#statutory demand

[lexlawuk]

Abusive Winding-up Petition Based on DIY Statutory Demands Restrained (Invenia v Hudson)

In the recent case of Invenia Technical Computing Corporation & Anor v Matthew Hudson [2024] EWHC 1302 (Ch), the High Court issued a landmark judgment that serves as a stark costs warning against the misuse of statutory demands and winding-up petitions. This case highlighted the severe consequences that can follow when a creditor takes a DIY approach and fails to seek appropriate legal advice…

[defective-titan]

Shitty that I kinda miss 2019-2021 era bc my ex made me so horrifically depressed I was actually Skinny for a hot minute.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Billionaire-proofing the internet

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.

It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN. The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 per file) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he changed majors and stopped studying Computer Science.

No, really.

What's more, none of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists. The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."

One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.

You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was bad tactics.

Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."

We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.

Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.

Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?

There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.

Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice – it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there's no fire exits!"

This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.

We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.

Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics:

https://freeourfeeds.com/

Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.

That's why Apple went so hard after Beeper Plus, a service that enhanced iMessage's security by making conversations between Apple and Android users as private as chats that were confined to Apple users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

It's why Elon Musk periodically freaks out and suspends users who list their Mastodon userids in their Twitter bios:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/

And it's why Meta will suspend your account if you link to Pixelfed, a Fediverse-based alternative to Instagram:

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project

The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs. It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech and free as in beer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

In the years since, a thicket of laws we colloquially call "IP" has grown up around services and products, and people have literally forgotten that there is an alternative to wheedling people to endure the pain of leaving a proprietary system for a free one. IP has put the imaginations of people who dream of a free internet in chains.

We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.

After all, there's no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.

If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

[tinfoil-jones]

The pursuit of knowledge is long and demanding but do you also wanna know what else is long and demanding? That right! My need for this man *point to jerk Ford* so here are more questions (I realized the lack of child jerk Ford and sea grunks and now my brain won't leave me alone)

1. Since jerk Ford is a jerk from birth and holds a grudge till the day he dies, how much of Crampelter life did he ruin? I wanna see little jerk Ford saying fuck you and little Stan's reaction

2. If Stan were to get grounded or get detention, how much longer till jerk Ford also gets grounded or gets detention? Or does he just break Stan out of them?

3. Has there been time where Stanley does something bad but people just assumed it's jerk Ford pretending to be Stan or that Stan was pressured into helping jerk Ford? I need to know who Filbrick blames for the missing golden chain in the lost legend comic

4. We're there like full-blown panic for the coast guard, the navy, the fishermen, the pirate, and the marine life? Because "oh God he's in the seas, HE'S IN THE SEAS"

(I will be back >:) muehehehehe)

(1)

In High School, people told Crampelter to leave Stanford Pines alone; that even though he wasn't as big as his brother, he still could and would hurt you in ways you never thought possible.

Crampelter did not listen.

After a week of no retribution from Jerk Ford, and Crampelter assumed that everyone must have been exaggerating, sure the guy was mouthy as hell but-

Wait.

Why is he telling everyone he f***ed Crampelters mom?

He's just bluffing, there's no way-

And then Crampelters mom goes to jail for statutory. And he never lives it down.

He had to move out of Glass Shard Beach after High School.

(2)

Believe it or not, in the AU Stan was a good student. Teachers realized early on that the only way to keep Jerk Ford somewhat behaved was to keep his twin with him, because he was the only person he wasn't a jerk to and could actually talk him down.

So Stanley got a lot of extra help and support from the school and even his parents for his learning needs to be met, so he and Jerk Ford could share as many classes as possible throughout their school years.

Obviously they didn't share every single class because they still had differing interests (Jerk Ford taking robotics while Stan was a theatre kid) and Jerk Ford was a Math and Science prodigy, but they were usually in the same core classes.

Jerk Ford was indefinitely banned from detention in his Freshman year because if he was in detention, you bet whoever the teacher or supervisor was wasn't going to be there.

(3)

Because of how catastrophically bad Jerk Ford was, nothing Stanley did in comparison could ever look that bad.

Stanley took the gold chain? That same week, he and Jerk Ford tried opening a lemonade stand only for the Sibling brothers to do the same thing and take all of their business (not that they got a lot because everyone in Glass Shard Beach stayed clear of Jerk Ford even at the tender age of twelve).

And what happens? Well, Jerk Ford said or did something because the Sibling brothers stand was shut down by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and also the f***ing FBI showed up; Ascot and Dickie had to wear ankle monitors all summer.

Stanley wouldn't let Jerk Ford take the fall for something he did, however, so he'd own up to it. He'd be punished like a normal kid, none of that 'hold an extra Stan sign' stuff.

(4)

When the expedition for the Stan O'War II began, Jerk Ford was mostly unknown at first. He'd been out of his dimension and believed to be dead for three decades.

At first.

At first.

[itsbansheebitch]

The Cody Ko Allegations: It was a CRIME

TW: Sexual violence

Cody Ko has been accused of committing statutory rape against Tana Mongeau. These allegations have been around for years, but he he, his friends, and his subreddit have repeatedly covered them up. I would recommend D'Angelo Wallace's video on the topic.

Not only has Tana's story stayed consistent, but also, she has a WITNESS. Gabbie Hanna saw what was happening and tried to stop Cody, but he continued anyway.

Gabbie has been seen on video telling the EXACT SAME STORY.

The idea that if you lose good will in the eyes of the public that it doesn't matter what happens to you... it's terrifying. People will do ANYTHING to demand a perfect victim.

It doesn't matter if you don't like Tana or Gabbie. IT WAS A CRIME

Cody's fans have taken two different approaches:

1, insulting Tana in pretty much anyway you can imagine/saying that if Tana is fine, then why should we care

2, demanding a response from Cody. Since Cody has been vigilant with his comment moderation, his fans have moved to his wife's channel to demand an answer.

[no-passaran]

[...] The International Olympic Committee, FIFA, UEFA, FIBA, and other sports organisations are complicit as they allow a continuous participation of the occupying apartheid regime in their events. Following a swift response and an instant suspension of Russia, it is now difficult for them to justify turning a blind eye to the Israeli government’s actions.

We must however take heart from history and support the liberation of Palestine as generations before us brought apartheid to an end in South Africa. That struggle took on all possible dimensions, with one of the earliest being suspension of sporting ties – which aided in peacefully isolating the South African regime, demonstrated a global rejection of apartheid and changed domestic perspectives in the country.

This act must now be extended to Israel – not only due to its practice of settler-colonialism, military occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, apartheid and illegal exploitation of natural resources on occupied territories – but also due to its brutal assault on cultural, academic and sporting life of the Palestinian society.

We thus urgently demand:

An immediate suspension of Israel from participation in all international sports until it fully complies with international law and sports regulations

For global and European sports governing bodies to immediately uphold their statutory obligations – especially their own rules on human rights and non-discrimination given Russian, South African and other precedents. This would include, inter alia, a ban on Israel competing at the 2024 Paris Olympics, UEFA’s European Championship and FIFA’s World Cup.

For a deeper analysis on the rationale to suspend Israel from international sports, please review this paper (also available in Spanish) that will be sent to sports organisations.

[palestinegenocide]

More than 300 Palestinian sports teams are calling to ban Israel from the Olympics over its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The Israeli offensive on Gaza has claimed the lives of 26,706 civilians, including 11,422 infants and children. Ninety percent of Palestinians are internally displaced and living in inhumane conditions with “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” No functional hospitals. No mosques. No churches. No libraries. No schools. No universities. No bakeries. At this rate, the brutal Israeli regime will soon destroy every aspect of life in Gaza, including its sports.

Join the global campaign to peacefully disrupt the road to Paris 2024 calling on the IOC to #BanIsrael until it ends its crimes against Palestinians and recognizes our UN-stipulated rights.

Register your group to join the campaign

We thus urgently demand:

An immediate suspension of Israel from participation in all international sports until it fully complies with international law and sports regulations

For global and European sports governing bodies to immediately uphold their statutory obligations – especially their own rules on human rights and non-discrimination given Russian, South African and other precedents. This would include, inter alia, a ban on Israel competing at the 2024 Paris Olympics, FIFA World Cup, and UEFA’s EURO. 

For a deeper analysis on the rationale to suspend Israel from international sports, please review this paper (also available in Spanish) that will be sent to sports organisations.

Here’s what you can do.

1. Join the Global Day(s) of Action, March 15-17 

Ahead of the IOC executive board meeting in Lausanne Switzerland (March 19-21), take the call from Palestinian teams to your National Olympic Committee, International Sports Federations and Recognized Sports Federations. Organize protests, sit-ins, peaceful disruptions, or awareness raising events on Israeli attacks on Palestinian sports. Register your group for more information.

2. Olympics qualifiers and events

From now until the Olympic Games start in July, the road to Paris will be filled with opportunities to remind the IOC that there is no place in the Olympics for genocide perpetrators. Earlier this month, four runners took the #CeasefireNow message to the Olympic Trials Marathon in Florida, crossing the finish line with Palestinian flags. Find information on Olympic time trials and qualifiers (also here) or other Olympics-related events in your area. Register your group for more information.

3. Kick Israeli apartheid out of sports

Is your country a signatory to the International Convention Against Apartheid in Sports? If so, it has an obligation to “take all appropriate action to secure the expulsion of a country practising apartheid from international and regional sports bodies.” Register your group to learn what you can do.

4. Sign the petition to ban Israel from world sports

Join more than 70,000 people from all over the world who have signed the petition calling for banning Israel from international sport.

Add your signature here

Israel has killed Palestinian Olympic Football coach Hani Al Masdar, destroyed the Palestinian Olympic Committee offices, and turned sports facilities into shameful mass detention and torture centers.

We can’t sit back as the IOC allows Israel to use the Olympics to sportswash its genocide in Gaza and its apartheid regime against Palestinians everywhere. Support the call from Palestinian teams. 

Join the campaign to #BanIsrael from the Olympics and peacefully disrupt the road to the Paris 2024 games. 

[torillatavataan]

Finland seizes Russian state-owned property

Finland's National Enforcement Authority has begun seizing properties in Helsinki that belong to the Russian state. The agency operates under the remit of the Justice Ministry and is responsible for undertaking the state's statutory enforcement duties.

The seizure of the property is related to compensation claims made by the Ukrainian state-owned gas firm Naftogaz. Naftogaz has demanded more than five billion euros in compensation from Russia following the Kremlin's invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the firm's subsequent loss of gas reserves, pipelines, and warehouses in the Crimea region.

Full article by YLE

According to Helsingin Sanomat, 44 properties have been seized, most of them located in Helsinki. The seized properties include the Russian Centre of Science and Culture, an office building, four waterfront properties, and several limited liability housing shares.

According to Iltalehti, in Finland, Naftogaz are represented HPP Attorneys, pro bono.

"This is something that we feel is important and we want to play our part in helping Ukraine. We felt that this is a meaningful way for us to help."

Images via Iltalehti

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Emily Yoffe

Published: Jan 20, 2025

Toward the end of the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s campaign released an unexpected ad, and one that was extremely politically effective. The tagline—“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”—could go down in history as one of the most effective campaign slogans ever devised.

The ad reinforced a promise Trump repeated at rally after rally as he toured the swing states: If returned to office, he would immediately take on the gender ideology the Biden administration had embraced. Namely, he would end policies such as allowing males on women’s sports teams and in women’s locker rooms, and the housing of male prisoners who identify as transwomen in federal prisons for female offenders.

President Trump has addressed all this and more in an expansive executive order he will sign tomorrow afternoon called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Here is what the order sets out:

The Executive Order establishes Government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female.

All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.

Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination.

“Woman” means an “adult human female.”

The Executive Order directs that Government identification like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.

The Executive Order ends the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and taxpayer funded “transition” for male prisoners.

The Executive Order ends the forced recitation of “preferred pronouns” and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex.

This includes protection in the workplace and in federal funded entities like schools.

Asked why Trump is making sex-based policy a day one priority of his administration, an incoming senior administration official said, “This really was a defining issue of the campaign. The president is going to be fulfilling the promises he made on the trail.” The executive order puts it more bluntly: “Radical gender ideology has devastated biological truth and women’s safety and opportunity.”

It is becoming something of a presidential tradition to begin a term with sweeping directives regarding “gender identity.” President Biden, on his first day in office, demanded the federal government “review all existing orders, regulations, guidance documents, policies, programs, or other agency actions” that could impinge on transgender rights. Language and rules about transgender identities became embedded in the vast federal bureaucracy.

Now, Trump has ordered a reversal of all this. In an exclusive briefing with The Free Press, two senior officials provided a summary of the executive order. “Women deserve protections, they deserve dignity, they deserve fairness, they deserve safety,” said a senior policy adviser explaining why the order explicitly embraces the necessity of special treatment for women. “And so this is going to help establish that in federal policy and in federal laws.”

In reading the order, it’s clear that lawsuits challenging the new directives will start stacking up quickly. The order, for example, asserts that “All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.” This is far from mere symbolism. United States passports—which since 2022 have allowed citizens to choose “X” as their gender—will revert to offering exclusively male and female options, with the proviso that what people select must “reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.”

The executive order also “ends the forced recitation of ‘preferred pronouns’ and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex.” When asked about how this would affect public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment’s free speech protections, the senior policy adviser said the U.S. attorney general will enforce these rights. The adviser cited a 2022 federal court ruling to the effect that a Shawnee State University philosophy professor was deprived of his First Amendment rights by being forced to address a transgender student using that student’s chosen pronouns.

The task of the Trump administration now will be to promulgate rules implementing the order, which will affect people’s daily lives. It is inevitable that activist organizations will take these matters to court. The policy adviser said the administration is ready for litigation, predicting Trump will be “100 percent successful.”

It’s a fight the new administration seems to relish. Both officials said the executive order has the potential to broaden the president’s support. “Just take a look at the polling,” the senior official said. “The public is broadly in favor of the president’s and of the Republican Party’s stance on gender. That there are two biological sexes is something that the public is supportive of.”

The executive order does not address one of the most contentious areas of transgender activism: “gender-affirming care” for minors, meaning putting gender-distressed young people on a swift course to transition and lifetime medication. The Biden administration ardently supported such treatments, even as other Western nations began to restrict them, and dozens of U.S. states began to ban them.

The Biden administration sued Tennessee over its ban. That case resulted in a contentious oral argument at the Supreme Court in December, after which most observers felt the court would probably uphold Tennessee’s law.

Asked about why the new executive order does not deal with this, the senior official said, “This executive order is the first of many. I would expect that anything the president said he would do on the trail regarding these issues, he’s going to be fulfilling those promises.”

The order ends with a sweeping statement about the fundamental issue the White House believes is at stake in this order: ”Men and women are equal but have obvious sexual differences,” it reads. “If federal policies promote such an obvious falsehood that men can become women, the government will forfeit all credibility. The government must maintain a commitment to recognizing biological reality to maintain the trust of the American people.”

This order is one of nearly 200 executive actions the White House is rolling out today. Among them: orders to declare a national emergency at the border; end all DEI programs across the federal government; withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; and a return-to-office directive for federal workers.

==

Go ahead and try to explain how this is unreasonable.

[titleleaf]

The disruptive effects of unpredictable embodiment were accompanied by a powerful cultural positioning of disabled people as eternal children or as old before their time. Employers routinely referred to disabled workers as ‘girls and boys’, whatever their age. Institutions such as asylums, hospitals and convalescence homes imposed rigid bedtimes and routines associated with the very young or the elderly. Campaigning organisations, largely led by non-disabled people until the 1980s, used images of children to fundraise for disabled adults, and found it hard to adjust to growing demands for choice, control and autonomy made by disabled people. Parents and other relatives also found it extremely hard to allow disabled family members the space to grow into adulthood, judging them unable to bear its burdens and therefore also excluded from its privileges. Fluctuating or insecure adult status was not simply a subjective experience or materially expressed in the design of mobility aids, as George Thomas had encountered. It was hardwired into statutory interventions, institutional practices, social attitudes and the campaigning methods of advocacy groups.

"Marriage, intimacy and adulthood in disabled people's lives and activism in twentieth-century Britain", Lucy Delap

[pluckyredhead]

Character Profile: Rose Wilson (Ravager)

By popular demand, the next member of the Lost Titans: Rose Wilson!

Rose was introduced in Deathstroke the Terminator #15 in 1992. She is the daughter of Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke the Terminator, and at the risk of rehashing stuff everyone knows, I have to give you the basics on Slade, too.

Slade Wilson was a soldier (originally in Vietnam, though that's obviously been updated since) who was so good at soldiering that the army gave him a super soldier serum that made him faster and stronger than any normal human. After leaving the military, he became an assassin - unbeknownst to his wife, Adeline, and their young sons Grant and Joey. When Slade's secret assassin-ing and ego caused Joey's throat to be slit, rendering him mute for life, Adeline left him.

The Wilson family first crossed paths with the New Teen Titans years later when Grant became the supervillain Ravager. When Grant's own janky powers got him killed, Slade decided this was the Titans' fault somehow and vowed revenge. This involved sleeping with a fifteen-year-old girl for some reason. Slade is a terrible person.

Meanwhile, Joey grew up to become the superhero Jericho, and became a long-standing member of the Titans. However, he got possessed by like a thousand ghosts at once, like you do, and went crazy and evil, and Slade had to kill him for his own good.

By this point, Slade had become such a popular character that he'd shifted from villain to antihero. (Never mind all the attempted child murder and statutory rape.) It was in this context, fresh after Joey's death, that Rose was introduced.

Rose is the daughter of a woman named Lillian Worth, a.k.a. Sweet Lili, a Cambodian woman who Slade once helped escape from the Khmer Rouge. Lili set up a high-end brothel in the States, and she and Slade became essentially fuckbuddies (this was after Slade's divorce), which eventually led to Rose. Lili didn't tell Slade about Rose because of his...everything, and Rose had a happy childhood, growing up with the other sex workers' kids in the brothel.

Unfortunately, Slade's enemies eventually came for Rose. Specifically, Slade's evil, shitty half-brother Wade LaFarge. (If you're thinking "Wait...Slade Wilson has a brother named Wade?" then yes, Deadpool was in fact Rob Liefeld shamelessly ripping off Deathstroke. Liefeld's collaborate Fabian Nicieza named him Wade to acknowledge this, and joked that he was Slade's brother. So Marv Wolfman gave Slade an actual brother named Wade, who sucks so bad and who nobody likes. I don't think Marv was happy about Deadpool.)

Anyway, Wade became the fourth Ravager (don't worry about the second or third, they don't matter) and kidnapped Rose. Slade...basically decided not to try to rescue her because he was busy, leaving the job to Lili and his best friend Wintergreen. Rose, who had been trained in martial arts by her mother, managed to partially escape on her own...at which point Lili showed up and tried to kill Wade by hitting him with her car...and driving them both off a cliff. This is usually described as Wade killing Lili, which...okay. (She died, but he secretly survived, because of course he did.)

Slade refused to take any responsibility for Rose, afraid of putting her in even more danger, so this extremely traumatized tween was placed in the care of the Titans, who at this point were led by Roy Harper. She was still a civilian at this point, although she did spar with the team, and she also showed she was not to be fucked with when women and children were in danger:

This is when Rose's powers first manifested: she has precognitive abilities, which originally involved lengthy visions of the distant future but quickly became flashes of what is about to happen, which makes her particularly good in a fight because she can predict what her opponent will do.

Also! During this period she became friends with Grant and also developed a brief but adorable crush on Kyle Rayner, while Bart Allen developed a brief but adorable crush on her. Babies!

She later shows up in the 1999 Titans series, considerably older (I'm assuming she's at least 18 here), when Roy hires her to be Lian's nanny, a job she takes very seriously:

But then the 1999 series was canceled. Then the 2003 Teen Titans series began, and very quickly it was revealed that Joey Wilson was alive, that he had been possessing his father, and that that was the reason for Slade's turn as an antihero, not any actual desire on Slade's part to be good. A newly freed Slade decides he wants a do-over with one of his kids.

Meanwhile, Rose has been placed with a foster family, because I guess she's somehow underage again? But said family is then murdered by Wade LaFarge - remember him? - who then kidnaps Rose. Who is rescued by Slade:

Rose, at Slade's encouragement, kills Wade and becomes the new Ravager. It's later revealed (to the reader, not to Rose) that Slade anonymously hired Wade to kill Rose's family because he wanted exactly this setup: for Rose to become completely emotionally dependent on and devoted to him.

Rose spends the next few years by her father's side, attacking the Titans and saying "Yes, daddy" in a sexy baby voice a lot. It's...tiresome. She's so determined to prove her loyalty that she even stabs her own left eye out, because we're in the mid-2000s now and it's peak edgelord time, baby! It's later explained that she's behaving like this because Slade drugged her with the same super soldier serum that gave him his powers (???), so Rose is now also extra strong, fast, etc.

Slade blackmails Dick (in his "villain" era) into briefly training Rose, and I have to include this panel because it kills me every time:

She's trying to be mean and scary but she loves the Harpers so much. I'm cry.

Anyway, Slade has only involved Dick as part of a convoluted plot to kill Superman by putting kryptonite in Rose's empty eye socket (sure), and when Dick reveals that kryptonite causes cancer in humans and that Slade knew that perfectly well and just didn't give a shit about Rose, Rose decides to go back to the side of good and join the Teen Titans properly.

It...does not go smoothly. Cassie hates and distrusts Rose and makes that very clear, and Rose responds by being as obnoxious and antisocial as possible, constantly accusing the other Titans of not trusting her, and basically causing problems on purpose. Like slipping naked into Tim's bed to surprise him problems:

I want to be clear that the writing here is absolutely abysmal. Johns and later writers (and artists) were trying to make Rose sexy sexy jailbait and also going for some kind of reductive Madonna/whore dichotomy with her and Cassie, and it's all very sexist and boring. But if you look past the, uh, actual comics, I do think that a lot of Rose's characterization here makes sense. She's a very traumatized teenager who expects people to dislike her, so she ensures that they dislike her to maintain control of the situation. She sees sex very much as something transactional and rooted in power exchange - which makes a lot of sense, since she was raised in a brothel! Plus she likes starting shit for fun. The comics are bad, but the idea of Rose is so, so good.

Another thing that is good in concept but shitty in execution: Rose/Eddie. As I mentioned in my Eddie profile, Eddie is utterly smitten with Rose pretty much immediately and he is both not at all subtle about it but also not at all a Nice Guy - his feelings are his to deal with and he never puts them on her to manage for him. Rose, for her part, doesn't seem to know how to handle just...a sweet boy who adores her, and so she alternates between flirting with him, being extremely mean to him, and being fiercely protective of him.

That last comes into play when Eddie is abducted by a villain team called (sigh) the Terror Titans. Rose fights her way through a gauntlet of them to rescue him, which is SO DAMN ROMANTIC even if the comic looks like shit. But she's so ruthless about it that Cassie and Tim discuss kicking her off the team, which she overhears - so she defects to the Terror Titans. Her plan is to go in undercover and take them down, but during the storyline she starts to wonder if maybe this isn't where she belongs after all.

Rose. Honey. Baby girl. The Terror Titans are led by the fucking Clock King, a loser in clock glasses who likes to sleep with teenage girls and is making other teenage superheroes fight each other to death in a ring. No, this is not where you belong.

(During this period Rose also becomes addicted to huffing adrenalin. I truly do not know how I made it through the late 2000s, y'all. The comics were abysmal.)

Somewhere in there Joey Wilson comes back as a hero, and he and Rose quickly bond, which is as touching as it is heartbreaking. But Joey is still deeply unwell, and despite Rose's best efforts, he goes villain again, and she has to help the Titans take him down. After butting heads with Cassie again, Rose decides to leave the Titans, again. She tries to convince a depowered Eddie to come with her, but he declines. She then stars in her own backup feature where she travels to a remote Canadian village and saves a bunch of women and children from trafficking; while she's gone, Eddie is killed. Rose then returns to the Teen Titans for the fifth time and remains on the team until Flashpoint.

New 52 Rose is...honestly I'm not even going to try to explain her, because most of it is just incomprehensible nonsense. She shows up as a supporting character (with two eyes) in Superboy and The Ravagers, but it really feels like Lobdell just used the character name (and a worse design, which is saying something) for an OC. She's basically hired muscle for an evil lab, and there's no mention of Deathstroke for ages.

Eventually over in Deathstroke's book, it's revealed that Rose's mother is Adeline in this universe, not Lili, which means that Rose has been completely whitewashed. Of course most art of her has always depicted her as white, but this erased any possibility of her being biracial. The Wilson family's New 52 adventures culminate in Slade killing both Grant and Joey by sticking a sword through their heads (?) while Rose watches in horror, which is so awful as to be actively hilarious.

Also the New 52 is of course where we got the first hint of a Jason/Rose relationship, when she appears in Red Hood and the Outlaws as his ex. This has nothing to do with any of her other completely contradictory appearances during this era. The New 52 was a goddamn mess.

Rebirth erased all of that mishegas, thankfully. Rose is once again Lili's daughter, and Lili is specified to be Hmong, meaning Rose is too. In a change from the pre-Flashpoint continuity, Rose was conceived while Slade and Addie were still married, meaning Slade was cheating on Addie with Lili. In fact, Slade was out of town saving Rose's life when Joey's throat was slit, so Addie viscerally hates Rose even though obviously none of that was Rose's fault. Despite this, Rose and Joey are quite close and love each other fiercely, which is nice, even if the astonishing toxicity of the Wilson family means they can't really do anything in a healthy or functional way, including love.

Here's an example of what I mean: during this period, Rose became possessed by an ancient Vietnamese warrior princess who occasionally took over her body. During one of those times, she killed Joey's fiancee (who was also sleeping with Slade) (and who Joey was cheating on with Slade's friend, a man at least twice his age). Joey forgave her. So that's...nice? I guess?

Both of you need so much therapy and also to go no contact with your father.

As of Infinite Frontier, Rose's original history seems to be pretty much intact, except that she has two eyes. (Her missing eye was restored by the New 52, although she was wearing an eyepatch in Death Metal. Maybe just for fun?)

She next appeared in Robin, hanging out on Lazarus Island with Damian, partially to keep an eye on him but mostly because she was trying to figure out what the deal was with one of the other competitors in the assassin tournament, a kid named Respawn. Eventually Respawn was revealed to be a clone of Talia and Slade, so basically Rose's younger half brother. Rose tried to take him under her wing, but she made the mistake of introducing him to Slade, who was like "Yes! A third chance to have a son and not fuck it all up entirely!" Rose was like "Hey maybe don't hang out with Slade" and Respawn was like "No this seems fine" and then Respawn was almost instantly murdered. So. That was a bummer.

Should've listened, Grant 2.0.

These days, Rose is a member of the clandestine team Stormwatch for some reason, and is appearing with them in Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Rose is one of those characters who is a fan favorite of gross dudes and so a lot of the writing (and art, oh god the art) around her has been truly abysmal. But she's so popular that every so often she's in something really solid, and even when the comics are bad, she somehow shines as a really fascinating, heartbreaking, lovable character. Maybe someday we'll get a really good Ravager and Jericho miniseries, that would be nice. In the meantime, there's always twelve thousand shitty issues of Teen Titans!

[lexlawuk]

Amanda Staveley fails to Set Aside Victor Restis' £3.5 Million Statutory Demand

British financier labels demand an ‘abuse of process’ that should be settled through arbitration. A recent ruling of the High Court has left Amanda Staveley, the co-owner of Newcastle United football club, facing payment of her substantial debt of nearly £3.5 million following a legal dispute with the Greek shipping tycoon Victor Restis. Victor had issued a statutory demand against Staveley,…

[olivafans]

The Treasury warns Congress that the debt ceiling could be reached in January. The FDA says that the decongestant in many cold medicines is ineffective

WASHINGTON-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said her agency would need to start taking "extraordinary measures," or special accounting maneuvers intended to prevent the nation from hitting the debt ceiling, as early as January 14, in a letter sent to congressional leaders Friday afternoon.

Kids do not click this link

"Treasury expects to hit the statutory debt ceiling between January 14 and January 23," Yellen wrote in the letter addressed to House and Senate leadership, at which point extraordinary measures would be used to prevent the government from breaching the nation's debt ceiling — which has been suspended until January 1.

The department has deployed the "extraordinary measures" before to keep the government operating. But once those measures run out, the government risks defaulting on its debt unless lawmakers and the president agree to lift the limit on the U.S. government's ability to borrow.

"I respectfully urge Congress to act to protect the full faith and credit of the United States," she said.

The news comes after President Joe Biden signed a bill into law last week that averted a government shutdown but did not include President-elect Donald Trump's core debt demand to raise or suspend the nation's debt limit. Congress approved the bill only after fierce internal debate among Republicans over how to handle Trump's demand. "Anything else is a betrayal of our country," Trump said in a statement.

After a protracted debate in summer 2023 over how to fund the government, policymakers crafted the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which included suspending the nation's $31.4 trillion borrowing authority until January 1, 2025.

Notably however, Yellen said, the debt is projected to temporarily decrease on January 2 because of a scheduled redemption of nonmarketable securities held by a federal trust fund associated with Medicare payments. As a result, "Treasury does not expect that it will be necessary to start taking extraordinary measures on January 2 to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations," she said.

The federal debt, which ballooned across both Republican and Democratic administrations, is now roughly $36 trillion. The spike in inflation after the coronavirus pandemic increased government borrowing costs; as a result, debt service next year will exceed spending on national security.

Republicans, who will have full control of the White House, House and Senate in the new year, have plans to extend Trump's 2017 tax cuts and other priorities but debate over how to pay for them.

Kids do not click this link

[jellogram]

I just think it's really fucking weird for the internet to be like "You owe us an apology for committing statutory rape against someone I have never met." Like why the fuck have you inserted yourself here? Either support his content or don't? It's one thing to defend young women and it's entirely another to act like someone owes the internet an explanation or apology for something that involves exactly two (2) people, both of whom have tried to keep this private.

Do you just want to see someone grovel? Will an empty apology make you feel better about watching his content? What exactly is the point of demanding that? It's gross and self-important, which is ironic because they're using those demands to feel morally superior.

[agp]

lets talk about birth assignment as sexual assault. lets talk about how the logic of statutory rape is used inversely to conclude that it cant be sexual assault. lets talk about the manufactured necessity of this intrusiveness. lets talk about the institutions that demand, facilitate, and execute this violence. lets talk about the coloniality of surveying, classifying, and discriminating between people. lets talk about the conquest of the human body by the medical system. lets talk about our morally mandated surrender to these institutions. lets talk about health as responsibility. lets talk about it in the context of those fourteen words. lets talk about how this applies to the distribution of labor and access to healthcare among different people. lets talk about having been assigned a gender as a unifying force, as a universal prerequisite to personhood. lets talk about who this duty falls back on - what category of person is constructed by its necessity. lets talk about bioessentialism and destiny. lets talk about violence in the context or birth assignment as sexual assault.

[corviiids]

(inspired by your earlier post about if L accused Sayu of being Kira) How do you think an au where Sayu got the death note would play out?

amazing question. i wrote so much more than i thought i was going to im so sorry. tl;dr i don't think the ultimate plot would change much but the beginning would sure be interesting.

i think if sayu found the death note, she would tell light before anyone else. he's clearly her most trusted confidant. light would tell her not to worry because it's clearly some chain letter shit but because she's clearly frightened of it he'd offer to hold it for her and get rid of it so she doesn't have to think about it.

now whether ownership officially passes to light at this point might depend on the specific wording they use. if light says 'hold onto it for you' or something to that effect it would likely just be sublet to light (wording from rule 13) - for our purposes im inclined to go with this version of events but i note the rules are really ambiguous on what the specific requirements and conditions are regarding ownership.

(i keep wanting to go through and do a full review of all the manga rules from like. almost like a statutory interpretation kind of lens but that's a stupid project i need to convince myself out of lmfao jesus)

hey this got really long and complicated. i thought it was going to be simple but now im going through branching possibilities literally for the sole purpose of analysing the rules so let's put the rest under the cut. click for me citing specific death note rules in the middle of my work day i guess GOD. you can also scroll to the bottom if you want to skip me talking about death note rules and just see my projected course of events

the issue of ownership actually doesn't matter that much at this point for reasons we will see but might change things a little bit down the road (see below re: ryuk and discussion of rule 47). let's go with the sublet thing for now and assume sayu is still the owner of the notebook but light is holding it.

light keeps the book, sayu tries not to think about it and fails. light can't resist testing it without sayu's knowledge. light meets ryuk. i note rule 13 states the death god will stay with the owner of the note. since light and sayu are in the same household (ie geographic distance is not an issue) and ryuk would find light more interesting, it's a coin flip which person he'd show up to (probably depends on the degree to which shinigami are bound by their rules which i don't have access to and can't review lol). let's assume for now that ryuk meets light first just for ease, but i will come back to this later because i actually prefer him showing up to sayu first while light is holding the notebook.

in the version where light meets ryuk first, then depending how forthcoming ryuk is with information, either sayu sees ryuk before light realises that's a risk or light realises sayu will see ryuk before she actually does. im leaning towards the latter because in canon light finds out in this order:

people who don't have the note can't see ryuk (when his mother comes into the room during their first meeting)

people who have touched the note CAN see ryuk (when sayu comes into the room asking for help with homework some days later)

so in this au, between events 1 and 2, light would realise that since sayu has touched and owns the note, she'll be able to see ryuk. i think light at this point would ask ryuk if there's any way to undo that effect at which point ryuk should inform light that forfeiting the note will allow sayu to stop seeing ryuk.

ok, now let's backtrack to before and say instead of light, ryuk shows up to sayu first. ryuk appears, sayu screams, ryuk informs sayu that light has used the note. light comes running because sayu screamed. light again in this timeline immediately demands to know how to get sayu out of this situation, partially because she's freaking out and partially because he's already pondering the possibilities and absolutely needs sayu not to know about any of this. she is already hysterical because hey, did this monster just say that her big brother killed someone?

ok here's where i got into a rabbithole digging through the rules for a loophole because i found a problem. (it's ok, i found one.)

we know a death note can pass from person to person because it happens in canon multiple times. we also know that losing the death note will erase your memory of the note (rule 22). where it gets interesting is that rule 47 provides that you will only lose your memories of the death note if you actually used it:

[...] You will not lose memory of the Death Note, for example, if you merely owned it and had not written anyone's name. [...]

you won't be able to see the shinigami anymore, but you'll still remember the notebook. not good enough for light - he needs sayu to forget completely or she'll be traumatised and he'll be compromised, especially because now she knows he used the notebook which makes her a liability. light now has two thoughts

he could ask sayu to kill one person using the notebook and then forfeit it so she doesn't remember the crime and can be free of the notebook forever, or

see if the shinigami can offer any other options.

1 is an interesting place for light's mind to go, but he goes with option 2 first because sayu looks like she's going to have a panic attack. luckily, there is another option, and we know ryuk is aware of it because of the events of the a-Kira story - this is lucky because even if a rule existed there's no guarantee that the shinigami know about it as ryuk demonstrates multiple times. (they also don't need to tell their human any of the rules at all - rule 4.) lmao. anyway im talking about rule 67:

Regarding the memories mentioned in Rule XLVII, the owner can have their memories of the Death Note erased if they so desire.

(well, it's more like 67.1, because there are three completely unrelated sub-rules in this rule. kind of justified because we know rule 67 was a last-minute amendment but seriously who fucking drafted these rules in the shinigami world i'd like a word)

under rule 67, sayu could forfeit the death note and willingly have her memories erased without needing to kill anyone. light asks sayu to do this and promises he won't kill anyone else with the book and that he'll burn it as soon as she's forfeited her memories.

sayu trusts light so much that she does not ask why he doesn't just burn it now. she forfeits the book and forgets the death note ever existed.

i think from that point everything else goes the same way it does in canon.

tl;dr, again - my projected course of events, preferencing the branches i personally find most likely:

sayu finds the death note

sayu tells light about it

sayu sublets the death note to light, remaining the note's official owner

light tests the death note without sayu's knowledge

ryuk shows up to sayu and informs her that light has used the death note

light joins the conversation and demands to know whether sayu can be rid of the notebook

ryuk informs them sayu can forfeit the notebook and will no longer see ryuk, then states anyone who's killed with the notebook would lose all memory of it once they had done so

light correctly infers that by default, your memory will remain unless you have killed with the notebook.

light realises he needs sayu to lose ALL her memories of the notebook, both for her mental health and because she knows he's killed someone with the notebook and is a liability

light briefly considers asking sayu to use the notebook once before forfeiting it

light dismisses this as an option

light asks ryuk if there are any other options

ryuk reluctantly informs light that yes he can erase sayu's memories of the notebook if she willingly chooses it

light convinces sayu to give up her memories and the notebook and promises he will destroy it

sayu trusts light and doesn't push him to destroy the book in front of her

sayu gives up the notebook and her memories

light becomes owner of the death note

story proceeds per canon