Tl;dr: I’m a queer disabled black creative who recently lost her disability benefits due to an inaccuracy in SSA income claims. The appeals process is underway, in the meantime rent & bills must be paid. Hey, hire Jay!
Hi, I’m Jay Justice. I’m a cosplayer, activist, and editor. You may have seen my work in comics, video games & on the internet. I’m permanently disabled and have been since I was a child. I have an autoimmune disease that destroys healthy tissue because my immune system does not recognize those cells as ‘self’. This causes me to experience severe pain, damage, and increasingly reduced mobility. I went from using a cane to a manual wheelchair, to a motorized scooter as I became more ill.
I’ve always been a very hardworking, dedicated and determined person. I worked as much as I could, and still do. I eventually had to apply for social security disability benefits to help make ends meet. My goal for years has been to move into wheelchair accessible housing because it is very difficult as a disabled person to live in an inaccessible home. Eventually, I will be completely unable to walk or stand and I desperately need to live in a place where I can be independent and functional.
I was working towards this goal when disaster struck. As of January 10th 2018, my disability benefits were suspended due to erroneous data that stated my earnings last year to be over $20,000 greater than their actual amount. Working with this false information, the government has determined that I have to repay all of the benefits I received in the last 16 months. To repay this amount, they are withholding the entirety of my disability check for the foreseeable future.
I am working on the appeals process currently to prove this information to be incorrect, and to get my benefits reinstated. Unfortunately, I am told that the investigation will take time, and that is something I do not have. I have to pay for food, rent, bills and medical care. I was relying on this money and without it, I cannot survive. My immediate goals are to secure enough funds to cover mandatory needs.
How You Can Help
I am experienced in and looking for work, gigs or positions in the following areas. I can provide excellent references from prominent companies and individuals in: Cosplay and Conventions Promotion and Marketing Sensitivity Reading Editing Novels, Comic Books & Graphic Novels Community Organizing Social Media Management and Consulting
I have several upcoming convention appearances scheduled and I will have my handmade items available for purchase at PAX South, Farpoint Con, Katsucon and Haven Con. My online store ( http://www.etsy.com/shop/JayJusticeDesigns ) will be open at all other times but closed during conventions as I am unable to ship during those times. I will accept donations via Paypal, Ko-fi, and YouCaring. Thank you for your support, whether it’s shopping at my store or booth, sharing a post or making a donation. I appreciate you so much.
I would also like to take the opportunity to discuss a serious issue affecting the disabled community. As a disabled person on benefits, I cannot exceed the monthly income limit which is $1,170. That’s $14,040 annually. If I do earn this much by working, the SSA will deduct over $6,000 annually from my benefits. This leaves the maximum possible earnings per year for me at under $17,000.
The minimum income required for wheelchair accessible housing is at least $20,000/year.
Independent living for a disabled person feels like an impossible dream.
You’re penalized for working and doomed to crushing poverty if you’re unable to work.
We need to change this.
I am writing letters to my representatives to highlight this issue & discuss ways we can improve the lives of people with disabilities. A life above the poverty line should be accessible to all.
Deyshia Hargrave is an English teacher at Rene Rost Middle Schools in Vermilion
Parish, Louisiana; on Monday night, she attended a special meeting of
the local school board and, when called upon comment period, politely
asked why the board superintendants had voted themselves a raise while
the teachers in the school district have been subjected to a long-term
pay-freeze.
The superintendent ruled her question out of order and then a deputy
Abbeville city marshal who works in the parish schools dragged her out
of the room, put her in handcuffs and threw her to the floor while
chanting “stop resisting.”
The board of education says it won’t press charges against her. However,
the city is holding her on charges of “remaining after being forbidden”
and “resisting an officer.”
It gets better. The school board president can’t fucking handle himself in a goddamn interview, and was getting all pissy about the “threats and obscenities” his office has been getting thanks to “that stupid a** video” and whining about how “everyone wants to side with the poor little woman who got thrown out.”
Fucker actually says “She made a choice. She could have walked out and nothing would have happened.”
Of course, if you watch the video you will see that she was A) addressed by the board, B) still being spoken to by a board member at the same time the officer was trying to eject her, and C) she did in fact gather her things and walk out peacefully after the board member finished speaking to her.
If anyone else would like to give Vermilion School Board President Anthony Fontana’s office a call and maybe some fresh obscenities to complain about, their number is (337) 893-3973
So if this officer is working in the schools it makes me wonder how students are being treated.
Nosey’s Law – the new “elephant protection”
law that was just passed in the New Jersey Senate and sits on Governor Chris
Christie’s desk, awaiting his signature – has turned out to be a complete mess,
both with regard to what it actually effects as well as the political
motivations of the various advocacy groups that pushed it through. Named after
an infamous privately owned circus elephant, the Nosey’s Law
the public thought they were supporting would have simply protected elephants
from being used in traveling entertainment acts; but instead, it effectively outlaws
all mobile animal education programs in the state.
In its first incarnation, Nosey’s Law emulated
anti-circus bills previously enacted in New York and Illinois that prohibit the
use of elephants in traveling animal acts (or even any type of entertainment at
all). Instead, imprecise language about what constitutes a “traveling act” and
a “performance” in the original bill allowed an overly broad amendment to
expand the scope of the ban from just elephants to all wild and exotic animals.
The combination of the two means that
not only is using elephants in any sort of travelling exhibition illegal, but that
any mobile business utilizing exotic or wild animals for any type of
exhibition, in any way, is also in violation of the new law. While this may
seem like good news to those readers who want to see all animals removed from
traveling entertainment, this actually has much further reaching effects: any
businesses doing wildlife outreach and conservation education programs with a
live wild animal collection will be completely eliminated by the passage of
this law. These highly valuable services and
exhibitions are not the type of animal entertainment that the public expected
Nosey’s Law to prohibit. Not only do they often serve to support the continued
existence of wildlife rehabilitation facilities and exotic animal rescues, they
are also often the only access underprivileged communities have to education
about the natural world.
“Be It
Enacted by the
Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:
1. a. Notwithstanding any other law, or any rule or
regulation adopted pursuant thereto, to the contrary, no person shall use an
elephant 1or other
wild or exotic animal1 in
a traveling animal act.
b. Any person who violates this section shall be subject to
the penalties provided in section 10 of P.L.1973, c.309 (C.23:2A-10), except
that the criminal penalties provided in subsection f. of that section shall not
apply.
c. As used in this section:
“Mobile or traveling housing facility” means a vehicle, including a
truck, trailer, or railway car, used to transport or house an animal used for
performance.
“Performance” means any animal act, carnival, circus, display,
exhibition, exposition, fair, parade, petting zoo, presentation, public
showing, race, ride, trade show, or similar undertaking in which animals
perform tricks, give rides, or participate as accompaniments for the
entertainment, amusement, or benefit of a live audience.
“Traveling animal act” means any performance which requires an animal
to be transported to or from the location of the performance in a mobile or
traveling housing facility.
2. This act shall take effect immediately.”
The important parts to note are that it
applies to all wild or exotic animals in addition to elephants, and that it
prohibits any public showing of these animals for the benefit of the public. Even
when this bill just dealt with elephants, this wording still would have been
overly broad in comparison with similar extant legislation. Both the New York
and Illinois elephant-specific laws were carefully written to make sure they
didn’t accidentally prohibit legitimate educational presentations: New York
banned the use of elephants in any type of entertainment, travelling or not,
but they emphasized the entertainment part of the definition and included an
exemption for programs run by zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and
Aquariums (AZA) and wildlife sanctuaries; Illinois (the existing law most
similar to what Nosey’s Law purported to be) chose to emphasize that they were
banning travelling elephant acts and
made sure they exempted any “non-mobile, permanent institution, or other
facility.”
If this legislation has passed as it was
originally written, the vagaries of the wording wouldn’t have affected the
actual implementation – there aren’t any facilities in the state of New Jersey
taking their elephants off-site for educational programs. So how did this bill
go from specifically restricting elephants to a disaster for educational
businesses? On 12/18/2017, the Assembly Appropriations Committee amended the
text of the bill, adding six words that changed the fundamental purpose of the
law: “or other wild or exotic animals.”
The term “exotic animal” is far broader than many people
realize, and “wild animal” is even more so. In general, both terms not only
encompass the iconic megafauna like bears and tigers, but also many species the
general public encounters regularly, such as guinea pigs and canaries. Nosey’s
Law does not define what is considered a wild or an exotic animal, and it does
not reference any other extant definitions (the text is marked as if the definition will be in a footnote, but no such footnote exists at the time of this writing). The bill, if passed, will be an
addition to Title 23 of the New Jersey State statutes.
According to the definitions found in that document, an exotic animal is “any
nongame species or mammal, bird, reptile or amphibian not indigenous to New
Jersey”. There appears to be no extant definition of a wild animal – the
closest is the definition of “wildlife,” which is “any wild mammal, bird,
reptile, amphibian, fish, mollusk, crustacean or other wild animal.” These
definitions are, in keeping with the rest of the bill, incredibly broad, but it
appears that the most likely interpretation of the bill is that it will outlaw
use of all non-domestic species of animals in any sort of mobile exhibition or
outreach.
This means that if Governor Christie signs
this bill into law, the addition of those six words will make it illegal for educational
outreach companies to help children fall in love with wild animals through
entertaining – but informative – events. It will make it illegal for wildlife
rescues to raise funding for their rehabilitation programs by doing
presentations about raptor conservation with the unreleasable animals in their
care. And, because the bill was not written with any of the normal exemptions,
there are six zoos – three of which are accredited by the “gold standard”
Associations of Zoos and Aquariums (a group that almost always has exemptions
from restrictive animal management laws) – it will also make it illegal for facilities
like the Turtleback Zoo to run the classroom programs where they teach
first-graders about the astounding diversity found in nature with the help of
specially trained ambassador animals.
While this may seem like a mistake – surely,
nobody who loves animals could purposefully attempt to do such damage to
educational programs – some of the biggest proponents of the bill indicated in
their comments this is /exactly/ what was intended to occur. The headline of
PETA’s celebratory blog post applauds New Jersey for banning “all wild-animal
acts.” PETA, an organization known for their animal liberation ethos, truly
wants to end all use of animals by humans in any capacity – even for
educational purposes that might encourage people to care about animals. They
even openly celebrated the passing of Nosey’s Law as the first step in closing
all zoos (although the reference to zoos was quickly and quietly removed from
the blog post, likely to avoid cluing in the duped supporters of Nosey’s Law to
their true intentions).
The oddest thing about all of this is that Nosey’s
Law is damaging the business practices of multiple facilities accredited by the
AZA less than six months after they very publicly teamed up with PETA’s legislation-focused
counterpart, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The CEO of HSUS,
Wayne Pacelle, wrote publicly about the need for the two organizations “to unite to fight cruelty and promote conservation,” and yet both Pacelle and the HSUS New
Jersey State Director both widely praised the passing of a law that actively
damages the conservation efforts of multiple AZA zoos. HSUS and PETA do not frequently
present themselves to the public as flip sides of the same coin, but their VP
of wildlife affairs, Nicole Paquette, has stated publicly that the two
organizations have the same goals, simply different methods of achieving them; in
light of that, it might seem that Nosey’s Law is the first stumbling block for
the overly optimistic partnership between a zoological organization and an
animal rights advocacy group. However, the comments made by both the HSUS New
Jersey State Director and Pacelle about the law passing indicated that they believed the bill to be
entirely focused on ending circus acts using wild animals. Pacelle,
specifically, opened his blog post on the topic with a statement that the law
bans “almost all wild-animal acts” when the bill as written in fact bans every exotic animal act.
While this
slight discrepancy might not be a big deal from most authors, the HSUS CEO is a
man whose books are written in collaboration with former White House speech
writers and whose blog posts frequently include vocabulary that even well-educated
readers occasionally have to look up in a dictionary – it is utterly
uncharacteristic of him to allow anything to be published under his name to
include a mischaracterization of what he himself dubbed the “biggest win yet”
for ending the use of wild animals in circuses. So what happened – how did HSUS
end up enthusiastically supporting a bill that is so blatantly damaging to
their newest collaborator?
Given that PETA actively celebrated the damage
Nosey’s Law will do to New Jersey zoos, and both HSUS people speaking publicly
about the bill didn’t seem to realize the true scope of the bill – the HSUS New
Jersey State Director didn’t even seem to be sure about what species of animals
would be covered by the ban – maybe HSUS was caught as unaware as the general
public was by the “wild and exotic animal” language amendment. The bill was
amended very late in the legislative process – more than a year after the bill
was originally introduced to the Senate floor – and it’s possible the
additional language could have gone unnoticed by animal advocacy organizations
until it was too late.
And that’s really the take-home lessons we’ve
all learned from this Nosey’s Law debacle – whether
you’re a member of interested public or a public figure heavily involved in
animal advocacy, it’s crucial to keep a close watch on the evolution of
proposed legislation. Even the smallest changes to the wording of a bill can
have big consequences, and in this case, six little words that went unnoticed
in what was intended to be a fairly targeted piece of animal protection
legislation might destroy the majority of conservation and wildlife education
opportunities for New Jersey residents.
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You know that whole trope where like, the protagonists get teleported up into the aliens’ spaceship or base or whatever and the alien appears to them only it doesn’t appear as it really looks like but rather, since it doesn’t want to scare the protagonists, it takes the form of something we find familiar and pleasing and is like, “I look like your dad or whatever–is this form okay?” Like I think about that trope a lot and I think like, what if the alien couldn’t pick out a form via telepathy and only had earth media to try and decide what form would scare its human guests least and be accepted almost immediately and honestly the more I think about it the more options for what form that might be are just really fun to me.
“I have chosen the form of your earth playwright and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda–do not be afraid. I come in peace.”
“Greetings. I am Glofnorbo of the cloud you call the ‘Pegasus Nebula.’ I have scanned your earth media from afar and empirically decided that you would find the form of the one known as Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson most pleasing. I have come to confer with your leaders.”
“Do not be panic. I come in peace. I have assumed the form of your insectoid demigoddess ‘Hatsune Miku’ so that we may communicate peacefully without my true form horrifying you.”
“It was decided that I would assume the form of your ‘Mister Rogers’ in order to best welcome your world to the galactic neighborhood without frightening your kind.”
“…So did your colleague take on the form of Jack Black for that reason too?”
“No, that is the actual Jack Black. We do not know how to make him leave.”
The race to build the world’s tallest skyscraper has reached new heights – and taken a turn in direction.
Designs for ‘The Big Bend’, a slender tower that would transform Manhattan’s skyline have been unveiled.
Described as the ‘longest building in the world’, the project’s concept drawings reveal a skyscraper reaching an apex then curving back down. And featuring an elevator system that can travel in curves, horizontally and in loops.
In a bid to work around the challenges of New York’s zoning laws, design studio Oiio has imagined an innovative concept to straddle across Billionnaire’s Row on 57th Street.
what the fuck is this
It’s why people hate New York.
Oh great there’s going to be a giant fucking paperclip in my skyline. Fucking neato
It looks like you’re baiting disaster! Would you like help?
Unless one half of this building is upside down, you have no right to the “world’s longest building” title. I demand an upside down
@dadhoc lost his job (they fired a bunch of ppl, whee)
I can’t even pay cash to pick up my meds bc there’s a new law in PA that they can’t even let you pay cash for your meds if the insurance requires a prior authorization so I’m facing down withdrawal if I don’t get an emergency supply like now
Davos got out of the yard and was missing for a while but we got him back but my nerves are shot
Good News:
Our synagogue is going to help us get our repairs on our house done so it’s all safe again
I’m teaching at my synagogue starting on 1/28, it’s a paid gig, my first class is on gender diversity and queerness in Torah
My rabbi and I had a really long good talk today, and he basically said he views the hate people have given me as proof of my goodness as a human being, bc ‘bad people are drawn to hate good people,’ which is the most refreshing take I have ever gotten on internet hate, and he knows me better than internet randos so I’ll take his opinion on whether or not I’m good
He thinks I should be a rabbi and I agree
@mistresskabooms and I are sharing a 5 lb bag of Sour Patch Kids courtesy of @gallusrostromegalus, and she has a new space heater for her room and I just filled my stomach with hummus and GF crackers.
So basically my family is critically broke but things are gonna get fixed. I’m super fucking stressed, but what else is new?
As much as I hate this, I’m gonna say again:
If you like what I do on the internets, and you’d like to support me and my family and make sure @mistresskabooms and @dadhoc and our pups are fed and clothed and sheltered, please consider:
Supporting me on Patreon!$1 gets you instant access to multiple chapters of multiple queer fictions, a bunch of short stories, some queer theory related rambling, and more.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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