Genuinely, one of the measures that's stopped book banning the most when districts implement it, is having the would-be banners fill out a form that demonstrates if they've read the book or not. Like where they have the summarize the plot and characters and do a mini book report and give a review. It stops them in their tracks. This is why in my high school, every time someone wanted to ban a book it ended up going nowhere. There was one where a conservative student wanted to ban the manga "Legal Drug" for having a marijuana leaf on the cover, then got the form that required them to actually read and either balked, or read it and realized it was not pro-drug at all.
(The other one that reduces book bans even further is "requiring the would-be banner to be affiliated with this actual school in some way, either by being a student, faculty/staff or a parent of a child at the school" because the vast majority of bans are "activists" with no affiliation with the school who just travel around trying to do this in districts all over the U.S. IIRC a few years ago someone crunched the numbers and just 51 parents were responsible for all the book bans that year nationally. 51! In a country with 50 states, with over 300 million people total!)
Laws like this indeed do a lot to stop fascist book censorship. They can also help legally protect librarians from getting fired or harassed for keeping books on the shelves! Some states like Rhode Island have already passed these laws. If you're in a blue state, look up whether you have laws like this on the books. MAYBE your state is trying to get one passed right now, like New York's Freedom to Read bill. call your state elected officials to voice support for it.
An executive order by Washington Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove has put 77,000 acres of older forests off-limits to logging.
An executive order by Washington Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove has put 77,000 acres of older forests off-limits to logging.
“What we're doing today is the largest forest conservation action in Washington in a generation,” Upthegrove said at a press conference at Tiger Mountain State Forest in Issaquah on Tuesday. “This is the kind of forest we want future generations to inherit.”
State officials call the woods to be protected “structurally complex forests,” referring to habitat elements like gaps in the canopy that allow to sunlight to reach the forest floor to support a variety of understory vegetation. Recently planted forests usually lack such elements, while old-growth or ancient forests are rich in them.
Some local activists call these old-but-not-quite-old-growth stands “legacy forests,” and have resorted to protests, including tree sits and road blockades, to stop them from being sawed down.
Upthegrove’s order would also allow logging to go forward on 29,000 acres of those almost-old-growth forests.
Some environmental groups praised the move, while others say it greenlights too much logging of the best remaining older forests.
Upthegrove called it “the start of a new era of forest management in Washington” and said “every acre of our older forests” would be protected.
“That’s not true,” activist Stephen Kropp with the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition said in a telephone interview. “Contrary to what Upthegrove said during the press conference, this executive order would greenlight clearcut logging of thousands of acres of many of the oldest remaining structurally complex forests in western Washington.”
“It’s a very misleading and confusing and amorphous term, ‘older forest,’” Kropp added.
Activists and state officials both say that the “legacy” or “structurally complex” forests, however they’re defined, are not as old as the Northwest’s iconic “old-growth” or “ancient” forests but are nearly as valuable for wildlife habitat and keeping heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
In January, on his first day in office, Upthegrove placed a pause on logging on Department of Natural Resources land.
Two current timber sales in the Elwha River basin remain on pause, while close to 30 others on state land can now proceed.
Forest activists still hope to save some of areas slated to be logged over the next five years.
Activists with the Elwha Legacy Forests Coalition say DNR’s “Doc Holliday” timber sale is going forward, with logging-road construction for the sale already begun.
“I just spoke with the owner of the logging company yesterday and he is delaying logging as long as possible around the campground and the rare coastal Sitka spruce forest, but the equipment is out there and we don't have much time,” Earth Law Center attorney Elizabeth Dunne said by email.
State officials say that timber harvest levels — and the revenue that goes to schools and counties — would be largely unaffected by the executive order.
Upthegrove said his agency would also generate revenue from its protected forests by selling carbon credits and other products based on the ecological services the forests provide.
A quarter of a century after our first visit, the Guardian returns to Guédelon to find old-fashioned toil has built “thoroughly modern” arch
It was the summer of 1999 and, in a disused quarry in a forest in deepest Burgundy, a dozen or so incongruously attired figures were toiling away, hewing limestone blocks, chiselling oaken beams and hammering 6in nails.
The rough outline of what they were building was discernible, just: a perimeter wall a substantial 200 metres long and three metres thick; round towers, two large and two small, to mark the four corners; another pair flanking the main gateway.
Outside the clearing it was almost the 21st century. Inside, it was 1230 and, using only medieval tools and techniques and materials sourced locally or made on site, work had just begun on the castle of Guilbert Courtenay, a fictitious nobleman of relatively modest means.
Back then, the walls were half a metre high and no one had the faintest idea when – or, more to the point, whether – Chateau de Guédelon would ever be finished. No one, after all, had thought to build an early 13th-century castle by hand for about 750 years.
Just over a quarter of a century later, it still is not quite finished. But in the summer of 2025 it is, recognisably and rather splendidly, an early 13th-century French castle, complete with ramparts, turrets, vaulted great hall, chambers, chapel, kitchens and, a little way off in the woods, a working flour mill.
It is also a living archaeological, architectural, cultural, historical, human and even scientific laboratory, praised and prized by everyone from medievalists and heritage restoration experts to professionals in the sustainable construction industry.
“I’m not really sure what I thought would come of it. Back then, it sometimes felt like just … having fun with friends,” said Maryline Martin, Guédelon’s project manager since the start. “It’s been the most amazing adventure. And it’s worked in a way I never dreamed of.”
Returning to Guédelon 25-plus years on provides something of a shock. What was once a bare, muddy expanse of rock-strewn ground dotted with the occasional artisan in a home-spun hemp tunic or a leather apron is now an actual medieval castle. There are also car parks, restaurants, shops, a smart eco-friendly office – and 310,000 visitors a year.
What it is most absolutely not, though, is a medieval theme park.
“This is play, but serious play,” said Martin, unchanged bar her shock of grey hair. Along with Michel Guyot, who had already spent decades restoring a ruined local chateau, she was one of the founding figures of Guédelon, inspired by the madcap idea of building one entirely from scratch. Guyot has since retired from the project.
“It’s about building to understand, inventing the future by rediscovering the past,” Martin said. “It’s actually thoroughly modern, in keeping with an era that values ecology and nature. We’re like a bird building its nest: we take only what we need, from nearby. It’s almost political.”
Guédelon has quarriers, stone cutters, masons, joiners, blacksmiths, tilers, painters, carpenters, ropemakers, wheelwrights, carters and basketmakers – 60-odd artisans in all – building cob and rubblework walls, firing tiles, blending dyes and pigments, braiding rope and forging and beating nails, hinges and decorative ironwork.
The sole concessions to modernity are safety boots for everyone, glasses for those cutting stone, and ropes and carabiner clips for people working on the castle’s medieval-style timber scaffolding (which itself must be health and safety approved).
“It sounds trite, but it’s ‘back to the future’,” said Emmanuel de Tissot, the newly appointed managing director. “We’re on a collective quest, for fidelity, for accuracy. For truth, I suppose. Guédelon engages body, heart and mind. Visitors, too.”
The typical visit here lasts five hours. A rapt crowd listens as Florian Renucci, master builder, explains that each beam of the great hall’s roof vaults is a single branch hewn from a single tree, respecting the strong “heart” of the wood. Guédelon joiners were instrumental in the rebuilding of the fire-damaged Notre Dame Cathedral.
The Guédelon method, Renucci said, was to study the remains of castles and other buildings of the time when Philippe Auguste was king of France, to consult scientists, historians, archaeologists and archives – and then to proceed by deduction and, most often, trial and error, until a working solution was found.
Sometimes, it can take years. The clay tile oven had to be dismantled and rebuilt five times before it worked: there was no intact 13th-century clay tile oven to copy. When masons failed to devise a waterproof mortar for the cistern, they took samples from a castle in the south of France and had them analysed in a university lab. And everyone lost sleep trying to figure out how to drop the keystone into the chapel roof.
“A whole ecosystem of archaeological and scientific research and of empirical experimentation has evolved around us,” Renucci said, “with so many applications for now, and for the future. Restorers come to learn how to make materials you can’t buy any more; builders to see nature-friendly techniques that vanished decades ago.”
In 1999, Martin reckoned the castle would be finished “by about 2020”. Now she thinks maybe “in five or six years”; the main tower, 30 metres high, still has to be topped off, while other elements are still incomplete. In truth, though, the answer is never: pretty soon, the north wall, the first to be built, is going to need repointing.
see, THIS? YOUR TAGS, @ithrowshoesatconservatives ??? THIS IS WHAT IM TALKING BOUT:
#any industry related to molten metal will make you have religious experiences#i've worked within six feet of an open vat of molten aluminum#the scary thing about aluminum is it doesn't even glow#it's this silvery liquid that looks so incredibly touchable#i've walked along paths where they bring melt trucks with massive crucibles that drip beads of aluminum everywhere#and the ground is studded with a million tiny stars of aluminum that never come off because they're melted onto the concrete#they have these forges for scrap that are twenty feet tall and glow orange all across the inside and they dump whole bales in at once#and when a fresh bale goes in the forge spews flames that lick at the (thankfully fireproof) ceiling#i once stood between the plates of a die press the size of a living room#and realized 'if this closed on me what came out would not be recognizable as a human being'#i've seen the face of god and it's molten metal
Texas gave up that land so they could keep slavery:
“When Texas sought to enter the Union in 1845 as a slave state, federal law in the United States, based on the Missouri Compromise, prohibited slavery north of 36°30' parallel north. Under the Compromise of 1850, Texas surrendered its lands north of 36°30' latitude.”
THAT FIRST SITE IS EVERY WRITER’S DREAM DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I’VE TRIED WRITING SOMETHING AND THOUGHT GOD DAMN IS THERE A SPECIFIC WORD FOR WHAT I’M USING TWO SENTENCES TO DESCRIBE AND JUST GETTING A BUNCH OF SHIT GOOGLE RESULTS
1. hates donald trump
2. got his ear pierced at claires because why not
3. legit asks people to beat him up in action scenes EVEN NOW AS AN OLD MAN
4. is arguably one of the most iconic star wars characters yet couldnt give less of a crap abt star wars
5. the universe tried to kill him (or at least permanently incapacitate him) twice in 2015 and it only mildly inconvenienced him
6. flies helicopters in search and rescue missions
7. was in his 40s for the majority of the indiana jones series which is insane when you think about all the stunts involved
8. quote “the director yells cut and harrison cracks open a beer and then builds a fucking shed”
9. arguably sexy
10. points angrily and its super effective
11. is just a really sweet person
12. no really my dad worked with him on firewall as the tech advisor and he was just a really swell guy
13. got my mom’s birth date from my dad and sent her flowers
14. he sent my mom flowers for her birthday
15. he didn’t even know her he just wanted to be sweet
When he was asked to be in Jimmy Kimmel’s “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” video, in which he pulled up alongside them in a car and gave Jimmy a little wink and an air-kiss, when he showed up at the set he looked kind of put out. Kimmel was afraid he wasn’t down with what they were asking. But he just said, “I don’t know, this wardrobe…don’t you have anything mesh that I could wear?”
When he was filming “Witness” he rented a small farm from a friend of mine. At the end of the filming my friend went and checked out the property as usual. He noticed the barn door had been leveled so it no longer would swing open on it’s own. Went into the house and saw the closets had been redone, in the kitchen the cabinets had been replaced and all the drawers now opened really well. Turns out that there were thousands of dollars of work and materials put into fixing up everything at the place.
My friend called Ford and asked him how much he was asking for the work. Ford told him doing that kind of thing helped him relax and stay sane when he was filming. Would not take a dime. Plus he paid for a new water heater and got the sewage system cleaned out.
One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had.
It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!
