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craycraybluejay · 6 months

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Had a dream about Chronic Illness Cat teaching about Radqueers and candy? I don't ID as radqueer and genuinely I do find some of the identities offensive such as people who claim to have disorders they don't, especially misunderstood or stigmatized ones. But. BUT. It's also not my business what other people identify as and so long as they aren't actually hurting anyone I just opt to ignore that kind of thing. Like I respect people even though I have some grievances with the movement. Like. If you have BIID and want to be disabled that's not really my problem nor is it your fault for having that disorder and if you want to make an identity around it I'll respect that decision. My only issue is when this "trans-disorder" status is used to talk about said disorder or disability like one actually has it, in a somewhat political way. I draw the line where people start to create and promote misinfo about medical problems and historical issues like racism or antisemitism. Like if someone claims to have a disability I do and then publicly announces what symptoms it has even though these are not in fact the symptoms of this disability. Otherwise, I couldn't really care less. If someone is mildly offensive it is their problem and not mine. If I have a problem with someone personally I'll just block them. But I know a few radqueers and they're pretty cool people.

Basically, you do you. I have enough openness not to give a shit unless and until it becomes a problem. In which case like with all people I'll speak out if I feel the need to.

#radqueer #im not in the radqueer movement so not pro but im also not anti like i generally dont give a shit and i cant pretend like i know #why people are that #dreams #discourse neutral #this is not a discourse post so please dont discourse on it just a weird dream #and some thinking out loud #not pro not anti but a secret third thing (judge people as you meet them and not by whatever labels)#i am open to learning more about rq identities if anyone wants to talk to me ab it i'll listen respectfully #its definitely interesting #i just hope the whole misinfo and buffing up harmful stereotypes ab mental illnesses is not as common as i worry about #its a little like if a transgender woman said that being in the kitchen for your husband is what makes you more of a woman so thats what she #does.#like you do you i guess but if you're promoting obvious sexism based on your personal ideas on the gender divide maybe check yourself #difference between 'working out makes me feel like a man' and 'working out is something all men have to do to be men'#y'all get what i'm saying?#yeah anyways #weird dreams

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newsmanmdgn · 3 years

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NO MORE MASKS!

CDC says people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can shed masks in most indoor settings

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can forgo their masks and social distancing in many indoor situations.

“Today, CDC is updating our guidance for fully vaccinated people,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday at a White House COVID-19 briefing. “Anyone who is fully vaccinated, can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing. If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”

CBS News

It's about time!

But I'll still be wearing a mask, thank you very much. I don't EVER want to be confused with anti-vaxxing non-mask-wearing MAGAts.

Stefanik voted into House GOP leadership, replacing Cheney

House Republicans chose Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) on Friday to fill the leadership post recently occupied by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), replacing a harsh critic of former president Donald Trump with a lawmaker who has become one of his staunchest defenders.

She received 134 votes while Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) received 46, according to the aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed meeting. Nine members voted present and three wrote-in a person who was not running.

The Friday morning vote capped a tumultuous week for the party, which has established support for Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election as a defining issue, and those who challenge his falsehoods have found themselves exiled.

Stefanik moved quickly to lock down support for the No. 3 spot in House GOP leadership when it became clear last week that Cheney would lose the job because she continued to challenge Trump’s unfounded assertion that the election was stolen and blame him for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. She was formally ousted on Wednesday.

WaPo

One word: DUH.

Gaetz ally plans to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors

The ex-Florida tax collector with close ties to Rep. Matt Gaetz is planning to plead guilty on Monday in a federal court in Florida, according to a new filing Thursday.As part of the deal, Joel Greenberg will cooperate with investigators in a wide-ranging probe, according to one source familiar with the matter. For months, federal investigators have been examining whether Gaetz broke federal sex trafficking, prostitution and public corruption laws and whether he had sex with a minor.

CNN

Now you know why #MattGaetzIsGoingtoPrison was trending on Twitter yesterday.

The IRS Is Coming for Crypto Investors Who Haven’t Paid Their Taxes

Cryptocurrencies are exploding—and so is the Internal Revenue Service’s pursuit of Americans who aren’t paying taxes on them. With Tax Day approaching, it’s a good time to clean up your act if you’ve been lax about taxes on crypto. Not doing so could compound future tax problems, especially if you have traded a lot or have more than a small stake.

Two new IRS efforts to find crypto tax cheats stand out: In April, a federal judge in Boston approved an IRS summons to the payments company known as Circle and its affiliates, including Poloniex, to turn over customer records to the agency. And in early May, a federal judge in San Francisco approved another IRS summons for records to the crypto exchange known as Kraken. In both cases, the turnover applies to customers who had more than $20,000 in transactions in any year from 2016 through 2020.

“With these summonses and other actions, the IRS is mounting a full-court press to show taxpayers how seriously it takes cryptocurrency compliance,” says Don Fort, a former chief of IRS criminal investigation now with Kostelanetz & Fink. “Taxpayers should take it seriously too.”

WSJ

Simple solution: Buy and never sell. Hilarious that you'll be a “paper billionaire” without ever owning ANY paper.

Activists and Ex-Spy Said to Have Plotted to Discredit Trump ‘Enemies' in Government

WASHINGTON — A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Donald Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.

The campaign included a planned sting operation against Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against FBI employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.

The operations against the FBI, run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the FBI employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Trump.

Yahoo News

Project Veritas is run by James O'Keefe. It's a despicable organization who specializes in made-up hits. They're the ones who went into Planned Parenthood facilities and doctored videotape to make it look like they were doing the exact opposite of their mission.

They are scum. O'Keefe belongs in prison. He's a fraudster.

Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5 Million in Ransom

What happens when you hoard gasoline by placing fuel in unapproved containers after Colonial Pipeline fucked up.

Colonial Pipeline Co. paid nearly $5 million to Eastern European hackers on Friday, contradicting reports earlier this week that the company had no intention of paying an extortion fee to help restore the country’s largest fuel pipeline, according to two people familiar with the transaction.The company paid the hefty ransom in difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, underscoring the immense pressure faced by the Georgia-based operator to get gasoline and jet fuel flowing again to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, those people said. A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. government officials are aware that Colonial made the payment.

Once they received the payment, the hackers provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network. The tool was so slow that the company continued using its own backups to help restore the system, one of the people familiar with the company’s efforts said.

A representative from Colonial declined to comment. Colonial said it began to resume fuel shipments around 5 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday.

Yahoo Finance

Of course they did. And the kicker, in case you missed it above, is that the decryption tool the hackers gave them after they ponied up $5 million? It was super slow.

LOL

Time we get some real pros running our infrastructure. And maybe, JUST MAYBE, how about we don't rely on private businesses whose ONLY motive is short-term profits?

The article was originally published here! NO MORE MASKS!

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womeninfilms · 7 years

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Tipping the Velvet

Year: 1998

Length: ~ 470 pages

Language: English

Written by: Sarah Waters

Story: The novel tells the story of Nancy Astley, an 18-year-old girl who grows up in Kent and works in her family's oyster restaurant. After a trip to the music hall, she meets the singer (and male impersonator) Kitty Butler and falls in love with her. When Kitty asks her to move to London with her and work as her dresser, Nancy gladly accepts and leaves her family and working-class life behind to become a star on the stage herself.

Pros:

Charles Dickens but with lesbians: The book has the length, depth, and themes of a Charles Dickens novel, but instead of being about a poor orphan boy or a greedy old man, the story is told from the point of view of a young woman who is slowly discovering her sexuality against the backdrop of 1890s London. I used to love Charles Dickens when I was in school, but I always had the feeling that the stories aren’t as exciting as I wanted them to be. Sarah Waters herself said her motivation to write Tipping the Velvet was to create a novel like she would want to read, and she succeeds in putting something into the story which was missing from Charles Dickens: sapphic women.

Anti-hero: Nancy is a bit of an anti-hero. She is a very flawed character and since the book is told in first-person-narration, an older Nancy is looking back and judging her actions. She doesn’t have a strong morale she follows and she’s not someone who always does the right thing - instead, she is first blinded by love (Kitty Butler) and then by money (Diana Lethaby). She even admits that the only reason she stayed with Diana is because she bought her nice things. Nancy's flaws only make the novel more interesting.

Life as a sapphic woman at the end of the 19th century: Sarah Waters worked on this novel while completing her PhD in English literature with a focus on lesbian and gay historical fiction. This makes the problems Nancy and Kitty (and later Nancy and Florence) face seem real and grounded in reality. There are no historical records of the lives of sapphic women during that time, but it feels as if it could really have been that way.

Socialist movement: In the third part of the novel, Nancy becomes involved in the socialist movement. Her involvement is part of her redemption arc, but it's still interesting to read about the movement which gave us many things we take for granted today.

London: Sarah Waters has an amazingly detailed knowledge about London. You can have a map next to you while reading the book and follow the streets Nancy takes. It reads like actual historical accounts of London during that time, which makes the book so charming.

Cons:

Vocabulary: I had to look up some of the words, like 'tom', just to be sure what their exact meaning is. Even though it's easy enough to guess from the context, some of the words haven't been in use since the 19th century. An annotated edition of the novel would make for a really interesting read, especially if it would contain more information on the lives of sapphic women during that time.

Abusive relationships: This isn't necessarily something that is bad about the novel, but it could be difficult to read for some people. Nancy is in three longer relationships (one in each of the three parts of the book), and two of them are abusive. First, Kitty Butler denies her identity and doesn't want to be associated with lesbians, reducing their relationship to a meaningless schoolgirl crush. After that, Diana Lethaby essentially holds her as a sex slave and pays her in fancy clothes and jewellery. She is possessive in a bad way, which results her almost sexually assaulting one of her servants and hitting Nancy.

Homophobia: 4/10 - There is almost no direct homophobia in the novel (apart from an audience member in a theatre they perform in shouting slurs at them in Part I and a small incident with a group of drunk men in Part III), but Kitty has a lot of internalised homophobia. The only time she is really upset by a rough audience is when a drunk man thinks she and Nancy are ‘toms’. Even though Kitty is a lesbian, she doesn’t want to admit it and turns her back on Nancy by marrying her manager Walter. In the end, it is revealed that she is very unhappy with him and wants Nancy to come back to her, so they can continue their relationship in secret.

Violence: 0/10 - None of the characters experience violence due to their sexual orientation.

Ending: In the end, Nancy realises she is in love with Florence and wants to stay with her forever, rejecting both Kitty and Diana.

Sexual orientation: This, of course, is one of the main themes of the novel. Nancy soon realises she is only sexually attracted to women. She is very sure of this, but suffers when Kitty is afraid and ashamed and leaves her for a man. Even though she becomes a renter, satisfying men who think she is a man herself, she is never attracted to them. Then she spends more than a year living as a woman dressed up as a boy to please Diana. In the end, Florence takes her in and takes her to a lesbian bar gives her the freedom to dress in men's clothes to feel comfortable herself and not to please others. Nancy’s journey isn’t about her accepting who she is, but trying to find someone who will accept her. Kitty loves her but doesn’t want to be with her because she is a woman. Diana doesn’t love her and only keeps her as a pet to show off to her friends. But Florence, who is also comfortable with her sexual orientation, finally accepts her and she is also the woman Nancy stays with in the end.

#tipping the velvet #review #lesbian fiction #sarah waters

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duaneodavila · 6 years

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Death of the Kiddie Clerkship

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Tennessee lawprof Glenn Reynolds, best known as the @Instapundit, offers a modest proposal in response to the Ninth Circuit’s sudden judicial shortfall.

Chief Justice John Roberts wants to do something about sexual harassment by federal judges. In his 2017 Report on the Federal Judiciary, the chief justice announced a plan to evaluate whether current standards and procedures “are adequate to ensure an exemplary workplace.”

He mentioned no names, but the report came out less than two weeks after Judge Alex Kozinski retired from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after former clerks accused him of inappropriate behavior.

Surely the courts of the United States of America should be an exemplary workplace. But to the extent the problem relates to law school grads desperately seeking glory as judicial clerks, the question of how to ensure that no law clerk is ever subjected to something that offends their sensibilities presents a problem. After all, judges are like feral cats. Polite cats, but cats nonetheless.

The chief justice is right to think the problem goes beyond the chambers of a single judge. It’s inherent in the system. Judges have inordinate power over their clerks—and the best solution is to abolish clerkships.

Wait, what? Abolish clerkships? But, but, but, aren’t clerkships critical? There are two reasons why clerkships exist. One is to provide judges with cheap and willing help to lighten their load. Reynolds suggests that this is not just a bad thing, in itself, but unnecessary.

Getting rid of law clerks would eliminate the harassment problem and get judges doing their own work. Justice Louis Brandeis, who served from 1916-39, is said to have observed that the high court’s members “are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.”

That’s not true anymore. The Supreme Court decided 160 cases in 1945, when each justice had a single clerk. Nowadays it decides about half as many cases with four clerks per justice. Law clerks were unknown for roughly the first century of the American judiciary, and the courts seemed to do fine. As my law students often comment, the older opinions are shorter and more intelligible than the newer ones.

While it’s certainly true that older opinions were shorter and more intelligible, it’s unclear whether that’s the fault of law clerks or computers. As someone who used to type his briefs on an IBM Selectric III, using carbon paper and Wite-Out for the occasional typo, length was a far more practical concern back then.

But there’s another reason for law clerks to exist having nothing to do with making judges’ lives easier.

True, anyone who qualifies as a federal judge’s law clerk is likely to be able to find an excellent job with a top firm. But for those who wish to enter legal academia, an appellate clerkship is almost required. A Supreme Court clerkship is a big boost to a career in academia or appellate litigation, and the justices now recruit clerks almost entirely from the federal circuit courts. The clerkship—and a strong recommendation from the judge—is vital, and therefore so is pleasing the judge.

A dirty little secret of academia is that it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a job teaching law school if you don’t have a federal judge’s chambers on your resume curriculum vitae. All the smart kids get clerkships, which they then bootstrap into a future of writing extremely long, tedious, impractical if not ridiculous, law review articles that they call “scholarship.” Then they get to hold meetings, between interviews with reporters where they explain their expert views of what the law should be in their Utopian image, to express their appreciation of each other’s brilliance.

Without clerkships, how would anyone prove they were pretentious enough to be lawprofs? Without clerkships, academics could end up coming from the ranks of people with actual knowledge of the law from experience. It would be a disaster.

But there is hope for the wordy gunners. As Judge Richard Kopf explains, there is another option.

Whether male or female, never ever hire kids out fresh out of law school. Pluck them out of practice after they have had several years of experience. There is among the practicing bar a great untapped source of term law clerks with experience who would be happy to take a year or two off to serve as a term clerks. This third model would tend to weed out snowflakes, nut jobs, and slackers whether they be male or female.*

* Thankfully, I don’t have to face this situation. My two career law clerks (who are grandfathered under the insane anti-career law clerk rule that allows only one one career clerk per judge) and the two pro se staff attorneys I supervise (and who are considered professional permanent staff) range in age from 35 or so to 66. Three are female and one is male. All had significant and highly successful legal experience before being hired.

Perhaps the issue isn’t law clerks, per se, but the hiring of children fresh out of law school rather than experienced lawyers or career clerks. Sure, this will adversely impact the top of the class, who fight for their right to bask in the glory of a feeder judge so they can be panelists at conferences, but don’t cry for them.

They can still get jobs at Biglaw paying small fortunes instead of paneled offices in the Ivory Tower. Whether they can keep them long enough to make partner is another story, but that’s their problem.

As for long and incomprehensible opinions, there is also an answer. Take away the judge’s computers and make them type out their rulings. Trust me, they’ll be shorter.

Copyright © 2007-2017 Simple Justice NY, LLC This feed is for personal, non-commercial and Newstex use only. The use of this feed anywhere else violates copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it means the page you are viewing infringes copyright. (Digital Fingerprint: 51981395c77d7762065ca2c084b63e47) Death of the Kiddie Clerkship republished via Simple Justice

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