Untitled

hey for no reason in particular, here's an audio of abc café/red & black and do you hear the people sing? from the les mis 40th anniversary gala, featuring jordan shaw as enjolras

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

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"

One of his oaths was ‘Damned fiddle-faddler’s fiddle-faddle!’

Hugo writes: Un de ses jurons était: Par la pantoufloche de la pantouflochade!

Hapgood gives us: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!"

2026 - 2025 - 2024 - 2023

in spite of it all, happy 2026 pride.

you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads

you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride

these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other's hands silently, and, leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade, they watched with an admiration in which there was some compassion, that grave young man, executioner and priest, composed of light, like crystal, and also of rock.

full scene & enj under the cut <3

"LES MISERABLES" LOCATIONS IN PARIS: AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE

BY KATIE BARNES

AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON

“Among many other things, “Les Misérables” is Victor Hugo's love letter to the Paris of his youth... His descriptions of its streets and buildings, and the routes the characters take, are almost forensically detailed and accurate.”

If you have ever wanted to know more about the locations in Paris where Victor Hugo says that Valjean, Javert and the other characters walked, this will be for you. Using contemporary and modern maps, photographs, engravings and paintings, this book gives detailed written and illustrated histories for 35 locations connected with the novel, the musical and the life of Victor Hugo, including the sites of the Barricade, the Rue Plumet, the quay where Javert commits suicide, the Cafe Musain, the church where Marius and Cosette are married, the street where Valjean dies, the street where Hugo was nearly killed on the night of the barricades, the Pantheon where he is buried, the place on the river bank where Valjean and Marius emerge from the sewers, and many more. And if you visit Paris in person, the book includes information on travel to each location by Metro, bus and bicycle, together with two suggested walking tours on the Right and Left Banks.

All profits are donated to Acting For Others, which provides financial and emotional support to all those working in theatrical professions, through its network of 14 member charities. I will receive no financial benefit whatsoever.

It's available as a Kindle download for £5.99/$7.99; as a paperback with colour illustrations for £21.50/$28.98; and as a paperback with illustrations in black & white for £12.50/$16.79. 

If you like it, please leave a rating and review on Amazon: if I get more than 10 positive reviews and ratings, Amazon will do more to help me publicise it, which would hopefully mean more sales and more funds raised for Acting for Others. 

These are the links to all three editions on Amazon:

Black & white edition:https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H2WCQTHM

Colour edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H2WCNZRZ

Kindle edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H4DWJ8LP

'25: All right, so you languished with garish battle wounds in the street. You were overrun at the end by the mass of soldiery. Your blood has certainly run into the sewers. What's that matter? Those checked trousers and the way you've got your cravat untied to show your manly breast were on point. You went out in high fashion.

'34: Part of the barricade literally exploded, but the karaoke was even more lit than Marius' idea of a battle plan. Not the worst time you could've had. You still feel guilty that you didn't say anything to Enjolras about his hair, though. Boy needed some leave-in conditioner to tame that mess.

'35: Talk about disorganization. You left before things wrapped up.

IM '48: You're haunted... haunted by the knowledge that if the National Guard had only sunk enough time into classic platformers, they wouldn't have been making pratfalls over those exploding barrels. It's all about the timing on the jump.

'52: You sneezed, and by the time you finished wiping your nose, the whole revolution question seems to have been put to bed.

'58: Must have been a hell of a time. You don't remember a thing.

'72: Between the poetry recitations and opera music, you think this crowd might be a little artsy for you.

'78: Sure, it ticked the boxes—soldiers, furniture piled up, cries of long live the Republic—but it was real hard to pay attention to all that through the haze of homoeroticism.

'98: Say what you will about the rest, we love a party with a tailgate, and this barricade started properly with a funeral.

2000: Fauchelevent party-crashing remains the most awkward moment of wait, did anyone here invite that guy? you've personally experienced, and you'd like to move on.

SC 2007: There's something to be said for a barricade this tidy. Sure, there's bodies, but as for blood, it's as dry as a well-monitored middle school dance.

2012: You are nagged by a sense of unfinished business, like when you turn off a radio in the middle of a song. It seemed like everyone was gearing up for a whole number, you know? Even dying beautifully to the sound of Broadway's best isn't making up for that entirely.

Arai 2016: Hold up. I'll tell the joke in a minute. Crying? Of course not. I've got something in my eye, that's all.

I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

Old houses in the Rue Mondétour - Adolphe Martial Potémont

Another album of Paris images I just dumped on Photobucket: A.M. Potémont’s engravings of old Paris. He did a lot of them; if you do an image search for Potémont on gallica.bnf.fr you’ll get hundreds of results. I cherry-picked a couple dozen of them for being relevant (however fleetingly) to Les Mis fandom’s interests, but if you like them and want to see more of what old Paris looked like, go check out more of them on Gallica!

(Note: Gallica leaves huge amounts of whitespace around the images, which can make them look tiiiiiny, but as the above cropped version demonstrates, once you download them they’re high-res enough to zoom in on details.)