ThePrettiestOne

The LGBT advocacy group Lambda Legal received confirmation Thursday that the Social Security Administration plans to retroactively offer spousal benefits to same-sex couples who were legally wed but lived in a state that did not recognize their marriage. From Lambda:

According to the Department of Justice, the new policy will apply to previously filed claims still pending in the administrative process or litigation. The expected policy change follows the Supreme Court’s June decision striking down marriage bans across the country.

Lambda Legal is pleased to receive this confirmation that the Social Security Administration will soon announce a change to their spousal benefits policy that could right a wrong for hundreds of same-sex spouses.

According to the release, the SSA has given no time frame for when it will officially make the change. But what this suggests is that widows and widowers who have a case pending and whose spouses died before the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage will be eligible to receive Social Security survivor and death benefits. The decision could also affect couples who have sought other spousal benefits but been denied based on the state in which they reside.

The news from Lambda came on the heels of a New York Times article about spouses whose cases to receive benefits were still pending.

... my Administration has been partnering with states and cities to help grow the middle class. Over the past few years, nearly 20 cities and counties have implemented paid sick days. Six states have enacted paid sick days or paid family leave. Seventeen states, and more than two dozen cities and counties, have raised their minimum wage. All of this will help working families. And across the country, folks are proving that preparing all our kids for the future doesn’t have to be a partisan issue. Seattle, a city with a Democratic mayor, just passed universal pre-k, while Indianapolis, a city with a Republican mayor, is starting citywide preschool scholarships. All told, 34 states have increased funding for preschool.

President Obama sent a pointed message to the Republican Congress this morning in his weekly address after extolling many of the economic growth partnerships between the federal government and states and cities. It's time to knock off the obstructionism and govern, he said, for the sake of the economy.

"Unfortunately," the president told listeners, "Congress left town for five full weeks – and they left behind a stack of unfinished business." That unfinished business included reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank and ... what was it? Oh, yeah. The federal budget.

Congress also hasn’t passed a budget – and when they return from vacation, they’ll only have a few weeks to do so, or shut down the government for the second time in two years. They’ve had all year to do this.

He closed with a final kick in the congressional pants.

Americans expect Congress to help keep our country strong and growing – not threaten to shut down our government. When Congress gets back, they should prevent a shutdown, pass a responsible budget, and prove that this is a country that looks forward – a country that invests in our future, and keeps our economy growing for all Americans.

To read the transcript in full, check below the fold or visit the White House website.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Bernie Sanders Announces Bill To Abolish For-Profit Prison Industrial Complex

This is ugly.

Pulled over for not completely stopping at a stop sign, Jerame Reid, who wasn't even the driver, was unarmed, non-violent, had his hands up, and his murder was filmed. In the car with a friend, sitting on the passenger side, you can clearly see Jerame slowly getting out of the car, communicating that he's doing nothing wrong, and see him putting his hands on his in the air above his head.

Standing nearly 10 feet away, on the driver's side of the car, deathly afraid of a peaceful Jerame Reid, Officer Roger Worley fired the first shot at Jerame, but missed. Upon hearing this shot, the other officer, Braheme Days, fired seven rapid shots directly at Jerame and killed him right there on the spot.

After seeing the video and learning all of the facts, a New Jersey grand jury decided the officers didn't even need to go to trial. If you let them tell it, all is well is in the Garden State.

When we say black lives matter, we say it for Jerame Reid because this grand jury just decided that his life wasn't even worth a basic criminal charge of something like reckless homicide.

And here's what's altogether flagrant ...

The officer who fired seven shots at Jerame Reid is being sued for raping a woman.

Not only that, but Jerame Reid's family won a lawsuit against the state for a 2009 instance where he was severely beaten by law enforcement.

In conclusion, what we see here is that the system will bend over backwards to protect violent police at all costs. It's despicable and reveals that even in some instances where a brutal police murder is filmed, it still takes a prosecutor who wants a conviction to get behind it.

In 2013, the Washington city of SeaTac became the first in America to approve a $15 minimum wage. But the question of whether the pay increase would apply to thousands of workers at Sea-Tac airport quickly got hung up in the courts. Now, those workers will get their raise—the Washington State Supreme Court has said that the minimum wage does apply to the airport, reversing a lower court decision in favor of the low-wage employers fighting to avoid paying a living wage.

The low wages at the airport are felt in the city of SeaTac:

“Now, possibly, our food pantry lines will go down,” said the Rev. Jan Bolerjack, minister at the Riverton United Methodist Church.

Airport workers have made up a big proportion of those using the food pantry.  “Some workers have come right off shift to get food for their families,” said Bolerjack.  “A living wage is the only fair thing, the only just thing, for workers working a full shift.”

Washington state, by the way, has one of the higher state minimum wages, at $9.47 an hour. It's still not enough for workers to live on.

“Thank you. And, for the record, it’s never a compliment. Want to see ALL the words from #Unspinning the Spin? You’re in luck! Barnes & Noble has the ebook here:http://bit.ly/1LkTH17″

As seen on the Women’s Media Center Facebook page

Today an autopsy confirmed the early eyewitness reports that St. Louis police officers shot teenager Mansur Ball-Bey in the back. Every person there who saw the shooting has said this for days and this was a huge reason immediate protests broke out after his death.

What I want you to notice, though, is something very troubling that was said in the press conference today. The police chief, Sam Dotson said:

"Just because he was shot in the back doesn't mean he was running away," Dotson said. "It could be, and I'm not saying that it doesn't mean that. I just don't know yet.

"What I do know is that two officers were involved and fired shots, but I don't know exactly where they were standing yet and I won't know until I get their statements."

In essence, what Chief Dotson just admitted was that days after the shooting death of a beloved teenager, his office still hadn't spoken to the officers who fired the shots. Now that the autopsy results are back, and are public, these officers have the chance to shape their statements around the evidence that is leaked.

Let's be clear, though: this process isn't accidental, it was built this way on purpose. In Cleveland, after police shot and killed Tamir Rice, the officers never gave official statements during the entire investigation. Nine months later, still no statements.

Police are given unending grace and latitude to use lethal force on their job and simply go not just days, but months on end, without even stating what happened. In the meantime, grieving families are virtually ignored and often treated like the enemy when they ask for even the most basic answers.

ozymandias271:

theunitofcaring:

suburbia-stoppushingg:

theunitofcaring:

dystopian novel premise:

A high flying Silicon Valley startup has invented Good Dollars, debit cards which can be restricted so that the money can only be spent “ethically” - that is, on products that have been whitelisted by the person who set up the card. Employers start paying their employees in Good Dollars instead of regular dollars so they can control how their workers spend their paychecks. 

Most employers blacklist alcohol and cigarettes, because they don’t feel it’s appropriate for you to spend your paycheck on those. Some employers, being especially socially conscious, blacklist movie theatres and swimming pools, while others make it impossible to spend your money on potato chips or soda. The CEO of Walmart really hates lobsters so Walmart paychecks are restricted so you can’t buy lobster. The CEO of Amazon has a beef with steak, so if you work for Amazon your Good Dollars won’t let you buy any.

Plot twist: like all great dystopian novels, this one is just “what if we treated everyone the way we treat poor people”. Kansas lawmakers have banned welfare recipients from spending their money on movies and swimming pools. Missouri tried to ban food stamps recipients from spending the food stamps on steak, seafood, and cookies. Wisconsin is debating a ban on buying “unhealthy” food with food stamps.

So if you’re in the mood to be a brave teenage protagonist, boy have I got a system for you to take on.

The difference, is that when you WORK for your money, the government will have no say in how you spend it. You know why? Because it’s YOUR money. When you’re spending the governments money, they have the right to decide how you spend it. They have the right to say “if your poor enough to be on welfare, your too poor to buy LUXARY ITEMS.” Get over government programs and stop complaining.

This post has gotten a lot of responses to this effect, and they bother me. 

If a company decides that its employees are “spending the company’s money, not your money” when they spend their paychecks, and therefore restricts paychecks so you can only spend them on virtuous things, almost everyone thinks that would be evil. Some people think it’s okay because you could always get a different job, but I think even most of those people would prefer that companies not do this.

We all know that some people will make bad choices. Pretty much no one thinks that justifies Good Dollars (partially because we think people have the right to make bad choices, partially because we think people are better at knowing their own needs than their bosses or Congress).

What does it mean to say someone on benefits doesn’t deserve to go swimming? That they are wrong to have decided swimming is a good use of their money, which the government knows because it is great at prescribing peoples’ personal lives and could definitely never go wrong while doing so? That, even though they’re right that going swimming will keep them healthy and happy, they don’t deserve to be healthy or happy? Maybe what people really mean is that not being allowed to go swimming will motivate people go get a job, but there’s no evidence to suggest it does and in any event lack of motivation isn’t really the barrier to employment for most unemployed people. 

It really seems to me that the reason people feel it’s okay for welfare programs to do this is that we think people on benefits are fundamentally less trustworthy, less deserving of happiness, and less capable of making choices than other people.  And honestly, fuck that. The government sucks at running peoples’ lives. Pretty much everyone can run their own life better than the government can do it for them. And every single being in the world is deserving of happiness and always will be, because happiness is good and suffering is bad. 

For many people, such as diabetics, “unhealthy” food is sometimes medically necessary.

Also, children who are on food stamps still have birthdays, and should be allowed birthday cake. I mean, if you want to be the anti-birthday-cake-for-five-year-olds contingent, be my guest, but be aware that you’re a fucking Care Bear villain

“I hate it when people say “homosexuality is unnatural” - according to science, homosexuality is VERY natural and also really important!

I have a couple of sources, because I did some research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals

The overall article is fantastic! I also found much interesting stuff in the external links and references.

Then I had:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0722_040722_gayanimal.html

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gay-penguin-couple-adopts-abandoned-egg-in-german-zoo-1.794702

which inspired me the most, and

http://www.echonyc.com/~stone/Features/BioExEx1.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bisexual-species/

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/10/10/gay-flamingos-adopt-chick-that-was-abandoned-by-its-parents/

I think I even had a couple more, I can link them later on if you want :) — with Jenny Jinya.

As seen on the Jenny-Jinya Facebook page

I remember when I was young, and Funky Winkerbean was in the newspaper, and it was starting to talk about more serious topics.  And it was cool!  I liked the idea of taking something silly and then finding something deeper in it, or putting characters who are generally humorous through something serious to see how they deepen.  I still like that idea, obviously, if you see the kinds of stuff I write and the kinds of stuff I like that’s made by other people (Scrubs, MTMTE, etc., stuff where the tone can shift dramatically from hilarious to depressing within the span of minutes)  

But, as y’all are probably well aware, I’ve come to not like Funky Winkerbean.  Stuff it does is grating and drives me up the wall.  And yet this is a bunch of ridiculous characters who have terrible things happen to them and became more serious, and that’s like my jam.  What’s going wrong?  AND HOW DO I AVOID THIS MYSELF IN MY OWN SHIT????  And so it just becomes a workshop session, you know?  Trying to examine what it’s doing badly that I can avoid like the plague.  Like, it’s become this example of What Not To Do.  And, honestly, it’s become pretty valuable to me in that respect!

The most important lesson it’s imparted on me is this:

Manage the bad things that happen to your characters as if it’s a bank account.  You first spend a while building capital on a character, and then when you’re ready, you make that withdrawal from the Bad Stuff Bank.  The problem you want to avoid is to not keep withdrawing and withdrawing and withdrawing from the Bad Stuff Bank that you stop remembering to put shit back in.  Eventually your nerve endings are all frayed and you don’t even remember why the fuck you liked this character to begin with.  They haven’t even been themselves for forever, and they’ve just become a person-shaped object to heap Bad Stuff on.  The story ceases being about the character and becomes about the overdrawing from the bank itself.  There’s no longer an arc, there’s just a freefall.  

And some people mistake that freefall for Important Deep Writing.  They point to their Bad Stuff as if it’s amazing on the face of it, not realizing nobody cares because for years now it’s been happening to a bunch of assholes.

Don’t overdraw from your Bad Stuff Bank.  

Don’t be Funky Winkerbean.  Or Electroma.  

god, electroma

Tea with Yoko

Did Planned Parenthood break any laws in facilitating fetal tissue donation from abortions? The answer is clearly "no," and now five states have proven it: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts and South Dakota.

Pennsylvania has found no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood in the state after a review, according to a letter from the state health department.

That decision makes it the fifth state to announce that they have found no wrongdoing by the organization in the wake of controversial undercover videos showing officials discussing the price of fetal tissue for medical research. Planned Parenthood says the officials are discussing compensation for expenses, which is legal, and not profit.

The organization also says it only has fetal tissue donation programs in two states, California and Washington.

Since none of these states are actually places where the program is in place, this was pretty much a foregone conclusion, wasn't it. So, are these states going to bill the anti-abortion group that released the bogus videos for wasting their time and taxpayer dollars with stupid investigations?

At any rate, they're possibly going to have to answer to Planned Parenthood. The organization is considering whether to sue the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-choice extremists pretending to be a medical group behind the videos. "I absolutely do believe that they have violated laws in terms of how they secured these videos," Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens told The Hill. "But the fraud is also in how they have presented them and in the editing." California is investigating the organization and whether it violated state laws in obtaining the footage.

spookychan:

sizvideos:

Sir Patrick Stewart Loves A Male Kiss

Video

Sir Patrick Stew going in for the hetro male kiss. This is kinda amazing the fact that it tears down all that macho bullshit and is closer to love and compassion of one’s fellow man. 

thechronicleofshe:

untouchablethot:

the-bored-cat:

A blonde and a lawyer are seated next to each other on a flight from LA to NY.

The lawyer asks if she would like to play a fun game? The blonde, tired, just wants to take a nap, politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks.
The lawyer persists and explains that the game is easy and a lot of fun.

He explains, “I ask you a question, and if you don’t know the answer, you pay me $5.00, and vice versa.”

Again, she declines and tries to get some sleep. The lawyer, now agitated, says, “Okay, if you don’t know the answer you pay me $5.00, and if I don’t know the answer, I will pay you $500.00.”

This catches the blonde’s attention and, figuring there will be no end to this torment unless she plays, agrees to the game. The lawyer asks the first question. “What’s the distance from the earth to the moon?”

The blonde doesn’t say a word, reaches into her purse, pulls out a $5.00 bill and hands it to the lawyer. “Okay” says the lawyer, “your turn.”

She asks the lawyer, “What goes up a hill with three legs and comes down with four legs?” The lawyer, puzzled, takes out his laptop computer and searches all his references, no answer. He taps into the air phone with his modem and searches the net and the library of congress, no answer. Frustrated, he sends e-mails to all his friends and coworkers, to no avail.

After an hour, he wakes the blonde, and hands her $500.00. The blonde says, “Thank you,” and turns back to get some more sleep. The lawyer, who is more than a little miffed, wakes the blonde and asks, “Well, what’s the answer?” Without a word, the blonde reaches into her purse, hands the lawyer $5.00, and goes back to sleep.

Ctfuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

YASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS Destroy him. and also destroy the history of blonde jokes with more jokes like thisss yesssssssssssssss

Sometimes you have to crunch and work overtime. While that can give you a productivity boost and help you get needed things done, in the long term—past four weeks—long work weeks actually make us accomplish less.

Read more...

By John Cheese  Published: August 21st, 2015 

Self-rising flour is commonly called for in recipes for biscuits, pancakes, and muffins, but if you don’t have room in your kitchen for multiple varieties of flour (or just don’t feel like going to the store), Epicurious has an easy formula for making your own with AP and a bit of salt and baking powder:

Read more...

aiglet12:

prokopetz:

If you ever need evidence of how profoundly sexist the mainstream gaming press is, you don’t need to look any further than the alleged rise and fall of point-and-click adventure games.

Everybody knows what a point-and-click adventure game is, right? You walk around pre-rendered environments looking for hidden objects and talking to quirky NPCs, then use those objects to solve inventory-based puzzles. They’re usually colorful, often comedic, and tend to have little or nothing in the way of twitch gameplay - fun for the whole family.

Now, the narrative the gaming press would have us believe is that, following the golden age of Sierra and LucasArts back in the late 80s and early to mid 90s, point-and-click adventure games suffered a sharp and seemingly irreversible commercial decline, essentially vanishing from the gaming scene until they were revived by the heroic efforts of outfits like Telltale Games and guys like Tim Schafer in the late 00s.

The trouble is, that never actually happened.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: point-and-click adventure games are enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment, and the names I just dropped deserve a lot of credit for that.

No, the part I have trouble with is the alleged interregnum between the reigns of LucasArts and Telltale. The fact of the matter is that point-and-click adventure games never died.

The chronology just doesn’t add up. To pose a few obvious examples:

• The Nancy Drew series, a point-and-click adventure franchise as old-school as they come, put out over a dozen titles during the early 00s.
• Funcom’s Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was enormously successful, both critically and commercially, during a period when the gaming press would have us believe the genre was almost wholly moribund.
• Likewise, the Dream Chronicles series managed three sequels during a period when point-and-click adventure games allegedly weren’t a thing.

Sure, a lot of these games weren’t sold via specialty gaming stores, instead appearing primarily on the discount software shelves at Target and similar stores - but then, that’s a matter of how you frame it, isn’t it? With a slight change in perspective, being relegated to the Target discount shelf becomes maintaining a strong presence in mainstream retail channels during a span when virtually all other games were increasingly confined to specialist hobby outlets.

So the question becomes: why was the gaming press claiming that point-and-click adventure games were dead when the genre was clearly alive and kicking?

I strongly suspect that the answer to that question lies in what the Nancy Drew franchise, the Dream Chronicles series and Dreamfall all have in common: female viewpoint characters and an explicitly female target audience.

None of that stuff counts because it’s for girls. When the gaming press talks about the revival of the old-school adventure game, they’re specifically talking about point-and-click adventure games for boys.

When FPSes began to dominate the young male gaming audience in the mid 90s, point-and-click adventure games saw the writing on the wall, and shifted their target audience en masse to young girls. And it worked fantastically - but as far as the gaming press was concerned, that was high treason.

There was a problem, though. You see, being a fan of point-and-click adventure games - particularly the kind with really obtuse puzzles - was once trumpeted as the badge of a “serious” gamer. There was far too much male gamer identity invested in the genre to simply turn around and say “well, they’re not real games anyway”, which is what usually happens when a genre finds a strong female audience.

And so the great myth of The Death of the Adventure Game was founded. That way, the gaming press could continue to lionise the point-and-click adventure games of the past while straight-up refusing to acknowledge the existence of the genre in its new, girl-targeted form.

These people are so sexist that they literally spent over a decade grandly eulogising a genre of games that was, in fact, alive and well rather than accept the blindingly obvious truth: that adventures games didn’t need male gamers to survive and thrive.

Yes, this. Except… I take issue with the “was” in the last sentence. Those games are vibrantly alive and well on tablets, to which they adapt fairly nicely.

manlyusername:

In a million years when we get invaded by lizard men you can blame it on Russia

“Parents are under no legal obligation to donate their organs to save their children’s lives after they are born, even though there is no debate about the “personhood” of children who are living outside the womb. Yet when it comes to fetuses whose personhood is a subject of debate, pro-life activists demand that this obligation be legally enforced.”

- Pregnancy is painful, difficult, and dangerous. No one should be forced into it. - Vox (via feministlibrarian)

Hacking group ‘Impact Team’ dumped all the company info for the adultery website online, exposing government officials and millions more.

By Luis Prada  Published: August 19th, 2015 

“Probably the biggest flaw I see in callout culture thinking is the inability to separate ‘my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering’ from ‘literally anything I do because of my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering.’”

- Certain Propositions Concerning Callout Culture (via alchemy)

vaspider:

huffingtonpost:

One Woman’s Reaction To Every ‘White Man’s Sentence’

That’s how Melissa Lozada-Oliva begins her powerful spoken word poem “Like Totally Whatever” that she performed at the 2015 National Poetry Slam earlier this month. Lozada-Oliva details the subtle sexism engrained in the critiques of how women speak. 

Watch the full poem here.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSS Yes YES yes YES this amg yes.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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evilsupplyco:

Today, Ol’ Grandaddy, the largest and oldest tree in Autumn’s Lost Woods, has begun a seasonal migration into the swamps to retrieve healing moss in preparation for autumn.

Countless lumberjacks the world over attempt to cull Grandaddy every year, either for fame or to win over the heart of a damsel or fellow in a misbegotten adventure.

“You are welcome to try,” the venerate tree states before each battle, “but be aware of the consequences of failure.” In a show of force, Grandaddy will then showcase the season’s trophies of broken swords and discarded weapons.

Some legends say Ol’ Grandaddy is a dragon who took on a tree form to sleep in the forest. Other legends say a dragon once challenged Grandaddy, but instead of fighting, the two spent a decade comparing treasure hoards and remain pen pals to this day.