Comedy interlude:

Donald Trump has claimed that the Club World Cup trophy that has featured prominently in the Oval Office will stay there, and that Fifa made a copy of the trophy that was awarded to Chelsea after their win in the tournament’s final on Sunday.

Trump attended the final along with numerous members of his cabinet and Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino. The pair of presidents jointly presented the trophy to Chelsea captain Reece James, with Trump staying front and center despite the apparent confusion of Chelsea players and the pleading of Infantino.

The pleading of Infantino is hilarious. Trump is the new Alfred E. Newman/Zelig, popping up to ruin everyone’s special moment.

Infantino unveiled the Club World Cup

This is the real problem – the how we got here. It’s more basic even than the belief in magic gender.

It’s the obsession with self self self self, and the insistence on forcing one’s precious divine holy sanctified fascinating SELF on everyone else.

Adults used to know that other people are never as interested in Precious Me as we are, and that it’s childish and embarrassing to act as if they are.

Teachers aren’t there to tell the children all about the teachers’ darling selves. That’s not the job. That’s not the point of school. They’re not there to chat to the kids about their sex lives.

I suppose it goes all the way back to the dreaded “self-esteem” … Read the rest

Oh come on. Seriously??? The head of MI6? Don’t jobs of that kind usually go to adults?

Victoria Smith does another one of those Every Damn Sentence Is a Gem articles at The Critic.

She starts with Jon Ronson’s 2015 book about being publicly shamed.

Back then, I’d been classed as a “terf” for over a year, having written a piece very tentatively critiquing the concept of cis-ness (I would not be so tentative now). It was a strange, disorienting period…

2015 is the year I left “Freethought” blogs as “colleagues” tripped over each other in the rush to class me as a terf. A strange period indeed.

You’d have to have been within certain specific circles — in my case, the feminist blogosphere, in which we were suddenly ordered not to write about abortion

Even Rand Paul doesn’t admire Vance’s joy in murdering people.

The Republican senator who heads the homeland security committee has criticized JD Vance for “despicable” comments apparently in support of extrajudicial military killings.

“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” the vice-president said in an X post on Saturday, in defense of Tuesday’s US military strike against a Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean Sea, which killed 11 people the administration alleged were drug traffickers.

See, vice presidents are supposed to know things like “you can’t just kill people you think did a crime without any due process first.” I’m pretty sure it’s taught on the very first day.

Trump

But wait a second, how does he know it’s not radio waves? Or the speed limit? Or bad vibes? Or over-ripe plums?

Doctor uses Reform conference speech to link king’s cancer to Covid vaccine

The speech by Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who was appointed as a senior adviser to the US health secretary and vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy, drew sharp intakes of breath in the Birmingham auditorium where he was handed a prime speaking slot.

After setting out what he said were findings showing that vaccines “created havoc” in the human body, Malhotra said he had been asked to share something by a doctor who[m] he described as one of Britain’s most eminent oncologists.

“He thinks it’s highly

The Scotsman reports:

One of Edinburgh’s top performing secondaries has been accused of censorship after it emerged senior teaching staff banned an interview with a gender-critical MP.

A pupil at Boroughmuir High School secured an interview with the former SNP politician Joanna Cherry last year – but the headteacher pulled the article from the school newspaper citing fear of controversy.

Fear of controversy? No. Fear of relentless uproar and shouting and bullying. So the noose tightens and tightens – no you are not allowed to talk to someone who says men are not women, because those men would shout at us. It’s not years in the Lubyanka, it’s not life in Siberia, it’s angry stupid deluded men shouting at … Read the rest

Sarah Barker is not impressed by Malcolm Gladwell’s mea culpa.

Hard-boiled editors, presidents of sports organizations, communications directors who were used to being screamed at, who were used to getting their way, they all smiled and nodded along meekly to the most nonsensical garbage, adopting absurd ideological language that they knew to be absurd ideological language…

Malcolm Gladwell, well known author, journalist, columnist, and all-around influential person, both in the sports world and beyond, came clean on that front, and my goodness, hasn’t it created a stir…

Gladwell quickly moved past that bombshell—that he knew back in 2022 that what these trans activists were saying was “nuts” but that he was “cowed” into not challenging it; that he agreed

CNN on Trump’s megalomania:

President Donald Trump posted a meme on social media Saturday saying that Chicago “will find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” as the city’s officials brace for an immigration crackdown.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning … Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the post reads. Trump signed an executive order Friday to rebrand the Pentagon as the “Department of War.”

…

Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Saturday called Trump’s post “not normal.”

To say the least.

On the one hand it’s absurdly childish, which I suppose is why my first reaction was to laugh, but on the other hand it’s outrageously fascist, … Read the rest

Trump declares war on Chicago. Not metaphorically.

President Donald Trump posted a meme on social media Saturday saying that Chicago “will find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” as the city’s officials brace for an immigration crackdown.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning … Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the post reads. Trump signed an executive order Friday to rebrand the Pentagon as the “Department of War.”

As people have been saying for months, this isn’t the approach to fascism, this is the thing itself.

Rep. Mike Quigley, who represents part of Chicago, said Saturday afternoon on CNN that the post is an example of Trump “edging

It just gets worse and worse and worse.

A retired police officer was visited by her former force over social media posts “dead-naming” a transgender activist, The Telegraph can reveal.

Cathy Larkman, who served with South Wales Police for more than three decades, was shocked when former colleagues turned up at her door near Port Talbot on Sept 4.

The former superintendent said police informed her that the home visit was related to a handful of social media posts about a transgender activist named Freda Wallace.

Ms Larkam had called the activist Fred, using the “dead” male name of the now transgender woman, and this act had been reported to the police.

What??? What the fucking fuck? What “act”? … Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on Full circle.

Again the sublime indifference to the futures of their children and grandchildren.

One class I had to take for my Ph.D. in Environmental Science was Economics, specifically Economics of Natural Resources. It was interesting to note that in the class, every thing he taught was about maximizing profit right now. In Economics, there is no future, there is only today. The idea that someone else ends up making the money once you’re dead is anathema. You must make as much money as is possible, and that means cutting the forests down, drilling the oil, and in general making mush of the environment right now.

It’s really all about the … Read the rest

Meanwhile today –

So let me get this straight. A lesbian is thrown out of Pride at the behest of a heterosexual Member of Parliament who of course is a Liberal Democrat. What a travesty. https://t.co/Cpc9WHQQJH

— Joanna Cherry KC (@joannaccherry) September 6, 2025

The MP in question is Zöe Franklin.

So, good policy – if you banish all the lesbians who raise the subject, no one will ever mention it or hear about it again.

Also, completely irrelevant but hilarious – she’s got the umlaut in the wrong place in her own name!! It’s supposed to be on the e, so that people know it rhymes with showy as opposed to show. … Read the rest

Via Tim Harris in comments, Paul Krugman in conversation with a couple of scientists, a few snippets thereof.

Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened. Transcript follows…

I felt like maybe we climate scientists had something to offer in terms of experience and insight, into how to deal with a sort of coordinated, orchestrated anti-science of the sort that Peter and Tony Fauci and others in the vaccine world were dealing with.

Like I said, we climate scientists were being vilified and attacked decades ago, before it became

We might as well give up. It’s all women’s fault, always, all the time, no matter what. He didn’t hit her, she provoked him, end of story.

Police are investigating claims that a leader of the For Women Scotland campaign group harassed a pro-trans activist by vandalising his rainbow umbrella.

They’re not investigating, or just plain recording, the obvious fact that an anti-women activist harassed women who dared to speak up for their own rights.

Police Scotland has faced intense criticism from gender-critical campaigners and MSPs for allowing Tom Harlow, of the Cabaret Against the Hate Speech group, to disrupt a rally outside Holyrood on Thursday by attempting to drown out speeches with amplified music.

The force defended its

On and on it goes: the rule that says women are of no importance at all and can be bullied and slandered at will, while men who claim to be women are saints, diamonds, gods, martyrs, angels.

Look at Ian Bristow for example.

A Liberal Democrat councillor has been suspended after posting a threatening image aimed at gender-critical women.

Ian Bristow, a councillor in Hertfordshire, tweeted a picture of a girl aiming a gun, alongside the words “Shut the f— up, Terf”.

A councillor did that. A man grown up enough to be elected to office.

The image was sent to Natalie Bird, a gender-critical party member who was removed as a prospective parliamentary candidate for Wakefield in 2018 because

PBS has a few samples from Kennedy’s deranged testimony.… Read the rest

From a public Facebook post:

I’m no political expert, but I’ve lived inside the Beltway for the last 30+ years, worked briefly on the Hill as a mere child, and have had a backseat to a lot of what DC has to offer—I don’t think I’ve ever had a political experience quite like the RFKjr hearing today.

I couldn’t take a lot of photos because I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to kick me out for causing a disruption. Clips you may have seen on TV cannot possibly recreate the sheer extended bizarreness, dystopia, and surrealism of this event.

RFKjr has absolutely no respect for anyone at all, not even for FOTUS, the hand that feeds him.

I still wonder why he keeps advertising himself this way, as if he were charismatic and irresistible instead of toe-curlingly creepy. That stuck in the throat voice is torture to listen to, and his posh boy demeanor is torture x 10.

Also the “our founder” bit as if he were not talking about himself.

JK Rowling is threatening to sue our founder Jo Maugham unless we back down.

We look forward to seeing them in court. pic.twitter.com/WmhD1AiVzE

— Good Law Project (@GoodLawProject) September 5, 2025

… Read the rest

So there’s this fella Tom Harlow who calls himself “Cabaret Against the Hate” and chats about it as if it were a group but it’s really just the one guy. His thing is to make noise where women are talking and/or protesting. That’s it, that’s the cabaret: just drown out women talking. I wrote a post about him in October 2023.

He was in Glasgow yesterday making noise to drown out women talking and protesting.

Does that twat look "alarmed, upset and frightened" pic.twitter.com/aKn8wnXBYj

— lizmac #SALVO #ClaimOfRight (@elizabethm46248) September 5, 2025

… Read the rest