“To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
Fire trucks are not being turned away because of emissions. They are being sent first to a checkpoint to get an inspection and maintenance check, because traveling long distances can cause things to come loose on fire trucks. Most are cleared immediately for use; those that aren’t are fixed and sent out to the fire lines as soon as possible. Why is this important? Because a fire truck breaking down while on the line puts everyone in danger. If a truck breaks down, the crew could be over taken by the flames and die. I’ve seen fires where it’s happened and I never want to see it again. No help will be turned away, the state just wants to make sure they are safe.
Oregonian here. The state fire marshal is fucking PISSED he’s having to waste time and energy explaining this. He’s so mad he’s had to take resources from his office to correct this information over and over. And he’s been very vocal about that. A lot of Oregonians are pretty fucking pissed too.
The inspection was standard and completely welcomed and planned for by both California and Oregon.
Fuck the people who do this. We have enough issues with conflagrations in both of our states we don’t need this too.
It’s very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you’re trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you’re why the cishets don’t accept us or including [aces/bi people with the ‘wrong kind’ of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can’t you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? – to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.
On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids – late teens, early 20s – asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled – or didn’t handle – the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the “women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it” poster. And so on.
I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, “they didn’t care until it started infecting more than just the fags.” I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, “remember when they called it ‘gay cancer?’”
That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.
Never.
These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can’t have it and they’ll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They’ll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.
And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.
Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.
You couldn’t create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.
Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I’m a dyke, which seems to depend on who’s yelling what from which window and what day it is.
Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they’re the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They’re the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word “dyke” in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don’t fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.
Most cishets, though… well, they don’t actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you’re right there in front of them. Maybe they’ll be okay with you, personally, especially if you’re the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.
They need people to know that they don’t have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You’re useful.
But they call you by your deadname when you’re not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won’t put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.
I didn’t want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he’d advocated for that tattoo being “over their assholes.”
(Buckley wrote that in ’86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.
Fucker.)
But yeah. I didn’t want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven’t given up.
I need you to know that, too. This isn’t a white flag. I’m not surrendering. This isn’t over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.
But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them – and he’s not – then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can’t trim ourselves down to something they’ll accept.
The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It’s revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don’t challenge them too much, or it’s conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we’ve got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.
That’s it. Either it’s all of us or it’s none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don’t agree with it but we’ll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.
The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.
Reiterating this again for those of us queers who think that assimilating and making our queerness more palatable to be accepted is the best course of action. Of course, if you’re in active danger, try and protect yourself. But the thing is, being the “right” kind of queer won’t save you, they’ll always eventually come for you too. So be queer out and proud when you can. Especially as the attacks get worse, it is our time to unify.
It recently became department policy to purchase all our animal care supplies online and have them shipped, but my work location (public park) doesn’t have a mailbox, so we’ve been getting things shipped directly to the post office. Today I went to pick up a shipment of several hundred superworms but the postal workers are insisting that it’s not possible to have packages shipped directly to the post office. I gave them a tracking number which revealed they were delivered a couple days ago and now they’re looking for them. Somewhere in the post office are 500 lost worms.
I can’t believe the post office lost my worms
Update: they found my worms!!!!
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The postal worker put these in front of me like she was delivering a bomb.
Honestly I can’t blame the postal worker; my advisor lost his grub ordering privileges after he failed to pick up a delivery from the front desk on time and they all hatched and escaped.
They told me not to have live bugs designated as Hold For Pickup anymore 😦
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I’m sorry you lost your 2,000 crickets but knowing the thief probably unleashed thousands of crickets inside their house or car is the kind of thing everyone who’s had a package stolen dreams of.
im so tired so here’s a recap of what trump did today summarized and probably incomplete because we are in super hell:
End birthright citizenship (a.k.a the 14th amendment)
Remove the legal existence of non-binary people
Withdraw from the world health organization
pardon jan 6 people
He did sign an executive order saying that children born in the U.S., but to undocumented immigrants, won’t be U.S. citizens. But there’s no way the Supreme Court will stand for ending the 14th amendment via executive order. Even his appointees oppose this.
An important note nonetheless: The Nazi Party started out by declaring a state of emergency so it could seize dictatorial powers, which he hasn’t done, and by ending birthright citizenship. So that it could strip citizenship from the Jews. This is what you might call a huge red flag – one in a lonnnng line of them.
And that “departments running federal prisons, migrant shelters, rape shelters and other ‘intimate spaces’ will be directed to protect single-sex spaces for privacy.”
And that federal employee records and federal department messaging will also uphold this.
The real fuckery here is gonna be in this part: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable… “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
That may also be its downfall, I suppose. I don’t think it’s possible to say what size reproductive cell someone was fated to produce at conception. This drags it into some wild religious belief territory, for starters.
Even more likely to become its downfall: the number of people suing because to all intents and purposes, they’re “biologically” men or women, but the federal government is now demanding that they…. Whatever it’s going to demand they do… with the visibly wrong crowd.
The executive order also says, “Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide to the U.S. Government, external partners, and the public clear guidance expanding on the sex-based definitions set forth in this order.”
Good fucking luck to THEM.
This executive order also bans “Federal funds… expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
Which will definitely be yet another series of court cases.
“Agencies shall effectuate this policy by taking appropriate action to ensure that intimate spaces designated for women, girls, or females (or for men, boys, or males) are designated by sex and not identity.” In practice, unless you change the bathroom signs to say “Small reproductive cell/Large reproductive cell,” people are just going to go on as we all normally do.
I’m just dying to hear which intersex variations produce which sizes of reproductive cells.
What about the ones who don’t produce reproductive cells at all?
“Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof” LMAO what.
TL;DR: He didn’t remove the legal existence of nonbinary people, he removed the legal recognition of nonbinary people, and all other transgender people, by federal agencies.
A whole lot of shit is run by state, county, and city agencies.
He did withdraw from the WHO. He did not give any kind of deadline for how long that will take, and the to-do list in the executive order sounds really onerous and detailed and difficult.
“Thanks to decades of strong partnership, the United States of America plays a crucial role in supporting WHO to protect and improve the health of Americans and people around the world. The United States is a strong advocate for global health security. An example is the fight against polio, where the country is a key partner in the WHO-led eradication efforts, which protect Americans and communities worldwide from the resurgence of this preventable disease. In partnership with the United States, WHO is advancing innovation in health surveillance and biolab security to address emerging threats. Through improved monitoring and preparation of responses, WHO and the United States are working together to strengthen global resilience against health and security risks.
Those are all major bipartisan issues.
I’m gonna predict he’s going to have massive pushback from Congress on this one.
At the time Trump issued the pardons, there were about 700 defendants who either never received prison sentences or had already completed their sentences, meaning pardons or commutations would have little practical impact on them, beyond restoring voting rights and gun rights for those who were convicted of felonies.
More than 600 people were sentenced to incarceration, but only a small fraction of them are still behind bars. Many of those who are in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons were convicted of violent attacks on police officers protecting the Capitol during an assault in which Jan. 6 defendants were armed with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device.
More than 140 police officers were injured and several Trump supporters died during the attack, including one who was shot trying to breach the House Speaker’s Lobby and another who died in the middle of a brutal battle at the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of the day took place.
…An attorney who worked on Jan. 6 cases as a federal prosecutor told NBC News that it was always possible that Trump would return to power and pardon Capitol riot defendants but that the Justice Department "pressed ahead anyway” because “political considerations should not play any part in the Justice Department’s evaluation of facts and law, which showed that these were crimes — some of them terribly serious crimes — that warranted prosecution.”
The source said that they and, they suspected, many of their colleagues "have no regrets about having pursued these cases” and that the effort remains highly consequential because it created “a definitive, public factual record of what actually transpired” on Jan. 6.
“These cases assured police officers and civilians who were assaulted at the Capitol that there were people, and there was a Department of Justice, who recognized what they endured and sacrificed. These cases led to hundreds of defendants’ acknowledging their crimes by pleading guilty in open court and hundreds of others’ being found guilty at trial,” the source said. “The work is likely be terminated before it can be fully completed, most significantly by the abrupt termination of the special counsel’s work. But the record stands.”
As I said elsewhere:
I am begging everyone to stop treating EOs like they are passed laws or judicial decisions. They’re not. The entire point of this is to scare everyone and get them to comply in advance. This is ‘Shock and Awe, Executive Order edition.’ Will Congress comply? Maybe. Will the courts bow down to him? Maybe. But don’t act like you assume that they will, don’t obey in anticipation. Make plans to keep yourself safe if Congress does roll over and the courts do just suck up to him, yes, but don’t comply in advance. Fascism expects you to do this.
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amhrancas 