I made a side blog for all my Supernatural posts so if you want it just let me know hi my name's Monica this is my big dumb blog please enjoy
rmt_ki101('0',176,'4ol9363ufvr','ff0000');
Tweets by @failbag !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");
var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-22475135-1']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.tumblr.com']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();
"Regulations don't exist because governments enjoy them" is an important statement here. The government has to spend money and labor to enforce regulations. The government has to be begged for years and sometimes threatened by the American people into even creating the regulations. The people with the money want you to believe regulations are "BIG GOVERNMENT INFRINGING ON OUR FREEDOMS" so you'll help them undo the regulations your grandparents had to force that same government to install in the first fucking place. They count on you being ignorant of the past so they can make another round of dirty money by poisoning you all over again.
I'm sorry guys A few years ago I found a button that says 'press this to make the world 1% more evil' and I have just been pressing it and pressing it all day long every day. I'm not going to stop pressing it anytime soon but I wanted to say I'm sorry. also I'm very happy to say that I have forgiven myself so that's a big milestone for me
The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.
“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.
You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”
Call your senators. Both of them. Tell them the Forest Service reorganization is proceeding without the congressional approval required by Section 716 of the Agriculture Appropriations Act and Section 421 of the Interior Appropriations Act. Use those numbers. Say them out loud. Staffers write down what they don’t recognize, and these are the provisions their bosses voted for.
If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didn’t get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?
If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDA’s general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?
Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.
“why are you, as someone in their 30s, still on tumblr” oh so you think you’re gonna be normal when you’re my age? you think you’re gonna be CURED?? you think the witches’ curse will have been lifted by then?? cmon now
when i was younger and stupid and in the (glass) closet i was dating the son of a pharmacologist. this man had made millions developing medications. he was fond of me and privately told me i was too funny and smart to be dating boys.
he also said that it was incredibly unlikely that sexism will ever be resolved in the medical field. that the majority of medications i will ever take - even some of which are "for women" - will not be clinically tested on my body.
the problem, he said, was in getting any human clinical trial approved. to test on a body with a uterus - any body, even elderly patients or those who have been sterilized - was often nigh-impossible, because the concern was that the test patient may, at any point, become pregnant. once/if the patient became pregnant, the study would not be about "the effects of New Medication on the body." instead, the trial would fail - the results would be "the effects of New Medication on a developing fetus/pregnant patient."
it was massively easier, he said, to just test without accounting for a uterus. that's how he phrased it - accounting for a uterus.
at the time, i remember him talking about the ethical implications of testing on a developing fetus; how such testing could theoretically bankrupt a company if a lawsuit was filed. he talked about informed consent and about how long it took for any legislation to be passed about this - that in 1993; the year i was born, it finally became illegal to outright exclude women and minorities from clinical trials.
i remember him shrugging. "that's not to say it doesn't happen," he said. my ears were ringing.
i was thinking about how every time i have been rushed to the ER, the first thing they have asked me is if i am pregnant. when i broke my wrist at 16 years old - despite never having had sex - they made me wait three hours for the test to come back negative before they gave me pain meds. the possibility of a child haunts my health.
how many people have died on the table because they were waiting for the pregnancy test before treatment. how many people have died on the table because they were pregnant, and the only thing we care about is the fetus.
it is hard to explain to other people, but it feels like some kind of strange ghost. our entire lives, we are supposed to "save" our bodies for our future partners. but really we are just saving the body for the future child, aren't we? that hovering future-almost that cartwheels around in a miasma. you can't get your tubes tied, what if you change your mind? think of the child you must have, eventually.
who cares about you and your actual safety. think about what you could be carrying.
Really hate how much time I am being forced to spend begging everyone around me to call their elected officials so I can maybe keep my job + so my lab won’t be shut down in October + so my entire professional network won’t be laid off + so the Great Lakes won’t go back to being a poisoned dead zone of industrial sludge/dead fish/toxic algal blooms. I would rather be spending all this time doing actual, you know, science, rather than pleading for people to make phone calls to try to stop the deliberate strangulation of environmental research across this damn country. It’s humiliating! It’s nightmarish! And yet here we are!
Anyway, I am once again asking you to call your reps if you care about accurate life-saving weather forecasts, clean drinking water, having fish you can eat, climate change, and more, because the people who work on these issues — including me and my peers — cannot survive this without your help.
Updates July 6, 2025: Poor distribution of warning alerts and evacuation orders to endangered communities ahead of the flash flooding in Tex
Thank you so much to everyone who has called so far — saving NOAA labs, cooperative institutes, and the whole Oceanic and Atmospheric Research division (currently slated to get zeroed out in 2026) along with our partners at EPA and USGS is essential if we want to avoid toxic algal blooms that could hurt you and your pets, oil spills in our shared waters, and the loss of baseline scientific research on everything from PFAS to climate change.
In addition to your local reps, please consider making calls to Senator Jerry Moran, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (DC office: 202-224-6521) and Congressman Hal Rogers, Chairman of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (DC office: 202-225-4601). I got through to two mild-mannered interns yesterday, so their lines aren’t ringing off the hook — yet. Putting in calls this week as the FY 2026 budget is determined is critical — again, thank you for anything you can do to help.
trump's big beautiful bill, which just passed congress, expands ICE's budget from $9.6 billion to over $170 billion, of which $45 billion is appropriated for new detention centers. not only is this budget bigger than the budget of the federal bureau of prisons, but it's greater than the military expenditure of all countries besides america and china ($246 billion), giving more money to ICE than the russian military receives ($129 billion). it will completely remake american society
in fact, the new ICE budget wouldn't be just bigger than that of the federal bureau of prisons ($8.1 billion), but that of the FBI ($10 billion), DEA ($3.28 billion), ATF ($1.6 billion), and the US Marshalls ($4 billion), and all the local and state police spending ($135 billion as of 2021)—combined
As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore
Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people
I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history
You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again
Ok, so. The Trump budget. It has already passed the House and now just needs 51 senators to pass it and send it to Trump for signature.
There are 53 Republican senators, 45 Democratic ones, and 2 Independents that vote with the Democrats. VP Vance is a tiebreaker vote.
So to block the bill, at least four Republican senators need to find their spines and the Democrats and Independents all need to keep their spines. This will not happen without direct action from voters.
They are only going to resist this bill if they hear from voters in their states. They do not care if some person from California calls them.
It's really fucking bad for everyone except the ultra-wealthy, surprise surprise.
At the center of the sweeping bill is trillions in tax cuts, which Republicans aim to partially offset through changes to safety net program
I'm going to go through some of the features of this budget in reblogs, but trust and believe that it's horrible for the vast, vast majority of Americans, including you.
Highlights include:
Extends the Trump tax cuts passed in 2017. This continues $3.7 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy. If this budget does not pass, these tax cuts will expire and go back up without any action.
$150 billion in additional military spending
Work requirements for Medicaid. "childless adults without disabilities would be required to work 80 hours per month to qualify for benefits.". They expect millions of people to fail to meet work requirements and lose Medicaid.
Planned Parenthood and trans care. "Bans Medicaid from providing funding to Planned Parenthood as long as the organization continued to provide abortions, and would bar Medicaid from covering gender affirming health care to any beneficiaries. "
Reduces SNAP food stamp access that 40 million people use. "mandates work requirements for able-bodied SNAP enrollees who don't have dependents.".
Clean energy "dramatically scaling back many of the tax credits for clean energy."
Border walls and ICE. "$46.5 billion toward completing Trump's border wall. It also allots $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and more than $6 billion to hire and retain more agents and officers"
Student loans. "cut $330 billion from the student loan system by scrapping several existing repayment options, including the Biden-era SAVE program that based payments on income and household size.". Does anyone want to have student loan payments that you cannot afford?
Guts Obamacare. "Saves $100 billion, but will result in millions of Americans becoming uninsured if they fail to adhere to new paperwork requirements or can no longer afford insurance premiums."
Weakens federal courts that keep using orders that his actions are illegal and unconstitutional. It prohibits courts from enforcing contempt citations for violations of injunctions or temporary restraining orders unless the plaintiff pays a bond. Bonds can be EXTRAORDINARILY EXPENSIVE and are not currently required in these cases. The provision "would make most existing injunctions—in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases, and others—unenforceable," says the god of constitutional law, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
So, you folks in red states and you folks in wobbly blue states (PA, NC, etc), you need to call your senators and save us all.
Spend 5 minutes. Make 5 calls. Make your voice heard.
Call every day. Call after hours so you can leave a voicemail and not talk to anyone.
For real y'all, millions of people are going to starve, go broke, and be without medical care if this bill passes. Which is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump administration.
And it will balloon the national debt to pay for these tax cuts for the wealthy.
Here's a good post (without melodramatic misinformation) if you want a detailed rundown of what is in the budget bill. As you can see, it's absolutely bad enough without additions, and needs to be resisted on those grounds alone.
Quick bonus media literacy/reading comprehension question: what position is the New York Times coaching you to take on these cuts by putting them in green (the go/"good" color) instead of say, red, which would make more sense for budget cuts? How does this connect to the way the NYT has been repeatedly criticized for soft-pedaling its coverage of Trump in the past? What overall impression does this give you about how you're supposed to feel about this budget and whether it's a good or bad thing?
