Don’t think it can’t happen here, it’s already happening.
“On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.
His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.
But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.
As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.”
The other day at the mall i saw a 15 year old sitting in a Claire’s piercing booth and it took every fiber in my being to not just grab her and take her to the actual, clean and sanitary and not guaranteed to fuck up your ears tattoo shop literally next door. Like I was frantic. Snakes manifested in my house
Piercing guns almost ALWAYS cause infections
They hurt more because they jam dull jewelry into your ear
Needles from a professional are designed to allow for minimum damage thus less pain.
The people working there literally have no idea what the fuck they’re doing and just guess it with a 1 hour training video vs a professional who trained under a mentor for at least a year and has a passion in the craft
They use bad metal for healings (copper, silver, etc) that can irritate ears. Surgical grade steel should be the only thing in your healing piercings
They put them on way to tight, causing swelling issues. Swelling is normal and piercings should be large enough to allow for that
They give you shit aftercare advice and cleaner (literally just buy saline solution at Spencer’s or hot topic for 8 dollars at the most and don’t touch them at all)
If done on cartilage it can LITERALLY SHATTER YOUR EARS
Please if any young girls in your family want their ears pierced take them to actual professional and don’t trust piercing guns. If a professional says your kid is too young (I.e a fucking baby) then trust their professional judgement. It costs more but you are getting essentially a art piece from a highly trained professional who knows what they’re doing vs a part time min wage employee who had 1 hour training on how to pierce ears.
I literally wrote an entire essay in college why piercing guns should be banned with pictures and my professor told me she was so interested in my topic and had no idea and even googled the topic herself out of curiosity and was horrified on the amount of damage they case
I am a licensed piercing professional and this is all sound and accurate advice. Get your piercings done by a licensed professional at a reputable shop. Not at the mall kiosk that uses piercing guns. Not by your friend who ordered a kit off of Amazon.
Association of Professional Piercers Aftercare Guide:
Didn’t know this, but I had a feeling after my cousin and I have both had our ears pierced twice there with issues(the first time, both of us got infections, second time hers hurt and one of mine just closed up within like 3 hours of having it out) I’m gonna get my next piercings probably when I get a tattoo
Y’all for real. Please take this advice.
My parents took me to get my ears pierced 3 times. The first time, I was five. It was a Claire’s. They used a piercing gun, obviously. Not only was it comically unsanitary, but they used nickel earrings, which as it turns out I am VERY allergic too. What followed was an absolutely horrific infection that spread onto my neck and into my scalp. Piercings closed up, of course.
Tried again age nine or ten. My parents didn’t know any better, and took me to another fucking Claire’s. I had a bunch of scar tissue from the first attempt, so the genius professional piercers at this Claire’s said, “Alright, we’ll just use more expensive earrings this time and pierce in a spot with no scar tissue, what could go wrong?” Got an even worse fucking infection. Surprise, surprise.
Age 12 I got my ears pierced a third and final time. This time, I was old enough to adamantly request surgical stainless steel earrings and at the very least didn’t get a horrible infection. It was still a stupid piercing gun though. The holes are a bit wonky and there’s… so much scar tissue built up in my ear lobes. I’ll probably get them professionally re-pierced at some point.
Anyway tl;dr if your kid wants earrings please get their ears pierced professionally, my parents are STILL kicking themselves over this cause they didn’t know better
Had my ears pierced when i was 7 (at a claires or a similar place) and it caused an ear infection that has never completely healed. Get professional ear piercings. Please.
I had my ears pierced with a piercing gun. It’s been more than 5 years and I still have problems. Don’t do that.
I also had my ears pierced with a gun. Tho the one ear the lady did somehow wrong and i have one hole like… Curved. Like – how am i supposed to put earrings in a such hole? (And this is why i can’t wear earrings in one ear)
Also i had few problems healing these (got silver earrings at first and then a bit of allergy) ;u;
For sake of your child’s health and your money & nerves pls don’t dare using piercing guns.
Pay a proffesional and have a smooth and competent work done.
Katharine Trendacosta, a policy analyst with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the situation undercuts the argument that net neutrality rules hindered emergency services by not allowing internet service providers to prioritize their data.
“They’ve often said if we’re allowed to throttle some and not others then we can give better service to emergency responders. We’re seeing here that’s not true,” she said. “It wasn’t net neutrality that prevented them from doing it. It’s clearly their own policies.”
Trendacosta said the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s experience “is an example of why actions like this are so dangerous and why we need to pay attention to how we’re getting our internet.”
Santa Clara County Fire Capt. Bill Murphy said officials felt compelled to join in the lawsuit as a means to ensure that reduced data speeds won’t impact the public’s access to information like evacuation routes and fire maps disseminated online during emergencies.
“If the public were to experience the same level of throttling that we experienced, their ability to access basic information we’re trying to get them would be significantly reduced,” he said.
…
Question: How many people died because Verizon pulled this price gouging shit? How many homes were destroyed? How much property was damaged? Crunch those numbers, get them in writing, and tattoo it all over their faces.
And they had the nerve to say it was a “consumer support mistake”. If you’re really so incompetent that you “accidentally” throttle emergency services in the middle of a catastrophic event then you should be cut off and the internet made a utility.
there is absolutely no reason hogwarts couldn’t’ve been founded as a monastic school for the education of the clergy, with two houses for women and two for men, except that the hp fandom is full of bitter atheists and people who don’t know shit about paganism & religious history
@ofloveandmedea said: please talk about this headcanon it sounds Fascinating and you always have such good sources
here’s two things that i don’t think fanfic writers understand about pre-enlightenment europe:
first, there is zero evidence that paganism continued to exist as a practiced faith in western europe after about 900 CE. there is more evidence for demons. (reading on this, among other things) if you want to make the case that with the statute of secrecy, wizards erased all evidence of their existence as your justification for pagan wizards, that’s fine, but you’re then left with the question of where the stories about witches came from.
second, there was no way for a non-christian organization to function. period. it didn’t happen. jewish groups, especially pre-1492, were very small and very quiet; islamic groups kept out of christian europe; there were no other options. if you were a guild, if you were a school, if you were a group of any form, if you were a government–you were christian. it was explicit. there wasn’t even a conception of how to organize without invoking christianity.
so when, in or about 950, hogwarts was founded, it had to be founded in a christian framework. there’s a big, huge, gigantic problem though: in 950, education happened one-on-one, through tutors or apprenticeships. the only, only institution educating in a group format was the church.
why? because clergy came from all classes, because clergy were required to be (at least partially) literate, and because the majority of the population (in some places and eras, from any demographic) was not literate. religious institutions were the only places collecting significant numbers of children and giving them an education.
there were two forms of this: cathedral schools, which produced priests, and monastic schools, which produced monks and nuns. (some reading)
couple of reasons why hogwarts would be monastic and not a cathedral:
the boring, the reasonable, hogwarts isn’t anywhere near anything that would be a cathedral, but monasteries were all over the place and the more remote, the better
priests were all male, which makes two of the founders difficult to explain
scotland was more connected to the irish monastic form of christianity than the mainland european bishop focused christianity
so. if you’re going to create a school in 950 in scotland that accepts students from all backgrounds with the goal of educating them, the most reasonable framework for this is the monastic school.
(monastic schools were also notoriously apolitical, which would go a long way to explaining some things in the books…)
but wait! you say. what about christianity and magic?
i’m so glad you asked. medieval catholicism didn’t actually have a problem with harry potter magic, as long as it was dressed up in the appropriate forms.
quote from holy feast and holy fast by caroline walker bynum:
By 1500, indeed, the model of the female saint, expressed both in popular veneration and in official canonizations, was in many ways the mirror image of society’s notion of the witch. Each was thought to be possessed, whether by God or by Satan; each seemed able to read the minds and hearts of others with uncanny shrewdness; each was suspected of flying through the air, whether in saintly levitation or biolocation, or in a witches’ Sabbath.
in other words, it’s not the things that people do that make them witches: it’s their relationship (or not) to God and the Church. things that we today would call magic–healing people by touching them, or saying incantations; turning one bread into many; transporting from place to place–all of these turn up in hagiographies of saints as miracles that they performed.
(complicating matters is that they did have a conception between good and bad witches, it’s just that all were damned. so you have good witches, who are doing good things, and bad witches, who are doing bad things, and saints, who are doing good things, and the quality of the thing…well it does matter, but it matters less than the position of the person doing it)
additionally, throughout the middle ages, you see records of people definitely doing magic which is contemporaneously acknowledged as magic who are…not getting burned as witches. the big easy example here is court alchemists & astrologers, who were all over the place telling the future and/or making things blow up and only really getting into trouble when their patrons did. (some reading)
there were also tumblr’s favorite women, the herbalist or local midwife (or, equally common, the wealthy widow). the line between “medicine” and “magic” was not all that well formed: if you knew that certain herbs with certain prayers would keep someone alive, who was to say that it was the herbs vs the prayers that did the heavy lifting? later there was a clear(er) distinction, but even then, the association of midwifery with witchcraft is not new and it is not unfounded. (more reading)
so there’s a deep, deep split here. because on the one hand, yes, people were (irregularly, but routinely) tortured and (less commonly) executed for witchcraft (under a variety of names). but on the other hand, people were socially rewarded for practicing magic within accepted forms, and while sometimes this was because the source of the magic was seen as different, sometimes it was not.
in this context, then, in this understanding that some people could (and did) work magic without being evil, in this society where education was the province of a very, very select group of people who were also (what a coincidence!) more likely to be workers of magic, in this situation that j.k. rowling seems to have absolutely no idea of–
hogwarts was a monastic school to produce good catholic magical monks and nuns.
(some more readings i didn’t have an excuse to share earlier: link (on merlin), link (on anglo-saxons), link (on things witches did), link (on what the witch hunters thought they were hunting and why)
lol the article frames it as “an opportunity for trouble youth”
It also frames it as job training which implies that a criminal record doesn’t get in the way of becoming a firefighter
california like “is your child unruly? have you thought about throwing them in coal mines? it’s hip! it makes $1.34 an hour!
with this job your child can: die letting other miners know theres no oxygen around.
great job experience!”
i want you all to know this comes directly from budget cuts in firefighter payments at the federal and state levels
california is increasingly relying on prison labor to accomplish necessary things, meaning they have made prison a necessary component of their economic system
which is to say california cannot cut down on its prison population even if they wanted to for prisoners are needed for californias very survival.
theyre ruining peoples lives because it’s cheaper to do that than to pay people what theyre fucking worth.
the original source link isn’t great so here’s some more reliable ones:
so the worst fires in californias history have minors fighting in them as punishment for crime.
“Our modern day slave laborers provide a virtual service that’s why we pay them next to nothing and expose them to dangerous conditions with life long health complications. And even after thy get out they can’t even use their experience here to get a job as a firefighter or qualify for health benefits despite risking their lives for us. Yes, a fair and humane system.”
A Middleground 