PLEASE VOTE. VOTE A STRAIGHT BLUE TICKET. VOTE BIDEN/HARRIS.

PLEASE VOTE. VOTE A STRAIGHT BLUE TICKET. VOTE BIDEN/HARRIS.

You need to vote Democratic in 2020 if you ever want your vote to count in the U.S. again. The Supreme Court’s latest ruling shows GOP intent to steal the 2020 elections and establish ongoing minority rule.

In Sept. 2016, I warned that Trump could win. I wasn’t overreacting then. I’m not overreacting now. We are in real trouble in the U.S.

Short version: the Republican party is openly preparing to steal the 2020 U.S. presidential election through the Supreme Court if it is even remotely close. If their cheating works this year, the United States may never have fair elections again.

The ONLY WAY to stop this now is to vote for Biden in such overwhelming numbers that the election can’t possibly be awarded to Trump. PLEASE vote if you haven’t yet. This isn’t even about who wins anymore: this is about whether you want to continue to live in a democracy or not.

If you can possibly vote in person, do so.

If you can vote safely on Election Day, Nov. 3rd, do so.

If you have to mail in your ballot, mail it NOW, or better yet, drop it off at an official ballot drop box or polling place rather than relying on the overburdened, sabotaged USPS.

If Trump loses, he will sue to throw out mail-in votes, absentee votes, and early votes, because those votes lean Democratic. So if you can vote in person, do– especially if you’re in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Arizona, or Texas.

Longer explanation: The Supreme Court is now packed with 3 judges who, as lawyers, worked on Bush v. Gore in 2000. These 3 judges were on the legal team that used underhanded tricks to throw out Democratic votes and keep the vote count going until Bush was ahead, then they used more tricks to stop the count at that point. The Supreme Court, then conservative-dominated, ruled to give Bush the presidency.

If all the ballots had been counted and held to the same standards, Gore would have won.

Trump has openly stated that he wants Amy Coney Barrett on the Court in time for the election: if he doesn’t win the election, he intends to sue to have votes thrown out until he wins.

Republicans have (receipts in links):

Deliberately sabotaged the US Postal Service to make voting by mail unreliable during the pandemic.

Limited ballot drop boxes to 1 per county in Texas, so that in some counties, millions of voters only had 1 drop box to take their ballots.

Put out fake ballot drop boxes to collect ballots illegally.

Sued to prevent election officials from counting mail-in or absentee votes that arrive after November 3rd.

Fought to allow untrained election officials to throw out mail-in ballots if they don’t think the signatures match the voters’ official signature, which might have been recorded decades before.

On the Supreme Court, the conservatives wrote that state courts don’t have jurisdiction over their elections, in a clear signal that if the election is close, SCOTUS intends to intervene and overrule the states to the benefit of the GOP.

The only way to secure the right to fair elections in the future is to vote Democratic in overwhelming numbers now so that 2020 can’t be stolen. Then we’ll have to keep pushing Democrats to balance the courts and fix the electoral systems to reclaim democracy in the U.S. But first, we have to get the GOP out of power, or they will institutionalize permanent minority rule.

VOTE.

Disney stiffs writer

Alan Dean Foster is an sf legend - a writer who produced a shelf of original novels but also made a reputation novelizing movies and TV from Star Wars to Aliens, turning out books that transcended quickie adaptations, becoming beloved bestsellers in their own right.

Disney now owns a bunch of these books, thanks to their acquisitions of Lucas and Fox, and these books continue to sell briskly. Disney not only isn’t paying Foster any royalties for these books - they’re refusing to even issue him royalty statements.

https://www.sfwa.org/2020/11/18/disney-must-pay/

Disney has blackholed Foster’s agents and lawyers, and also the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA); to the extent that they have communicated with him, they have espoused a radical (jaw dropping) copyright theory.

This is Disney’s theory: When they bought Lucas and Fox, they acquired the copyright licenses that enabled them to sell the Foster’s books - but not the liability, the legal obligation to pay him for his books.

As SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal says, this theory could absolutely upend the nature of copyright itself. Any publisher that wanted to go on making money from an author without paying them could simply sell the rights to a sister company, which then denies any obligations.

Foster brought his case to SFWA’s grievance committee - a group that has worked on my behalf in the past, extracting a fee from a multinational publisher that commissioned and accepted a story from me but then offered an odious and unacceptable contract they refused to amend.

Usually griefcom work happens in the background: a SFWA member goes to griefcom, griefcom goes to the publisher, the publisher settles. This is the first time in more than a decade that SFWA has gone public with a complaint.

To be fair, Disney DID offer to meet with Foster, but demanded that he sign an NDA PRIOR to any negotiation. This is Not Normal. Sometimes the OUTCOME of a negotiation is confidential, but you don’t go into a negotiation under NDA.

Disney appears to be taking a page from the private equity fund that acquired Taylor Swift’s masters from the cartoonish villain Scooter Braun, who refused to meet with her without an NDA.

https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/1328471874318311425

Foster’s case is a gross injustice. He has cancer and his wife is ill. He wrote these books, Disney bought them. They’re making money from them. They owe him money. Period.

But beyond the individual injustice being visited upon Foster, Kowal and SFWA worry that this represents a suite of new, corporate anti-writer tactics: flipping assets without liabilities, refusing to talk about it without an NDA.

You can follow Foster’s case with the #DisneyMustPay hashtag. If you’re a writer facing similar tactics (even if you’re not a SFWA member), they’re seeking your story, via this form:

https://airtable.com/shrr2S8rs4pcokske

Sometimes I look at a picture and think...Why haven’t I written a fic where someone has to jump into a pool to perform a brave rescue and then afterwards drinks a beer while sitting with wet clothes clinging to every curve of his body while the rescued person is recovering? Because, of course, he’s trying to look nonchalant about it, even though he’s deeply unsettled by how close he came to losing this person. Why hasn’t that even occurred to me? 

Tom Ellis for "Man's Health"

be on the lookout...

tumblr got sneaky and switched my dash to “best stuff first” without telling me. Having been woken up stupid early this morning, it took entirely too long for me to notice.

but if you notice that your dash url stays ‘tumblr.com/dashboard’ and doesn’t become ‘dashboard/max_post_id=‘, go check your dashboard settings.

unless you want tumblr to decide what stuff is best. and not look at things in reverse chronological order. which, if you did, you’d be somewhere else, I’d imagine.

Sometimes I love Pearls Before Swine. I hope everyone can just keep facing your day. 

Some of my absolute best friends!

Reblog if you've found friendship because of your fandoms.

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