Category: General

seananmcguire:

vaspider:

roenok:

1. They have a chronic physical or mental illness that causes pain, depression, or other serious symptoms. They don’t have access to medical care, and self-medicate.
2. Between their low-paying third-shift job, caring for their children, and caring for an older, ailing relative, they average three hours of sleep a night. Uppers help them stay awake at work.
3. They live in a home where a roommate, significant other, or relative smokes weed frequently. They breathe a lot of secondhand smoke. They would like to move out, but first and last month’s rent is too expensive.
4. They have a serious addiction. They’d like to stop, but they don’t have access to drug rehab programs that work. 
5. They have an addiction. They are not ready to quit yet. 
6. Like 22.2 million other Americans they enjoy an occasional joint.

Regardless of the reason, they still deserve food. 

A newly proposed House bill in the US would allow states to require drug tests to receive SNAP benefits, a.k.a. food stamps. If recipients tested positive, the state could take away their access to food.

SNAP benefits can only be used to buy food. Millions of Americans depend on this program to feed themselves and their families. Drug testing is expensive for taxpayers. It is invasive and humiliating for the people on these programs. It is also ineffective. People on public assistance have a much lower rate of drug use than the general population.

If you live in the United States, please find your representative and email them to let them know you oppose H.R. 4540. It only takes a minute.

This is not the way to deal with drug use. Starvation is torture, not a treatment program.

– They live in a state where medical or recreational marijuana is legal, but it’s recently been ruled you can still use a marijuana test to discriminate against/not hire/fire someone who tests positive, since it’s illegal at a federal level still. So maybe they are taking legal marijuana for a chronic condition, or just because it’s legal and they like it more than a beer after work, & lost their job or have kept their job(s) but are now failing the SNAP test.

Isn’t that a fucked up loophole?

Why is it that these bills always ignore the fact that the person receiving SNAP is often not the only person eating?

My mother smoked a lot of pot when I was a kid.  It was cheap, she had friends who would provide her with it, she had gone from being a trophy wife to a single mother of three with serious emotional issues, and she was doing physical labor to make ends meet.  She was in physical and mental pain.  Pot helped.  But even without that justification–even if she was just getting high because it was fun–my sisters and I deserved to eat.  Saying “sorry, you tested positive” wouldn’t have just starved her.  It would have left three little girls who were already food insecure (because SNAP is not enough) starving.  How is this a reasonable thing to want to do, as a civilized society?  “Sorry, kid, you popped out of the wrong womb and your mother did a drug, so no eggs for you this month.”

Our foster system is overloaded.  Taking children away from their families is not the answer.  Allowing their families to eat is at least a help.

lyrangalia:

iviarelle:

startedwellthatsentence:

tvalkyrie:

breadpocalypse:

ilovejohnmurphy:

furryputin:

ilovejohnmurphy:

corntroversy:

ilovejohnmurphy:

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

tinierpurplefishes:

rememberwhenyoutried:

No-one can say who would win in a fight between a Star Trek ship and a Star Wars ship because Star Wars has technology that is basically magic and does whatever the plot demands, while Star Trek, the more scientifically rigorous of the two, has technology that is basically magic and does whatever the plot demands.

Really, it’s going to come down to who figures out that they need to reverse the polarity on something first