#and from with i received no bills until this court ordered bill

[tbh-entp]

There's a really spectacular feeling when you get pursued by the tribunal debt collection ppl to pay a bill from an unknown source but you know you pay like... all of your bills, so when you find out the company pursuing you, you call and they realize that they actually owe you 360chf. Also I love arguing on the phone, can I just say that.

#i was so scared when i received the payment order like #wtf dont fuck up my credit score #and also who tf is this #i paid my bills. #maybe parking ticket or or orrrr speeding #because its hard not to speed in switzerland lol #but no #old health insurance from 2022 #which i cancelled #and from with i received no bills until this court ordered bill #i got that man on the phone #did all my yelling in french #got switched to his boss #got put on hold #and then the guy got me and was like soooo we fucked it #we owe you #our bad #:)

[germiyahu]

Why do you think it's OK to bomb children

Why do you think it's okay to shoot children, burn children alive in their own homes, kidnap children, murder children's parents in front of them, sexually abuse children, hold children in abysmal conditions as political bargaining chips?

Do you want to play this game? And I know you'll scream that Israel does all of that to Palestinian children, and I don't doubt that we can find examples of all of those. But that does not mean that Hamas are not rational actors with their own agency who choose to enact these examples of specific, targeted, malicious violence against children.

I'm not going to claim that dropping a bomb and killing a child as a result is good, or excusable. But I don't know, I deal with like, the real world? And I'm fairly confident if you lined up a Hamas insurgent, who gleefully physical and psychologically tortured children as "praxis" of "resistance," with an IAF fighter pilot who dropped a bomb after receiving an order from their superiors in order to eliminate a threat, and children died as a consequence... normal people would argue that the Hamas insurgent is the less moral person in that lineup.

Intent matters, but it doesn't absolve. And that's my whole point.

Of course, you'll claim that all IAF aircraft come with a custom installed "target nearest child" button, and that your Hamas woobies had no choice they're traumatized they had a trigger response, and that's why they carefully planned this attack for years. I won't get stuck in the weeds with people who don't want to be convinced and can't think rationally.

Nice try though. I do think bombing children is bad. I also know that I have zero effect on this war, it will continue no matter my thoughts about it. Children will continue to die. What I do know is that people like you completely abrogate the responsibility of Hamas in this conflict, which is rooted in ignorance and Jew hatred. What I do know is that Israel has proved to an international court that they are operating without intent to indiscriminately kill civilians, without intent to ethnically cleanse, without intent to commit genocide.

So they will continue operations, until Hamas offers unconditional surrender and/or all the hostages are released/rescued. That's just a fact. And it's also a fact that Hamas knows there's no better way to turn public opinion on something than saying "it killed my child!" which is the exact pr tactic they and their mouthpieces (aka you) accused and continue to accuse Israel of doing.

Every accusation is a confession 🤭

I do know that children are dying, which I find immoral, and those responsible will have to reckon with that. But I don't know how many children have died, and what the causes were in every case (I can say with certainty that some children have been killed by Hamas' own rockets misfiring). Also, again, if Hamas was not letting children shelter in their tunnels, if Hamas was stockpiling rockets and weapons in SCHOOLS AND DAYCARES, if Hamas is not capable of weighing the cost of civilian lives and suing for peace for their sakes... they are also responsible.

And as a final note, while children dying in this war is inevitable and condemnable, how does each "side" choose to honor murdered and maimed children? From what I've seen, Jews on social media are respectful of all children's privacy (and of their families), organized to pay for the hospital bills and funeral of a Palestinian boy murdered in Chicago, mourn the children who've died in Israel and in Gaza, pray for them, keep them in their thoughts. There are Jews in Israel are protesting the war! A lot of them. They want their family members to come home and they want to stop the bleeding in Gaza. It's like you don't care about reality you just want your edgy one-liner to condemn all Jews and Jewish allies you come across.

What has the Hamasnik side been doing to honor children? Sharing photos and videos, doctoring footage, stealing footage from Syrian children who've suffered and died? Laughing at dead Jewish children? Harassing Israeli teenagers who were released from captivity? Denying their stories and dismissing their trauma? Assaulting Jewish college students? Insisting that Jews have a penchant and a lust for murdering children? Threatening Jewish day schools and other Jewish institutions where children also attend in the Diaspora? Cheering on Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis as they fire rockets indiscriminately knowing that without the Iron Dome, children will die? Using dead Palestinian children as props and political tools?

I think this says a lot.

#israel #palestine #hamas #hamasniks

[fairy-writes]

Hi!! If your still writing for him can you do a Fred Porlock x fem!reader where the reader is an apothecary (like your other one) and her and Fred are pining for each other but are both shy so neither will act on it so the gang helps set them up? Thank you!!

ACCIDENTALLY IN LOVE

Reblogs and Comments are greatly appreciated!!

__________________________________________________________________________

Fandom(s): Moriarty the Patriot

Pairing(s): Fred Porlock x Female!Reader

Genre(s)/Tag(s): FLUFF, Pining, First Kiss

Notes: Based vaguely on the song of the same name (Accidentally in Love) by Counting Crows

__________________________________________________________________________

Fred Porlock wasn’t sure when he fell in love with you. 

Was it an accident? 

He wasn’t completely sure. 

Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t.

Either way, he wasn’t too upset about it. Except for the fact that he knew you didn’t reciprocate.

Because why would you?

He was him, and you were you.

You were a famous apothecary renowned for your remedies for just about anything. You were clean (almost extremely so), you washed your hands until they were cracked from the lye soap you used, and grew all your own herbs in your back garden.

So it wasn’t a surprise when William went to you for poison.

But it was a surprise when you agreed and got roped into their schemes. 

You were nearly ecstatic when it came to helping out. From coming up with different concoctions. To delivery. You always did it with a smile on your face. 

He never realized until later that you only ever smiled at him. Louis was always met with a neutral expression. And Moran? Ha, he was met with a scowl.

Fred pushed open the door to your little shop, the bell above the door jingling, signaling to you that someone had arrived. He heard a crash and some tumbling in the back room and nearly went to help before he remembered your very strict rule of do not go into your back room.

You appeared in the doorway a moment later, some herbs in your hair, a mysterious stain on your skirts, and a sheepish smile on your face. Fred smiled, his cheeks warming as you tried to get your appearance in order. 

“Fred! What a wonderful surprise!” You exclaimed, and he ducked his head, scuffing his shoes on your hard dirt floor. Your shop was in the slums of the city, among the overcrowded streets of England and on the outskirts of town. You often helped the people there regardless of their status, only charging the rich who came seeking your skills. Your compassionate heart warmed his own. 

It was one of the things he loved about you. 

“Mr. Moriarty said you had a package for me?” He said and pulled out the folded envelope of paper in his pocket. He stalled, however, when you tilted your head in confusion. 

“Package? I never received any information on this. Did Moran forget to drop off instructions again?” You said exasperatedly, dusting off your hands and setting one on your hip, and holding out a hand for the paper. “Let me see the paper. Maybe I can whip it up quickly.” 

Fred handed the envelope over without looking at it, slightly miffed at Moran for forgetting such a thing. 

“Um… Fred? What is this?” You whisper, and he looks up from where he had been fiddling with his fingers. You’re staring expectantly and look more than a little embarrassed. The paper is held delicately in your hands, and he frowns. 

“What do you mean? It’s instructions from Mr. Moriarty, isn’t it?” He says and holds out a hand for the paper, pointedly ignoring how his fingers tingle and his heart stutters when your hands brush. He looks down and reads the handwriting. It’s Moran’s.

Just kiss and court her already!~Sebastian Moran

There are a few bills crumpled up in the envelope that he dumps out in his hand. 

His heart and brain freeze simultaneously. Court you? You’d never allow such a thing… would you?

He feels hands gently cradle his and looks up to see you smiling timidly. 

“If I may… I think Mr. Moran is giving you a night off from your responsibilities.” You say softly, and he finds himself smiling in return, cheeks red with embarrassment. 

A night off? 

That sounded nice. 

But a night off with you? 

That sounded like heaven. 

He takes you to dinner on the shore of the Thames late into the night. It’s a small picnic, but something you seemingly adored. You squealed in delight when he uncovered his hands from your eyes, taking in the candles and picnic basket in the center. He had to admit, not bad for panicking and coming up with it on the spot. 

Your skirts had puffed up, and you pushed them down as you took a seat on the ground, Fred following suit and trying not to act too nervous. 

It was a first date. That’s what this was… wasn’t it?

The picnic went smoothly, with Fred occasionally asking questions about your current clients or remedies and you asking about the cats he had hidden in the Moriarty estate. 

It all came together when your hand brushed his. He looked over, and you were watching him with those deep eyes of yours and a soft smile lit by candlelight. 

You were beautiful. 

He found himself leaning in and watched as your eyes fluttered closed. His eyes shut as well, and his heart exploded when your lips touched his. 

You tasted like starlight and the little pies and pastries you had been enjoying. Your lips move tentatively, and he takes the lead. Not that he knows what he’s doing. Because, of course, he doesn’t. He never had time for anything like this. 

But you didn’t mind, instead cradling his cheeks as you brought him closer. 

He needed to remind himself to thank Moran later. 

#fred porlock x reader #fred porlock #ynm fred #ynm fred x reader #yuukoku no moriarty x reader #yuukoku no moriarty fred #moriarty the patriot x reader #moriarty the patriot fred #mtp fred x reader #mtp fred #fairy writes #fairy writes 900 followers #fairy 900 followers

[mariacallous]

Since 2018, conservative state legislatures across the country have proposed and passed laws targeting young transgender people’s freedom to to play on sports teams and use bathrooms that correspond with their gender, and to obtain gender-affirming health care. Advocates for trans rights argue that the increased interest in the subject has served to galvanize the energies of those who had fought an ultimately losing battle against gay marriage—and have observed how the anti-trans movement has used tactics that have proved successful in limiting abortion. As with much legislation of this type, amid the nationalized, culture-war politics, the effects are felt most acutely by the most vulnerable families and individuals.

In a startling piece of reporting in this week’s issue, Emily Witt follows a mother named Kristen Chapman who moves her family from Tennessee to Virginia, in order for her daughter Willow to continue receiving gender-affirming care. “I genuinely feel we are being run out of town on a rail,” Chapman says. “I am not being dramatic. It is not my imagination.” With nuance and compassionate precision, Witt captures the urgency of the family’s relocation, and the sense, as laws seem to change underfoot, of pursuit. As she writes, “Chapman had chosen Virginia for their new life, she said, because it was still in the South, but there would be ‘multiple avenues of escape.’ ”

On the last morning of July, Kristen Chapman was getting ready to leave Nashville. Chapman, who is in her early fifties and wears her silver hair short, sat on a camp chair next to a fire pit outside the rental duplex where her family had lived for twelve years. She was smoking an American Spirit and swatting at the mosquitoes that kept emerging from the dense green brush behind her. Her husband, Paul, who was wearing a T-shirt with the Guinness logo, carried boxes out to the front lawn. Their daughters, Saoirse and Willow, who were seventeen and fifteen, were inside, still asleep. Chapman looked down at the family’s beagle mix, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was drinking rainwater out of a plastic bucket. “We got him when we moved in here for the kids,” she said. “He’s never lived anywhere else.”

Paul was planning to stay in town; Chapman was heading to Richmond, Virginia, with Saoirse and Willow. Chapman and Paul’s marriage was ending, but the decision to split their family apart had happened abruptly. Willow is trans, and had been on puberty blockers since 2021. In March, Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, had signed a bill that banned gender-transition treatment for minors across the state.

On paper, the law, which went into effect in early July, would allow trans teens like Willow to continue their medical care until March of 2024. But Chapman wasn’t sure they could count on that. Willow was determined to begin taking estrogen when she turned sixteen, in December of 2023, which would allow her to grow into adulthood with feminine characteristics. If she couldn’t continue taking puberty blockers until then, she would begin to go through male puberty, which could mean more surgeries and other procedures later in life.

At first, the family had hoped that the courts would declare the new law unconstitutional. Federal courts had already done so in at least four other states in 2023, finding that such bans violated the First Amendment and the equal-protection and due-process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. But that spring the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where Willow had been receiving care, informed its patients that it was ceasing operations. Seeing this as a bad sign, Chapman set up a GoFundMe page in early May and began planning their departure.

Inside, the apartment was filled with abandoned objects—an old Wi-Fi router, trash bags of unwanted clothes. A Homer Simpson doll in a hula skirt lay forgotten on a windowsill. Chapman, an artist who supplements her income with social work, had recently quit her job as a caseworker. She would need their landlord as a reference to get an apartment, especially because she had bad credit, but the family still owed him back rent. She checked Venmo, waiting on a loan from a friend.

At six-thirty that morning, Chapman had gone out to her white Dodge S.U.V. and found her younger daughter asleep in the back seat. Willow had gone over to a friend’s house and stayed out late. When she got home, she realized that she had locked herself out. The Dodge’s window had been stuck open for months, so she got in. “Any other human being would have handled this totally differently,” Chapman said, shaking her head.

Willow had gone back to sleep in her room, which she once shared with her brother. (He was a sophomore in college and had already moved out.) The colorful scarves and lights that used to decorate the space had been taken down. When she woke up, she began sifting through what was left. “I feel like I’m ready to say goodbye to it,” she said, looking around. There were drawings scrawled on the wall, a desk spattered in paint. “Most of the stuff in here I’ve trashed.”

“It’s like getting a new haircut,” Chapman said. “A fresh palette.”

Chapman had chosen Virginia for their new life, she said, because it was still in the South, but there would be “multiple avenues of escape.” Paul worked nights for a large grocery-store chain; Richmond was among the northernmost cities where it had branches, and Chapman thought that at some point he might be able to transfer there. Earlier in the summer, she and Willow had driven to Richmond to see the city, and Chapman had lined up a marketing job. It didn’t pay well, but she knew she wouldn’t get a lease without a job. Willow, who had received her last puberty-blocker shot at the Vanderbilt clinic in late May, was supposed to receive her next one in late August. They didn’t have a lot of time.

Despite having taken puberty blockers for two years, Willow looks her age. She is tall and long-limbed and meticulous about her appearance. That morning, she had on Y2K-revival clothes: wide-legged jeans worn low on the hips with a belt, a patterned tank top, and furry pink Juicy Couture boots. Her blond hair was glossy and straight, her bangs held back with a barrette. She is committed to living her adolescence as a girl regardless of what medical treatment she is allowed to receive. At times she has used silicone prosthetic breasts; attaching them is an onerous process involving spray-on adhesive.

From a very young age, Willow wore dresses and gravitated toward friendships with girls. Her parents thought that she would likely grow up to be a gay man. As Chapman put it, “We knew she was in the fam.” When a homophobic shooter killed forty-nine people at Pulse, the gay night club in Orlando, in 2016, Willow, who was eight at the time, accompanied her mother to a vigil in Nashville. Willow wrote a long message on a banner in solidarity with the survivors. Chapman took a photo of her there. “It was like she was transfixed,” Chapman remembered. In the sixth grade, Willow went to an all-girl sleepover. A parent overheard the kids discussing gender and sexuality, and told Chapman. Willow says that it was around then that she began to think about her identity. “Pretty much as soon as I knew about, like, conceptualized gender, I knew I wanted to be a girl,” she said. She had been an A student, but her grades started going down. Looking back, Willow struggled to articulate what had happened. “It just got complicated, like with all my stuff physically, it just felt like a mess,” she said.

She came out to her friends first; then one day, in the spring of 2020, while she was upstairs on her laptop and Chapman was downstairs working, Willow sent her mother a three-word e-mail that said, “I am trans.” Willow told me, “I realized I have to do this sometime if I want to advocate for myself and get what I need to get.” She left it to her mother to inform the rest of the family. Chapman was accepting; Paul was more skeptical. “That’s him, you know—a man of science,” Chapman said. “It wasn’t overly positive or negative.”

Willow had already decided on her new name before coming out, and began using it with friends. She was again reluctant to tell her family. “I was, like, I’ll keep that secret,” she said—she had been named at birth for a brother of her father’s who had died, and knew the name was important to him. Her mother found out when another mom referred to Willow by her chosen name. Chapman started using it right away; it took Paul another year.

To figure out their next steps, Chapman took Willow, who was then twelve, to her regular pediatrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She was referred to the center’s Pediatric Transgender Clinic. The clinic, which opened in 2018, was part of a broader expansion of gender-affirming care at flagship medical schools in the South that occurred around that time. (Clinics also opened at Duke University, the University of Mississippi, and Emory University, among other schools.) These places “attracted the kind of people who build very trusting relationships with patients and are able to establish not just the clinical competencies but also an inclusive environment,” Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, an advocacy group for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, told me. “All those things are nothing you can take for granted when seeking medical care in the South.” (Federal funding for health care is often funnelled through state governments, some of which have a history of withholding money from providers that offer abortion and other politicized health services.)

Care for patients who are experiencing gender dysphoria is highly individualized: some trans kids opt for a purely social transition, changing their names or pronouns; others, like Willow, seek a medical transition, which can be started at the onset of puberty. In Willow’s case, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria had to be verified before pharmaceutical treatment could begin. A course of psychotherapy was accompanied by a physical assessment at Vanderbilt, which included ultrasounds, X-rays, and blood tests. The clinic was following a protocol supported by the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, whereby patients take puberty blockers—which have been used to treat children experiencing early-onset puberty since the nineteen-eighties—to delay the onset of secondary sex characteristics until they are ready to begin taking estrogen or testosterone.

“I’d always explain it to the families as a pause on puberty, allowing the youth to take a deep breath,” Kimberly Herrmann, a pediatrician and internist at Whitman-Walker Health, a provider in the Washington, D.C., area that offers gender-affirming care to patients aged thirteen and over, told me. (Some patients choose to go through their natal puberty.) “All of the data suggests that it is the correct thing to do for a patient with a clear diagnosis,” Izzy Lowell, a doctor who started a telehealth practice for gender-affirming care called QueerMed, said, of taking puberty blockers. “If they are going to develop the body of a grown man, it becomes difficult to undo those changes.”

Paul was worried about the blockers’ long-term effects on Willow’s health. (Studies have shown that they can affect bone density when used long term, and the protocol for hormone therapy advises doctors to discuss potential risks to fertility and options for fertility preservation.) Chapman thought the risks to Willow’s well-being would be worse if she developed male secondary sex characteristics. In one testimony against the Tennessee ban, an adult trans woman described her adolescence, in which she attempted to present as male, as “a disastrous and torturous experience.”

“Paul and I talked about it and came to the belief that we wanted her on them as quickly as possible for safety reasons,” Chapman said. “I hate that that’s true, but we know that’s the world that we live in, and that she is going to be a safer person for the rest of her life if she does not look male.” (A recent analysis of crime statistics from 2017 and 2018 found that transgender people are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to be the victims of a violent crime.)

The evaluation and diagnosis took almost a year. For Willow, the talk therapy was the most taxing part. Willow was insured through the state’s Medicaid program, TennCare, which meant that there were only a limited number of therapists she could see, none of whom were trans, or even queer. She went through three in a year. “We were in the lowest tier of care,” Chapman said, adding that at least one therapist dropped their health insurance. Willow told her mother that she wished she could just be left alone to be a “sad trans girl.”

At the age of thirteen, she was finally able to start puberty blockers. “You have an end goal,” Willow said of the experience. “And all the in-between doesn’t matter.”

In September, 2022, the conservative commentator and anti-trans activist Matt Walsh, who moved to Nashville in 2020 (along with his employer, the conservative news company the Daily Wire), posted a thread on Twitter. “Vanderbilt drugs, chemically castrates, and performs double mastectomies on minors,” it began. “But it gets worse.” Walsh—who is the author of books including “Church of Cowards: A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians” and “What Is a Woman?,” a polemic arguing that gender roles are biologically determined—worked in conservative talk radio before being hired by the Daily Wire as a writer, in 2017. Last year, the left-wing watchdog group Media Matters for America mapped Walsh’s origins as an aspiring radio shock jock in the early twenty-tens who once said, “We probably lost our republic after Reconstruction.” In 2022, he was one of several right-wing social-media pundits who began broadcasting misinformation about hospitals that provided gender-transition treatment for minors, which were then overwhelmed with phone and e-mail threats and online harassment. One study found that more than fifteen hospitals modified or took down Web sites about pediatric gender care after being named in these campaigns.

Walsh included in his thread about Vanderbilt a video clip of Shayne Taylor, the medical director of its Transgender Clinic, speaking of top and bottom surgeries as a potential “money-maker” for the hospital. Walsh did not specify that Taylor was mostly speaking about adults. (Vanderbilt never performed genital surgery on underage patients and did an average of five top surgeries a year on minors, with a minimum age of sixteen.) More than sixty Republican state legislators signed a letter to Vanderbilt describing the clinic’s practices “as nothing less than abuse.” In a statement calling for an investigation, Governor Lee, who was up for reëlection, said that “we should not allow permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children.” Within days, Vanderbilt announced that it would put a pause on surgeries for minors. Jonathan Skrmetti, Tennessee’s Republican attorney general, began an inquiry into whether Vanderbilt had manipulated billing codes to avoid limitations on insurance coverage.

In October, Walsh and other anti-trans advocates held a “Rally to End Child Mutilation” in Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza. The speakers included the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn, the former Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, and Chloe Cole, a nineteen-year-old self-described “former trans kid.” After identifying as male from the age of twelve, receiving testosterone, and getting top surgery, Cole de-transitioned to female at sixteen and is now one of the country’s foremost youth advocates of bans on gender-transition treatment for minors. “I was allowed to make an adult decision as a traumatized fifteen-year-old,” she said at the rally.

For the past four years, the number of anti-trans bills proposed throughout the United States has dramatically risen. The A.C.L.U. has counted some four hundred and ninety-six proposals in state legislatures in 2023, eighty-four of which have been signed into law. The first state ban on gender-transition treatment for minors was passed in Arkansas in 2021. It was permanently blocked by a federal judge this year, but more than twenty states have passed similar laws since then. As lawsuits filed by the A.C.L.U., Lambda Legal, and other organizations make their way through the courts, trans people are left to navigate a shifting legal landscape that activists say has affected clinical and pharmaceutical access. Lowell told me that she consults with six lawyers (including one she keeps on retainer) to best advise patients, who must frequently drive across state borders to receive care. “It’s literally a daily task to figure out what’s legal where,” she said.

In Tennessee, the Human Rights Campaign has counted the passage of at least nineteen anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws since 2015, among the most in the nation. Some of these laws have been found unconstitutional, such as a ban on drag shows in public spaces and a law that would have required any business to post a warning if it let transgender people use their preferred rest room. But many others have gone into effect, such as laws that censor school curricula and ban transgender youth from playing on the sports teams that align with their identity.

Proposals to ban gender-transition treatment for minors were the first bills introduced in the opening legislative sessions of the Tennessee House and Senate in November, 2022. “It was Matt Walsh who lit a fire under the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party this year,” Chris Sanders, the director of a Nashville-based L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group called Tennessee Equality Project, told me. “It was lightning speed the way it all unfolded.” At hearings throughout the winter, parents of trans kids, trans adults, trans youth, and a Memphis pediatrician who provides gender-affirming care testified against the ban. Those who spoke in support of it included Walsh, Cole (who is from California), and a right-wing Tennessee physician named Omar Hamada, who compared such treatment to letting a minor who wanted to become a pirate get a limb and one eye removed.

L.G.B.T.Q. activists who attended described feeling disregarded by the Republican majority. Molly Quinn, the executive director of OUTMemphis, a nonprofit that helps trans youth navigate their health care, likened the experience to “being the only queer kid at a frat party.”

Three months after Governor Lee signed the ban, Vanderbilt University Medical Center informed patients that the previous November, at the attorney general’s request, it had shared non-anonymized patient records from the Pediatric Transgender Clinic, including photographic documentation and mental-health assessments. “I immediately started hearing from parents,” Sanders said. Their fear stemmed in part from attempts in states like Texas to have the parents of trans kids investigated by child-protective services. (The attorney general’s office said in a statement that it is “legally bound to maintain the medical records in the strictest confidence, which it does.”) Former patients have sued Vanderbilt, and a federal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services is also under way. (A spokesperson for Vanderbilt declined to comment for this article.)

In July, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals became the first federal court in the country to allow a ban on gender-transition treatment for minors to take effect, with a final ruling planned for September. Chapman, who had spoken out for trans rights through local media outlets, and had been targeted with online threats and menacing phone calls in return, understood that Tennessee, where she had lived for most of the past thirty-five years, had become a hostile environment for her family. “I genuinely feel we are being run out of town on a rail,” she said. “I am not being dramatic. It is not my imagination.”

It was dusk by the time Paul had loaded the last of the boxes into three storage pods. Everything was ready, but the family was having trouble leaving. Someone would walk out of the house and get into the car, only to go back into the house five minutes later. Chapman suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to buy padlocks for the storage pods, which were scheduled to be picked up by U-Haul the next day. As she drove off to get them, Paul sat on the back steps and stared out at the lawn. Fireflies were winking on and off over the grass.

“Bollocks,” he said to himself, then stood up and went inside.

Although comprehensive demographic data on transgender youth are scarce, the American Academy of Pediatrics has reported that “research increasingly suggests that familial acceptance or rejection ultimately has little influence on the gender identity of youth.” But without parental consent most kids in America who wish to transition medically are legally unable to do so until they turn eighteen. Having a supportive parent or guardian as a trans child is more than a legal or practical advantage, though. A study of eighty-four youth in Ontario, aged sixteen to twenty-four, who identified as trans and had come out to their parents found that the rate of attempted suicide was four per cent among those whose parents were strongly supportive but that nearly sixty per cent of respondents who described their parents as not supportive had attempted suicide in the previous year.

Chapman’s decision to support her daughter grew in part out of her own experience as a black sheep in a deeply religious family. She was born in East Tennessee to a Baptist minister and his wife and had an itinerant upbringing, moving around the South. The last words her grandfather, who was also a Baptist minister, said to her were “I’m so sorry I’m not gonna see you in Heaven.”

Paul was raised in Dublin, Ireland, as the youngest of twelve children in a Catholic family. “We both came from communities that were super fundamentalist,” Chapman said. They agreed that they would raise their children outside of any religious tradition. If they had a doctrine, Chapman said, it was “critical thinking.” They brought their kids to Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and took them to hear the Georgia congressman and civil-rights activist John Lewis speak. But Paul and Kristen would also listen to the far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh, to know what the other side was saying. As the children got older, Paul and Kristen started to have different visions of the future—Kristen wanted to buy an R.V. and travel the country, and Paul wanted to buy a house. In 2019, they decided to separate, but they couldn’t afford to split their family into two households.

Paul at first had trouble understanding how Willow could decide about her gender so young. Kristen would argue, “If a person presents and says, ‘This is who I am,’ it is not your job to unpack that.” In the end, it was by talking to two trans women—a co-worker in her fifties and a twentysomething bartender at the pub he frequented—that Paul came to understand his daughter better. “Reading online was too much right-wing or left-wing,” he said. “I needed something more grounded.” The bartender told him that her father had rejected her, and that she had scars on her arms from self-harm. “I said, no matter what, I wasn’t doing that,” Paul recalled.

Willow had told me that one of the hardest parts of leaving town was doing so while her relationship to her father was still evolving. “I feel like my biggest unfinished business is that relationship,” she said the day before the move, over boba tea in a strip mall called Plaza Mariachi. “I think I’ve dealt with it. We’ll talk on the phone. Even if we don’t have an in-person connection, I think we’ll be O.K.”

Once they all managed to leave the house for the last time, Paul gave Chapman and each daughter a hundred dollars in cash as a parting gift. The family had dinner at Panera Bread, then sat for a while at a nearby park. Paul cancelled two Lyfts before finally getting in one and heading to the pub, where he would try to process the day. Chapman and the girls got in the white Dodge and took I-24 out of Nashville.

L.G.B.T.Q.-rights activists around the country have seen the sudden uptick in bills targeting transgender identity as a strategy to rally conservative voters after the legalization of gay marriage and the criminalization of abortion. “There was an inordinate amount of money and attention and huge far-right groups, many of which have been deemed hate groups, focussed on keeping us as L.G.B.T.Q. people from getting married, right?” Simone Chriss, a Florida-based lawyer, told me. Chriss is representing trans people in several lawsuits against the state over its restrictions on gender-affirming care. She observed that, after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, in 2015, “all of the people singularly focussed on that needed something else to focus on.”

She recalled watching as model legislation propagated by groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council targeted trans people’s freedom to use bathrooms of their choice, and to play on their preferred sports teams. Health care came next. “All of a sudden, you see this surge in gender-affirming-care bills,” Chriss said. “And what’s bananas is there was not a single bill introduced in a single state legislature prior to 2018.”

The anti-trans rhetoric about protecting children mirrored that of the anti-gay-marriage movement, she continued, and new rules mandating waiting periods, for example, were familiar from the anti-abortion movement. “It’s like dipping a toe in by making it about trans children,” she said. “I think the goal is the erasure of trans people, in part by erasing the health care that allows them to live authentically.”

Beach-Ferrara, of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said her organization estimates that more than ninety per cent of transgender youth in the South live in states where bans have passed or will soon be in effect, and that between three and five thousand young people in the South will have ongoing medical care disrupted by the bans. (The Williams Institute at U.C.L.A. estimates that there are more than a hundred thousand thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds who identify as trans living in the South, more than in any other region in the country.) Already, university hospitals such as the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Medical University of South Carolina have discontinued their pediatric gender services before being legally required to do so.

Had Chapman stayed in Tennessee, Willow’s closest option for getting puberty-blocker shots would likely have required a four-hundred-and-fifty-mile trip to Peoria, Illinois. Willow’s TennCare insurance would not easily travel, and a single shot can cost twelve hundred dollars out of pocket. Paul had told Chapman not to be ashamed if the move didn’t work out and she changed her mind, but she already knew she would never go back to Nashville.

On their way east, the family stopped for a few days in Seneca, South Carolina, where Chapman has relatives. Back on the road, she tried not to focus on the uncertainty that awaited her and her daughters, but she had to pull over at least twice to breathe her way through anxiety attacks. There was a heat wave, and by the time they arrived in Richmond the back speakers of the S.U.V. were blown out, and everyone was in a bad mood. Willow had snapped at her mother and Saoirse for trying to sing along to the Cranberries; she had even yelled at the dog. “It was difficult?” Willow told me afterward, when I asked how the trip had been; then she added, “I’m still excited.” (Saoirse declined to be interviewed.)

Chapman had booked an Airbnb, a dusty-blue bungalow outside Richmond. It had good air-conditioning and a small back yard for the dog. She could afford only a week there before they would have to move to a motel. That night, Willow zoned out to old episodes of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in the living room, while Chapman scrolled through real-estate listings on her phone. She asked for advice on the social-media feeds of local L.G.B.T.Q. groups, and the responses were heartening. She decided that, if she was able to find a place to live by the end of the week, she would not take the marketing job she had lined up. School wouldn’t start for a few weeks, and it was not the right moment to leave her daughters alone all day.

At eight the next morning, Chapman was sitting in an otherwise empty waiting room at the Southside Community Services Center, filling out forms to get the family food stamps and health insurance. She had put on makeup for the first time in days and was wearing wide-legged leopard-print pants and a black shirt. She had forgotten her reading glasses, however. “Do you have a spouse who does not live at home?” she read out loud, squinting her way through the questions. “Yes,” she answered to herself, checking a box. (She and Paul are not yet divorced.)

Chapman kept mistakenly writing “Willow” on the government forms—she had never officially changed her daughter’s name. (A 1977 Tennessee state law that prohibits amending one’s gender on a birth certificate will apply to Willow no matter where she moves; another Tennessee law, which went into effect this past July, bans people from changing the gender on their driver’s license.) Chapman picked up the next batch of forms, for Medicaid. “One down, one to go,” she said.

Later in the day, Chapman and her daughters went to see a house that was advertised on Craigslist, an affordable three-bedroom in the suburbs of Richmond. As they were driving, the owner texted Chapman that he had a flat tire and couldn’t meet them. But the place looked ideal from the outside, so she filled out an application and sent the landlord a thousand-dollar deposit. At five the next morning, she woke up and saw a text from the owner claiming that the money transfer had not gone through. She quickly realized she’d been scammed.

Chapman became weepy. She posted on social media about the con, then drove Saoirse to a thrift store she wanted to visit. At first, only one shopper noticed the woman crying uncontrollably in the furniture section. Then someone went to find some tissues, and someone else brought water. Soon, Chapman recalled, she was surrounded by women murmuring words of sympathy.

That evening at the Airbnb, Chapman and Willow sat at the kitchen table. “The emotional impact of the scam hit me way more than the money,” Chapman said, still tearing up at the thought of it. Willow nodded in sympathy. But for Chapman the experience was also a reminder of the advantages of talking about their situation—the women had told her that the schools near the house were not very good, anyway. “Thrift-store people will help you when you’re down and out. They’re used to broken shit,” she said, shaking her head. “If I had broke down in a Macy’s? Think how different the reaction would be.”

The next morning, Chapman was feeling a little less pessimistic. The humidity had broken, and the weather was good. People had responded to the news of the scam by donating money to replace what she had lost, and a local Facebook group had led her to a property-management company that was flexible toward tenants with bad credit.

She drove to see a three-bedroom apartment in a centrally situated part of Richmond. Though one of the bedrooms was windowless, the place was newly painted, and it had a wooden landing out back that could serve as a deck. It was also in a school district that people had recommended. “I can see this working,” Chapman said tentatively. Most of the utilities were included in the sixteen-hundred-and-fifty-dollar rent. Chapman didn’t have time to overthink it. She wrote the real-estate agent saying she would apply.

That afternoon, Chapman drove Willow to see the apartment. The door was locked, but Willow climbed through a window and opened the door so they could consider the space together. “We were, like, ‘Oh, this is nice,’ ” Willow said. She loved the neighborhood, which had vintage stores and coffee shops. “You can walk anywhere, you don’t need transportation—that’s really cool.”

The next day, Willow was sitting on a couch in the Airbnb watching a slasher film called “Terrifier.” Chapman was next to her, getting ready for a Zoom call with someone from a local trans-rights organization called He She Ze and We.

In the weeks leading up to the move, Chapman had taken time to research which schools were friendly to trans people. Willow estimated that maybe half the students in her middle school in Nashville were transphobic, and twenty per cent were explicit about it. She was bullied, but she says that it didn’t bother her. Her teachers were more supportive, such as the one who gave her an entire Lilith Fair-era wardrobe. “She was, like, ‘Do you want some of my old clothes? Because you’re so fashion,’ ” Willow said. “I had that black little bob.”

“She had Siouxsie Sioux hair for a while,” Chapman said, looking at her fondly.

The two of them agree that Willow’s personality shifted after transitioning. Once withdrawn and nonconfrontational, she began to develop a defiant attitude. “It was kind of fun to just mess with them,” she recalled of the bullies, who she said were not vicious but more into trying to get a laugh—“like, childish, immature stuff.” She would be coy; she would tell them to give her a kiss. “My only weapon, I guess, was how I chose to respond,” she said.

“She’s not a shrinking violet,” her mother added.

“I just don’t like the traditional way that you’re taught to stand up for yourself,” Willow said. “I think absurdism is the best way.” If she lets someone misgender her, she said, “it’s not because I don’t want to be the annoying trans person, it’s more like . . . you’re not gonna get to those people.”

In her freshman year, she attended a public arts high school, and began skipping class and smoking. She says there were at least ten other students who identified as trans, but she remained something of an outsider. When she was in school, she says, she almost thought of herself as a kind of character expected to perform.

Chapman is not a disciplinarian—she had enough of that growing up. But she had a conversation with her daughter after watching a video of an incident in which Willow was voguing in a school hallway, attempted to do a death drop, and ended up with a concussion. The students around Willow were clapping and egging her on even after she fell. “It’s great that you’re the kind of person who will do crazy things,” Chapman remembered saying, “but you need people around you who are not like that.” Both Chapman and Paul worry about Willow’s safety, in part because she is not easily scared herself.

“Will you turn that off?” Chapman said now about the horror film, as she logged on to Zoom. Willow took that as a cue to leave the room.

“You’re going to want to be on this thing,” Chapman said, calling her back.

Willow, who wore blue eyeshadow, a purple baby tee with a peace sign and the word “Smile!” on it, and magenta-pink shorts, plopped back down on the couch, then got up to retrieve supplies to disinfect her belly-button piercing, which she began to do with studiousness.

On Zoom, Chapman introduced herself to Shannon McKay, the co-founder of He She Ze and We, and gave a summary of their situation.

“Have you gotten connected with the medical piece yet?” McKay asked. She explained that, in Virginia, Willow might not have to wait until she turned sixteen to start estrogen. At this news, Willow looked up and made eye contact with her mother, who nodded back.

The conversation turned to politics. Earlier in the week, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, had held a town hall on parents’ rights at a school in Henrico County. A parent there had urged Youngkin to introduce a ban on gender-transition treatment for minors.

“Our governor, just to let you know, has not taken a stance,” McKay, who also has a trans daughter, explained to Chapman. “And I think he’s not conservative enough for the folks that wish he would be.”

In July, Youngkin had issued a series of rules that direct trans kids to use pronouns and bathrooms that accord with the gender they were assigned at birth, unless they have parental permission to do otherwise. Chapman asked McKay if that gave her some control over how Willow would be treated at school.

“The clincher here is, even if all parents involved do fill out the form and say, ‘We’re all on board,’ school personnel can still say, ‘I don’t believe in that. I’m not going to do it,’ ” McKay said. She did have some good news, however: if Willow learned to drive, she could determine the name and gender on her identification card.

“I’m not ready for it,” Chapman said, referring to the driving.

“Well, before this governor messes it up, I encourage people to go ahead and get these documents lined up,” McKay said.

Chapman got the apartment she and Willow had visited, and a few days later the family moved in. Willow started at her new school on Tuesday, August 22nd. She made friends with another trans girl in the first week. But, despite a letter from Chapman specifying Willow’s name and pronouns, school administrators told her they had to use the name on her registration. She was also told she should use the nurse’s bathroom instead of the girls’ bathroom, even though it was on a different floor and might cause her to be late to class. Willow ignored that rule, and asked her mother not to intervene on her behalf.

Before the school year had begun, Chapman told me that if school didn’t work out she would be fine with her daughter getting a G.E.D. When I asked Willow about the future, she said that she wants to move to New York City. She wants to go to the balls, “maybe be a model, I don’t know,” she continued. “I like doing art. I like meeting people. I don’t know how to connect all of those things and get paid.”

“You care more about personal freedom than hitting a milestone,” Chapman said. “You care less about the traditional high-school things, the traditional college things.”

“I feel like I should care about them,” Willow said.

“Oh!” Chapman said, looking surprised. “I like hearing that.”

“I’m open—like, I could potentially care about them, but if it’s not welcoming me then I won’t,” Willow said.

The day in August when Willow needed her puberty-blocker shot came and went. The family’s insurance still had not come through, and the earliest appointment Chapman could get at a clinic with tiered pricing was in mid-September. An administrator at the clinic assured her that there was a window with puberty blockers, and that Willow’s voice would not drop overnight.

I talked to Chapman the evening after the appointment. “We thought we were just going in for an intake, but they started Willow on estrogen today,” Chapman told me over the phone. “The doctor was in shock that Willow had been on puberty blockers for two years and that she was almost sixteen.” (“It’s really hard for cis people to fully appreciate the deep destabilizing physical betrayal that these kids are navigating on a day-to-day basis,” the doctor, Stephanie Arnold, told me. “It’s a period where you should be establishing confidence in yourself and your ability to interact with the outside world.”) Willow, Chapman added, “is over the moon.” They called Paul to let him know. “After every fucking thing . . . it just happened,” she said.

The following Monday, Chapman started a new job, counselling people on signing up for Medicaid. She was earning less than she had in Nashville, but hoped to rebuild her career as an artist and a community organizer.

The family was getting to know Richmond, with its restored Victorian row houses and stately parks. Using the hundred dollars from her father, Willow had bought herself a skateboard to get around town. Paul was planning a visit for October. “This city is just dang cute, let’s be honest,” Chapman said. They had found a leftist bookstore where she had bought Willow a book of poetry by trans writers. When I asked Willow how she felt on estrogen, she said that it was too early to discern any changes with clarity; what she felt, she said, was more vulnerable. A little more than a month in, Willow said that she was liking her new school and had even attended the homecoming dance. “And my grades are O.K.,” she added. “So that’s something.”

On September 28th, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban on gender-transition treatment for minors in Tennessee. The court found, among other things, that state legislatures can determine whether the risks of gender dysphoria are less significant than the risks of treating it before a patient turns eighteen. A dissenting opinion stated, “The statutes we consider today discriminate based on sex and gender conformity and intrude on the well-established province of parents to make medical decisions for their minor children.” Because the federal appeals courts have split in their findings, with other circuits finding such bans unconstitutional, the issue has the potential to proceed to the Supreme Court.

“I know what’s going on,” Willow had said, when I asked her about politics. She doesn’t see herself as an activist, though; she prefers to let the news filter through her mother rather than to consume it herself: “She’s my person on the inside.” 

[breaniebree]

SNEAK PEEK!!!

Chapter 7 -- The One With the Theo Sandwich

Holidays with the Weasleys was always something Harry looked forward to, but this year was very different from the others and everyone felt it.  Not only was it the first Christmas without the patriarch of the Weasley family, but the whole fiasco of Zee being missing and murdered but not really murdered made everything seem harder.

Harry was keeping the speculation about the spell on Zee a secret from the family until he knew anything for sure.  The last thing he wanted was to get Grandma, Grandpa, or Grandmama’s hopes up that maybe she could be saved.  His own hopes were high enough as it was and he was terrified it wasn’t true.  Instead, he did his best to push those thoughts aside and focused on the joint celebration they had thrown together at Clevedon Court.

It had been Hermione’s idea and Harry was grateful to his friend for suggesting it.  Christmas Eve was being celebrated in their home and everyone was invited.  It was a mashup of everyone together and it was exactly the kind of big celebration they all needed to forget the troubles that were happening.

Flo, Sorcha, and Molly were cooking up a storm in the kitchen, having decided that everyone else was to hurry off and let them prepare things.  But it didn’t stop everyone from helping out.

Greg and Jean Granger brought homemade bread sauce.  Bill and Fleur brought butternut squash soup.  Charlie brought these amazing Romanian cheese donuts called Papanași.  Percy and Audrey brought a Caesar salad with beer bread.  Fred and Fiadh brought a plum pudding.  George and Angelina brought baked potatoes with garlic and cheese.  Remus and Tonks brought cherry, apple, strawberry, and rhubarb pies.  This didn’t even include the Christmas fairy cakes Theo and Sebastian brought that Theo had ordered from Hannah or the turkey and ham that Sorcha and Flo made or the four other kinds of potatoes, puddings, and trifles that Flo, Sorcha, and Molly had thrown together in the kitchen.  And to Harry’s happiness, Flo made cornbread and Molly made treacle tart.

It was more food than they even knew what to do with.

Neville and Hannah had come by early in the day to have a drink and tea with them before heading back to Cumbria to celebrate Christmas with Augusta and Neville’s great-uncle Algie.  Harry had received a card from Seamus and Dean who were celebrating Christmas Eve with Dean’s mum and then Christmas Day with Seamus’ family.  Ginny had insisted that Theo and Sebastian come for Christmas Eve since they were spending Christmas day with Sebastian’s family and Molly insisted Theo needed to be around family.

Harry was pleased to have everyone there with him.  He only wished that Zee could be here too.  He sat on the floor in the living room, looking around at all of the conjured chairs they’d made to fill the space and thought that this was what an amazing Christmas with family was like.

Ginny was sitting between his legs, her back against his chest as they drank red wine and watched Aydin, Mina, and Leo play together.  Teddy was lying on a blanket in the middle of the room on his back, rolling all over the place.  At nine months old, he hadn’t quite mastered crawling yet, but it certainly didn’t stop him from being on the move as he belly shimmied and almost crawled around.  Then there was Felicity and Finley, each girl was cradled in the arms of an uncle and very happy.

Ron stretched out on the floor next to Harry, clinking his wine glass with his.  “I think we did a pretty great job decorating the place.”

“Yeah, we did,” Harry agreed.  

He was glad that Hermione had convinced them to decorate the house.  The big tree was beautifully lit and decorated and it made the holiday feel more real.

Ginny stood up, bending to peck Harry on the cheek before she mumbled something about more wine.  He watched her go and turned when Remus sat on the floor next to him.

“How are you holding up?”

Harry shrugged.  “Okay, I guess.”

At Remus’ raised eyebrow, he shrugged again.  He honestly didn’t know how to answer that question.  Spending time with Ginny made him think of all of the good things.  It took his mind off of the bad that was happening.  It stopped him from thinking and worrying about what it meant with this potion; what meant about Zee and Sirius and… he didn’t know how he felt about it all.  

Remus squeezed his shoulder.  “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, Harry, but I know that you’ll figure all of this out.  You and Dora make a good team.  Higgins has been talking about how great you’ve been doing.”

Harry turned to give Remus a small smile.  “I like Rex.  He’s honest with me and he’s patient.”

“That’s because he learned from the best,” Tonks said, plopping herself down onto her husband’s lap.  “I taught him everything he knows.”

“I know, he told me,” Harry said, earning himself an elbow to the ribs.  “No, he’s great.  He’s been letting me take the lead on a lot of things.”

“He trusts you,” Tonks told him.  “He was really worried when I requested him to be your trainer.  He had it in his head that I’d expect him to go easy on you and when I assured him I expected him to kick your arse, he was a little more sure of himself.  You’ve surprised him with your strength and tenacity.”

“Thanks,” Harry said.  

Higgins was always telling him he was doing great, but hearing it from Tonks reiterated the words and made Harry feel more confident at what he was doing.  He loved being an Auror and he rather liked knowing that his partner was confident in his skills.

Tonks stared at him a moment as Charlie played with Teddy on the floor.  “Still no word from Borage and Slughorn yet?”

Harry shook his head.  “No.  I have a feeling that we won’t hear from them again until after the new year.  I just… I don’t know, Tonks.  There’s too many questions and not enough answers.  Nothing makes sense.”

“I know, but we’ll figure it out.”

#harry potter fanfiction #breanie #chapter sneak peek #third times the charm #welcome to breanie's world of asc the kismet trilogy

[vacantgodling]

NAD worldbuilding notes about the city of new mananza

donte “don” macbride (the d in our acronym) is a private investigator, a noir staple if you will. but he’s a one man show run out of a rickety little building on the border of the slums. he’s hard to find, but if you know how to find him, he still probably won’t take your case unless you’re looking for closure. why’s that? here’s why: the state of crime in new mananza is FUCKED. there’s a myriad of reasons as to why it’s fucked so let’s take a mosey down jfc line as to why the crime rate is left to its own devices:

the police department doesn’t do investigations; they only enforce “public safety” as decreed by policy created by the corrupt ass government, and run overcrowded prisons. what “public safety” actually entails is a damn mystery. most of the time they’re seen escorting big wigs, quelling riots, and generally raking in tax dollars to do jack and fucking shit. but when i say that they don’t do investigations i mean literally there are ZERO investigators or detectives hired by the police or the government. so… how do cases get solved, i bet you’re wondering. SUPER simple: freelance detectives… but only kinda. barely.

all investigations are done through legions of private investigators (unioned and un-unionized) who receive little to no funding from the city, unless it is a city run operation or if you know someone/come from somewhere with backing. otherwise, good luck paying the fucking bills. many pi’s that aren’t unionized have a day job and are rarely hired bc of lack of visibility. unionized pi’s face the problem of too little cases to go around (their exorbitant prices and most people rarely hiring in the first place leads to just mess) and are also rarely staying on long enough to make names for themselves.

the real reason why many civilians in new mananza don’t seek out pi’s is simple: just bc an investigation has been done doesn’t mean it will go to court or that anyone will be charged. 99% of cases do not go to court. this is because in order to issue an arrest via investigation, a pi has to present their case to a judge to receive a ‘warrant of prosecution’ along with a sum relating to the ‘damage of the alleged crimes committed’ by the person or people in question. if the warrant is granted, then pi then has to take this court ordered document to the police, who can decide whether or not they are willing to take on the decree. they usually don’t. why? bc:

there are a lot of private glorified security brokers who are considered ‘police’ by the government after signing a few papers, and as they’re a business they only do work with high profile and high paying clients to secure events, do dirty work under the table, or stop riots.

police departments only recieve payout from the city once the person in question is arrested and convicted of the alleged crimes (because all of this doesn’t signifiy that they’re automatically guilty, they still go to trial). long cases or convoluted cases that aren’t immediately going to be solved and paid out tend to be ignored by police, which allows criminals and crime syndicates to continue to run amuck.

the reason police cannot be paid out until someone is convicted is because the defendant, once convicted, becomes by law responsible for paying back the damages they are deemed responsible of by the court. another reason that prisons are overcrowded, is those who are financially unable to pay back the damages of a crime they’re deemed responsible for, are sent to work for poverty wages until everything is paid back. however, if you can pay your dues, you can essentially get out scott free with very little repercussions. unfortunately, this means homicides, kidnappings, rapes, domestic abuse, etc. tend to be harder to secure a payout for because these types of crimes are not committed to objects that have easily identifiable monetary value, but towards people. it becomes a complex debate of not only (1) is the defendant actually responsible for the crime itself? and (2) what is the monetary value of the weight of the crimes committed? is it quantifiable? how can you prove it?

it’s just a fucking mess. so, there aren’t many real pi’s left. don is a good one; still can solve any murder if you put it in front of him. but he’s not going out to get warrants of prosecution anymore it’s a damn headache, he’d rather live in squalor. so he does. so whenever someone comes a knocking on his door begging him to take a case, he always has one condition: do it for closure, not for justice.

as he says;

“trying to pursue law in a lawless city, is like a first time magician trying to force a rabbit out of a hat.” donte brought the gifted cigar back to his lips to take another sinful drag. after a moment he released the smoke to fend for itself among the smog. “it can be done, but only if you have real magic on your side. or if you’re damn good at sleight of hand.”

#are u curious about nad yet #me too #i only have basics but it’s messy #anyway tho it’s not too different than how crime works idk #it’s just that it literally will not be investigated if money isn’t involved #fuck justice only money #is the vibe #s: nad

[arewelemmings]

Alan Grayson: Right to Choose

The following is how Florida Representative Alan Grayson describes his policy concerning the Right to Choose:

"Right to Choose:

Because Roe v. Wade has protected the right to choose for so long, those of us who are pro-choice haven’t had any urgent need to think through how to protect that right – until now.  So here are seven practical proposals, all legal and feasible, to protect the right to choose:

Abortion rights should be incorporated, through the 51-vote reconciliation process or through agency rulemaking, as part of Obamacare’s health insurance minimal care, like preexisting conditions.  Making this an Obamacare “money bill” puts it within reconciliation.  And under the Constitution’s Supremacy clause, the states couldn’t thwart it.

By regulation or executive order, abortion should be included in all health coverage for military families, federal workers and federal contractors, and their spouses and children.  Also, every SSD (Social Security Disabled) and Medicaid beneficiary.  Here again, the states couldn’t prevent it.

Abortion should be a reimbursed and offered procedure in all hospitals receiving federal funding (which is, essentially, all hospitals), either by statute, regulation, or executive order.  This also applies at VA hospitals, and federally funded rural health clinics.  Abortion is healthcare.

Every major corporation should reimburse or front travel expenses to women who now must travel to have an abortion.  The Fair Labor Standards Act and labor law in “blue” states should incorporate this as a required employee benefit.  For others, governments and private donors/NGOs should do the same through small grants.

There are several “blue” states that had abortion bans in effect before Roe v. Wade, and they should be repealed immediately.

As long as the science supports it, the FDA should make pregnancy termination pills available without prescription, and also enforce existing federal laws that prevent anyone from interfering in the distribution of a federally licensed drug.  (Note to Supreme Court: the Post Office is in the Constitution.)  If an Rx is required, it should be available via Zoom.

“Blue states” can make it a crime for anyone to interfere with the rights of their citizens to terminate a pregnancy, including when those citizens are traveling elsewhere.

After the Alito draft decision was released in early May, helpless anomie settled over many pro-choice leaders.  Well, anomie is the enemy.  I believe that the right to control one’s own body is the most fundamental right of all.  No one should ever interfere in someone else’s decision about whether to have a child.  That goes against a bedrock principle of government and civilization: “Mind Your Own Business.”  In other words, if you’re against abortion, then don’t have one.

For all of us who support the Right to Choose, we must fight for what’s right."

(This article is taken directly from Alan Grayson's election website.)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"GREY HAIR SAVED HIM FROM LASH," Hamilton Spectator. April 1, 1913. Page 6. --- George Hurst Must Serve Three Months' Sentence ---- Sixteen Year Old Boy Placed on Indian List ---- Policeman Found Him in Intoxicated Condition ---- George Hurst, who appeared yesterday and was found guilty of assaulting his sister, Mrs. Anna Gibbons, and who was remanded until this morning to give the magistrate time to decide whether he should be whipped, in police court to-day received a three months' sentence. The magistrate said he did not want to sentence a grey- haired man to be lashed, but, nevertheless, he felt the case warranted it. The prisoner asked for another chance, promising to stay away from drink. which he said was the cause of all the trouble, but his worship's heart would not soften, and he was led below.

BOY ON INDIAN LIST The magistrate made à record this morning, when he ordered a 16-year-old boy's name to be placed on the Indian list. George Baker, the youth. met Thomas Heding, who lives Lear the high level bridge, shortly before 7 o'clock Saturday evening, and asked him to purchase a bottle of whisky for him, claiming It was for his father. The boy handed over a dollar bill to Reding, who, knowing his father, complied with the request. Later the boy was picked up by a constable in an intoxicated condition, and upon being questioned, told where he procured the liquor. Reding appeared this morning on a charge of procuring liquor for a minor, but was acquitted. The boy was severely reprimanded by the court, and told that if he was over found at any time with liquor about his person he would be arrested and sent over the road.

DENIES THEFT CHARGE. Charles MeCallum, 29 Bay street north, pleaded not guilty to a charge of theft preferred against him by Roy Hoover. They formed an acquaintance yesterday afternoon and spent the balance of the day together, taking in the sights of the city. When supper time came around, McCallum offered to take his new found friend to his boarding house for supper. This was agreeable to the complainant, who went to an uptown hotel, where he slept the night before and where his club bag still remained. Hoover car- ried the bag to his friend's boarding house and left it in his room. After the meal had been completed, he hied himself off somewhere. The prisoner, in the meantime, was told by the landlady that he would have to get out, as his room had been engaged by new boarders. He started out to dig up a new boarding house, and his friend not being around, he took the bag along with him. When Hoover came back to the house later on in the evening, be was surprised to find the prisoner gone and immediately swore out a warrant. The case was laid over until to morrow morning until the landlady called to see if she will substantiate the prisoner's evidence.

NOW HE IS SORRY. Harry Hadderson, Toronto, appeared to answer a charge of assaulting and threatening to kill his wife Lila. The complainant did not appear to press the charge and Hadderson was allowed his liberty. Before leaving the courtroom the magistrate put a couple of questions to him the answers to which caused much merriment among the backbenchers.

"Are you married this woman?" he was asked.

"Yes, sir: oh, yes, sir, but I wish I wasn't," came back the reply.

"How long have you been married?"

"About nine months."

"And you have come to the parting of the ways so soon?"

"Yes, sir, and I'm glad of it." said Hadderson as he was about to disappear through the doorway.

A WAGES CASE. Arthur Grayson, who its a shoe repair shop at 451 Barton street east. was ordered to pay Wm. Moynes $12 wages and $4 arrears.

MUST DO BETTER. Aylmer MacDonald. 183 Oak avenue, was charged by his wife. Lily, with non-support, and upon his promise to do the right thing by her in the future, he was allowed his freedom with the understanding that if is wife complained about him again, would be sent to jail without the option of a fine.

#hamilton #police court #assault #drunken assault #theft #illegal possession of alcohol #prohibition in ontario #liquor charge #public intoxication #non-support #back wages #sentenced to prison #central prison #crime and punishment in canada #history of crime and punishment in canada

[thalkonvotes]

South Carolina Primary Voting Dates & Requirements - U.S. Domestic Voters

Go Back

State Elections Website

Where's My Polling Place

Sample Ballot

Saturday Feb 23 - Democratic Presidential Primary

U.S. Domestic Voters Voter Registration Deadline - Submitted by Thursday January 4, 2024 Absentee Ballot Request Deadline - Received by Tuesday January 23, 2024 5:00 PM EST - Emergency Ballot Period from Tuesday January 30th to Saturday Feb 3, 2024 Absentee Ballot Return Deadline - Received by Saturday February 3, 2024 Early Voting Available - From Monday January 22 to Friday February 2, 2024

Saturday Feb 24 - Republican Presidential Primary

U.S. Domestic Voters Voter Registration Deadline - Submitted by Thursday January 25, 2024 Absentee Ballot Request Deadline - Received by Tuesday February 13, 2024 5:00 PM EST - Emergency Ballot Period from Tuesday February 20 to Saturday February 24, 2024 Absentee Ballot Return Deadline - Received by Saturday February 24, 2024 Early Voting Available - From Monday February 12 to Thursday February 22, 2024

Tuesday June 11 - State Primary

U.S. Domestic Voters Voter Registration Deadline - In-person Request by Friday May 10, 2024 - Email, Online, or Fax by Sunday May 12, 2024 - Postmarked by Monday May 13, 2024 Absentee Ballot Request Deadline - Received by Friday May 31, 2024 5:00 PM EDT - Emergency Ballot Period from Friday June 7 to Tuesday June 11, 2024 Absentee Ballot Return Deadline - Received by Tuesday June 11, 2024 Early Voting Available - From Tuesday May 28 to June 7, 2024

Registering

Check Registration Status

Register to Vote

Registration FAQ

You can register to vote or update your registration information online, by mail, in person at your elections office, or at some public assistance offices and motor vehicle offices.

Registering Identification

SC Driver's License or State ID Number (online applicants only) Social Security Number If registering for first time by mail, you must provide a copy of valid ID - Current and Valid Photo ID - Government issued document that shows your current name and address - Current utility bill, pay check, or bank statement * ID is not required if you are 65 or older, have a temporary or permanent physical disability, are a member of the active uniformed services or merchant marine who is absent form the county for active duty, or a spouse/dependent thereof, or are currently living outside the U.S. but otherwise eligible to vote.

Eligibility to vote in SC

A U.S. Citizen

Resident of South Carolina

At least 18 years old by Election Day

Live in the precinct in which you want to vote

Voting If You Are A Student In SC

Reside in SC but are attending college in another state

Reside in another state but attend college in SC

What Disqualifies You From Voting in SC

Due to a voting related court order

In prison or jail for a conviction of any kind (does not include pre-trial detention)

Convicted of an offense against state election laws and have not served the entire sentence, including probation or parole, or have not received a pardon

How Can I Restore My Voting Rights in SC?

You must complete your felony sentence, including any term of incarceration, parole, supervision, period of probation, or you have been pardoned. After that you are immediately eligible to register to vote

ID For Voting In-Person

You must present one of the following

Valid SC Driver's License

Valid SC Voter ID Card w/ Photo

Valid ID Issued by SC Department of Motor Vehicles, Transportation, Highway Safety, etc.

Valid US Passport

Valid Military ID

Early Voting

Early Voting Locations

Any registered voter can vote early without an excuse. You may vote early in person from 8:30 am until 5pm on the day before the election.

Absentee Voting

Where is My Ballot?

Has My Ballot Been Counted?

You must be a registered voter in South Carolina and meet one of the following qualifications (For an absentee ballot to count you MUST have one Witness Signature included on the ballot)

Student attending school outside your county of residence (includes spouses and dependents)

Member of the Armed forces or Merchant Marine serving outside your country of residence (includes spouses and dependents)

Serving with the American Red Cross or with the United Service Organizations (USO) who are attached to and serving with the Armed Forces outside your county of residence (includes spouses and dependents)

For reasons of employment you will not be able to vote on election day

Physically disabled

Government employee serving outside their county of residence on Election Day (includes spouses and dependents)

Death or funeral in the family within three days before the election

Plan to be on vacation outside their county of residence on Election Day

Certified poll watcher, poll manager, or county election official working on Election Day

Overseas citizens

Attending sick or physically disabled persons

Admitted to the hospital as an emergency patient on Election Day or within a four-day period before the election

Serving as a juror in state or federal court on Election Day

65 years or older

Confined to a jail or pre-trial facility pending disposition of arrest or trial

AS OF MAY 2022, YOU CAN NO LONGER VOTE EARLY IN-PERSON WITH AN ABSENTEE BALLOT. YOU MUST RETURN YOUR ABSENTEE BALLOT BY MAIL. MAKE SURE TO USE NEW ABSENTEE BALLOT APPLICATION FORM IF APPLIED FOR AFTER MAY 31, 2022. IF SOMEONE ELSE TO RETURN YOU BALLOT FOR YOU, YOU MUST MAKE THIS AUTHORIZATION IN WRITING. A CANDIDATE OR A CANDIDATE'S PAID STAFF MAY NOT RETURN THE BALLOT FOR YOU UNLESS THIS PERSON IS AN IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBER.

Where is my Ballot?

Go Back

#South Carolina Voting Information #Presidential Primary Dates #Helpful Links #Presidential Primaries #U.S. Domestic Voter

[healthstyle101]

Former Arkansas State Medical Board chairman arrested on Medicaid fraud charges

Former Arkansas State Medical Board Chairman Arrested for Medicaid Fraud The former chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board, Brian Thomas Hyatt, has been taken into custody on two counts of Medicaid fraud, according to authorities. Arrest and Detainment Brian Thomas Hyatt, a 49-year-old psychiatrist from Rogers, was apprehended by the Rogers Police on Monday, as reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Currently, he is detained in the Benton County Jail on behalf of the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office, with no bond set, as indicated by online jail records. Despite a call placed to his attorney, Erin Cassinelli, no immediate response was received as of Tuesday. Statement from Attorney General Tim Griffin Attorney General Tim Griffin disclosed that Dr. Hyatt's arrest came about after a warrant was issued by a Pulaski County district court judge. Griffin stated, "Prior to Dr. Hyatt’s arrest by the Rogers Police Department, prosecutors from my office and defense counsel had already reached an agreement for Dr. Hyatt’s surrender and appearance in court. We are honoring that prior agreement and look forward to his appearance in Pulaski County court later this month." Hyatt's Board Position and Resignation In January 2019, Hyatt was appointed to the medical board by then-Governor Asa Hutchinson. Although he relinquished his role as board chairman in March, he retained his seat on the board until May, according to the newspaper. In his resignation letter dated May 16, Hyatt asserted his innocence, stating, "I am not resigning because of any wrongdoing on my part, but so that the board may continue its important work without delay or distraction. I will continue to defend myself in the proper forum against the false allegations being made against me." Investigations Unveiled Allegations of fraud against Hyatt prompted both state and federal investigations. U.S. Attorney Clay Fowlkes confirmed that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had searched Hyatt's Rogers office in May. The attorney general's office received a whistleblower's tip from the behavioral health unit of Northwest Medical Center-Springdale in April 2022, leading to the issuance of a search warrant. Hyatt served as the medical director of the unit since January 2018, but his contract with the medical center was terminated in May 2022. Medicaid Claims and Settlement In March, Griffin announced that Northwest Arkansas Hospitals had agreed to pay over $1 million to the state, linked to 246 Medicaid claims. These claims were based on medical evaluations, diagnoses, and supporting documentation certified by Hyatt and nonphysician providers under his supervision. This settlement was reached following an audit by the Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care, a state contractor, which found that the documentation failed to meet the medical necessity requirement for hospitalizations. Medicaid Inspector General's Action The Office of Medicaid Inspector General suspended all payments for Medicaid services provided by Hyatt after determining there was a "credible allegation of fraud" against him, as revealed in a February 24 letter obtained by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette through the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. Civil Lawsuits In addition to these legal actions, Hyatt is facing several civil lawsuits. One such lawsuit, filed in March in Washington County Circuit Court, alleges that Hyatt and others unlawfully detained patients at Northwest Medical Center-Springdale's behavioral health unit in order to fraudulently bill private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or other applicable insurance for care and treatment that was not actually provided. Read the full article

[cardwellthaxton]

What You Should Know About Dealing with Probate Real Estate in New Jersey

By Cardwell Thaxton

The Cardwell Thaxton Group can buy your NEW JERSEY house. Contact us today! When dealing with a probate property in New Jersey, you may have many questions you would like to have answered. Below, we offer some information about probate properties as well as ways to handle them.

What Is Probate?

Probate is the legal process following a homeowner’s death if the property was not in a trust or owned with another person that did not have full rights of survivor ship. In most cases, the real estate that needs to go through probate will need to be sold so the proceeds from the sale can be split up between the beneficiaries if it was not indicated in the will to go to anyone or more people. The first thing to do is to determine where the probate needs to occur. The best place to start is the municipality where the property is located. There are many states that require the probate to be done in the county in which the property is situated. Then, you will need to hire a lawyer to analyze the will then draw up the paperwork. The paperwork is then taken to the courts. The judge determines who is the rightful owner of a piece or portfolio of real estate usually based on the previous owner’s will. Very rarely does the judge rule against the will.

Who Pays for Probate?

You can either pay for the probate out of pocket, or you can arrange that the probate costs be taken out at closing. The executor of the estate will determine a listing price for the property, negotiate the sale price and execute the sale contract. The lawyer that is handling the probate for you will then send their invoice to the title company handling the real estate transaction. The probate will be subtracted from the proceeds of the sale of the property. Their fee can range from a few hundred dollars to well over a thousand dollars. This varies by state and value of the property.

Can I List Probate Real Estate?

You cannot sell or even list the property before the probate is completed or without approval from the court. You will have to petition the court to be allowed to list the property. When it is listed available for sale, you may take offers on the property and have a contract; however, the closing will not occur until the probate is complete. When the probate case is filed, the title company knows who now can legally sell the property. 

How Much Should I Sell For?

In order to know how much you can ask for the real estate, you need to have the property appraised so you know how much it is worth and if there are any problems with the structure because these issues must be disclosed on the contract for sale. When you receive offers, you must take into consideration the probate cost. If you own a vacant lot, make sure the offer is enough to cover your bill. Most houses and other types of real estate will sell for way more than the cost to have the probate completed. If you want to sell the probate real estate quickly, you may want to list on the lower end of the market comps or appraisal price, this will ensure your property receives offers very quickly.

I’ve Accepted an Offer, Now What?

When you have received an acceptable offer, or you have negotiated a price you are willing to sell for, execute the contract. If you have any questions about the contract, reach out to a real estate lawyer to help you understand all the terms, conditions, and riders necessary to complete the deal. When the title company is chosen, make sure you provide the probate lawyers invoice to them so they can take care of the bill out of your proceeds. 

Contact Cardwell Thaxton today at 908-456-1593 to discuss in greater detail what you should know about dealing with probate real estate in New Jersey.

The Cardwell Thaxton Group Cardwell Thaxton, New Jersey 📲[phone] 📧[email protected] https://www.sellmyhousefastnewjersey.org/

#sellyourhousefastNewJersey #NJHomeInvestor #NewJerseyRealEstateInvesting #InvestingInNJHomes #NJPropertyInvestor #RealEstateInvestmentNJ #HouseFlippingNJ #NJRealEstateInvestor #PropertyInvestmentNJ #HomeFlippingNJ #NJRealEstateFlips #RealEstateInvestorNJ #NJHouseFlipping #InvestmentPropertiesNJ #NJRealEstateMarket #HomeBuyersNJ #RealEstateDealsNJ #NJInvestmentOpportunities #HouseHuntingNJ #NJHouseSales #NJRealEstatePros #foreclosures #divorce #realestateconsultant #GardenState #NewJersey

[45dazedandconfused]

How to be homeless on a budget.....part one

Yep you read that right, being homeless doesn't mean you have no bills, you just don't have a home. So here's what I've learned over the last 8 months, how many more to go I have no idea. So I've decided to blog about my journey. It starts differently for everyone. Mine was a slow moving,  fast spiral that was out of control before I really knew what was happening. It started with me being an alcoholic. I had gotten two OVI's back to back and was in debt to the court to the point I don't think I will ever get it paid back. But believe it or not that was just the start. Those happened in 2020 I became homeless in 2022. So that's why I say fast and slow spiral. I didn't see what was happening until it was too late. I was so busy struggling to eat and pay my bills everyday I wasn't watching how the private landlords, city officials, and investors from all over the country were about to make my hometown, "A place to be desired". The fancy way of saying, if you are middle class, single, or poor we don't want you to live here. They started a war on the homeless camps. Kicking them out of the woods and tearing down any shelter they could have. This new change all  started with a complex the city said was going to bring so much revenue to our town it would bring us back to life. A lot of the landlords thought the same thing including mine, so she cancelled my lease and raised the rent $200. I got the notice and had to be out 2 weeks later. It was move or we could go to court. So I took the last months rent, got a storage and moved into my car with my dog 2 weeks after Thanksgiving. Thank God that was a mild winter. Then just a few weeks later I found a house that was a fixer upper and I could do the work for cheap rent so not such a bad stint of being homeless. It all had worked out. It was only 9 months later and I was back in the same situation, only this time I had no car, no money, a shitty job, and no friends. The reason I was losing my house you ask? That ridiculous complex that at this point wasn't finished because they ran out of money, brought no extra business to our local places, didn't employee as many people as promised, and only brought extra traffic, and headaches on Friday's during rush hour. I mean don't get me wrong people benefitted from it. You know city officials, construction and road crews, landlords who sold their homes for top dollar to private investors who then charged 4 times the average rent, or just turned them into an Air B&B and charged 10 times the average rent per bedroom. It was a serious mess, and I wasn't the only one affected. So many long time residents received eviction notices and were made to move out of homes that some of them had lived in over 20 years. I was already going through a seriously emotional time in my life. Dealing with all the healing of past and present trauma while being a new empty nester, and newly sober human. That notice threw me into a tailspin I still haven't recovered from. I spent the next couple months trying to work and save to be able to move. The problem was the world was also more expensive and being a single women I just didn't make enough to put anything back. Then a month into this new mess my car got reposed and that is when I had my meltdown. It was tragic, freeing, self destructive, and satisfying all at once. Oh. wait a little side note, my mother had also disowned me because I suck at being alive. That's a story for later though, back to my homeless journey.  I got a storage again, paid a fortune to get my car back, and quit my job. In that order. I can't tell you what was happening to me still. I know now that I was just spiraling and had no idea how to make a decision. I  just said fuck it, I don't care anymore. It's too fucking much for me to deal with. The guy I was dating was a complete ass, another story for later. My kids were pissed at me over him, I had no friends because sober people lose all their non sober friends almost instantly, the one kid that was talking to me is in prison and needs money from me, and I just had found out that I had a warrant for my arrest for not paying my fines. I just didn't give a fuck anymore and was ready to throw in the towel. I mean for the love of God I had just went 3 months with no utilities, bathing in rain water I had collected, and living by candlelight. Finally paid the bill only to realize my car wasn't paid, the only reason I could afford the lights, and then my car is taken. Get it back only to  find out I was going to be homeless again within less than a year. All of this on top of the traumas I had buried my entire life and kept deep inside with alcohol were coming at me, and I was struggling to heal in a sober healthy way already. The worst part about the Year 2022 is the things I'm writing about is a small portion of the actual shit show I was living. When I say hot mess express with so much trauma happening a monk would even have to scream, I am underplaying how bad my life was. I for the first time ever didn't care if I lived or died. I wasn't just drowning I was buried. With all this going on you would think that I went back to drinking and that is how I became homeless. Nope, I didn't give up. I became homeless because I had no money to save, and that is when I quit my job. I decided with so much conviction that I would no longer work long hours and not have a life to make other people rich, while I couldn't even afford to eat. So I said fuck you all I quit!! I still picked up work freelancing and working for myself. I saved and still at the end of the day, I couldn't find a place that  I could afford and  would accept animals. So once again out on the streets I went, this time with no car. I can say at first it wasn't horrible. I stayed with my boyfriend and things were ok. Then Christmas morning all hell broke loose and I was kicked out on the street. He eventually let me and my dog back in so we wouldn't freeze to death but man I went through hell for the following weeks and months. I couldn't work with no ride so I couldn't pay bills or pay off debts at all. I had borrowed from everyone and everything was getting past due fast including my storage. I did everything I could to stay above water. Right when I was ready to give up completely, asshole of the year kicked me out. So with no where to go I went to a persons house I barely knew and spent the night. That was the first step in the right direction. We stayed up all night talking and she agreed to sell me a car for nothing down and payments when I could make them. Looking back on that night I remember I didn't trust her, the situation, or any excitement I felt because in my 44 years I had learned something too good to be true almost always is. This was the first time I was wrong. A few days later I had her car and I finally was only partially homeless. The first thing I did was go to my storage to get my blankets and pillows so I could sleep in the car with my dog. God it was like Christmas morning when I cuddled my big comfy comforter around me. I cried a little at how good it felt. That night I felt comfort and security again, it was freezing but I had a space heater, extension cord, and my blankets. I was happy for a brief moment. I sat with my laptop and dog and started to make plans. You know I would like to say that the house I was plugged into was a nice strangers, or one of my good friends that was allergic to dogs, or someone in my family that just didn't have room for me inside. But none of that is true. The truth of the matter was I knew hundreds of people, and were related to even more than that. You can throw a  rock in any direction in my town and hit someone and there is a 77.89% chance I'm related to them, and a 99.78% chance I know them well enough to be able to sleep on their couch. Yet there were only a couple who even offered me a place to shower, or just use the bathroom. God forbid I ask to sleep over. So I was stuck in the now asshole, cheating boyfriends driveway using his electric. All while he was inside warm and not hungry, talking to other women telling them how beautiful they were, and how he would rescue them from their awful ungrateful men they were dating. To top that off he would come out to accuse me of cheating and talking to other guys while I sat freezing in my car trying to start a business on my laptop. I struggled on, and eventually started booking appointments. So back to my storage to get my tools for work. I almost collapsed when I seen the overlock tag on it. I swear I thought that was it for me. I was going to just become a fulltime committed homeless person. With dirty clothes and a backpack, taking better care of my dog than myself. I cried a lot. I begged them to let me get my tools. I called everyone I knew trying to borrow or buy on payments what I needed. I had one friend sell me a pretty expensive item on payments. I am still making them to her. Then finally I got a call from the storage and the owner let me in to get what I needed! I was so relieved and cried again. I think homeless makes you cry a lot, or maybe it was just me. I took my time organizing my new home.  I put my work things, clothing, bathroom, and cleaning supplies in my trunk, set up the backseat like a bedroom, and the passenger seat and floor board as the office and kitchen area. I slept in the house that night. It was nice but I remember wondering if I would ever be warm again. Laying there in the bed with the douche canoe I was still freezing. My hands clenched up not able to relax, but I kept reassuring myself that this too shall pass. The next morning I went to my first clients house and started my business. I felt so embarrassed and unsure about it. Pulling up in this beater with a broken heater, dog in the backseat, breakfast in the front. I knew I looked homeless and desperate and I felt the same way inside. To my surprise no one ever said a word and that was such a relief. I felt like shit, looked like shit, and was being treated like shit by a man all the time. I got off work and sat in my car driving from one place I could park to the next. Never being able to relax because I still hadn't been able to take care of that warrant for my fines. So I had no license or insurance and was afraid a cop would come to my window asking questions. I used to get so upset about that. I still can't wrap my head around taking someone to jail for not paying a fine. Obviously I can't afford it or I would pay it! Most laws are ridiculous, most laws make no sense, and most laws aren't needed. It's all about money and control. The police don't protect and serve like they are supposed to and the judges don't rule with the facts mixed with heart. They rule to make the city more money. Why the hell do I have to pay the state of Whatever $300 for not wearing a seatbelt! I am a grown ass women with my own mind. If I want to risk my fucking life leave me the fuck alone and let me. It's none your damned business what I am doing in my car or with my life! OH and my loud mother fucking muffler!! I sat in jail 5 hours over a fucking muffler I couldn't afford to fix!! Then paid to get my car out of the cop impound, paid the ticket of almost $300, and had to get a special more expensive insurance cause in the process of moving my insurance company had dropped me because of the fucking seatbelt ticket added with a speeding ticket. They all work together for the greater good right? Lmao I will never agree with the bullshit traffic laws, or the outrageous cost of being a licensed driver. It's fucking ridiculous and everyone knows it they just don’t say it. Anywho,  after doing this driving and parking driving and parking I would be able to come the males house late at night and take a shower, shit, and eat. Sometimes he even let me sleep inside all night, as long as I was a well behaved pet I could come inside. I was exhausted and at this point crying all the time. I was making money though and saving what I could. One night he kicked me out and I had  a full busy day the next day, I tried the driveway but he threatened to call the cops. I knew I would go to jail, my dog the pound, all my things and car be taken away, and I just wanted to sleep in a bed! A warm room of my own and take a fucking shower! A good long shower. So I paid way too much for a hotel room. God it was wonderful, so much so I spent every dime I had saved to stay there. I didn't pay my fines again. I didn't pay my car insurance, or my cellphone bill, or anything on the car. Not a dime went to eat, or car maintenance, gas no way! All I wanted was to sleep and recover. I cancelled appointments, I flaked out on everything and in the end I found myself begging him to help me out. Once again allowing a man to treat me in a way I would have never put up with before. My life before was so different. I had new cars, nice houses, season seats to the football stadium. Vacations when I wanted, friends blowing my phone up wanting to do one amazing thing after another. I stayed in mansions and met movie stars. I was on top of  the world, and then the world fell and all I had was a shitty car and my storage. But to me that was something to start with. I had to get out of this mess for myself, but also my kids, animals and most importantly my granddaughter. She needed to see mamaw come from the bottom and get it back like her dad, aunt, and uncle had witnessed before. She had to see a strong women that didn't give up and fought the fight until the bitter end. Soldier up little princess, the world is not easy and it's even worse if you are a women. Watch mamaw fight, you will never see her give up. If she fails, she will take the blood of her enemies with her! So the next morning I went to work and when I was done for the day, the man I had to beg for help, and only person that helped me, was in a good mood and I was allowed in the house a little earlier. That was when I knew I had to get focused and live like I did when I had household bills and responsibilities. So I sat down and did my budget. Holy Mary mother of Christ!! I couldn't believe how mother fucking expensive it was to be homeless!! I cried and I think my soul died a little. I seen no way out of this situation. Nothing, I was fucked in the ass with no lube and an abnormally large dick!! This was planet bullshit and I was living on the mother fucker. That's when the anger started. I was 5 months into this fucked up situation and there wasn't an ounce of hope in site. I wanted to just curl up and someone else figure this shit out, but there was no one else. It was me, I was the adult and I was supposed to know the answers. Who the fuck left me in charge of my life? Can't they see this isn't working out?

#homelesswomenwithadog #carliving #homeless #gypsysoul

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 6.13

313 – The decisions of the Edict of Milan, signed by Constantine the Great and co-emperor Valerius Licinius, granting religious freedom throughout the Roman Empire, are published in Nicomedia. 1325 – Ibn Battuta begins his travels, leaving his home in Tangiers to travel to Mecca (gone 24 years). 1381 – In England, the Peasants' Revolt, led by Wat Tyler, comes to a head, as rebels set fire to the Savoy Palace. 1514 – Henry Grace à Dieu, at over 1,000 tons the largest warship in the world at this time, built at the new Woolwich Dockyard in England, is dedicated. 1525 – Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns. 1625 – King Charles I of England marries Catholic princess Henrietta Maria of France and Navarre, at Canterbury. 1740 – Georgia provincial governor James Oglethorpe begins an unsuccessful attempt to take Spanish Florida during the Siege of St. Augustine. 1774 – Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain's North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves. 1777 – American Revolutionary War: Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette lands near Charleston, South Carolina, in order to help the Continental Congress to train its army. 1805 – Lewis and Clark Expedition: Scouting ahead of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four companions sight the Great Falls of the Missouri River. 1855 – Twentieth opera of Giuseppe Verdi, Les vêpres siciliennes ("The Sicilian Vespers"), is premiered in Paris. 1881 – The USS Jeannette is crushed in an Arctic Ocean ice pack. 1886 – A fire devastates much of Vancouver, British Columbia. 1893 – Grover Cleveland notices a rough spot in his mouth and on July 1 undergoes secret, successful surgery to remove a large, cancerous portion of his jaw; the operation was not revealed to the public until 1917, nine years after the president's death. 1895 – Émile Levassor wins the world's first real automobile race. Levassor completed the 732-mile course, from Paris to Bordeaux and back, in just under 49 hours, at a then-impressive speed of about fifteen miles per hour (24 km/h). 1898 – Yukon Territory is formed, with Dawson chosen as its capital. 1917 – World War I: The deadliest German air raid on London of the war is carried out by Gotha G.IV bombers and results in 162 deaths, including 46 children, and 432 injuries. 1927 – Aviator Charles Lindbergh receives a ticker tape parade up 5th Avenue in New York City. 1944 – World War II: The Battle of Villers-Bocage: German tank ace Michael Wittmann ambushes elements of the British 7th Armoured Division, destroying up to fourteen tanks, fifteen personnel carriers and two anti-tank guns in a Tiger I tank. 1944 – World War II: German combat elements, reinforced by the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division, launch a counterattack on American forces near Carentan. 1944 – World War II: Germany launches the first V1 Flying Bomb attack on England. Only four of the eleven bombs strike their targets. 1952 – Catalina affair: A Swedish Douglas DC-3 is shot down by a Soviet MiG-15 fighter. 1966 – The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their Fifth Amendment rights before questioning them (colloquially known as "Mirandizing"). 1967 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. 1971 – Vietnam War: The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers. 1973 – In a game versus the Philadelphia Phillies at Veterans Stadium, Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Ron Cey and Bill Russell play together as an infield for the first time, going on to set the record of staying together for 8+1⁄2 years. 1977 – Convicted Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray is recaptured after escaping from prison three days before. 1977 – The Uphaar Cinema Fire took place at Green Park, Delhi, resulting in the deaths of 59 people and seriously injured 103 others. 1981 – At the Trooping the Colour ceremony in London, a teenager, Marcus Sarjeant, fires six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II. 1982 – Fahd becomes King of Saudi Arabia upon the death of his brother, Khalid. 1982 – Battles of Tumbledown and Wireless Ridge, during the Falklands War. 1983 – Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune. 1990 – First day of the June 1990 Mineriad in Romania. At least 240 strikers and students are arrested or killed in the chaos ensuing from the first post-Ceaușescu elections. 1994 – A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blames recklessness by Exxon and Captain Joseph Hazelwood for the Exxon Valdez disaster, allowing victims of the oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages. 1996 – The Montana Freemen surrender after an 81-day standoff with FBI agents. 1996 – Garuda Indonesia flight 865 crashes during takeoff from Fukuoka Airport, killing three people and injuring 170. 1997 – A jury sentences Timothy McVeigh to death for his part in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. 1999 – BMW win 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans. 2000 – President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea meets Kim Jong-il, leader of North Korea, for the beginning of the first ever inter-Korea summit, in the northern capital of Pyongyang. 2000 – Italy pardons Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981. 2002 – The United States withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. 2005 – The jury acquits pop singer Michael Jackson of his charges for allegedly sexually molesting a child in 1993. 2007 – The Al Askari Mosque is bombed for a second time. 2010 – A capsule of the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa, containing particles of the asteroid 25143 Itokawa, returns to Earth by landing in the Australian Outback. 2012 – A series of bombings across Iraq, including Baghdad, Hillah and Kirkuk, kills at least 93 people and wounds over 300 others. 2015 – A man opens fire at policemen outside the police headquarters in Dallas, Texas, while a bag containing a pipe bomb is also found. He was later shot dead by police. 2018 – Volkswagen is fined one billion euros over the emissions scandal. 2021 – A gas explosion in Zhangwan district of Shiyan city, in Hubei province of China kills at least 12 people and wounds over 138 others.

#Events

[bound2happin-blog]

My Legal Battle with my Family and their Co-horts / Co-conspirators (137):

This is a letter I received from my parents, Leonard and Gloria Sumter, while at Wheeler Correctional Facililty on 2-11-16.  If you see where I highlighted my mother, Gloria Sumter, wrote,

“Dad put [$]1000.00 in BOA (Bank of America) on Jan. 20th & [$]2000.00 in today.”

This is my mother, Gloria Sumter, telling me that my father, Leonard Sumter Jr., put $1000.00 into my Bank of America checking account on Jan. 20th, 2016 and another $2000.00 on February 11th, 2016.  So without me asking or me finding out about it until after it was already deposited into my checking account, my parents deposited $3000.00 into my Bank of America checking account Jan/Feb, 2016.  Despite having paid my AT&T account (cell phone number: 404-915-2030) for all the months between my June 21, 2015 arrest and April 2016 per her agreement.  However, two (2) months later in April 2016 my mother then reversed the payment she had made to my AT&T account (cell phone number: 404-915-2030) after learning that I had been granted a hearing to contest the fraudulent-statements based Harassment Restraining Order (HRO) which my assailant, Creighton Hussey, filed against me in the Fourth Distrcit Court of Minneapolis, MN.  This is the document which caused the GA State Board of Pardons and Paroles to issue a warrant for my arrest, for an alleged parole violation.  I was checking my account regularly using a cell phone that someone in a nearby bunk had smuggled in illegally and checked my AT&T account, saw that the payment had been reversed and texted my mother who then said, “fine, I’ll pay it.”  She then went ahead and paid the bill for that month and then completely stopped paying it.  This caused my AT&T cell phone to be cut off and for me to lose that phone number: 404-915-2030.  This was the two-step verification method I used to sign-in to all my online accounts.  (GMail; Google Drive; iCloud; etc.)  So this completely destroyed my ability to sign-in to these accounts and therefore destroyed a plethora of evidence which was stored on these cloud drives.  As Dennis Bickham made sure that the phone itself was also destroyed, this prevented me from obtaining the evidence which was on the phone (text messages, voice messages, pictures, etc.)  Without the ability to get the same phone number again, I am prevented from being able to access this evidence, which is a felony on the part of my parents and Dennis Bickham, and the other parties of their scheme.)  Without a search warrant level subpoena to obtain the text messages with content, I will be unable to retrieve this evidence.

They did this as a ruse.  To make me and anyone else “looking in” think they were helping by depositing money into my checking account while actually destroying evidence by not paying my AT&T cell phone bill which was agreed upon.  This agreement is apparent by the fact that the bill from June 2015 to April 2016 was paid and my parents knew on September 16th, 2015 my parole date was set for September 16th, 2016.  I have another letter I will post from Dennis Bickham, in which he states that he had spoken to my mother and that she had spoken to the parole board who told her PIC (Prisoner Incentive Credits) were being applied to my release date for PIC points I earned during my stay at Wheeler Correctional Facility.  This means that they (my parents and Dennis Bickham) lead me to believe that I was going to be released a few months earlier than September 2016.  In fact, approximately May 2016.

[lawyerserving456]

The Reason Why You Must Hire A Family Law Lawyer

You might be given an opportunity to present your case when it's your turn. You should show your claims in your application or your answer . The judges use a take a look at called the “balance of probabilities” to see in case you have proven your claims. This signifies family law lawyers that your declare must be more possible (more than 50%) than the opposite party’s claims. Always be respectful and well mannered to everybody within the courtroom, including the other celebration.

I can't say sufficient good issues concerning the people at AP Lawyers.They are professional, educated, thorough and empathetic. They will observe up with you and make certain family law rules you are heading in the best direction.I will recommend them every time. We are accountable with our client’s sources and are all the time fair and transparent in our billing practices.

Our authorized staff will work with you to ensure that you receive the steerage and assist that you need to make the transition as simple as possible. You’ll have the ability to rely on our expertise in defusing complex conditions and bringing a couple of favourable resolution. With his broad and focused expertise in family law, Barry provides efficient and strategic options for his clients whereas striving to make the entire process as easy, stress-free and as comfortable as potential. Barry has a monitor record of successfully resolved family law recordsdata in favour of his shoppers by way of arbitration, mediation and negotiated settlement. If an agreement is reached in mediation, it could then be written right into a binding contract that can be enforced in court docket. It is totally confidential and cannot be used as proof for any function in the identical proceedings.

You must additionally get permission from the choose to file the report with the court docket on the trial management conference. You ought to only call witnesses who've info that can help the decide decide your case and is related to the orders that you actually want the choose to make at the trial. You may call witnesses who've information that goes towards family law act the other party’s case. The offer to settle have to be stored confidential from the decide listening to the trial until the choose has dealt with all the issues in dispute, apart from prices. That’s why we offer all the knowledge you have to make the finest possible decision at each stage of the method.

The Canadian Courts should, when making selections relating to parenting rights, including custody and access, concentrate on the question of “What is in one of the best curiosity of the child? ” somewhat than what may be in one of the best pursuits of both parent within the dispute. Options for resolving disputes without litigation and outdoors of the Adversarial System. Some of the choice dispute resolution strategies are Judicial Dispute Resolution, mediation, collaborative law, arbitration and negotiation.

Our divorce and family law lawyers serve shoppers all through the State of New Jersey. We supply a full vary of choices to resolve child custody disputes - including litigation, mediation, or collaborative divorce choices. He devotes his practice to matrimonial litigation and matters involving industrial disputes. Karahotzitis has co-authored several articles utilized in continuing authorized training seminars.

[law-office-of-spiro-k-pistiolas]

How Much Of My Work Injury Settlement Amount Can I Keep?

If you have a work injury claim because you were injured on the job, you may have a challenging path ahead of you to ensure that your case is resolved in your favor. Once you receive benefits or a settlement from your employer’s insurance company, other parties, such as your attorney, doctors, and government agencies, may have a claim on a portion of that money.

So, how much of your compensation for a work injury can you actually keep? This is a legitimate inquiry. It is also advisable not to be surprised by what you may have to pay to third parties once the process is well underway. This article lists fees and payments you may be required to make with your settlement funds.

Work Injury Attorneys’ Costs And Fees

Many work injury attorneys in California charge what is known as a “contingency fee.” This essentially means that you will not incur any costs or fees upfront. However, your attorney will receive a percentage of the money you receive in a settlement or award for a workplace injury. If you do not receive any benefits, you will not owe anything.

California limits attorneys’ fees in workers’ compensation cases to 15% of the amount awarded to the worker, as opposed to the 30% to 40% contingency fee a personal injury attorney may charge in a car accident or other personal injury case. In addition to the contingency fee, you will be responsible for reimbursing your attorney for any expenses, such as copying medical records, hiring expert witnesses, and court reporters to transcribe depositions that he or she may have advanced.

Unpaid Work Injury Medical Bills

If your initial claim for a work injury is denied, but your appeal is successful, the judge may order the insurance company to pay your medical bills in addition to your workers’ compensation settlement or award. If you have already paid your medical expenses, you may keep the award money designated for those costs. However, if your doctors permitted you to defer payment of your medical bills until you received your workers’ compensation settlement, you are required to pay those bills after receiving your settlement or award.

In certain instances, your attorney for work-related injuries may negotiate a settlement that requires the insurance company to pay a portion of your medical bills directly. In most cases, however, the settlement will include a lump sum for medical expenses. Your attorney may withhold a portion of the settlement to cover the unpaid medical bills, but he or she may also be able to negotiate a reduction with your medical providers. If this occurs, you will retain a larger portion of your workers’ compensation settlement.

Will I Owe Taxes On My Work Injury Settlement?

State and federal taxes will not apply to your work injury settlement or award. The only exception to this rule is if you also receive Social Security Disability Insurance or SSDI benefits. If your combined SSDI and workers’ compensation benefits are high enough, your SSDI benefits may be reduced, a process known as “offsetting.” You may be required to pay taxes on the offset amount. Your work-related injury settlement may also affect your eligibility for certain tax credits, as the IRS may consider the amount you receive as income when determining your eligibility for those credits.

Conclusion

Pistiolas Law knows that healing from your work injury and navigating a complicated legal process can be difficult for you and your family. Your choices now may affect your financial future. Call [phone] to schedule your free consultation and comprehensive case evaluation.

#workinjury #attorney #workercompensation