Retired litigator Paul Eisner has submitted the "Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act" to the state Attorney General's office, sparking both attention and criticism for its provocative title.

The proposed measure would make it illegal in California for anyone other than a licensed physician to deny, delay, or modify medical procedures or medications. Eisner, who still holds an active law license, says the initiative was inspired by his personal battle with cancer and subsequent disputes with his insurance company.

"People are tired of carriers, of insurance companies denying them health care," Eisner told CBS 8. 

The measure would allow patients to sue insurers and potentially receive attorney fees and triple damages if successful.

~ Popular Amusements, Rev. J. T. Crane, D.D, 1870

The Rev. J.T. Crane, who previously disapproved of reading novels, turns his attention to another frivolous time-waster: the game of chess.

Gaming and moral panics through the ages

The Spiral of Police Violence: A Work of Art Criticism

https://crimethinc.com/spiralofviolence

This photograph taken during the 2017 G20 summit truly captures the timeless spirit of policing.

Our art critic in residence explores the compositional elements that give the photograph its expressive power.

Koningskerk (1954-56) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, by Wouter van de Kuilen & Cornelis Trappenburg

Slipping estrogen into your boss's coffee might sound cathartic, but if you unionize your workplace then you won't even have to slip it in his coffee. You'll be able to openly demand that he take estrogen. That's the power of collective bargaining.

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

sometimes you just want to look at the qing dynasty jadeite cabbage again

here she is!

[ID: a sculpture of a chinese cabbage carved from a piece of two-tone white-and-green jadeite, resting on an intricate wooden stand /end ID]

People hate paper and reusable straws because they're such a ridiculous hill on which to stake claims of sustainability. are plastic straws bad for the environment? Yes. But are they bad enough to make abolishing plastic straws a meaningful or even worthwhile intervention? Almost certainly not.

Reusable and paper straws give the aesthetics of being environmentally friendly through a minor and inconvenient intervention of unclear effectiveness. Think about it. Metal straws weigh over 15x more than plastic (~7g vs ~0.4 g), meaning it requires 15x more energy to ship them, so you're underwater pollution-wise until you've used the straw at least fifteen times. Paper straws are even worse, since they also weigh more (~1.5 g, over 3x more than plastic), and they're single use.

And that's just shipping costs. Before it can be made into consumer products, metal has to be mined and smelted, both notoriously energy intensive processes (though admittedly, requiring less energy per kg than many plastics) leading to widespread environmental devastation. Paper making involves many nasty chemicals and produces massive volumes of toxic waste, and, because of the processing and additives required to make paper straws viable, they may be even worse for your health than plastic. (Of course the environmental devastation of industry is usually restricted to areas populated by poor or marginalized people, while single use plastic straws can be found littering the gas station parking lot of any well-off suburb.) Producing tons of single-use plastic tubes may be significantly less damaging than producing lots of metal or plastic straws that will be used twice and then forgotten in the drawer when you realize they're actually hard to clean.

So once again, are drinking straws really the environmental battle we should be fighting? Moves away from plastic straws are great examples of vibes based policy making. They're not driven by an accounting of the environmental, health, or climate implications, but just by the feeling that plastic=bad.

Luckily, people are doing the work to figure out the environmental costs of replacing plastics. A recent paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology put it bluntly in their title: "Replacing Plastics with Alternatives Is Worse for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Most Cases." This paper focused solely on the climate impacts, which of course must be weighed against other environmental and health impacts, but their conclusions are clear:

People hate paper and reusable straws because they're such a ridiculous hill on which to stake claims of sustainability. are plastic straws bad for the environment? Yes. But are they bad enough to make abolishing plastic straws a meaningful or even worthwhile intervention? Almost certainly not.

Reusable and paper straws give the aesthetics of being environmentally friendly through a minor and inconvenient intervention of unclear effectiveness. Think about it. Metal straws weigh over 15x more than plastic (~7g vs ~0.4 g), meaning it requires 15x more energy to ship them, so you're underwater pollution-wise until you've used the straw at least fifteen times. Paper straws are even worse, since they also weigh more (~1.5 g, over 3x more than plastic), and they're single use.

And that's just shipping costs. Before it can be made into consumer products, metal has to be mined and smelted, both notoriously energy intensive processes (though admittedly, requiring less energy per kg than many plastics) leading to widespread environmental devastation. Paper making involves many nasty chemicals and produces massive volumes of toxic waste, and, because of the processing and additives required to make paper straws viable, they may be even worse for your health than plastic. (Of course the environmental devastation of industry is usually restricted to areas populated by poor or marginalized people, while single use plastic straws can be found littering the gas station parking lot of any well-off suburb.) Producing tons of single-use plastic tubes may be significantly less damaging than producing lots of metal or plastic straws that will be used twice and then forgotten in the drawer when you realize they're actually hard to clean.

So once again, are drinking straws really the environmental battle we should be fighting? Moves away from plastic straws are great examples of vibes based policy making. They're not driven by an accounting of the environmental, health, or climate implications, but just by the feeling that plastic=bad.

Honestly if someone is making the argument that a marginalized gender or sexual/romantic orientation is inherently untrustworthy or bad (which is already a red flag tbh) and is doing it from a perspective that said marginalized gender/sexuality are actually just secret agents of cisheteropatriarchy and not really marginalized…

You should not trust that! Ever!

There’s no queer group for who that is true!

Reblogging because when I made a list of every group I’ve seen this said about more than one, it’s… it’s the whole LGBTQIA alphabet actually. Just to drive home how bad an idea that is

Also applies to people arguing that cishet men are inherently untrustworthy or bad. Simply the belief that demographics determine goodness or trustworthiness can only help the oppressor.

You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is?  I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off.  Woopie. 

would you eat these snail pastries?

snastries ...

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