Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Ok ok we take it back.

An interesting article from Salon, “MAGA’s true believers don’t understand capitalism — Trump will teach them a hard lesson.”

The highlights

America is a nation at war with its mythologies.

For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism.

(…)

With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too

One rule for me, another for thee.

A story in 3 parts

So a women’s centre decided to have a community pop-up.
Crafts, advice, self-defence etc
Sounds good
1/3 pic.twitter.com/jN59S42wRi

— Caro Betts (@BettsCaro) January 29, 2025

So it’s been cancelled
Because heaven forfend women should have any space at all
But no conflict of interests. Right?
3/3@SexMattersOrg @MForstater @HJoyceGender @jk_rowling pic.twitter.com/sammoD5HLR

— Caro Betts (@BettsCaro) January 29, 2025

All women’s centres pop-ups have been paused from the 30th January onwards.

Mind you…the event itself sounds like all my worst nightmares in one place. Quiet/prayer space? Crafts and more crafts and more crafts?? Blrrrghh. But that’s not the point. The point is all this stupid relentless bullying.… Read the rest

Don’t mention the man.

A second teenage footballer has been handed a six-match ban for asking whether adult transgender opponents she was playing were men.

An 18-year-old who, Telegraph Sport has been told, has both ADHD and learning difficulties, was sanctioned by a National Serious Case Panel in a case with parallels to that for which a 17-year-old girl with suspected autism was handed a similar suspension.

The second teen was charged by her county FA over comments she made to a referee during a match in September, the same month she turned 18. It was alleged she said: “Ref, have you checked if all of their players are eligible to play? Look at their ’keeper and for example

Oh honestly, is this how it’s going to be? They throw a bomb, the shouting is too loud, they haul the bomb back? Government by toddlers?

The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants, according to a copy of a new memo obtained by The Washington Post, after the administration’s move to halt spending earlier this week provoked a backlash.

In a memo dated Wednesday and distributed to federal agencies, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, states that OMB memorandum M-25-13 “is rescinded.” That order, issued Monday, instructed federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.”

In other … Read the rest

Trump is setting fire to the entire federal government.

The Trump administration has offered buyouts to almost all of the roughly 3 million people who work for the US government if they leave their jobs by 6 February, as the White House attempts to gut the civil service.

The US office of personnel management (OPM), the government’s human resources agency, sent an email to the entire federal workforce on Tuesday evening with four directives that it says Trump is mandating. They included a full-time return to the office for most employees.

The email said that the federal workforce would be subjected to “enhanced standards of suitability and conduct”, aiming to retain only employees who were “reliable, loyal, trustworthy”. It

So even the Holocaust has to be inclooosive now. I did not see that on the horizon.

Holocaust Memorial Day is about the holocaust of Jews under the Nazi regime. End of story. It’s not a grab bag. It’s not about Everyone.

Updating to add: Ok I overstated it – see Naif’s comment @ 2. It’s about the holocaust of Jews and others in the Nazi death camps. It’s not about post-Nazi genocides.

The truth is there should be a new Memorial Day, or rather a God damn it stop DOING THIS day, to recognize AND DISCOURAGE all these post-1945 genocides that keep happening. Have one of those days every month, or every day, since we can’t seem to … Read the rest

Rape Crisis Scotland still determined to taunt and bully women who have been raped.

A rape crisis charity embroiled in a transgender row has dropped a pledge to issue a definition of women, The Telegraph can reveal.

Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS) admitted it was no longer planning to publish a definition, despite previously promising to do so, following the recommendations of independent expert review.

Of course we shouldn’t need a definition, since we already know, and have all along, but because RCS is so determined to play silly buggers, here we are.

Vicky Ling was commissioned to investigate Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) after a damning tribunal ruling found it was operating an “extreme” version of gender identity theory under

Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic:

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability

This clip is an oldy, but it’s still interesting.

Yes.

Michael Ann Devito is an Assistant Professor in Khoury College of Computer Sciences, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication Studies. She works in the areas of AI & Social Justice and Extraordinary HCI. Dr. Michael Ann DeVito (she/her) is a qualitative, interdisciplinary researcher and designer. She studies how users and communities understand and adapt to the challenges of AI and machine learning-driven sociotechnical environments…

Michael Ann most often acts as a member-researcher, employing her own positionality as a neurodivergent, transgender lesbian as a key tool in her grounded theory-based approach.

Such as sharing clips of himself warbling that if you … Read the rest

Yeah great, let’s throw all those unemployed little kids off school lunch programs.

CNN’s Pamela Brown asks Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) about President Trump’s administration pausing aid for federal grants and loans that could affect millions of Americans. McCormick defended President Trump’s move and argues that aid programs, including ones that help vulnerable students eat lunch at school, should be evaluated.

And in order to “evaluate” the programs it’s necessary to snatch them away first, because poor people, especially children, must be punished.… Read the rest

Noah Berlatsky on The Terror:

Donald Trump spent the first week of his second term using the presidency to glorify political violence and weaponize the threat of it against anyone who might consider criticizing him.

Trump pulled the security detail from former chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is an enemy of MAGA thanks to his efforts to fight covid. He also ended security details for his former National Security Advisor John Bolton and his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both of whom have been targeted by Iran because they worked to advance Trump’s hard-line policies during his first term.

Bolton of course is an outspoken Trump critic, but Pompeo campaigned for his former boss

Reuters tells us

California on Tuesday denied President Donald Trump’s claim that the U.S. military entered the state to release more water in the wake of deadly wildfires.

In a Truth Social post late on Monday, Trump wrote: “The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.” California’s Department of Water Resources responded hours later.

“The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful,” the agency said early on Tuesday in an X post.

On Sunday, he ordered the federal government

Wut?

The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water,…

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 28, 2025

Wtf is that even supposed to mean? Is there a giant faucet in Redding or somewhere that a couple of majors “turned on” to send all the water here to LA County?

No, so what’s he babbling about?

Also it’s not a Fake Environmental argument that the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades gets more rain than LA County, it’s just reality. LA … Read the rest

Trump’s revenge:

The Justice Department said Monday that it fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting Donald Trump, escalating the president’s campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies.

The employees worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that led to now-dismissed indictments against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Two extremely serious crimes that he committed basically in front of our faces, especially the attempted theft of the election.

As a country we’re rolling around in the mire like a herd of hyperactive pigs.

“Today, Acting Attorney General James McHenry terminated the employment of a number of

Trump is not messing around: he’s already bullying Denmark to underline his rude demands that it give him Greenland.

Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.

Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described [as] aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

He doesn’t get to order any head of state to give the state to him. Who does he think he is?

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed

There’s this fella named Philip Low who knows Elon Musk all too well. He has this to say about Musk and the Nazi salute:

Elon is not a Nazi, per se.

He is something much better, or much worse, depending on how you look at it.

Nazis believed that an entire race was above everyone else.

Elon believes he is above everyone else. He used to think he worked on the most important problems. When I met him, he did not presume to be a technical person — he would be the first to say that he lacked the expertise to understand certain data. That happened later. Now, he believes he has all the solutions.

All his talk about

How NOT to talk about the Holocaust on a tv news program.

“Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay, or belonged to another ethnic group.”

The statement actually doesn't make sense as spoken. It's as if an editor read the…

— Dr. Henry Silverman (@PropagandaBuff) January 27, 2025

As well as millions of others THAN WHAT?

They erase women by saying “people” and they erase Jews by saying “people” – and they do it right in plain sight.… Read the rest

It’s surrogacy day at the BBC.

A couple said they decided to document their journey to have a child via a surrogate after feeling there was “no information” available about the process.

Kevin Pittuck-Bennett, 46, and his husband Michael, 38, from Chelmsford, had their two-month-old daughter, Peggy, in 2024 via surrogacy, which is when a woman carries a pregnancy for another couple or individual.

…

Sarah Jones, the chief executive officer at Surrogacy UK, said: “The UK surrogacy community in the UK is really unique in the fact that we operate altruistically, so nobody is allowed to make profit, nobody is allowed to financially profit from surrogacy in the UK.”

It’s interesting how all the altruism is from women. … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bruce Everett on A pause, a freeze, a ban, a cancellation.

This is going to be a pretty big global economic storm that Trump’s brewing. I’m kind of glad to be in Australia right now, where we certainly have economic problems, just not as fundamentally bad as a lot of other economies. We may be well positioned to mitigate a lot of the chaos.

That being said, we’ve got an opposition that’s great at talking up its economic cred, but hasn’t done a competent job since 2007, despite being in government for most of it, and they weren’t even that s**t hot when they were okay (The Howard Gov’t 1996-2007 coasted on Keating’s economic reforms … Read the rest

Trump is doing the deportations thing just as he said he would, but the reporting reveals that the Biden and Obama administrations did plenty of deporting themselves. It’s not clear to me that Trump is doing anything radically different.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants out of the US and the promise of “mass deportations”. To that effect, the defence department has said that it will provide military aircrafts to deport more than 5,000 people [who] have been detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

ICE statistics show that over 1,000 people were removed or repatriated on Thursday, the fourth day of the Trump administration.

…

Deportations are not unique to the