyager, which began in the mid-’90s and ran into the next century. In short, the series reflects the science of the times and, more importantly, helps make certain concepts feel familiar rather than alien or threatening.

Second, in these science-infused times, the current series, Discovery, has tried to keep up, basing a rather strange plot line on hot-off-the-press research suggesting that tardigrades are able to withstand extreme conditions because they incorporate massive amounts of foreign DNA into their genome. Before the episodes even aired, this finding was disproven — it had resulted from sample contamination. Noor is characteristically kind on this point, praising the writers’ efforts to stay current rather than chastising their poor science. The plot in question is so far out, however, that Noor is almost at a loss for how to address it, starting with a hesitant, “This idea is … creative?” before launching into a generous attempt to explain what the writers may have been trying to convey. As he told Duke Today, “It’s always easy to use science to say, oh, that’s stupid. But I try to challenge people to try to find a way that maybe it could work.” In other words: Embrace science, but don’t forget to use your imagination.

Noor may be preaching to the converted, but Trekkies remain a big group. Discovery has won enough viewership to warrant a second season. A new program focusing on Next Generation’s Captain Picard is in the works, and the new series of films continues to command massive budgets. In short: Trekkies are alive and well, and they are Noor’s audience, even if he intends a more general one. Since only a true Star Trek lover will ever pick up this book, a bit more geeky frolicking by way of meatier descriptions of actual episodes wouldn’t have gone amiss. After all, Krauss’s best seller The Physics of Star Trek does just this. Noor doesn’t quite have Krauss’s playful style, and his discussions don’t move as smoothly between hard scientific facts and the fantastical adventures of the Enterprise crew. His book is thus unlikely to be a best seller, but, this said, for the Trek fan, it will add to her understanding of evolution, and perhaps, dare we hope, bump up support for endeavors like fruit fly research in Paris.

¤

Erin Zimmerman is a plant biologist turned science writer and illustrator. She holds an MSc in fungal genomics and a PhD in molecular systematics. Her work also appears in The Cut, Undark, Working Mother Magazine, and elsewhere.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/becoming-alien-the-pioneering-vision-of-star-trek/

[yande-re-blog1]

stuff about my characters and how they fit into the world (world post)

kedzie is a 20 year old male who’s just taken two gap years to fit in with society and get used to living on his own. he lives in whats essentially a mass dorm, where he met his best friend, abernathy (more on her in a bit). hes essentially failed at his goal, which was to fit into society around him and make friends. see, ked has a huge problem. whenever he’s scanned, his seratonin levels are steadily fallen and when the story opens, he’s almost at the point where he will be hospitalized until he’s fixed. in modern days, ked would be diagnosed with major depressive disorder, as he generally finds less enjoyment in things than he did before and is down all the time. he finds this to be overwhelming and doesnt leave his apartment/dorm, where he lives with his companion, often. he mostly just lays in bed and wallows. every friend he has made has left him, except for a girl named abernathy, who lives in his building. hes placed into college and is expected to go after his gap years are over, but personally doesn’t think he’ll be able to handle it, as his symptoms started in high school.

kedzie is mixed race. hes primarily (eatern) asian american, mixed with white and south asian. his family life was fine but as per custom of the world, he’s distanced himself. hes mostly cut off from the world around him, though he goes along with the world just fine. however, he fears hospitalization and is terrified that once hes taken away, he’ll never come back. his fear is a very real one, and he questions what they can do for him there that the medication hasnt done for him at home.

abby (abernathy) is a 19 year old fillipina woman who’s made friends with ked. theyre closer than most people are in the world, and abby makes it her mission to get kedzie out of his funk. so far, it hasn’t worked, but fuck if she isnt determined. she has had a turbulent life, as her mother and father were caught as part of the underground and arrested when she was very young. everything about abby is unconventional, from her tastes to her appearance to her relationships to even her name. when she was a baby, her parents gave her a name that wasn’t on the allowed list (abernathy, though at the time, it wasn’t that big of a deal), and abby still goes by that name, even though shes been encouraged to change it legally to abigal. abby pushes the limits of what’s allowed, as she dyes the tips of her hair pink and wears revealing clothing. she can be characterized as a party girl, as she often attends parties and has many friends, though she’s taken a major and strange interest in kedzie.

one day, she convinces kedzie to attend a party with her after questioning him about his mood. he agrees after abby’s trademark badgering, and goes with her. the party is tame, though kedzie finds it suffocating. he leaves to go outside to find respite. there, he meets one of the runners of the underworld, a man named andre.

andre and nadine are twins, but they’re fraternal. they look alike enough, with their freckles, green eyes, dark skin, and frizzy hair. theyre mixed african-asian and white (french in specific), but took particular interest in their african and french sides, hence the names they chose for themselves. they are essentially the runners of the underworld, but not in the way one might expect.

upon meeting them, they appear less than menacing, and it seems like their roles are reversed. nadine is small due to a defect in growing (ill get to that in a second) and andre stands at over six feet tall, way taller than most men are. andre wears his hair in dreds, something that’s typically not allowed, and wears glasses, although vision problems are typically corrected in modern society (nadine has vision issues, too, but chooses to wear contacts). upon initially meeting them, one might assume that of their team, nadine is the brains while andre is the brawn, when their roles are actually completely reversed. nadine is a ruthless fighter and has never lost a fight, while andre is typically the orchastrator of plans.

they have a complicated history. andre is the only one who remembers their early childhood. nadine only knows what andre tells her. andre and nadine grew up in the world until about the age of six or seven, at which point they were reported by their parents and it was determined that they were mentally ill. nadine was determined to be far worse off, though, and the entire reason they were reported was because their mother had witnessed nadine ruthlessly and cruelly killing an animal while andre did nothing. this was after a long history of nadine being in trouble at school for violence and speaking out against things. andre was more quiet in his mental illness, though he was characterized as having terrible and violent mood swings. their parents tried to control them, but ultimately failed.

they were instantly taken away from their parents and separated.they were chosen for research, since twins were a rare thing, and both of them having a disorder were even rarer. nadine was determined to have a far worse disorder and she acted violently towards anyone who came near her. andre was determined to be well enough for rehabilitation, but fought against it in an attempt to see his sister. nadine was so drugged that it messed with her brain chemistry even more, forcing parts of her brain to completely shut down. her memory was wiped, hence why she remembers nothing, and eventually, enough parts of her brain shut down and became defective due to the extreme amount of drugs she was on, that she completely stopped feeling emotion. she became what the doctors described as a monster, as she was ruthlessly violent towards them for years before they decided enough was enough.

andre, on the other hand, wasnt damaged. or, at least, he wasnt damaged as much. he was still heavily drugged, but not to the extent nadine was. he was also allowed more freedoms and there was a particular doctor that gave him updates on nadine. he was informed early on that nadine did not remember him and because of that, any attempts to escape with her would be met with violence from her. andre believes this for a while, and believes in what he’s told, but as they prepare to release him, he makes plans to escape.

he succeeds and rescues nadine, who cooperates with him. the two run. by this point theyre about 11-12 and they attempt to leave the city while andre attempts to make nadine understand who he is.

nadine and andre are now about 22-23. nadine’s brain is still completely messed up from what the government did to her. while she has a close bond with her brother and inner circle, feeling actual love is difficult and near impossible for her. at the beginning of the story, it’s determined that the only person nadine actually loves is andre and even then, her love for him is a little convoluted. theyre very close, something thats rare in this society, and many of the people that they with are still incredibly confused by their relationship, as close familial relationships are completely unheard of. still, nadine and andre are completely inseparable and they do everything together.

nadine has made progress, but her emotions are still wild and violent. every emotion that she feels is amplified times ten of that of a normal person, and the two emotions that she actually shows are anger and happiness. sadness is a foreign concept to her in the same way love is. those two parts of her brain still aren’t working right, though progress has been made by zephyr (more on her in a bit). nadine has a particular enjoyment of music and she likes learning about the old world. shes still incredibly violent and close to anger and of the two of them, shes the brawn, though she stands at a very short stature due to the growth centers in her brain being damaged. nadine is off of all government drugs, and only takes the things that zephyr gives her.

andre, however, turned out a little differently. he takes old-world medication that was originally intended for bipolar disorder and it makes him functional. he takes a particular interest in  computers and like nadine, the old world. the two of them reconnected with their heritage at one point, and chose new names. andre changed their names in the official system and successfully erased all instances of their old identities. the information loss was huge, as nadine and andre were some of the only twins studied by the government, and one night, all the studies and information was gone without a trace

nadine and andre run an empire. theyre young, but theyre the leaders of the underworld. with the help of zephyr and the rest of their inner circle, theyve engineered a drug thats non-addictive but will allow people to feel the high of real emotion. this is how they get people to join them--by showing them what is possible. this is how they built their empire, and all activity in the underworld is connected to them and their inner circle in some way or another. andre and nadine have bigger plans, though, bigger plans than their wide range of dealers, runners, and informants can handle, and they plan to one day take down the government.

zephyr is the next most important character. she’s around 24, though her real age is unknown. shes almost as short as nadine is, though a little taller, and she’s almost completely asian. zephyr is undeniably autistic, something that isnt allowed in society. she has many typical autistic behaviors. she doesnt recall much of her life before being taken by the government, but she was taken at a young age and held until she was about 13 in the same facility that nadine and andre were. she was considered ‘high functioning’, so she wasn’t immedaitely ‘taken care of’, but she was still heavily mistreated. she escaped during andre and nadine’s escape, though she didnt meet up with them until much later.

by the time zephyr met up with nadine and andre, she was around 16 and living on the streets and could not speak. after refusing to cut it for years, her hair had grown to the point where it dragged on the floor. she did not take care of herself. nadine caught her eye one night and took her in, where the two of them instantly bonded. zephyr began to talk and allowed nadine to cut her hair to her waist. zephyr was nadine’s first real friend.

zephyr took a huge interest in science immediately and read everything she could get her hands on. andre and her bonded over this and became fast friends. nadine taught zephyr how to put her hair up into pigtails, though zephyr still prefers that nadine do it for her. zephyr soon began practicing science and became the group’s scientist. she is closest with the twins and her and nadine share a room and a bed together in the headquarters. zephyr is the one to run tests on nadine and andre knows that zephyr has a bit of a crush on her. zephyr is off of all government drugs and has been since she escaped.

then theres racine. racine is the oldest of the group by far at 44. shes the ‘mother’ of the group and is almost entirely latina. she was actually the original leader of the gang, but before nadine and andre joined, it was small and struggling. raci takes care of all the members of the group, as she lost her only child before she left the city. her child was determined to be mentally ill and transgender and taken away from her by force. nadi was thrown in a rehabilitaion center three times before she gave up and ran away from the city. she has a close bond with all the members of the inner circle and has since stepped down from her position as leader. she doesnt leave the headquarters much, and takes care of the rest of the inner circle from there and makes sure the missions go smoothly.

racine is somewhat of emotional support, but essential to the group. she was an aspiring artist at one point, but it was determined by the government that she wasn’t allowed to pursue that passion and was punished for drawing when she was found out. her husband turned her in multiple times for acting strangely and raci quickly fell out of love with him. her child was the one thing that racine truly loved in the city, and he was taken away from her because he was born female. she never saw him again, and it was revealed to her by andre a few years back that her child had died in the facility.

racine’s true passion is art and taking care of people. since her one biological child was taken away from her. she views the others of the inner circle as her children. she raised nadine and andre from the time they escaped until now, and she also raised zephyr, as well. shes proud of all them and does what she can to help them, and they all have a certain respect for her. andre loves her as if she were his biological mother, and zephyr and nadine show it a little differently, though she doesnt mind. right now, though, noyes is her priority.

noyes is the youngest of the group, and nadine was extremely iffy about taking them in. noyes is a professional informant who worked their way up from runner to the inner circle, where andre and racine took huge interest in them. nadine was swayed by racine into taking them in when racine confessed to her that noyes reminded her so much of her late son. nadine relented and allowed them into her inner circle, though noyes has been slow to adapt.

noyes is undeniably jaded. they are latinx and genderfluid, and that was the reason they were singled out and mistreated by the government so heavily. they escaped the government’s clutches and worked for the underworld, working their way up from a lowly runner to the inner circle. they keep to themself and are extremely quiet. theyre incredibly good at getting information out of people, and thats their strongest suit. andre has made attempts to get close to them, but noyes pushes him away, as well as everyone else. they particularly respect nadine for being cautious and also for leaving them alone for the most part.

noyes is, however, close with racine. racine never gave up on trying to get through to them and eventually succeeded. they remind raci of her son, but she’s careful to make the distinction between them. racine is currently trying to reverse the damage done to noyes on the street and by the governemnt, and is making slow progress.

thats what i have of the characters so far!! sorry that was so long omg

[briefbouquetcreatorlove-blog]

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

"Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://freeautoinsurance.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

RELATED QUESTIONS: 

Motor cycle insurance for an 18 year old using usaa?

How much would insurance be for an 18 year old using USAA? I am going to get a Honda CBR250R for the gas mileage. I live in Southern California in Riverside county. the bike would be my primary transportation and i have a perfect driving record. along with straight A's. please help?

Is my insurance rate going to go up? High Point Auto Insurance?

Long story short, I received a speeding ticket today. It will be a 2-point ticket. I called my insurance provider and they said yes, my insurance will go up but she couldn't tell me by how much. She also didn't sound like she knew what she was talking about. This is my first moving violation in 8 years, so I was wondering if anyone with High Point had any experience with this so I can weigh my options between pleading guilty and fighting the ticket for a dismissal. NYC is a non plea bargain jurisdiction so plea bargaining is not an option. I am not asking for exact answers, I am asking whether there has been anyone in my position, with a relatively clean record, has experienced an increase in their insurance rate, and if so, if it was a substantial increase.""

Where can i get the cheapest car insurance?

i live in virginia

On average how much more is insurance when you add a teen driver?

I am 17 and I've taken driving lessons( I heard insurance give like a little discounts) if this matters.

How much is car insurance for a 16 year old?

I live in CA orange county and have a 1999 honda. Parents have good insurance

Should I get a new health insurance plan?

Hi there, I'm a 26 y\o male living in california. I just came off my family's kaiser health plan in April and have started paying for cobra to stay on it. As of today it's $670 a month. I know very little about buying health insurance, but I'm wondering if I can get a better deal with an individual plan. My only worry is being turned down for per-existing conditions. I have an anxiety disorder which requires medication and have had 2 eye surgeries for retinal problems. I know very little about the health insurance market other than that insurers having little compassion for the gouge they put on people. Is this a fair price? Or would it be better to look for a different insurer? Also, what is a deductible and how do they work? thanks""

Difference between comprehensive and third party insurance?

hi all. What is the difference between comprehensive insure for your car, and third party insurance for your car. please help. and thankyou in advance (:""

Can I get off of my parents auto insurance?

So when I got my license when I was 19 about two years ago I was automatically put on my moms nationwide insurance which was fine because I drove one of her cars but now she only has one vehicle and although I do still live at home I'm a full time student at a community college so she usually drives me around so she can keep the car so in order to save money would I be able to drop myself from her car insurance policy since I don't really drive anyway?

Why is it that car insurance is Mandatory ?

why is it that if you crash you just can't pay for the damage and not have car insurance ?

Looking for best insurance product (LIC) which returns guaranteed & handsome amount on maturity along with acc?

Age : 35 yrs., married Premium Amount : 90  99 K per year Premium term : 25 to 30 yrs best lic plan combo plan""

I'm 21! I'm getting kicked off my parents insurance here in a month? Whats the best place to go find insurance

I would go through my work but i'm leaving by the time i can get on. So i've looked on the net but i haven't found anything that great. I'm also and asmathic so i need medication every month. Any help?? :D

""What are insurance rates like in Thailand. Car, health and home.?

I have no idea what the charge for insurance and I hope to retire soon. I own houses in Thailand but they are not insured. And help would be appreciated.

What does new car replacement mean on car insurance?

I am buying a new car and thinking about taking new car replacement instead of gap insurance Thanks

How much will my insurance go up after dui in ny?

OK so i recently was caught for a DUI in NY state , i am under my sister's insurance (geico) and the car is in my name....i want to know how much will the insurance go up even though my sister never had a claim and i am under her...""

California unemployment insurance?

what is the fraction of wages that is given for employment insurance? 40%? more? less?

How much will my car insurance cost? (Teenager)?

I am 16 years of age, and will be in 11th grade as of the next school year. I had B Honor Roll the last two years of school. I will be most likely driving my mother's Nissan Quest (2013) or my father's Nissan Titan (I do not remember the year). I am currently enrolled in Driver's Ed, and will get my permit once I finished. I live in Jacksonville, Florida, if that is helpful. I need to know for a Driver's Ed assignment. I was supposed to ask my parents, but they don't know, and I know they will forget soon.""

No Insurance means i cant get temporary plates? MTO !!?

i recently recived a car, so i went to switch over the ownership and get temporary plates apparently i need to have insurance to get temp plates, but i do not plan on driving the car, i just need the plates to park it underground...without plates the car will get towed! i called to get an insurance quote..and theyre charging me 600 a month just to leave the car parked up. i only have my g1 so i dont know why theyre assuming i need to drive it...what do i do now. i dont know anyone who will get plates in their name for me !! i dont want all my money to be wasted""

First time getting car insurance I'm 20 years old...help!?

I'm 20 (will be 21 in March '08) and have only been on my dad's insurance. His record isn't that great so to add on a car to his is expensive. My relative is selling a '98 Escort - very basic - to get to work and college. $1500 car. don't understand collison and comprehensive. The one that pays for a replacing the car I don't want. Anyway, I went online for quotes and they ask if I've had insurance before and I haven't (on my own) so I'm not sure if I'm being docked for that. I have a clean driving record and just want some basic coverage mostly for if I hit other people. Could someone guide me so I don't have to pay an arm and a leg? What are the ranges I should look for? I see numbers like 200/300/500 but I don't get it. My mom said she'd insure the car under her insurance but then naming me as a drive might be expensive. How do people get insurance that covers any driver? Like when people use other people's car? So many questions! It's hard to work, be in college and pay for car.""

Why are Dental and Vision Insurance separate from regular Health insurance?

Why are Dental and Vision Insurance separate from regular Health insurance? I have regular health insurance one me and my kids. I also have Dental and Vision insurance on just myself, because I can't afford it for my kids. They are the ones who need it most. Why are Dental and Vision not included on Health insurance? I'm not talking about for Braces or colored contacts, but for wellness check-ups, fillings, glasses if needed, etc.""

Which insurance company?

I am 17 year old male in the UK. I have a Citroen Saxo 1.1L 3 door 2000 car. I bought the car for 800. It is not modified in any way and it is in a secure garage every night. Having my dad as the policyholder is not beneficial because although he has been driving for over 30 years, he has always had a company car and has never owned, and therefore never had insurance. I have looked everywhere for insurance and the cheapest is 3500, most quotes are over 4000 and around a third of the results are over 10000. This is 3rd part F+T and using sites such as Confused, Compare the Market etc. I also tried getting quotes direct from the company and it's no cheaper. If anything it's more expensive. Which companies should I try, and has anyone else been getting ridiculous quotes like this?""

Pulled over for no insurance but do have insurance?

today i got pulled over and couldn't find my insurance. i finally did find my insurance but the cop didn't want to write a new ticket. he said that i could take a copy of the insurance to the clerk at the police station and they would void the ticket. is this all correct?? also does this no anything to my insurance or points on my license. i live in missouri.

If I finance a new motorcycle do I need full coverage?

I live in Texas, 19 years old. I am going to buy a new 2011 ninja 250. I have the cash to pay for it. But I'd rather have payments. Does Insurance in the state of Texas REQUIRE you to have full vehicle coverage on a FINANCED vehicle? Thank you!""

Hit and Run Insurance Claim: How do you go about it?

I have case # from the police. Will the Insurance company send someone to check the car or should I have to get them quotes?

Could someone tell me how to get a speeding ticket reduced?

Hi. I got pulled today. It is my first ticket and the first time I have ever been pulled. I was going 47 in a 25. I thought that the speed limit was 35 becasue everywhere else around the place I was pulled is 35. I have no problem paying the fine of $222 I would just like to know if anyone could walk me through the process of getting the violation lessend so that it will not be put on my license. Any help that someone could give me would be greatly appreciated.

""I got pulled over, and failed to surrender insurance?""

I was driving my friends home from a party one night, (being a DD), unfortunately I was caught going 123 in a 90 zone, and then I got pulled over. The police officer told me that not only I was speeding, but I was driving past midnight with a G2 class license. But the only thing I was charged with, was a 65$ fine for not surrending insurance, because I was driving my Dad's truck and could not find the insurance papers ANYWHERE. Since the police officer said there were no demerits to be added, does this mean my insurance rates will go up? I plan on pleading guilty and paying the ticket.""

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Should an average person buy a life insurance?

Should an average person buy a life insurance?

Cost of car insurance for 46 year old?

Cost of car insurance for 46 year old?

Car Insurance coverage?

I was driving in a dirt parking lot at my school, I drove over some 3 foot tall weeds, I didn't see there was rocks underneath and as a result, damage to the under carriage occurred to my vehicle as follows: 1. Radiator crack 2. Transmission oil pan bent, 3. Exhaust damage total est cost $1,800 I am wondering whether or not this will be covered by insurance this happened yesterday I have not yet contacted my insurance company it occurred within 100 Yards of a paved road.""

Has anyone had a negative experience with Progressive Insurance Company?

Has anyone had a negative experience with Progressive Insurance Company?

How does life insurance work?

i talked my dad into buying life insurance but he says that i just want him to die but i told him only to take out a 50 thousand dollar policy for the funeral and other expenses nothing else i don't need a million dollar policy and how does life insurance work if i talk my dad into getting a 50k policy does the insurance pay it all at once or does the insurance give it month to month or year to year explain it all just in case he wants to get more which i highly doubt he will but anything from 25k to 50k will be find i don't need a million dollars to plan a funeral and how much do you think it would cost to make him have a 50k policy and i asked this question before and i got the response 50k is too much i see people who get 5million dollar policy im not trying to get rich im just trying to get enough to pay for the funeral if i really wanted something i would ask for more because im paying off his 500 thousand dollar house with my money and my pay so he can at least appreciate what i do for him

""Someone hit & run my car when it was parked, will my insurance go up?""

I have coverage with AAA, a friend from State Farm said I wasn't at fault so I should call AAA, but will my insurance rate rise if I report it?""

What is the cheapest insurance in alberta for a new driver?

What is the cheapest insurance in alberta for a new driver?

Car insurance question ? And leasing a brand new car question HELP!?

im planning on leasing a brand new bmw 08 , but the lease says $357. Ok, in the end what do i have to pay? im talking about after paying the down payment.. how does the insurance work? Every month do i actually pay 357 or is there taxes including, and insurance.. im confused about the insurance part cause do u pay with bmw insurance or lik for example geico..... i dont get it.. someone help.. how ddoes it all work wat are the final costs of a monthly leasE?""

Will insurance be different on any of the 5 Camrys?

My dad wants to get a new Camry. I really want the SE (i'm a 16 yr. old guy) But he doesn't want to pay a whole bunch more insurance. We have Allied. Our options are CE, LE, SE, XLE, Hybrid. Will there be a huge insurance difference?""

Does pass plus help new older drivers with cheap insurance?

Does pass plus help new older drivers with cheap insurance?

""Why do people think because Obama wants heath care to be more affordable, that he is for socialism?""

I personally am tired of paying over $10,000. for medical coverage and co-pays because we do not get a more reduced rate, then would be from a larger company, we do recieve a small ...show more""

License suspended because of no insurance?

What happens after that? I live in California and I couldn't afford insurance then but now I can. Question is will i be able to get my license back if I get insurance immediately or will I have to reapply for a new one and pay back fines which add up daily?

How much roughly would moped insurance cost for a 16 year old?

How much roughly would moped insurance cost for a 16 year old?

What wold be the cheapest and best insurance?

I'm 19 and a full time college student and I live in Wisconsin. I have a work study job at school as well as a full time job in the summer. I live with my grandma because I was technically abandoned by my mom while in high school and she is unemployed so I don't think she has insurance. I wrestle in college and earlier this year I sustained a concussion and a few days afterward I got rear ended which made the symptoms a lot worse. Theyre insurance is paying for some of the bills but not all. So what insurance should I try to pursue.

Question about general car insurance?

I'm doing a Statistics Lab based off car insurance and i'm a little confused. I'm supposed to make a statement to my boss about charging higher or lower car insurance based on the rating the cars get. So, for the larger, and safer the car is, should I tell my boss to RAISE the insurance prices, or lower the insurance prices? I'm a little confused on the correct way to do it? Safer = Higher insurance or lower insurace? and WHY?!?!?""

What to do when not involving car insurance in car accident?

Ok so I hit someones bumper, my fault. I don't have insurance but they do. Her car insurance called me the next day asking for basic info. A couple days later the car owner called me and said she didn't want to go through the insurance company because it would take her too long to receive her deductible back. She said she was going to pay the deductible to allstate and get the car fixed but not go after me I guess, I don't really get it, as long as I pay her back for the deductible. Would I still owe something to allstate afterwards or would I actually be able to walk away from something like this?""

What is the cost of motorcycle insurance?

I currently am looking into buying a yamaha v-star 650cc. I have been to the progressive website, but i do not wish to grant them access to pull my credit profile (just dont think its neccessary for quoting insurance). So now i am asking everyone. I will be 25 in August, I am married, and have an excellent driving record. Does anyone have an estimate price for full coverage insurance for Louisiana. Thanks.""

How much would it cost to make an insurance comparison site?

I live in a place that doesn't currently have a good insurance comparison site. I have little experience with website design and costing. I would be looking for a good quality site, comparing 4 markets and 6-8 companies for each.""

Value Of Car Set By Insurance Company?

My car was recently stolen and declared a total lost, when I first got insurance on this car the new or used cost value was set by my insurance company for $19,000. Now that my car is a total lost they only said they can give me the fair market value only. Why did they set a price of $19,000?""

Rental car insurance?

I want my sisters friend to rent a car for me, because i am only 19. But i want to make sure if i buy rental car insurance that i will be covered because she wont be with me. Anything helps""

Auto insurance question?

I'm 20 yrs old and I'm thinking of signing up with state farm auto insurance. I'm buying a car and i have none. So can someone tell me what I need, where I have to go, and what i have to do to get this done?""

Is it true that esurance car insurance are con artists?

I've had several friends and co-workers thats told me esurance car insurance are con artists...they give u a really low quote and then start charging your credit or debit card several small amounts to increase yuor policy...

Car Insurance and good grades ?

I hate All state as insurance. I am in college, how high does my GPA have to be and also how much do they lower insurance for having good grades?""

How can 18 year old male afford an car insurance?

Im 18 year old male, i have full driving license i was searching for car insurances on my Vauxhall Corsa 2002 the prices is like 400+ a month! this is crazy! i can afford like 50-70 a month, any advice? Thanks.""

How i can get insurance on my brothers car?

How i can get insurance on my brothers car?

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Insurance boyfriend and girlfriend.?

Well as topic says I need an insurance for me and gf (I don't have one yet) and I live in newyork and she lives in georgia I need some plan that can have me and her on same thing and I can pay for it. Your help is appreciated

Can someone provide best independent health insurance i can buy thats affordable?

I have been chewing tabaco for about 8 years i am 26 years old my teeth havent rotted out yet, but i have a very tiny bump on my tonsils (which i think its just irritated) However to ...show more""

What questions can I expect if I want to get a car insurance?

Also how can I lower my insurance rate. Currently I have IP only (not the actual driver's license) but have recently purchased the car. I live in OH.

Is it legal to have two different auto insurances on two different cars but are both in my name?

I have 2 cars, I just bought one cash. So I already have full coverage on one car and its paid for 6 months, and I want to add insurance on the other but with a different insurance company because it is cheaper and I will be getting only liability. Is it legal to be carrying different insurances or are they required to be both with the same company? I live in Texas!""

""Is it true that the older the car, the lower the insurance cost?""

My dad has a car that is 4 years old, it is a subaru outback, with 200,000+miles on it (not a typo, he drives it all over the eastern coast). Now would the subarus insurance cost(total) be lower than if i bought my own used car?""

Will Insurance cover this?

I ran over a rather large rock in a Toyota Prius and now the car rattles at 15 MPH, 25, 35, and 45 MPH. I dented the catalytic converter and I believe it needs replacing at the cost of $1800. I also dented the gas tank. In the 2007 Prius I believe there is a rubber bladder inside the tank that holds the gas. I am not sure how bad it is to have a dented tank such as mine. If I call the insurance and tell them what happened will that help ease the cost and I'll only have to pay a deductible? It's not my car and i'm not sure if it has full coverage or not. Thanks!""

Car insurance questions!!?

I'm 18 and when I search for car insurance the quotes are crazy like 6000 to 9000, if I lease a car can I get something like basic or part coverage I'm new to this, I have a friend who has to pay like 100 a month and he has part coverage.""

How much does deep cleaning usually cost?

My pocket size was 2 or 3 and some of my molars were 4 or 5. So I know I do need deep cleaning. I did half of my mouth already which is $200 and I'm going to do the other side which also cost $200. So I'm paying $400 overall. I have good insurance through my dad so I didn't have insurance it would be Around $1800. It just seems so expensive

I've been taken off my parent's car insurance policy. What do I do now?

I am 17 and I recently got into a serious car accident where my car was totaled. I got kicked out of my parent's car insurance policy because of this. My parents said that no insurance company is going to sell to me because I was in a serious accident while I was a minor. What should I do if I want to drive again? I can't drive a car without insurance.

""Getting a yamaha r6, how much is insurance usually?""

Never had a bike, have a clean record, what does insurance usually cost on a bike??""

I need hand insurance?

I need hand insurance

Do you NEED insurance for a motorcycle?

meaning can you get arrested with no insurance?

What is the minimum required age to get an insurance liscense in California.?

To get a license to sell life insurance in the state of California.

Doi have to provide cell phone and car insurance?

I live in georgia. My wife has asked for a divorce and has asked me to move out. We have two boys 1 and 3. I'm trying to settle things and save our marriage which prob will not happen. My ? Is...do I have to furnish her with cell phone service (in my name) and car insurance? We are both on title for car, I don't mind if I must as long as the bill is split equally...but am I required to provide her with cell phone services if she indeed wants to divorce and the phones are in my name? She has a home phone which she can conduct her business with....no money for lawyer but I'm not going to give her cell service if its what she wants?""

Can you give me examples of how Obama care will drive up the cost of health insurance for employers.?

Im not totaly clear how and why exactly obama care is going to hike the cost of insuring employees. And are employers the only ones being effected by this new law mandating them buy health insurance for the federal goverment?

Why has the cost of Car insurance suddenly shot up?

Got my renewal quote today, car insurance has risen by over 250 extra, I phoned around and the companies are saying that the quotes have just gone up without explanation. Is this just sheer exploitation and profiteering?, in this time of recession how can they seriously do this and ask for such things hand over fist.? Rip of Britain indeed. Is there an insurance regulator people can go to to get an opinion on it?""

Motorcycle insurance full coverage?

I pay full coverage for my motorcycle and my co worker who is still paying on his bike has way cheaper insurance then me. Were the same age. Is it possible not to have full coverage when you have a loan for the bike? I know your suppose to, i do but i would think the insurance company could find out some how if you told them it was paid off..right?""

Question about health insurance?

I went to the ER in late May and I recently got promoted so I applied for health insurance. However, my health insurance does not go into effect til July. I was told by the hospital that I will be billed in about 2 -3 months. Is there anyway I can use my insurance for the bill or will I have to pay out of pocket?""

Will someone elses tickets effect MY car insurance?

recently my friend got two tickets in my car. We went through a police stop and he wasn't wearing a seatbelt in the frontseat of my car while i was driving and got a $37 ticket. I also let him drive my car because it was past my driving curfew since i'm under 18 and it was 2am. He got us pulled over for speeding and got a $294 ticket. no one else can drive my car on my insurance plan so what does that mean for me?

How does life insurance work?

Me and my fiance been together for 4 years. We have a daughter together. Right now, we're both working to make ends meet. So basically, we need each other. We have rent, car payment, and tons of bills. We was talking the other day about it, that what if one of us passed away, the other one would lose everything. Our daughter is 1, so we wanted to make sure that if anything happened to one of us, our daughter would still be well taken care of and everything will be paid off so they wouldnt have to struggle. So my question here is how does life insurance work. If I was to die, does the money go directly to my family? What if I wanted part of the money to go to my parents? I just want to know some info about it and is it affordable? Thanks in advance.""

Will I receive confirmation my insurance covers it?

I'm 19 and currently living at home with my parents and I am trying to keep this medical problem a secret and I found out that my insurance will cover the mini procedure. My parents keep track of the health insurance, however I have all my information. Will my parents get something in the mail saying my insurance is covering this, or will they never find out? Thanks.""

Classic car insurance?

i want cheap insurance so will buying a classic help that?

Where can i get cheap car insurance?

I am an eighteen year old and i need to get cheap car insurance on a 1999 grandam

What's the most affordable Health Insurance for 55 yr old in California?

Not retired but paying almost 800 a month for Cobra/Kaiser and unemployed for over a year now due to knee replacements. It seems that with my new history of surgery that I am persona non grata at all the local health outlets.

Motorcycle Insurance?

My father has his own motorcycle. I just got my motorcycle permit. Am I legally allowed to drive it (following the rules of my permit, of course) although the insurance is in his name? State: New Jersey""

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Home insurance?

I am buying a home. How do I find a home insurance company? Will my mortgage company help me with that?

How much will my auto insurance cost?

Just bought a new car. im 20 years old and am a student in pennsylvania. iv had two tickets in the past 3 years for going 15 over. my credit score is 700. any guesses?

Can the government require you to buy insurance?

In listening to the Supreme Court arguments about Obamacare a question keeps coming to mind. The major arguing point seems to be: Can the government constitutionally require people to buy health insurance? If the answer turns out to be no, does that mean the government can not require you any insurance? Like car insurance? Don't use the argument that driving is a privilege, not a right. There is ample judicial precedence that says owning a car & driving is, in fact, a right in the U.S. It certainly is necessary to get hired.""

Can one opt out of Pay as you go Car Insurance rates?

I was recently shopping around for car insurance. One to see if I could save a couple dollars on my current plan of $150 a month, as well as to get an idea of what I'd be expecting to pay upon getting a better car for commuting. While I was shopping around I quickly started finding out that California has milage based insurance. I commute on average 130 miles a day to and from work not including my personal driving on the weekend or when I go out shopping or whatever else. With that I found that these insurance companies want me to pay them the equivalent of a small mortgage payment to insure my vehicle. So I wouldn't be saving any money in fact I'd be paying close to 1100 dollars more per month than what I do now. All cause I need to live further out from where I work in order to afford a nice place for myself and family. So what are my options? Can I request non milage based quotes and plans or is this some mandate now? Would I have to uproot my entire family just so I can save money on car insurance. While at the same time spending way more on rent? Example I rent a 4 bedroom house for about $2000 a month currently. To get the same thing much closer to my job would be about $5000 a month. If gas prices were't bad enough, lets now punish the many who have longer commutes than the rest is that how its to be understood?""

Why are Americans so opposed to universal health insurance?

Virtually every Western industrialized nation has it, even Canada, and they are not more bankrupted than the US because of it. It seems like getting in the way of progress for the local population, really. So, what are the arguments of the people opposed to this reform? Thank You.""

How much would insurance usually raise adding a minor on it?

How much would insurance usually raise adding a minor on it?

How can I get cheaper car insurance at 17?

How can I get cheaper car insurance at 17?

Car insurance on a first car.?

I'll be buying my first car on Friday. I went to the garage today and was told I should come down on Friday when it will be ready to pick it up. My question is should I be getting my insurance sorted before Friday? I haven't put any money down on it as they said I wouldn't need a deposit on the car. Is it just the licesne plate number I need?

Do any of you have insurance?

Car insurance cell phone insurance life insurance health insurance renters insurance homeowners insurance Title insurance Troll insurance No matter what the product its good to have insurance AM I RIGHT?

""First car! help with car insurance,tax&other stuff please ?? uk owner?

smart car 2 seater white and silver 2010 reg how much would it cost to tax and insure female driver at 17 year old? best place for insurance ?? is it worth getting a black box installed into the smart car ?? if so how much do the cost on average? where is cheapest place to get break down cover ?? what over things do i need to consider on my first car? how much does a smart car cost to fill with fuel in uk?? would love some help if possible kind regards mia xxx :D

Cheap car insurance for new drivers?

im 23 years old and about to take my driving test, IF i pass i'll be needing car insurance which i've noticed is very expensive. and tips or websites that are good for people in my situation?? i've put the excess up but its just too much! any help will be good thanks""

Whats the best Health Insurance for Canada?

I'm going to Canada on holiday, and need to have some health insurance. Could anyone please tell me where I can get this from? Also, what the best health insurance consists of? Thanks!""

What happens to my car insurance with 2 speeding tickets?

I got a speeding ticket and took a defensive driving class in December 2012 and was put on probation for I think 6 months? Now, only four months later, I got another speeding ticket. Will both of these tickets go on my record? And if so how much do you think my AAA car insurance rates will go up? I am 19 and have nothing on my record except for these two tickets. Also, what will I have to pay in court?""

How come my insurance is going up?

My mom just told me that the insurance company is raising my insurance by like 168$(6 month pay day) and I dont know why. I havent gotten a ticket, pulled over or anything. I mean at school I get parking infractions and stuff and it says ' your license plate has been reported to the police department' but ive gotten multiples of those and have friends that have gotten way more and nothing happens. So I want to know a reason on why the insurance would be going up. Thanks""

Insurance esitmate for 2 door vauxhall corsa?

Im 17, and im planning to get a vauxhall corsa, estimated insurance prices please?""

""Since the Federal Govt. will make us buy govt health insurance, can they make us buy a GM?""

Since the Federal Govt. will make us buy govt health insurance, can they make us buy a GM?""

""In ontario, does a 10-day permit for a car include insurance?

My father-in-law gave us his old car. We need to get it certified. Does the 10-day permit include insurance for the car? How much does the 10 day permit cost?

Does anyone know where i can get cheap and affordable health insurance from in wisconsin?

Im looking for cheap or affordable health insurance ,, sure cant seem to find any .. does anyone have an answer""

""After the insurance adjuster gives an estimate on the damages on my car, whats the next step?""

My car was hit by a van and the vans insurance company is paying for everything. I recently got a call from a body shop saying they received the estimate cost for the damage of my car. My question is: if I find another body shop to fix my car for less then the insurance company estimated, what happens with the left over money? Do they keep it or I do?""

""How to significantly lower my car insurance, just got fired, can't afford more than $50 or so a month...?""

I'm only 18 and I was just fired from my first job, I worked there for 8 months or so. I still live at home and don't owe any money on credit cards, so my only real problem is car insurance/gas. My parents refuse to help me at all. I currently pay $133 a month in car insurance; I have Statefarm. I've been driving for a year or so and have been in 1 fender bender, my insurance didn't even go up because of it. I've been paying my own insurance for a few months, maybe 6 or so. Is there anyway I can lower my car insurance? One of my friends only pays $80 a month and he's my age. By the way, the car is a 2004, dark blue, not flashy, four door car. If the type of car matters at all. I'm not sure what the $133 a month I'm paying covers, but is there anyway I can pay less and have it cover less stuff? I'm a very safe driver and have never been in any type of accident my entire life (the fender bender was my boyfriends fault -- he was driving my car, not me). I live in Virginia. Is there like a $50 a month option or something that doesn't cover me or the person I hit if I were to get in an accident, and the $50 a month is just so I don't get pulled over and charged with driving without insurance? I need some options because I have very limited funds and I'm not sure how long it will take me to find a new job. Thank you for any help!""

""What are some good, low cost family health insurance plans for...?""

My husband and I need health insurance. He is a full time student and I am full time worker. We cannot get decent health insurance through his school or my work. We are looking for a low deductable, 0% coinsurance, and we need something with great maternity coverage, since we're planning on starting a family soon. If you know of any great plans like this, please share! Thank you for your help!""

""Hi, I'm 20 and 6 weeks pregnant. Insurance problems?""

Medi-cal won't let me file an app b/c I'm not 21, And my mother doesn't qualify for me. I make 900 a month with car payments ins. Anyway I don't have money to buy insurance. Planned Parenthood told me my edd, and gave me the positive test. I haven't seen a doctor, and I don't know what to do? I live in CA are there any suggestions?""

Lexus Tail lights and Angel Eye front lights - Insurance?

So im thinking about getting these for car my, does anybody know how much the insurance will go up by if i get them, thanks""

Why would a African America have to pay more for car insurance?

Me and my friend writes for the school news paper. We did our own investigation like the local news will do sometimes.We both at two different times went to see a local and same agent for a car insurance quote . We are both the same age, No record of bad driving, No criminal record, also wanted insurance on the same car and same gender. The only different variable was race. I don't think time would of played part since it was only 1 hour apart. This offends me how the car companies can do this. I wondered why? Any information or missing links that can help us write this story?""

Where can i get car insurance for 20.00?

i'm going to ask this question until i get the correct answer ok listen closely i'm not selling my car i'm not catching a cab i paid 10.000.00 for my car it is my car i worked for it i dont joy ride i drive about 1 mile a month i'm disabled i go to the grocery store credit union auto zone my car is parked about about 99 % of the time i dont need that much car insurance. liability is all i need i keep hearing about this car insurance program 15 dollars a month. if you qualify is it the government that has this program has anyone heard of this?

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

Allen Maryland Cheap car insurance quotes zip 21810

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gio-car-insurance-quote-nsw-landon-yates/"

[apsbicepstraining]

Peru’s ayahuasca industry thunders as westerners search for alternative healing

Every year thousands of tourists leader to the Peruvian Amazon to take the plant medicine ayahuasca. But what does the powerful guzzle actually do, and what do local shaman think up the rise in its notoriety?

Imagine youre in a simple wooden house in the outskirts of Iquitos, the largest municipality in the Peruvian Amazon, and drinking a bitter, dark dark-brown liquid. The lightings go over. Half an hour later the most extraordinary eyesights begin.

Fast forward four hours and its all over. Youve received Christ and Buddha, and youve nearly been moved to snaps by the charms of curandero ( healer) Juan Tangoa Paima and all the deep-throat upchuck youve been doing in his garden.

Ayahuasca is made from an Amazonian vine known as Banisteriopsis caapi( and usually at the least one other bush ). Photograph: Emilie Lescale

That was my first experience, in 2005, of what has come to be known internationally as ayahuasca. Made from a mix of an Amazonian vine known as Banisteriopsis caapi and usually at least one other flora( in Peru chiefly chacruna ), ayahuasca is a plant drug that has been used in the Amazon for centuries for mending and spiritual purposes.

Its about connecting to the natural environment, says Romulo Sinuiri Ochavano, a Shipibo curandero who sucks ayahuasca to communicate with the character world and understand his patients illnesses. Its one technique for us. Its the same as a medical doctor in a clinic with gear that permits him to see if someones ill. Wheres the illness? The curandero checks which bushes are good for antidote that person.

Ayahuasca being brewed over a grove flaming. Photograph: Emilie Lescale

Traditional use involves merely the curanderos booze, according to Luis Eduardo Luna, a Colombian anthropologist and ayahuasca researcher. He says it has mainly been used for divination, such as diagnosing psychosomatic or ethno-specific illnesses with no western equivalent, or for acquiring contact with the flavour world.

The manifestation[ of the psychosomatic illness] may be you lose your articulation or have a physical trouble, or in children through diarrhoea and vomiting, says Luna. Or somebody who has very bad luck in love or business they would go to a curandero who will take the ayahuasca, give the patient ritual tubs and vitality, and protect them.

A area is prepared for a group to drink ayahuasca at the Temple of the Way of Light

Over the last 25 years ayahuasca has exited world, with thousands of beings understand better it, and boozing it too. Curanderos are travelling abroad and ayahuasca is being exported very. In Peru, major centres include the Cusco region and the cities of Pucallpa and Tarapoto, but it is Iquitos that captivates most sake. Every year thousands descend on the city, where centres offering ayahuasca have bounced up in the enclose forest, while hostels offering jungle tours or quality tours include ayahuasca as well. The majority of guests are foreigners.

Estimates of the number of centres in the Iquitos region offering ayahuasca diversify from 30 to 100. Then “theres” jungle hostels and the curanderos living in the city, like Juan Tangoa Paima, and encircling villages. The latter gratify chiefly for neighbourhoods, though tourists can seek them out too.

Temple of the Way of Light ayahuasca centre, two hours from Iquitos. Local Shipibo welcome guests

Why are so many immigrants, especially westerners, coming to Iquitos to suck ayahuasca? Some are striving healing: for sadnes, alcohol-related issues, tobacco and drug addictions, arthritis, diabetes, disease of the skin, cancer and more.

Most of the therapy were carrying out is for trauma, says Matthew Watherston, founder of the Temple of the Way of Light, a centre two hours from Iquitos. The drive is often the crises that beings appear in day-to-day life, certified on a psychological, psychological or physical height. Ultimately, these are all symptoms; the origin, normally, comes from an energetic imbalance or disorder.

Temple of the Way of Light

Others drink ayahuasca because theyre curious and want to learn about it, or theyre looking for a brand-new tendency in life. Then “theres” those who, captivated by the often extraordinary visions, think its another tourist activity or recreational medicine. Thats an idea many experienced with ayahuasca vehemently dismiss.

If anyone thinks its in the same category as a sail, well, the first beverage would promptly change their heads, says Peter Gorman, a correspondent offering expeditions into the forest that include swimming with dolphins, foraging for wild food, hiking and ayahuasca. Its very serious remedy; very profound, very quick.

Unlike western medication, ayahuascas makes no distinction between thinker and person Photograph: PR

Those after only a high arent welcome at some cores. Omar Gomez, from the Rainforest Healing Center, told me that he swerves away 60% of potential visitors: either because they have difficulties that ayahuasca doesnt mix with( such as schizophrenia) or because theyre not sufficiently serious about it.

We do an intense screening process to make sure we dont have any psychedelic tourists, says Gomez. Right now the ayahuasca industry is booming. But we want to made to ensure that the people who come are parties that have a strong purpose and are looking forward to heal.

Indigenous Shipibo at the Temple of the Way of Light

Fundamental to ayahuascas plea is that, unlike western remedy, it is believed to address the true causes of illness and makes no distinction between psyche and person. Ayahuasca practitioners recognize the physical manifestation of some mental, psychological, mental or energetic disorder.

Reports of success are common, particularly with depression, trauma and addictions. Brendan, a former US marine, was overweight and suffered by radiation poisoning, hypothyroidism, and nerve damage caused to his left leg after a education coincidence, and massive remorse after not serving in Iraq. But 12 days at the Temple transformed their own lives; it get him off the oxycontin and other prescription he had been taking daily for years. He says he lost more than 45 kg, his thyroid gland now serves commonly, and he is fully mended from the radiation.

When I left the Temple I went to a Veterans Affairs hospital in the US and had blood tests; everything was running normally, something they said is not feasible, says Brendan, who now lives in Iquitos and has opened his own centre, The Sanctuary of Renana, offering free care to other veterans. My doctor almost scorned me when I told him I was coming out here but when he saw the results of the tests he grew fascinated.

In 2013, the International Centre for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service( ICEERS) issued a report on ayahuasca went on to say that clinical tribulations evidenced it to be physiologically very safe. One of research reports signatories was Jordi Riba, a Spanish pharmacologist who has researched ayahuasca for years.

Theres preliminary evidence that it has the potential to change life positions for the better in situations of drug addiction, depression and damage, says Riba, currently involved with a landmark study by ICEERS analyse the impacts of medication on visitors to the Temple.

The an opportunity for drinking ayahuasca in and around Iquitos( in terms of rates and bundles) diversify profoundly. The Temple furnishes nine-day, 12 -day, three-week and month-long recedes, mainly for big groups, with costs ranging from $2,000 to $3,300 per person, while the Rainforest Healing Center, approximately two hours from Iquitos, offers seven- and 10 -day withdraws for small groups expensing $995 and $1,495 per person respectively.

The admission to the Sachamama Botanical Garden, run by Francisco Montes Shuna. Picture: David Hill

Then there are options such as the Sachamama Botanical Garden, 90 minutes from Iquitos, where one weeks stay and three ceremonies costs $650, or they are able to drop in for a ritual and thrash out world prices when you arrive. In additive, there are currently curanderos such as Paima, who I paid 40 Peruvian soles ($ 12) for one ceremony in 2005 and $60 for another ceremony last year.

Despite numerous positive know-hows, there are numerous things to watch out for, and anyone very interested in drinking ayahuasca should do as much study as is practicable. In Iquitos, there are reports of increasing numbers of beings announcing themselves curanderos, or offering ayahuasca while knowing anything about it, as well as sex crime on dames. Some beings have had terrifying ordeals and violent actions, and over the past decades there have been ayahuasca-associated deaths.

One tragedy, in December 2015, was reported or rather, misreported by the mainstream media. A Canadian gentleman, Joshua Andrew Freeman Stevens, killed Briton Unais Gomes after apparently being attacked by him during an ayahuasca ritual at Phoenix Ayahuasca near Iquitos. Despite initial reports that both men had drunk ayahuasca, one of “the centres activities” founders told me Stevens had not done so, and one precede media report claimed the toxicology decisions confirmed that.

As the ayahuasca event can be intense and even psychologically destabilising, one should be careful when choosing a proper ceremonial navigate, wrote Joe Tafur, a western-trained Colombian-American doctor and marriage in the Nihue Rao Centro near Iquitos, in a recent article in the Iquitos Times.

Other concerns include claims the ayahuasca thunder is moving the Banisteriopsis caapi vine more difficult to beginning; that it isnt regulated by the government; that the emphasis on business fails to respect the sanctity of the weed; and that it is employing indigenous peoples knowledge.

Francisco Montes Shuna, a curandero running the Sachamama Botanical Garden, says most centres are owned by non-Peruvians and therefore should be closed. Its our culture; the Amazons culture, says Shuna, whose parents were indigenous Capanahuas.[ These foreigners] are coming here and plagiarizing our knowledge.

In the last couple of months more than 40 centres in Peru have committed to joining the newly formed Ayahuasca Safety Council to establish common standards of safety and moralities, as William Menech from the Qhispikay Kawsay Ayahuasca Retreat makes it. Laws on ayahuasca differ and are sometimes fuzzy. According to the Ayahuasca Defense Fund, hosted by ICEERS, it is legal in Peru, illegal in Canada, illegal for everyone in the US apart from two religious organisations, and appears to be caught by prohibitive legislation in England and Wales due to a combination of factors. These are instances set by case law, the brand-new Psychoactive Substances Act which came into force on 26 May, and the facts of the case it contains N, N-Dimethyltryptamine( DMT ), which is listed as a Class A medication in the UK. The International Narcotics Control Board schedules DMT, one of the alkaloids present in ayahuasca, as a controlled substance, but to expressly stated that ayahuasca itself is not prohibited.

Luna calls the boom in ayahuasca a sword with two margins. Some without proper training see it as a method to shape easy money and seduce gullible sightseers, he says, but the positives include reigniting respect for it among indigenous peoples and others and was helping to a certain renaissance in Shipibo art.

Ayahuasca may find its neighbourhood in future civilizations, says Luna. Its ritual usage is expanding, as well as its therapeutic applications, and its further consideration of its effects may reveal aspects of the workings of the psyche.

The post Peru’s ayahuasca industry thunders as westerners search for alternative healing appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2giNOJl via IFTTT

[apsbicepstraining]

Peru’s ayahuasca industry thunders as westerners search for alternative healing

Every year thousands of tourists leader to the Peruvian Amazon to take the plant medicine ayahuasca. But what does the powerful guzzle actually do, and what do local shaman think up the rise in its notoriety?

Imagine youre in a simple wooden house in the outskirts of Iquitos, the largest municipality in the Peruvian Amazon, and drinking a bitter, dark dark-brown liquid. The lightings go over. Half an hour later the most extraordinary eyesights begin.

Fast forward four hours and its all over. Youve received Christ and Buddha, and youve nearly been moved to snaps by the charms of curandero ( healer) Juan Tangoa Paima and all the deep-throat upchuck youve been doing in his garden.

Ayahuasca is made from an Amazonian vine known as Banisteriopsis caapi( and usually at the least one other bush ). Photograph: Emilie Lescale

That was my first experience, in 2005, of what has come to be known internationally as ayahuasca. Made from a mix of an Amazonian vine known as Banisteriopsis caapi and usually at least one other flora( in Peru chiefly chacruna ), ayahuasca is a plant drug that has been used in the Amazon for centuries for mending and spiritual purposes.

Its about connecting to the natural environment, says Romulo Sinuiri Ochavano, a Shipibo curandero who sucks ayahuasca to communicate with the character world and understand his patients illnesses. Its one technique for us. Its the same as a medical doctor in a clinic with gear that permits him to see if someones ill. Wheres the illness? The curandero checks which bushes are good for antidote that person.

Ayahuasca being brewed over a grove flaming. Photograph: Emilie Lescale

Traditional use involves merely the curanderos booze, according to Luis Eduardo Luna, a Colombian anthropologist and ayahuasca researcher. He says it has mainly been used for divination, such as diagnosing psychosomatic or ethno-specific illnesses with no western equivalent, or for acquiring contact with the flavour world.

The manifestation[ of the psychosomatic illness] may be you lose your articulation or have a physical trouble, or in children through diarrhoea and vomiting, says Luna. Or somebody who has very bad luck in love or business they would go to a curandero who will take the ayahuasca, give the patient ritual tubs and vitality, and protect them.

A area is prepared for a group to drink ayahuasca at the Temple of the Way of Light

Over the last 25 years ayahuasca has exited world, with thousands of beings understand better it, and boozing it too. Curanderos are travelling abroad and ayahuasca is being exported very. In Peru, major centres include the Cusco region and the cities of Pucallpa and Tarapoto, but it is Iquitos that captivates most sake. Every year thousands descend on the city, where centres offering ayahuasca have bounced up in the enclose forest, while hostels offering jungle tours or quality tours include ayahuasca as well. The majority of guests are foreigners.

Estimates of the number of centres in the Iquitos region offering ayahuasca diversify from 30 to 100. Then “theres” jungle hostels and the curanderos living in the city, like Juan Tangoa Paima, and encircling villages. The latter gratify chiefly for neighbourhoods, though tourists can seek them out too.

Temple of the Way of Light ayahuasca centre, two hours from Iquitos. Local Shipibo welcome guests

Why are so many immigrants, especially westerners, coming to Iquitos to suck ayahuasca? Some are striving healing: for sadnes, alcohol-related issues, tobacco and drug addictions, arthritis, diabetes, disease of the skin, cancer and more.

Most of the therapy were carrying out is for trauma, says Matthew Watherston, founder of the Temple of the Way of Light, a centre two hours from Iquitos. The drive is often the crises that beings appear in day-to-day life, certified on a psychological, psychological or physical height. Ultimately, these are all symptoms; the origin, normally, comes from an energetic imbalance or disorder.

Temple of the Way of Light

Others drink ayahuasca because theyre curious and want to learn about it, or theyre looking for a brand-new tendency in life. Then “theres” those who, captivated by the often extraordinary visions, think its another tourist activity or recreational medicine. Thats an idea many experienced with ayahuasca vehemently dismiss.

If anyone thinks its in the same category as a sail, well, the first beverage would promptly change their heads, says Peter Gorman, a correspondent offering expeditions into the forest that include swimming with dolphins, foraging for wild food, hiking and ayahuasca. Its very serious remedy; very profound, very quick.

Unlike western medication, ayahuascas makes no distinction between thinker and person Photograph: PR

Those after only a high arent welcome at some cores. Omar Gomez, from the Rainforest Healing Center, told me that he swerves away 60% of potential visitors: either because they have difficulties that ayahuasca doesnt mix with( such as schizophrenia) or because theyre not sufficiently serious about it.

We do an intense screening process to make sure we dont have any psychedelic tourists, says Gomez. Right now the ayahuasca industry is booming. But we want to made to ensure that the people who come are parties that have a strong purpose and are looking forward to heal.

Indigenous Shipibo at the Temple of the Way of Light

Fundamental to ayahuascas plea is that, unlike western remedy, it is believed to address the true causes of illness and makes no distinction between psyche and person. Ayahuasca practitioners recognize the physical manifestation of some mental, psychological, mental or energetic disorder.

Reports of success are common, particularly with depression, trauma and addictions. Brendan, a former US marine, was overweight and suffered by radiation poisoning, hypothyroidism, and nerve damage caused to his left leg after a education coincidence, and massive remorse after not serving in Iraq. But 12 days at the Temple transformed their own lives; it get him off the oxycontin and other prescription he had been taking daily for years. He says he lost more than 45 kg, his thyroid gland now serves commonly, and he is fully mended from the radiation.

When I left the Temple I went to a Veterans Affairs hospital in the US and had blood tests; everything was running normally, something they said is not feasible, says Brendan, who now lives in Iquitos and has opened his own centre, The Sanctuary of Renana, offering free care to other veterans. My doctor almost scorned me when I told him I was coming out here but when he saw the results of the tests he grew fascinated.

In 2013, the International Centre for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service( ICEERS) issued a report on ayahuasca went on to say that clinical tribulations evidenced it to be physiologically very safe. One of research reports signatories was Jordi Riba, a Spanish pharmacologist who has researched ayahuasca for years.

Theres preliminary evidence that it has the potential to change life positions for the better in situations of drug addiction, depression and damage, says Riba, currently involved with a landmark study by ICEERS analyse the impacts of medication on visitors to the Temple.

The an opportunity for drinking ayahuasca in and around Iquitos( in terms of rates and bundles) diversify profoundly. The Temple furnishes nine-day, 12 -day, three-week and month-long recedes, mainly for big groups, with costs ranging from $2,000 to $3,300 per person, while the Rainforest Healing Center, approximately two hours from Iquitos, offers seven- and 10 -day withdraws for small groups expensing $995 and $1,495 per person respectively.

The admission to the Sachamama Botanical Garden, run by Francisco Montes Shuna. Picture: David Hill

Then there are options such as the Sachamama Botanical Garden, 90 minutes from Iquitos, where one weeks stay and three ceremonies costs $650, or they are able to drop in for a ritual and thrash out world prices when you arrive. In additive, there are currently curanderos such as Paima, who I paid 40 Peruvian soles ($ 12) for one ceremony in 2005 and $60 for another ceremony last year.

Despite numerous positive know-hows, there are numerous things to watch out for, and anyone very interested in drinking ayahuasca should do as much study as is practicable. In Iquitos, there are reports of increasing numbers of beings announcing themselves curanderos, or offering ayahuasca while knowing anything about it, as well as sex crime on dames. Some beings have had terrifying ordeals and violent actions, and over the past decades there have been ayahuasca-associated deaths.

One tragedy, in December 2015, was reported or rather, misreported by the mainstream media. A Canadian gentleman, Joshua Andrew Freeman Stevens, killed Briton Unais Gomes after apparently being attacked by him during an ayahuasca ritual at Phoenix Ayahuasca near Iquitos. Despite initial reports that both men had drunk ayahuasca, one of “the centres activities” founders told me Stevens had not done so, and one precede media report claimed the toxicology decisions confirmed that.

As the ayahuasca event can be intense and even psychologically destabilising, one should be careful when choosing a proper ceremonial navigate, wrote Joe Tafur, a western-trained Colombian-American doctor and marriage in the Nihue Rao Centro near Iquitos, in a recent article in the Iquitos Times.

Other concerns include claims the ayahuasca thunder is moving the Banisteriopsis caapi vine more difficult to beginning; that it isnt regulated by the government; that the emphasis on business fails to respect the sanctity of the weed; and that it is employing indigenous peoples knowledge.

Francisco Montes Shuna, a curandero running the Sachamama Botanical Garden, says most centres are owned by non-Peruvians and therefore should be closed. Its our culture; the Amazons culture, says Shuna, whose parents were indigenous Capanahuas.[ These foreigners] are coming here and plagiarizing our knowledge.

In the last couple of months more than 40 centres in Peru have committed to joining the newly formed Ayahuasca Safety Council to establish common standards of safety and moralities, as William Menech from the Qhispikay Kawsay Ayahuasca Retreat makes it. Laws on ayahuasca differ and are sometimes fuzzy. According to the Ayahuasca Defense Fund, hosted by ICEERS, it is legal in Peru, illegal in Canada, illegal for everyone in the US apart from two religious organisations, and appears to be caught by prohibitive legislation in England and Wales due to a combination of factors. These are instances set by case law, the brand-new Psychoactive Substances Act which came into force on 26 May, and the facts of the case it contains N, N-Dimethyltryptamine( DMT ), which is listed as a Class A medication in the UK. The International Narcotics Control Board schedules DMT, one of the alkaloids present in ayahuasca, as a controlled substance, but to expressly stated that ayahuasca itself is not prohibited.

Luna calls the boom in ayahuasca a sword with two margins. Some without proper training see it as a method to shape easy money and seduce gullible sightseers, he says, but the positives include reigniting respect for it among indigenous peoples and others and was helping to a certain renaissance in Shipibo art.

Ayahuasca may find its neighbourhood in future civilizations, says Luna. Its ritual usage is expanding, as well as its therapeutic applications, and its further consideration of its effects may reveal aspects of the workings of the psyche.

The post Peru’s ayahuasca industry thunders as westerners search for alternative healing appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2giNOJl via IFTTT

[apsbicepstraining]

Peru’s ayahuasca industry thunders as westerners search for alternative healing

Every year thousands of tourists leader to the Peruvian Amazon to take the plant medicine ayahuasca. But what does the powerful guzzle actually do, and what do local shaman think up the rise in its notoriety?

Imagine youre in a simple wooden house in the outskirts of Iquitos, the largest municipality in the Peruvian Amazon, and drinking a bitter, dark dark-brown liquid. The lightings go over. Half an hour later the most extraordinary eyesights begin.

Fast forward four hours and its all over. Youve received Christ and Buddha, and youve nearly been moved to snaps by the charms of curandero ( healer) Juan Tangoa Paima and all the deep-throat upchuck youve been doing in his garden.

Ayahuasca is made from an Amazonian vine known as Banisteriopsis caapi( and usually at the least one other bush ). Photograph: Emilie Lescale

That was my first experience, in 2005, of what has come to be known internationally as ayahuasca. Made from a mix of an Amazonian vine known as Banisteriopsis caapi and usually at least one other flora( in Peru chiefly chacruna ), ayahuasca is a plant drug that has been used in the Amazon for centuries for mending and spiritual purposes.

Its about connecting to the natural environment, says Romulo Sinuiri Ochavano, a Shipibo curandero who sucks ayahuasca to communicate with the character world and understand his patients illnesses. Its one technique for us. Its the same as a medical doctor in a clinic with gear that permits him to see if someones ill. Wheres the illness? The curandero checks which bushes are good for antidote that person.

Ayahuasca being brewed over a grove flaming. Photograph: Emilie Lescale

Traditional use involves merely the curanderos booze, according to Luis Eduardo Luna, a Colombian anthropologist and ayahuasca researcher. He says it has mainly been used for divination, such as diagnosing psychosomatic or ethno-specific illnesses with no western equivalent, or for acquiring contact with the flavour world.

The manifestation[ of the psychosomatic illness] may be you lose your articulation or have a physical trouble, or in children through diarrhoea and vomiting, says Luna. Or somebody who has very bad luck in love or business they would go to a curandero who will take the ayahuasca, give the patient ritual tubs and vitality, and protect them.

A area is prepared for a group to drink ayahuasca at the Temple of the Way of Light

Over the last 25 years ayahuasca has exited world, with thousands of beings understand better it, and boozing it too. Curanderos are travelling abroad and ayahuasca is being exported very. In Peru, major centres include the Cusco region and the cities of Pucallpa and Tarapoto, but it is Iquitos that captivates most sake. Every year thousands descend on the city, where centres offering ayahuasca have bounced up in the enclose forest, while hostels offering jungle tours or quality tours include ayahuasca as well. The majority of guests are foreigners.

Estimates of the number of centres in the Iquitos region offering ayahuasca diversify from 30 to 100. Then “theres” jungle hostels and the curanderos living in the city, like Juan Tangoa Paima, and encircling villages. The latter gratify chiefly for neighbourhoods, though tourists can seek them out too.

Temple of the Way of Light ayahuasca centre, two hours from Iquitos. Local Shipibo welcome guests

Why are so many immigrants, especially westerners, coming to Iquitos to suck ayahuasca? Some are striving healing: for sadnes, alcohol-related issues, tobacco and drug addictions, arthritis, diabetes, disease of the skin, cancer and more.

Most of the therapy were carrying out is for trauma, says Matthew Watherston, founder of the Temple of the Way of Light, a centre two hours from Iquitos. The drive is often the crises that beings appear in day-to-day life, certified on a psychological, psychological or physical height. Ultimately, these are all symptoms; the origin, normally, comes from an energetic imbalance or disorder.

Temple of the Way of Light

Others drink ayahuasca because theyre curious and want to learn about it, or theyre looking for a brand-new tendency in life. Then “theres” those who, captivated by the often extraordinary visions, think its another tourist activity or recreational medicine. Thats an idea many experienced with ayahuasca vehemently dismiss.

If anyone thinks its in the same category as a sail, well, the first beverage would promptly change their heads, says Peter Gorman, a correspondent offering expeditions into the forest that include swimming with dolphins, foraging for wild food, hiking and ayahuasca. Its very serious remedy; very profound, very quick.

Unlike western medication, ayahuascas makes no distinction between thinker and person Photograph: PR

Those after only a high arent welcome at some cores. Omar Gomez, from the Rainforest Healing Center, told me that he swerves away 60% of potential visitors: either because they have difficulties that ayahuasca doesnt mix with( such as schizophrenia) or because theyre not sufficiently serious about it.

We do an intense screening process to make sure we dont have any psychedelic tourists, says Gomez. Right now the ayahuasca industry is booming. But we want to made to ensure that the people who come are parties that have a strong purpose and are looking forward to heal.

Indigenous Shipibo at the Temple of the Way of Light

Fundamental to ayahuascas plea is that, unlike western remedy, it is believed to address the true causes of illness and makes no distinction between psyche and person. Ayahuasca practitioners recognize the physical manifestation of some mental, psychological, mental or energetic disorder.

Reports of success are common, particularly with depression, trauma and addictions. Brendan, a former US marine, was overweight and suffered by radiation poisoning, hypothyroidism, and nerve damage caused to his left leg after a education coincidence, and massive remorse after not serving in Iraq. But 12 days at the Temple transformed their own lives; it get him off the oxycontin and other prescription he had been taking daily for years. He says he lost more than 45 kg, his thyroid gland now serves commonly, and he is fully mended from the radiation.

When I left the Temple I went to a Veterans Affairs hospital in the US and had blood tests; everything was running normally, something they said is not feasible, says Brendan, who now lives in Iquitos and has opened his own centre, The Sanctuary of Renana, offering free care to other veterans. My doctor almost scorned me when I told him I was coming out here but when he saw the results of the tests he grew fascinated.

In 2013, the International Centre for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service( ICEERS) issued a report on ayahuasca went on to say that clinical tribulations evidenced it to be physiologically very safe. One of research reports signatories was Jordi Riba, a Spanish pharmacologist who has researched ayahuasca for years.

Theres preliminary evidence that it has the potential to change life positions for the better in situations of drug addiction, depression and damage, says Riba, currently involved with a landmark study by ICEERS analyse the impacts of medication on visitors to the Temple.

The an opportunity for drinking ayahuasca in and around Iquitos( in terms of rates and bundles) diversify profoundly. The Temple furnishes nine-day, 12 -day, three-week and month-long recedes, mainly for big groups, with costs ranging from $2,000 to $3,300 per person, while the Rainforest Healing Center, approximately two hours from Iquitos, offers seven- and 10 -day withdraws for small groups expensing $995 and $1,495 per person respectively.

The admission to the Sachamama Botanical Garden, run by Francisco Montes Shuna. Picture: David Hill

Then there are options such as the Sachamama Botanical Garden, 90 minutes from Iquitos, where one weeks stay and three ceremonies costs $650, or they are able to drop in for a ritual and thrash out world prices when you arrive. In additive, there are currently curanderos such as Paima, who I paid 40 Peruvian soles ($ 12) for one ceremony in 2005 and $60 for another ceremony last year.

Despite numerous positive know-hows, there are numerous things to watch out for, and anyone very interested in drinking ayahuasca should do as much study as is practicable. In Iquitos, there are reports of increasing numbers of beings announcing themselves curanderos, or offering ayahuasca while knowing anything about it, as well as sex crime on dames. Some beings have had terrifying ordeals and violent actions, and over the past decades there have been ayahuasca-associated deaths.

One tragedy, in December 2015, was reported or rather, misreported by the mainstream media. A Canadian gentleman, Joshua Andrew Freeman Stevens, killed Briton Unais Gomes after apparently being attacked by him during an ayahuasca ritual at Phoenix Ayahuasca near Iquitos. Despite initial reports that both men had drunk ayahuasca, one of “the centres activities” founders told me Stevens had not done so, and one precede media report claimed the toxicology decisions confirmed that.

As the ayahuasca event can be intense and even psychologically destabilising, one should be careful when choosing a proper ceremonial navigate, wrote Joe Tafur, a western-trained Colombian-American doctor and marriage in the Nihue Rao Centro near Iquitos, in a recent article in the Iquitos Times.

Other concerns include claims the ayahuasca thunder is moving the Banisteriopsis caapi vine more difficult to beginning; that it isnt regulated by the government; that the emphasis on business fails to respect the sanctity of the weed; and that it is employing indigenous peoples knowledge.

Francisco Montes Shuna, a curandero running the Sachamama Botanical Garden, says most centres are owned by non-Peruvians and therefore should be closed. Its our culture; the Amazons culture, says Shuna, whose parents were indigenous Capanahuas.[ These foreigners] are coming here and plagiarizing our knowledge.

In the last couple of months more than 40 centres in Peru have committed to joining the newly formed Ayahuasca Safety Council to establish common standards of safety and moralities, as William Menech from the Qhispikay Kawsay Ayahuasca Retreat makes it. Laws on ayahuasca differ and are sometimes fuzzy. According to the Ayahuasca Defense Fund, hosted by ICEERS, it is legal in Peru, illegal in Canada, illegal for everyone in the US apart from two religious organisations, and appears to be caught by prohibitive legislation in England and Wales due to a combination of factors. These are instances set by case law, the brand-new Psychoactive Substances Act which came into force on 26 May, and the facts of the case it contains N, N-Dimethyltryptamine( DMT ), which is listed as a Class A medication in the UK. The International Narcotics Control Board schedules DMT, one of the alkaloids present in ayahuasca, as a controlled substance, but to expressly stated that ayahuasca itself is not prohibited.

Luna calls the boom in ayahuasca a sword with two margins. Some without proper training see it as a method to shape easy money and seduce gullible sightseers, he says, but the positives include reigniting respect for it among indigenous peoples and others and was helping to a certain renaissance in Shipibo art.

Ayahuasca may find its neighbourhood in future civilizations, says Luna. Its ritual usage is expanding, as well as its therapeutic applications, and its further consideration of its effects may reveal aspects of the workings of the psyche.

The post Peru’s ayahuasca industry thunders as westerners search for alternative healing appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2giNOJl via IFTTT