Come on, it’s a better name.

In a flurry of first-day-in-office activity, Donald Trump has signed an order to rename the 617,800 sq mile Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s 20,000ft mountain Denali.

The Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the Gulf of America, and Denali, the highest peak in North America, will revert to Mount McKinley – the name it was called before Barack Obama changed it in 2015.

The renaming of the two natural features is to honor “American greatness”, according to a preview of the orders obtained by the New York Post.

Pffff – what’s so great about McKinley?

And anyway Denali is American. Alaska is an American state, thus Alaskans are Americans, thus their name for … Read the rest

Ah, here is the author.

The executive order restoring women's rights was written by @MayMailman, former Director of Independent Women's Law Center, now Deputy Assistant to the President. pic.twitter.com/K1vw9VnXgm

— Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) January 21, 2025

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on The one silver lining.

The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) takes credit for being the architect of model legislation used in Executive Order 14166 that Trump signed yesterday about the definition of ‘sex’ in the Federal government:

Independent Women — the Original Champion of Legislation to Define ‘Woman’ — Applauds President Trump’s Day One Executive Order to Restore Biological Reality

Independent Women is the architect of model legislation to define sex-based terms in law and code in order to stop bureaucrats and elitists on the federal and state level from redefining language to fit a false narrative and erase women. Gender ideologues have sacrificed women’s rights to single-sex spaces, opportunities, and privacy on

Female people are basically just their genitals. They’re useful holes for men, and (sadly) they’re the only way to make children. Other than that they’re garbage.

Iraq votes to legalize the rape of 9-year-old girls.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s parliament passed three divisive [bad] laws Tuesday, including amendments to the country’s personal status law that opponents say would in effect legalize child marriage.

The amendments give Islamic courts increased authority over family matters, including marriage, divorce and inheritance. Activists argue that this undermines Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law, which unified family law and established safeguards for women.

Iraqi law currently sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage in most cases. The changes passed Tuesday would let clerics rule

That one Executive Order:

Section 1.  Purpose.  Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.  This is wrong.  Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.  The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.  Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in

Where’s the joined-up argument?

Zuckerberg's 'masculine energy' got its first win with Trump declaring there are only two genders. This agenda will see laws passed to force gays back into the closet and women back into the kitchen. Our trans siblings are in the front line of this fight, so now more than ever pic.twitter.com/4elMDntCcU

— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) January 21, 2025

In what way does feminism (aka women escaping the kitchen) depend on the belief that there are more than two “genders”?

In no way. It’s a stupid leap Bragg is making, and it’s devoid of sense.

Women have been escaping the kitchen for decades, without any help at all from trans ideology or trans activists.… Read the rest

Across the pond

Europe’s left-wingers on Tuesday raced to condemn Elon Musk after the world’s richest man performed a stiff-armed salute at an event to celebrate new United States President Donald Trump.

…

The salute immediately generated a viral and divided response, with online critics attacking Musk for the gesture and supporters minimizing its significance.

“I will start by talking about the response, or perhaps the lack of responses of the EU to Trump’s inauguration. It represents a threat to the whole of the European Union,” said French member of the European Parliament Manon Aubry, co-chair of The Left group, at a press conference Tuesday morning. “Let’s start by keeping things simple, I am sure everyone saw the Nazi

A break for humor.

Ever since he left Britain, Prince Harry has valiantly endeavoured to carve out a new role in life. Unfortunately, however, not all his ideas have been successful – as a remarkable story in the new issue of Vanity Fair makes clear.

Shortly after moving to the US, a source claims, Harry told Spotify that he wished to present a “sociopath podcast”. In each episode, he would interview powerful world figures (for example, “Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump”) – and ask them how their life experiences had “made them into sociopaths”.

A startling enough suggestion. But there’s more. Because the podcast would also seek to find out why Harry, unlike his honoured guests, was

A soap opera from Scotland:

Four killers housed in the female wing of a Scottish jail have become embroiled in a “misgendering” row which led to one being accused of a transphobic hate crime, a court has heard.

Never mind that whole murder thing, zoom in on the putative twanzfobeea. Killing people is just one of those things that happen, but misgendering is unforgivable.

Alexandria Stewart, a transgender woman in HMP Greenock previously known as Alan Baker, claims fellow inmate Jane Sutherley carried out a four-year campaign, between Jan 1 2019 and March 23 2023 of verbal abuse that left them feeling suicidal.

Who? Who is this “them” left feeling suicidal? Both of them? Stewart and Sutherley? Or … Read the rest

Musk has gone full Nazi already.

Elon Musk waded into controversy on Monday when he gave back-to-back fascist-style salutes during celebrations of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.

Gee, I wonder why two Nazi salutes at a change in government would be of interest.

“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, the richest person on earth and a major Trump donor and adviser, told Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

Musk then slapped his right hand into his chest, fingers splayed, before shooting out his right arm on an upwards diagonal, fingers together and palm facing down.

Not your average random gesture.

Musk asked

No dissent allowed.

Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) Cult Survivors (and their Supporters)

Solisa Zamora  · 8m  · 

@everyone This is your friendly reminder that hate is not welcome here. We recognize all genders, we affirm your identity and we do see color and acknowledge and fully honor and respect it. There is no space here for any of the “-ism’s” Anything to the contrary will be dealt with as quickly as possible, please remember to tag or report to mods/admins. Thank you.

No space here for any of the “isms”? So saying that men can be women and that you can’t say otherwise is not an ism? Saying a man is not a woman is an ism while saying a … Read the rest

It’s not just the warming, it’s also ecological overshoot.

Global heating poses a horrific challenge, but climate change is only one co-symptom of a much greater malaise. Explosive growth has propelled the human enterprise into a state of advanced ecological overshoot (EO) (Catton 1982, Rees 2023). EO exists when the human consumption of bioresources exceeds the regenerative capacity of our supporting ecosystems, and the production of wastes overwhelms their assimilative capacities. Co-symptoms include plunging biodiversity, ocean acidification, tropical deforestation, land/soil degradation, the pollution of land air and water, contamination of food supplies, etc., etc.—all so-called ‘environmental’ problems.  When in overshoot, the world community can achieve further growth—and even just maintain itself—only by depleting essential natural capital and overtaxing the

Joan Smith on Yet Another Backlash:

For too long, a motley collection of trans activists and green zealots have only needed to threaten to withdraw from literary events, and the organisers have taken fright. Now the Oxford Literary Festival has discovered a backbone, inviting the gender-critical author Helen Joyce and the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel to take part in this year’s programme. Cue the predictable outrage.

There have been calls for authors to withdraw, on the dubious (some would say bonkers) premise that the invitation puts other writers at risk. Harry R. McCarthy, a lecturer in early modern literature, grandly announced that he had withdrawn from his scheduled session on “Shakespeare for the modern age” because Joyce and

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator.

To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers.

Of course genderism isn’t so much a “mass movement” as it is a movement forced upon the “masses” by way of forced teaming and captured institutions. They’re at no risk of being plowed under if they’re driving the plow. So much the better for one’s self image if you can claim that resistance is bigotry.

You know what I’m thinking about, of course – the chronic question of why so many

I’m not seeing any journalism reporting on this.

The answer is in!
And it is no.
Lesbians in Australia are not allowed to hold public events without men being present.
More info when we have digested this news.
So sorry everyone!

— Lesbian Action Group (@ActiveLesbians) January 20, 2025

Now, lesbians can still meet in private without incloooding men, so…back in the closet.

In a public event – yes. You can have a women only private party, but you can't advertise it, otherwise it becomes a public event and anyone who wants to come must be allowed in.

— Lesbian Action Group (@ActiveLesbians) January 20, 2025

Which being translated means: closet.

Updating to add:

Yes, go underground, like Jews in … Read the rest

Anne Applebaum on Trump v Denmark:

What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.

…

In private discussions, the adjective that was most

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator.

It’s tribalism all the way down. My endless fascination with Scientologists taught me that attachment to a tribe is one of the great instincts that drives human behaviour — just as great as the sexual and pair-bonding instincts are. What the Scientologists demonstrate so vividly is the capacity to completely block out obvious facts if they pose a threat to their sense of belonging within their tribe. The Xenu space alien story is possibly the most obvious pile of bullshit ever conceived, and yet perfectly rational people will find ways to avoid dispelling it, for the sake of staying in the tribe.

Tribalism is the whole reason … Read the rest

Anne Applebaum in 2020 on collaboration and resistance:

Separately, each man’s story makes sense. But when examined together, they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?

It’s a … Read the rest

Mmyeah. This is the way to do it. Just list all the good things and don’t pause for a single second to ask whether they are compatible with each other. Six twelve a million impossible things before breakfast.

Sure, kid, sure – challenge sexism and shout that men are women.

How’s that going?… Read the rest

Infant.

Donald Trump has said he will “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from a ban that is due to take effect on Sunday, on the eve of his swearing-in as the 47th US president.

I don’t have an opinion about TikTok or its ban or its reprieve from a ban, because I know pretty much nothing about it.

“The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation,” Trump said in a phone interview with NBC News.

He made similarly remarks hours later to ABC News.

“Well, I have the right as you know, I’m the one