The NY Times reports:

Not long before the Ukrainian president was inaugurated in May, an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s journeyed to Kiev to deliver a warning to the country’s new leadership, a lawyer for the associate said.

The associate, Lev Parnas, told a representative of the incoming government that it had to announce an investigation into Mr. Trump’s political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and his son, or else Vice President Mike Pence would not attend the swearing-in of the new president, and the United States would freeze aid, the lawyer said.

The claim by Mr. Parnas, who is preparing to share his account with impeachment investigators, challenges the narrative of events from Mr. Trump and Ukrainian officials

It seems Don Junior was booed out of his own book event because he’s…not right-wing enough? Jeez, conservatives are so easily triggered. Pass me a hanky.

Donald Trump Jr. apparently failed to grasp the hypocrisy in refusing to answer questions for an event to promote his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, which is dedicated to mocking liberals and their so-called political correctness.

But the president’s eldest son’s missteps were not lost on the audience at UCLA on Sunday, where his own supporters, frustrated with the lack of a Q&A opportunity, filled the event with incessant booing.

So then his girlfriend, a former Fox “News” performer, taunted them with not being … Read the rest

Julie Bindel wrote about Sophie Wilson and Spearmint Rhino a week ago, starting from the humiliation of Labour under Corbyn:

Sophie Wilson, a 23-year-old Sheffield councillor who was last week selected as Jeremy Corbyn’s candidate for Rother Valley, has campaigned against feminists trying to close a notorious club, and for the “right” of women to “choose” to work there.

Last year, Wilson was carpeted by Sheffield City Council after a complaint about her online conduct was partially upheld. She had tweeted that the women protesting the existence of lap dancing clubs in the city — many of whom are survivors of sexual exploitation — were “trashy SWERFS”. Another tweet read: “SWERFS and TERFS are usually one in (sic) the

Even Parents Magazine? What next, The Mainstream Herald? The Churchy Gazette? Middleground Digest?

Headline:

Mom’s Viral Post Celebrates That ‘Some Women, Some Non-Binary People, & Some Men’ Get Their Periods

Yunh hunh, and some bats make webs, some spiders echolocate, some tigers knit, some orcas play Bach cello suites, some houses are made of cotton candy, some cars can climb trees, some hats can fill out tax forms – let’s see some viral posts celebrating that.

Last month, Always announced that the Venus symbol would be removed from their sanitary products’ packaging to be more inclusive of transgender and non-binary people. “For over 35 years Always has championed girls and women, and we will continue to do so,” Always’

Janice Turner in The Times:

A friend told me his student daughter had become a feminist activist. Check out her Facebook page, he said. So I did, expecting posts on the gender pay gap or #MeToo. Instead I discovered the campaign to which she and her mates devoted their energy was to save the Sheffield branch of Spearmint Rhino.

Seriously? A lap-dancing club? Indeed, a multinational lap-dancing corporation, where men from London to Las Vegas can pay near-naked women to grind on their crotches in private booths. Spearmint Rhino, whose posters of strippers dressed in sexy uniforms for “naughty schoolgirl” parties were banned by the advertising watchdog, and which exists to flatter and feed the sexual entitlement

A tale of the German Democratic Republic (aka the GDR aka East Germany) and doping:

40 years of the official GDR were done, the Berlin Wall was about to be dismantled to the sound of the scuttling feet of Stasi (secret police) operatives dashing for the archive and the shredder.

Thankfully, there was just too much to shred, too much to hide, too many notes to wipe from the slate of history. They included scribblings of the precise dosages of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs – some of them clinically trialled on human guinea pigs – that fuelled the GDR sports medals and records factory.

…

The Stasi kept files on about 5.6 million people. The archive of what

More moles:

Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley alleges that two of President Trump’s senior advisers tried to recruit her to secretly undermine the administration from the inside.

That’s Business Insider’s way of wording it.

In her explosive new memoir, Haley claims former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly attempted to bring her in to subvert the president, according to The Washington Post which obtained the book prior to its release.

Haley refused their attempts to convince her to “save the country,” noting Tillerson and Kelly were suspicious of and threatened by her relationship with the president. During her time in the administration, Haley demonstrated an “obligation

Ray Blanchard interviwed at Quillette:

I published my early writings on autogynephilia in specialty journals with very small circulations. I intended them for a tiny readership of clinicians who specialized in the assessment and management of gender-dysphoric patients. However, this work attracted the attention of two individuals who decided to promote it more broadly, one online (Anne A. Lawrence) and one in a book (J. Michael Bailey). These efforts, especially the book, enraged three influential trans women—two of them senior academics—who attempted to get Bailey fired from his teaching position at Northwestern University for writing it. This campaign has been documented in detail by Alice D. Dreger, a medical historian. Paradoxically, the efforts of trans

Jonathan Freedland on Labour and antisemitism.

For most progressive-minded, remain-leaning folk, is it even a dilemma? I’m not sure. To them the logic must seem simple and straightforward: they want to eject a cruel and useless government and stop Brexit, and that means denying Boris Johnson a majority and replacing him with Jeremy Corbyn, who will end austerity and hold a second referendum. Job done.

But it’s not that simple for him, much as he would like it to be.

The thought of it prompts in me, and the overwhelming majority of the community I grew up in, a fear that we have not known before.

I’m referring to Britain’s Jews who, for the first time in their history,

Some dastardly fiend stabbed the Alabama Trump Baby balloon.

A towering Baby Trump protest balloon was knifed and deflated by someone unhappy with its appearance during Donald Trump’s Saturday trip to Alabama, organisers said.

The incident occurred during the president’s visit to watch a University of Alabama football game. The balloon, which is more than 6.1 metres (20 feet) tall, was set up in a nearby park.

Jim Girvan, the organiser of a group that “adopts” out Baby Trump balloons for protests, said a man charged the balloon with a knife and cut a 2.4-metre (8-foot) gash in the back. Girvan said the unidentified man was taken into custody.

Good! Throw the book at him!

Robert Kennedy,

How difficult can it be?

It took a marathon school board meeting. It followed months of divisive debate, including two student walkouts. It came after the student newspaper opted for change for similar reasons.

“It” is another high school dropping its longtime “Redskins” mascot, with this one in Idaho proving a particularly contentious exercise.

Hm. Maybe we could shorten these exercises with a new plan: all teams named “Redskins” will alternate between that and “Whiteskins” every week until people get the point.

As reported by the Washington Post, Teton High School (Driggs, Idaho), which sits just outside Yellowstone Park and the Wyoming border, announced Tuesday evening it would retire its “Redskins” mascot at an undetermined date in the near future.

Lara Adams-Miller shared some anti-suffrage images yesterday. It’s always unnerving to see how very venomous they were.

“Shut up, terf” and “punch a terf” rhetoric is nearly indistinguishable from anti-suffrage rhetoric.

Those go way beyond just shut up – they urge torture.

Suffer, bitch!

More:

A man’s foot on her breasts, a hundred-twelve*-pound concrete block on her abdomen and crotch, while she is choked and drowned by a great vat of soup. Clear enough?

*correction… Read the rest

Originally an item for the Miscellany Room from Screechy Monkey. 

So, Slate has a really, really shitty sex advice column called How To Do It. It presents a real dilemma for me: from Slate’s point of view, a click is a click, so they can’t tell that I sometimes read it just for the train wreck value as opposed to actually thinking the authors give good advice.

(Why is it shitty? Well, aside from the issue I’m about to complain about, I’m reminded of something Dan Savage once said when asked if he had any advice for young people who want to be sex advice columnists. After noting that he wasn’t interesting in encouraging competition, he said the one mistake … Read the rest

An authoritarian state boss abusing his power who isn’t Trump:

A British Indian author and journalist has been stripped of his Indian citizenship after he wrote an article criticising the regime of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Aatish Taseer, who was born in the UK but raised in India and spent a further decade living there from the age of 25, was stripped of his overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status on Thursday.

Taseer, who has written multiple books on India, described the government’s move as “highly suspicious and systematic”. He added: “They are making an example of me and sending a warning message to other journalists.”

Wouldn’t Trump love to do that.

The decision followed the

To the surprise of no one we learn that Mick Mulvaney too is implicated in the Ukraine extortion.

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney approved a White House meeting for the Ukrainian president – if Ukraine announced investigations tied to Joe Biden, a political rival of Donald Trump, according to testimony unveiled on Friday by the congressional committees pursuing an impeachment inquiry.

Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, “blurted out” that Mulvaney had approved the meeting if the Ukrainians announced an investigation of Burisma, a gas company that formerly employed Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, said Fiona Hill, a national security council member who was deposed by the committees last month.

Hill’s account was corroborated

And speaking of special rules for women – a conversation among some feminists on Twitter brought up the familiar issue of Why is it always women who have to wear the torture shoes or tight lacing or tiny dress in freezing cold?

Jennifer Lawrence has criticized “sexist” media coverage of her fashion choices in a new Facebook post.

The Oscar-winning actor, currently on a press tour for thriller Red Sparrow, responded to comments suggesting that the sleeveless Versace outfit worn during a photocall in London implied that she was being mistreated alongside her coat-wearing male co-stars.

“Wow. I don’t really know where to get started on this ‘Jennifer Lawrence wearing a revealing dress in the cold’ controversy,” she wrote.

cazz pointed out this Harvard Business Review article.

Susan Fiske and her colleagues have shown that people seem to universally use two dimensions to judge others: competence and warmth. We decided to test for both of those in addition to confidence. As a proxy for the likelihood of being promoted, we also tested for influence, on the theory that people who are seen as influential are more likely to be promoted to leadership roles.

We conducted a study analyzing the judgments that colleagues made regarding the competence and warmth of 236 engineers working in project teams at a multinational software development company. As part of their performance evaluation, the engineers were evaluated online by their supervisor, peers, and collaborators