Why not shepherds? Priests? Angels?

America’s newest branch of the military is about to celebrate the end of its first year, and now members of the Space Force will have something to call each other.

Vice President Mike Pence announced on Friday that members will be called “guardians.”

On the one hand it sounds a bit fascist, and on the other hand it sounds soppy. We’re not orphans, we don’t need “guardians.”

“It is my honor on behalf of the president of the United States to announce that henceforth the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as guardians,” Pence told an audience at the White House. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians will be

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Trump is soothing his poor bruised ego with the thick poultice of cash he’s fooled a lot of people into giving him.

Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Mr. Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.

Not bad as a consolation prize.

His astonishing talent for raising money by being a flaming asshole means he is still the boss of the Republicans.

Mr. Trump has long acted with few inhibitions when it comes to spending other people’s money, and he has spent millions of campaign dollars on his own family businesses

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I’m not the only one who finds it absurd that Jolyon Maugham says judges must not meddle with what parents decide is best for their children.

https://twitter.com/oliverburkeman/status/1340007739389558785

How can he be? If he thinks for even a second? Some parents are abusive. Some are mentally ill. Some are alcoholics. Some are addicted to drugs that render them incapable. Some are religious fanatics. Some are sadists. The law sometimes has to protect children from their own parents. Maugham is a barrister; he can’t possibly be unaware of that fact.

While I was in rehab recovering from heroin addiction, my daughter was made a ward of court and put in the care of my parents.
At that time, the judge knew better

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The Guardian reports:

One of the Scottish Greens’ most prominent MSPs has resigned abruptly from the party, citing its “intolerance” to open discussion of potential conflicts between women’s and transgender rights.

Andy Wightman, the Scottish Greens’ list member for Lothian region and a highly respected campaigner for tenants’ rights and land reform, stated in his resignation letter published on Friday afternoon: “Some of the language, approaches and postures of the party and its spokespeople have been provocative, alienating and confrontational for many women and men”.

It’s the part about treating women’s rights as entirely secondary to trans rights that gets on our nerves. That and all the rest of it, but it’s rooted in this bizarre assumption that we … Read the rest

Lesson time!

Your pronouns reflect…you!… Read the rest

It’s the old “feminism is just victimhood” trope.

https://twitter.com/hatpinwoman/status/1339628416170115072

Uh huh. It’s that simple. Just be full and capable and awesome and there will be no arbitrary unjust obstacles! Or maybe there will, but that means you get to overcome them and be better than everyone else. Yay we’re better than everyone else! Unjust obstacles are a good thing because we get to look so much more capable by overcoming them.

https://twitter.com/Julio_Vichon/status/1339541425084575747

So…there are unjust obstacles, but they are thrown in front of trans people only. Women just sail through one open door after another, the bitches.… Read the rest

Let them eat…grouse? Truffles? Caviar? Foie gras? Saffron-infused fish and chips?

Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Unicef of “playing politics” after the charity launched a campaign to help feed children in the UK.

The Tory MP said the charity was meant to look after people in the poorest countries and should be “ashamed”.

It comes after Unicef said it would pledge £25,000 to a south London charity to help supply breakfast boxes over the Christmas holidays.

Unicef said every child deserves to “thrive” no matter where they are born.

Surely even Jacob Rees-Mogg can grasp that living in a rich country is compatible with being personally very poor. If you live in a rich country with crap social services … Read the rest

I keep thinking “imagine trying this bullshit with race – imagine white guys saying they ‘identify as’ black and trying to bully black people into agreeing.” Now we can see an actual example in the wild.

.@Critic_Speak asked me to contribute to a podcast discussion around the subject of race in the Welsh Arts scene.

They wanted me to talk about how I might have suffered, as a Black artist, from the gatekeeping White hierarchy that has dominated Welsh culture forever.

Instead/ https://t.co/QIuO58NaNb

— Sonya Douglas (@SonyaDouglas) December 17, 2020

That is, simply, How Do I Live?

How do I live when women and girls are subjected to such violence on their bodies, their psychology, their education and choices?

… Read the rest

Trump longs and craves and pines and yearns to see a special counsel investigate something something something Hunter Biden, but it’s a little tricky in the last weeks of a lame duck presidency.

President Donald Trump is pushing extensively for the appointment of special counsels to separately investigate his baseless allegations of voter fraud and allegations surrounding Hunter Biden, the son of the President-elect, according to people familiar with the matter.

I wonder if it ever occurs to him that an investigation of his baseless allegations would simply underline the fact that they’re baseless. “Please please please investigate my fake claims! You’re sure to find something even though my claims are fake!!”

Justice Department rules say a special counsel must

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Beware “wellness.” It’s always bullshit and sometimes it’s worse than that.

Another day, another ‘clean eating’ instagramer posting images of toxic flowers on food.

It may not contain dairy or gluten *gasp* but it does contain the toxic plant alkaloid, lycorine.

Symptoms: Itching, swelling, (and in quantity) nausea, vomiting & convulsions. pic.twitter.com/CH4zLMnS1i

— James A Wong (@Botanygeek) January 28, 2018

From 2018 but “wellness” promoters who tell us to poison ourselves haven’t gone away yet.

Yes, whilst this “pudding” is free from gluten and the milk we’ve drunk for centuries, any health benefits would be heavily offset by the terrible diarrhea you would likely get from lycorine, found in the deadly Narcissus flowers sat prettily atop the glass. You

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I missed this news item from DC a couple of years ago:

The Cuba Libre restaurant in Penn Quarter has agreed to institute civil rights training for employees and pay a $7,000 fine following an incident in June in which two staff members attempted to prevent a transgender woman from using the ladies bathroom.

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced today that his office had reached a settlement with the Washington location of the chain following an investigation that found Cuba Libre DC violated the city’s Human Rights Act by discriminating against Charlotte Clymer’s gender identity and failing to educate its employees on customers’ rights.

Customers’ rights? Or customers who are trans women’s rights. Clearly women’s rights are not … Read the rest

The Great Man quotes himself.

"I've moved a long way in my conceptualisation of what privilege really means, and quite how extraordinarily stupid and thoughtless and arrogant my tribe can be" https://t.co/TjJbNspeav

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) December 15, 2020

He hasn’t though. Or maybe he has, in the sense that he was even worse before. I don’t know, I didn’t know of him before. But in the sense of actually becoming thoughtful and not arrogant? No. No, there he has failed utterly.

In fact, amusingly, the very act of tweeting this vain “Look how awesome I am” self-quotation demonstrates that failure. His habit of blocking anyone who disagrees with him no matter how politely just underlines it.

Updating to add … Read the rest

Grace Lavery in action just a few hours ago.

I mean, the tactic of SAYING NUMBERS VERY LOUDLY in support of a minor criticism about citation? Smacks of self-knowledge. This may be the first time Jesse has had to confront how petty, pedantic, obscure, and obscene he seems to those who aren’t part of his little cult.

— Prof. Grace Lavery (@graceelavery) December 16, 2020

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1339282593901142025

Grace Lavery’s graceful response?

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1339308878476013573… Read the rest

“Grace” Lavery gets a pile of crap published at Foreign Policy. Why FP is that gullible is beyond me. It’s about the Tavistock ruling (so that makes it suitable for FP because it’s in Another Country?).

In effect, the courts intervened in the transition-related care of children experiencing gender dysphoria, putting those children and their families in the position of having to seek care abroad.

But calling it “care” assumes the very thing that is at issue – that puberty blockers are a legitimate treatment for a genuine medical condition that needs treatment. That’s a very shaky assumption, and for Keira Bell, for instance, it turned out to be entirely wrong. Lavery is cheating by treating it as obvious … Read the rest

Hey kids, let’s have martial law!

Virginia state senator Amanda Chase [has thrown] her support behind President Donald Trump‘s refusal to concede to former Vice President Joe Biden, going so far as to say that the commander in chief should declare martial law and let the military oversee another election.

Is that fascist enough yet?

While some of Trump’s closest allies have acknowledged Biden’s victory, the president himself has not indicated he has plans to give up the fight to stay in power.

Chase, who is looking to garner the Republican nomination for governor, also refuses to accept the results, writing in a Tuesday Facebook post that Biden “is not my president and never will be.” She praised

… Read the rest

The locusts might return for a second round.

New swarms of desert locusts are threatening the livelihoods of millions of people in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of control efforts, the United Nations has warned.

The UN says there have been good breeding conditions in eastern Ethiopia and Somalia, with Kenya also at risk.

And breeding underway on both sides of the Red Sea poses a new threat to Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

This is after the worst locust invasion in 70 years.

Between January and August this year East Africa saw billions of the insects destroying crops across the region. “We lost so much of our pastures and vegetation because of the locusts

… Read the rest

Trump lost but the Republican party remains the Republican party.

Today, to be an aspiring Republican politician in good standing, one must espouse a set of core beliefs that are either entirely baseless or provably untrue: the climate crisis isn’t real; gun safety laws don’t reduce gun violence; masks don’t reduce the spread of Covid-19. To many observers, embracing a conspiracy theory about corrupted voting machines or late-night “ballot dumps” would represent a break with reality. But for much of the Republican elite, that’s not a problem. They broke with reality long ago.

The Republican establishment is also increasingly willing to disenfranchise eligible voters if it helps them win. Between 2008 and 2016, America lost 10% of its polling

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About all this gender stereotyping…

“Harmful” gender stereotyping has helped fuel the UK mental health crisis afflicting the younger generation, an influential report has warned, adding that it is at the root of problems with body image and eating disorders, record male suicide rates as well as violence against women and girls.

And maybe the hot new fashion for claiming to be the other sex?

Stereotyped assumptions also “significantly limit” youngsters’ career choices, in turn contributing to the gender pay gap, according to the findings of an influential commission set up by the leading gender equality campaigning charity the Fawcett Society.

Warning that stereotyping persists in parenting, education and the commercial sector – notably toys, books and

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Trump’s neighbors would really rather not.

Next-door neighbors of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., that he has called his Winter White House, have a message for the outgoing commander in chief: We don’t want you to be our neighbor.

Mister Rogers would have said the same.

That message was formally delivered Tuesday morning in a demand letter delivered to the town of Palm Beach and also addressed to the U.S. Secret Service asserting that Trump lost his legal right to live at Mar-a-Lago because of an agreement he signed in the early 1990s when he converted the storied estate from his private residence to a private club.

Yes but everybody knows that Trump’s signing an … Read the rest

She really doesn’t care.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1339002069345325062… Read the rest