A burden

Oct 14th, 2019 11:18 am | By

Cis privilege:

A newborn baby girl has been discovered buried alive in northern India, a local police chief has revealed.

Abhinandan Singh told reporters the baby was found by a villager who was burying his own daughter, who had died minutes after birth.

The baby girl, who had been placed inside an earthen pot about 3ft (90cm) below the ground, was rushed to hospital, where she is recovering.

Anoop Kumar Mishra

India’s gender ratio is one of the worst in the world. Women are often discriminated against socially and girls are seen as a financial burden, particularly among poor communities.

Campaigners say a traditional preference for sons has meant millions of female children lost to foeticide and infanticide over

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Not impressed

Oct 14th, 2019 11:01 am | By

Biden, a good deal too late, is making a big show of being Mister Ethics.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden unveiled a plan Monday for how his administration would prioritize ethics should he be elected president in 2020, pledging to “ensure that no future president can ever again abuse the office for personal gain.”

In a rebuke of the Trump administration, Biden pledges to “restore” ethics in government, “rein in executive branch financial conflicts of interest,” and “return integrity” to decision making in his administration.

That’s nice, but it’s a great pity he didn’t tell his son that he (the son) couldn’t use his daddy’s job in the White House as a lever to extract highly-paid jobs from Ukrainian … Read the rest



Officers are investigating a large number of offensive stickers

Oct 14th, 2019 10:26 am | By

James Kirkup at The Spectator:

Oxford is suffering a crime wave. Police are investigating numerous serious offences over more than six months. Thames Valley Police has issued this sweeping statement about unacceptable acts in the city:

“Thames Valley Police is appealing for witnesses following a number of public offences in Oxford.

Officers are investigating a large number of offensive stickers that have been placed across Oxford city centre containing transphobic comments. It is believed they started appearing in March 2019 within the High Street, Catte Street and Parks Road area.

Investigating officer PC Rebecca Nightingale based at St Aldates police station said: “Behaviour like this is not acceptable and we take incidents of this nature very seriously.

“I am

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Spectators in their own sport

Oct 14th, 2019 9:46 am | By

The mother of Alanna Smith, one of the Connecticut high school runners pushed out by two boys who “identify as” girls, points out how grotesquely unfair it all is:

Men are stronger than women. Boys are faster than girls. An influx of hormones doesn’t undo these realities.

Study after study has reaffirmed this basic fact about what it means to be human. Most recently, Swedish scientists followed 11 biological men whose testosterone was dramatically decreased due to cross-sex hormone treatments over a year.

Even when the men’s testosterone levels matched that of ­biological women, the men’s competitive advantages remained almost fully intact, with muscle size and bone density remaining virtually unchanged in some and decreasing only 5 percent in

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Is the romance truly gone?

Oct 14th, 2019 9:01 am | By

Trump has a sad about his old buddy Fox.

Fed up with the coverage on his favorite cable news station, President Trump decided late this summer that a direct intervention was needed. So he telephoned the chief executive of Fox News, Suzanne Scott, and let loose.

In a lengthy conversation, Mr. Trump complained that Fox News was not covering him fairly, according to three people with knowledge of the call.

By “fairly” he must mean “adoringly.”

Irked by their reporting, he taunted the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who resigned from the network on Friday, and its chief national correspondent, Ed Henry. He declared that the Fox News pollsters “suck” after they found majority support for impeachment and openly

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To celebrate the launch of Trump Towers Istanbul

Oct 14th, 2019 8:06 am | By

Joyce Vance:

Kurdish journalists report that a Kurdish politician, a 35-year old woman, was raped & stoned to death by advancing Turkish forces. What’s happening in Syria is due to Trump taking an unstaffed call with Erdogan & caving to his Turkish business allies.

And, because it’s always important to understand context, this 2012 tweet from Ivanka Trump.

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An event by a known TERF

Oct 13th, 2019 4:39 pm | By

Another rage-attack because Meghan Murphy is going to say things in a room rented from the Toronto Public Library:

Hey @torontolibrary, given that you’re a place deeply invested in education and learning, why are you hosting an event by a known TERF? Twitter banned Meghan Murphy for being transphobic. Why give her a platform?

Yes how dare a feminist woman ask questions about what “gender identity” means for women. It’s not as if women have any stake in the subject after all.

But never mind all that, just tell lies.

I would also like to know why my hometown library system is allowing someone who thinks someone like me doesn’t deserve to participate in society to use their facility.

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History written by?

Oct 13th, 2019 11:49 am | By

Elizabeth Warren tweets:

For most of America’s history, when our companies did better, our workers did better – and America built a thriving middle class. The Accountable Capitalism Act will help realign our skewed market incentives so companies & workers can once again do well together.

Erm, no. Not for “most” of America’s history at all. For a couple of decades after World War 2, and even then of course black people were almost entirely shut out. What was different about those two decades? Strong unions and high taxes on extreme wealth.

There are a lot of replies saying that.

When unions did better workers did better. This rhetoric can only come from a capitalist.

That was unions Liz.

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The murder of Hervin Khalaf

Oct 13th, 2019 11:06 am | By

Via Reuters:

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces accused Turkey-backed fighters of killing a Kurdish politician in an ambush on a road in northern Syria on Saturday, drawing a denial from a Turkey-backed rebel force which said it had not advanced that far.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based organization which reports on the war, said Turkey-backed groups had killed a total of nine civilians on the road, including Hervin Khalaf, secretary general of the Future Syria Party.

Khalaf had been returning from a meeting in Hasaka at the time of the attack in which her driver and an aide were also killed, said Hussein Omar, the Future Syria Party’s coordinator in Europe. Party officials including Khalaf have

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As Jews were protested for trying to talk about anti-Semitism

Oct 13th, 2019 10:46 am | By

Disagreement, dissent, protest – how do we do it, how do we do it fairly and reasonably, can we avoid doing it unfairly and unreasonably? Batya Ungar-Sargon writes about being protested at Bard College for being a Jew:

When I was asked to speak at last week’s conference on racism and anti-Semitism at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center, I think my heart actually skipped a beat.

Arendt, the German-born political philosopher who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and eventually settled in New York, is the thinker who has most deeply influenced me, and racism and anti-Semitism are two topics I think about constantly, the most pressing issues of our time. It was the perfect combination of topic and

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More dangerous than people suspected

Oct 12th, 2019 5:42 pm | By

If mental health professionals can’t tell us that Trump is mentally unfit to serve, then who can? It’s not as if we don’t need to know. One mental health professional explains:

I am not a political person but a medical professional. Yet because of my field of expertise, I unexpectedly became an academic whistleblower. I have been compelled to blow two whistles: first, by publishing a book to alert the public that Donald Trump was more dangerous than perhaps any president in history, for psychological reasons; and second, on the American Psychiatric Association’s actions that have effectively silenced those of us trying to fulfill our professional responsibility to society as outlined in its own code of ethics.

Politics never

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No wall, no rich-people-only rule

Oct 12th, 2019 10:40 am | By

CNN stitches together all the bad things that happened to Trump yesterday.

Within moments of each other, a career diplomat began painting a damning portrait of the President’s foreign policy to lawmakers just as Trump lost his appeal in a federal appeals court to stop a House subpoena of his tax documents, which he’s guarded fiercely since refusing to make them public as a candidate.

Then, in rapid succession, judges in New York, Texas, Washington state and California sided against Trump administration initiatives meant to limit immigrants from entering the country — both through a physical barrier and by raising the requirements on migrants seeking legal status.

They will all be appealed, but still, it’s steps. Yovanovitch’s turning up … Read the rest



Barr squawks about the death of The Traditional Moral Order

Oct 12th, 2019 9:28 am | By

The deeply in Trump’s pocket US Attorney General gave a talk at deeply Catholic Notre Dame University yesterday, blaming secularists for everything bad and defending…morality. This lying sleazing hack who does his level best to shield Trump from any kind of oversight and law enforcement sets himself up as a source of wisdom on morality. You couldn’t make it up.

Because of the decreasing influence of Judeo-Christian traditions, Barr insisted, “along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence and a deadly drug epidemic.”

(Violent crime has decreased significantly over the past

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Is that the one with the red nose?

Oct 11th, 2019 5:34 pm | By

It’s Rudy’s turn.

President Donald Trump sought Friday to distance himself from attorney Rudy Giuliani, even casting doubts about whether the former New York mayor is still his lawyer.

Asked whether Giuliani remained his personal attorney, Trump said: “I don’t know.”

“I haven’t spoken to Rudy,” Trump told reporters as he was leaving the White House for a political rally in Louisiana. “I spoke to him yesterday, briefly. He’s a very good attorney and he has been my attorney, yeah sure.”

By the end of the day it will be “Rudy who?”

Trump’s remarks followed the arrest late Wednesday of two of Giuliani’s associates, Ukranian-born business partners Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, at Dulles International Airport. The two

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Must be the Wheaties

Oct 11th, 2019 5:01 pm | By

Oh good, another one. TV sports director tweets:

Today June Eastwood won the Griz home cross country meet and HBO Sports had a crew there filming

How about that. June is the great big one in the middle then?

Of course.

On Saturday, August 31, Juniper Eastwood will become the first transgender athlete to compete in DI cross country when she runs for the University of Montana in the women’s division at the Clash of the Inland Northwest meet.

Assigned male at birth, Eastwood, now a 22-year-old senior, says she has identified as female since middle school and made the decision to transition during her third year competing on the men’s track team at Montana.

Because that way … Read the rest



He wants to make it dangerous to oppose him

Oct 11th, 2019 4:29 pm | By

Jack Holmes at Esquire on Trump’s new level of horror last night:

Donald Trump, American president took the stage and, among a great many other things, did this. The crowd laughed and cheered.

He may once have told you, in his way, not to believe your eyes and ears. But you can. The President of the United States did indeed just act out some sort of sexual fantasy, in front of thousands and on C-SPAN, between two characters from his extended Deep State Conspiracy Universe…

…This is the president deliberately debasing his office, going lower than ever before and bringing his supporters with him, because he knows they have ventured into the deep and dark together now and they

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Disquieting omens

Oct 11th, 2019 11:04 am | By

Aaron Rupar live-tweeted Trump’s rally in Minneapolis last night and wrote it up for Vox:

It wasn’t surprising that Trump attacked one of his most regular targets of abuse, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) while rallying in the heart of her district in downtown Minneapolis. But what was jarring was not only how extreme his attacks were, but also the fact that he went out of his way to demonize the Somali community more broadly in a city that has one of the country’s largest Somali populations.

Citing articles from a fringe right-wing Minnesota-based blog, Trump called Omar “a disgrace to our country” and pushed unfounded conspiracy theories about her marital history. He also attacked the community of Somali

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That will eventually result

Oct 11th, 2019 10:29 am | By

A subhead at the Telegraph:

Author David Thomas still lives as a man, but has begun the male-to-female gender transition that will eventually result in becoming a woman. Each week he chronicles his progress. This week, he talks about his attempts to lose weight

Have we all regressed to childhood?

There’s no such thing as doing or beginning or practicing the X “that will eventually result in becoming a woman” if you’re a man. A man beginning a “gender transition” can do all sorts of things to imitate women, perform being a woman, act the part of a woman, and the like, but there is no becoming a woman, not even eventually.… Read the rest



Private influence and personal gain have usurped diplomats’ judgment

Oct 11th, 2019 9:48 am | By

There is reporting on Yovanovitch’s testimony even though the deposition is behind closed doors.

Marie Yovanovitch told the House committees investigating impeachment that Trump had pushed for her removal as ambassador to Ukraine based on “false claims”, according to the New York Times.

The Times reports:

Marie L. Yovanovitch, who was recalled as the American ambassador to Ukraine, testified to impeachment investigators on Friday that a top State Department official told her that President Trump had pushed for her removal for months even though the department believed she had ‘done nothing wrong.’

In a closed-door deposition that could further fuel calls for Mr. Trump’s impeachment, Ms. Yovanovitch delivered a scathing indictment of his administration’s conduct of foreign policy, warning

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Whether the President has been accurate in his financial reporting

Oct 11th, 2019 9:16 am | By

Also in Trump loses:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s accounting firm must turn over financial records requested by a House committee, a legal blow to the administration’s efforts to block congressional investigations of his finances.

It’s almost as if we have more need to see the financial records of a corrupt lying crook rather than less.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee sent a subpoena to Mazars USA, in April asking for documents related to Trump’s accounts going back to January 2009. His lawyers sued to block the subpoena, arguing that Congress had no legitimate legislative purpose for getting the materials.

But Congress also has an oversight role. Legislation is not their only … Read the rest