So now I’m curious about Bret Stephens and especially about his excitingly original take on climate change, so I’ve hit the googles to learn more. David Roberts at Vox reported in May 2017 that Stephens had been hired away from the Wall Street Journal. Oh that kind of “diversity.”

Though the paper defends the hire in the name of opinion diversity, Stephens is a very familiar sort of establishment conservative — a cosmopolitan, well-educated, reflexively pro-Israel war hawk (who once wrote a column on “the disease of the Arab mind”) who thinks anti-racists are the real racists but moderates on select issues to demonstrate his independence.

Guys like that are a dime a dozen, I promise you.

Stephens

David Karpf points out how much worse it would all have been if he were not a white guy.

The controversy began earlier this week after reports of a bedbug infestation at the Times. Karpf, an activist and former Sierra Club board member who says he has been particularly disappointed with Stephens’s takes on climate change, made a joke about the conservative writer, whose columns have prompted some dismayed readers to cancel subscriptions.

“The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Karpf tweeted Monday. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

“He tends to write pretty lightweight, poorly researched columns about things that I know something about,” Karpf explained later. “So I’ve always seen him as this person that everyone complains about but we just

Vivian Ho at The Guardian on Bret Stephens’s Revenge Column:

On Friday, Stephens used his weekly column to issue a warning about the modern dangers of hateful comments disseminated through mass communications, drawing a line from Hitler’s radio addresses to the power of social media today.

In the ultimate subtweet move, Stephens didn’t even reference what had happened on Twitter – rather, the column casually dropped a quote about bedbugs in relation to the burning of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto.

Nothing to do with David Karpf at all! Pure coincidence!

David Klion doesn’t buy the coincidence theory:

My jaw is on the floor

David Karpf, the author of the tweet that started the saga, told the Guardian he was

Somewhat breathtaking – Trump appears to have tweeted classified intelligence again.

President Trump has tweeted what experts say is almost certainly an image from a classified satellite or drone, showing the aftermath of an accident at an Iranian space facility.

Along with text that someone wrote for him, because he’s not literate enough to have written it himself.

It says:

The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.

NPR goes on:

NPR broke the news of the launch failure on Thursday, using images

Trump continues the Torture Children program:

Migrant girls being held by the Trump administration are being given only very limited access to items as basic as sanitary pads and tampons, according to a lawsuit that claims to put fresh light on the “appalling” conditions being endured by youngsters.

Earlier this year, it was revealed children being held in facilities in Texas operated by immigration authorities, were being detained in circumstances United Nations (UN) human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said appalled her. Children were denied access to showers, adequate food or bedding, allegedly in breach of a 20-year ruling.

Now, in a lawsuit filed by 19 states, further details have been provided by some of those children, who

Even John Bolton can’t keep Trump’s love.

Bolton, who has long advocated an expansive military presence around the world, has become a staunch internal foe of an emerging peace deal aimed at ending America’s longest war, the officials said.

His opposition to the diplomatic effort in Afghanistan has irritated President Trump, these officials said, and led aides to leave the National Security Council out of sensitive discussions about the agreement.

…

At the zenith of his influence, Bolton enabled the president to act on his most aggressive instincts and outmaneuvered other Cabinet officials with less experience in the interagency process. But his tough management style and bellicose worldview have frayed relations with some colleagues.

You’d think it would endear … Read the rest

Girls’ schools will probably go the way of the coral reefs.

Girls schools would have to admit transgender pupils under proposals being considered by the equalities watchdog.

The confidential Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) draft guidance, leaked to The Telegraph, reveals that schools could be set to consider admissions of trans students to single-sex schools on a “case-by-case approach”.

There were supposed to be guidelines by 2018 but the process has bogged down. Quel surprise.

The Telegraph however has a draft and is sharing from that.

It says that: “A refusal to admit a trans pupil to a single-sex school which is the same as the trans pupil’s sex recorded at birth would be direct sex discrimination.

A thing I saw.

H/t Josh… Read the rest

Julie Bindel on the Blame Women trick:

Men blaming women for ‘getting themselves raped/murdered/beaten’ is certainly nothing new. But women being blamed for male violence towards other vulnerable groups, such as trans-women of colour, is the latest pernicious tactic by misogynists. Feminists are blamed for the murder of trans-women, including those killed by intimate male partners.

Apparently, we whip up hatred and fury that leads men to decide to kill trans women. Doubtless these violent male murderers will have been sitting reading me, Janice Turner, Janice Raymond, and watching Magdalen Berns videos before deciding to take a gun, knife, fists or whatever and brutally kill a trans-woman. Not being satisfied with having total permission, indeed praise, for screaming TERF,

The health of The Great Barrier Reef isn’t just bad, it’s very bad. That’s official.

The Great Barrier Reef’s outlook has been officially downgraded from poor to very poor due to climate change.

Rising sea temperatures thanks to human-driven global warming remain the biggest threat to the reef, a five-year Australian government report says.

They mean from bad to very bad. For some reason officials think we can’t deal with the word “bad” but we’ll be ok if they change it to “poor,” but “bad” is what they mean. In short the GBR is doomed, which is very bad (not poor) news.

Rising sea temperatures caused “mass bleaching events” in 2016 and 2017 that wiped out coral and destroyed

Peter Tatchell’s decision to blame feminists for the fact that a man murdered a trans woman continues to annoy everyone who sees it.

What he said:

Tracy Single is 15th trans woman of colour murdered in US this year. The tiny minority of feminists who demonise trans women as a threat to non-trans women contribute to the toxicl atmosphere that fuels prejudice, discrimination & violence

Janice Turner:

A man killed Tracy. It is overwhelmingly men who commit murder and violence against trans people. As they kill far, far greater numbers of women. Yet somehow feminists are the cause of male violence. Why not challenge men, Peter Tatchell? Your misogyny is disgraceful.

Sarah Ditum:

Tracy Single was killed

Meghan Murphy has more on the activism vandalism against VRR:

On Tuesday, Vancouver Rape Relief & Woman’s Shelter (VRRWS) tweeted images of vandalism left on their storefront — a space used for meetings, events, and support groups. ‘Kill TERFs,’ ‘Fuck TERFs,’ ‘TERFs go home, you are not welcome,’ ‘Transwomen are women,’ and ‘Trans Power’ had been scrawled across the windows and door in black marker. ‘TERF,’ for the blissfully ignorant, is an acronym that stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist.’ This is, of course, a misnomer. Radical feminists are not interested in ‘excluding’ trans-identified people from anything. What they are interested in is protecting certain spaces designated for women and girls.

Not because trans people are trans, but … Read the rest

Stella Nyanzi is in prison for criticizing a guy.

A prominent Ugandan academic has bared her breasts and screamed obscenities in protest as a magistrate sentenced her to 18 months’ prison on controversial charges of “harassing” President Yoweri Museveni.

The verdict against Stella Nyanzi on Friday drew the ire of rights activists who accused the government of using laws about electronic communications to stifle political dissent.

Nyanzi, a university lecturer and researcher who once called Museveni “a pair of buttocks”, is expected to serve nine months in prison after having already spent nine months behind bars.

…

A second charge of “offensive communication” was dropped against Nyanzi, who has vowed not to relent in her barbed criticism of Uganda’s