Travels with Stormcrow into the Internet

meanwhile on Twitter

wait wait a minute this is hilarious. First of all because I'm pretty sure this journey is actually possible to do "by sea" although it involves canals and locks, but also

Behold, the Rock of Scylla!

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"

Long before George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. engineered his massive steel monolith for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the fundamental concept of the “pleasure wheel” was spinning throughout the Ottoman Empire. By the early 1900s, these traditional, hand-cranked wooden structures, often referred to in Turkish as a dönme dolap (spinning cupboard), remained a vibrant fixture of rural markets, Eid celebrations, and village festivals across Anatolia and the Balkans.

It wasn't that long ago that banks and companies would refuse to serve gay people. People are going all the way up to the Supreme Court to enshrine the right not to serve LGBTQ people in their business. Rainbow capitalism showed which companies were safe to do business with and it pressured other companies to do the same.

Likewise, companies did and do try to discrominate against LGBTQ employees. Rainbow capitalism let employees be open about their identities and feel safe. The 50 year old gay man marching with Bank of America may have hidden his sexuality for decades because it wasn't safe to come out at work.

It helped set top down societal values and norms that LGBTQ people are a welcome part of society.

It pressured companies to adopt nondiscrimination policies and DEI policies.

It made companies donate to pride celebrations and LGBTQ causes.

with mixed success, it provided powerful and visible allies for political change, like the Respect for Marriage Act. Businesses pulled out of North Carolina and forced it to go back on a bathroom bill.

The drawdown of rainbow capitalism has real consequences. Pride celebrations losing corporate sponsorships means they are not able to hold those celebrations. DEI programs are being rolled back. Companies are buying less from queer owned businesses. Support for gay marriage is actually decreasing in polls.

Are these all cause and effect? No. Is it sometimes just a lagging indicator? Yeah. Are fair weather allies like big corps really not great? Yeah.

Like imagine if all Americans residing or visiting outside of the U.S suddenly had to condemn Trump before being allowed to attend Pride, to host a panel or lecture in their field of expertise, to check in to a hotel room, to just exist in public or online. And even if you condemn Trump, people still refuse to exist near you because of where you were born.

Its just an exhaustion of always being immediately assumed to be a bad person before I get to even share my actual opinions and beliefs.

Whilst the NZ government is nowhere near as bad as the Israeli Government, I, a jew who has never stepped foot in Israel, am always expected to condemn the Israeli government but never at any point has anyone asked me to condemn the NZ government, not online and not irl.

EVOLUTION OF PALEOART : Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus, Megalosaurus

Many other examples of how our perception of prehistoric animals changed as more discoveries were made over the decades are festured on this SERIES OF VIDEOS

These posters are available for PRINTS and other items HERE

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