People can be so stupid. Voluntarily stupid, stupid because not paying attention and not giving a shit, as opposed to unable to help it.

Like setting off a pyrotechnic device in Southern California while fires rage all over the state and the Santa Ana blows.

A smoke-generating pyrotechnic device used during a gender reveal party sparked the El Dorado Fire burning near Yucaipa, which has charred more than 7,000 acres, officials said Sunday.

And doing it at a “gender reveal party” for fucks sake.

According to the Cal Fire San Bernardino Unit, the El Dorado Fire was caused by “a smoke generating pyrotechnic device” used during the party in El Dorado Ranch Park. The fire spread from the park

Nicholas Wade wrote a book on race, published in 2014 to scathing reviews. One of the reviews was in American Scientist. (I didn’t notice at first that it’s written by someone I know slightly: Greg Laden.)

In his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, science writer Nicholas Wade claims that race is real—that Darwinian natural selection has resulted in a number of biologically separate human populations characterized by distinct, genetically determined social behaviors. He asserts that many of these differences have emerged over the last 10,000 years and that they explain much of human history. He writes that recent science has “established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional” and uses this

Breaking news:

Unidentified masked men snatched the leading Belarusian opposition figure, Maria Kolesnikova, from the street in the centre of the capital, Minsk, on Monday and drove her away in a minivan, witnesses told local media.

Kolesnikova was one of the campaign partners of the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who claimed victory against the long-ruling president, Alexander Lukashenko, in disputed elections on 9 August.

Kolesnikova was reportedly seized soon after 10am local time while walking close to Minsk’s national art museum. Three other members of the opposition coordination council have also vanished, in what appears to be a targeted attempt by the authorities to wipe out the protest movement.

After, it appears, rigging the election.

Lukashenko’s victory

The NY Times reports on how Trump pays for all those lawyer hours:

He has drawn on campaign donations as a piggy bank for his legal expenses to a degree far greater than any of his predecessors.

Probably because his predecessors weren’t so eager to break the law.

In New York, Trump dispatched a team of lawyers to seek damages of more than $1 million from a former campaign worker after she claimed she had been the target of sexual discrimination and harassment by another aide. The lawyers have been paid $1.5 million by the Trump campaign for work on the case and others related to the president.

Couldn’t he have just paid someone to torture her to death … Read the rest

Well that will certainly change everyone’s mind!

The malicious lies about @realDonaldTrump from anonymous sources in the Atlantic are disgusting.

This story is an insult to journalism.

I would know, because I was there-> pic.twitter.com/pt7rDfwr8x

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 6, 2020

Yes indeed, Sarah Sanders who told countless lies to us at the behest of the chronic liar who lied and cheated his way into the presidency – she is just the person to convince us her lies about Trump are the truth.… Read the rest

Trump had other business that fateful day in Paris:

Trump pointed out a Benjamin Franklin bust, a Franklin portrait and a set of figurines of Greek mythical characters, and insisted the pieces come back with him to Washington. McCourt, the ambassador, was startled, but didn’t object, according to people briefed on the incident. Trump later quipped that the envoy would get the art back “in six years,” when his potential second term in office would be winding down.

…

The White House claims that Trump brought the pieces back so that they could be displayed for the American people. The problem is that the pieces are being displayed in the Oval Office, which is not open to the public.

More on the efforts to silence Claire Chandler:

Addressing the Senate on Thursday evening, Liberal senator Claire Chandler said a complaint had been filed against her under Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act in relation to an opinion piece on free speech published in a Tasmanian newspaper earlier this year and an email related to the piece.

In the opinion piece, Senator Chandler said women’s sports, women’s toilets and women’s changing rooms were designed for people of the female sex and should remain that way.

So we’re now in a world where legal bodies can punish women for “discrimination” for saying women are women and men are not women.

“Being summoned by a quasi-judicial body to appear and explain why I say

A motorcycle rally is worth dying for, right? And worth killing people for?

More than two weeks after nearly half a million bikers flocked to South Dakota, the tally of coronavirus infections traced back to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has surpassed 260, an estimate that is growing steadily as more states report cases and at least one death.

…

A Minnesota man in his 60s who went to the rally was later hospitalized for COVID-19 and died earlier this week, said Kris Ehresmann, head of infectious disease for the Minnesota Department of Health.

Minnesota has counted more than 45 cases tied to the rally, and that only includes people who got tested and then notified state health departments about

Here’s the tweet:

Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded! https://t.co/dHsw6Y6Y3M

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2020

Here’s CNN’s coverage:

President Donald Trump is continuing to wage battle against interpretations of history which he claims are un-American.

So the true-American or yes-American interpretation is that slavery was a benign arrangement that worked out very well for everyone, especially the slaves? In other words an enormous lie? That’s affirm-American?

In a Sunday morning tweet, the President said the US Department of Education would investigate whether California schools are using the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in [the] public school curriculum. The Pulitzer-Prize winning collection reframes American history around the date of

I can see only the first two paragraphs but that’s plenty. Iain Gately in The Sunday Times:

It’s been nearly six months since we were first asked to work from home, and one of the early silver linings of lockdown was — I think we can all agree — not having to spend a large proportion of every morning and evening with our nose pressed into a stranger’s armpit on a packed train or bus.

But, with a half a year to reflect, did we wish our commutes away too readily? If you’re not back at your desk, isn’t a small piece of you missing that daily ride to and from the office? For many of us, the commute

From Pliny’s Far Corner Cafe:… Read the rest

Trump doesn’t want any more of that god damn anti-racism training around here, understood?

Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.

You know, racism is kind of divisive too.

To be fair, I’m not sure I trust the people who do mass trainings of this kind to do it well, having sat through some silly bullshit even just working for the Seattle Parks Department, but on the other hand I trust Donald Trump a whole lot less than that.

The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical

Jessica Krug won’t be teaching her classes this year.

In a statement released on Friday night, the University provost, Brian Blake, and dean, Paul Wahlbeck, wrote: “Dr Krug will not be teaching her classes this semester. We are working on developing a number of options for students in those classes, which will be communicated to affected students as soon as possible.”

…

Krug’s biography on the GW website lists imperialism and colonialism and African American history among her areas of expertise. Her writings center heavily on issues of African culture and diaspora.

In itself there’s nothing wrong with that. People should be interested in other cultures and histories. But she faked it, which is another matter.

In Krug’s book

Is it a Sign?

A parade of boats in Texas celebrating their support for Donald Trump ended in disarray when multiple vessels got into trouble on apparently choppy waters leading to several sinking and a slew of distress calls being made to rescue officials.

Well, buddying up to Trump tends to end that way.

The event, called the Lake Travis Trump boat parade, had been organized on Facebook with images of Trump campaign slogans adorning a variety of boats.

Does Antifa have submarines?

Meanwhile Trump is playing golf.

Donald Trump visited one of his own golf courses on Saturday amid one of the worst recent scandals to his presidency in recent months and after expert warnings that up to

In a public post in a public Facebook group, a discussion of what to tell contact tracers.

Layperson looking for feedback. So I am in training to be a contact tracer, I have a trans family member so I escalated the way we were initially asking these questions. For epidemiological reasons we are required to ask for the following information:

Sex at birth

Gender identity

Sexual orientation

I have now been asked to create the verbatim myself that will go out to all the trainers for current and future training. The reason for this post is I am hoping to hear what would be prefered in terms of the verbiage for how a tracer would ask for that info.

Who is that fascinating man?

Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US, has said Boris Johnson is fascinated and inspired by Donald Trump, and is intrigued by the US president’s patchy relationship “with the facts and the truth”.

Well, “patchy” – more like non-existent. Trump’s relationship with the facts and the truth is like Trump’s relationship with Tiffany: it doesn’t exist. Trump wouldn’t even recognize facts and the truth if they came up to him at a party and sat on his lap.

Darroch wrote that Johnson had been “fascinated” by Trump on his visits to Washington as foreign secretary before he became prime minister, with particular focus on the president’s use of language.

This includes “the limited

Aw, he mad.

Jennifer Griffin of Fox News Did Not Confirm ‘Most Salacious‘ Part of Atlantic Story https://t.co/rUpbSWhHac via @BreitbartNews All refuted by many witnesses. Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never even called us for comment. @FoxNews is gone!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020

The Guardian gives details:

The Atlantic magazine published a story that described how Trump said he cancelled a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers”. Other outlets confirmed the news and detailed more incidents of Trump’s insulting attitude to American soldiers.

Among those was the Fox News national security correspondent, Jennifer

Greene’s post was so bad Facebook removed it.

Facebook said Friday it removed a Republican congressional candidate’s post [that depicted her holding a gun next to the images of three progressive congresswomen] for violating its policies against incitement of violence.

Brackets added for clarity.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a House candidate who has history of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic remarks and who has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory, on Thursday posted a picture of herself holding a rifle next to images of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — three of four members of the so-called liberal freshmen “squad.”

The terrible thing is, she will win that seat.

In the accompanying post, Greene railed against

Oh no, a 19-year-old was not allowed to order alcohol in a pub because the photo on xir id didn’t resemble xir. Tears ensued.

A transgender woman has spoken of her upset after she was refused service in a pub because staff did not think she looked like the person on her ID.

Savanna Galloway, 19, said she left Wetherspoons on Tuesday in tears after being told she would not be served.

She showed her passport to prove her age, but was told by two members of staff her picture did not resemble her.

Wetherspoons has issued the required groveling apology but has also said it still requires “‘a valid ID which resembles the person presenting it’ to be … Read the rest

Melania Trump today:

.@TheAtlantic story is not true. It has become a very dangerous time when anonymous sources are believed above all else, & no one knows their motivation. This is not journalism – It is activism. And it is a disservice to the people of our great nation.

— Melania Trump 45 Archived (@FLOTUS45) September 4, 2020

Melania Trump in 2011:

Your periodic reminder that Melania Trump was a shameless birther. pic.twitter.com/0CSpsAlqdf

— Ahmed Baba (@AhmedBaba_) December 5, 2019

Not journalism but activism YOURSELF, you lying piece of crap.… Read the rest