Sweaters for elephants. That’s right, sweaters for elephants.

Winters get chilly in Northern India, so volunteers at the the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center decided to knit giant sweaters for its rescued elephants.

It takes around 4 weeks to make one sweater, and it does not come as a surprise knowing that elephants are the largest land mammals on the planet. Still, the volunteers make sure that the knits are not only warm and cozy, they are also colorful , and even fashionable.

I hope they’re also washable, because elephants love coating themselves with dirt.

“It is important to keep our elephants protected from the bitter cold during this extreme winter, as they are weak and vulnerable having suffered so much abuse making them susceptible to ailments such as pneumonia,” cofounder Kartick Satyanarayan said in a release. “The cold also aggravates their arthritis which is a common issue that our rescued elephants have to deal with.” Thank goodness the abuse those sweet babies had to face is in the past, with bright – and stylish – future ahead of them.

They look pretty happy about it.

H/t James

The BBC shared a graph last year after the Oscars:

Pretty stunning, isn’t it. Chicago is the only one in which women speak more.

Just think how that seeps into all of our consciousnesses, without our even noticing it. Just think how it’s been seeping in our whole lives, and the implications for how absolutely everyone sees and understands and thinks about women. What does all that silence and absence suggest? That women are an afterthought, an oddity, an exception, a deviation from the normal; that women live in the shadows, doing their weird spooky womany thing, and emerge only occasionally, to say “thanks honey” or cuddle a baby or be raped or murdered or both. That women are helpless and incompetent and feeble.

Also, that men are the real people, that men do all the real work, that everything that matters in life is done by men and planned by men and talked about by men, that only what men do is interesting or important or heroic or effective.

I look forward to hearing more about the cis privilege women have.

Well, if Barr won’t and Mueller can’t and the Senate won’t, the House can and will.

House Democrats are planning to cross one of President Donald Trump’s red lines: investigating his personal finances.

With special counsel Robert Mueller expected to wind up his work soon, Democrats are launching an investigation to discover why Deutsche Bank was willing to lend the Trump Organization money when other banks wouldn’t and whether Russia was involved.

For more than two years we’ve known there was this Deutsche Bank issue but it’s been buried because the Republicans successfully stole everything.

The House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees have been staffing up for their probes into the bank and Trump’s Russia ties. Democrats on the panels say that with Deutsche Bank they are willing to pursue a key area that Mueller may have avoided — crossing what Trump sees as a “red line” into his personal finances.

Who cares what Trump “sees” as a “red line”? Trump wants to keep his crimes hidden; no shit. Can we move on now?

Democrats won’t be confined by boundaries set by the president as they ramp up their probes, so any perceived omissions by Mueller will be prime targets for House committees.

It’s ridiculous that Trump has been able to “set boundaries” that prevent investigation of his many apparent crimes. Ridiculous, shameful, and a disgrace.

I don’t usually link to the Washington Times, but there are exceptions to (almost) everything. Andraya Yearwood is a junior at Cromwell High School in Connecticut, and is trans.

She recently finished second in the 55-meter dash at the state open indoor track championships. The winner, Terry Miller of Bloomfield High, is also transgender and set a girls state indoor record of 6.95 seconds. Yearwood finished in 7.01 seconds and the third-place competitor, who is not transgender, finished in 7.23 seconds.

In short, they have a physical advantage and they’re not ashamed to exploit it. They should be, but they’re not.

(Imagine you felt like a child in an adult’s body. Set aside the problems with that idea [what is it to “feel like” a child?] for the moment and just imagine. Would you join children in their games, including physical games, and feel quite entitled to throw them to the ground, bloody their noses, wrench their arms? The correct answer is “No, of course not.” The same applies to 17-year-old boys who “feel like” girls and so compete in girls’ races, thus shutting out girls who would otherwise win or be eligible for more races.)

Miller and Yearwood also topped the 100-meter state championships last year, and Miller won the 300 this season.

Critics say their gender identity amounts to an unfair advantage, expressing a familiar argument in a complex debate for transgender athletes as they break barriers across sports around the world from high school to the pros.

“I have learned a lot about myself and about other people through this transition. I always try to focus most on all of the positive encouragement that I have received from family, friends and supporters,” Yearwood said. “I use the negativity to fuel myself to run faster.”

Well, that’s psychopathic. Yearwood should be paying attention to the “negativity,” that is, to the entirely reasonable objection that people with male bodies shouldn’t compete in girls’ races, no matter how sure they are that on the inside they are girls. They should realize it’s not fair and thus not sporting, and not race or else race on the boys’ teams.

One of their competitors, Selina Soule, says the issue is about fairness on the track with wider implications. The Glastonbury High School junior finished eighth in the 55, missing out on qualifying for the New England regionals by two spots.

Soule believes that had Miller and Yearwood not run, she would be on her way to race in Boston in front of more college coaches.

It’s not really a belief, it’s an obvious fact: she missed out by two spots and Miller and Yearwood are in those two spots.

The Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs high school sports in Connecticut, says its policy follows a state anti-discrimination law that says students must be treated in school by the gender with which they identify.

“This is about someone’s right to compete,” executive director Glenn Lungarini said. “I don’t think this is that different from other classes of people, who, in the not too distant past, were not allowed to compete. I think it’s going to take education and understanding to get to that point on this issue.”

Well think again. It’s not about the right to compete, it’s about the right for male-bodied people to race against female people in sex-segregated competitions. It is very different from other classes of people, who, in the not too distant past, were not allowed to compete, because it’s not about preventing them from competing.

The Times is barely concealing its laughter.

President Trump has talked for years about hosting a patriotic parade in Washington, and on Sunday he announced that something of the sort would take place in a Fourth of July “gathering” at the Lincoln Memorial.

“HOLD THE DATE!” Mr. Trump said in a tweet about the event, which he said would be called “A Salute to America.”

The president, who is also fond of hosting rallies for his supporters, added that the celebration would include a “major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!”

Very po-faced, very solemn.

Mr. Trump said at a meeting of his cabinet at the White House this month that he was envisioning “a gathering, as opposed to a parade, I guess you’d have to say.”

He enlisted David Bernhardt, the acting secretary of the interior, whose department oversees the National Park Service, to help plan it. “David, you’re taking care of that, and we’ll see how it works out with schedules and everything else,” Mr. Trump said at the meeting.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump indicated that the event would take place, but few details were available. In a statement on Sunday, the Interior Department said the National Park Service was “working diligently to provide the president with a plan for Salute to America,” adding, “At this time, everything is pre-decisional.”

Nice one! Totally stealing that.

Mr. Trump has seemed smitten with the idea of a military parade since the early days of his presidency. The committee planning his inaugural ceremony reportedly explored, but rejected, using military equipment in the traditional parade from the Capitol to the White House.

In July 2017, Mr. Trump witnessed the grandeur of a military parade at the annual Bastille Day celebration in Paris. He could be seen gesticulating and whispering at the elaborate display of tanks, soldiers on horseback and military jets flying overhead.

Beautiful punch line. It’s so Trump, so embarrassing, so hilarious.

Oh look, a poll.

Graham Linehan has threatened to sue me for calling him a bigot. It is a view many would agree with. I am going to do a poll, if I lose I will retract my tweets & apologise. Is @Glinner a bigot for his transphobic views YES or NO?

— Anthony Watson (@AnthonyWatson) February 23, 2019

Hahaha I’m kidding, of course; a question on Twitter is not a real poll because the respondents are not randomized. It’s a poll-within-a-set, if you like, but it doesn’t demonstrate anything.

And yet…

Please help @AnthonyWatson with his research poll … it’s important. https://t.co/JpIqYtjYRs

— Jan Gooding (@Jan_Gooding) February 24, 2019

His research poll. His research poll. Come on. It’s Twitter. The people who see your tweets are not a random sample of the population. You can’t do a research poll on Twitter!

There is also of course the highly tendentious, loaded wording of the question.

Who is Jan Gooding? The chair of Stonewall UK.

Speaking of men and sex and consent and men who send other men photos and videos of women without consent…Joan Acocella wrote about New York City Ballet (of Balanchine fame) in the New Yorker last week. One story she tells jumped off the page at me.

She starts with a rumination on ballet at its best as an emblem of truth, beauty and the good.

The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché—the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line—the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world.

Such thoughts, however, are unlikely to have occurred to Alexandra Waterbury, a nineteen-year-old model and a former student of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate academy, on the morning of May 15, 2018. She woke up in the apartment of her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Chase Finlay, a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., who was away at the time, and thought to check her e-mail on his computer. What she found on the screen was a series of photographs of women’s private parts, including her own, plus a brief clip of her having sex with Finlay.

According to the complaint in a lawsuit that she later filed, there were text messages, too. Finlay, sending someone a photograph of Waterbury naked, asked, “You have any pictures of girls you’ve fucked? I’ll send you some . . . ballerina girls I’ve made scream and squirt.” The exchanges included several participants, notably two other N.Y.C.B. principals, Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, and a young donor, Jared Longhitano. “We should get like half a kilo”—of cocaine, one assumes—​“and pour it over the . . . girls and just violate them,” Longhitano wrote to Catazaro and Finlay. “I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals.” “Or like the sluts they are,” Finlay rejoined. “Yeah,” Longhitano wrote back. “I want them to watch me destroy one of their friends. And they know they’re next. I bet we could triple team.”

That. What is that? What is that hell-brew of sexual desire plus hatred and disgust? Why do men like that – and we’ve seen this kind of thing before, so we can assume there are a hefty number of them – have such hostility to women who have sex with them? Why do they share it and inflame it with other men they know? Why does anybody do this?

Call me weird, but the way I like to do things is, I like to spend time with people I like and avoid people I don’t like. It seems so much simpler. Avoidance definitely includes sex. This story (and who knows how many others like it) seem to hint that that’s actually not all that weird for women. It seems to be always women who have sex with a man in good faith and then find out that he’s been hate-sharing photos of her crotch with his buddies. It’s more of a guy thing (though far from a universal guy thing, I’m pretty sure), and the question is why?

I suppose one answer would be that hatred of the female is everywhere so boys grow up steeped in it so a too-large proportion of them simply combine it with sexual desire and thus despise the people they want to fuck. It seems like a thin explanation though. It just seems like such a vile, crappy, depressing, Trump-like way to live life…that I don’t get it.

Peggy Orenstein in the Times notes that men tend to define “consent” to suit themselves (which misses the point by quite a large distance, doesn’t it, since the whole point of consent is that it involves the not-self).

The truth is, men are not the most reliable arbiters of whether sex was consensual. Consider: When Nicole Bedera, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan, interviewed male college students in 2015, each could articulate at least a rudimentary definition of the concept: the idea that both parties wanted to be doing what they were doing. Most also endorsed the current “yes means yes” standard, which requires active, conscious, continuous and freely given agreement by all parties engaging in sexual activity. Yet when asked to describe their own most recent encounters in both a hookup and in a relationship, even men who claimed to practice affirmative consent often had not.

When they realized that their actions conflicted with that benchmark, though, they expanded their definition of consent rather than question their conduct. Their ideas of “yes” were so elastic that for some they encompassed behavior that met the legal criteria for assault — such as the guy who had coerced his girlfriend into anal sex (she had said, “I don’t want to, but I guess I’ll let you”). She then made it clear that he should stop. “He did, eventually,” Ms. Bedera told me, “and he seemed aware of how upset she was, but he found a way to rationalize it: He was angry with her for refusing him because he thought a real man shouldn’t have had to beg for sex.”

So pretty much the opposite of consent, then. Thinking you are entitled to sexual access to another person as a matter of right is not a good set up for consensual sex.

A “good guy” can’t possibly have committed assault, regardless of the mental gymnastics he has to engage in to convince himself of that (“20 minutes of action,” anyone?). Even men who admit to keeping sex slaves in conflict zones will claim they did not commit rape — it’s that other guy, that “monster” over there, that “bad guy” who did. In fact, one of the traits rapists have been found to reliably share is that they don’t believe they are the problem.

In my own interviews with high school and college students conducted over the past two years, young men that I like enormously — friendly, thoughtful, bright, engaging young men — have “sort of” raped girls, have pushed women’s heads down to get oral sex, have taken a Snapchat video of a prom date performing oral sex and sent it to the baseball team. They all described themselves as “good guys.” But the fact is, a “really good guy” can do a really bad thing.

That last item – the photo sent to the baseball team – what’s that about? What is that other than shared misogyny?

A few of them admit it if pressed.

Sometimes, boys I talk to acknowledge having willfully crossed lines. One college sophomore had repeatedly ignored his partner’s hesitation during a hookup, despite his own professed scrupulousness about consent.

“I suppose there was something in the back of my head that I wasn’t fully listening to,” he admitted. “I guess when you’ve been flirting with someone the whole evening and you feel close to what you’ve been wanting to happen, it’s difficult to put on the brakes. And — I don’t know. I was enjoying myself. I was having what in the moment was a positive sexual experience. I think I just wanted to. Which is scary.”

It is, yes, as well as very common. Be afraid.

Meanwhile…

https://twitter.com/lesbianleftie/status/1099359254266421248

Labour Students elect a boy National Women’s Officer, because girls are just girls, while boys who “identify as” girls are infinitely more significant and interesting and woke. That’s feminism.

https://twitter.com/Lsgirlgang/status/1099342880630558720

Happy to announce your next @LabourStudents Women’s Officer will be a boy.

Perhaps the tide is starting to turn.

The chief executive of the campaign group Stonewall, Ruth Hunt, has resigned after a growing protest by leading gay and lesbian supporters against her stance on promoting transgender rights.

Two of the charity’s former ambassadors and donors revealed this weekend they had withdrawn their support in protest because “Ruth Hunt called it wrong and Stonewall is no longer a worthy champion of our rights”.

Maureen Chadwick, creator of hit television programmes including Bad Girls, Footballers’ Wives and Waterloo Road, said that she and her partner, Kath Gotts, quit after Stonewall embraced what they called “the ‘trans’ cause”.

They were big donors until Stonewall went all trans all the time.

This weekend she said they had no idea “how completely the militant ‘trans’ agenda would overwhelm Stonewall with its confusion of sex and gender and its blindness to all the complex rights issues resulting from that.

“Many other longstanding supporters of Stonewall, including transsexuals, share our concerns and dismay that the very organisation we helped to fund and turn into the ‘go to’ LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] authority, advising political parties and corporates, is now telling schoolchildren that a bearded man with a penis can be a lesbian and any girls and boys deviating from 1950s gender norms are in the wrong body.”

Stonewall however says it’s not changing a thing.

Figures who have played a significant role in the 30-year history of Stonewall said they had stepped away in dismay.

One said: “We want people to be nice to trans people, just as we want people to be nice to [gay people], but that is not the argument. The argument is not whether people can be trans or are trans; the argument is what happens when you shift identity in opposition to biology.”

And impose your idea of yourself on everyone else.

The Manafort sentencing memo has been made public.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort committed crimes that cut to “the heart of the criminal justice system” and over the years deceived everyone from bookkeepers and banks to federal prosecutors and “members of the executive branch of the United States government,” according to a sentencing memo filed Saturday by special counsel Robert Mueller’s office.

The memo, in one of two criminal cases Manafort faces, does not take a position on how much prison time he should serve or whether the punishment should run at the same time or after a separate sentence he will soon receive in a Virginia prosecution. But it does depict Manafort as a longtime and unrepentant criminal who committed “bold” crimes, including under the spotlight of his role as campaign chairman and later while on bail, and who does not deserve any leniency.

“For over a decade, Manafort repeatedly and brazenly violated the law,” prosecutors wrote. “His crimes continued up through the time he was first indicted in October 2017 and remarkably went unabated even after indictment.”

Citing Manafort’s lies to the FBI, several government agencies and his own lawyer, prosecutors said that “upon release from jail, Manafort presents a grave risk of recidivism.”

Makes ya proud to be a Namurikn, doesn’t it.

Of course they have.

Even before Democrats finish drafting bills to create a single-payer health care system, the health care and insurance industries have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill “Medicare for all,” an idea that is mocked publicly but is being greeted privately with increasing seriousness.

How could we possibly want universal health insurance instead of the thrillingly frightening risk of losing insurance along with a job or never being able to get it in the first place because your job doesn’t provide it or because you’ve been unemployed for too long or because there’s an R in the month?

The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.

“Reasonably well” is good enough for the peasants who have the bad taste not to be rich, is that the idea? Just plain “well” is too much to ask?

The Democrats’ proposals could radically change the way health care providers do business and could drastically shrink the role and the revenues of insurers, depending on how a single-payer system is devised.

Well, you know, shrinking the role (and $$$) of insurers would not be a bad thing, given that they are useless unless your goal is to extract profit from brokering health care. They don’t provide health care or help people find the best health care, they simply sell insurance for health care, adding a step that adds nothing of value. If people were automatically insured as of right there would be no need for insurers and nothing of value would be lost.

The hospital federation and two powerful lobbies, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, created a coalition last June to pre-empt what they saw as an alarming groundswell of interest in proposals to expand the federal role in health care.

In a daily fusillade of digital advertising, videos and Twitter posts, the coalition, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that Medicare for all will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients — arguments that echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health plan in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago.

Blah blah blah, but what it will really do is eliminate the vast superstructure that withdraws money from the system because it can. Nobody needs a vast superstructure that withdraws money from the system because it can.

When members of Congress unveiled legislation to let people age 50 to 64 buy into Medicare, the coalition conflated it with proposals to put all Americans into Medicare.

“This is a slippery slope to government-run health care for every American,” said David Merritt, an executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobby for insurers.

Oh no, a slippery slope to guaranteed health care for everyone! The horror!

Ah, this is charming: male sports writer tells women it will be inspiring if trans women do completely take over women’s sport. He does it with plenty of contempt, too.

They’re coming! Over the horizon, they’re coming! They’re coming for your medals and your trophies and your endorsement contracts. They’re coming, with their giant bulging muscles and enormous flapping penises, to ruin everything pure and good. Nothing will ever be the same again. Nothing means anything any more. For the trans people – and let’s call them what they are, men in sports bras – are coming. And all is lost.

Great first para; lets us know where we are.

This is the apocalyptic scenario currently facing women’s sport. At least, if you ask certain people. Still, a certain feverish hysteria has long characterised the debate over transgender, intersex and DSD (differences in sex development) athletes in sport, sharpened to a point by recent events.

“A certain feverish hysteria” – wink wink nudge nudge elbow elbow. Women, am I right?

[T]he first thing to say is probably: like, chill out a bit. For most of the arguments against allowing trans women to compete in female athletic competition rest on a scenario that borders on the fantastical. Are we really suggesting there are hordes of male athletes who will suddenly declare themselves female simply to game the system?

He never explains why it has to be “hordes” before we’re allowed to think and say it’s a bad thing. Hey it was just one woman who had her leg broken by Hannah Mouncey; that’s  no big deal so chill, laydeez.

Then he explains why Navratilova is wrong, after giving a cursory acknowledgement of her accomplishments.

But on this one, she’s sadly misguided. You know what? Sport isn’t fair. Never has been. Genetics isn’t fair. Basketball players are blessed with height. Gymnasts are blessed with compact, flexible bodies. Fulham players are blessed with a preternatural ability to give the ball away on the halfway line. Economics isn’t fair. Geography isn’t fair. Privilege isn’t fair. What we call the level playing field is in fact a cosy myth, a homespun feel-good tale that hoodwinks us into chasing our dreams.

Therefore, abruptly change the rules so that women are forced to compete against men, so that the playing field will be vertiginously less level than it was when women and men played on separate teams.

But let’s follow this argument all the way through. Let’s say the floodgates do open. Let’s say transgender athletes pour into women’s sport, and let’s say, despite the flimsy and poorly-understood relationship between testosterone and elite performance, they dominate everything they touch. They sweep up Grand Slam tennis titles and cycling world championships. They monopolise the Olympics. They fill our football and cricket and netball teams. Why would that be bad? Really? Imagine the power of a trans child or teenager seeing a trans athlete on the top step of the Olympic podium. In a way, it would be inspiring.

Says the man, about his imagined utopia in which women never again get to the Olympic podium.

Another consignment of evil:

The Trump administration took aim at Planned Parenthood Friday, issuing a rule barring groups that provide abortions or abortion referrals from participating in the $286 million federal family planning program — a move expected to redirect tens of millions of dollars from the women’s health provider to faith-based groups.

What do we not want religious zealots doing? Anything to do with planning pregnancy.

The change means federally funded family planning clinics can no longer refer a patient for abortion and must maintain a “clear physical and financial separation” between services funded by the government and any organization that provides abortions or abortion referrals. Groups receiving money under the Title X program, which serves an estimated 4 million low-income women, were already prohibited from performing abortions with those funds.

Gotta punish women for being women; gotta make sure women can’t plan their own lives; gotta make women the helpless playthings of chance and rape.

Critics, including 15 governors and the American Medical Association, decried the change as a “gag rule” that would undermine the physician-patient relationship and threatened legal action to block it from taking effect. They have also described it as an indirect way to defund Planned Parenthood, which has long been a target of antiabortion activists as the nation’s largest provider of reproductive care services.

Women must never ever be free.

The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research center that supports abortion rights, said it expects lawsuits seeking to stop the law’s implementation before it even goes into effect. Senior policy manager Kinsey Hasstedt accused the administration of seeking to “subvert this long-standing and critical program to appease social conservatives and further their ideological agenda.”

The rule takes effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register. But clinics will have 120 days to comply with the requirement that family planning and abortion services [be] kept financially separated and a year to comply with the physical separation requirement.

The rule, which was announced in May, was modeled after requirements adopted under President Ronald Reagan but never enforced.

We’re racing backward! Go us!