ACTION ALERT: Almost There On Health Care!

autisticadvocacy:

The Senate thought that this was the week they could repeal the Affordable Care Act and destroy Medicaid, but your persistence made them think twice. Last night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that they didn’t have the votes–but there’s a catch. Now, in a last desperate attempt to take your health care away, the Senate is moving to vote on full repeal – a bill which would strip away the protections of the ACA without any kind of replacement. We can still make them back down and give up this disastrous fight for good–but they won’t do that without hearing from you.

Here’s what’s at stake:

  • Health insurance for 32 million Americans
  • Access to the care we need, regardless of disability or pre-existing condition
  • Coverage for mental health, maternity care, occupational and speech therapy, prescription medications, and more
  • Protection from discriminatory insurance practices such as annual and lifetime caps on coverage

Here’s what you can do:

  • Attend local actions and events. Today is a day of action for hundreds of community groups across the country, with more coming in the days ahead. Families USA has a list of upcoming rallies and events in many states. If you don’t see a local action on the list, try searching online for “upcoming healthcare rallies [name of your state]” to find other organizations near you that may have upcoming events. Check out the Center for Public Representation’s Action Center for more ways to get involved.
  • Go to your Senators’ local offices and tell their staff what you think. To find your Senators’ local offices, visit contactingcongress.org. Under the contact information for each Senator, there is a list of their local offices. You can contact or visit these offices to set up a constituent meeting – this is one of the most effective ways to get your point across to an elected official.
  • Keep calling. You can find your Senators’ contact information by entering your ZIP code at contactingcongress.org. If you find it easier to leave an answering machine message than to talk to a staffer on the phone, you can call after work hours, and your message will still be counted. If you don’t speak, you can call using your AAC device, or get a friend to call in and read your message. Here’s a script you can use:

    My name is [your full name]. I’m a constituent of Senator [Name] , and I live in [your town]. I’m calling to ask the Senator to vote NO on repealing the Affordable Care Act. If this bill is passed, 32 million Americans will lose health insurance. This bill takes away protections that patients depend on, and it will return us to the bad old days when people with disabilities like [me/ my family member/ my friends] were uninsurable. We can’t go back. Please vote AGAINST repealing the Affordable Care Act. It’s time for Congress to scrap repeal, leave Medicaid alone, and work together to improve the ACA. We’re counting on you to do the right thing.

  • Share your story by participating in the Arc’s emergency Medicaid Matters to Me Letter Writing Campaign. If you or a loved one rely on Medicaid or a waiver for health insurance or other disability services, take a moment to write a letter to your Senators explaining why Medicaid matters to you, and email it to jorwic@thearc.org. Make sure to include your state in the subject line, and send the email by midnight on Wednesday. The Arc will print your letters and hand deliver to them to your Senators!

Senate leadership says they will replace the ACA later. But after everything they’ve tried this year, we know better than to hand them a blank check.  It’s time for Congress to start over and work together on a meaningful, bipartisan basis to improve the Affordable Care Act and make health care better for all of us. Your voices and your advocacy have already made an incredible impact. Let’s make this week the final push to win this fight, once and for all.

My senator is Pat Toomey, one of the authors of the bill. I’ll admit I’m having trouble coming up with a script for calling him that isn’t “EAT IT, DOUCHEBAG.”

ACTION ALERT: Almost There On Health Care!

llywela13:

bogganbeliefs:

cosmogyros:

seonaxus:

rubidium118:

stephrc79:

crystalpoints:

When people assume Celtic = Irish I get a strong urge to stab myself in the eye.

No no no no no no. 

Sit down we must have a conversation.

There were 6 Celtic nations.

Éire, Cymru, Alba, Kernow, Breizh, and Ellan Vannin.

Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Mann respectively.

They’re all related, but not the same. They all have different languages descended from a similar group, Irish (Gaeilge), Scottish (Gàidhlig), Manx (Gaelg), Welsh (Cymraeg), Cornish (Kernowek), and Breton (Brezhoneg). Some are more widely spoken than others, for example Welsh is still commonly spoken in Wales, whereas hearing Cornish in Cornwall instead of English is rare. 

All Celtic nations have varied mythology and culture.

Irish Mythology is different from Breton Mythology, and even Welsh and Cornish mythology (arguably the most related Celtic Nations) have subtle differences to each other. I wish I could add more about the cultures at this time but my knowledge of Celtic nations is primarily made up of the history and languages of those regions, particularly Cornwall. 

You might have notice that England and English are missing from this, because the English descended from Anglo-Saxons, who were German invaders that came to the isles right around the Fall of the Roman empire in the 5th Century, erasing the Celtic influence in what is now England. 

So what this all really means is that Celtic is an umbrella term, and just because it’s Celtic doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Ireland at all. So don’t assume that just because someone’s talking about something Celtic that they’re talking about something Irish.

I actually didn’t know this. Thank you, tumblr person

I love you for this. I love learning and this day started in a good note.

Furthermore there are currently six modern Celtic languages divided into two families. The Goidelic or Gaelic languages: Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, which are all descended from Middle Irish; and the Brythonic languages: Welsh, Cornish and Breton all descended from Common Brythonic. It should be noted that both Manx and Cornish are revived languages, that is they effectively died (There were no living native speakers) for a time, but revitalisation efforts amongst the communities to learn the languages as second languages resulted in children picking up the languages as their first language, thus returning the languages to living languages with communities of native speakers. Although all of the languages are growing in number of speakers at each count, only Welsh is not counted as being endangered. This revitalisation is part of why the written form of Manx is so different to that of its sisters, despite the close similarity of the spoken form; its spelling is designed to make sense to a native English speaker, whereas Irish and Gaelic use a more traditional phonetic spelling system which only makes sense if you are used to the concept of a séimhiú being represented by the letter h. The Manx for “Isle of Man”, for example, is “Ellan Vannin” whereas the Irish name is “Oileán Mhanann” while the spelling is very different the actual pronunciation is almost identical. Both refer to Manannán mac Lir of the Tuath dé Danann, an ancient race of supernatural creatures, often interpreted as a christian retelling of the ancient Gaelic gods.

Also, depending on who you ask, there’s a seventh Celtic nation! It’s Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain. Opinions are divided as to whether it’s Celtic enough to “count”, but here are some sources for further reading:

BBC: Where is the seventh Celtic nation?
Spain Then and Now: The Celts in Spain
Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies: Celtic Legacy in Galicia
University of Pennsylvania Museum: The Modern Celts of Northern Spain

…and I can’t help but link to my own post of the beautiful song “Va unan,” sung in Breton and Spanish by the chorus “L’Ensemble choral du bout du monde” with the Spanish guest vocalist Jesús Cifuentes from the band Celtas Cortos.

I think I’m honor bound to always repost this.

It’s easiest to think of the difference between Goidelic and Brythonic languages as q-Celts and p-Celts. Take the word ‘son of’, for instance, which we’ve all seen in names like MacDonald or MacGregor. Mac. That’s a q-Celtic word, Goidelic, ending in a ‘c’. In Welsh, which is a Brythonic or p-Celtic language, the same word became ‘map’ or ‘ap’. So where the son of Donald in Scotland became MacDonald, in Wales the son of Rhys became ap Rhys became Prys became Price or Preece. Same original root, leading to a very different linguistic end.

kittydesade:

midnightmindcave:

braezenkitty:

key–lime–pie:

celticpyro:

lesbianshepard:

lesbianshepard:

honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible

i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”

I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.

No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.

…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.

mai nam is jane
and wen i dig
i fynde some roks
both smol and big
i put my tung
upon the stone
for science yes
i lik the bone

Look my archaeology professor regularly had classes at the local bar and told us about his friend’s plan to create the Foundation for Unified Cultural Knowledge (when you see it…) archaeologists aren’t freaks, they’re damn entertaining freaks.

akireyta:

pog-mo-bhlog:

die-tochter:

evieplease:

incredifishface:

#yoga#where is this dude’s romance novel#THE SCOTTISH LORD’S SECRET#his secret is yoga#YOU MUST TRY IT MISS DUNTHORPE#he enthuses at the heroine#over kippers#YOUR HEADACHES WILL VANISH#uh huh says miss dunthorpe#who had kind of been hoping#the secret was vampirism#anyway then he demonstrates#just like this#miss dunthorpe regards his thighs#and his biceps#and reconsiders her opinion (fahye)

Naw, turn t’ camera, ye bastid!

I was sitting here praying for him to put his legs all the way up during the handstand. I was disappointed.

kilted yoga is truly a wonderful thing

I feel this might be relevant to the interests of some of you all

sevdrag:

seriesofnonsequiturs:

lizzywhimsy:

megcubed:

The average age in Boston in the early 1770s was 14. More than half the population of Boston was under 21 in the events leading up to the American Revolution.

It really puts everything into a completely different context, doesn’t it?

 #England: YOU DO YOUR CHORES LIKE I ASKED YOU #America: YOU’RE NOT MY REAL MOM #*slams door* #England: OOOHH YOU’RE GONNA GET IT #America: EAT MY SHORTS (beggars-opera)

oh, and they complain about millennials shutting down a few colleges and highways

get some perspective!

EAT MY SHORTS I’m crying

Honestly this explains like… All of medieval Europe too. Everybody acted like a jerk with no impulse control because they were all TEENAGERS, and in fact DID NOT HAVE impulse control because what frontal lobes?

what are your thoughts on mary magdalene? also i love your blog and your poetry x

boykeats:

resurrection was delivered into the hands of a single woman like. before anyone else, jesus and his wildfire blood came to her to tell her that yes, these miracles do happen, this future isn’t empty, you are saved, you are saved now and forever.

and who was she? mary, from a village by the sea. a girl who grew up singing saltwater hymns while sickness burned in her body. when the messy-haired, sunlight-boned wanderer burst into town with his pack of young rebels, she looked god right in his human eyes and said, “i’m not afraid. heal me.” she watched the romans kill him slowly, and she wept, and she ached, and she spent two nights sitting in the dirt outside the tomb, whispering prayers to the stars like it might be worth something, anything, everything. and it was.

and we couldn’t believe that christ would want to trust a woman before anyone else, so we wrote her down as a sinner and a person of bad character, even though she was neither. we made her name synonymous with prostitution, even though there’s no biblical evidence to support that. history likes to pretend she had little power but without her there would be no witness to the news.

a young woman is the mortal catalyst for one of the biggest turning points in christian theology! a young woman who runs to other women first! that’s who christ placed his trust in above everyone else to bear the sight of the resurrection. isn’t that spectacular?

One of my favorite bits in the Gospel of Thomas is when Peter goes “Lord, why do you keep telling Mary, a Mere Woman, all your secrets when you don’t tell them to us?” and Jesus looks him dead in the eye and says “because she’s cooler than you. Stop being such a whiny putz and be more like her and maybe I’ll tell you secrets too.”