Sure but they got away with it anyway.

Judge says Barr “misled” aka lied about the Mueller investigation.

A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.

That’s a terrible opening sentence/paragraph. The Times should worry less about wiping out the Oxford comma and more about a too-long one-sentence opening paragraph with too much context-free information lumped all together with no punctuation. I know the idea is overview first then details but the overview in this … Read the rest

Heeheehee Trump has a blog. I bet mine is better.

His retro webpage, billed “From the Desk of Donald J Trump”, appears at DonaldJTrump.com/desk and features a small photo of the 45th president writing in a book on his desk.

Which is funny because he barely knows how to write.

Twitter announced it had banned Trump permanently after the US Capitol attack for breaking its “glorification of violence” rules.

Facebook also banned him, with its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, saying “the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great”.

But Facebook’s independent oversight board is expected to announce on Wednesday whether it is overturning the suspension.

In the meantime

… Read the rest

Big news – another open letter saying eeek transphobia eeek. Great, because there haven’t been enough of those yet.

A group of individuals from across the books industry has written an open letter to The Bookseller which has warned “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry”, arguing that what is needed is “quiet statements of acceptance from companies and organisations within our industry”. 

But how are these individuals defining “transphobia”? It tends to mean just not agreeing with the magical dualist claims of trans ideology.

The three-page letter, entitled ‘The Paradox of Tolerance’, is signed anonymously from a number of trade figures, including publishers, writers, illustrators and booksellers. It is published below this article. The Bookseller

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on So, Dan.

How on earth do they get from one to the other?

Leap of faith.

Call me paranoid, but I think there’s more to it than that. They look like two serarate, but connected moves.

Opening girls’ sports to boys who claim to be girls will only result in a tiny number of trans girls joining teams anyway so it’s not a problem”

First, minimize the the imposition. Make the problem look small; make the reaction to it look extreme and unreasonable. “It’s only a few, what’s the harm? You’re over-reacting!” And this is setting aside the fact that however “few” boys are admitted to teams, at least that … Read the rest

A woman wonders, very tentatively, if there’s anything at all sexist about the ever-escalating trend (aka pressure) for women to spend much of their time and money repairing putative flaws in their faces breasts genitals buttocks legs arms hands feet nails teeth hair.

It’s nothing shocking now for women of my age (30) and younger to seek out anti-ageing procedures. To feel troubled by this puts you in strange territory.

I feel sometimes there is a feedback loop in feminism. Issues first raised by second-wave feminism – and perhaps broached too prescriptively – were later reconsidered under the idea that feminism should allow women to do what they want. Take body hair removal. Quite rightly, feminists over the years have

… Read the rest

Frank Bruni at the Times says Tucker Carlson is trying to be the new Trump – i.e. the new guy who says stupid shit to rile people up. Grab some popcorn, kids, it’s another episode of Who’s the Biggest Troll?

Case in point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.

“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse.”

So what we should do, no doubt, is deny him the … Read the rest

#CreepyTucker is trending on the Twitterbox, and this is why.

Tucker Carlson reacts to Obama doing a PSA calling on more Americans to get vaccinated after teenagers over 16 were approved to get the shot:

"Some creepy old guy telling your children, your little kids to take medicine whose effects we do not fully understand." pic.twitter.com/eQ5HX0TAv6

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 4, 2021

Obama is “some creepy old guy.”

"Tucker Carlson is the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott. Certainly not Ted Cruz. Those other men are vying merely for Trump’s political mantle…Carlson is seizing Trump’s theatrical mantle as well." https://t.co/WHygDY8083

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 2, 2021

A cheerful prospect.… Read the rest

The New York Times did an offensively bad and one-sided job of Explaining the moves to prevent boys from competing against girls in school sports. To put it more bluntly, they argued for allowing boys to compete against girls as if it were just obviously fine and not at all unfair.

I’m quoting from the transcript. It’s worth listening to some, to hear how emphasis is used to tip the scales even more.

Just four months into 2021, Republican state lawmakers across the country have already proposed more bills restricting the lives of transgender youth than in any previous year. Today, Sabrina Tavernise spoke with our colleague, Dan Levin, about what’s behind these bills and the impact they could have

… Read the rest

About Australia’s travel ban from India…

Scott Morrison has continued his “don’t worry about the India travel ban” media tour this morning on Nine’s Today show, where he was asked about former test cricket opener Michael Slater’s comments that the prime minister has “blood on his hands”.

…

The decision to make attempting to return to Australia within 14 days of being in India a criminal offence punishable with up 5 years in prison and fines as high as $60,000 has been roundly criticised. Morrison has been going to great lengths to water down this rhetoric this morning.

The likelihood of any sanction, anything like that is extremely remote.

If the law is on the books the law is … Read the rest

But it’s not dehumanizing.

No one should have to deal with this. But I am 38 years-old and they are not going to shake me by trying to dehumanize me. But remember this is what they are doing to kids. Every day. Relentlessly. Saving women’s sports? Or just hating trans people…. pic.twitter.com/sJQIXGooCZ

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) May 3, 2021

But it’s not dehumanizing. Women are human. Saying a woman is a woman isn’t dehumanizing her. You can call it rude or unkind if you like, but it’s not even slightly dehumanizing. Women and men are both human.

He’s 38 years old. I do find that slightly shocking. People should be reasonably adult by that age.… Read the rest

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic sought out some vax-refuseniks to explain their thinking.

The people I spoke with were all under 50. A few of them self-identified as Republican, and none of them claimed the modern Democratic Party as their political home. Most said they weren’t against all vaccines; they were just a “no” on this vaccine. They were COVID-19 no-vaxxers, not overall anti-vaxxers.

Many people I spoke with said they trusted their immune system to protect them. “Nobody ever looks at it from the perspective of a guy who’s like me,” Bradley Baca, a 39-year-old truck driver in Colorado, told me. “As an essential worker, my life was never going to change in the pandemic, and I

… Read the rest

We can’t have herd immunity because people are too stupid.

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are

… Read the rest

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre puts the lotion on its skin.

https://twitter.com/EdinRapeCrisis/status/1389112490215288832

Who wouldn’t be delighted to welcome a man as head of a rape crisis centre?

https://twitter.com/dinahbrand2/status/1389171027704389633… Read the rest

Trevor Phillips warned of the problem back in 2018.

The disaster of the public consultation process on gender recognition has revealed a government so terrified of being labelled transphobic that it is ready to destroy half a century of painstakingly assembled anti-discrimination legislation to the detriment of every woman, person of colour and disabled individual in Britain. Under the current law, a change of gender requires a two-year period of reflection, medical checks and possible physical alterations. It is a gruelling process and proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act rightly aim to make the process less bureaucratic.

However, agitation by a guilt-tripping band of “trans” activists has corralled MPs into contemplating a wholly unnecessary and dangerous further step.

… Read the rest

So apparently Rudy Giuliani should be allowed to break whatever laws he chooses now, because if he’s not then that’s fascism?

Attorney Alan Dershowitz on Sunday criticized federal agents’ raid on Rudy Giuliani’s apartment last week, telling radio host John Catsimatidis that it was reminiscent of conduct seen in authoritarian countries.

“In banana republics, in Castro‘s Cuba, in many parts of the world when a candidate loses for president, they go after the candidate, they go after his lawyers, they go after his friends,” Dershowitz said. “That’s happening in America now. They’re going after Rudy Giuliani.”

So Rudy Giuliani should have permanent total immunity now? Because he was Trump’s lawyer and fixer and enforcer? Is that how that works?… Read the rest

More on Mridul Wadhwa, from Stuart Campbell at Wings Over Scotland:

Party insiders like the former Trade And Industry spokesman Iain Lawson have been shining light on the arcane and opaque processes of “vetting”, whereby people who want to be candidates themselves astonishingly have the power to block potential rivals and where “woke” candidates are receiving extremely preferential treatment, but the fait accompli is almost complete – by the time the party belatedly elects a new NEC in six weeks, candidates will be in place and it’ll be too late to change anything.

And of course, what’s revealing is who HAS been passed to stand for nomination as well as who hasn’t. Readers, meet a man called

… Read the rest

On and on it goes, ratcheting ever up.

Hooray hooray as a man is named CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

Mridul Wadhwa takes over from Caroline Burrell who has led the organisation for 16 years.

Mridul said: “I am very excited to be moving to ERCC. Having been involved in the violence against women and equality sectors in Scotland since 2005, I am really looking forward to leading the committed team of women who do such incredible work supporting survivors of sexual violence. 

“I am especially pleased to be joining the organisation at a time when it is seeking to increase its accessibility to and inclusion of survivors of gender based violence from marginalised and easy to ignore

… Read the rest

https://twitter.com/kazarnowicz/status/1388148589671686146

I don’t believe that pianos can become oranges, but I do believe that trans oranges are oranges. Just like trans apples are apples.

If a bunch of cranks can just decide by fiat that the word that has always named the female half of humanity now includes men, then they can decide by fiat that anything means anything and we will never be able to make any kind of sense ever again.

The word “women” is already taken, and random Michaels don’t get to grab it away from us.… Read the rest

Just another woman.

A serving police community support officer whose body was found in woodland died from “significant head injuries”, police said.

The body of Julia James, 53, was found in Akholt Wood, Snowdown, near Dover, on Tuesday.

…

Ms James, whose body was found a few hundred yards from her house, had been taking her dog for a walk when she was killed. The pet was found unharmed at the scene.

…

Ms James joined the force as a PCSO in 2008 and had more recently been working with victims of domestic abuse while based in Canterbury.

Mr Richards said: “She was a hugely-devoted, passionate individual who was completely committed to serving the people of Kent.

But also … Read the rest

The UN points out that the torrent of online threats and abuse aimed at women journalists is not a good thing.

The avalanche of misogynistic abuse and threats is not only damaging women working in media, it is also weaponised “to undercut public trust in critical journalism and facts in general”, a report commissioned by the UN’s cultural agency Unesco has found.

‘The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence Against Women Journalists” draws on interviews with 901 journalists from 125 countries. Journalists from diverse backgrounds faced particularly intense attacks, as misogyny mixed with racism, homophobia, religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination, the report found. “Online violence against women journalists is designed to belittle, humiliate, and shame; induce fear,

… Read the rest