The last piece of the Mediterranean

May 29th, 2017 1:52 pm | By

Speaking of Montenegro and Duško Marković and NATO and Russia and Trump…last November the Times reported on an alleged plot allegedly by the Russians allegedly to fuck everything up.

Aleksandar Sindjelic, a veteran anti-Western activist from neighboring Serbia, has become a key informant — and a suspect — in a sprawling investigation into an alleged plot orchestrated by two Russians to seize Montenegro’s Parliament building last month, kill the prime minister and install a new government hostile to NATO.

Mr. Sindjelic’s account of the events includes a visit to Moscow in September to plan the operation and details of the encrypted phones he was asked to use to avoid eavesdropping. He has not directly implicated any Russian

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Is it ever permissible to exclude?

May 29th, 2017 11:01 am | By

Is it racist to have a feminist festival that excludes white people?

The Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has called for a black feminist festival in the French capital to be banned, saying it was “prohibited to white people”.

The first edition of the Nyansapo Festival, due to run from 28-30 July at a cultural centre in Paris, bills itself as “an event rooted in black feminism, activism, and on (a) European scale”.

Four-fifths of the festival area will be set aside as a “non-mixed” space for black women, according to its website. Another space will be a “non-mixed” area for black people regardless of gender. Another space would be “open to all”.

Is separatism an intermediate step on the … Read the rest



Didn’t see that coming

May 29th, 2017 10:13 am | By

Talk about ironic. Wise people stashed an emergency supply of seeds in a vault buried in permafrost within the Arctic Circle, in case humanity ever needed it. Only it turns out the permafrost isn’t perma. We done melted it.

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an

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Passive-aggressive non-retraction retraction

May 29th, 2017 8:28 am | By
Passive-aggressive non-retraction retraction

How “skeptics” operate.

Stephen Knight aka Godless Spellchecker wrote a post on May 25 about the reception of the Boghossian-Lindsay “hoax” that wasn’t really a hoax but rather a not very good satire. His focus is on the pay to publish issue.

I took a look at the journals where PZ Myers, Ketan Joshi, Phil Torres (Philippe Verdoux), and Amanda Marcotte published to see if their paper had ever appeared in pay-to-publish journals. While we do not know the details of how much they paid to have their articles published, or even if they paid at all, below is a list of the journals and their fees where their articles have appeared.

To be clear: I do not know if

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Spoiler-in-chief

May 28th, 2017 10:23 am | By

It’s shaming how stark the isolation is.

In an unusual admission, Group of Seven (G7) leaders have said in their final communique from a summit in Italy that they had failed to bridge differences over climate change with US President Donald Trump – and America was unable to join other countries in committing to the Paris Agreement.

“The United States of America is in the process of reviewing its policies on climate change and on the Paris Agreement and thus is not in a position to join the consensus on these topics,” the communique read.

“Understanding this process, the heads of state and of government of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom and the presidents of

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Very difficult, not to say very unsatisfactory

May 28th, 2017 9:42 am | By

Our problem child didn’t impress the more intelligent, polite, informed, thoughtful heads of state who encountered him on his Adventure Overseas.

Europe can no longer “completely depend” on the US and UK following the election of President Trump and Brexit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

Mrs Merkel said she wanted friendly relations with both countries as well as Russia but Europe now had to “fight for its own destiny”.

It follows the G7’s failure to commit to the 2015 Paris climate deal, talks Mrs Merkel said were “very difficult”.

And they were very difficult why? Because our stupid self-willed narcissistic president refused to co-operate, because he thinks his ego is more important than the future survival of everyone on the … Read the rest



Dr Jen brings her A game

May 27th, 2017 6:00 pm | By

Jen Gunter tears a chunk out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s metaphorical hide.

Dear Ms. Paltrow,

I understand you recently said that anyone who is going to fuck with you better bring their A game.

From tampons to tomatoes to toxic lube your website is a scare factory. Literally. It’s either made up (often poorly, but with liberal use of the word toxin) or someone’s hypothesis with little to no supporting data. Tampons are not vaginal death sticks, vegetables with lectins are not killing us, vaginas don’t need steaming, Epstein Barr virus (EBV) does not cause every thyroid disease, and for fuck’s sake no one needs to know their latex farmer what they need to know is that

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Stolen tortillas

May 27th, 2017 2:33 pm | By

Another “cultural appropriation” crisis.

Willamette Week reported ten days ago:

During an impromptu Christmastime road trip last year to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly lost their minds over tortillas.

“In Puerto Nuevo, you can eat $5 lobster on the beach, which they give you with this bucket of tortillas,” Connelly says. “They are handmade flour tortillas that are stretchy and a little buttery, and best of all, unlimited.”

They liked them so much they wanted to sleuth out the recipe.

“I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did,” Connelly says. “They told us the basic ingredients, and we

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Crunching and shoving

May 27th, 2017 11:13 am | By

Trump viewed from the vantage point of Jon Henley at the Guardian:

He crunched hands, shoved shoulders and struck poses. He scoffed chocolates, ignored protocol and harangued heads of state. He denied saying things he had said, then said things that showed he did not understand.

In short he was an embarrassing ludicrous spectacle.

First, there were the body language battles. Trump is well known for his efforts to dominate male interlocutors with a firm handshake, often accompanied by an arm wrench: notable victims include the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who survived a 19-second power grip in February.

In Brussels on Thursday for meetings with EU and Nato leaders, he was trumped by the French president, Emmanuel

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Trump went to the G7 to learn

May 27th, 2017 9:22 am | By

The BBC on A Trump Abroad, this time at the G7, refusing to reaffirm the Paris accord.

The final communique issued at the G7 summit in Italy said the US “is in the process of reviewing its policies on climate change and on the Paris Agreement and thus is not in a position to join the consensus on these topics”.

However, the other G7 leaders pledged to “reaffirm their strong commitment to swiftly implement the Paris Agreement”.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the discussion on climate change had been “very unsatisfactory”, adding “we have a situation of six against one”.

Mr Trump tweeted: “I will make my final decision on the Paris Accord next week!”

His economic adviser,

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The Trump administration has hired dozens of former lobbyists

May 27th, 2017 8:29 am | By

They gave up on one fight while Donnie Twoscoops was out of town.

The White House unexpectedly backed down Friday in a confrontation with the government’s top ethics officer, announcing it will publicly disclose waivers that have been quietly handed out since January to let certain former lobbyists work in the administration.

The reversal came after the White House wrote last week to the Office of Government Ethics and asked its director to suspend his request for copies of the waivers. Such waivers are needed when officials want to work on policies or other government issues that they were directly involved in recently as private-sector lobbyists or industry lawyers.

The debate over the waivers — which were routinely made public

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Shadow Secretary of State Jared

May 27th, 2017 7:32 am | By

So. Last December – after the election, before the inauguration. Some people got together at Trump Tower in Manhattan; among them were Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, and Sergey Kislyak. After the eggnog and mince pie and the exchange of prezzies, Kushner suggested “establishing a secret communications channel between the Trump transition team and Moscow to discuss strategy in Syria and other policy issues.”

Yes that’s right, the president-elect’s daughter’s husband, age 36, a real estate hustler, tried to set up a secret communications channel with the Russians, i.e. a hostile foreign rival.

News of the discussion was first reported by The Washington Post. The revelation has stoked new questions about Mr. Kushner’s connections to Russian officials at a time

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Guest post: Reading Whipping Girl 5 – Who ISN’T Transgender?

May 26th, 2017 6:18 pm | By

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen

Time for another whipping of Whipping Girl. We’re on Chapter 1, Coming to Terms with Transgenderism and Transsexuality. As the title implies, it’s about terms, but Serano slips a lot of assumptions into the mix.

If you want to play along at home, we’re on pages 25 – 28.

Serano defines “transgender”–

While the word originally had a more narrow definition, since the 1990s it has been used primarily as an umbrella term to describe those who defy societal expectations and assumptions regarding femaleness and maleness;

Note that this definition would include Portia, Viola, Atticus Finch, Scout, me, and probably you, dear reader.

this includes people who are transsexual (those who live as members

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Promotion

May 26th, 2017 3:37 pm | By

It’s entirely understandable that Trump is doing such a terrible job as president – he’s so busy promoting all his golf clubs. What’s he supposed to do, stop promoting them? That’s crazy talk. Now the Senior P.G.A. Championship is happening at one of his clubs. Big bucks for President Pig!

Over the past decade, the Trump Organization has stockpiled golf courses, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy, remake and upgrade a dozen different clubs and resorts from the Hudson Valley to Doonbeg, Ireland. Golf resorts and clubs have accounted for roughly half of Mr. Trump’s revenue, according to his personal financial disclosure last year.

Just four months into his presidency, Mr. Trump has visited his family-owned

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More swamp clearance work

May 26th, 2017 3:02 pm | By

Greg “Bodyslam” Gianforte won election to Congress despite having slammed a reporter to the floor and then jumped on top of him and punched him at least twice. Welcome to Trump’s America.

Republican Greg Gianforte won the special election for Montana’s lone congressional seat on Thursday despite an election eve misdemeanor assault charge for allegedly body-slamming a reporter.

Gianforte had been silent following the allegations, with his campaign only releasing a statement claiming that The Guardian‘s Ben Jacobs had been the aggressor. But speaking at his victory party in Bozeman shortly after the race was called, Gianforte admitted he was in the wrong and apologized to Jacobs.

What next, perps elected to Congress hours after their latest murder?

In

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Phone calls and emails to the State Department go unanswered

May 26th, 2017 2:03 pm | By

Der Spiegel too dislikes Trump.

Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees.

He is a man free of morals. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat. I feel ashamed to use these words, as sharp and loud as they are.

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A wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly

May 26th, 2017 10:25 am | By

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker tells us how Trump lectured the democratic heads of state at NATO on how awesome the Saudi king is.

He had just come from Saudi Arabia, Trump told the nato leaders, in a brief speech. “There, I spent much time with King Salman, a wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly.” That meeting had been “historic,” Trump said. The “leaders of the Middle East” had promised him that they would “stop funding the radical ideology that leads to this horrible terrorism all over the globe.” So that should take care of the problem. He did not define “radical ideology,” or acknowledge that he was praising a monarch in

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Guest post: Fewer doors and fewer chances

May 26th, 2017 9:38 am | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on Cop on Comrades.

This is something I have been seeing more and more. Well, you (meaning me) have a college degree and a job as a professional, while I (meaning the man speaking) am [unemployed, underemployed, uneducated – fill in the blank]. And I lost my chance at a job because a [black woman, Native American, Mexican] was hired instead of me, even though I was more qualified.

First, I would like to comment on that last sentence – I have never heard of any white male (who is self-reporting) that has lost out on a job to someone more qualified. They always lost it to a woman or a person of color, … Read the rest



They just called your number at KFC

May 26th, 2017 9:27 am | By

Was it a shove? Yes, of course it was a shove.

Let’s break it down.

A slow-motion viewing of the video indicates no words spoken by Trump as he approaches the group from behind. No “Excuse me” or “Pardon me.”

Trump reaches out his right arm, grabs Markovic’s right shoulder and pushes him aside. Markovic looks surprised. Trump doesn’t acknowledge his existence as he moves past him. It’s as if Markovic isn’t there.

Or, rather, it’s as if Trump is an arrogant bullying shithead who treats other people as things he gets to shove out of his way.

Markovic abruptly looks back at Trump but gets no eye contact from Trump in return.

Then he pats Trump on the

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Cop on Comrades

May 26th, 2017 9:02 am | By

A week ago the Irish Times published an opinion piece by Frankie Gaffney that apparently was an instant hit with the Pepe crowd. It’s not difficult to see why.

I grew up in Dublin’s inner city, an environment where poverty, violence, and addiction were normal. Given the odds I had to overcome to get where I am today, I thought I’d meet a lot of allies among those who preach equality. But instead, I was often met with open hostility, despite the fact I campaign on a variety of related issues. Why? Because I happen to be straight, white, and male.

“Straight white male” is an identity I didn’t choose. I mean it wasn’t a decision I had any say

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