Golly. I know it seems silly to be surprised by anything about Trump at this point, but still, this caused me to manage it.

I can’t imagine saying this ONCE, let alone so many times it goes on for two minutes and ten seconds. His fans would say it’s just theatrics, just being The Donald, yadda yadda – but there’s no space between just being himself and this grotesque string of claims to be omniscient. Any possible space has been obliterated as we’ve watched him performing Man Who Thinks He’s Best At Everything And Knows More About Everything Than Anyone.

Also, it occurs to me, it’s sort of explanatory. This is why nothing gets through to him, ever. He really does think he knows more than anyone else, and not just about his chosen subjects but about everything. He knows more about designing a stealth battleship than anyone – what you do is, you make the hull bigger, you make it beautiful. He and he alone knows that. He’s like a god, only better, because he knows more than any god.

Remember when one of the popular mantras was how crucial it is to have high self-esteem? Yeah.

A must-read:

This is How a Child Dies of Measles

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Might as well fall faster.

Pessimistic grouchiness? Alright then.

(Rolls up sleeves, cracks knuckles, begins to type.)

What these idiots throw out with their dismissal of science is the understanding of the nuance and complexity of what is happening. One might normally expect “nuance and and complexity” to be about subtle, unlikely edge effects, or rare cases, but the complications of climate change (and the destruction of Earth’s biodiversity) are likely to be sudden, extreme, and mutually reinforcing. Our entire planet has become an edge effect.

We have pushed the Earth system beyond the envelope of conditions that allowed the origin and evolution of human civilization itself. These are the conditions upon which civilization depends. Correction: upon which civilization depended. Those conditions no longer obtain. Growing seasons; weather patterns; water tables; vegetation zones; biomes. These are all now disconnected from each other, and that more-or-less stable pattern of interconnectedness, which allowed human numbers to grow eightfold in just over two centuries*, is gone. These basic parameters will not be re-established in any way until some sort of new equalibrium arises, and any such new constellation of biogeographic relationships may not be as useful to humans as the one we’ve just destroyed. But that is still (centuries? millenia??) in the future. In order for any such stable pattern to crystalize, we have to stop our continuing interference and disruption. With things in flux, expecting any kind of reliable stability is like trying to find a parking spot on top of an avalanche. Until then, we’re going to be rapidly approaching the point at which we will have eight billion people who don’t know where there next meal is coming from.

For other parts of this picture, the future is now, or at least a lot sooner than the parasitic money grubbers who are demolishing the few, thin protections that the United States has managed to throw together in the two generations they had to do so expected. Fires and floods are happening now, as are droughts and deglaciation. Fisheries are depleted. Climate refugees are on the move now, and with large areas of the tropics becoming unihabitable as temperatures rise, that mass migration, mostly northward, will only grow.

The hyper-rich are all living on the same planet as the rest of us, dependent upon the same ecological systems and infrastructure. They have to eat too. They are as vulnerably human as the rest of us, and if it comes down to the crunch, can they depend upon the mercenary loyalty of their guards and retainers? Money doesn’t grow on trees, but food does, and in extremes, people will have to choose which is more important.

The current, grotesque wealth inequality is as temporary and unstable as our current civilization. Such a corruption and exploitation of the social contract cannot last. It requires everyone else’s awe, fear, and obedience to continue. These too are contingent, finite, ephemeral resources. Values change; so do fears. If everyone stops imagining that they can become billionaires, or worse, realizes that they can never become billionaires, how will they feel about actual billionaires when they themselves can’t afford to eat, or there is no food to buy? What happens to all that cryptocurrency when the lights go out? Who will still accept money when they’re nowhere to spend it? Who will respect (or indeed protect) their “property rights” when desperate people arec faced with starvation and death? And in their mansions, on their estates, up in their penthouses, just how much security can the wealthy buy? Every wall can be breached, every fence can be pushed over. Now and then the yachts have to come into port. If they don’t like “socialist wealth redstribution” wait ’til they see the alternative.

*All by itself, the presence of eight billion humans, along with their collective agricultural/technological footprint, is an environmental disaster. Any such global civilization of eight billion of us, based on our current patterns of production, consumption, and destruction was only ever going to be a flash in the pan. Something truly sustainable wouldn’t have ballooned to such population figures, and would not be on the verge of committing omnicide.

The Telegraph on that ruling that has Jolyon in a snit:

Employers can legally ban transgender women from using female toilets and changing rooms, the High Court has ruled.

Employers can legally ban men from using women’s toilets. Remember when it was just taken for granted that men were banned from using women’s toilets? Remember when men could be arrested for perving on women that way? I do.

Activists had challenged interim guidance from the equalities watchdog that said public bodies and organisations should segregate toilets, changing rooms and sports teams by biological sex rather than self-declared identity.

But on Friday a judge dismissed their claims that the guidance was unlawful because it conflicted with previous human rights and equalities legislation.

Activists shmactivists. They’re no more activist than we are – we’re all activists, because we’ve been forced to be by this utterly stupid ideology.

There is now no legal obstacle to prevent employers from implementing the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) advice, published in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that the word “sex” in the Equality Act does not refer to biological sex.

Women’s rights groups will use the ruling to urge Bridget Phillipson to publish the EHRC’s final version of the guidance following months of delays, and take action against employers who flout the rules.

Ms Phillipson has so far refused to publish the EHRC’s final guidance, claiming that she is concerned about the potential cost to businesses.

Subtle hint that actually she’s just another Idiot For Trans Ideology.

Maya Forstater, the chief executive of gender-critical charity Sex Matters, said: “The law is clear. There was never any excuse for the Government, public bodies, regulators, charities or businesses to delay in implementing the Supreme Court judgment.”

No excuse, but plenty of reason. What reason? Contempt for women.

The judge rejected Ms Phillipson’s argument that the EHRC guidance, which said trans women – biological men – should not use female facilities, could be “trans exclusive”.

We do not care. We do not care about trans, we care about men perving at us. It’s that simple. We’ve all experienced it, starting around age 8, and we are embittered after years of watching men in government flattering and encouraging those men at our expense.

Lawyers from the Good Law Project had launched a judicial review against interim guidance from the EHRC. They had argued that the guidance was rushed, legally flawed and overly simplistic.

Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, said the rules “violated” trans people’s right to privacy.

See? Like that. Jolyon pretending that women are violating men’s privacy. If it weren’t so foul it would be funny.

Classy people.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly had a Coast Guard pilot fired because she was missing a blanket – only to realize there was no one else to fly her home.

The former South Dakota governor had been forced to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket was not moved to the second plane, those familiar with the incident told the Wall Street Journal. She then reportedly had her special advisor Corey Lewandowski fire the US Coast Guard pilot, who was told to take a commercial flight home once they reached their destination.

But when staffers learned there was nobody else available to fly the plane, the unidentified pilot was reinstated, the Journal reports.

It’s all so very grownup, don’t you think?

This. I have been wondering/fuming about this for YEARS.

…one day soon, drag artists will be about as politically acceptable as the Black and White Minstrels are today. Right now, you cannot turn on your TV without being assailed by some hideous gurning goon in a garish dress and ludicrous make-up lampooning the female sex – the BBC, in particular, seems obsessed with drag queens. They are even invited into our schools to disseminate filth masquerading as sex education to kids.

For some reason, a reason hard to comprehend, the objections made about ‘blacking up’ do not apply to drag artists. They are, of course, two sides of the same coin, or perhaps the same side of the coin. Drag artists are not paying homage to women, they are parodying and belittling them for the purposes of humour. They dress in the manner of slappers and tarts, with short skirts and fishnets and vast, bulbous cleavages perpetually on display. Their names are usually a parody, too, of women’s names: they are rarely called Anne or Sarah, but more usually Roxanne or something similar which denotes, somehow, a comedic and perhaps repellent sexual voracity.

The reason isn’t hard to comprehend once you become aware of how deeply ingrained contempt for women is.

The Black and White Minstrels were castigated for being a cruel parody of blackness – and indeed that white make-up around the eyes and the mouth is a little weird and demeaning. But compared to the appearance of the drag queen, the Minstrels were an object lesson in respect and even reverence. With both the drag queens and the notion of ‘blacking up’, it is a case of a tranche within society which has power mocking a tranche within society which does not. That, at least, is the Marxist way of analysing it and it is certainly why nobody blacks up any more.

Marxist? Is that Marxist? It doesn’t sound very Marxist to me.

It’s right though. Men mock women because they can. Men hate women because women are contemptible, or otherwise men wouldn’t mock them. It’s an endless loop.

More on those pesky regulations Trump is deleting:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first took a stance on the impacts of greenhouse gases in 2009, in the first year of Obama’s first term. The agency decided that six key planet-warming greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, were a danger to human health. With a divided Congress unable to agree on legislation to tackle rising global temperatures, the EPA finding became central to federal efforts to rein in emissions in the years that followed.

“The endangerment finding has really served as the lynchpin of US regulation of greenhouse gases,” said Meghan Greenfield, a former EPA and Department of Justice attorney. “So that includes motor vehicles, but it also includes power plants, the oil and gas sector, methane from landfills, even aircraft. So it really runs the gamut, all of the standards for each of the sectors is premised on this one thing.”

So getting rid of it will be that much more awesome.

But as Mike B points out, it’s too late anyway. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic anyone?

High Court rules: EHRC guidance lawful

The High Court has dismissed a legal challenge from the Good Law Project (GLP) and three anonymous claimants against the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s interim guidance on single-sex services published last year.

Sex Matters intervened in support of the EHRC.

Mr Justice Swift endorsed the interim update that the EHRC published in April last year as an accurate statement of the law for employers and service providers and ruled that “transsexual persons” under the Equality Act have no right to use opposite-sex toilets or changing rooms.

Somewhere, deep inside the forest, a jolyon is raging.

Trump deletes the science.

Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

We love heat waves! And droughts, and wildfires!

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

The administration is saying that because it knows better. Who knows more about climate science than Trump? Besides everyone?

At issue is what’s known as the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare. The finding was based on more than 200 pages of research and evidence.

Mr. Trump, who has called climate scientists “stupid people,” claimed on Thursday that the finding “had no basis in fact”

For nearly 17 years, the E.P.A. had relied on the bedrock finding to justify regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution from oil and gas wells, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources that burn fossil fuels. By repealing the endangerment finding, the United States is likely to emit up to 18 billion metric tons of additional emissions into the atmosphere between now and 2055, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. That is about three times the amount of climate pollution the country emitted last year.

Never mind. It builds character.

High court rules:

The High Court has dismissed a legal challenge from the Good Law Project (GLP) and three anonymous claimants against the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s interim guidance on single-sex services published last year.

Sex Matters intervened in support of the EHRC.

Mr Justice Swift endorsed the interim update that the EHRC published in April last year as an accurate statement of the law for employers and service providers and ruled that “transsexual persons” under the Equality Act have no right to use opposite-sex toilets or changing rooms.

Women win, Jolyon loses.

GLP was judged not to have standing as it lacked “sufficient interest” in the legal questions. The three anonymous claimants did have standing, and so their substantive arguments were considered. The court dismissed their claims in their entirety. It found nothing that was wrong in law about either version of the EHRC’s statement, and found that the claimants’ human rights had not been breached by being told not to use facilities provided for the opposite sex. 

Jolyon lacks standing. In more ways than one. Sux to be you, Joly.

Yikes.

Bondi’s indifference is a sight to behold.

EPA says Never mind.

Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories.

Oh. Great. We’re just going to pretend it’s not happening and do nothing to slow it and let the current generation of children fix it way down the road when it’s not our problem any more.

The repeal of that landmark determination, known as the endangerment finding, will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change.

The finding — which the EPA issued in 2009 — said the global warming caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endangers the health and welfare of current and future generations.

“We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy,” Trump said at a news conference. “This determination had no basis in fact — none whatsoever. And it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world.”

I wonder where he got the evidence for “no basis in fact — none whatsoever.” Pam Bondi maybe?

It’s true about technology lifting people out of poverty, but that doesn’t mean global warming is not a problem. It doesn’t even mean global warming is not a bigger problem.

The endangerment finding underpinned the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles and power plants and to mandate that companies report their emissions. It required the federal government to take action on climate under the Clean Air Act.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA had the authority to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases and acknowledged that harms associated with climate change are “serious and well recognized,” which led to the creation of the endangerment finding two years later.

Ah. So the thing is to elect people who won’t nominate Supreme Court justices who will rule that way. Elect justices who are perfectly happy to continue cooking the planet because it will be the children and grandchildren of those justices who will have to deal with the cooked planet. Isn’t time a wonderful thing?

Last month a judge told Trump to cool his jets on the Ballroom plans.

In October, the administration bulldozed the East Wing of the White House in order to build a ballroom he wants to put on the site. Although Trump had promised over the summer that the project wouldn’t “interfere with the current building,” workers razed the entire structure, which was constructed in 1902 and expanded in 1942. 

Well that’s what he meant. It won’t interfere with it, it will obliterate it altogether. Totally not deceptive at all.

Trump managed this the same way he has so much in his second term: He simply didn’t ask permission from any of the possible relevant authorities, including Congress, and acted so fast that no court could restrain him. 

Just imagine all the exciting actions he could apply that pattern to.

In a court hearing last week, Richard Leon, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush, skewered the government lawyers representing the administration against a challenge to the ballroom, which would be as tall as the original executive mansion and have nearly double its footprint. Although a law enables the executive branch to conduct maintenance on the building without congressional authorization, Leon said it was not intended to cover $400 million projects. A Justice Department attorney suggested that Trump’s ballroom was similar to previous renovations, including a pool added decades ago, but Leon was not having it.

“The Gerald Ford swimming pool? You compare that to ripping down the East Wing and building a new East Wing? Come on,” he said.

Such reactions from a judge are not generally considered a favorable omen for a litigant. Leon has not issued a ruling yet, and whatever he concludes is likely to be appealed. But the hearing suggests the real possibility that Trump will be unable to construct anything in the East Wing’s place, leaving just an empty site and idled construction equipment.

Half the prize is better than no prize at all, right?

Destruction followed by stagnation seems to be something of an MO, the likely outcome for some of Trump’s less tangible and visible changes to the federal government. Consider last week’s clash over Greenland. Trump threatened European and Canadian leaders with tariffs and unspecified future consequences, culminating in Trump settling for a tentative deal that appears to closely resemble the existing arrangement, but not before creating bad blood and encouraging Europe to think of the U.S. as not much of a friend. Trump has the capacity to tear down the global international order, but he has neither the plans nor the wherewithal to rebuild anything in its place.

Look, he made a difference, ok? That’s what matters. Enough of this kvetching and criticizing about the lack of concrete results.

Róisín Michaux writes on TwitX:

The EU Parliament has voted to recognise “trans women” as women for all purposes, explicitly calling for them to be granted access to women-only domestic violence shelters and refugees.

An EU delegation will present this radical recommendation at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York next month. It is not binding, but intended to be adopted/followed as an “international standard”. It also demonstrates the ideological makeup of the European Parliament.

Few speakers mentioned the “trans women” part of the recommendation during the debate leading up to the vote. Parties could have asked for a vote on the individual paragraph, but having failed to do so, MEPs were left with a choice between rejecting the entire resolution, or adopting it with no possibility of removing the trans paragraph.

The chamber was almost empty for the debate. Left-wing parties and centre-right parties concentrated on the Epstein files, “gender” stereotypes, the “gender pay gap”, and the “anti-gender movement” as well as ICE operations in the US. MEPs from both the Patriots party and the European Conservatives and Reformists, spoke up in favour of protecting the category of woman in international fora. They were defeated.

What men want, men get.

Oh look – today the BBC is not calling the shooter a woman.

Police identify 18-year-old as suspect in Tumbler Ridge shooting

Not calling him a man either, you’ll notice. They don’t want to get all extreme about this.

“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who approximately six years ago began to transition to female,” Dwayne McDonald, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) deputy commissioner, said.

The shooting at the nearby home occurred first, then the suspect went to the school, McDonald said. The victims at the school were a 39-year-old female educator, three female students, all aged 12, and two male students, one aged 12 and the other 13.

Huh. Will you look at that. The BBC just straight-up calls the victims female and male. I wonder why they still can’t call the perp male.

Journalist Janet Murray writes

There are unethical people in every profession. Journalism is no exception.

But unethical journalism isn’t only about phone hacking, going through bins or taking bribes.

At its core, it’s about knowingly misrepresenting reality.

Yesterday’s case involved one of the worst mass shootings in Canada’s history – the kind of event where the stakes for getting the facts right could not be higher.

You cannot claim to uphold journalistic standards while describing a crime committed by a man as having been committed by a woman.

Nor can you sidestep it by using the word “person” when sex is materially relevant.

Yet several major outlets did exactly that yesterday – including Sky and the BBC.

This isn’t about politics.

It’s about truth.

Because if we cannot rely on the media to report observable facts clearly and honestly, then what exactly can we rely on them for?

SEEN in Journalism makes the point I just made in a comment: that calling the perp a woman in the lede and not telling the truth until many paragraphs down is a grossly obvious violation of journalistic standards.

‘Canadian police have identified the suspect as an 18-year old woman with a history of mental health problems’ This is a very serious lie about a shattering event. It’s not a point-scoring exercise to say so: it’s not stigmatising to notice and explain the lie. Journalist convention is to explain the bones of the story in the first four paragraphs. This developed from the understanding that people don’t always read down: they may click, but they don’t scroll. Engagement tapers.

In short: DON’T BURY THE LEDE.

The Guardian did it on purpose, knowing perfectly well it’s a violation of that journalistic convention. That’s why they did it: because they know most people won’t read that far. It’s a conscious, deliberate cheat, in aid of manipulating people into believing women are every bit as violence-prone as men.

Not only that, at this point, the facts that the killer was a man (contra earlier reports) who ‘identified’ as trans (previously dismissed as speculation) are the newest lines, a fresh top.

The @guardian defies all natural editorial instincts to bury in the tenth paragraph the newest line and the explanation that its first sentence is untrue. It will know by its own data that a percentage of readers will just bounce off after reading the lie, and increasing numbers drop off by a third or half of the way down. Certainly before reaching the truth. Which turns out to be not so sacred after all.

The madness of this slavish, unquestioning devotion to the lie is puzzling and very worrying. There’s a defiance with which the paper sacrifices itself to the service of identity affirmation.

Which is also, unavoidably, the service of harming women.

Dude.

Like this?

Watching.

Attorney General Pam Bondi at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday seemed to have a printout of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s history of searches of the Department of Justice’s database of documents related to the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Photos of a black binder that Bondi had at the hearing showed the words “Jayapal Pramila Search History” and a list of documents whose numbers coincide with the number of Epstein files.

That’s my Rep – not mine personally, but ours in Seattle. Seattle, of course, is not Trump Territory.

Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, and other members of Congress have visited the DOJ in recent days to view documents related to Epstein that are not available to the public.

Jayapal blasted Bondi in a post on X on Wednesday evening.

“It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files,” Jayapal wrote. “Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched,” the congresswoman said. “That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this and stop this spying on members.”

More on the news media blatantly lying in the headline:

Ten dead, including female suspect, after Canada school shooting – as it happened

Yo. Suspect not female. Suspect male. Repeat, suspect male.

Summary

• Ten people died in a mass shooting in British Columbia
• It’s one of the deadliest mass shootings in recent Canadian history
• Six people were found dead at a high school in the town of Tumbler Ridge
• The suspected shooter, a woman, was among the dead at the school
• Two more were found dead elsewhere and another died en route to hospital

Item 4 in that list is a lie. The shooter was not a woman.

It’s nearing midnight in Tumbler Ridge, the town in British Columbia where six people were found dead – including the suspected female shooter – at a high school.

We’re winding down our live coverage for now, but here’s what we know and don’t know so far about one of Canada’s worst mass shootings in decades:

• Overall, 10 people died in the small town of Tumbler Ridge, a remote municipality with a population of around 2,400 people.
• Six bodies were found at the local high school, which has a student population of 160 students.
• Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney cancelled a trip abroad in response to the deaths.
• Authorities haven’t identified the woman who was the suspected shooter, nor any motive.

There was no woman who was the suspected shooter. There was only a man.

Are all these reporters and their editors just hugging themselves with glee at being able to pretend that women are the perpetrators of mass shootings by men? Is it totally the best fun they’ve ever had?