Welcome to the GoFundMe for the United Brothel Workers (UBW) (A Division of CWA Local 9413) aid fund! We are a group of legal NV courtesans who decided to unionize after our employer refused to negotiate an unfair contract that gave them ownership over all of our intellectual property and gave them Power of Attorney to sign documents in our names in perpetuity. They wanted to own our images, our ideas, our inventions, and our likenesses, and make money off of them, forever.
We said "NO"
The Communications Workers of America (CWA), one of the nation's largest unions, agreed to help us become the first ever brothel worker's union in the United States. We met with the union, and got a supermajority of the women working at the ranch to sign cards within 48 hours!
Now more than 7 of us have been illegally and wrongfully terminated. While the CWA will eventually get us our jobs back, until then we need to pay our bills. Many of us support multiple people and even multiple households as sole breadwinners.
We are like other workers in America, we deserve a fair contract, we deserve good faith bargaining from our workplace, and we deserve to have agency, safety, and security.
We are working on other ways to support ourselves and any others of our number who are wrongfully terminated, but we need a little help until we can do that. Your donations would be used to give ourselves and wrongfully terminated co-workers the funds they need to make it through until justice prevails and jobs are re-instated.
from left (Jupiter Jetson, Molly Wylder, Adalind Gray) 3 of the workers wrongfully terminated from Sheri's Ranch for unionizing. Not Pictured; Paloma Karr, Genevieve Dahl, Gwen Bunny. Photos By Nikki Zee.
Paloma Karr, one of the first workers fired for union activity.
We have numerous video resources for those who want to learn more, or who just want to support our effort by commenting and sharing our videos!
If you want to support us in other ways, please visit the United Brothel Workers Website where you can sign our petition, keep up with current updates, and coming soon, Union Merch!
What are we fighting for?
Ownership of our own intellectual property
Control of our own names and signatures
An end to wage theft in the form of predatory fees
An end to tip theft in the form of "tip splitting"
Thank you so much for your support and remember; Bust Nuts not Unions!
Updates:
Sheri's Ranch has illegally terminated more than 7 ladies for unionizing.
The CWA legal team is working on getting our jobs re-instated
We are close to approving final designs for merch. Pre-orders will be available soon.
After I made some fun of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for putting his two twentysomething sons in charge of financial behemoth Cantor Fitzgerald, Andrew Gelman and Mark Palko reminded me that they have been waging a lonely fight against the whole theoretical concept of “meritocracy” for many years now.
Back in 2007, Gelman noted that James Flynn — the discoverer of the Flynn effect in re IQ scores — had pointed out why the concept is itself practically incoherent:
[Flynn] summarizes some data showing that America has not been getting more meritocratic over time. He then presents the killer theoretical argument:
[quoting Flynn]: The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
Gelman translates this into straightforward practical/political terms:
Basically, “meritocracy” means that individuals with more merit get the goodies. From the American Heritage dictionary: “A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement.” As Flynn points out, this leads to a contradiction: to the extent that people with merit get higher status, one would expect they would use that status to help their friends, children, etc, giving them a leg up beyond what would be expected based on their merit alone.
In other words, a class-based society in which merit is the defining characteristic of class status is ultimately an oxymoron, practically speaking. Individuals may have to a greater or lesser extent themselves “earned” their power and privilege via their own “merit,” but they inevitably use their power and privilege to favor their families in particular, and their friends and fellow network members more generally, because that’s the whole point of having power and privilege in a hierarchically stratified, aka class-based, society.
Twelve years ago Palko pointed to what I’m going to call “soft” nepotism, which is probably much more prevalent than the crude nepotism of for example Donald Trump’s imbecile sons being rich and famous people:
The New Republic has a very good profile by Julia Iofee of Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation. The whole thing is worth reading, but there’s one paragraph I’d like to single out both because of its content and its placement deep in the article.
[Quoting TNR] After [Michael] Needham graduated from Williams in 2004, Bill Simon Jr., a former California Republican gubernatorial candidate and fellow Williams alum, helped Needham secure the introductions that got him a job at the foundation. Ambitious and hard-working, he was promoted, in six months, to be Feulner’s chief of staff. According to a former veteran Heritage staffer, Needham is intelligent but “very aggressive”: “He is the bull in the china closet, and he feels very comfortable doing that.” (“I consider him a friend,” says the college classmate, “but he’s a huge asshole.”) In 2007, Needham, whose father has given generous donations to both Rudy Giuliani and the Heritage Foundation, went to work for Giuliani’s presidential campaign. When the campaign folded, Needham followed his father’s footsteps to Stanford Business School and then came back, at Feulner’s bequest, to run Heritage Action.
The soft nepotism here is that there’s no reason to doubt that that this prodigy of successful networking is talented and hard-working, aka Full of Merit:
You’ll notice Iofee goes out of her way to suggest that Needham got his first rapid promotion by being “ambitious and hard-working,” and there is, no doubt, some truth in that, but pretty much everybody who goes to work for a big-time D.C. think tank is ambitious and hard-working. These are not traits that would have set Needham apart while being the socially well-connected son of a major donor very well might have.
Soft nepotism is absolutely endemic to the American version of meritocracy. Basically it works like this: almost everybody who goes to HYPS these days or similar (Williams, Swarthmore etc.) is very smart and very hard working. You do still get occasional instances of crude nepotism, like Charles Kushner straight up bribing the Harvard Corporation to allow Little Jared to attend its college, but for the most part entrance into these places is quite meritocratic, in the sense that the relevant filters are for ability rather than familial status. But the problem is that those filters themselves are reflections of the ability of people from the Right Families to manipulate the system, so that Connor and Maddie can get in, via their individual “merit,” that has been excruciatingly cultivated from birth by their parents. Lauren Rivera’s great bookPedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs is a fascinating ethnography of exactly how this kind of “merit” works, and work it does.
This is all related to what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” The idea that talented and hardworking people are scarce is just facially preposterous if you say it out loud, which is why people generally don’t. An exception that I find particularly amusing is The Atlantic magazine’s EIC, Jeffrey Goldberg, who had this to say a few years ago when he was trying to explain/rationalize why so few Atlantic cover articles were written by women:
It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!
Goldberg’s job, as he sees or at least saw it, is to nurture the extraordinarily rare woman journalist who can be transformed into someone who has The Necessities (h/t Al Campanis) to do something like create a unified field theory of physics write an Atlantic cover story. As I commented at the time:
The merit myth exists to justify the maintenance of extremely hierarchical anti-egalitarian social structures. If there are 10 or 100 or 1000 times as many people who have the ability and desire to, say, write cover stories for prestigious magazines, or to attend hyper-elite colleges, or to be captains or at least lieutenants of industry, or to be good Supreme Court justices, or to star in a Hollywood movie, or to write the Great American novel, as there are social slots available for people to fill these roles (and there are), then you’ve got to create sorting mechanisms that give the impression that these slots aren’t being handed out arbitrarily, or worse yet on the basis of pre-existing social privilege.
That’s where Jeffrey Goldberg and his search for ultra-rare gynecological journalistic muscles comes in.
Goldberg’s mission, as he understands it, is to perform the extraordinarily difficult job of finding people who can write good Atlantic cover stories. He thinks this job is hard because there are so few such people. It is a hard job — but for exactly the opposite reason. There are enormous numbers of extremely gifted hard-working creative etc. American journalists out there, many of them working for nothing or close to it, for reasons that are too obvious to belabor.
All this applies equally to actors, writers, aspiring disrupters of the market for whatever, potential HYPS undergraduates, and so forth.
It’s a big country. So what to do? The answer is you come up with a bunch of largely phony metrics for sorting out sheep of supposedly unicorn-like rarity from the vast multitudes of goats.
These include things like whether somebody has a degree or preferably degrees from super-elite educational institutions; whether somebody is related to somebody already in the business; whether somebody seems “polished” enough to make clients comfortable, etc.
The merit myth is critical to the maintenance of our phony meritocracy. Gelman’s and Palko’s related points is that meritocracies must inevitably be phony, at least on their own ideologically self-justifying terms, given the way that social power and privilege actually work.
And the underlying historical irony here is that, before it became a term of approbation, “meritocracy” was coined by academics who were using it derisively for pretty much these very reasons.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge said Thursday that the IRS broke the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information “approximately 42,695 times” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS had erroneously shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people with the Department of Homeland Security as part of the agencies’ controversial agreement to share information on immigrants for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the U.S.
Her finding was based off a declaration filed earlier this month by Dottie Romo, IRS’ chief risk and control officer, which revealed that the IRS had provided DHS with information on 47,000 of the 1.28 million people that ICE requested — and, in most of those cases, gave ICE additional address information in violation of privacy rules created to protect taxpayer data.
Kollar-Kotelly said in her Thursday decision that the agency violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute, “approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to ICE.” She called the Romo declaration “a significant development in this case.”
“The IRS not only failed to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met the statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for that information was patently deficient,” she wrote.
The government is appealing the case, but the Thursday ruling is significant because Romo’s declaration supports the decision on appeal.
Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which has sued the government over the disclosure, says “this confirms what we’ve been saying all along: that the IRS has an unlawful policy that violates the Internal Revenue Code’s protections by releasing these addresses in a way that violates the law’s requirements.”
Representatives from the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to Associated Press requests for comment.
A data-sharing agreement signed last April by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem allows ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records. The deal led the then-acting commissioner of the IRS to resign.
There are several ongoing cases that challenge the IRS-DHS agreement.
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to issue a preliminary injunction for the immigrants’ rights group, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, and other nonprofits that are suing the federal government to stop implementation of the agreement.
In declining the preliminary injunction request, Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote that the nonprofit groups “are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim,” since the information the agencies are sharing isn’t covered by the IRS privacy statute.
Still, two separate court orders have blocked the agencies from massive transfers of taxpayer information and blocked ICE from acting upon any IRS data in its possession. Those preliminary injunctions are still in place.
Projected cost overruns and profit-taking by developers could leave Canadian LNG priced out of weakening global markets, undermining Ottawa’s export-focused energy strategy, says Investors for Paris Compliance.
Those are reserved for first-class citizens whose virtuous lives earned them passage to the uppermost heights.
Down below, stringed instruments produce the most hellish sort of cacophony, a fitting accompaniment for the horn whose bell is befouled with the arm of a tortured soul.
Let us hope they stopped shy of shoving flutes up their bums. (Such a placement might produce a sound, but not from the flute’s golden throat).
The Bosch experiment added ten more instruments to the museum’s already impressive, over 1000-strong collection of woodwinds, percussion, and brass, many from the studios of esteemed makers, some dating all the way back to the Renaissance.
Unfortunately, the new additions don’t sound very good. “Horrible” and “painful” are among the adjectives the Bate Collection manager Andrew Lamb uses to describe the aural fruits of his team’s months-long labors.
Might we assume Bosch would have wanted it that way?
Bosch and his contemporaries viewed music as sinful, associating it with other sins of the flesh and spirit. A number of other instruments are also depicted: a harp, a drum, a shawm, a recorder, and the metal triangle being played by the woman (a nun, perhaps) who is apparently imprisoned in the keybox of the instrument. The hurdy-gurdy was also associated with beggars, who were often blind. The man turning the crank is holding a begging bowl in his other hand. Hanging from the bowl is a metal seal on a ribbon, called a “gaberlunzie.” This was a license to beg in a particular town on a particular day, granted by the nobility. Soldiers who were blinded or maimed in their lord’s service might be given a gaberlunzie in recompense.
To the best of our knowledge, no gaberlunzies were granted, nor any sinners eternally damned, in the Bate Collection’s caper. According to manager Lamb, expanding the boundaries of music education was recompense enough, well worth the temporary affront to tender ears.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
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