What a mess we are.

As more and more details emerge about the recent unfortunate exercise in Second Amendment freedoms at Michigan State University, there are a couple that not only stick in the throat, but also make you wonder even more deeply what kind of madhouse in which we’ve all been living for the past few decades. From Fox2 in Detroit:

When Jackie Matthews was 11 years old, she was inside a classroom in Newtown, Connecticut, when children were shot and killed. Now at 21, she’s a Michigan State student and was just a few feet away from where a gunman killed at least 3 other students. Jackie shared her story on TikTok, recounting the moment she

Dennis Kavanagh has a stemwinder of a thread on Sturgeon. Since so many of you are allergic to T_____r I’ll quote it instead of showing.

1/ The fall of Sturgeon is an object lesson, a parable even, in what happens when you subcontract equalities policy to extremists. Scottish voters (and women in particular) have, in effect, delivered a decisive blow to government by Stonewall and govt by insulting your own people pic.twitter.com/pZb1qkwwff

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) February 15, 2023

2/ Sturgeon embraced an unreal, elite fad because she mistook it for gay rights 2.0. It should have been obvious from the start this was not the case had she listened to women and gay groups making the point that

BBC Live on Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation.

One snippet:

Ms Sturgeon says she has found public opinions about her have become “barriers” to debate.

She says issues that are controversial “end up almost irrationally so” – though makes no specific reference to Scotland’s gender reforms.

That’s probably especially true when the issue itself is rooted in an irrational belief system.

Another:

Sky News touches on the row around transgender prisoners. The FM is asked whether this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She is also asked – was it a failure of her leadership not to deliver independence?

Sturgeon says she will “leave other people to judge” her record and says “no, that issue wasn’t the final straw”.

Walter Shapiro in The New Republic:

Maybe I’m expecting too much from Biden, but a small incident recently reported by Annie Linskey in The Wall Street Journal troubled me. Toward the end of a nuanced article about the president’s many, many ties to the University of Pennsylvania, Linskey revealed that one of Hunter Biden’s daughters was rejected for early admission to Penn in 2019. That setback prompted Biden—then a private citizen about to declare for the presidency—to speak to the dean of admissions at Penn. Probably not coincidentally, Biden’s granddaughter ended up among the 7 percent of applicants eventually admitted to Penn in 2019.

Of course it did, and of course she did, because this is the guy who … Read the rest

The Telegraph on the Tavistock:

The Tavistock clinic ignored evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness, a new book claims.

Not to mention the general confusion and partial information and rudimentary critical faculties that go with being very young.

Staff at the NHS facility were so determined to push a pro-transgender policy that children who might not have been trans were treated as “collateral damage” by clinicians who labelled doubters “transphobic”, a whistleblower says.

So the question becomes “why?” WHY were they so determined to do that? What is it about the trans ideology that was so attractive to people at a … Read the rest

It’s funny (or sad, or both) when they do the very thing they’re warning not to do. Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, the title says. Spoiler: it’s because they blend right in.

Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of

It’s no picnic being a girl, and it’s apparently getting worse.

Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking

It seems someone went too far.

I would like to publicly apologise for a previous Twitter thread where I interacted with JK Rowling on matters relating to the transgender community. I have now removed these tweets and would like to apologise to JK Rowling directly for causing potential upset.
 
(1/3)

— JJ Welles (@josephjames94) February 13, 2023

I would also like to retract my likening to JK Rowling to any far right or Nazi organisation and emphasise I do not wish any individual, inclusive of JK Rowling, to come to any harm.

(3/3)

— JJ Welles (@josephjames94) February 13, 2023

His friends line up to continue his valiant work.

I would like to state that JK Rowling is a transphobic

Chase Strangio is in battle gear.

We will be suing in Tennessee if/when they pass these bans on care for trans adolescents. See you in court. https://t.co/C9E2NNhgZu

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 13, 2023

In 2016 I began lobbying against anti-trans bills in state legislatures. At the time we were fighting back against the proliferation of the anti-trans bathroom bill and the false and weaponized narrative that trans people posed a threat to women and children in bathrooms.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 14, 2023

Did Tennessee ban care for trans adolescents though? Did it pass a law saying trans adolescents can’t have health care?

The ACLU press release is more precise than Strangio on Twitter.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The

There’s no such thing as misogyny.

On Saturday night, Wiebke Hüster, a German dance critic, was taking a break from watching a ballet program at Hanover’s main opera house when the choreographer Marco Goecke appeared in front of her.

That morning, Ms. Hüster, 57, had published a review of Mr. Goecke’s latest work, and it wasn’t positive. Watching his new dance, “In the Dutch Mountains,” audiences would feel like they’re either “going insane” or “being killed by boredom,” she wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major German newspaper.

So it was perhaps unsurprising when Mr. Goecke, 50, the ballet director at the Hanover State Opera, confronted her, asking why she wrote so negatively about him.

Oh … Read the rest

I decided for some reason we needed some Lift Every Voice and Sing.… Read the rest

There was this derailment in Ohio last week…the one that spilled a whole lot of vinyl chloride. It’s gone bizarrely or suspiciously under-reported. I looked for reporting a few hours ago and the only major news outlet that turned up was, of all things, Fox News. Where the hell are the other majors?

The short version is it’s bad. Really really bad.

Since the news outlets are looking fixedly in the opposite direction for some reason it’s going to have to be some tweets, sorry.

Nearly 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride were on this train. Now, the EPA has confirmed it's entered the Ohio River basin which is home to 25 million people.

This is one of the deadliest

This is how they derive the “they want to wipe us out!!!” lie. They translate successful treatment into wiping them out. Their condition is their idenniny so treating the condition equals genocide.

Making gender dysphoria go away=wiping out trans people, is the logic here.

But. The people in question still exist.

That makes it not genocide, not “they want to wipe us out.”

If people change political parties they don’t cease to exist. They change, but they don’t cease to exist. If believers turn atheist or atheists turn believers, same thing – they still exist, they’re just different.

A change in belief can of course be a very profound change, but no matter how profound it is … Read the rest

Tavistock scandal is scandal:

More than 1,000 children were referred for puberty blockers at an experimental gender clinic where concerns were ignored to preserve a “gold dust” NHS contract, a new book claims.

Former clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, have detailed how some “incredibly complex” children were placed on medication after one face-to-face assessment, despite many having a variety of mental health or family background problems.

And the “medication” isn’t really medication, it’s more like tampering.

The claims come in Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes, which will be released this month.

Barnes,

This. Again.

Today, once again this male was given permission to enter a female mountain bike race and claim the winners cheque(again) of $1100
This needs to stop. Kate Weatherly is MALE. Why are race organisers allowing females to be stripped of their effort & rewardhttps://t.co/BCJN16u8KY pic.twitter.com/McWzz44Puj

— hellofromnz (@hellofromnz) February 12, 2023

A woman’s $1,100 went to a man.… Read the rest

Coel will enjoy this.… Read the rest

Trump called in the researchers, but they didn’t deliver the goods, so he blanked them.

Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined werevoter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could

“Katy” Montgomerie says he had a bad experience.

What is a “hen do”? It’s what in the US is called a “bridal shower” – a party for a soon-to-marry woman attended only by women.

First of all, obviously nobody should throw drinks over people.

Second, if it really was a hen do then he didn’t belong there, and neither did the guy who threw the drink over him.

Third, I don’t believe it for a second about the crying. Montgomerie is a notorious bully; I can easily believe he was enraged, but not that he got the boo-hoos.

Fourth, it wasn’t his night, it was the future bride’s night. (Sorry, I find all this bridal/showery/do stuff kind of ooky, … Read the rest

OJ is doing his “blame women” thing again.

It's striking how both the anti-trans and anti-migrant backlash are using the same rationale – 'protect women!' – using the all too real endemic crisis of male violence against girls and women to specifically target two vulnerable minorities.

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) February 12, 2023

To put it another way, it’s striking how men like OJ cheer from the sidelines as other men dress up in womanface and steal women’s rights.

Men who dress up in womanface are not “vulnerable” in relation to women. It’s the other way around. Men can still punch even when wearing lipstick.

Also, false equivalence is false.

By the way, the Ku Klux Klan's founding rationale was,

The rest of that interview:

20:59:

Robinson: Just one last specific: the other example, about women’s rights, is this yes tabloid story, but with substance behind it, that people who give birth shouldn’t be called mothers, they should be called people who give birth – is that really Stonewall’s view of the world?

Anderson: So, no, this again is what gets mischaracterized. What Stonewall looks to do is to provide organizations with good practice to provide an incluzive place to work. It’s not the law, Nick.

Robinson: But is it good practice to stop calling mothers “mothers”?

Anderson: In some organizations potentially that’s what they might want to do, in terms of the culture that they’re trying to create