NPR reported on July 25:

A jury has ordered anti-government extremist Ammon Bundy and associates to pay more than $50 million in damages to Idaho’s largest hospital in connection with armed protests last year that led to a security lockdown.

Remember him? The violent lunatic who invaded a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, and violently stayed there for a couple of weeks, and got one of his followers killed, all because he thinks he should be allowed to graze his cattle on federal land for free?

The decision handed down late Monday follows a ten day civil trial in which Bundy was a no show and where attorneys with St. Luke’s Hospital outlined what they called an extensive campaign

Is Willoughby immortal?

"Once this difficult generation of older women dies out, it'll be replaced by a new, compliant generation who know their place, haven't gained any confidence and find all lifecycle experiences irrelevant," thinks every misogynist ever https://t.co/hjQ2FlVSsM

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) August 11, 2023

… Read the rest

The BBC “reports”:

A teenage girl arrested on suspicion of a homophobic public order offence will face no further action, police said.

A video uploaded to TikTok by her mother showed the autistic 16-year-old being detained outside her home in Leeds in the early hours of Monday.

The hell it does. The police detained her inside her home, as we’ve all seen from the video. Bare feet on carpeted stairs; the police tromping all over the carpeted floor of the hall; the 16-year-old cowering at the end of a short corridor; inside.

It’s possible that she said the shock-horror thing about the cop looking like a lesbian like her aunty outside the door; we don’t know, because that … Read the rest

Reactions to the West Yorks Police “oops” are not uniformly admiring.

No further action.

Read that again. No further action. So why did a disabled child need to be dragged out of a cupboard screaming. Then be held in custody for 20 hours.

No further action.

Sack them all. We can’t have people so ignorant and dangerous as police officers. https://t.co/G72B4FW9sh

— Sarah Phillimore (@SVPhillimore) August 11, 2023

What happened to all that other stuff not shown in the video that was going to show the case in a completely different light? You know, the stuff you talked about in the original statement that you've now deleted? Making evidence up isn't a good look in a police force https://t.co/ttxR4t05a1

—

Oh look, West Yorks Police have admitted it was a mistake. They haven’t actually apologized, yet, but they have dropped the charge.

Please see our update in relation to the arrest of a girl in Leeds on Monday.https://t.co/WWN4ZzZb2a pic.twitter.com/1RhqCEEZPB

— West Yorkshire Police (@WestYorksPolice) August 11, 2023

… Read the rest

The NZ Herald on the puncher:

A young LGBTQ rights activist who was filmed punching a 71-year-old woman in the head during the heated Posie Parker counter-protest in Auckland this year has pleaded guilty to assault.

A young male activist. They just can’t stop themselves trying to defend the aggressors and accuse the victims when it comes to trans ideology, can they. It’s a young man who punched an elderly woman in the head, and that fact belongs in the lede.

The victim, who did not attend today’s hearing, told the Herald she was pleased to hear about the guilty plea.

“I am feeling very good today,” said the grandmother of six, who suffered a concussion and facial bruising

Paragraph one sets the scene…with a sudden plot twist at the end.

When she woke up on July 14, Chelsea Wolfe’s life was—in her own words—perfect. Her tickets were booked for Scotland, her registration for Freestyle BMX as part of Team USA was confirmed, her bags were partially packed, her training was going according to plan. She sat down to a bowl of cereal before heading to the bike park for a training session, and opened up Instagram. That’s where she learned that the UCI had just instituted a ban on trans athletes, starting in three days.

It’s not subtle. Eight iterations of “she” or “her” before getting to the trans part. Chelsea Wolfe is a man.

“My world

Stuff New Zealand reports:

A man has admitted assaulting an elderly woman during a protest against an anti-transgender speaker.

That’s a misnomer. It implies that the issue is just “transgender” in general, when it’s the way trans ideology erodes women’s rights. Letting women speak is not inherently “anti-transgender” and it’s certainly not an attack on trans people.

The protester, who has name suppression, appeared at the Auckland District Court on Thursday and pleaded guilty to a charge of assault, his lawyer Emma Priest confirmed to Stuff.

Why does the man who attacked a woman have name suppression?

The man hit the woman during a heated clash between supporters of Keen-Minshull and those who support transgender rights.

The man hit … Read the rest

Credit where it’s due – Peter gets it right for a change.

Police manhandled 16 year old autistic girl out of house "because she said officer "looked like her nanna, who is a lesbian"

This was allegedly deemed by #WestYorkshire police to be a homophobic hate crime

WTF!

Go fight some real crime @WestYorksPolicehttps://t.co/UiLkHh6Qqp

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) August 10, 2023

… Read the rest

Clarence Thomas has been cashing in even more than we knew.

During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:

At least 38

West Yorkshire Police have issued a statement.

West Yorkshire Police Assistant Chief Constable Oz Khan said: “We are aware of a video circulating on social media which, as is often the case, only provides a very limited snapshot of the circumstances of this incident.

“Officers had their body-worn video cameras activated during their wider involvement with this young girl which provides additional context to their actions.”

Ok so it could be that she was verbally abusive as the police were taking her home along with her older sister. But we know she wasn’t arrest-level abusive on the way home because the police didn’t arrest her, they took her home. They presumably didn’t take her home in order to show … Read the rest

Horror story out of Leeds:

A mother in Leeds, UK, has revealed that her 16-year-old autistic daughter was arrested by West Yorkshire police after one of the officers accused her of “homophobia.” The incident occurred after police had been called to provide a safe escort home for the vulnerable girl.

The girl (“Amanda” – not her real name) had tagged along after her older (non-autistic) sister who was out with friends.

After the two met up, Amanda’s sister began to experience concerns about her younger sibling acting in “unsafe ways,” and attempted to contact her mother but was unable to reach her.

Without another mode of communication, the older girl called their local West Yorkshire Police dispatch for help,

I probably disagree with LBC on most things, but not on this one. She’s good.

'People can't be reduced to one word like Karen.'

After SNP MP Mhairi Black compared gender critics to '50 year old Karens', @ShelaghFogarty says it's not 'bigoted' to have concerns about women's sex-based rights. pic.twitter.com/E8qoGBU4jJ

— LBC (@LBC) August 9, 2023

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on We left “normal” behind years ago.

We left “normal” behind years ago, and the worst we have ever seen so far may soon be as good as it ever gets.

To quote a Bruce Cockburn song, “the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”*

I’m no climatologist, but my understanding is that one of the effects of anthropogenic climate change is instability. So things won’t just change or shift, they’ll keep changing and shifting. So long as we keep pumping out more CO2, there is no “normal” to stabilize to. After Titanic struck the iceberg, it did not reach its “new normal” until it hit the floor of … Read the rest

The first thing I wonder is why on earth the CBC published this:

I shouldn’t have to ‘look’ non-binary for my identity to be respected

I’m serious about the wondering. The piece is bad – it’s stupid, trivial, self-absorbed, entitled, badly written, extremely badly reasoned, childish, fatuous, did I mention self-obsessed? There’s literally nothing of value in it. Why would a grownup national broadcaster publish such a thing?

I never know which is worse about the trans craze, the narcissism or the stupidity. I guess I don’t have to make a choice, but it kind of nags at me sometimes.

So anyway, I’ll show you what I mean.

Last year, I attended a conference where everyone wore name tags. I

More news on Storm Hans:

A dam in Norway has partly collapsed as the country battles record high river levels, flooding and landslides after a fatal storm.

…

All main roads between Oslo and Trondheim were closed on Wednesday.

Pål Erik Teigen, chief of staff at Innlandet police district, said his force had been monitoring the Braskereidfoss dam and working with power plant owner, Hafslund Eco. “On the south-west side the water is starting to go through … it’s going slowly. This is the best thing now,” he told the Guardian.

They had been considering staging a controlled explosion but once the water started coming through the side, they decided the best solution was to leave it.

“It’s a

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Storm Hans.

I’m still here even though it’s been a while. About a year ago I commented on how last summer was the driest on record in South-Eastern Norway. To hydropower companies, such as the one I work for, the drought made it a serious challenge to keep our powerplants running. To the end consumers the consequence was economy-breaking energy prices and a real danger of energy rationing during the winter. In the end what saved us (for the time being..) was heavy rainfall in late September/early October and lots of snow in January.

Well, this year is the polar opposite. In (what used to be) a “normal” year, the reservoirs would … Read the rest

Question of the day: is Mhairi Black a Karen?

Speaking with journalist Graham Spiers this week, Black suggested that gender-critical commentators were “bad actors” and “50-year-old Karens”. She also compared the gender-critical school of thought to historic white supremacy and intellectuals “who made these big prolific statements about how race was a key factor”. 

[God only knows what she meant by “prolific” there.]

When challenged by a member of the audience, who asked if someone could be perfectly decent and simply disagree with her on gender ideology, Black replied “If you keep it to yourself, aye.” So her message to those of us concerned about our hard-won sex-based rights might be summed up as: shut up woman. 

It’s not exactly

The NY Times broke the secret memo story and has the details.

The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory. In mid-December, the false Trump electors could go through the motions of voting as if they had the authority to do so. Then, on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally count those slates of votes, rather than the official and certified ones for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Step one, create some fake electoral votes. Step two, put Mike Pence alone in a room so that he can count the fake ones. Success!

While that basic plan itself was already known, the

There’s a secret memo.

An internal Trump campaign memo by Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer allied with Donald Trump, reveals new details about how the former president and his team initiated the plan to interfere with the electoral college process and install fake GOP electors in multiple states after losing the 2020 presidential election.

The 6 December 2020 memo, made public on Tuesday by the New York Times, shows how Chesebro laid out the plan to put forth slates of Republican electors in seven key swing states that Trump had lost.

The document, which federal prosecutors described as a “fraudulent elector memo”, revealed that Chesebro proposed the appointment of fake electors, and detailed a “messaging” strategy to portray them as