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Links #757

January 5, 2025 by Maggie McNeill

I don’t for a second believe that this woman is going into labor.
–  Caleb Stewart

The movie Amadeus continues to inspire modern musicians, as demonstrated by this takeoff on “Gangnam Style” called to my attention by Mike Siegel.  The links above it were provided by IncarcerNation, Tracy Quan, T. Greg Doucette, Tim Cushing, Ryan Marino, Stephen Lemons, and C.J. Ciaramella, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

In the News (#1501)

January 4, 2025 by Maggie McNeill

You don’t [leave] any human being on earth…lying on a cement floor in their own shit.  –  Mrs. White

Torture Chamber

The government calls this “correction”; for journalists to parrot that ugly euphemism is a choice:

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has ordered that 13 [screws] and a…nurse [collaborator] be fired after the [brutal murder] of a…[human being locked] in [one of the state’s filthy cages by] a…[gang] attack that [even] their [own] union called “incomprehensible”…[The murder of] Robert L. Brooks…[was] at least partly captured on video.  [Prison bureaucrats at first tried to downplay the savage, animalistic beating by calling it]…a “use of force” [and talking about the crime the victim had been convicted of]…The[y also first rewarded the thugs with paid vacations]…Hochul [made the logically-absurd claim that]…“The vast majority of [screws] do extraordinary work“[, in apparent ignorance of the meaning of the word “extraordinary”]…

Pyrrhic Victory (#995)

Judges have ruled that if cops forcibly hold your head to unlock your phone, it counts as “consent” to root through your property:

Apple is working on a new s[stupid] doorbell camera that uses Face ID to unlock your door…The camera could be released by the end of 2025 “at the soonest”…The lock would work just like your iPhone, automatically unlocking your door when you or another resident looks at it…this device will “likely” work with existing third-party HomeKit s[stupid] locks and that the company may also partner with a s[tupid] lock company “to offer a complete system on day one”…

Torture Chamber (#1110)

Just in case you thought screws restricted their petty sadism to the prisoners:

For people entering prisons, jails, or courts, consent is coerced at every visit.  Throughout the time that I traveled to these institutions, I felt caught in an inescapable loop, always forced to let someone [grope] my [breasts] under the guise of “security”.  After spending time and money traveling to [prisons]…far from urban centers, visitors are not likely to challenge demeaning [molestation disguised as a “]search[“]…The fear of canceled visits, retaliation against imprisoned loved ones, or being late to court appearances makes people comply…Questioning the search process can end the visit…Carceral institutions are sites where sexual violence is routine and protected by law…In 2019, New York settled a class action lawsuit for conducting unlawful, invasive [sexual assault]s on jail visitors.  This year, California paid a $5 million settlement to Christina Cardenas, a woman [who was groped by screws] before a doctor sexually violated her…[after belching out the magic rights-negating word “]contraband[“]…But these settlements are the exception, not the rule…

Thought Control (#1362)

Laws criminalizing women for pragmatic thoughts are equally unconstitutional, but don’t expect any judge to recognize that anytime soon:

A federal judge…struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers [if a wannabe censor pointed at any book in their collection and belched out the word] “harmful”…Judge Timothy Brooks [wrote]…“The law deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest”…

Don’t Call It Trafficking (#1411)

It’s never called “trafficking” when the government and crony corporations do it:

No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners [as slave labor] to private companies than Alabama.  With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.  Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease [slave]s from one of the most violent, overcrowded…prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone…The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000…Most jobs are inside [prisons]…but more than 10,000 [enslaved prisoners] have logged a combined 17 million work hours outside Alabama’s prison walls since 2018, for entities like city and county governments and businesses that range from major car-part manufacturers and meat-processing plants to distribution centers for major retailers like Walmart…

Eavesdropping (#1482)

If a system lets “authorized” busybodies spy on you, “unauthorized” ones can do the same:

…the Salt Typhoon…hackers [have still not been expelled] from most of the compromised systems and [officials] were unable to give a timeline for when that would be achieved…the effects of the hack threaten to be…widespread, with CISA and its counterpart agencies in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada warning this month that Salt Typhoon’s campaign extends beyond just U.S. networks…[and] NBC News report[ed] that the hackers also accessed…metadata…of more than a million Americans…[cybersecurity expert] Tom Kellermann [said]…“This is something we’re going to be dealing with for years, to identify all the back doors that [copsucking politicians forced companies to install] in the systems”…

Torture Chamber (#1493)

Be fair; how much medical skill does it take to repeatedly yell “Stop faking!” at people?

One doctor accidentally chopped off part of a newborn’s…finger…[and cho]ked two nurses…in a rage.  Another…drained the wrong side of a patient’s chest…and altered a medical record to [cover]…the [mistake]…A third…botch[ed] 10 surgeries in four years…and [subjected victims to] extensive, medically inappropriate procedures.  Common to all…is…their most recent place…of employment: the New York state prison system.  They are among [the incompetent] physicians…who…ma[ke] up [more than 10%] of the system’s full-time core of doctors, despite being sanctioned for horrific mistakes and other professional abuses…Some were hired…after serving lengthy probationary sentences meted out by the state’s Board for Professional Medical Conduct…

 

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Tyranny | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Son of Fridaystein

January 3, 2025 by Maggie McNeill

The unnamed multitudes for whom “research” is anathema and “critical thinking” might as well be some obscure principle of Hindu metaphysics, are the greatest enemies of truth and reason in the world today.
–  “Gullible’s Travels”

Christmas comes only once a year, and in my opinion it seems a bit rude to rush a guest out practically as soon as he arrives.
–  “The Feast of Stephen”

Unless the burgeoning power of police to victimize peaceful people is radically amputated, it must eventually result in catastrophic consequences for any society so afflicted.
–  “Catastrophic Consequences”

Tyrants never fight harder than when they know they’re losing.
–  “New Year’s Eve 2020”

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Forty Years

January 2, 2025 by Maggie McNeill

Forty years ago this month, I accepted money for sex for the first time.  It was Friday of the first full week of January; according to a perpetual calendar that would’ve been January 11th, 1985.  When my blog was only a few weeks old, I shared the story in these words:

An engineer who was a friend of one of my professors had to go out of town on business; his wife, also an engineer, was away as well, but they had been waiting for some time for a contractor to do some work on their house and he had offered to squeeze them in between two long jobs.  The gentleman was willing to trust the contractor in his house but not with his keys, but I came highly recommended so I was offered a house-sitting gig.  All I had to do was open the house at 8 AM, supervise the contractors until they left and close up by 6 PM.  For this I was to be paid $5/hour, 10 hours a day for seven days, or $350 total; not bad for a broke coed in those days.  The contractors got done ahead of schedule, by Friday morning, and the engineer also came home early and arrived about 4 that afternoon.  While I was showing him a few things the contractor had asked me to point out, he kept finding excuses to rub up against me and eventually came right out and propositioned me.

I honestly don’t know what got into me, because without hesitation I said, “Can I stay on the clock?”  He raised an eyebrow and I elaborated, “I was counting on being paid through the weekend.”

“OK, if that’s what you want,” he said, and he was as good as his word.  It took less than an hour, and when he forked over the whole $350 I felt rather proud of myself.

For the next couple of years, I expected guys who wanted to date me to provide a monetary gift in addition to the cost of dinner or whatever; though I was never very specific about amounts, they learned fast that cheapskates would not long remain in my good graces.  As one might expect, that meant most of my gentlemen were at least a decade older than I was, but that never bothered me; undergrad boys were generally far too immature to hold my interest.  I never advertised or otherwise put myself out in public; my business was all word of mouth.  But unlike many of today’s sugar babies, I had no illusions about what I was doing and what prudes (or cops) would call it.  Alas, I was too young to recognize that no one man I was likely to attract would give me as good a deal as I could give myself, and so it was that (almost) exactly ten years later my poor decisions blew up in my face, and I returned to making my way in the world by the same means I had first learned barely two months after turning 18.  The rest, as the saying goes, is history.  But I can’t help wondering how the course of my life might’ve been different (and almost certainly worse) had I not been offered that house-sitting gig four decades ago.

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New Year’s Day 2025

January 1, 2025 by Maggie McNeill

Happy New Year, dear readers!

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New Year’s Eve 2024

December 31, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

However destructive a wildfire may be, it’s at least possible to fight it when there aren’t hordes of fools running around throwing lit matches everywhere they go.  – “New Year’s Eve 2023“

Though “sex trafficking” hysteria has imploded, that does not mean we will soon enter a new golden age of sex workers rights; as I wrote two years ago today,

When the last iteration of “sex trafficking” hysteria died in the 1920s, the laws it spawned remained and are still being used to persecute people for thoughtcrime to this very day; the laws passed over the past 20 years will likewise long outlive the moral panic which spawned them.

Furthermore, no massive structure built over 15 years disappears without leaving debris.  Trumpists are still vomiting out “sex trafficking” myths in support of their anti-migrant, anti-LGBT, anti-porn, and anti-brown people agendas; cops still use the propaganda to justify raping Asian sex workers; gullible stenographers who dare to call themselves “journalists” still uncritically repeat copaganda; and even those who have finally admitted that the “trafficking” mythology is a load of dingo’s kidneys now label it a “right-wing conspiracy theory” and refuse to admit their own culpability for the society-wide toxic effects of the racist, misogynistic wanking fantasy they helped spread for so long.  The ascendance of Trumpism and the re-criminalization of abortion across much of the US are the direct results of that ugly narrative, and both book-burning crusades and the widespread demonization of anything to do with LGBT people are other offshoots of the same noxious root system which, had it been dug out and burned in the Oughts, would have been neither robust enough nor extensive enough to engender such toxic growths.  The moral panic is over, but its rotten fruit have burst, spewing xenophobic, anti-sex, authoritarian poison all over American society.  It’s going to take many years of arduous, unremitting effort to clean it up, and that’s assuming there are more willing to do so than are actively engaged in making it worse.

Posted in Holidays, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, Tyranny | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Diary #757

December 30, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

We intentionally did a little “smaller” Christmas celebration this year, because I knew Grace might not have the energy for a lot of noise and bustle.  On top of that, the radiation is taking its toll on her throat, which often hurts her too much to swallow; her oncologist prescribed a viscous solution of lidocaine that she can swallow a few minutes before eating to make swallowing anything rougher than liquid bearable.  But she did just fine; after she had a little breakfast we gathered beside the tree and fire and exchanged presents with the friends who usually gather with us on holidays.  My friend Sophie helped out quite a bit, bringing a couple of dishes and helping me with logistics just in case I needed to attend to Grace, and though I had to puree her turkey and gravy she was able to eat, and she didn’t even get too tired to socialize.  Everyone seemed to like their presents, and in addition to the nice ones Grace got a very important one: Sophie took up a collection from her usual donors and presented me with $1000 toward her dentures, which means we now have enough!  As soon as her doctors declare her in remission, we’ll get the impressions taken and her dentures ordered, and by the time they arrive she should be getting over the throat pain; that’s a good thing, because although she loves soup I’m sure she’ll be ready for something more substantial by then!

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Links #756

December 29, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

The four accused her of “interfering with the dead.”  –  Kevin Underhill

Alice Cooper and Rob Halford are featured in this video I recently happened upon; it’s not amazing or anything, but it’s certainly interesting.  The links above it were provided by Jesse Walker, The Onion, C.J. Ciaramella, Phoenix Calida, Walter Olson, Nun Ya, and IncarcerNation, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

In the News (#1500)

December 28, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

I’m not guilty, and they’re not gonna make me believe I’m guilty.  –  Brandy Moore

Property of the State (#1149)

Some light enters the defective brain of a moral imbecile:

Leake County, Mississippi…District Attorney Steven Kilgore…[has] for years deployed patently frivolous criminal charges in an attempt to [force] drug-using mothers [into] the help he thought they needed, whether they wanted it or not…[the] legal ordeal…[of one of his victims wa]s detailed in a Mississippi Today story…and…remarkabl[y], Kilgore, who seems to have previously overlooked the human consequences of treating mothers as criminals based on hospital drug tests, had an awakening of his own as a result…”I’ve reevaluated our stance on the topic and have decided not to handle these cases anymore,” Kilgore [said]…after learning how his decisions had harmed…women, several of whom received stiff prison sentences because they failed to [jump through all the hoops set up by] the…drug court program…including paying hundreds of dollars in fines and fees each month…submitting to home searches and drug tests, and waiving medical privacy…for up to five years…

The Vultures Descend (#1323)

Moral imbeciles can always be trusted to abuse any power they’re given:

[Psychopathic South Carolina politicians] are renewing their push for a piece of legislation that would allow [psychopathic] prosecutors to charge a woman who got an abortion with homicide…[she] could then be…[condemned to] death…

Thought Control (#1345)

It’s always nice to see authoritarian fanatics hoist with their own petard:

The head of a Texas school district says the Bible had to be removed from school libraries because of a new state law prohibiting…books…[containing] sexually explicit or vulgar content…even though [cherry-picked] portions of the Bible remain available in the district’s libraries…The [announcement] sparked outrage from local parents [who have never actually read the Bible and cannot comprehend the plain text of a law], with many expressing disbelief at the [100% predictable consequences of a law they want to use only to censor books they dislike]…

The Widening Gyre (#1401)

Cops keep pissing into the wind, so it’s inevitable some will spray back on them:

In a December 16 Instagram post that received more than 190,000 likes, user Ernest Carter shared a video of a Coca-Cola delivery truck that he claimed was found “full of kids”…and that the video showed police getting the children off the truck.  “The same video and false claim have circulated elsewhere on Instagram, [Twitter], Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, YouTube, Rumble and Gettr — including in Spanish and French,” AFP reports…In a follow-up video, he said that his initial post about trafficked children was wrong but there were two abandoned kids found on the truck.  This was also wrong.  The truck and the police depicted were actually outside a mall in Davenport, Iowa, where the local police association was running a toy…drive…

I Spy (#1452) 

Cops everywhere are moral imbeciles, and those who facilitate their evil are enemies of humanity:

Serbia[n cops] have repeatedly used Cellebrite tools to unlock mobile phones so they could then infect them with potent malware, including the phones of activists and a journalist, according to a new report from…Amnesty International…Amnesty…says it, along with researchers at Google, discovered a vulnerability in a wide spread of Android phones which Cellebrite was exploiting.  Qualcomm, the impacted chip manufacturer, has since fixed that vulnerability.  And Amnesty says Google has remotely wiped the spyware from other infected devices….Cellebrite is a…[fascist] Israeli company that sells its mobile forensics technology to [anyone who can pay] all over the world…[and] in multiple cases…these arrests or detentions appear to have been orchestrated specifically to infect a device…

Welcome to the Future (#1461)

Don’t let computers call them, either:

Schools are employing dubious…software to accuse teenagers of wanting to harm themselves and sending the cops to their homes [using that excuse] — with [typically] chaotic and traumatic results…the…software…tracks every word [students] type [on school-issued devices and]…unsurprisingly…[often] woefully misinterpret[s] what the students are actually trying to say.  A 17-year-old in Neosho, Missouri, for instance, was woken up by the police in the middle of the night…[because] a poem she had written years ago triggered the alarms of a software called GoGuardian Beacon, which its maker [markets to control-freak educational bureaucrats] as a way to “safeguard students from physical harm”…

Feudalism Redux (#1472)

Paxton is a dangerous psychopath Texans have empowered to destroy as many human lives as possible:

The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has sued a New York doctor…[named] Megan Carpenter [for] sen[ding] abortion pills to a 20-year-old Texas woman through telemedicine…After the woman sought medical attention for severe bleeding in July, the [abusive sire of the 9-week fetus rooted through her belongings]…and found the abortion pills…Because Carpenter is based in New York, Paxton’s lawsuit will come up against New York’s shield law, which dictates that officials in the state not cooperate with attempts by other states to sue or prosecute providers who send abortion pills to people in states that ban abortion.  Seven other states have passed similar shield laws…[which have] helped providers send pills to more than 9,700 people [per month] who live in [wannabe totalitarian] states…

 

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, News, Perception, Tyranny | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Back Issue #138

December 27, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

Hypersuggestible people…can be induced to “remember” all sorts of fantastic things which are not even physically possible, much less grounded in actual events.  –  “False Witness”

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