"During An Archaeological Dig In A Desert Area North Of Jerusalem 40 Years Ago, A Seed Was Discovered

The ACA is why insurance is so darn expensive. If insurance has to take on more risk and pay out more for "preventive" services then they have to jack up the costs to make money. The federal subsidies are the only way this is affordable. Too bad we can't just make it possible for people to shop around and compare pricing for medical services so the free market can regulate pricing.

So ocarina of time goes to great lengths to show that the Hero of Time doesn't kill anything that's not a monster. If you shoot a patrolling Gerudo, you knock her out. One of the ones that ambush you even says that he hit her with the flat of his sword. He doesn't (can't?) kill the Skull Kids that attack him as an adult in the Lost Woods. This continues into Majora's Mask when he moves to restrain the Skull Kid rather than attack him even thought he has a sword. And even in Twilight Princess. Even though it's only briefly mentioned in the manga and hyrule historia about how careful The Hero's Shade is with the Hero of Twilight.

ALL I'M SAYING IS: The Hero of Time is actually an incredibly gentle person and Zelda bound Ganon at the end to protect Link from having to kill him a second time.

Sometimes I feel like us as the bat family fandom forget how starry eyed people get about Nightwing canonically.

Because with the exception of early era Tim most of the Batkids are like. lol that’s my loser older brother or some variation of yeah…he’s some guy I guess? He helps me with homework?

And Nightwing is the canonically a center of multiversal light.

When Heroes meet Nightwing they do the vigorous handshake and the “it’s an honor to meet you sir, I have heard so much about you oh my god”

There are so many character where they are literally shown giggling and kicking their feet whenever Nightwing talks to them.

Even the people who don’t have the celebrity level worship of him respect the hell out of him and call him as soon as they need help.

From raven to Starfire to Superman to Superboy to all or the flashes there is so much respect and awe given to this one dude.

And it is deserved

But imagine you are Damian Wayne and you’ve been working with what 90% of the people you’ve met (all bats) have been calling an embarrassment to your father’s legacy.

Your mother hates him and your Grandfather doesn’t feel that strongly about him.

The red hood calls him an embarrassment and a coward and he couldn’t even keep Red Robin from running away.

Your father tells him that he never should have been Batman

And you’ve worked with him and you know what you think everyone is full of shit about him and you and him the new Batman and Robin are the best no matter what anyone says.

And fuck it the fact he keeps going in a suit that everyone tells him he’s not good enough for is scratching something in your brain that you’re refusing to acknowledge because why would you feel that way? You are the circus freak have nothing in common (shut up)

And then you meet the justice league and all the extended teams.

And people are falling over themselves to listen to a word out of your brothers, your Batman’s mouth. They wait for a nod or headshake and dictate decades worth of planning on it.

Both Drake and Todd’s hero teams ask him for advice with or without their designated bats presence.

The man of steel asks for child rearing advice and wonder woman cracks a joke about a spar

Newer heroes whisper about him in the halls

He’s literally your favorite hero’s favorite hero

And it’s breaking Damian’s Brain

Because well… he kinda gets slapped around in Gotham. He’s the butt of half the jokes the other Batkids make and Dick just smiles and takes it.

The rogues have a bounty on nightwings ass and he gets leered at by goons, rogues, civilians and anti-hero’s alike and he doesn’t say anything.

He lets oracle crack jokes about a pretty face and having to do everything herself

Let’s Jason run the alley despite the fact that apparently he knows how to take it back

Apparently he’s had 12 people tailing Drake since Paris and despite being the man Ra’s Al Ghul calls detective has yet to notice. (Because you can’t tell me Dick was just magically at the right place to catch Tim falling to his death on coincidence)

And necessary to peace talks because he’s the best they have at deescalation

Like imagine you are a child who was raised to believe power is this obvious, all consuming thing. That the ones who control the board are visibly larger than life figures who fought their way to the top and cling to power by even the thinnest hangnail if they had to.

People who ignore simpler morals or an overall greater goal or good

And then you’re taken in by the man who whispers the correct answers into the larger than life figures ear.

Like I feel like that would have such an impact because Dick didn’t take power from anyone to reach his goals, it’s why his siblings don’t really defer to him unless in crisis.

Dick didn’t take power, no people just looked at him and decided he was the best option to give it to.

Everyone basically looked at this kid and went, yeah you’re the future of all heroism.

And if that dude can’t even get Bruce Wayne’s respect what chance does Damian Wayne have

This graph implies either 1996 was 1000 years ago or the wheel was invented 90 years ago.

And here is the Krista post that I’ve been mentioning in the Rashta analysis. Krista is like Rashta level 2 but less prickly, and she can garner way more sympathy compared to our other problem girl. This is going to be 100% spoiler because we’ve only seen her once and had a name drop in the English Webtoon comic.

Keep reading

We only get 3 months of decent weather in Washington and you can't take August away from me. It is summer. Agree or fight me. :)

JUST A FEW LIES ABC NEWS LET KAMALA GET AWAY WITH 

CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed Tuesday during a debate with former President Donald Trump that there were currently no active-duty troops in any combat zone anywhere around the world for the first time this century.

VERDICT: False. There are currently active duty U.S. troops deployed to Iraq and Syria who have been under frequent attack by Iran-backed militia forces over the past year. There are also thousands of active-duty U.S. sailors deployed to the Middle East who are facing attacks by drone strikes and missiles fired by the Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. Earlier this year, three U.S. soldiers were killed on the border of Syria by Iran-backed forces.

CLAIM: “The Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit — one of the highest we’ve ever seen in the history of America,” Harris said.

VERDICT: FALSE. The trade deficit climbed to around $653 billion in Trump’s final year as president, in part because of depressed global demand for U.S. goods and services and a U.S. economy that recovered sooner than most other developed economies. But it never rose to the levels seen under President George W. Bush or the Biden-Harris administration. In fact, the trade deficit under Biden-Harris has never been as low as it was under Trump

CLAIM: Harris claimed that she supports Israel, after Donald Trump said she “hates” it.

VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. Harris has hired radical anti-Israel advisers and threatened to cut off weapons to Israel if it entered Rafah, she ignored Netanyahu on his most recent visit (after she was the presumptive nominee) not meeting him at the airport and boycotting his speech to congress to instead go to a sorority party, she offers only rhetorical support of Israel .

CLAIM: Harris INCORRECTLY labeled Trump tariff plan as a national sales tax. And claimed his tax would raise prices to consumers by $4000 a year.

Verdict: false. Inflation was very low during Trump’s presidency, including after his imposition of tariffs. In the first year of his presidency, prior to the imposition of tariffs, the consumer price index rose by 2.13 percent. In 2018, consumer prices rose by two percent. In 2020, prices rose by 2.5 percent. In 2021, prices rose by just 1.3 percent. By contrast, inflation soared under the Biden-Harris administration. In 2021, consumer prices rose 7.2 percent. In 2022, prices rose 6.4 percent. Last year, prices rose 3.2 percent.

CLAIM: Kamala Harris said: “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”

VERDICT: FALSE. Unemployment was 6.4% in January 2021 when trump left office, lower than it was in 2014, under Obama. Unemployment spiked to 14.8% in April 2020, only because of coronavirus-related shutdowns in democrat run states, When Biden took office, they inherited an economy that was already recovering.

Concerning Juliet’s age

I find a big stumbling block that comes with teaching Romeo and Juliet is explaining Juliet’s age. Juliet is 13 - more precisely, she’s just on the cusp of turning 14. Though it’s not stated explicitly, Romeo is implied to be a teenager just a few years older than her - perhaps 15 or 16. Most people dismiss Juliet’s age by saying “that was normal back then” or “that’s just how it was.” This is fundamentally untrue, and I will explain why.

In Elizabethan England, girls could legally marry at 12 (boys at 14) but only with their father’s permission. However, it was normal for girls to marry after 18 (more commonly in early to mid twenties) and for boys to marry after 21 (more commonly in mid to late twenties). But at 14, a girl could legally marry without papa’s consent. Of course, in doing so she ran the risk of being disowned and left destitute, which is why it was so critical for a young man to obtain the father’s goodwill and permission first. Therein lies the reason why we are repeatedly told that Juliet is about to turn 14 in under 2 weeks. This was a critical turning point in her life.

In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of the law in many countries which states children can marry at 16 with their parents’ permission, or at 18 to whomever they choose - but we see it as pretty weird if someone marries at 16. They’re still a kid, we think to ourselves - why would their parents agree to this?

This is exactly the attitude we should take when we look at Romeo and Juliet’s clandestine marriage. Today it would be like two 16 year olds marrying in secret. This is NOT normal and would NOT have been received without a raised eyebrow from the audience. Modern audiences AND Elizabethan audiences both look at this and think THEY. ARE. KIDS.

Critically, it is also not normal for fathers to force daughters into marriage at this time. Lord Capulet initially makes a point of telling Juliet’s suitor Paris that “my will to her consent is but a part.” He tells Paris he wants to wait a few years before he lets Juliet marry, and informs him to woo her in the meantime. Obtaining the lady’s consent was of CRITICAL importance. It’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays have such dazzling, well-matched lovers in them, and why men who try to force daughters to marry against their will seldom prosper. You had to let the lady make her own choice. Why?

Put simply, for her health. It was considered a scientific fact that a woman’s health was largely, if not solely, dependant on her womb. Once she reached menarche in her teenage years, it was important to see her fitted with a compatible sexual partner. (For aristocratic girls, who were healthier and enjoyed better diets, menarche generally occurred in the early teens rather than the later teens, as was more normal at the time). The womb was thought to need heat, pleasure, and conception if the woman was to flourish. Catholics might consider virginity a fit state for women, but the reformed English church thought it was borderline unhealthy - sex and marriage was sometimes even prescribed as a medical treatment. A neglected wife or widow could become sick from lack of (pleasurable) sex. Marrying an unfit sexual partner or an older man threatened to put a girl’s health at risk. An unsatisfied woman, made ill by her womb as a result - was a threat to the family unit and the stability of society as a whole. A satisfying sex life with a good husband meant a womb that had the heat it needed to thrive, and by extension a happy and healthy woman.

In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual compatibility between lovers manifests on the stage in wordplay. In Much Ado About Nothing, sparks fly as Benedick and Beatrice quarrel and banter, in comparison to the silence that pervades the relationship between Hero and Claudio, which sours very quickly. Compare to R+J - Lord Capulet tells Paris to woo Juliet, but the two do not communicate. But when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first speech takes the form of a sonnet. They might be young and foolish, but they are in love. Their speech betrays it.

Juliet, on the cusp of 14, would have been recognised as a girl who had reached a legal and biological turning point. Her sexual awakening was upon her, though she cares very little about marriage until she meets the man she loves. They talk, and he wins her wholehearted, unambiguous and enthusiastic consent - all excellent grounds for a relationship, if only she weren’t so young.

When Tybalt dies and Romeo is banished, Lord Capulet undergoes a monstrous change from doting father to tyrannical patriarch. Juilet’s consent has to take a back seat to the issue of securing the Capulet house. He needs to win back the prince’s favour and stabilise his family after the murder of his nephew. Juliet’s marriage to Paris is the best way to make that happen. Fathers didn’t ordinarily throw their daughters around the room to make them marry. Among the nobility, it was sometimes a sad fact that girls were simply expected to agree with their fathers’ choices. They might be coerced with threats of being disowned. But for the VAST majority of people in England - basically everyone non-aristocratic - the idea of forcing a daughter that young to marry would have been received with disgust. And even among the nobility it was only used as a last resort, when the welfare of the family was at stake. Note that aristocratic boys were often in the same position, and would also be coerced into advantageous marriages for the good of the family.

tl;dr:

Q. Was it normal for girls to marry at 13?

A. Hell no!

Q. Was it legal for girls to marry at 13?

A. Not without dad’s consent - Friar Lawrence performs this dodgy ceremony only because he believes it might bring peace between the houses.

Q. Was it normal for fathers to force girls into marriage?

A. Not at this time in England. In noble families, daughters were expected to conform to their parents wishes, but a girl’s consent was encouraged, and the importance of compatibility was recognised.

Q. How should we explain Juliet’s age in modern terms?

A. A modern Juliet would be a 17 year old girl who’s close to turning 18. We all agree that girls should marry whomever they love, but not at 17, right? We’d say she’s still a kid and needs to wait a bit before rushing into this marriage. We acknowledge that she’d be experiencing her sexual awakening, but marrying at this age is odd - she’s still a child and legally neither her nor Romeo should be marrying without parental permission.

Q. Would Elizabethans have seen Juliet as a child?

A. YES. The force of this tragedy comes from the youth of the lovers. The Montagues and Capulets have created such a hateful, violent and dangerous world for their kids to grow up in that the pangs of teenage passion are enough to destroy the future of their houses. Something as simple as two kids falling in love is enough to lead to tragedy. That is the crux of the story and it should not be glossed over - Shakespeare made Juliet 13 going on 14 for a reason. 

I really enjoy the linguistic anaylasis and this just enriches the story so much

I saw this post by @danosphere91 and I was going to reblog it and just ramble in the tags for a minute, but it got way too long for tag rambling very fast and I figured if I’m going to ramble I may as well just go ahead and let myself ramble for days. 

‘Cause, like, I’ve been thinking about One Piece having different languages since somewhere around Alabasta in my first watch, and I always kind of low-key headcanon it as being a thing going on in the background.

Like, there’s a standard language enforced by the World Government, but of course it gets tweaked a bit as the years go by and some islands don’t have much contact with other islands, and then there are places the World Government doesn’t control and it’s really anybody’s guess whether or not the people there will be able to speak a language anyone recognizes. While most of each individual sea speaks the same language, most islands in the Grand Line have their own languages, since going between islands can be so difficult. One of the most notable exceptions is the islands connected by the sea train, which have agreed upon a shared language to make trading easier. 

The Marines all speak the standard language, and officially that’s all they’re really supposed to speak, though most are aware that there are some circumstances that call for a language shift. A good early indicator of what sort of person any given marine is is how willing they are to cycle through languages and dialects until they find the one the person they’re talking to is most comfortable conversing in. (Akainu probably doesn’t speak anything but Standard.)

The East Blue group has a bunch of inside jokes that only work in the East Blue dialect, and sometimes they’ll try to make a new one and it just completely falls apart because the slang in Syrup Village is not at all compatible with the slang in Cocoyasi Village and then everyone is just speaking nonsense. 

Luffy’s language skills are just a fucking mess because he learned some from Garp, and some from the people in Windmill Village, and the entire time Shanks was in town and for like two weeks after Luffy just practiced talking the way Shanks did, and then he learned stuff from the mountain bandits and Ace and Sabo and people in the Grey Terminal so it’s all just a mashup of different grammar rules and slang terms and everything else until he’s almost speaking a different language altogether. You know how he does that thing where, after having something explained, he’ll go ‘ah, its a mystery (insert thing here)’? It’s partially because his standard isn’t very good and, rather than try to cross the language gap, he just lets it go. He usually understands a lot more than people think, he just doesn’t have the language skills to communicate it. 

Sanji isn’t much better; the fighting chefs come from all over the East Blue - to say nothing of all the language quirks Zeff picked up in the Grand Line and from his crew - and it shows. He’s a little more aware of it than Luffy though, and can usually at least pick one style and stick with it for the sake of consistency over the course of a conversation. His ability to do this slips when he gets mad, and he’ll also start adding in stuff from the language he spoke while living in the North Blue - his arguments with Zoro usually dissolve into physical fights around the time no one can tell what he’s saying anymore. It’s even worse against enemies - Black Leg Sanji is known as ‘that one Straw Hat who will scream nonsense at you while he kicks your face in’.  

All those verbal tics characters have? Heavy accents. Law, for instance, never really got the hang of speaking Standard and when he does it - as he usually does in the Grand Line - he does so with a heavy accent that’s a mix of the general North Blue accent and the Flevance-specific one. All of the Minks have accents because of the way their mouths are shaped. ‘Garchu’ is a general greeting and carries a strong sense of community because they can all say it with pretty much the same pronunciation. Bepo lost his accent as a child from trying to sound more like Law, Shachi, and Penguin.

Speaking of Law. He rarely speaks Flevance’s language, but he writes all his notes in it. If people see them, they often assume he’s being paranoid or planning something, so he’s writing in code or something. Really, he’s just trying to make sure this last piece of Flevance doesn’t die before he does.

Big crews with people from lots of different backgrounds, like the Whitebeard Pirates, have to learn each other’s languages in order to communicate, and the crew ends up with a language that’s made up of all their different slang words and figures of speech. You’re really part of the crew when you can communicate fluently in it. Ace isn’t good at picking up new languages - Makino teaching him the proper dialect to be able to thank Shanks for saving Luffy was a nightmare - but the rest of the crew, especially the second division, helps him out where they can. Marco has a pretty heavy accent but he’s fluent in pretty much every language that’s ever come onboard. 

The language of the Celestial Dragons is holy and no one else is allowed to speak it. With the exception of a few slave commands and a handful of employees, no one else is even allowed to understand it (plenty of people pick up on parts of it, of course, but you’d better not let on that you can understand it where they can see you). Doflamingo still speaks it to himself or at other people sometimes, as a ‘fuck you’ to all of them. No one else understands it so no one realizes how he’s forgotten a lot of the grammar rules, how he’s lost the accent and now the words break on his tongue, how he’s never had - never will have - a vocabulary better than a ten year old child. 

Brook’s speech patterns range between ‘posh gentleman’ and ‘your embarrassing grandfather who thinks it’s still normal to say things like ‘groovy’ unironically’. 

Chopper had to learn how to speak human languages from scratch. He can read tons of different languages fluently, but he can’t really speak any but Standard - he can’t get the hang of pronunciation, slang words, or context clues. He’s also not very good at tonal indicators or facial expression cues, since they weren’t things little baby reindeer learn (this is part of why he never realizes when Usopp is lying about things like having 8,000 men - in addition to his naivety, he can’t pick up on the tone shift that Usopp takes on when he starts telling stories). 

Franky, in addition to whatever his biological parents spoke, Standard, and the language of Water Seven, can also speak some of Fishman Island’s language. Iceberg used to speak it better, but these days Iceberg is out of practice because the government doesn’t think much of people speaking it (yay, racism). Franky spoke it with Kokoro when she’d come to visit, and would help Chimney practice it too. 

And while we’re on the subject of Fishman Island, they probably don’t get access to very good education, especially for the lower class citizens (*coughracismagaincough*), so the lower class the citizen the less likely they are to be able to speak Standard well, if at all. This is one of the arguments used for keeping them out of world meetings, to justify enslaving them, and so on - ‘look, they can’t even speak the language’. Those who can speak Standard usually do it with a thick accent, partially because of the education system and partially because of their mouth shapes. 

Koala learned a decent amount of the Celestial Dragon language while a slave, and then the Fishman language from the Sun pirates. The latter is a comfort language; lots more positive associations with it than any other language. She relearns the Celestial Dragon language in the Revolutionary army to help translate things. 

Sabo and Koala have some difficulties at the beginning of their friendship because Sabo’s noble accent and some of the terms are ingrained in him and last past the amnesia and it reminds her too much of the Celestial Dragons and other nobles. He purposefully uses more slang and forces a more casual accent around her. He isn’t sure why he’s so much more comfortable talking like that than he is talking like a gentleman. 

So, yeah, I could go on for about a thousand years because I’m a linguistics nerd, but basically languages and the cultural and social implications thereof are super interesting and I like thinking about them, can you tell. 

Headcanon:

At some point between the Silver Chair and the Last Battle, as Susan is slowly falling away from her faith in Narnia, she and Eustace have a fight about it. She just can’t understand how someone who used to be so logical, someone who hadn’t grow up on fairy tales at all, could believe something so fantastical. She calls him a baby, tells him he needs to grow up and open his eyes to the real world because this is all there is.

His answer?

“Well, you know, I don’t really care what you say about it. Maybe it is all just a silly game, something we made up to pass the time in a world that is so dreary and dark. But it was real to us anyway, and that’s all that matters. So I’m going to go on believing in Aslan even if there isn’t any Aslan. I’m going to keep living as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. Because even if it wasn’t real, that make-believe world, as you called it, is a good deal better than this one.”

(Bonus: He doesn’t even realize he echoed Puddleglum’s speech to the Lady of the Green Curdle. But the situation is uncanny, and Puddleglum’s words had stuck with him in such a way that he’d never forgotten them.)