#Excise Department

[kamalkafir-blog]

shopkeeper selling liquor more than print rate this is how you can complaint against him

[NEWS] Complaint For Alcohol Extra Charges: खुशी का मौका हो या गम का मौका हो लोग शराब का सेवन खूब करते हैं. अलग-अलग  मौकों पर और खास तौर पर शादी, बर्थडे सेलिब्रेशन, एनिवर्सरी और होली जैसे मौकों पर तो जमकर शराब पी जाती है. हालांकि पीने वाले पीने के लिए किसी मौके का इंतजार नहीं करते हैं. सबको पता है कि शराब का सेवन सेहत के लिए हानिकारक होता है. शराब की बोतलों पर भी यह ब��त लिखी होती है. लेकिन…

[rightnewshindi]

हिमाचल में शराब ठेके अब सरकारी हाथों में: 200 ठेके नहीं बिके, CM सुक्खू लेंगे बड़ा फैसला

Himachal News: हिमाचल में शराब ठेके बिक्री की सुस्ती ने सरकार को नया कदम उठाने पर मजबूर किया। सरकारी एजेंसियां अब इनका संचालन करेंगी। यह बदलाव न केवल आर्थिक लक्ष्य को पूरा करेगा, बल्कि स्थानीय स्तर पर रोजगार भी बढ़ाएगा। आइए, इस पहल की ताजा जानकारी जानें। 200 ठेके बिक्री से बाहर हिमाचल में लगभग 200 शराब ठेके बिक्री के लिए उपलब्ध हैं। आबकारी विभाग ने आधिकारिक आंकड़े अभी साझा नहीं किए। सूत्र बताते…

[townpostin]

234 Liters of Illegal Liquor Seized from Locked Quarter in Jamshedpur

Excise Department seizes 234 liters of English liquor from a closed quarter in Agrico Workers Flat, Jamshedpur. Excise Department seizes 234 liters of English liquor from closed Agrico Workers Flat quarter in Jamshedpur; police investigate. JAMSHEDPUR – The Excise Department seized 234 liters of English liquor from a closed quarter in Agrico Workers Flat in Sidhgora on Monday. Excise Commissioner…

[narmadanchal]

36 हजार कीमत की अवैध कच्ची शराब एवं महुआ लाहन जब्त

नर्मदापुरम। आबकारी विभाग (Excise Department) द्वारा आगामी विधानसभा निर्वाचन के मद्देनजर अवैध शराब के विरुद्ध जिले में चलाये जा रहे विशेष अभियान के अंतर्गत सिवनी मालवा (Seoni Malwa) में अवैध शराब माफियाओं के विरुद्ध बड़ी कार्यवाही कुल 30 लीटर कच्ची हाथभट्टी शराब एवं 300 किलोग्राम महुआ लहान जब्त कर मध्यप्रदेश आबकारी अधिनियम (Madhya Pradesh Excise Act) अंतर्गत 02 आरोपियों के विरुद्ध धारा 34(1) का…

[thevioletcaptain]

the next customer to ask me "what's wrong with your eye?" is getting thrown into the sea :)

[ellipsus-writes]

The words they're afraid of.

(Read on our blog.)

The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?

This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.

Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.

If you don’t name a thing, does it exist?

These words are as numerous as they are generic: women, race, Black, immigrants, multicultural, gender, injustice. But what is painfully unserious is also particularly dangerous in its real-world consequences. The process of controlling words is a well-worn authoritarian tendency. Fifty-two universities are now under investigation as part of the President's effort to curb “woke” research and thought crimes. Institutions are being coerced to comply with a nebulous set of ideological demands, or face budgetary annihilation. That means cutting funding for entire departments, slashing financial aid, defunding scientific grants, and pressuring faculty to self-censor.

The possibilities for censorship extend far and wide—interfering, by extension, in everything from reproductive healthcare programs, to libraries and museums. The Trump administration’s proposed budget slashing all federal funding for libraries, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will effectively gut an infrastructure that supports over 100,000 libraries and museums across the country—community centers, educational lifelines, internet access points, and archives of marginalized histories (starting with the Smithsonian Institution).

When you erase access, you erase participation. And when you erase participation, you erase people, and the means by which future generations might even learn they existed. A culture that cannot remember is a culture that cannot resist.

The erasure is, yet again, unsurprisingly targeted at minorities and LGBT+ people. The National Parks Service quietly revised the Stonewall Monument’s website to remove references to transgender people—a fundamental part of the original protests. Not an oversight, not a mistake, but a deliberate excision—one point in a wider plan of erasure depicted in stark detail in Project 2025, a blueprint to dismantle civil rights, defund LGBT+-related healthcare, and rewrite history from the ground up.

Dehumanization by deletion—welcome to the reactionary resurgence of doubleplusungood governance. In Trumpland, words are weapons—but not in the way they intend. Their fear of language betrays its power; that’s why they’re trying so hard to police it.

Words hurt them.

Hurt them back.

- the Ellipsus Team

[mindblowingscience]

Sunburns and aging skin are obvious effects of exposure to harmful UV rays, tobacco smoke and other carcinogens. But the effects aren't just skin deep. Inside the body, DNA is literally being torn apart. Understanding how the body heals and protects itself from DNA damage is vital for treating genetic disorders and life-threatening diseases such as cancer. But despite numerous studies and medical advances, much about the molecular mechanisms of DNA repair remains a mystery. For the past several years, researchers at Georgia State University have tapped into the Summit supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study an elaborate molecular pathway called nucleotide excision repair (NER). NER relies on an array of highly dynamic protein complexes to cut out (excise) damaged DNA with surgical precision. In their latest study, published in Nature Communications, the team has built a computer model of a critical NER component called the pre-incision complex, or PInC. PInC plays a key role in regulating DNA repair processes in the latter stages of the NER pathway. Decoding NER's sophisticated sequence of events and the role of PInC in the pathway could provide key insights into developing novel treatments and preventing conditions that lead to premature aging and certain types of cancer.

Continue Reading.

[cantsayidont]

When attempting to critique the values of a long-running franchise like STAR TREK, it's important to draw a distinction between superficial issues and structural ones.

"Superficial" in this sense doesn't mean "minor" or "unimportant"; it simply means that an issue is not so intrinsic to the premise that the franchise would collapse (or would be radically different) were it changed or removed. For example, misogyny has been a pervasive problem across many generations of STAR TREK media, which have often been characterized by a particular type of leering-creep sexism that was distasteful at the time and has not improved with age. However, sexism and misogyny are not structural elements of the TREK premise; one can do a STAR TREK story where the female characters have agency and even pants without it becoming something fundamentally different from other TREK iterations (even TOS, although there are certainly specific TOS episodes that would collapse if you excised the sexism).

By contrast, the colonialism and imperialism are structural elements — STAR TREK is explicitly about colonizing "the final frontier" and about defending the borders, however defined, of an interstellar colonial power. Different iterations of STAR TREK may approach that premise in slightly different ways, emphasizing or deemphasizing certain specific aspects of it, but that is literally and specifically what the franchise is about. Moreover, because STAR TREK has always been heavily focused on Starfleet and has tended to shy away from depicting life outside of that regimented environment, there are definite limits to how far the series is able to depart from the basic narrative structure of TOS and TNG (a captain and crew on a Starfleet ship) without collapsing in on itself, as PICARD ended up demonstrating rather painfully.

This means that some of the things baked into the formula of STAR TREK are obviously in conflict with the franchise's self-image of progressive utopianism, but cannot really be removed or significantly altered, even if the writers were inclined to try (which they generally are not).

What I find intensely frustrating about most modern STAR TREK media, including TNG and its various successors, is not that it can't magically break its own formula, but that writer and fan attachment to the idea of TREK as the epitome of progressive science fiction has become a more and more intractable barrier to any kind of meaningful self-critique. It's a problem that's become increasingly acute with the recent batch of live-action shows, which routinely depict the Federation or Starfleet doing awful things (like the recent SNW storyline about Una being prosecuted for being a genetically engineered person in violation of Federation law) and then insist, often in the same breath, that it's a progressive utopia, best of all possible worlds.

This is one area where TOS (and to some extent the TOS cast movies) has a significant advantage over its successors. TOS professes to be a better world than ours, but it doesn't claim to be a perfect world (and indeed is very suspicious of any kind of purported utopia). The value TOS most consistently emphasizes is striving: working to be better, and making constructive choices. Although this can sometimes get very sticky and uncomfortable in its own right (for instance, Kirk often rails against what he sees as "stagnant" cultures), it doesn't presuppose the moral infallibility of the Federation, of Starfleet, or of the characters themselves. There's room for them to be wrong, so long as they're still willing to learn and grow.

The newer shows are less and less willing to allow for that, and, even more troublingly, sometimes take pains to undermine their predecessors' attempts along those lines. One appalling recent example is SNW's treatment of the Gorn, which presents the Gorn as intrinsically evil (and quite horrifying) in a way they're not in "Arena," the TOS episode where they were first introduced. The whole point of "Arena" is that while Kirk responds to the Gorn with outrage and anger, he eventually concedes that he may be wrong: There's a good chance that the Gorn are really the injured party, responding to what they reasonably see as an alien invasion, and while that may be an arguable point, sorting it out further should be the purview of diplomats rather than warships. By contrast, SNW presents the Gorn as so irredeemably awful as to make Kirk's (chronologically later) epiphany at best misguided: The SNW Gorn are brutal conquerors who lay eggs in their captives (a gruesome rape metaphor, and in presentation obviously inspired by ALIENS) when they aren't killing each other for sport, and even Gorn newborns are monsters to be feared. Not a lot of nuance there, and no space at all for the kind of detente found in TOS episodes like "The Devil in the Dark."

[neysaadept]

Prometheus Chapter 7

Emily Prentiss x Female CIA Reader

Chapter 7 - Excision Part One (Criminal Minds Case Time)

Tags: Limited use of y/n but established last name. Swearing, mentions of the pandemic and human and sex trafficking. Canon typical violence. Sexual innuendos. Drinking. Smoking. Slow Burn. Murder. Depictions of Flaying. Implied Rape. Mentions of Date Rape Drugs. Strangulation. Minors DNI.

Word Count: 4.4k

AO3

Chapter 6

Saturday night was supposed to be drinks with Tara and Rebecca as planned until Penelope heard about it. Then it evolved into you and Rebecca having your first BAU ladies’ night at the Fireside Lounge, the local bar the unit enjoyed socializing at. You were finding ways to politely say no at the end of the workday because the group was now too big for your comfort level. Getting to know one new person at a time was you’re your sweet spot, but now it was four. And were doomed to accept because Penelope’s pouting pulled too hard at your heart strings to further deny her.

Thankfully, two cases came in that Garcia’s law enforcement surveillance had flagged as interests. Though, it really wasn’t with gratitude that you felt having victims which cancelled the event. It was just a postponement. There was no way that Garcia was going to let you off the hook for drinking, dancing, and gossiping – as she had put it. At least this gives you time to formulate some excuses that can stick so Garcia isn’t too disappointed.

It was a problem for another time. The team arrived at Quantico Saturday afternoon and were briefed on the cases. One was in Germantown, MD where there was a break in. Two men with distorted faces had triggered the alarms to kidnap the security guard. They beat up and executed him on live feed while the homeowners watched. It’s quite possible the equipment and makeup they are using are from a Sicarius kill kit as the town is about ten miles away from Rockville, MD.

The other case comes in from Thermal, CA where a body was found at a plant nursery under shrubbery. The victim was male and strangulated to death. But that wasn’t what caught the BAU’s attention. It was a fact that the victim’s face had been precisely cut off and lain atop his chest. There was no blood at the crime scene either. The unsub appeared to be ritualistic in how they displayed the body per first impression with local law enforcement. The tools for this type of kill could also be one of Sicarius’ followers as Thermal, CA was about nine miles away from Indio, CA.

Prentiss split the team. JJ, Alvaz, and Lewis would remain in town and drive up to Germantown to investigate. She kept JJ close to home on purpose to be near her family. That meant Prentiss would take you and Rossi to California by jet. The trio remaining behind were so jealous that they all balled up paper sheets and threw them at you, making you laugh as you tried to dodge and bat them away.

Rossi was kind enough to remind the team that if not for you, there might not be a jet to use.

And that was where you were right now, being briefed in the air enroute to Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport, right in Thermal. The local sheriff department secured a landing area for the private jet and would meet the unit there.

The three of you sat together on the four seaters – you were next to Rossi and had the window seat. Prentiss was across from you as Garcia spoke over face time. You hope you hide your excitement well since you were being trusted enough to be in the field. You brought a different kind of experience to the unit and understood there was a lot you could learn from Rossi and Prentiss.

“Since this place is in Bufu, California, they’re taking their sweet time sending me over the files. But I’ve gotten preliminary pictures from forensics.” Garcia shares her screen displaying the wounds of the neck and face. “For the record, I am NOT looking at this. La, la, la, la, la! This is all for your desensitized eyes! And I’m assuming your eyes are made that way too my CIA Cutie?”

“Unfortunately,” you answer, zooming in on the strangulation marks around the victim’s neck by garrote. The line was too thick to be wire or some sort of line. The pattern was uneven and did not cut into the flesh, just left a lot of yellow and purple bruising.

“Meet Cole McGarth, 24, who until recently, was a paralegal for a probate attorney near … oh, ho! Indio, CA!”

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” muses Rossi. “But it could be coincidence.”

You play around with the touchscreen some more and point out the marks on Cole’s wrists and above the ankles. “Looks like he was bound.”

“Indeed, he was per initial report,” Garcia says in confirmation. “Coroner is doing the work up as we speak. Or fly, in your guys’ case.”

“Any idea how the unsub removed the victim’s face?” asks Prentiss.

“Yes! Definitely meticulously excised but not sure what tool was used yet. It wasn’t sloppy work.”

“Probably not a disgruntled client then. This wasn’t done in anger, or in a fit of rage,” says Rossi.

You flip through files on the table and hum in agreement. “Too precise. Need a steady hand with how the unsub removed the skin.”

With a grimace, you look at McGarth’s eyeless face resting on his body and wonder, what did this guy do to deserve this?

“What we’re seeing here is a killer that knows what they’re doing,” adds Prentiss. “This isn’t new to the unsub.”

“You think there’s more bodies out there we don’t know about?” you ask, trying to understand Prentiss’ logic.

“Maybe. Just, this is too good. No one gets this good on the first try. Hey Garcia?” Prentiss looks to the screen to address her. “Check to see if there’s any cases that are similar to this one.”

“Will do! Anything else?”

“Any other prelim findings, send our way, but I’ve a feeling we won’t know more until we land with how slow local law enforcement’s processing this.”

“They have a major crimes unit, but this is far above their means,” explains Rossi. “They’d be calling us in eventually to assist.”

“Turtles run faster, yes,” Garcia confirms. “Oh! JJ is requesting my divine presence. I’ll keep you all up to speed on the home team, too. Tootles!”

Her face blinks out and you keep looking between the file in front of you and on the screen, not realizing Prentiss and Rossi were looking at you. Then they share a look that you were unaware of, eyes focusing with brows raising and motioning toward you with a slight shake of Prentiss’ head. They were wordlessly debating if they should chit chat with you.

Rossi shrugs. “So, Whitlock, what do you do for fun?” he asks suddenly as you look up with confusion.

“Uh …” Your brows pinch and you gesture to the files. “You don’t wanna talk about this?”

He chuckles. “We always talk about the case, but we talk about other things too. Besides, you owe me a conversation.”

You look lost, like a puppy with its head tilted trying to understand what was going to happen next. Prentiss thought it cute and made sure to down some water to hide it.

“About my work with the Gideons?” he supplies.

You lean back in the seat and smack your forehead. “Right. Yeah. Sorry! Been a hectic week and totally forgot about that.” You lower your hand and look at Prentiss. “Evil woman there’s working me hard.”

“Hey!” Prentiss sets the water bottle down with offense. “I am not evil.”

“The paperwork that you gave me is. Since you supplied the paper, it is your fault. Ergo evil paper, evil you.”

“That is the lamest logical argument I’ve heard in some time, Whitlock.”

You both then share a laugh as Rossi watches the banter curiously. He was very glad to see the two of you were finally getting along. “Well, to be fair, she did provide a valid argument. Won’t hold up in a court of her peers, but it is valid.” He smiles as Emily gives him a withering look. “But anyway, back to my question. What do you do for fun?

You close the file and set it aside as you consider this very difficult question. Rossi sees the hesitation and prods further. “Is it really that hard to answer?”

Grimacing, you nod and gesture around the jet. “Considering this my first vacation from work in, fuck, I don’t know how long?” You set your hand down and sigh. “Yeah.”

Emily thinks back on her career and yes, there were times that the ability to take a vacation dried up due to assignments, but she had vacations time – willingly and mandated by her superiors. “That doesn’t sound right.” But she knew you were serious by the solemn expression on your face, especially those exhausted eyes that had seen very little of the pleasures life could hold.

You really never take time off, do you? Prentiss thinks as she slowly begins to understand you. What are you running from that you don’t want downtime?

You shrug, offering that as answer. On the surface, you could be seen as a workaholic with no ties to anyone. Rossi picks up on that. “So, no special someone?”

You shake your head no.

“Kids?”

You laugh a little too hard. “No.”

“Family?”

Your eyes narrow briefly, the only indication that this question heightens your irritation which Emily spots. “I think that’s enough for now, Dave.”

Rossi holds up a hand apologetically. “Sorry, kid. Been awhile since we had someone new and got carried away.”

You nod as he gently squeezes your shoulder. Your eyes soften at Prentiss with thanks, but you start to worry. The section chief’s brown eyes turn mischievous. You frown as she grins. “Besides, I’m sure Penelope will continue the interrogation later.”

Rossi pulls his hand away. “Why’s that?”

“Girls’ night was cancelled. I’m sure when we have a free night, she’ll rectify that.”

You groan. “Please start finding another case right now.”

Rossi laughs. “Good luck trying to dodge her curiosity. Penelope’s tenacious. But also, sweet and easy to talk with.”

And that’s what you’re afraid of. Brian, too.

At least Rossi decided to shift gears to discuss his work with Jason and Jill Gideon. He found it precious you were taking notes …

The three of you eventually part ways for the rest of the flight to decompress until you land. As you disembark the jet, you slip on your sunglasses to stave off the bright sun and look at the one hangar that had a FedEx plane docked to be unloaded. The rest were small propellor plans that were used for lessons or crop dusting.

Wow, you think, not seeing anything like this on U.S. soil since… ever? Yeah, overseas a ton, but here? Never.

Waiting for the team at the end of the tarmac was a squad car and an SUV, with two officers waiting for you. One is a skinny fellow with a buzz cut that stood close to the other, looking restless as he paces. The other officer looks back and says something, making him stop.

As the three of you approach, the one seemingly in charge greets you with a curt nod. He wore thick glasses, dark hair kept neat and trimmed and carried a stocky build. “Chief Prentiss?” Emily nods. “I’m Captain Michael Robles and this is Deputy Aiden Miller.”

“This is Senior Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi and Special Agent Y/N Whitlock.” Both you and Dave nod as Emily introduces you. “Any updates on the investigation?” Garcia hadn’t received anything from Thermal or found any similar crimes thus far.

“Unfortunately, yeah. Another body turned up. Found in some bushes off of 62nd when a trucker pulled to the side to relieve himself.” He shook his head. “Poor bastard saw the arm hanging out. Thought it was a ringtail. Wasn’t expecting a dead body.”

“We have an ID on the victim?” Rossi asks.

Yeah,” says Miller. “His name’s Lee Sullivan. Head shrink out of Palm Desert. Both vics are with the Sheriff now and said we’re to bring y’all to him.”

“Oh, so he’s with the coroner?” you ask.

Robles chuckles. “The sheriff’s the coroner, too.”

Your eyes widen much to Prentiss’ amusement. “Welcome to small town Americana.”

To save time, Rossi went with Deputy Miller to speak with McGarth’s family and glean more information about last known locations and any potential individuals that may want to hurt him. All three of you found the initial interview lacking with local law enforcement because they didn’t want to push the grieving family too hard. While there is a need for compassion, time is precious and wasting it with no leads could get someone else killed. Look at Sullivan.

You and Prentiss went to see Sheriff Alex Grosch at the station. Yes, you were surprised that the sheriff’s station and the medical exam office were in the same location. Usually, they were separated to avoid any tampering or misuse of evidence that could impede an investigation. But since you had one guy playing M.E.* and cop? Sure! Why not have everything located in one place to make their job easier?

Sheriff Grosch was already grown and gloved by the bodies as you entered. His hair was covered with a cap, glasses secured around his head with a strap. Next to him was a tray of tools, some used, some sterile. Right now, he was taking notes. You were thankful he took off his gloves before doing that. Ew…

The room was far more cramped than you’d expect it to be, only have room for three examination tables, which were position directly in front of freezer lockers. One wall had supplies and equipment for examination on shelves and cabinets that were stuffed so much that they were slightly ajar. There were boxes of various sizes stacked against the wall haphazardly and leaning against that were various shipping boxes and envelopes in various states to be mailed out. There was a half open door with a glass panel on top that led to what was presumably Grosch’s office.

The place was chaos and probably violated many OSHA’ laws.

He took a break from scribbling and looks at you both. “Agents.”

“She’s a chief,” you quickly correct, pointing to Prentiss. Then to yourself. “I’m the agent. Special Agent actually.”

His slate blue eyes narrow. “Sure.”

You didn’t like this self-righteous fuck at all. His tone drips with condemnation and you felt it was more than just the correction of Prentiss’ title.

Sensing that this could go bad quickly, Prentiss jumps into facts. It was the best equalizer. “Catch us up.”

He sets down the clipboard and offers gloves to both of you. “Nothing new. Second vic died the same. Strangulation.” You and Prentiss put on examination gloves as he does too. “Has the same mark around the neck.”

Both you and Prentiss move around the table to get a good look at the second victim. “Yeah. Matches the pictures,” you confirm as Prentiss looks at the wrists and feet.

“And the same signs of being bound. Same indentations, too. Whatever it is,” she says, squinting, “hard to make out.”

Now being up close with the body, it looked like a two-inch strap was used by how the indentation looks, but then it becomes not as deep as you look away from the point of contact. You gently stroke your finger along the victim’s wrist and find it not to be smooth but prickly. There were several smaller lines that dug into the skin as you roll the limb back and forth. “Yeah. This could be anything right now.”

But something in the back of your mind knew what this was, just out of reach. Right on the tip of your tongue. “Any other signs of trauma?”

“Nah. Just like the first,” confirms the sheriff.

Prentiss’ eyes slide up to the covered face of Sullivan. Without hesitation, she pulls back the sheet as the sheriff holds up his hand. “I really don’t think you need to see that. It’s pretty gruesome.”

She squints her face with the same parental that you recognize immediately. It was the same one she gave you when you were acting petulant in her office when you first met. She looks absolutely commanding with the etched scorn set on her face. “I’ll be the judge of that.” She looks at you and gestures over with her head to join you.

You take position on the opposite side and with a shared look, reveal Sullivan’s head. You both went immediately into silent investigation mode and compartmentalize what you feel. You both saw enough throughout your respective careers to get the job done, which caught the sheriff by surprise as there wasn’t even a gasp or flinch from either of you.

The unsub left a terrible work of art. They had removed the entire layer of skin leaving the muscles visible and unharmed, same with the eyes. You saw the entire glazed over orb staring right back at you. That should have been unsettling enough, but this isn’t the worse thing you’ve seen. As you look further down the face, the incisions were a clean angular pattern. A skilled hand as you thought.

With her free hand, Prentiss traces the cuts above the face. “Cauterized the wounds as they cut.”

You nod in agreement. “Yeah. Either skilled with both hands or ambidextrous.”

“Especially being able to remove the skin in one piece.”

“And there’s no trauma to muscle. They wanted the victims to be preserved like this.”

Prentiss bunches up her lips in thought and motions to cover the victim, which you did. She turns to address Grosch. “Have you identified what tools were used with the excision?”

“Nothing specific but definitely the high-grade surgical kind. I did figure based on the timeline of the excision and the strangulation, the vics loss their face before they were killed,” he admits soberly.

“The victim was alive?” Prentiss was shocked. Nothing indicated that there was a struggle, or the victim fought back while being flayed. The team had presumed the face was removed postmortem.

You were thinking it too. “That doesn’t add up. The bodies have nothing to indicate they tried to fight off their attacker. Fingernails and hands have no trauma.” You pull the second victim’s hand up and show there was no blood or skin under the fingernails. No bruising of the hands or knuckles.

The sheriff nods. “It’s like that with the other one, too.”

“And the unsub had time to complete their objective, without interruption,” explains Prentiss. “Was there a tox screen done?”

“Yeah. Just waiting on lab to send over the results. Should be ready any time now.”

“Make sure we get that ASAP so we can discuss and add to our profile.”

He mutters a non-committal, ‘Uh huh.’, as you and Prentiss take off your gloves to throw out and leave the exam room.

As the door closes behind you, you huff out a harsh breath of air. “What an asshole.”

Prentiss smiles. “Even if he somehow forgets to send the information over, Garcia’s already on it.” She chuckles at your look of surprise. “This isn’t the first time some male ego may try and cock block the ladies of the BAU.”

Now you snort laugh. “Yeah, I’ve dealt with it, too.”

You both enter the bullpen and head straight for the coffee. This shithole town didn’t have French Vanilla, so you were stuck with boring old creamer. Prentiss at least got her Splenda.

“The unsub had to have known our vics. Or at least caught them off guard. It doesn’t make any sense at all that our victims wouldn’t have tried to fight back - when they were taken, flayed, or even during the strangulation. Nothing,” muses Prentiss before she takes a sip of her coffee. She makes a face at how bitter it was and stirs in another packet.

“Yeah, there’s nothing substantial on those bodies to indicate anything. And the unsub didn’t take anything off the victims as far as we’re able to determine. Except their dignity, I suppose.” You lean against the counter and look at the snail’s pace of a station working. No one appears to be in a hurry. Like everything was business as usual and the only signs that something was amiss was the FBI presence. There was quiet chatter in the bullpen and eyes directed towards the two of you. Whether it was curiosity or genuine need to solve the case, who knew?

That got you thinking.

“One’s face is the first thing you really see. Physically, I mean. So why did the unsub want to remove it?”

“Stress and depression are psychological concerns that can trigger dermatological issues – even somatically perceived ones. Feeling like your skin is crawling. Pins and needles across the skin. So much so, someone might want to tear your skin off. So, to speak.”

“And medically, you’re looking at pain and hives. Psoriasis and eczema. A shit ton, actually.” You consider it but shrug. “None of our victims have it. Open for debate on our unsub. But …” you look to Prentiss, “there is something to be said about feeling like you want to crawl out one’s skin. Maybe there is a deeply rooted emotional need to remove someone’s face so the unsub can have a cathartic release of emotions they can’t normally feel?’

Prentiss raises a brow in consideration. “Not a bad theory.”

“There’s also the fun thought of a face mask. I mean, I’m not talking exfoliation, but we hide our true selves behind layers of walls we build up. It all depends on how we grow up. Who we have contact with. Family, friends, lovers, co-workers. The interconnections we pull from that we use to define ourselves, or equally knowing when to open up. Everything we’ve experienced creates the persona we want people to see. It’s all based on threat and trust.” You pause as you work your jaw in thought and come to a different conclusion. “What if the unsub’s flaying is symbolic. Removing a layer of that mask from the victim?”

She raises the other brow, impressed with your knowledge and focus. Yeah, your humor edges through a little but it’s a blip in the conversation. You had a work ethic that hadn’t been able to be appreciated since she had sidelined you on day one. Out in the field, you are able to shine and show how intelligent you are. You ask all the right questions and didn’t discount anything too small or too big. You home in on small details and carry the conversation without any prompting form her. It was a natural flow of ideas between the two of you. Regardless of what it is you actually do for the CIA, it clearly meshes up well with profiling with the BAU. And if she was honest, your style was meshing with her, too.

But what really bothers her with what you said is that she knows you were speaking from experience. You spoke with too much familiarity about walls being built for protection. Couple that with being dismissive of any personal connections in your life that Dave tried to ask about, Prentiss couldn’t help wonder how long have you lived such a lonely life…

Right then, Prentiss’ phone rings and she accepts it, putting it in on speaker so you can hear. “Tell me you got something, Dave.”

“I do. Last known whereabouts of our victim was at a bar called Coachella.”

You make the face. “What? Like the music festival?’

“Exactly. The festival’s in Indio. Bar’s named after it.”

“Did the family give any indication as to why he was there?” asks Prentiss.

“No. Just went for drinks after the long work week to wind down. McGarth texted his sister before he went over. Sometimes he does try for a hook up, but I’m doubting his situation had to do with anything like that.”

“You’re not kidding. Anything else? Trouble with any family, friends? Anything at work?”

“Nothing yet. I’m heading to his work now to speak with his boss. Maybe we’ll get something there. After that, I’m following up on Sullivan’s family. How are things on your end?”

“Not much that we didn’t already know, but Whitlock has a couple of good theories about our unsub. Either flaying for the emotional release or removing an emotional wall the victim has built up.”

There was a pause as you hold your breath and wonder what Rossi would think. “Not bad, Whitlock.”

You exhale slowly and preen with pride. “Thanks.”

“Anything else?”

“Nah. Waiting on labs. Until then, we’re just throwing ideas around for the profile.”

“Then I leave you ladies to it. Talk later.”

The sheriff comes jogging into the bullpen a few minutes after you both hang up with Dave, flagging you down with paperwork in hand. “Report’s just came in off the first victim.”

You speak quietly behind your coffee cup so only Prentiss can hear. “Who knew snails could run?”

She fights a laugh, neck straining as her lips contort to squash away any visible humor. “What do the reports say?” Prentiss impresses you with her ability to go pro so fast.

“Couple things of note. Got flunitrazepam and midazolam in the system.” He turns the pages towards the two of you and you take it.

“Flunitrazepam?” Your confusion was palpable as you see it written plainly on the report. “That’s one of the date rape drugs.”

“And midazolam’s a sedative,” states Prentiss. She’s baffled, too. “You said there’s no indication of assault, but did you examine for one sexual in nature?”

Grosch frowns deeply and his eyes lack focus. You were quite happy to answer for him. “I’m gonna go with a no there, chief.”

He clears his throat. “With, ah, no signs of struggle, I didn’t see a reason to.”

“Well, you do now. Make sure you check both victims.” He nods and heads out as Prentiss sets aside her shitty coffee. “Honestly not his fault. He really had no reason to assess for it until now.”

“Yeah, but it was nice seeing him freak out for a sec there,” you say with a smile that fades thoughtfully. “Case keeps getting weirder, huh?”

“Oh, honey,” Prentiss smirks wistfully, “this is nothing but another day in the BAU ...”

… to be continued in Excision Part Two.

*Medical Examiner

*Occupational Safety and Health Administration

Chapter 8

@unkonw00 @ara-a-bird @rayisaknight @sevyscoven

[mariacallous]

In December, the Republican senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, released a report tauntingly titled “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst, the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, had recently announced her intention to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “cut Washington’s pork and make ’em squeal.” The report, with the alliterative plosives of its title raining down like flecks of spit, was an opening volley in the fight to rouse sleepy bureaucrats and put them on notice.

Ernst charged public employees with widespread absenteeism and dereliction of duty. The report’s headline finding—claiming that just six per cent of federal employees work full time in their offices—was quickly debunked. But the narrative of a lethargic civil service in bad need of work discipline was set in motion. “The parasites are thrashing hard,” Musk posted on X. Instead of government employees “pretending to work” and “being paid a lot for nothing,” Musk wrote, they would have to “get a real job.” The Fox News personality Jesse Watters summed up the story line by pronouncing, in December, that “bureaucrats have never been lazier.” According to Watters, “Biden spent forty per cent of his Presidency on vacation. But compared to the rest of the government he’s a workaholic.”

America’s federal government employs a dizzying range of workers: mail carriers and mapmakers, firefighters and fish biologists, volcanologists positioned on tectonic-plate boundaries, cooks on Navy submarines. Recent antagonism toward the government workforce, however, has targeted a particular type: the office-dweller, the laptop-user, the knowledge worker who is possibly remote, possibly dead, whose products are indeterminate and, therefore, of dubious value. DOGE’s waves of firings has been indiscriminate, more machine-gun spray than surgical excision. Yet throughout, the image of the pampered paper pusher has stood in for a larger hazy vision of taxpayer-sponsored waste.

Bureaucrats are easy to loathe. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises—a leading thinker beloved by enemies of big government and friends of the free market—wrote in 1944, “Nobody calls himself a bureaucrat.” The very term implies an insult. The rule of bureaucracy, von Mises argued, favors the “inefficient expert” who “cannot succeed within a competitive system.” For von Mises, as a bureaucracy swells, it risks blossoming into state tyranny. Other critics of bureaucracy point to a different danger: the corrupting effects of the system on the bureaucrats themselves.

Gray walls, harsh lighting, stiff hierarchies, mystifying rules, endless reams of paper: the tedium and repressiveness of bureaucratic work is proverbial. Writing in the early twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber saw bureaucracy as dehumanizing, a coldly rational deprivation of human freedom. “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed,” Weber wrote. “He is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march.” The government worker may “enjoy security,” von Mises added. “But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls.” The political scientist Ralph Hummel went so far as to argue, in the nineteen-seventies, that bureaucrats are bad in bed: warped by their work, bureaucrats focus not on love but on “technical performance in sexual intercourse.” Recent claims, in the conservative press, of a twelve-person orgy among officials at a Veterans Affairs medical center in Tennessee, offer salacious elaboration on this theme of erotic pathology, casting the bureaucrat in the bedroom as at once perverse and virtuosic.

Although the question of whether bureaucrats make good lovers is relatively modern, the trope of the bureaucrat as avoiding hard work has existed for as long as bureaucracy itself. The scribes of ancient Egypt were among the world’s first bureaucrats, and while scribal work was considered prestigious and honorable, a career as a scribe was also a way of evading the hardships of other forms of labor. “The Satire of the Trades,” a frequently copied text composed during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, presents itself as advice composed by a father for a son on his way to scribal school. Becoming a scribe, the father says, “saves one from work.” That is, it saves one from the miseries, indignities, and bodily damage incurred in nearly all nonscribal occupations.

The bulk of the “Satire” is devoted to recounting the physical arduousness of jobs outside the courtly bureaucracy. The barber “wears out his arms to fill his belly,” walking the streets “crying out, his bowl upon his arm,” looking for customers to shave. The potter’s clothes are “stiff with mud,” the furnace tender’s eyes are red from smoke, the weaver gets whipped, and the fisherman must contend with crocodiles. Only the scribe is spared these horrors. And so the father exhorts, “I shall make you love books more than your mother.” Then again, the division between manual and cognitive labor is, as ever, deceptive. The Egyptian scribes may have avoided the crocodiles, but skeletal remains indicate that plenty of them developed arthritis.

The idea that bureaucrats are slow-moving and unproductive, as well as insufficiently motivated, is drawn out in Victorian literature, too. In Charles Dickens’s novel “Little Dorrit,” published between 1855 and 1857, the most powerful government department is the Circumlocution Office, through which all official business gets routed—and blocked: “Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.” A full-blown moral panic about the laziness of government workers, such as we are now experiencing, is more rare. Nonetheless, Musk’s filleting of the federal government is not the first time that so-called lazy bureaucrats have been thrown under the wheels of historical change. Campaigns to purge the “parasites” tend to emerge—or to be fanned into flame—at moments of political rupture. When an insecure yet ambitious regime attempts to carry out large-scale social transformation, the indolent bureaucrat makes for an ideal scapegoat.

In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, fearing decline, pursued modernizing reforms. The reformers worried that change was too halting, and that the Ottomans were falling behind the industrializing European nations. In 1906, Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting “The Tortoise Trainer,” one of the period’s most celebrated art works, memorably depicted such anxieties. It shows an elderly man in religious Ottoman garb attempting to train the sluggish tortoises crawling at his feet, their domed shells evoking mosques.

In this context, widespread alarm arose in Istanbul about whether civil servants were working hard enough, as the historian Melis Hafez recounts in her 2021 book, “Inventing Laziness.” Bureaucrats who didn’t measure up were purged. Clerks who fell asleep in the office were charged with crimes. In 1911, as the empire verged on collapse, the Grand Vizier—the head of state second only to the Sultan—demanded that “every lazy, incompetent, and inefficient civil official be weeded out.” An empire in decline turns on itself and attacks its own organism, while fastening onto the belief that if people worked harder, the country would be saved.

Classic attacks on bureaucracy center on the paralyzing effects of rigid institutional structures. The concern with bureaucrats sleeping in the office shifts the emphasis from structural issues to individual weakness of will. In Trump’s America, as in late-imperial Istanbul, the napping bureaucrat has been summoned for abuse. One self-proclaimed former federal worker reported via TikTok that “our government is filled with the most incompetent and most lazy people.” Every morning, she said, she would walk past one colleague “snoring at his desk.” Another employee, she alleged, would regularly slip out of the office to “take a nap in his favorite park, under a shady tree.”

Trump’s consolidation of power in his second term has been driven by a perceptible change of pace. The Administration has ginned up a sense of urgency, doing away with brakes and guardrails by insisting that the fate of the nation depends on rapid executive action. “All federal workers should be working at the same pace that President Trump is working and moving,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News last month. Why? Because “we have a country to save.” As Watters said on his show, “Work-from-home Fridays isn’t going to fly in the Golden Age.” He credited Trump with a revival of the American work ethic. “This country was forged by pioneers. This isn’t a lazy nation like some of you nations out there. You know who I’m talking about, Canada.”

The purging of bureaucrats has often coincided with zealous announcements of a new golden age. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong came to believe that the revolution was losing momentum because of the country’s lumbering bureaucracy. Mao rejected the idea that communism encouraged laziness. On the contrary, he saw laziness as counter-revolutionary. “The Chairman could not abide ‘lazy’ bureaucrats,” the historians Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals write in “Mao’s Last Revolution.” In 1964, Mao declared, “Laziness is one of the sources of revisionism”—a deviation from revolutionary ideals. Purges of supposed revisionists were routine in Mao’s China; linking laziness to counter-revolution, he put idlers on the chopping block. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, the Chairman hacked away at the bureaucracy, focussing especially on ministries dealing with culture, education, and public health.

Soviet Russia, too, experienced periodic panics about slothful bureaucrats impeding the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, films such as “Don Diego and Pelagia” presented indifferent and self-indulgent office workers reading romance novels and eating huge meals at their desks. The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes, in her book “Everyday Stalinism,” a political cartoon titled “Bureaucrat on the trapeze.” It depicts a pair of circus artists, one representing the Soviet citizen, the other representing the bureaucrat; the citizen has just launched himself into the air, but the bureaucrat, instead of rising to catch him, holds up a sign reading “Come back tomorrow.”

The morality of work was crucial to the Soviet Union’s revolutionary effort. The 1936 Soviet constitution quoted St. Paul’s dictum, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Later in the century, idleness was criminalized. The Soviet Union’s 1961 law outlawing “social parasitism” mostly targeted tramps, beggars, and prostitutes (as well as poets like Joseph Brodsky)—not bureaucrats. But the message was clear: if you’re lazy, you’re not with the program. The glorious future of the nation depends on everyone laboring at a fast pace, with no time to slow down and question what’s happening. Trump’s agenda, reactionary though it may be, exhibits a certain revolutionary fervor.

In the United States, the apparent incontestability of the work ethic makes it awkward to fight back against attacks on “lazy” bureaucrats. Musk’s recruiting call for DOGE asked for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week.” (The conspicuous youth of the DOGE team may reflect the greater willingness of young people without family responsibilities to submit to such a punishing regimen; according to Politico, some DOGE staff members are sleeping on IKEA beds in a federal office building.) Musk has repeatedly contrasted the fecklessness of federal employees with the industriousness of his élite cadre of libertarian workaholics. DOGE employees, he boasted on X, are working a hundred and twenty hours a week. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”

Attempts to defend federal employees by showing that they actually do work long hours, while helpful, miss the point. Totting up working hours places us on Musk’s argumentative terrain. Over the years, Musk has made himself into a contemporary saint of overwork, laboring with a ferocity at once stunning and pathological. A Business Insider headline, from 2023, announced that “Elon Musk’s productivity hack is taking 2 or 3 days off a year, working 7 days a week, and getting 6 hours of sleep a night.” Musk confided to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that the strain of work “would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit”; in 2018, he wept on the phone with a Times reporter while describing the agony of his hundred-and-twenty-hour workweeks. Few of us are going to match Musk on hours worked. Nor should we.

DOGE’s assault on the federal workforce is, in part, a classic Silicon Valley story of condemning the public sector as unproductive while lauding the private sector as dynamic, innovative, and entrepreneurial. (This picture of the public sector’s inertia is, at the very least, highly disputable: Musk himself has received thirty-eight billion dollars in federal funds for his businesses in the past decades, and a low-interest Department of Energy loan helped get Tesla off the ground.) But it’s also a story about how work ethic gets twisted to serve the ends of people in power. For Musk and Trump, the “lazy bureaucrat” is anyone who stands in their way. ♦

[knitmeapony]

"LAY-DEES, Gentlemen, and THOSE for whom TIME is a factor, I bring you the FINEST, absolutely PALACE-GRADE goods so that you, too can REACH the GREAT BEYOND with SAFETY, SECURITY, and most of all -- QUALITY. Yes, step right up my friends to see what we have to offer. Do you need to speak to your dearly departed mother and ask where she kept the pin-money? Do you want the spirits to ask if he truly loves you? Do YOU need that HORRID little SPIRIT excised from your house?"

[rightnewshindi]

बॉटलिंग प्लांट में बन रही थी शराब, आबकारी विभाग ने पकड़ा ट्रक; स्टॉक किया जब्त

बॉटलिंग प्लांट में बन रही थी शराब, आबकारी विभाग ने पकड़ा ट्रक; स्टॉक किया जब्त

Una News: राज्य कर एवं आबकारी विभाग ऊना ने टाहलीवाल के बॉटलिंग प्लांट का औचक निरीक्षण किया। विभाग में अनियमितताएं पाए जाने पर स्टॉक जब्त कर प्लांट को सील कर लिया। विभागीय कार्रवाई को देख आसपास के उद्योगों में भी चर्चाओं का बाजार गरमा गया है। बीती 15 और 16 मार्च को टाहलीवाल क्षेत्र के बॉटलिंग संयंत्र का राज्य कर एवं आबकारी विभाग की टीम ने औचक निरीक्षण किया। विभा���ीय दल ने शराब से लदा ट्रक उद्योग…

[townpostin]

RPF Ranchi Recovers Unclaimed Whiskey Bottles Under Operation Satark

Alcohol Worth Rs 9,360 Handed Over to Excise Department The RPF’s vigilance during Operation Satark led to the recovery of unclaimed whiskey bottles worth Rs 9,360, later handed to the Excise Department for further action. Ranchi – On July 1, 2024, as part of Operation Satark, officers and staff of the Railway Protection Force (RPF) Ranchi recovered 18 unclaimed whiskey bottles from an abandoned…

[olderthannetfic]

Sometimes I see people in fandom get angry at writers for not writing a more common experience. For instance, I got someone angry at me ranting about how I was pushing false narratives when I wrote a character who'd known they were trans since they were young. I knew I was trans when I was young and I have never in my life said anything bad about anyone who has the much more common experience of realizing it later. A friend of mine got people going "ugh, this is so trite and cliche" in her comments because she wrote a character who is totally, completely deaf and was from birth. She was deaf from birth and is so in a way where even an implant wouldn't help. I've seen multiple people complain about an author in my fandom writing a Mizrahi Jewish character instead of "normal" Jewish one (whatever the fuck that means). The writer is Mizrahi.

I get that a lot of people look at fandom and want it to be representation but why does it have to only represent the most common experiences in a group? Why can't it represent my experience, or my friend's experience, or some other author's experience? Just because we have somewhat unusual lives, does that mean we have to excise everything resembling our lives from the stories to make them "more normal"?

--

I remember when Fringe came out and people were rolling their eyes at Astrid's triple major or whatever it was... She was literally in the same department I got my undergrad degree in, and people with a bunch of majors and minors were extremely common both because it was smartypants college and because of the specific major and department in question.