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power word kill

Based on some actual experiences

- When a stranger comes to your apartment door on May day morning asking to borrow some butter or milk, don’t lend any…all your luck will go with it. Never give any stranger a light for their cigarette on May day either - giving out fire is giving away your luck as well. 

- When you are walking at night and you hear music, no matter how beautiful, or voices inviting you to join them don’t acknowledge that you can hear them and turn back towards home.

- When you are out walking at night and you hear the sound of horses or hounds or riders find shelter indoors or in your car quickly. The Wild Hunt (we call them Ghost Riders in America) is mercurial and if it’s the Slua Sí passing by they will do you harm if they can.

- Never run from the Fair Folk, if you see Fairy hounds or anything uncanny that frightens you. Running is what prey does and you do not want to be prey. Don’t acknowledge seeing them, if possible, but leave as quickly as you can. 

- If you are being pixy-led, if you have lost your way in familiar territory, turn your socks or coat outside in or laugh and joke about how much fun you are having. this will free you from the enchantment. 

The Supreme Court just issues a ruling allowing Ohio and other states to purge voters from their election registration rolls due to their failure to cast a ballot in previous elections.

This is a major victory for the Trump administration and the GOP, and a direct consequence of the Supreme Court being stacked with more conservative judges (the votes were 5-4). This is also a huge part of what Trump/the GOP were counting on to save them in the 2018 midterm elections, which is where Democrats have been hoping to take back a majority in the House, giving them more power to combat Trump’s abuses of power and Republican legislation.

What this means is YOU CAN NOT ASSUME THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED for the 2018 elections, just because you SHOULD be. Thanks to this decision, red states can purge voters’ registration based on their not having cast a ballot in even just previous federal elections, NOT just the national Presidential elections. Effectively, if you haven’t voted in previous senate races or for congressional representatives in the past few years, that’s all they need now to say you’re no longer registered and need to register again.

They’re deliberately counting on people assuming they’re still registered and so not checking until after registration deadlines have passed, or showing up to vote this November and only then finding out they’re no longer registered, when its too late to do a damn thing about it.

And this is absolutely targeted at marginalized communities, low income voters, disabled voters, and basically anyone who simply can’t always AFFORD to keep on top of every federal election and show up to vote in every senate race, etc. Which not so coincidentally happen to be all the communities and voters who have the most to gain from Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms and are the least likely to cast votes for GOP candidates at this point.

This was absolutely a calculated effort aimed specifically at keeping the GOP in power with a majority control of the government come November, and unfortunately, it has a DAMN good chance of accomplishing just that if it goes by unacknowledged. I’m not looking to alarm or panic anyone, simply to say:

If you have an emergency and have to go to the hospital, you’ll owe the hospital a lot of money. (I got into a car wreck and broke my ankle and my arm. My hospital bill was around $20,000)

You’ll also owe the ambulance provider, if you need one. (My ambulance bill was about $800)

You may get separate bills from the anesthesiologist or surgeon. (My anesthesiologist bill was $1,700)

You may need follow-up appointments. (My orthopedic surgeon billed me for the appointments and his surgery together and it was about $1,000)

You’ve also got to pay for medical equipment you need afterward, like crutches or a walking boot. (Mine cost about $75)

Altogether, I ended up with almost $24,000 in medical debt from one car accident. That’s a really scary number for someone like me who makes $10/hr at a 12 hour a week job.

I got my debt down to $1075 by making some phone calls and submitting some paperwork.

The first thing I did was contact the hospital. They don’t make it easy to find, but many hospitals (perhaps most hospitals?) have financial assistance programs for people who can’t afford medical bills. I don’t make a lot of money, and I have bills to pay, so they were able to help me. I called the billing department and asked if they had any assistance programs for low income people who can’t pay their bills. I had to call multiple times, and I got transferred in circles by people who didn’t know what I was talking about. Finally, I got an appointment with someone in “Eligibility Services” (I don’t know what other hospitals call it, if it’s something different). I had to bring my pay stubs and copies of all of my bills. When I got to the hospital for the appointment, nobody knew what I was talking about so I had to wander a little to find where I needed to go. I spoke with the guy in Eligibility Services, and I waited for a decision on how much of the bill they would forgive. A month later, I got a call telling me it was totally forgiven.

I did the same thing for my ambulance bill and my anesthesiologist, but the process was a LOT easier. I just had to mail some paperwork and it was totally forgiven.

I didn’t bother with the medical equipment suppliers, since the bills came from separate companies and I didn’t feel like going through the process twice for $75. I was assured at the hospital that they had similar programs for debt forgiveness, so I could have probably avoided paying that too.

The only thing I couldn’t get taken care of was the surgeon/follow-up appointment cost, but they were able to put me on a no-interest payment plan.

ITS INSECTIDENTIFICATION.ORG…. it only covers north american insects and most of the descriptions are pretty straight forward but some of them are

— paraphrasing Patricia C. Hodgell,  Seeker’s Truth  (not Carl Sagan)

Linus Quotes

EDIT: Linus and I feel like blockheads. Attributing this quote to Sagan can be destroyed by the truth, so it should be: We were unaware that this quote was not, in fact, from Carl Sagan, but from P.C. Hodgell. Thanks for the correction, @pennysquabbles!

Snopes explains: ____________ …A frequently cited source for the attribution was the social literature site GoodReads, but we couldn’t find the quote in any of his books. Another prominent placement of the phrase involved Sagan’s Wikiquote page, under the “misattributed” section, which observed that the quote was built on a similar phrase in fantasy author P.C. Hodgell’s novel Seeker’s Mask:

That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.

Hodgell commented on a Reddit page in February 2016, confirming that the quote appeared in her novel, but that she didn’t get it from Sagan:

Hodgell here. “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be” appears in my 1994 novel Seeker’s Mask. I first heard of the Sagan quote in 2013, more or less. No source that I’ve seen dates the latter. If it’s not a case of misattribution, it’s probably a matter of “great minds” etc.

As Hodgell indicated, the quote didn’t appear to exist in the Sagan-attributed form until mid-2013. (Hodgell’s novel appeared in 1994.) The likeliest trajectory is one of the most common for misattributed quotes: the phrase was dormant for nearly two decades, and then reached socially viral status only when a slightly rewritten version was incorrectly attached to a beloved science celebrity.

However, Sagan really did write the following on the topic of truth:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.