Who is that fascinating man?

Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US, has said Boris Johnson is fascinated and inspired by Donald Trump, and is intrigued by the US president’s patchy relationship “with the facts and the truth”.

Well, “patchy” – more like non-existent. Trump’s relationship with the facts and the truth is like Trump’s relationship with Tiffany: it doesn’t exist. Trump wouldn’t even recognize facts and the truth if they came up to him at a party and sat on his lap.

Darroch wrote that Johnson had been “fascinated” by Trump on his visits to Washington as foreign secretary before he became prime minister, with particular focus on the president’s use of language.

This includes “the limited

Aw, he mad.

Jennifer Griffin of Fox News Did Not Confirm ‘Most Salacious‘ Part of Atlantic Story https://t.co/rUpbSWhHac via @BreitbartNews All refuted by many witnesses. Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never even called us for comment. @FoxNews is gone!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020

The Guardian gives details:

The Atlantic magazine published a story that described how Trump said he cancelled a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers”. Other outlets confirmed the news and detailed more incidents of Trump’s insulting attitude to American soldiers.

Among those was the Fox News national security correspondent, Jennifer

Greene’s post was so bad Facebook removed it.

Facebook said Friday it removed a Republican congressional candidate’s post [that depicted her holding a gun next to the images of three progressive congresswomen] for violating its policies against incitement of violence.

Brackets added for clarity.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a House candidate who has history of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic remarks and who has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory, on Thursday posted a picture of herself holding a rifle next to images of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — three of four members of the so-called liberal freshmen “squad.”

The terrible thing is, she will win that seat.

In the accompanying post, Greene railed against

Oh no, a 19-year-old was not allowed to order alcohol in a pub because the photo on xir id didn’t resemble xir. Tears ensued.

A transgender woman has spoken of her upset after she was refused service in a pub because staff did not think she looked like the person on her ID.

Savanna Galloway, 19, said she left Wetherspoons on Tuesday in tears after being told she would not be served.

She showed her passport to prove her age, but was told by two members of staff her picture did not resemble her.

Wetherspoons has issued the required groveling apology but has also said it still requires “‘a valid ID which resembles the person presenting it’ to be … Read the rest

Melania Trump today:

.@TheAtlantic story is not true. It has become a very dangerous time when anonymous sources are believed above all else, & no one knows their motivation. This is not journalism – It is activism. And it is a disservice to the people of our great nation.

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) September 4, 2020

Melania Trump in 2011:

Your periodic reminder that Melania Trump was a shameless birther. pic.twitter.com/0CSpsAlqdf

— Ahmed Baba (@AhmedBaba_) December 5, 2019

Not journalism but activism YOURSELF, you lying piece of crap.… Read the rest

Trump tells cities and the people in them we’re bad and stupid and he hates us.

President Donald Trump, on Wednesday, signed a memo threatening to withhold federal funding from Democrat-run cities the White House deems “anarchist jurisdictions” because of their handling of ongoing civil unrest that continues to ripple around the country. 

“Anarchist jurisdictions” – this from a greedy cynical asshole who has broken a thousand laws and gotten away with it because he’s filthy rich.

The five-page presidential memo, officially titled “Memorandum on Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities,” is more of a political document than a policy one. The real point of the memo

Fox News confirms it. It will be interesting to see how he spins that. Fox has always hated him, it’s so unfair?

And there it is. Fox News confirms the story that the White House has been denying all day. This thing's a done deal.pic.twitter.com/7kVY3vmAwB

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) September 4, 2020

… Read the rest

Another exciting one of whatever these are, where reporters ask questions and Trump just says whatever pops into his head for a minute or two.

LOL. After a bizarre aside about "central casting" college football coaches, Trump announces that Lou Holtz will be receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. pic.twitter.com/ElLjMjXsoF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 4, 2020

Football! Medals! Central casting! Gerbil, ski pole, lima bean, choo choo train.

"It is interesting that everybody is always mentioning Russia … but I think China probably at this point is a nation you should be talking about" — Trump responds to a question about the Navalny poisoning pic.twitter.com/c460n6kGbN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 4, 2020

Russia…North Korea! China! Hillary! Football!

Trump on

A guy who writes for Forbes on “LGBT life, identities and being queer” wants us to know how wrong the Spectator is on trans issues.

Being transgender was declassified from the international classifications of diseases by the UN’s WHO body last year, and numerous trans activists have pointed out their lived experience is not a debate.

That doesn’t tell us much. Maybe the WHO was bullied into the “declassifying.” The second item is hand-waving bullshit. If someone’s purported “lived experience” relies on a belief system that defines women in a way that most women don’t want to be defined, then the belief system damn well is open to debate. Women get to say we’re not a feeling in … Read the rest

Alan Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology, explains that race is real but not genetic.

Like a fish in water, we’ve all been engulfed by “the smog” of thinking that “race” is biologically real. Thus, it is easy to incorrectly conclude that “racial” differences in health, wealth, and all manner of other outcomes are the inescapable result of genetic differences.

The reality is that socially defined racial groups in the U.S. and most everywhere else do differ in outcomes. But that’s not due to genes. Rather, it is due to systemic differences in lived experience and institutional racism.

…

As a professor of biological anthropology, I teach and advise college undergraduates. While my students are aware of

Always great when the Attorney General of the whole country says things that aren’t true on national tv – especially when the untrue things convey that voter fraud is a much bigger problem than it is, weeks before an election which could see an evil corrupt monster re-elected.

In his latest warning about the dangers of mass mail-in voting, Attorney General William P. Barr pointed to a case in Texas that he said highlighted the risk of fraud.

“Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion,” Barr told CNN on Wednesday. “For example, we indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected, he — from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for

All fine, completely normal, nothing to worry about.

Here’s the photo she posted: https://t.co/psgZSVV8Tw pic.twitter.com/60bXKMDacP

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 4, 2020

Updating to add full image.… Read the rest

Trump denies it!!

Well of course he does. He denies everything. He also lies constantly. Who cares that he denies it?

According to The Atlantic magazine, Mr Trump cancelled a visit to a US cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he said it was “filled with losers”.

The allegations have since been corroborated by two senior military officials in a story by AP news agency.

But in a tweet, the president denounced the claims as “made up fake news”.

Oh, well, if it’s in a tweet, that changes everything.

People in the military world are stunned by the remarks that Mr Trump reportedly made about US soldiers killed in combat, the latest in a series of surprising comments from a

Yes here we go – the vile Ivanka Trump claiming that her vile father’s bullying and venom is “being real.”

“Tonight, I stand before you as the proud daughter of the people’s president,” Trump told a packed-in audience of about 2,000 supporters on the White House South Lawn, minutes before her father delivered his nomination acceptance speech.

Proud of what? The children dying on the floors of holding pens on the border? The women who can’t get abortions? The ever more belligerent racism? The lies, the insults, the corruption? The friendship with Putin?

Criticizing the nation’s capital as dysfunctional and slow-moving, Trump said her father “did not come to Washington to win praise from the Beltway elites.”

Excuse me? What … Read the rest

I wonder how the Trump loyalists will explain this to themselves: Trump thinks Americans killed in wars are losers.

Remember when he didn’t go to the American cemetery when he was in Paris that time? And said it was too rainy, and everybody said sir that makes no sense sir?

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with

Uh oh.

In a scenario reminiscent of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, an African history professor at George Washington University has admitted to pretending to be a Black woman throughout her career.

“I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” Jessica A. Krug confessed in a post on Medium. 

Also a child of the hood.

jessica krug's old author bio is, uh, something else pic.twitter.com/YMKW8eHiI0

— graham starr (@GrahamStarr) September 3, 2020

Krug recently published a story for Essence named “On Puerto Rico, Blackness,

Lotta people talking about this “defense of looting” idea. Graeme Wood at the Atlantic for one:

Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that

William Barr is a piece of work.

Pressed late Wednesday to respond to President Donald Trump’s remarks encouraging North Carolina residents to try to cast two ballots in the November election, Attorney General William Barr—the top law enforcement official in the U.S.—repeatedly claimed to not know whether it’s illegal to vote twice.

“I don’t know what the law in the particular state says,” Barr said in a CNN appearance when host Wolf Blitzer told the attorney general that it is, in fact, illegal to vote twice

“How would I, the mere Attorney General of the United States, know such a thing?”

"I don't know what the law in the particular state says" — Wolf Blitzer has to explain to

Sex needs to be taken into account in research on COVID-19; also, we “recognize” that sex is not fixed.

Well if sex is not fixed, how can it be taken into account in research on COVID-19? How can you take it into account if you think you can’t know who is which sex?

Men this, women that – but, by the way, we don’t actually know which subjects were men and which were women. But here are our findings anyway. But! But! We recognize that we don’t actually know which subjects were men and which were women.

This is just embarrassing for @nature.

They report on science that shows sex needs to be taken into account with covid, but

Claire Chandler in the Senate:

Liberal Senator for Tasmania Claire Chandler has called for Anthony Albanese to reject slurs by Labor Senators against women who acknowledge biological sex as a reality and have concerns about safety and fairness in women’s sport.

“In the Senate last week, I spoke about the findings of World Rugby that biological males playing women’s rugby present a 20-30 per cent increase in the risk of injury to female competitors. These findings have major implications for many Australian sports and this is an incredibly important issue for millions of women around the world,” Senator Chandler said.

“At the end of my speech last week – I asked the question of whether Australians are able to … Read the rest