#southern corruption

[demaparbat-hp]

Dandadan Dandadan Dandadan!

[mooncrystal141]

Bryke are funny because they purposefully chose Zuko to be the one to support Katara in her mission so you’d get the impression that since violence has been used by the fire nation → violence for revenge is practically the same thing → so Katara’s not allowed to be violent in general, but especially not towards her mother’s murderer

Mix that in with the previous messages from Jet and Hama’s episodes that “violent resistance is wrong” and you get the overall message that “‘revenge’ is always wrong, so Katara is wrong for seeking it in the first place” just more liberal propaganda brought to you by ATLA 🙄

[kozilmog]

Can you transform Wolverine into a USA redneck

Wolverine -> Red Neck Mechanic

Going down South on a mission, Logan had to make a pitstop. He couldn't let his Harley Davidson get too damaged from a long ride.

However, when the Southern Mechanic saw what a Man's man Logan was, he couldn't let him get away.

He quickly got some of that Southernisation into him and he quickly became the Mechanic's best friend and worker.

[lambnotincluded]

no promise of heaven will make me march with my final breath I deny the church

[aventurineswife]

Aventurine with a fem reader who has a strong sense of justice and short temper? Which gets her into fights often (both verbal and physical). I can imagine her fuming at seeing how Aventurine is talked down to sometimes and talking constant smack about the IPC. Oh and what if she had Boothill's accent—

Reckless, but Right

Summary: Aventurine dazzles the casino crowd with his skillful gameplay and effortless charm. When an opponent lashes out after losing, you, Aventurine's fiery and fiercely protective partner, step in, shutting down the tension with your no-nonsense attitude and southern sass. Despite Aventurine’s insistence that he can handle himself, your unwavering defense and genuine belief in his worth leave him momentarily disarmed. As you walk out together, Aventurine reflects on how your love and support anchor him in a cutthroat world, making him feel like the true winner in life.

Tags: Aventurine x Female!Reader, Romance, Fluff, Southern Accent, Protective Reader, Verbal Sparring, IPC Criticism, Gambling Themes, Banter.

Warnings: Mild profanity, References to gambling and manipulation, Mentions of corporate corruption and disrespect.

A/N: this reminded me of my Madea fic 🫣

The dimly lit casino hall hummed with the murmur of voices and the soft chime of slot machines. At the center of the floor, Aventurine stood at a card table, the faint smirk on his lips betraying his confidence as he laid his cards down. His signature hat rested jauntily on his hair, and his eyes gleamed behind rose-tinted glasses. Every move he made seemed effortless, calculated—a dance of precision and charm.

Across the table, his opponent scowled, their loss evident by the pile of chips Aventurine had neatly collected.

“Better luck next time.” he said, his voice smooth, laced with just enough sarcasm to make his opponent flush with anger.

But before the tension could escalate, your voice cut through the air like a whip.

“That’s what ya get for underestimatin’ him, ya overgrown buffoon!” you said, stepping up behind Aventurine with all the fire of a Southern storm.

Heads turned at your arrival. Dressed simply but with an undeniable presence, you didn’t care much for the glitz and glamor of the casino. Your fiery personality was your true calling card.

Aventurine turned, his smirk widening at the sight of you. “Darlin’, I thought I told you to behave while I worked.”

You crossed your arms, your piercing gaze flickering to the man at the table. “I was behavin’, sugar. Until I saw this here jackass actin’ like you weren’t worth his time. Now, I don’t take kindly to folks disrespectin’ my man.”

The man bristled, but one look at your steely glare—and your clenched fists—made him think twice about opening his mouth. He muttered something under his breath before stalking off, and the crowd that had gathered quickly dissipated.

Aventurine chuckled, gathering his winnings. “You know, my dear, there’s something terribly poetic about you charging into my defense, especially when I hardly need it.”

You huffed, poking a finger into his chest. “I don’t care if ya need it or not. Ain’t nobody gonna talk down to ya while I’m around. IPC or not.”

His eyes softened, the playful mask slipping for a brief moment. “You truly are one of a kind.”

“Damn straight,” you said with a wink, though your tone quickly turned serious. “But let’s talk ‘bout the IPC. You’re too good for them vultures, sugar. All they care about is profits. They don’t see the man behind the mask.”

Aventurine tilted his head, intrigued. “And what do you see?”

You leaned closer, your accent thick as molasses. “I see a man who’s brilliant, who’s got more guts and brains than those pencil-pushers could ever dream of. I see someone who don’t need to play by their rules to win.”

For once, Aventurine was rendered speechless, his normally quick wit failing him. Your unshakable belief in him had a way of disarming him like nothing else.

He reached for your hand, his fingers brushing yours in a gesture both intimate and grounding. “And here I thought I was the gambler in this relationship. But it seems you’ve already gone all in on me.”

You grinned, the fiery spark in your eyes never dimming. “Damn right I have. And don’t you forget it.”

As you both left the casino, Aventurine couldn’t help but feel like the luckiest man alive. In a world where high stakes ruled and facades were currency, you were the rare, unyielding force that reminded him of who he truly was—and who he wanted to be.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

One of America’s most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

"I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." The now-famous quip from Robert Reich cuts to the bone of corporate personhood. Corporations are people with speech rights. They are heat-shields that absorb liability on behalf of their owners and managers.

But the membrane separating corporations from people is selectively permeable. A corporation is separate from its owners, who are not liable for its deeds – but it can also be "closely held," and so inseparable from those owners that their religious beliefs can excuse their companies from obeying laws they don't like:

https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2014/10/13/hobby-lobby-and-closely-held-corporations/

Corporations – not their owners – are liable for their misdeeds (that's the "limited liability" in "limited liablity corporation"). But owners of a murderous company can hold their victims' families hostage and secure bankruptcies for their companies that wipe out their owners' culpability – without any requirement for the owners to surrender their billions to the people they killed and maimed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Corporations are, in other words, a kind of Schroedinger's Cat for impunity: when it helps the ruling class, corporations are inseparable from their owners; when that would hinder the rich and powerful, corporations are wholly distinct entities. They exist in a state of convenient superposition that collapses only when a plutocrat opens the box and decides what is inside it. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Key to corporate impunity is the rigged bankruptcy system. "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," so every successful civilization has some system for discharging debt, or it risks collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

When you or I declare bankruptcy, we have to give up virtually everything and endure years (or a lifetime) of punitive retaliation based on our stained credit records, and even then, our student debts continue to haunt us, as do lawless scumbag debt-collectors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

When a giant corporation declares bankruptcy, by contrast, it emerges shorn of its union pension obligations and liabilities owed to workers and customers it abused or killed, and continues merrily on its way, re-offending at will. Big companies have mastered the Texas Two-Step, whereby a company creates a subsidiary that inherits all its liabilities, but not its assets. The liability-burdened company is declared bankrupt, and the company's sins are shriven at the bang of a judge's gavel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

Three US judges oversee the majority of large corporate bankruptcies, and they are so reliable in their deference to this scheme that an entire industry of high-priced lawyers exists solely to game the system to ensure that their clients end up before one of these judges. When the Sacklers were seeking to abscond with their billions in opioid blood-money and stiff their victims' families, they set their sights on Judge Robert Drain in the Southern District of New York:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers

To get in front of Drain, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, NY, then waited 192 days to file bankruptcy papers there (it takes six months to establish jurisdiction). Their papers including invisible metadata that identified the case as destined for Judge Drain's court, in a bid to trick the court's Case Management/Electronic Case Files system to assign the case to him.

The case was even pre-captioned "RDD" ("Robert D Drain"), to nudge clerks into getting their case into a friendly forum.

If the Sacklers hadn't opted for Judge Drain, they might have set their sights on the Houston courthouse presided over by Judge David Jones, the second of of the three most corporate-friendly large bankruptcy judges. Judge Jones is a Texas judge – as in "Texas Two-Step" – and he has a long history of allowing corporate murderers and thieves to escape with their fortunes intact and their victims penniless:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

But David Jones's reign of error is now in limbo. It turns out that he was secretly romantically involved with Elizabeth Freeman, a leading Texas corporate bankruptcy lawyer who argues Texas Two-Step cases in front of her boyfriend, Judge David Jones.

Judge Jones doesn't deny that he and Freeman are romantically involved, but said that he didn't think this fact warranted disclosure – let alone recusal – because they aren't married and "he didn't benefit economically from her legal work." He said that he'd only have to disclose if the two owned communal property, but the deed for their house lists them as co-owners:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24032507-general-warranty-deed

(Jones claims they don't live together – rather, he owns the house and pays the utility bills but lets Freeman live there.)

Even if they didn't own communal property, judges should not hear cases where one of the parties is represented by their long term romantic partner. I mean, that is a weird sentence to have to type, but I stand by it.

The case that led to the revelation and Jones's stepping away from his cases while the Fifth Circuit investigates is a ghastly – but typical – corporate murder trial. Corizon is a prison healthcare provider that killed prisoners with neglect, in the most cruel and awful ways imaginable. Their families sued, so Corizon budded off two new companies: YesCare got all the contracts and other assets, while Tehum Care Services got all the liabilities:

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/prominent-bankruptcy-judge-david-jones-033801325.html

Then, Tehum paid Freeman to tell her boyfriend, Judge Jones, to let it declare bankruptcy, leaving $173m for YesCare and allocating $37m for the victims suing Tehum. Corizon owes more than $1.2b, "including tens of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices and hundreds of malpractice suits filed by prisoners and their families who have alleged negligent care":

https://www.kccllc.net/tehum/document/2390086230522000000000041

Under the deal, if Corizon murdered your family member, you would get $5,000 in compensation. Corizon gets to continue operating, using that $173m to prolong its yearslong murder spree.

The revelation that Jones and Freeman are lovers has derailed this deal. Jones is under investigation and has recused himself from his cases. The US Trustee – who represents creditors in bankruptcy cases – has intervened to block the deal, calling Tehum "a barren estate, one that was stripped of all of its valuable assets as a result of the combination and divisional mergers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy filing."

This is the third high-profile sleazy corporate bankruptcy that had victory snatched from the jaws of defeat this year: there was Johnson and Johnson's attempt to escape from liability from tricking women into powder their vulvas with asbestos (no, really), the Sacklers' attempt to abscond with billions after kicking off the opioid epidemic that's killed 800,000+ Americans and counting, and now this one.

This one might be the most consequential, though – it has the potential to eliminate one third of the major crime-enabling bankruptcy judges serving today.

One down.

Two to go.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[lycanlovebites]

You know what? Fuck you *hits Father Ardelian with the shoujo filter and babygirlifies your priest*

@stjohnstarling

[thursdaygrl]

closed starter for @blcssom

"would it kill you to make yourself decent in common areas? it's inconsiderate."

[proleone]

Unbelievable overreach of power once again by Kay Ivey. Why won't this evil b*tch die? She and her fellow crooks want the ability to re-allocate VA funds to more general funds that can be manipulated.

[relaxedstyles]

[martyr-mayhem]

In case you missed it, a criminal was appointed as the Communications Director for Ohio's Sixth District congressman in January 2025.

After a series of train derailments in 2023 caused by unsafe railway maintenance at Norfolk Southern, Mike Peppel started a charity to provide safe drinking water to the community. However, no one received safe drinking water from Mike Peppel's charity because Peppel kept the money he raised in his own pocket.

Peppel settled a lawsuit for his scam. But, recently, there were lawsuits against Norfolk Southern. The suits claimed that the train derailments caused massive chemical destruction and health issues for residents of Ohio. These lawsuits have been dismissed, and to this day, there have been no actions taken by Northfolk Southern to improve railway safety.

But that's not all! A decade prior, in 2013, Peppel was sentenced to 2 years in prison for money laundering and fraud. He's been a known fraudster and criminal for over a decade, and now he has a new job in Congress.

Soooo, what fraud is Elon Musk investigating again?

[santaxsangre]

when i'm down on my knees, you're how i pray ♱

[thekyanitedragon]

no specific thoughts, just imodna vibes