Jellycat of the Day | 16th January 2024

↳ Forest Dragon | 2021 Retired Design

"Riding the breeze above the trees."

NAHLA AL-ARIAN HAS been living a nightmare for the past seven months, watching from afar as Israel carries out its scorched-earth war against her ancestral homeland in the Gaza Strip. Like many Palestinian Americans, the 63-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher from Tampa Bay, Florida, has endured seven months of a steady trickle of WhatsApp messages about the deaths of her relatives. “You see, my father’s family is originally from Gaza, so they are a big family. And they are not only in Gaza City, but also in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, other parts,” Al-Arian told me. Recently, the trickle of horrors became a flood: “It started with like 27, and then we lost count until I received this message from my relative who said at least 200 had died.” The catastrophe was the backdrop for Al-Arian’s visit last week to Columbia University in New York City. Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut. The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them. “Of course, I tagged along. You know, why would I sit at the hotel by myself? And I wanted to really see those kids. I felt so down,” she said. “I was crying every day for Gaza, for the children being killed, for the women, the destruction of my father’s city, so I wanted to feel better, you know, to see those kids. I heard a lot about them, how smart they are, how organized, you know? So I said, let’s go along with you. So I went.” Nahla Al-Arian was on the campus for less than an hour. She sat and listened to part of a teach-in, and shared some hummus with her daughters and some students. Then she left, feeling a glimmer of hope that people — at least these students — actually cared about the suffering and deaths being inflicted on her family in Gaza. “I didn’t teach them anything. They are the ones who taught me. They are the ones who gave me hope,” she recalled. “I felt much better when I went there because I felt those kids are really very well informed, very well educated. They are the conscience of America. They care about the Palestinian people who they never saw or got to meet.” Her husband posted a picture of Nahla, sitting on the lawn at the tent city erected by the student protesters, on his Twitter feed. “My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students,” he wrote. Nahla left New York, inspired by her visit to Columbia, and returned to Virginia to spend time with her grandchildren. A few days later, that one tweet by her husband would thrust Nahla Al-Arian into the center of a spurious narrative promoted by the mayor of New York City and major media outlets. She became the exemplar of the dangerous “outside agitator” who was training the students at Columbia. It was Nahla’s presence, according to Mayor Eric Adams, that was the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

On February 20, 2003, Nahla’s husband, Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, was arrested and indicted on 53 counts of supporting the armed resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PIJ had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, and the charges against Al-Arian could have put him in prison for multiple life sentences, plus 225 years. It was a centerpiece case of the George W. Bush administration’s domestic “war on terror.” When John Ashcroft, Bush’s notorious attorney general, announced the indictment, he described the Florida-based scholar as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian.” Among the charges against him was conspiracy to kill or maim persons abroad, specifically in Israel, yet the prosecutors openly admitted Al-Arian had no connection to any violence. He was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the Tampa community, where he and Nahla raised their family. He was also, like many fellow Palestinians, a tenacious critic of U.S. support for Israel and of the burgeoning “global war on terror.” His arrest came just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a war Al-Arian was publicly opposed to. The Al-Arian case was, at its core, a political attack waged by Bush’s Justice Department as part of a wider assault on the rights of Muslims in the U.S. The government launched a campaign, echoed in media outlets, to portray Al-Arian as a terror leader at a time when the Bush administration was ratcheting up its so-called global war on terror abroad, and when Muslims in the U.S. were being subjected to harassment, surveillance, and abuse. The legal case against Al-Arian was flimsy, and prosecutors largely sought to portray his protected First Amendment speech and charitable activities as terrorism. The trial against Al-Arian, a legal permanent resident in the U.S., did not go well for federal prosecutors. In December 2005, following a six-month trial, a jury acquitted him on eight of the most serious counts and deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. The judge made clear he was not pleased with this outcome, and the prosecutors were intent on relitigating the case. Al-Arian had spent two years in jail already without any conviction and was staring down the prospect of years more. In the face of this reality and the toll the trial against him had taken on his family, Al-Arian agreed to take a plea deal. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing nonviolent support to people the government alleged were affiliated with the PIJ. As part of the deal, Al-Arian would serve a short sentence and, with his residency revoked, get an expedited deportation. At no point during the government’s trial against Al-Arian did the prosecution provide evidence he was connected to any acts of violence. For the next eight years following his release from prison in 2008, Al-Arian was kept under house arrest and effectively subjected to prosecutorial harassment as the government sought to place him in what his lawyers characterized as a judicial trap by compelling him to testify in a separate case. His defense lawyers alleged the federal prosecutor in the case, who had a penchant for pursuing high-profile, political cases, held an anti-Palestinian bias. Amnesty International raised concerns that Al-Arian had been abused in prison and he faced the prospect of yet another lengthy, costly court battle. The saga would stretch on for several more years before prosecutors ended the case and Al-Arian was deported from the United States.

“This case remains one of the most troubling chapters in this nation’s crackdown after 9-11,” Al-Arian’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in 2014 when the case was officially dropped. “Despite the jury verdict and the agreement reached to allow Dr. Al-Arian to leave the country, the Justice Department continued to fight for his incarceration and for a trial in this case. It will remain one of the most disturbing cases of my career in terms of the actions taken by our government.” That federal prosecutors approved Al-Arian’s plea deal gave a clear indication that the U.S. government knew Al-Arian was not an actual terrorist, terrorist facilitator, or any kind of threat; the Bush administration, after all, was not in the habit of letting suspected terrorists walk. Al-Arian and his family have always maintained his innocence and say that he was being targeted for his political beliefs and activism on behalf of Palestinians. He resisted the deal, Nahla Al-Arian said. “He didn’t even want to accept it. He wanted to move on with another trial,” Nahla said. “But because of our pressure on him, let’s just get done with it [because] in the end, we’re going leave anyway. So that’s why.” Sami and Nahla Al-Arian now live in Turkey. Sami is not allowed to visit his children and grandchildren stateside, but Nahla visits often.

Seb helmets: the long awaited sequel

Mugello 2020:

Not on Seb's website, but still on ferraris instagram, Seb had this helmet to celebrate Ferraris 1000th gp. (in the same week, he announced his move to aston martin)

Turkish GP 2021

a beautiful sea creature design to remind us to save our oceans. i personally really love the turtles

Singapore GP 2022

gorgeous neon rainbow on super light absorbent black design. now it can be said with finality (as of yet): jens munser and sebastian vettel never missed when it was about helmets in singapore. i have a keychain of this helmet so I'm especially fond of it.

British GP 2022

ngl i cried a bit just from pulling those pictures up again. he is so loved. i love how even though we know barely anything about sebs family, this helmet shows so much personality from his kids and hanna. this is the most gorgeous helmet of them all. however, shoutout to the subtle nigel mansell design hed have driven with if his family hadn't made a secret birthday helmet for him.

Abu Dhabi 2022

I'm so so proud to be a fan of a driver who loves his fans. The few times I've met Seb, he's always taken his time - often more than allotted - to greet as many people as he could, pose for pictures sign things etc. He feels very genuine in showing his appreciation for his fans and so I think this helmet is a beautiful monument to the love people have for him. He is deeply beloved and in turn, he loves his fans and has shown this from his retirement message that was so much more personal than a press release, over the time between the announcement to his last race and beyond. This helmet is a testament to the way we love Seb and the way he loves us back.

USGP 2022

Peace and Love baby! this gorgeous woodstock inspired piece is incredibly gaudy and glittery and very unapologetically so. i love it deeply but opinions were very split on it

Japan 2022

a very cleverly done thank you to helmet provider arai. who doesn't love opening packages? especially one as beautiful as this one! it's a bit sad to not have the little ninja mascot on the helmet for sebs last f1 race in japan, however, with his 2022 helmet designs being so beautiful and elevated, he outgrew it a bit. important side note about japan 2022 here is sebs battle to the line with fernando alonso.

Hungary 2021

Let us remember this GP for the joy it brought and not the desperation that followed. Seb came, saw and served cunt in his rainbow sneakers, rainbow shirt, rainbow mask and rainbow helmet. He drove to the podium and nothing bad or terrible happened after.

Brazil 2022

the intertwined bars of the german and then, further up, the climate change flag (and the brazilian one on top) are reminiscent of the 2018 german gp helmet!

Austria 2022

The iconic bee helmet! I actually have a few pics of this one from the Austrian GP that i took myself. Even though that GP specifically sucked so hard it made Seb sway towards retiring, the helmet is beautiful and iconic.

Honourable Mentions:

- Miami 2022: the snorkel helmet! first GP underwater, also premiering sebs GIGANTICALLY OVERSIZED climate change t shirt also found in his shoo

- Canada 2022: Canadas Climate Crimes/ stop mining tar sands. this one made a politician on twitter sooooo angry. it lost her rant a bit of credibility that she directly profited from the tar sand mining.

- LGBTQ+ CLEAN OUR OCEANS (Abu Dhabi 2021): the world's to do list. i mostly have to laugh at the unlucky placement of the lgbtq+ and the clean our oceans phrase. why are the cishets exempt from cleaning our oceans? questionable.

- Race4Women: Saudi Arabia 2021. a return of the beautiful day-glow paint.

almost all of sebs helmets are either on the sebsite or deep in jens munsers archives (difficult but not impossible to find)

Seb helmet masterpost

Private equity ghouls have a new way to steal from their investors

Private equity is quite a racket. PE managers pile up other peoples’ money — pension funds, plutes, other pools of money — and then “invest” it (buying businesses, loading them with debt, cutting wages, lowering quality and setting traps for customers). For this, they get an annual fee — 2% — of the money they manage, and a bonus for any profits they make.

On top of this, private equity bosses get to use the carried interest tax loophole, a scam that lets them treat this ordinary income as a capital gain, so they can pay half the taxes that a working stiff would pay on a regular salary. If you don’t know much about carried interest, you might think it has to do with “interest” on a loan or a deposit, but it’s way weirder. “Carried interest” is a tax regime designed for 16th century sea captains and their “interest” in the cargo they “carried”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity is a cancer. Its profits come from buying productive firms, loading them with debt, abusing their suppliers, workers and customers, and driving them into ground, stiffing all of them — and the company’s creditors. The mafia have a name for this. They call it a “bust out”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Private equity destroyed Toys R Us, Sears, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and many more companies beloved of Main Street, bled dry for Wall Street:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

And they’re coming for more. PE funds are “rolling up” thousands of Boomer-owned business as their owners retire. There’s a good chance that every funeral home, pet groomer and urgent care clinic within an hour’s drive of you is owned by a single PE firm. There’s 2.9m more Boomer-owned businesses going up for sale in the coming years, with 32m employees, and PE is set to buy ’em all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

PE funds get their money from “institutional investors.” It shouldn’t surprise you to learn they treat their investors no better than their creditors, nor the customers, employees or suppliers of the businesses they buy.

Pension funds, in particular, are the perennial suckers at the poker table. My parent’s pension fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Fund, are every grifter’s favorite patsy, losing $90m to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency scam:

https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers--statement-on-ftx/

Pension funds are neck-deep in private equity, paying steep fees for shitty returns. Imagine knowing that the reason you can’t afford your apartment anymore is your pension fund gambled with the private equity firm that bought your building and jacked up the rent — and still lost money:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/

But there’s no depth too low for PE looters to sink to. They’ve found an exciting new way to steal from their investors, a scam called a “continuation fund.” Writing in his latest newsletter, the great Matt Levine breaks it down:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Here’s the deal: say you’re a PE guy who’s raised a $1b fund. That entitles you to a 2% annual “carry” on the fund: $20,000,000/year. But you’ve managed to buy and asset strip so many productive businesses that it’s now worth $5b. Your carry doesn’t go up fivefold. You could sell the company and collect your 20% commission — $800m — but you stop collecting that annual carry.

But what if you do both? Here’s how: you create a “continuation fund” — a fund that buys your old fund’s portfolio. Now you’ve got $5b under management and your carry quintuples, to $100m/year. Levine dryly notes that the FT calls this “a controversial type of transaction”:

https://www.ft.com/content/11549c33-b97d-468b-8990-e6fd64294f85

These deals “look like a pyramid scheme” — one fund flips its assets to another fund, with the same manager running both funds. It’s a way to make the pie bigger, but to decrease the share (in both real and proportional terms) going to the pension funds and other institutional investors who backed the fund.

A PE boss is supposed to be a fiduciary, with a legal requirement to do what’s best for their investors. But when the same PE manager is the buyer and the seller, and when the sale takes place without inviting any outside bidders, how can they possibly resolve their conflict of interest?

They can’t: 42% of continuation fund deals involve a sale at a value lower than the one that the PE fund told their investors the assets were worth. Now, this may sound weird — if a PE boss wants to set a high initial value for their fund in order to maximize their carry, why would they sell its assets to the new fund at a discount?

Here’s Levine’s theory: if you’re a PE guy going back to your investors for money to put in a new fund, you’re more likely to succeed if you can show that their getting a bargain. So you raise $1b, build it up to $5b, and then tell your investors they can buy the new fund for only $3b. Sure, they can get out — and lose big. Or they can take the deal, get the new fund at a 40% discount — and the PE boss gets $60m/year for the next ten years, instead of the $20m they were getting before the continuation fund deal.

PE is devouring the productive economy and making the world’s richest people even richer. The one bright light? The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division just published new merger guidelines that would make the PE acquire/debt-load/asset-strip model illegal:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-doj-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines

The bad news is that some sneaky fuck just slipped a 20% FTC budget cut — $50m/year — into the new appropriations bill:

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1681830706488438785

They’re scared, and they’re fighting dirty.

I’m at San Diego Comic-Con!

Today (Jul 20) 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause — Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)

Tomorrow (Jul 21):

1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)

12h: Signing, AA09

Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

[Image ID: An old Punch editorial cartoon depicting a bank-robber sticking up a group of businesspeople and workers. He wears a bandanna emblazoned with dollar-signs and a top-hat.]

⚙️ This laptop was saved from obsolescence! [10 mins of read]

Hello!! i am making this post here to raise awareness for PC and laptop upgrades, and how it should motivate you to do that same thing to preserve yours for longer or to give it the power you need! this will feature my history with mine, as well as the steps i took to be able to make him breathe life better! this is the story of his journey, and how it went to this current day.

his name is samuel, he is an asus fx570u and i bought him back in september of 2018 after i turned 13! he was brand new during that time and priced at 800 euros, offering only 6 gb of memory and an HDD as his specs. however he does have an 8th gen core i5 as his cpu and a geforce 1050 ti for his gpu. for something marketed as a gaming pc, it's pretty low and it wouldn't allow him to run fast enough, especially for highly demanding software and causing some compatibility issues. it wasn't severe, but as i was stuck with an hdd, that meant operating systems would run pretty slow on it, also leading to long software loading times. this is made worse by the fact that its bundled system, windows 10, isn't designed to work efficiently on hdd in the first place, but at least that means i have my hands on a windows key to be able to use some windows exclusive programs..

i mainly used him to be able to use advanced video editing software and customize the games i have on it for my own taste, because back then i loved making youtube videos and it was a passion i've had for years until i've partially retired from it. i rarely bought games on it and instead opted for free-to-plays, and overall had a good time with him.

unfortunately within only 3 months, his HDD broke down and i sent him to technicians for them to replace it with another one. it was a minor accident i've had but it formatted all my data, even though it didn't matter much since i uploaded most of it to the internet. i just had to be gentle with him by trying to not moving him around too much to stop that issue from persisting... but it was still low-end in terms of system performance. i finally used him for 1 year straight before moving on to a tower pc, feeling tired about his slowness and believing i couldn't do much about it.

i used that other (unnamed) pc for almost a year, starting from 2020! they seemed to work better since it had windows 7, but embarrassingly enough that version itself stopped receiving official security updates months before i started using it, even though i was careful while accessing the internet with it. its performances were also low, but didn't really matter much since i didn't take so much advantage from the power of samuel. suddenly, i had the foolish idea of installing windows 8.1 on the latter to try to deal with the performance issues on 10, but it led to even more compatibility issues since the drivers i used were meant to be for 10 only. only by early 2021, i got win10 back on him and started using him again to get more power again.

so the low-end performance persisted for very long. back then i never knew how to upgrade pcs, so i was only used to replacing devices with others which wasn't cost-efficient. after realizing i used windows for well over 10 years, i had the idea of switching to a mac and as a result, for xmas 2021 i got myself a cute yellow silicon imac, who goes by the name of sarah! but switching to macos posed new serious challenges, such as getting used to the lack of windows compatibility and the missing features that i was used to for a long time. most of the creativity i did with her was drawings with firealpaca and krita, and cgi with blender, which wasn't really much. still, she is pretty glossy and also powerful for many of the tasks i'm performing with her. originally i also intended to sell samuel, but that never happened (i low regret that decision so much i swear).

in late 2022, samuel's performance apparently had had a big hit... he now takes approximately 20 seconds to open any program and it seemed to me like something was wrong with him. at that time i also gained interest in linux since it's a libre OS capable of much more flexibility, essentially allowing it to revive old PCs. i finally decided to get linux mint to work on him via a dual boot with win11 (what was i thinking when i "upgraded" him from 10?). the performance seemed a little better from then, but programs still took very long to open. for that reason, he had often been collecting dust as he finally became unusable.

finally we've reached 2023. this is the year i decided to take on tearing down devices to learn how to examine problems inside of them. after checking samuel's performance again, i noticed that his HDD was having extremely low writing and reading speeds compared to my tower, which made me feel disappointed. but that's when i finally decided i could be able to replace his hard disk with an ssd, a new generation which is more durable, faster, quieter and energy-efficient...

but i still had a good wait until it was possible. suddenly with my money, i found an ssd which only costed €30, and it made me happy that this would be a quick way of healing up samuel! so i rushed to get it, and finally opened him to prepare everything... unfortunately, his keyboard has to be lifted up in the process, and there are flex cables connected between it and the motherboard. but taking out the hard disk thankfully only requires a few steps; removing some screws, then inserting the SSD inside of it. after that i quickly put linux mint back into him. SO SPLENDID...

for only the price of a high budget indie game, now he can open programs very fast, close to how fast sarah can do, and just about any task works perfectly well on him with way less bugs! thanks to that fast upgrade he's become viable for daily drives again, even though i don't have other desks suitable for pcs which makes me less motivated to use him. really wish id be able to since the architecture he has (x64) means he has a lot more software he's able to handle natively...

but then, i hadn't upgraded his ram. i said before that he only had 6 gb of it, and that meant he could only work with a few programs before becoming bloated. and as i like doing power tasks on him, that obviously causes problems. so one day, i went to a pc part store out of curiosity, and became shocked when i found small ram carts that could be compatible with my laptop. after some talk with the seller, i bought 2 ddr4 carts each containing 8 gb and clocked at 2666 mhz, more than double of what i used to have. after that it was time to take on a challenge to be able to insert them myself.

when the seller asked me if i needed assistance to have the carts inserted into my laptop, i giggled internally because of my past stories with learning how to open devices and trying to troubleshoot or modify them internally. i obviously declined it which saved me money, but also meant i had to do it all myself. after an hour of painful manipulations which required me to take out the entire motherboard from samuel, while that next step was also difficult i was finally able to insert the carts into it, before placing all his components back into place. and after such a long time of waiting...

i've finally done it!

Samuel is feeling very well right now!! despite his cpu and gpu dating from over 5 years, now he can do even more tasks at a time, while also being able to read them faster, a massive improvement compared to when it was stuck with an hdd and only 6 gb of ram. i'm guessing those low specs were for the purpose of saving manufacturing costs, but until you'd find use for the components that you'd remove, they'd end up becoming waste. and with a free os like linux mint, it adds up to an even more optimized experience than windows 10, which comes with so many unwanted stuff and can't be customized very well.

have you had a similar story to mine? did that pose you challenges? i took over 40 minutes to write this entire piece of text, but it should at least be very well detailed! on the best case scenario i hope it would inspire others to do some research on upgrading PCs to preserve their lives and especially save costs. Thank you for reading the entirety of it, don't hesitate reblogging it if you think it would interest your own audience! peace for all of you 💙

Women’s sports is not a retirement plan for old men

A 50-year-old trans-identified male runner has seized his eighth championship title in a women’s category after smashing the competition at the Italian Indoor Masters Championship in Ancona.

On March 12, Valentina Petrillo, born Fabrizio, competed in the 200m race for women aged 50 to 54. Marco Alciator, a statistician, was present at the championship to monitor Petrillo’s performance and provided a report to the Italian Feminist Post on what he witnessed. 

Alciator recorded that that a difference in “physicality [was] immediately noticeable,” and that the female competitors were unable to hold their own against Petrillo, who effortlessly dominated the competition.

But Petrillo’s prowess in women’s athletic competitions is hardly praiseworthy, says Alciator, who notes that if Petrillo had been competing in the equivalent men’s race, he wouldn’t have even broken the top 10.

“Were it not for the fact that Petrillo is still unbelievably entitled to compete in the women’s category, he would have finished 14th place in the M50 category.”

Following Petrillo’s victory, the female athlete who came in second place expressed that she felt disappointed in the results. Cristina Sanulli would have come in first place, and set a women’s indoor running record, if not for Petrillo.

“We do not feel equal, precisely because [Petrillo’s] physical structure is male,” Sanulli said to Alciator. “So we are not running at par. Although the [personal] path Valentina has taken is respectable… athletically speaking it is not, and because of this we feel very discriminated against.”

At the end of the race, a spectator could be heard shouting, “Brava, Cristina!” a cheer that received applause from other athletes. This show of support for Sanulli enraged Petrillo, Alciator says, who then shouted several times in response: “Dedicated to all those who want to hurt me!”

Leading up to the latest race, a women’s rights advocacy group called RadFem Italia contacted government officials to ensure that Petrillo would not be granted access to the women’s locker rooms. In response, Petrillo was provided with a designated changing room reserved especially for him at the Italian Masters Championships in Ancona.

On March 16, Petrillo again lashed out in a Facebook post wherein he equated criticism of his presence in women’s sports to Nazism, telling detractors they were “on the same level as Hitler,” and comparing sex-based sports categories to a 1936 ban on Jewish athletes.

Upset at being denied the use of the women’s locker room, Petrillo wrote, “In Ancona, you made me have a terrible time, it is not fair… you’ve relegated me to a ‘dedicated’ locker room,” a situation which he claimed was similar to the segregation of those called appestati, or sufferers of a plague.

A number of female athletes and professional experts have been highlighting concerns about Petrillo’s participation in the women’s category. At the Master’s Athletics Championships in Arezzo in October 2020, 

Petrillo outpaced Sanulli and Denise Neumann, both of whom had previously won world and European Masters titles and have been regarded as the best in their events.

The athletes took the podium with Petrillo at the time to avoid becoming embroiled in controversy, but later stated that they felt that Petrillo had an unfair advantage.

“I didn’t feel like I competed as an equal. It was my race, my goal for the season. I had been preparing it for a long time and I wanted to win,” Sanulli said at the time.

Sanulli and Neumann were among more than 30 female Master athletes who signed a petition in 2021 opposing men being permitted to identify into women’s sports.

The women were represented by Italian lawyer and athletics champion Mariuccia Fausta Quilleri, who claimed that the admission of male athletes in women’s competitions constitutes a violation of Article 1 of the Code of Equal Opportunities between Men and Women. The petition was sent to the president of the Italian Athletics Federation, Stefano Mei, the Minister for Equal Opportunities, Elena Bonetti, and the undersecretary of state for sport, Valentina Vezzali. According to RadFem Italia, their efforts were not acknowledged by the government officials.

Petrillo currently holds 8 women’s running championship titles, but failed to earn even one while competing as a male. In January 2019, Petrillo changed his name to Valentina and began taking estrogen. The following year, he began competing against female athletes and has since broken multiple Italian women’s running records.

Petrillo has been diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a disorder of the eye that causes retinal degeneration over time. Due to this visual impairment, he has been permitted to compete in both matches designated for women with disabilities, as well as those which are not.

In September 2020, Petrillo raced in the women’s 100-, 200- and 400-meter competitions at the Italian Paralympic Athletics Championships in Jesolo, despite having not undergone the procedure euphemistically labeled sex reassignment surgery.

Additionally, Petrillo had not altered his identification documents, which still listed his sex as male, though this did not deter him from being granted permission to enter the match. He won first place in all three races and therefore qualified to represent Italy at the Tokyo Olympic Games.

At the last minute, however, the Italian government intervened and barred Petrillo from competing against women with disabilities at the Paralympics in 2021. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) had just announced updates to guidelines for trans-identifying competitors stating that male athletes must keep the levels of their testosterone below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months in order to participate.

After being awarded three gold medals at the Paralympics qualifiers, Petrillo dedicated his victory to Bologna-based trans activist organization Gruppo Trans APS, headed by a trans-identifying male named Milena Bargiacchi. 

“I dedicated to them my victory in my favorite race,” Petrillo told OutSports. “Gruppo Trans supported me in my darkest hour, and they helped me find the answers I needed when I was questioning my identity and my life.”

Gruppo Trans’ website has a section dedicated to outreach for crossdressers, where counseling and Zoom sessions are offered. The point of contact is a man called Charlotte Verniani, who runs a lingerie and sex shop and engages in a fetish practice called “female masking,” a sexual activity which involves men donning a silicone “female” face mask, or, on occasion, a full-body silicone “woman suit.”

Speaking about his history with the BBC in June 2021, Petrillo said: “Until four years ago, if you’d talked to Fabrizio (the name Petrillo was given at birth), Fabrizio would have given you the idea he was sexist. He was a tough guy who’d speak dismissively of women and then be a woman in his private space.”

Petrillo has stated that he used to “try on his mother’s clothes” when he was younger, a behavior that until recently was considered a symptom of a sexual disorder known as transvestic fetishism. He has also said that prior to declaring a transgender identity, Petrillo would steal his wife’s clothing. While describing a memory of “touching” his mother’s skirt for the first time, Petrillo said, “It was an incredible emotion. It was like touching heaven with your finger tip.”

Gruppo Trans lobbies for males to be allowed to compete in women’s sports, and runs a program called QueerFit, a fitness course that offers “genderless changing rooms” and guarantees “privacy” of participants by allowing them to join using an alias.

The organization frequently employs Petrillo as a representative, and he has spoken for Gruppo Trans on several occasions. Gruppo Trans is backing a documentary film about Petrillo’s life called “5 Nanomoles – The Olympic Dream of a Trans Woman.” The title is a reference to the maximum testosterone limit set by World Athletics in 2019 for trans-identifying males in order for them to be eligible to compete against women.

In addition to partnering with Petrillo to campaign for males in women’s athletics events, Gruppo Trans also discusses “trans adolescents” and offers a variety of “training” programs through their website. Corporate diversity management training, courses for health care workers, and gender identity workshops for teachers are all available, as are lessons for children intended to be provided by instructors at schools.

An introduction to VR locomotives, part 5/7: the Sr2

The Swiss Clock. The Alpine Rose. The Guinea Pig. The Blob (affectionate). This time, we look at the Sr2 mainline electric locomotive.

With these locomotives, we opted for an established design by a foreign locomotive builder for the first time since the 1940s. And we were not disappointed: the Swiss Clocks work like Swiss Clocks. They were designed by the Swiss locomotive builder SLM, with 119 examples built for the Swiss national operator SBB-CFF-FFS, and a further 18 for another Swiss operator BLS.

The sleek looks of Sr2 were created by the Italian industrial design company Pininfarina. We ordered 20 of these sleek ladies in 1992. As they proved extremely good, we later increased the number first to 40 and then to 46. All were delivered between 1995 and 2003. (Our Norwegian colleagues at NSB followed our example in 1994 and ordered 22 units).

As originally specified, our ladies could reach a top speed of 230 km/h. However, as it was a little embarrassing that they were faster than our flagship high-speed Pendolino trains (which could only do 220 km/h), we later reclassified the top speed as 210 km/h. Still, their high speed allowed for Intercity trains to be upgraded to a maximum of 200 km/h running when we took delivery of new double-decker carriages starting 1998.

As our flagship units (let's admit, the Pendolinos are a bit rubbish), all Sr2's were repainted in out new green and white livery in the 2010s. Due to unavailability of spare parts, the first Sr2 (the prototype loco 3201) was retired in 2021 and used as a source of parts for its sisters.

Decided to make a roster of Necros I currently have.

Long wall of text below explaining each Necro!

---

First is Saladbowld, my oldest Necro. I mainly use him for Fractals. He was created on Nov 20th, 2015 as a joke. I think I was talking about a sentient Caladbolg and made Saladbowld as kinda a gijinka. His initial design was very VERY different from his current look. I unfortunately do not have any screenshots of his baby years, but he used to have Caladbolg colors and the ponytail hairstyle. He was supposed to be a keyfarmer and I was supposed to delete him, but over the years I got too attached to him and now Saladbowld has a background concerning the Mad Realm. I used to use him for Labyrinth farming, but I've retired him from that.

I didn't make another Necro until May 31st, 2020, and that's when I created Somhanavir. Vir is based on one of my OCs from a story I was writing. His full name is Somhanavir Gabris von Hallow and he's a kind of mantid monster. He has no connections to anything in GW2 story/lorewise. I made Vir for WvW at the time when I was somewhat enjoying Scourge, and when Scourge was somewhat decent in zergs. These days, he's park at New Kaineng JP to collect my daily Jade Runestone.

Nov 27th, 2020 is when Lyikera was created. She was initially created to be a reincarnation of Trahearne after HoT. But now, her story ties in with being Aurene's half, literally being Aurene's twin sister as the two were born together when Mordremoth was vanquished. I still headcanon that she and Aurene both embody Trahearne thanks to Mordremoth's death when they absorbed the magic of the Jungle Elder Dragon. In my story, Trahearne was a part of that blast and now is a part of Lyikera and Aurene.

On Aug 21st, 2021 I created Belavalla. She doesn't have any deep lore, she was just my "Pale Reaper" who guides lost Sylvari back to the Dream. I headcanon that her face is unrecognized/incomprehensible to those not ready to return aka Not Dead Yet. But her face will appear as someone comforting to help ease dead Sylvari back to the Dream.

Mender Lunaria was created on Jun 23rd, 2022 as a companion toon to my Pale Reaver Solaria. My Lunaria was once a Sylvari who was unfortunately a victim and test subject to Ardjin. Ardjin successfully spliced her with a Melandru Stalker. Lunaria was one of the lucky experiments, as she retained her memories and escaped Ardjin's facility in Brisband to return to her Dearheart, Solaria.

Apr 22, 2023 is the creation of Oozwald. I'm prolly the only person in GW2 who's created an NPC clone based off the Inquest Technician who got turned into an Ooze in the Thaumanova Reactor Fractal lol. Oozwald is my bag opener.

Jul 4th, 2023 comes Fish Lich. It is a Fish that is a Lich. That's it. No story as of now.

And my latest, current fascination is Hass (Has Seen Things). Created on Feb 29th 2024, he was supposed to be a kobold, but during character creation I couldn't stop laughing at the max-size eyes on one of the Asura faces and that's how he came to be. He uh doesn't have a story. Yet.

And that, for now, are all my Necros. Thank you for taking the time to read this!

I saw the ask about Lewis and I couldn't agree more! His attitude is entitled, his thinks the motosport world owns him something, and it pisses me off. This season on dts it just showed more (even if we all are aware on how they change stuff to look more dramatic and all).

He builted a character while in Mercedes, people bought it, and fail to see that underneath he is not all the mister fixing the world that people think

I’m watching the Merc episode right now and yeesh the attitude on this man. He really gives off the energy that he thinks he’s the first person to ever drive a race car, and now he acts like he could build one, too. He remains unpleasant af. And I 100% sympathise with his frustrations but he has this martyr act like he’s doing anyone a favour to deign to drive the Merc shitbox as if he’s doing it for free. You know where the door is.

But you know, besides Toto, I think that whole team was done with him. Even Toto looks tired but he’d have hung on, but between the way Lewis is talking about everyone and the way he says they talked to him - which I totally believe - I think Merc as a whole was sick of him. And that’s not even his fault, he lost the trust in the engineers that they could do their job.

Like, just yesterday in an interview Max was asked if he was skeptical when he saw the designs for the RB20 and he was like “I’m not an engineer, I trust they know what they doing and they know how to make a fast car”, which was in such stark contrast to how Lewis was saying he would be in the factory meeting with the engineers a lot about design over the break. He didn’t trust them anymore and they grew annoyed by his micromanagement. There was bitterness on both sides I think, and they were not working with him the way they should have been.

His obsession with being THE name in motorsport history is a complex on its own but I think he’d have been better going about that off track. Should have retired gracefully after 2021, stolen a bit of the hype from Max’s win, and transitioned to an advisory role or something. Even become some kind of diversity advocate for the FIA since he loves that sort of stuff. Idk if maybe part of his issue with Toto is that he convinced Lewis to stay with the promise of a good car and Lewis hasn’t forgiven him or what. He had a way out and he didn’t take it and now he’s punishing everyone around him because it’s too late to get out with his reputation intact.

I am being nosy. Right now Minis skirts are retired/ on hold due to business things. I am just morbidly curious about the 'extra logistics this entails' and if that is something on the horizon (6-12 months) or like a 5 year plan. I also don't totally understand the difference in your new manufacturer. I think the fabric will be more detailed with the new manu? Thank you in advance!

so, miniskirts were retired for 2 main reasons:

1. when you sells two products with minimal differences (i.e. two different lengths of the same skirt design, two of the same style of shirt with different sleeve lengths, etc) it doubles the amount of variations you have to account for in inventory without necessarily doubling sales. some people are only interested in either mini or midi skirts, but a lot of people are happy with either, and for us midi skirts were more popular ever since we introduced them and by the end made up about 60-70% of our skirt sales.

2. our old manufacturer fucked up really, really bad. in march 2021 we ran the most successful round of preorders we had ever run. in two weeks we made sales comparable to almost our entire sales in 2020. we made a huge order with the manufacturer we’d been working with for around 5-6 years at the time and we stressed (as we always had) that we preferred quality over speed, that we would pay extra and wait longer to make sure the skirts were made well, that they could be made and sent in batches so we wouldn’t overwhelm their holding capacity. well. they didn’t fucking do that. our old manufacturer changed skirt materials without informing us and about 60% of the entire skirt order was defective and specifically around 90% of miniskirts were defective. most of the midi skirts defects were minor printing errors (so a few white dots where there was dust on the fabric when it went through the printer, or a couple dark splotches from some splattered ink, or some minor print banding) but about 60% of the defective miniskirts were unsellable because they were literally falling apart. we are still dealing with the ramifications of this. we’ve sold through a bunch of the horrible miniskirts, selling them as scrap material below cost in the hopes that literally anyone can find a use for them so they don’t end up in a landfill. we still have a ton left that we need to sort and list in the store, but it is a truly staggering amount of work. we had to pay out of pocket to remake those skirts, which sucked.

so the difference with the new manu is about more than just material or print fidelity. it’s about consistency and quality. with the skirts from our old manu, we spend a ton of time quality checking every individual garment because there are so many defectives. that’s why the restocks had to be broken up into smaller, more frequent restocks: because that QC takes a TON of time. the new factory does their own, extensive QC, including wash tests, which will likely cut down our processing time to a 10th of what it is currently because we won’t have to scour every individual garment. defectives will be the outlier instead of the norm, meaning if someone gets a defective item without our knowledge it’ll be easy and painless to replace it because it’ll be at most 5% of garments instead of like 60%. if we had to process returns/exchanges on 60% of our orders it would literally shut us down. and we likely wouldn’t be able to process most exchanges bc we wouldn’t have that many non-defective skirts to exchange with defective ones.

i don’t have an ETA yet on the return of miniskirts, but i would guess either later this year or some time next year. i just wanted to get things settled with the new factory, to make sure we know our production timeline/etc and have midi skirts 100% figured out/squared away before we add other variables. unfortunately there have been delays with the first batch of midi skirts (i talked abt this earlier today but there have been a number of earthquakes in turkey, where our new factory is) so we are running behind on that, but we’ll be getting part of our first batch of new manu skirts later this week and the rest will arrive some time in the next few weeks. after that devin and i will sit down with ash (our lovely supply chain manager and pattern maker) and go over an action plan/logistics for miniskirts, among other things. we have a lot of projects cooking right!

ran out of both zines a while ago and finally got around setting this up so here we go c:

🌟 preorder them here, until aug20! 🌟

💜 the 2021 zine includes several illustrations currently not posted!

💜 PDFs of each zine available for 3€ in bundle with the respective printed zine! (sent at preorders end as I’m planning to possibly do some final tweaks and maybe add a couple more pics!)

💜 my old KL scarf charm, which is currently a retired design, is also available for preorder again alongside the 2018 zine! (u can view it in the zine page)

💜 you can use code ZINEBUNDLE at checkout to get 3€ off if you order any 2 printed zines/comics until aug20! (order can include PDFs but the discount will only be applied to printed copies)

💜 these won’t be ready to ship until mid september at the earliest!

thank you for reading, if you have questions let me know!  💖

Jellycat of the Day | 30th November 2023

↳ Crumble Goat | 2021 Retired Design

"Yodel if you love to climb!"

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … February 15

1748 – The English philosopher, jurist, economist, and political scientist Jeremy Bentham (d.1832) argued for a tolerant attitude toward homosexuality in a series of papers first published in full in 1985.

He was the most notable law reformer the English-speaking world has ever produced; in this role, his influence extended not only to Britain and the United States but also to France, Spain, and Latin America. Several of the emerging republics of South and Central America consulted him in drawing up their constitutions and law codes. In the Hispanic world, he was hailed as "el legislador del mundo."

Among his all-but -illegible unpublished papers were hundreds of pages, written at intervals over half a century, which make a contribution to what we would today call "gay studies." Bentham did not dare to publish any of them during his lifetime. Though a fragment of twenty-two pages appeared in print in 1931, no comprehensive account of the scope and significance of this impressive body of materials was published until 1985.

Bentham's primary interest in homosexuality arose in connection with law reform. In his day, men convicted under the English "buggery" statute were regularly hanged, a punishment public opinion enthusiastically applauded in England long after executions had ceased in the rest of Europe.

Bentham's task as reformer was made difficult not just by the force of English prejudice, but also by the absolute taboo on public discussion of homosexuality. In law books and in parliamentary debate, homosexual behavior was referred to stereotypically by the Latin formula, "peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum"—"that horrible crime not to be named among Christians." Bentham candidly admits in his notes the extreme fear he felt at the idea of making public his liberal opinions on the subject.

Bentham regarded prejudice against homosexuals simply as an irrational hatred and antipathy. It is one of the distinctions of his later writings (from 1814 on) that he identifies what we now call homophobia and directs his efforts to analyzing it.

He had of course no word that is exactly equivalent to the modern term homosexual. He often employs "paederast," sometimes in its original sense of a lover of boys, but often also to mean an adult male who is sexually involved with another man, as in modern French usage; in this latter sense, it approximates closely to "homosexual."

1923 – Adolfo Faustino Sardiña (d.2021), professionally known as Adolfo, was a Cuban-born American fashion designer who started out as a milliner in the 1950s. While chief designer for the wholesale milliners Emme, he won the Coty Award and the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award. In 1963 he set up his own salon in New York, firstly as a milliner, and then focusing on clothing. He retired from fashion design in 1993.

Adolfo Sardiña was born in Cárdenas, Cuba. His mother was Irish; his father Spanish. He attended the St Ignacio de Loyola Jesuit School in Havana and served in the Cuban Army. In 1948 Adolfo immigrated to New York.

As his mother had died in childbirth, Adolfo was brought up by an aunt who enjoyed wearing French haute couture, and encouraged her nephew to pursue fashion design. With his aunt's help, Adolfo joined Cristóbal Balenciaga as an apprentice milliner. He worked at Balenciaga from 1950–52.

In 1953 Adolfo joined the New York-based wholesale millinery company Emme as their chief designer. In the summer of 1957, to further his skills, he served an unpaid apprenticeship with Coco Chanel's New York hat salon. Adolfo would later admit that he "never enjoyed making hats."

With financial help from Bill Blass, Adolfo opened his first salon in New York in 1963, where he met many of the customers who would become his patrons when he gave up millinery to focus on clothing. He had met the Duchess of Windsor by 1965, through whom he met regular customers Betsy Bloomingdale, Babe Paley and Nancy Reagan. After Mainbocher retired, one of his highest-profile clients, C. Z. Guest, came to Adolfo to make her clothes instead. Adolfo's clothes were designed to complement his hats, which the designer saw as an optional accessory rather than a wardrobe essential. During the 1980s, his creations were worn in the hit TV series "Miami Vice", the fashion-defining show for the decade.

In 1993, at the age of 60, (based on a disputed birth year of 1933) Adolfo decided to retire from fashion design and rely on the income from his licensing agreements with various manufacturers.

His partner, Edward C. Perry, died in 1993. Adolfo died on November 27, 2021, at the age of 98.

1965 – On February 15, 1965, the Maple Leaf Flag, our national flag, was raised for the first time on Parliament Hill. Canada was just two years away from centennial celebrations when the maple leaf flag was made official by Royal Proclamation. In 1996, February 15 was declared National Flag of Canada Day and has been observed every year since.

February 15, 2015, marks the 50th anniversary of the National Flag of Canada. This special Flag Day is the perfect opportunity to learn more about how our flag was created and what it means to us.

After the First World War and again after the Second World War, the Government of Canada discussed the importance of our country having its own flag. Attempts to adopt a specific design repeatedly failed as consensus could not be reached.

In 1964, the Government made the creation of a distinctive Canadian flag a priority as the 1967 centennial celebration of Confederation was approaching. When Parliament could not reach agreement on the design, the task of finding a national flag was given to an all-party Parliamentary committee.

It was the single leaf, red and white design that the Committee recommended to Parliament. The motion was passed to adopt this design as the National Flag of Canada with a vote of 163 to 78 on December 15, 1964.

The winning flag was selected for the following reasons:

The simplicity of the design that made it easily recognizable.

Its use of Canada’s official national colours.

The maple leaf had become a symbol of Canadian pride and national identity.

Canadian troops as well as Canadian athletes had already used the maple leaf as an emblem on their uniforms when representing Canada abroad.

1968 – Richard Blanco is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet.

Blanco, born in Madrid on February 15, 1968, immigrated as an infant with his Cuban exile family to Miami, and was raised and educated there. He earned a B.S. from Florida International University in Civil Engineering in 1991 and his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1997, where he studied with Campbell McGrath.

Since 1999, he has traveled and lived in Guatemala and Brazil. He taught at Georgetown University, American University, Central Connecticut State University, and Writer's Center.

He explored his Cuban heritage in his early works and his role as a gay man in Cuban-American culture in Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012). He explained: "It's trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay." According to Time magazine, he "views the more conservative, hard-line exile cohort of his parents' generation ... with a skeptical eye."

His work has appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly Review, New England Review, and Americas Review.On January 8, 2013, he was named the inaugural poet for Barack Obama's second inauguration, the fifth person to play that role. He was the first immigrant, first Latino, and first gay person to be the inaugural poet. He was also the youngest. He was asked to compose three poems from which inauguration officials selected the one he would read. After reading "One Today," he said to his mother: "Well, Mom, I think we're finally American." The poem he presented, "One Today", was called "a humble, modest poem, one presented to a national audience as a gift of comradeship, and in the context of political, pop, and media culture, a quiet assertion that poetry deserves its place in our thoughts on this one day, and every day."

He and his partner split their time between Bethel, Maine and Boston, MA. In the poem "Queer Theory, According to My Grandmother," he described how his grandmother warned him as a young boy: "For God's sake, never pee sitting down ... /I've seen you" and "Don't stare at The Six-Million-Dollar Man./I've seen you." and "Never dance alone in your room."

1989 – A Los Angeles jury awards Rock Hudson's ex-lover, Marc Christian $21.75 million in damages for the emotional distress he claims to have suffered upon learning that Hudson had AIDS. The award is later reduced to $5.5 million.

1999 – Australian diplomat Stephen Brady and his partner Peter Stephens were the world’s first openly gay ambassadorial couple. Accompanied by Stephens, Brady presented his credentials as Australian Ambassador to Denmark, to Queen Margrethe II on February  15,1999.

Today's Gay Wisdom:

Susan B. Anthony

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We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Susan B. Anthony

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation. - Susan B. Anthony, "On the Campaign for Divorce Law Reform" (1860)

The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires. - Susan B. Anthony

Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself. - Susan B. Anthony, Speech in San Francisco (July 1871)

The only chance women have for justice in this country is to violate the law, as I have done, and as I shall continue to do. - Susan B. Anthony

By: Ben Appel

Published: Dec 26, 2023

In 2021, Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven stated on a television news program that there are “two sexes” and that “those sexes are designated by the kinds of gametes we produce.” She added that “understanding facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect” when it comes to “their gender identities and use [of] their preferred pronouns.” Afterward, a Harvard graduate student, in her official capacity as director of the Human Evolutionary Biology Department’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Task Force, tweeted that Hooven’s “dangerous” and “transphobic” remarks made the department unsafe for transgender people. The Graduate Student Union took out a petition against Hooven, and, since no one would agree to serve as her teaching assistant, she had to discontinue her popular lecture course. This past January, under duress, Hooven retired from her position at Harvard.

More recently, I heard Hooven speak at a conference in Denver. She talked about academic freedom and her dedication to creating a just society. She said something I believe: that the truth is the way toward true social justice, and that the truth is what ultimately alleviates human suffering. After Hooven left the stage, I tweeted my thoughts about what she said, concluding, “Yep, I’ll die on that hill.” A Twitter user, in a now-deleted series of replies, responded, “Wish you would then. And quickly.” Later, this person elaborated, “Cis white conservative gays can all d*e. Please do, no one likes you.”

This might be the first time I’ve been called “conservative” for voicing my support of the truth and social justice. Right-wing homophobia is nothing new, though the enmity for “cis white gays” like me from the other side of the aisle has sadly also become widespread online. Here’s a very small sampling:

“[C]is white gay men are the weakest links and idc who knows it.” — @ann_forcino.

“ur rave wasn't ‘100% queer joy’ it was a warehouse party full of white cis gay men who want to dance and fuck each other lmfao [...] “that's not queer joy, that's f^g joy.” — @Maxies_back

“Chelsea and Hells Kitchen, more so than other neighborhoods in New York, produce nothing better than prissy, entitled cis White Power pretentious gay men, who don't respect diversity, or the rule of law.” — “LGBT for Change”

“Maybe they were right all along and white cis gays really do go to hell.” — Jerry Falwell @obssdwmlp

“Behind every bad man there is an even worse cis gay white man.” — @ANIMETWTDNI

“We need to realize that gay cis white men are still cis white men.” — @pettypiedpipertake

“Maybe homophobia against cis white gay men is valid.” — @heartIwin

“Noah Schnapp is also evidence that gays will truly go to h£ll. especially a cis white upper class gay like i genuinely, genuinely mean that and i’m sorry if that comes off as problematic.” [Schnapp is a 19-year-old Jewish gay actor who has spoken out in support of Israel in the wake of the October 7 2023 terrorist attacks.] — @brat6z

 “I love it when white gays erase the trans and black side of this flag [...] You faggots deserve to get hatecrimed to death.” — @daredevilshill_

Writing for The Nation in 1994, the gay playwright Tony Kushner argued that homosexuality and socialism are intrinsically linked. Homosexuals, he wrote, “like most everyone else, are and will continue to be oppressed by the depredations of capital until some better way of living together can be arrived at.” Kushner lamented the growing number of gay activists, like Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bawer, who advocated a more pragmatic approach to equal rights. The radical contingent of the LGBT community has long pejoratively described these types of gay and bi people — those who prioritize marriage equality, the right to serve openly in the military, and peaceful inclusion in Western society — as “assimilationist.” Real gay liberation, the radicals argue, will result from razing Western civilization and its capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal system and rebuilding it in their utopian vision. Like the gay journalist Donna Minkowitz once said to Charlie Rose, “We don’t want a place at the table — we want to turn the table over.”

The thing is, the pragmatic approach won. Today, gay, lesbian, and bi people get married, serve proudly, have jobs, own homes, and raise families. Like black civil rights leaders who preached nonviolent protest and a politics of respectability, discerning LGBT activists took the long view. We don’t want to exist on the margins of society, they insisted, we want to participate in it. LGBT people, just like black Americans, are a vital part of the fabric of this nation.

But the radicals haven’t taken this defeat lying down. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage equality the law of the land, the radicals pounced. “You got what you want,” they seemed to say. “Now it’s our turn.” LGBT rights organizations, either under the influence of impatient extremists or in an attempt to stay relevant (i.e., donor-worthy), refocused their missions to a form of revolutionary activism that purports to fight on behalf of trans people but in practice agitates for a revolt against Enlightenment ideals, liberalism, capitalism, and even basic biology.

Every LGBT organization seemingly became an extension of a university Gender Studies department, whose purpose was not to produce new knowledge but to interrogate — or, in their academic lingo, queer — existing knowledge which they spuriously associate with “whiteness”, colonialism, and Western patriarchy. Alongside this, a new social hierarchy of disadvantage was erected, where everyone was in competition to be the most “marginalized” — and therefore deserving of resources, a voice, and power in the revolutionaries’ value system. According to that value system, being gay or bi seemed to matter far less if one were also white, cis, and male, and therefore deemed to be in cahoots with the oppressors.

In 2017, while I was a student at Columbia University, I interned for GLAAD, one of the largest LGBT organizations in the US. Not only had their mission absorbed this new orthodoxy, it had filtered down to the interpersonal level. On campus and at GLAAD’s offices, I was regularly called “cis” in a kind of sneering, vitriolic tone that reminded me more than a little of the bullies who called me “fag” in middle school. The oddest thing was that much of the vitriol was coming from people who didn’t seem to be LGB, or even T, but who identified only as nonbinary or “queer.” Many of the people I encountered seemed to be profoundly homophobic. Any gay or bi man that didn’t at least adopt he/they pronouns, especially if they were white, was considered assimilationist, right-wing, traitorous upholders of the evil sex binary.

I never quite got used to being eyed with suspicion by other activists for my normative, gender-conforming appearance, or the constant bad-faith interpretations of anything I said. The only cis white gays spared this unfairly cold treatment were the ones who made a public show of being self-hating — the ones who renounced their “cis white gayness” and frequently apologized for their white privilege.

It was alarming to be on the receiving end of such vitriol simply for being myself — for not shaving one side of my head, painting my nails, piercing my septum, and adopting plural pronouns. It was alarming especially because so much of the hate I received when I was young came precisely because I was way too sex-nonconforming (in fact, in middle school, my classmates would often ask me if I was a boy or a girl). I wondered if my peers cared that I had been mercilessly bullied as a gay kid, or that I had worked on a trans rights anti-discrimination campaign when they were barely teenagers. I knew that my volunteering for marriage equality wouldn’t earn me any points, since marriage was to them an antiquated Western institution and part of an “assimilationist” agenda. This attitude has become so entrenched in LGBT activist spaces, I suspect it partially explains why support for same-sex marriage among Gen Z Americans has dropped from 80% in 2021 to only 69% in 2023.

Last year, I got a little more clarity about this issue when I came across an article, also written in 1994, by Stephen H. Miller. The publishing journal, Heterodoxy, titled it “Gay-Bashing by Homosexuals,” although Miller’s original title was “Gay White Males: PC’s Unseen Target.” In the late 1980s and early 90s, Miller chaired the media committee of GLAAD’s New York chapter. In fact, Miller came up with GLAAD’s mission statement, which was to “fight for fair, accurate and inclusive representations of gay and lesbian lives in the media and elsewhere.” In the article, Miller wrote that he was “purged” from GLAAD in 1992 because he objected to the rising political correctness and censoriousness in the gay, lesbian, and bisexual movement. Similar to the cultural shifts of the past decade, Miller recounts how activist organizations began prioritizing race and gender (and of course, the Correct political views) over individual merit. New staff members had to attend “endless sensitivity sessions” which “identified white men (whatever their sexual orientation) as the oppressor class.” Suddenly, it seemed like there was more antagonism towards the “white males” within the LGBT rights movement than without. Miller, who described himself as a “political moderate who believed in dialogue with the straight world and a good-faith search for common ground,” found himself “shunned.”

The race and gender quotas that LGBT rights organizations began adopting, Miller wrote, included weighted voting that favored women and people of color. For example, after regional delegations of organizers for the 1993 March on Washington for LGB rights failed to achieve their quotas, it was decided that women’s votes would count for three votes apiece and non-white votes would count for two votes apiece. That decision — and the many others that have since followed in LGBT activist spaces — calls to mind some dark and creepy moments from American history best learned from rather than imitated.

Of course, this also raises the question: Who decides who is a person of color and who is white, and how? Will they apply the one-drop rule, the early 20th-century legal principle that deemed any American with even one black ancestor (“one drop of black blood”) as black? I suppose that would be illegal since the Supreme Court outlawed the one-drop rule in its 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision. And yet, I’m not surprised by these backward tactics. It was Ibram X. Kendi who recently wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Around and around we go.

Then as now, as Miller wrote, anyone who challenged this illiberal orthodoxy was “deemed racist and sexist” and accused of harboring the belief that “white men are the main victims of discrimination.” Naturally, Miller notes, such accusations serve to discourage people who sense this hostility toward gay white men from voicing their dissent.

Then after AIDS decimated gay and bi male activist communities, lesbian radical feminists moved in, and a “critical attitude toward men, male sexuality, and ‘the patriarchy’” became the norm. “Male solidarity, once a hallmark of gay liberation, is now anathema.”

A direct line can be drawn from this upheaval in the early 1990s and the divisiveness in today’s LGBT activist spaces, where “cis gays” — and, in particular, “cis white gays” — are seen as upholders of villainous Western cisheteropatriarchy and its henchman capitalism. These modern activists are sure to include “white” not only out of an animus against white people, but because they assume that all people of color are helpless victims of Western capitalism who, because of their oppression, invariably hold the “correct” far-left politics. In his aforementioned article, Kushner invoked Oscar Wilde, quoting “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” He added that he is “always suspicious of the glacier-paced patience of the right.” Writing for The Advocate, the gay writer Bruce Bawer responded that he and so many others are “impatient with models of activism that involve playing at revolution instead of focusing on the serious work of reform.”

This anti-“cis white gay” attitude proliferates in LGBT media as well. “White Gay Men Are Hindering Our Progress as a Queer Community” was the title of an article published in the magazine Them. “You had your time — now, we have other things to fight for,” read the subhead. “Let's Talk About People That Aren't Young Cis White Gay Men,” a HuffPost article was titled.

I could go on and on.

A few years ago, I attended a conference for LGBT journalists. There, I met a young, white, gay writer who would go on to work for a progressive news outlet in New York. He said his upbringing in a Southern state had made him racist, but since then, he has “trained” himself to be attracted to black and brown people, and now black and brown people are the only types of people he wants to sleep with.

If this is the “progressive” strategy for combating racism, I want no part of it. And any liberal cis white gay person who opposes racism won’t either. This is racism, operating under the guise of “anti-racism”, plain and simple. It attempts to end inequality by inverting it and, in the process, is attacking the foundations of the principles that have enabled the remarkable progress our society has made in transcending bigotry and prejudice. I only wish more people who saw this dogma for what it is were unafraid to voice the truth about it.

==

Homophobia and anti-gay hate are alive and well as progressive virtues.

Hiske Altena “Vital Mud”. Self-published, Amsterdam

With the photographic project Vital Mud, Hiske Altena (NL) explores the theory that life on Earth once began in clay. In the 1980s, her uncle, a now-retired geologist, found an unusual rattle stone. In this stone, he discovered organic-looking structures that he could not explain with existing geological theories. However, the alternative so-called “clay hypothesis”, according to which clay helped the evolution of early life forms, seems to offer a better explanation.

What will these first life forms have looked like? As large slimy tree-shaped structures or perhaps as giant floating zeppelin-like gas bubbles? Rattle stones, clay crystals, the life cycle of bacteria, and large oval shapes in the American landscape are all possible evidence for the hypothesis that life once originated in clay. Perhaps this even explains the similar shapes and descriptions that keep recurring in old fairy tales, myths, and religious stories.

Vital Mud takes this theory as its starting point. It is the foundation on which Altena builds a collection of images that changes our perspective, makes us look again, and wonder about what humans are capable of. She reminds us that science is a continuous search for the unknown, and that perspective shifts, just as it does in art.

The book’s dummy was shown at exhibitions and festivals around the world, was shortlisted for several awards, including the Paris Photo/Aperture PhotoBook Award, and was selected as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs of 2021.

Hiske Altena is a Dutch image maker. Her work stems from a fascination with how we relate to things that differ from what is generally accepted. Belonging, questioning the norm, curiosity, and the power of imagination are central themes in her work. To show the fun and value of a different perspective, she plays with our image of reality. Her work is often a combination of – often staged or manipulated – photographs, collages and found footage.

NASA's Roman team selects survey to map our galaxy's far side

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has announced plans for an unprecedented survey of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. It will peer deeper into this region than any other survey, mapping more of our galaxy's stars than all previous observations combined.

"There's a really broad range of science we can explore with this type of survey, from star formation and evolution to dust in between stars and the dynamics of the heart of the galaxy," said Catherine Zucker, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who co-authored a white paper describing some of the benefits of such an observing program.

A galactic plane survey was the top-ranked submission following a 2021 call for Roman survey ideas. Now, the scientific community will work together to design the observational program ahead of Roman's launch by May 2027.

"There will be lots of trade-offs since scientists will have to choose between, for example, how much area to cover and how completely to map it in all the different possible filters," said paper co-author Robert Benjamin, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

While the details of the survey remain to be determined, scientists say if it covered about 1,000 square degrees—a region of sky as large as 5,000 full moons—it could reveal well over 100 billion cosmic objects (mainly stars).

"That would be pretty close to a complete census of all the stars in our galaxy, and it would only take around a month," said Roberta Paladini, a senior research scientist at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, and the white paper's lead author. "It would take decades to observe such a large patch of the sky with the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes. Roman will be a survey machine."

Milky Way anatomy

Observatories with smaller views of space have provided exquisite images of other galaxies, revealing complex structures. But studying our own galaxy's anatomy is surprisingly difficult. The plane of the Milky Way covers such a large area on the sky that studying it in detail can take a very long time. Astronomers also must peer through thick dust that obscures distant starlight.

While we've studied our solar system's neighborhood well, Zucker says, "We have a very incomplete view of what the other half of that Milky Way looks like beyond the galactic center."

Observatories like NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope have conducted large-area surveys of the galactic plane in longer wavelengths of light and revealed some star-forming regions on the far side of the galaxy. But it couldn't resolve fine details like Roman will do.

"Spitzer set up the questions that Roman will be able to solve," Benjamin said.

Roman's combination of a large field of view, crisp resolution, and the ability to peer through dust make it the ideal instrument to study the Milky Way. And seeing stars in different wavelengths of light—optical and infrared—will help astronomers learn things such as the stars' temperatures. That one piece of information unlocks much more data, from the star's evolutionary stage and composition to its luminosity and size.

"We can do very detailed studies of things like star formation and the structure of our own galaxy in a way that we can't do for any other galaxy," Paladini said.

Roman will offer new insights about the structure of the central region known as the bulge, the "bar" that stretches across it, and the spiral arms that extend from it.

"We'll basically rewrite the 3D picture of the far side of the galaxy," Zucker said.

Roman's sharp vision will help astronomers see individual stars even in stellar nurseries on the far side of the galaxy. That will help Roman generate a huge new catalog of stars since it will be able to map 10 times farther than previous precision mapping by ESA's (the European Space Agency's) Gaia space mission.

Gaia mapped over 1 billion stars in 3D, largely within about 10,000 light-years. Roman could map up to 100 billion stars 100,000 light-years away or more (stretching out to the most distant edge of our galaxy and beyond).

The Galactic Plane Survey is Roman's first announced general astrophysics survey—one of several observation programs Roman will do in addition to its three core community surveys and Coronagraph technology demonstration.

At least 25% of Roman's five-year primary mission will be allocated to general astrophysics surveys in order to pursue science that can't be done with only the mission's core community survey data. Astronomers from all over the world will have the opportunity to use Roman and propose cutting-edge research, enabling the astronomical community to utilize the full potential of Roman's capabilities to conduct extraordinary science.

The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

TOP IMAGE....The plane of our Milky Way galaxy, as seen by ESA’s Gaia space mission. It contains more than a billion stars, along with darker, dusty regions Gaia couldn’t see through. With its greater sensitivity and longer wavelength coverage, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s galactic plane survey will peer through more of the dust and reveal far more stars. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

LOWER IMAGE....This image shows two views of the same spiral galaxy, called IC 5332, as seen by two NASA observatories – the James Webb Space Telescope’s observations appear at the top left and the Hubble Space Telescope’s at the bottom right. The views are mainly so different due to the wavelengths of light they each showcase. Hubble’s visible and ultraviolet observation features dark regions where dust absorbs those types of light. Webb sees longer wavelengths and detects that dust glowing in infrared. But neither could conduct an efficient survey of our Milky Way galaxy because it covers so much sky area; since IC 5332 is around 30 million light-years away, it appears as a small spot. It would take Hubble or Webb decades to survey the Milky Way, but NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could do it in less than a month. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), Rupali Chandar (UToledo), PHANGS Team