Yes all cops. Do Piracy. Trans rights.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

Red-billed Oxpecker (Buphagus erythrorhynchus) on a rhino, sound asleep.

Here on land there are only so many ways a creature can move, and by the time you're six or so, you've seen pretty much all of them that you're ever likely to.

Now I need some sources (tried to get both sides but it's hard to tell anymore)

Second home:

USA today

Ny post

Balanced budget:

CBS

Forbes

The second time I heard about it and realized that it was serious, I just stared at the screen for a good minute.

Why?

Because the "You can wager on anything and everything--wars, death tolls, conflicts, anything, there's no subject too taboo to put money on" concept was not new to me.

Where I'd run into it before, however, was in fiction.

Specifically, the Star Wars Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy written in the late 1990s.

Where it was deliberately done as a plot and setting point showing the corruption and inhumanity of the seedy underbelly of Imperial society--the sort of environment that the Star Wars bounty hunters moved in. It was deliberately shown as corrupt, rife with insider trading, betting manipulation, and cruelty.

And now it's real.

@thewolvesrunwild, the money comes from the people who lose their bets.

In one case, there have already been death threats against one reporter, because his (accurate) reporting would have made a bunch of gamblers lose a LOT of money.

But I wish more people would grasp that this isn't a function of being RIGHT-wing, it's a function of being any-fucking-WING. The idea that you don't have to understand how something works in order to judge whether it's Good or Bad, and in fact trying to understand something Bad is going to contaminate you spiritually, is very much in evidence on the left as well.

TL;DR version: Stalin’s favorite scientist decided that evolution wasn’t communist enough so therefore genetics and natural selection were fake. This led to thousands of scientists being fired or imprisoned and entire fields of agricultural research being thrown out.

there's been a housing showdown in my city recently where popular rent freezes didn't pass because lawmakers recognized that it actually exacerbated housing issues in practice, based off of observations of trials elsewhere. But people freaked out because it sounds good and was struck down.

They don't want to know about its ineffectiveness, and don't care to listen, and it's likely to shake up the local government significantly.

The left wing will ignore Platner's nazi tattoo, ignore Galindo's internment camps, ignore Piker's bigotry, ignore the holodomor, ignore antisemitism when it comes from the left, all because they don't want to understand something that isn't convenient for their worldview.

(The fact that these people never have a cute nickname for trump or hold him and the GOP responsible for ANYTHING let alone blaming them for the Gaza War to the degree they do Dems, and Biden and Harris specifically is an indicator that they and the people who buy their framing are deliberately attempting to suppress dem votes and get Dems to turn on Jews in the meantime. They have no smoke for the GOP, they don't care about black democratic voting rights, and they sure as shit don't care about Palestinians either. It's about their view count and reward for blaming 'Mommy' while the world burns around them like we fucking told them it would)

like.

the labor people are sexist. the queer people are fatphobic. the trans people are ageist. the disabled people are transphobic. the antiracists are homophobic. and on and on

on top of which, everyone is racist and ableist and antisemitic and islamophobic and misogynistic. and on and on

I know facing your own prejudices and internalized biases isn't fun. It was a lot of hard work digging through my own bullshit and discovering all the hidden grossness I never asked to own. It's still some amount of work doing the necessary regular maintenance to make sure it doesn't slip in and begin to accumulate once more.

I did and do that work because it's important and worthwhile. The only true control I have over the environment outside of myself is what I personally put into it.

So if I want a world with less prejudice and discrimination against marginalized peoples, I must also try to not add more prejudice and discrimination into the world. I may not always succeed, but I do always try.

It is not up to me, the individual, to end a structural problem. But it is up to me, the individual, to determine my own actions.

Saying you want a world with more kindness in it, but personally choosing to add anger or vitriol to the world, is working against your stated interest. Either you think it's up to other people to do that work for you, or you don't actually desire a more kind world.

Nobody was behind me in line, which seemed to be a good reason for her to treat me to a five minute retelling of the identification, rescue, and argument over initial custody of Kit Kat, who was so small they thought when they first heard him crying for help that he was a bird and not a kitten in a tree, and is now fifteen pounds of "pure, sculpted lardass".

And I didn't mind, precisely, I wasn't bored or anything, but around the time she was bringing me up to speed on Kit Kat's current status it occurred to me that this woman is a cashier in a store that primarily sells candy bars and beverages. People must buy Kit Kat bars from her multiple times a day. Does she do this every time there's nobody in line behind the purchaser? Did I just have that I Own Several Cats And Will Enjoy Your Cat Stories look about me? Was it the first time it occurred to her that she sold the brand of candy bar she named her cat after? Was she new to the job of selling Kit Kat bars?

I was in the same snack shop, which I'm in, like, once a month, recently. I only recognized her because I spent five minutes listening to this monologue in sincere wonder. But I did recognize her, so as I was buying a soda and a Milky Way bar (this time) I said, without thinking about how this would come across, "Hey, how's Kit Kat?"

She looked genuinely horrified and said, "What...how?"

"Oh fuck!" I blurted. "Sorry! You told me about him last time!"

This is still quite cryptic as responses go but she gave me a frankly frantic look of sudden recognition and said, "He's fine! You bought a Kit Kat! I was unmedicated!"

I did not inform her she is small town famous on Tumblr and instead just said, "Glad you're both doing well!" and we parted as confused and mortified friends.