Luke:

luke: oh you mean my new daughter

force ghost obi-wan: but isn't leia the chancellor?

luke: EXACTLY imagine paying taxes to your sister!!! i'd rather die. anyway that's how i ended up with 15 children. they're all skywalkers.

yoda: force-sensitive, some of them are not.

if you have a well funded library you might even have access to maker spaces that have 3D printers. or video/audio recording equipment. libraries aren’t these tomb silent homes for books any more. they’re community spaces. they’re full of life and things. 

- wifi hotspots that can be checked out for weeks so you can have internet on the go or at home

- CDs, DVDs, blurays including usually multiple copies of new stuff

- A tech lab with a 3d printer, computers for graphic design and game dev focus, VR headsets, and a soundbooth for recording

- Study rooms for solo or groups

- Printers, copiers, faxes, and scanners for just about anything you need taken care of.

- Including a new printer big enough to make giant posters, maps, and business-grade ads.

- A seed library, both floral and food-related.

- A computer lab programed to erase your data and reading history so you’re never at risk while visiting sites like domestic abuse hotlines

- Laptops pre-programmed with Adobe and Office software so you don’t have to buy them

- Monthly author visits

- Ebooks including comics on tons of various platforms

- Classes for those who want to learn how to or better their computer skills

- Art you can check out to hang on your wall for as long as it’s available, including the work of local artists who get paid for their art, especially if it gets popular and we want even more of their stuff.

- Monthly papers ranging from local newspapers to multi-national magazines on just about any topic you can imagine.

- We used to offer food and drink at a loss but You Know ©

- Notaries with extensive legal knowledge including renters rights, getting you in contact with immigration protection, and contacts with pro-bono lawyers.

- A connection with all the libraries in the state, so if we don’t have something, we can have it shipped to you within a matter of days.

- Books translated into multiple languages

- A donation bin for old books/DVDs/VHSes that often turn around and get sold for two or less dollars

- A food donation site for local food banks

- A “suggest a purchase” section on our site where you can support your favorite indie writers/musicians by suggesting their work if we don’t already have it

- We’re growing butterflies this year, and in prior years we hatched chickens! \o/

- An outreach program for the elderly and disabled who hand-deliver almost everything I’ve just mentioned

(Trigger warning for abuse, electroshock therapy, torture, and ableism.)

The US court has overturned the ban on shock devices being used against disabled students, predominantly autistic students in the US.

The shock device being legalized is called the graduated electronic decelerator (or GED). This is a torture device that is used to ‘correct’ autistic behaviors / symptoms. Autistic people are shocked for stimming, and for having meltdowns, ect. This device was made popular by a behavioral center (the Judge Rosenberg Center, specifically) that is infamous for its abuse and torture of autistic / disabled patients.

(Image ID: someone is holding their arm out and resting it on a table, with their sleeve rolled up. Attached to their arm are wires, which connect to a small cube device.)

This is what the device looks like. It sends electric shocks into the victim’s skin; the victim often being restrained and held against their will. This is torture. GEDs have been reported to cause intense psychological trauma, PTSD, and physical injuries.

In March of 2020, the FDA ruled for GEDs to be banned. (Although, of course, they were still illegally used at a number of places.) This ruling has recently been appealed, and today, the US court of appeals has re-regulated the law to stop the use of GED. Sounds great, right? It would be!

... If not for a huge loophole in the wording, which basically allows this torture to continue. This device is going to have continued use on autistic students in order to “correct their behavior.”

“So.... What can I do??”

Great question! You can:

Listen to and boost autistic voices to spread awareness

As-of now (July 7th), autistic activists are trying to get #StopTheShock trending on Twitter, so Tweet out the hashtag if you have Twitter

If you’re in the US, email / call your legislators

Sign this petition if you’re in the US

Follow this case and look out for updates

If Autism Speaks (known ableist hategroup) says anything about this, DO NOT BOOST IT

The Biden administration issued an interim rule aimed at ending the evil ugly practice of surprise medical billing Thursday, following up on a law passed by Congress back in December. The new rule, released by the departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Treasury, and Labor, will go into effect on January 1, 2022, and should largely eliminate surprise medical billing, at least for people with health insurance through their employers, or who buy individual plans on the private market.

So what the hell is surprise medical billing? It occurs when somebody uses medical services that would be covered by their insurance, but which involves some part of service that — surprise! — is actually out of network, and billed at an insanely high rate. For instance, someone might make sure their planned surgery is done at an in-network hospital, by an in-network surgeon, but — surprise! — the anesthesiologist that day is out of network, and the patient is billed for tens of thousands of dollars. This practice has gotten much much worse as private equity firms have taken over American healthcare, because the whole point is to extract as much money as possible from patients, fairness be damned. Cory Doctorow has an excellent Twitter thread on how it all works, go read it, you.

As part of last year’s big omnibus budget bill, Congress passed the “No Surprises Act,” which authorized HHS to enact rules to put the kibosh on surprise medical billing. The resulting 411-page rule still needs to go through a routine 60-day public comment period and other administrative steps, but it’s not likely to be modified much, because public support for reining in the practice is so strong. Let’s take a look at how this sucker will work!

Fierce Healthcare has the skinny…

The rule would also forbid insurance plans from requiring prior authorization for emergency services, regardless of whether the policyholder goes to a hospital that’s in network or not, or whether the providers of the emergency services are in or out of network.

So if suddenly you are run over by a truck, you will no longer be expected to emerge from your concussed state and tell the EMTs to take you to an in-network hospital, or to call your health insurer’s call center to authorize treatment before they sew your leg back on. And even if an assistant surgeon scrubs in, you can’t be billed more than the co-pay you’d have to pay for in-network treatment.

The rules will also limit how much can be charged for air ambulance services in emergencies, another huge source of surprise billing.