The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the city of Charlottesville, VA can’t collect its business license tax from freelance writers. Writer Corban Anderson, represented by the Institute for Justice, will get a refund of the taxes he had been assessed.
The city does not list freelance writing as having to pay the tax, but the city held that a “catchall provision” in the law let it tax writers.
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On May 28, Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was involved in a collision and then charged with DUI. This would be mostly a matter of local interest. Since then, a story has spread on the Internet that the charges against him were dropped. This suggests string-pulling and would be an important story if it were true. In fact, no reliable news outlet has confirmed it. Snopes calls it an unfounded rumor. Anything could happen in the future, but as of my writing this, there’s no evidence that the story is true.
It’s hard to tell where made-up stories originate. A tweet by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert asserted the charges were dropped. Donald Trump, Jr. lied on Twitter. Another source was some “news” sites that employ bottom-of-the-barrel freelancers and instruct them to write articles with a partisan spin. They’re called “pink slime” sites. Why pink, I don’t know. They may have names that sound newsy and uncontroversial. Some sites of this kind don’t use human writers at all, just artificial intelligence.
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My first article on the Online Library of Liberty has been published!
Fidelio: Beethoven’s Hymn to Freedom
Some employees of a huge corporation demanded it should decide which books are acceptable for customers. They engaged in what’s called a “die-in,” which consists of lying on the ground while issuing demands. They demanded that Amazon decide which books it approves of and not make others available to customers.
This is small stuff, but it’s weird that anyone would demand that a mega-corporation which is the world’s largest bookseller should have an Index of Prohibited Books that it won’t sell. The protesters fantasize that they’ll get to call the shots. They imagine that they’ll decide what’s on the Index; probably they all think they’ll be promoted to the new position that compiles the Index.
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This past weekend saw an unusual event in science fiction fandom. The con chair of Balticon apologized for the convention’s treatment of a guest, removing her from a panel in progress. This follows the blowback SFWA received for removing Mercedes Lackey from the Nebula conference after naming her a Grand Master. Could the era of bullying of convention volunteers and program participants be coming to an end?
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