#the reformation project

[fruit-spirit]

God bless the Reformation Project for bridging the gap for queer Christians. It means SO much

I've had my moral compass and the holy spirit helping me figure things out, but this past year I've been able to actually study affirming theology and verbalize what I'm talking about. They've given me a lot of peace :)

[chalkrub]

art trade from toyhouse - love this funny evil guy

[aria-i-adagio]

Marcellus Williams is scheduled to be executed on September 24 for a crime DNA proves he did not commit. The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney reviewed these DNA results and filed a motion to vacate Mr. Williams’s conviction because he believed the DNA results proved by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Williams did not commit this crime. Although the circuit court has not yet scheduled a hearing to address this motion–and no court has ever considered the new exculpatory evidence — the Missouri Supreme Court set an execution date for Mr. Williams.

Marcellus’ legal team, including lawyers from the Innocence Project and Midwest Innocence Project, said they “will continue to fight for Mr. Williams’ exoneration and seek a hearing on the prosecutor’s motion to vacate.

Learn more and add your name to the petition. (Use the link below, the link in the infographic isn't working yet.)

[rozodka]

all i know is that every single year the best cinematography nominees list is so shitty, it's always 1-2 movies that deserve it (they barely ever win) and the others are so fucking random, meanwhile movies that look like fucking paintings get snubbed!

[sleeperagentclone]

Obsessed with the idea of Sol watching his sisters join this pantheon that a few thousand (?) years ago he was completely down for and wondering why no one is asking him to join so he takes a look at his followers is like "oh, right"

On a completely separate note one night Bucky Applebees jolts awake in a cold sweat and says "I have to kill Bobby Dawn"

[spotlightstory]

The Michigan Medicis of Donald Trump’s America

Left, clockwise from top left Blackwater founder Erik Prince; U.S. Sec of Education Betsy DeVos (Prince); philanthropist Elsa and Prince Corporation founder Edgar Prince. Right, philanthropist Hellen and Amway co-founder Richard DeVos; standing, businessman Dick DeVos.

If you ever wondered where the weird Republican ideas came from or how did we get here, well, here's a piece of the puzzle. Buckle up, it's a long read. Link to full article above. I pulled out quotes on topics below.

"In the solar system of elite Republican contributors, Richard DeVos Sr., who died Thursday at age 92—one of the two founders of Amway, the direct-sale colossus—occupied an exalted place, and his offspring did too. Since the 1970s, members of the DeVos family had given as much as $200 million to the G.O.P. and been tireless promoters of the modern conservative movement—its ideas, its policies, and its crusades combining free-market economics, a push for privatization of many government functions, and Christian social values. While other far-right mega-donors may have become better known over the years (the Coorses and the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson and the Mercers), Michigan’s DeVos dynasty stands apart—for the duration, range, and depth of its influence."

Conservative think tanks, advocacy organizations, and colleges

Grand Valley State University; Calvin College, attended by several generations of DeVoses, including Rich’s daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos, Northwood University, her husband Dick’s alma mater. Hillsdale, the libertarian-plus-Christian liberal-arts college in southern Michigan.

Other recipients of DeVos largesse: the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Justice, and the American Enterprise Institute

"The DeVoses’ preference for “values-oriented” candidates reflect the teachings of the Christian Reformed Church. A small breakaway denomination of its Dutch forerunner, it has some 300,000 adherents in North America, many living in the same western-Michigan towns where their immigrant ancestors settled in the 1840s to pursue a faith.."

SCHOOL REFORM: Who can forget Betsy DeVos’s campaign to undo the state’s public-education system and replace it with for-profit and charter schools that, as she had put it two decades earlier, shared her mission of “defending the Judeo-Christian values"?

“[Among] her big ‘accomplishments,’” says Diane Ravitch, the N.Y.U. professor and respected education historian, “have been reversing civil-rights enforcement for kids with disabilities, putting administrators from for-profit colleges in charge of monitoring for-profit colleges . . . stabbing in the back young people with heavy debt for their college education, and being a constant critic of public schools.” One saving grace, Ravitch contends, is that DeVos has gotten very few of her budget proposals through Congress. 

LABOR UNIONS: Another target was labor unions. Amway and the Prince Corporation had no use for them. Now the family waged a public fight. After Dick DeVos was routed when he ran for governor of Michigan in 2006, he blamed his defeat, in part, on Michigan’s unions and began to push for a right-to-work law (weakening the unions’ economic power and political clout, a pillar of the state’s Democratic Party). In 2012, the bill got through, and Michigan—headquarters to the United Automobile Workers, no less—became yet another of the country’s right-to-work states.

FAMILY: "Betsy and Erik’s father, Edgar Prince, was a Chrysler-Plymouth salesman and then machine engineer who started a die-cast business and also had a tinkerer’s gift for inventions. One, the lighted vanity mirror on the flip-up sun visor (introduced in 1972), helped Prince become one of the wealthiest men in Michigan." (wow) "As he got richer, the elder Prince rewarded his hometown handsomely; Prince money has done much to preserve downtown Holland, which remains a 1950s time capsule of Candy Land façades."

The C.R.C.’s greatest figure, Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and prime minister who died almost a century ago, had declared, in words the faithful know by heart: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”  

The Princes and DeVoses—with neighboring homes in Holland—had effected a merger thanks to the 1979 marriage of their firstborn, Betsy Prince and Dick DeVos, then in their 20s. “Bible-reading jet-setter” was the description in a Detroit Free Press profile of Betsy.

Betsy and Dick own a 22,000-square-foot mansion on Lake Macatawa.

ERIK PRINCE was devoted to his father, who doted on him. He played four sports at Holland Christian and was the proudly straitlaced kid who, without being asked, put away the soccer balls after practice. Prince enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 but was shocked by the frat-house atmosphere—too much for a junior culture warrior who’d been an intern at the Family Research Council. After three semesters, he transferred to Michigan’s Hillsdale College.

Today Hillsdale, under its president, Larry P. Arnn (former head of the Claremont Institute, a citadel of far-right ideology), is known as a feeder school for the Trump administration, including Betsy DeVos’s chief of staff, Josh Venable. In May, the week Vice President Pence gave the commencement address there, Politico called it “the college that wants to take over Washington”—citing many alums who are now D.C. power players. 

In 1989, Erik had been invited to a “youth” inaugural ball for Bush—and there had met Joan Keating, the woman who would become his first wife. Prince even worked as a Bush White House intern. “I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with,” he later said. “Homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.” He left that job for another, in the office of California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who has often been called Vladimir Putin’s top Capitol Hill asset, so valued, the Times has reported, that he was given a Kremlin code name.

Prince spent four years with the SEALs in the early 90s but moved on after his wife was diagnosed with cancer and his father, aged 63, died of a heart attack. The elder Prince left behind a business with 4,500 employees. The family sold it for $1.3 billion, and Erik, at 25, now had a sizable inheritance.

One of Prince’s instructors in the SEALs, Al Clark, was also looking to set up a security-and-defense training company. Prince had money to invest. Out of this came Blackwater, which began as an instruction facility for law enforcement, the military, and special-ops squads in Moyock, North Carolina. 

The article goes into detail about Blackwater and it is mind-blowing. Their involvement post 9/11, Russian arms dealings, US government contracts,

"The source says he resigned after he discovered that Prince had approved plans to illegally weaponize aircraft and “actively train former Chinese Red Army personnel that are now being deployed into Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Uighur region in China”—actions he perceived as supporting foreign interests above America’s. (Other Prince associates reportedly resigned for similar reasons.) Prince firmly denied the allegations."

[finzphoenix]

An illustration of @caesariawrites' favorite scene from her fantastic story Cat & Mouse, commissioned by @kleineralbtraum!🖤🤍 Eddie's feeling particularly cocky in this one! :'D

Character (c) @caesariawrites

Edward Nigma (c) DC comics

Art (c) FinzPhoenix

[spr0utsies]

"dont vote for the fascist" the red one or the blue one?

the one that wants to completely overturn the democratic system idk. think with your fucking brain lol this is not the “gotcha” you think it is. i fucking hate joe biden but i also don’t want republicans to start project 2025 and make my existence illegal 👍

[sandymybeloved]

god I hope the tories come in third on thursday (and then the party completely collapses, and then all the members eat shit and die)

[miodiodavinci]

laying down by a brook with one hand in the water like some kind of tragic prince , , , , , ,

[samueltanders]

YESSSS MY SEAT DIDNT FALL TO REFORM!!!! THE EXIT POLL WAS WRONG LADS.

[annot8]

Happy to see the tories go but at the end of the day, unlike England, Scotland hasn’t voted for the tories in almost 70 years. Weird, it’s almost as if Scotland’s vote and voice means fuck all to Westminster

Democracy, am I right?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch:

In continuing our tour of the lesser-covered but still potentially disastrous Trump campaign promises, I want to look today at the former president’s repeated vow to confer some sort of “immunity” on law enforcement officers. During Trump’s disastrous interview at the National Association of Black Journalists forum last month, Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked him about this. In particular, she asked if he thought the Springfield, Illinois deputy who killed Sonya Massey — one of the more horrific police shootings recently caught on video — should be given “immunity.”

Trump stammered. He said the killing “didn’t look good to me,” and did not appear to object to the murder charges brought by local prosecutors against deputy Sean Grayson. He then quickly pivoted to a non-sequitur about violence in Chicago, then garbled, “There’s a big difference between being a bad person and making an innocent mistake.” Later in the interview Trump claimed, as he often does, that crime is soaring, and that post-George Floyd efforts to hold police more accountable are to blame. The truth of course is that Trump is the first president since George H.W. Bush to leave office with a higher murder rate than when he started. Crime has also dropped since Trump left the White House, and in most places is nearing the historic lows we saw prior to the pandemic. Trump’s calls to immunize police are clearly in reaction to the modest reforms we’ve seen since the murder of George Floyd. And they’re of a piece with his 2016 and 2020 campaign promises to “unleash” or “unshackle” the police to go after the bad guys without fear of recrimination.

It can be difficult to cobble together a coherent policy from Trump’s vague, stream-of-consciousness rambling. But his answer to Goba and his other public statements on police immunity suggest that, while he thinks police officers should be given the benefit of the doubt, those who engage in egregious, unambiguous abuse — like Grayson’s killing of Massey — could merit criminal charges. This, in fact, is pretty much how things already operate today. Less than 2 percent of police officers who kill someone while on duty are ever charged with a crime. We can debate whether that number is too high or too low. The point is that while criminal charges for police abuse are marginally more common today than they were before George Floyd, they’re still vanishingly rare.

The main thing Trump appears to want to change is who makes these decisions. Currently, the decision to charge police officers is made by locally-elected district attorneys or, in rare cases, by U.S. Attorneys independent of the White House. Trump wants these decisions to be made by him, or at least by those loyal to him. But Trump also clearly has no idea what he means by “immunity,” how immunity currently works, or what he could do to change it. For starters, he doesn’t seem to understand that immunity for police officers from criminal charges isn’t . . . well, it isn’t anything. It doesn’t exist. Trump first invoked this idea earlier this year while making the once ridiculous — and now, thanks to the Roberts court, all-to-real — argument that as president, he should be immune for any crimes he may have committed while in office. In the process, he compared the immunity he thinks presidents need to the immunity he thinks police officers need.

But police immunity from criminal prosecution isn’t a policy any serious person has ever suggested — not police unions, not Jeff Sessions, not the Manhattan Institute. You could make a persuasive argument that when prosecutors consistently fail to charge police officers for clear crimes, the police enjoy a sort of de facto immunity. But there is no law, policy, or regulation anywhere in the country that says police officers can’t be charged with crimes.

Trump appears to be confusing criminal liability for police with the post-George Floyd debate over qualified immunity — a form of immunity from civil liability, not criminal charges. It’s about how much protection police officers should get from lawsuits. Qualified immunity makes it extremely difficult to get lawsuits for police abuse in front of a jury. To do so, a plaintiff must show not only that an officer violated their constitutional rights, but that the officer’s actions were unconstitutional under “well-established” law. This generally means that you have to find a case in which another officer engaged in similar behavior, after which a federal court ruled that his actions were unconstitutional.

[...]

High probability, low impact

A Trump DOJ will almost certainly stop providing oversight for constitutional violations by police. Traditionally, when local prosecutors have refused to prosecute police for clear constitutional violations, federal law enforcement has stepped in — the FBI will launch an investigation, which might result in federal criminal charges. It’s a near-certainty that Trump will appoint DOJ leadership and U.S. attorneys who refuse to intervene in such cases. It’s also a near certainty that a Trump DOJ would stop seeking new consent decrees with police agencies with a pattern and practice of abusive policing. It’s also likely that the DOJ will stop enforcing existing decrees — or just laxly enforce them. Project 2025 calls on the next administration to “promptly and properly eliminate all existing consent decrees.”

A second Trump administration would also likely tie favored police and prosecution policies to federal funding. Currently, presidents don’t have much influence over local policing (though Trump will seek to change that, too). But they can use funding and other incentives to reward policies the president favors, and discourage those he doesn’t. Project 2025, for example, explicitly calls for denying federal funding to cities that don’t use stop-and-frisk. (Given the overwhelming data on these policies, it seems safe to say that the more discriminatory and racist the policy, the more Republicans seem to support it.) More generally, Trump and the Project 2025 people want less discipline in policing. They want officers using more force, more often (unless it involves people with close ties to Trump). They want more militarization, less deescalation, and less negotiation. This is the main reason why they also want to end federal training for state and local law enforcement, which they consider to too woke, too weak, and too conciliatory.

High probability, moderate impact

Moving up in seriousness, a Trump DOJ may also interfere when local prosecutors do try to hold bad cops accountable. His administration could threaten to withhold federal funding to jurisdictions in which local prosecutors and police agencies discipline bad cops, as he tried to do with sanctuary cities. A Trump DOJ may also try to bully cities away from voluntarily implementing police reforms, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to do in Chicago. Trump is also likely to pervert the intent of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division by opening investigations of local prosecutors and police agencies who do hold officers to account by launching “civil rights” investigations of those agencies based on alleged “reverse discrimination,” as previous Republican administrations have done in other contexts. Trump has already vowed to open “civil rights investigations” of “radical leftist prosecutors” who “refuse to charge criminals.” Project 2025 calls for this as well — criminally charging progressive DAs for not enforcing certain laws. (Back in reality, no DA has the resources to enforce every law. All DAs prioritize based on the resources they have). The 2025 blueprint also calls on the Civil Rights Division to divert resources from investigating police abuse to investigating public agencies, private businesses, and universities for DEI programs and affirmative action that engage in “reverse discrimination.”

[...]

Back in July, several media outlets reported that MAGA activist Ivan Raiklin has been assembling a Trump enemies list. The list apparently includes “high-ranking Democrats and Republicans, U.S. Capitol Police officers, officials at the FBI and other intelligence agencies, witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trials, and journalists at The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other news outlets.” Once Trump takes office, Raiklin plans to recruit far-right sheriffs to arrest the people on that list. Raiklin also thinks he can also recruit tens of thousands of ex-military personnel, people he says were discharged for refusing COVID protocols. This is an unserious, unconstitutional, pie-in-the sky, batshit-insane scheme. But so was sending a bunch of idiots to the Capitol to stop Mike Pence from certifying electors in a bid to overturn the election. They tried it anyway. (Raiklin, by the way, is generally credited as the first person to float that Pence/electors scheme.)

So far, media outlets have been unable to find any sheriff who will commit to the plan. I’m not sure how much comfort we should take in that. Democrats currently run the DOJ. I doubt any sheriff is going to publicly volunteer himself as a participant in a criminal conspiracy to violate the Constitutional rights of, among others, the people who currently oversee the Justice Department. If Trump were able to make the DOJ into his personal law firm, fixer, and enforcer, I suspect things could change. The scheme doesn’t seem likely to get far in blue states. A Democratic attorney general, a state police force in a solidly Democratic state, or a Democratic governor with the National Guard would snuff it out pretty quickly. I’m less confident about red states, particularly those with feverishly MAGA attorneys general and governors. It could get at least far enough to intimidate and chill dissent, which is the whole point. And it’s more likely to get that far if the law enforcement officers who carry it out know they won’t be prosecuted for doing so.

Raiklin, by the way, isn’t just some fringe activist out of nowhere. He’s a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, and was an aide to QAnon conspiracist and unregistered foreign lobbyist Michael Flynn — the man Trump appointed National Security Advisor, the single most sensitive position in U.S. government. Raiklin and Flynn remain close, and Trump has said he’d appoint Flynn to another high-ranking position. I suppose that on some level, once we reach the point where sheriffs are making out-of-jurisdiction arrests of journalists and politicians with complicity from the DOJ, whether or not those sheriffs can later be charged or sued is probably the least of our problems. Like the mass deportation plan, when the details were reported, the MAGA faithful on sites like X-Twitter didn’t react with denial or skepticism. They reacted with glee.

Radley Balko exposes how Donald Trump’s two-tiered plans for law enforcement could impact policing in a 2nd Trump term: favorable immunity for cops who follow his tune, and retribution for those that don’t follow it.

[jamaicahomescom]

The Rich History of Emancipation Day and Independence Day in Jamaica

Jamaica’s history is a vibrant tapestry of resilience, struggle, and triumph. Central to this story are two pivotal celebrations: Emancipation Day and Independence Day. These holidays commemorate Jamaica’s journey from colonial rule and slavery to freedom and self-governance. Understanding these days offers a glimpse into the spirit of the Jamaican people and their enduring quest for liberty and…

[angelx1992]