Whoa.

Paleontologists have found a fossil site in North Dakota that contains animals and plants killed and buried within an hour of the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. This is the richest K-T boundary site ever found, incorporating insects, fish, mammals, dinosaurs and plants living at the end of the Cretaceous, mixed with tektites and rock created and scattered by the impact. The find shows that dinosaurs survived until the impact.

The beginning of the end started with violent shaking that raised giant waves in the waters of an inland sea in what is now North Dakota.

Then, tiny glass beads began to fall like birdshot from the heavens. The rain of glass was

Down we continue to go.

Trump’s presidential campaign has started selling $28 “Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff” T-shirts that feature a drawing of Rep. Adam Schiff with a pencil for a neck and a clown nose.

It really has.

Little Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff

He spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking. He should be forced to resign from Congress!

Everyone should buy a Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff shirt today!

BUY Now: https://t.co/5SMsrJC8nU pic.twitter.com/v3Vvmma0e6

— Official Team Trump (@TeamTrump) March 29, 2019

While we’re here, let’s pay a visit to Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign.

By promoting values such as healthy living, encouragement, kindness, and respect, parents, teachers, and other adults can help prepare children for their futures.

Mmm, encouragement, … Read the rest

No wonder Trump chose him.

Stephen Moore, the economics commentator chosen by Donald Trump for a seat on the Federal Reserve board, was found in contempt of court after failing to pay his ex-wife hundreds of thousands of dollars in alimony, child support and other debts.

Trump loves to refuse to pay people what he owes them, so no doubt he likes people who do the same as long as they don’t do it to him. Kindred spirits type of thing.

In a divorce filing in August 2010, Moore was accused of inflicting “emotional and psychological abuse” on his ex-wife during their 20-year marriage. Allison Moore said in the filing she had been forced to flee their home

Not a misogynist dude at all.

… Read the rest

Sorry if you’re sick of McKinnon, but the combination of sports cheat and philosophy instructor and pugnaciously misogynist trans activist is just too special.

Transphobes want to control what trans people say, what spaces we have access to, and which fights we're constantly fighting

Transphobes want to use our words against us, but also to stop US from using our own words

— Dr. Rachel McKinnon (@rachelvmckinnon) March 29, 2019

This is all to say: WE SEE WHAT YOU'RE DOING

And we won't shut up

You are TERFs. You are TRANSPHOBES. You are CIS.

You will not control our words, our bodies, our actions.

— Dr. Rachel McKinnon (@rachelvmckinnon) March 29, 2019

“You are CIS even though you reject that … Read the rest

So we’ve got philosophy instructors publicly fantasizing about women dying in grease fires and we’ve got presidents calling Congressional representatives “pencil neck.”

“Little pencil neck Adam Schiff,” he says, to cheers and applause.

TRUMP: "Little pencil neck Adam Schiff. He has the smallest, thinnest neck I have ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter." #BeBest pic.twitter.com/NW7oU3z4Il

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

He goes on to say Schiff has the “smallest, thinnest neck” he’s ever seen. Are we supposed to assume “neck” is a euphemism for “dick”? No doubt we are. But keeping it above the waist…is a wide neck better than a thin one? Really?

Trump has plenty of neck, for sure. Trump’s neck is as wide … Read the rest

Meanwhile McKinnon – who teaches philosophy, let’s not forget – is still defending the “die in a fire” brand of rhetoric.

I don't want them to LITERALLY die in a grease fire…

— Dr. Rachel McKinnon (@rachelvmckinnon) March 29, 2019

Haw haw. Yes, so funny, so wry, so sophisticated. Of course it’s also true that mouthy feminist women tend to be targets of a great deal of “voicing of violent revenge fantasies” of that kind on Twitter and other social media, and it has been known to drive some of them off social media altogether, which means they are silenced in that particular medium…but let’s giggle about it amongst ourselves anyway, because we know better than those stupid cis women … Read the rest

Finally.

It is great to see straightforward, non ideological, answers to common questions that have respect for established science and the paucity of evidence around gender incongruity. pic.twitter.com/uWyDZVITcf

— Andy Lewis (@lecanardnoir) March 29, 2019

“It is not possible to change biological sex.”

It takes only eight words.

“There is no agreed scientific basis for someone having the mind of someone from the opposite sex or being born in the wrong body.”

Bam.… Read the rest

The corrupt self-dealing sleazy treasonous shits on the Trumpian side of Congress are whining that Adam Schiff should resign as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The hell he should.

The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority demanded Thursday that Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel’s Democratic chairman, resign from that role over his handling of Russia investigations involving President Donald Trump.

Schiff, who has been one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s leading advocates, laid out what called the “evidence of collusion” in a fiery response.

The call for Schiff to step down, submitted during a hearing in a letter signed by all nine of the committee’s Republican members, came hours after Trump tweeted Thursday morning that Schiff “should be

Sports editor dude at not-NY Times explains to women athletes why it doesn’t matter if trans women shove them aside:

I’m writing this knowing that most of the people reading it will disagree, knowing that the responses will likely be aggressive. But I’m writing it because I feel the other side deserves a voice. This does not make me right. This does not make me wrong. But in the debate over transgender athletes there has been one dominant narrative, so this is an attempt to try to change a few minds.

He means the women. You know, the historically dominant sex, historically in charge of all the narratives. He’s hoping to be able to be heard over the domineering roar … Read the rest

All right then.

We @IndexCensorship are seriously concerned about apparent rise in police intervention on issues of legal speech in UK, particularly apparent confusion between speech that social media platforms might choose to outlaw under their terms of service and legally permissible speech. https://t.co/PdoFyQm5ta

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) March 28, 2019

We are discussing this with @Twitter and have raised with @Law_Commission as it reviews hate crime law, and with @HumanRightsCtte. We will also raise with @PoliceChiefs.

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) March 28, 2019

Good. Carry on.… Read the rest

McKinnon promoting the cause again:

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on A much-debated topic in Menlo Park.

In defense of we socially clueless techy fools, the problems Facebook has with this kind of thing are mostly due to three things:

1. A disconnect between policy makers and technical people.

This can cause any number of problems and I’ve seen them all a hundred times. A classic one (and Facebook does this a lot) is when policy makers ask the tech people whether they can do X and the tech people say “no, X is either practically or fundamentally impossible” and the policy people say the tech people are just being negative or not trying hard enough or that some technology that eats poorly-defined … Read the rest

Alex Miller at Rolling Stone talked to Cecile Richards, former head of Planned Parenthood. One subject was the Princess and Prince.

I want to talk about your meeting with Ivanka and Jared, because that was an extraordinary episode [in your book].Can you talk a little bit about that meeting? They invited you to a Trump golf course?
Yes.

You must have had some hope that the meeting could go well, or you wouldn’t have taken it.
Well, let’s be honest: We didn’t have a lot of options. And that was actually kind of what Jared Kushner said. He said, “Look, we control everything. We control Congress, we control the White House. So I’m kind of your only avenue.”

Vanity Fair has a big long piece about how Facebook attempts to deal with abuse.

To my surprise, the person in charge of it isn’t some socially clueless techy fool, she’s a former prosecutor from the Obama administration.

But when it comes to figuring out how Facebook actually works—how it decides what content is allowed, and what isn’t—the most important person in the company isn’t Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Monika Bickert, a former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law School graduate. At 42, Bickert is currently one of only a handful of people, along with her counterparts at Google, with real power to dictate free-speech norms for the entire world. In Oh, Semantics*, she sits at the head of a long

This is a horror to watch.

This is a government room in a government building for government business. It is not a church.

I walked off the House floor in protest during today’s prayer led by a GOP member. This fire and brimstone Evangelical prayer was before the swearing in of the PA House’s first ever Muslim woman. It epitomizes religious intolerance. Below is the video. https://t.co/pq34UmK2Nn

— Kevin J. Boyle (@RepKevinBoyle) March 25, 2019

… Read the rest

Meanwhile, the NRA is opposing the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

Wouldn’t it be great if women could “identify” our way out of violence?

The National Rifle Association is preparing to punish lawmakers for voting to protect women from their stalkers and domestic abusers. The gun lobby announced this week that it will dock its grades for politicians who vote to renew the Violence Against Women Act. The legislation, first passed in 1994, is up for reauthorization this session — augmented by a provision that could give law enforcement officials the power to confiscate guns from men who hurt or menace women.

NRA spokesperson Jennifer Baker told the National Journal that this “red-flag” provision — intended