What higher purpose could a billionaire have than to get poor people thrown off food stamps and Medicaid?

Last December, an innocuously named nonprofit, the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), wined and dined Republican politicians and White House staffers at a Walt Disney World resort, according to a new report from the Center for Public Integrity. The pitch: make it harder for poor Americans to access government programs meant to help them get on secure financial ground, especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, and Medicaid.

In other words, make already poor people even poorer. Take the already pathetic hanky of a “safety net” and shred it more.

FGA is heavily financed by a powerful

Someone has commented on Know her name, the post about Chanel Miller and the guy who raped her. It’s a first-time comment and I’m not going to let it appear on the post like a normal comment. I’m going to quote it in a post instead, like an abnormal comment.

Only 3 months? Brock Turner’s life was completly ruined. He lost his scholarship to Stamford was banished from the campus for life, lost his membership in the amateur swim association so he can never swim in competion again, lost his once in a lifetime bid to try out for the olympic swim team, is now a convicted felon and sex offender so he can never enroll in any school

Dirtier more toxic water please; that’s what we want.

The Trump administration is changing the definition of what qualifies as “waters of the United States,” tossing out an Obama-era regulation that had enhanced protections for wetlands and smaller waterways.

Thursday’s rollback is the first step in a process that will allow the Trump administration to create its own definition of which waters deserve federal protection. A new rule is expected to be finalized this winter.

The repeal ends an “egregious power grab,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler says. He adds that the 2015 rule had provoked 31 states to file complaints and petitions for legal review.

“We’re delivering on the president’s regulatory reform agenda,” Wheeler says.

It’s not … Read the rest

Sometimes an unpopular opinion is unpopular because it’s kack. This one for instance:

Unpopular opinion: hating on astrology is masculine distaste for female-coded interest in emotions and psychology which feeds misogyny that denies women access to scientific spaces

Say what? If you’re interested in emotions and psychology talk about them. What’s astrology got to do with it? Also astrology is pre-scientific handwaving. Also defending astrology seems like a pretty inept way to give women access to “scientific spaces”…whatever those are.

The tweets @karenmcgrane was replying to:

Unpopular opinion: your just-for-fun flirtation with astrology apps is normalizing belief in anti-scientific bullshit that undermines important, life-and-death public health and policy debates.

I used to work at a company that sold

Holly Lawford-Smith on what we mean when we talk about gender and gender norms:

Radical and gender critical feminists think the best way to understand gender is as a set of harmful norms, which are applied to people on the basis of their sex. A female person, for example, is subjected to norms that tell her to take great care over her appearance, to be helpful, kind, caring, and warm. A male person is subjected to different norms, for example telling him to be strong, bold, clever, and stoic, to not care much about his appearance. What’s key here is the subjection part: norms are applied to us by others, throughout our early childhood socialisation, both inside the

Good.

From Speak Up for Women New Zealand:

This morning the Green Party has been presented with a letter calling for them to clarify the party’s position on women’s rights. It has been signed by hundreds of people, including some of New Zealand’s most prominent feminists: Sandra Coney, Prue Hyman and Dr Alison Laurie.

The letter was triggered by the Party’s decision to remove an article written for their newsletter by Jill Abigail – a feminist activist and long standing Party member.

Dr Alison Laurie, says “Jill Abigail’s well reasoned, moderate letter raised points that need further discussion. Bullying and silencing her is indicative of an authoritarian culture within the Green Party.”

Marama Davidson, the Greens co-leader, dramatically claimed

More shit news:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday granted a request by President Donald Trump’s administration to fully enforce a new rule that would curtail asylum applications by immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, a key element of his hardline immigration policies.

That is to say, his hardline racist immigration policies. It’s brown people he’s hell-bent on keeping out, not people in general.

The court said the rule, which requires most immigrants who want asylum to first seek safe haven in a third country through which they traveled on their way to the United States, could go into effect as litigation challenging its legality continues.

Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

…

The rule would bar

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Funny kind of public engagement.

One of the signs in that picture really pisses me the fuck off, as it perfectly encapsulates the doublethink involved in this whole goddamn process. It reads, “Don’t look for society to give you permission to be yourself.”

You know what? That’s what feminists have been saying since the beginning. A woman should not need to fight for social license to study physics, be a doctor, drive a race car, have short hair, or wear goddamn pants. A man should not need to fight for social license to study dance, be a nurse, do interior decoration, have long hair, or wear frilly, lacy sleeves. We … Read the rest

Another exchange with Alice Roberts:

I don’t seek to promote any ideology, just to make sure science isn’t misrepresented and misused to justify certain political ends. And biological essentialism is especially dangerous – having been used variously to excuse racist, homophobic and anti-trans ideology in the past.

DrFondOfBeetles:

Do you think it’s fair for transwomen to participate in female sports?

[an hour later] This is a very simple question. Did you miss it or are you ignoring it?

Here is Selina Soule. She used to win sprint races.

Now she loses sprint races. Now she fails to qualify for junior championships. Because now she has to race against males.

These males. These males who believe they

Yes Trump actually did order NOAA to contradict its own staff in order to back up his mistake about Alabama. Yes he is that dishonest and that petty and that dictatorial and that willing to abuse his power.

President Trump told his staff that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needed to deal with a tweet that seemed to contradict his statement that Hurricane Dorian posed a significant threat to Alabama as of Sept. 1, in contrast to what the agency’s forecasters were predicting at the time, senior administration officials said. This led chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to call Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to tell him to fix the issue, the officials said.

That should never happen. Trump is … Read the rest

Framing is everything.

Transgender teen bullied for using girl’s locker room

Being a transgender teen at Galesburg High School, Ali Mcdorman, always knew she would eventually encounter hate. However, she never thought that hate would come from an adult.

“I feel like grown people…like adults… wouldn’t target a teenager,” said Ali McDorman, a 16-year-old student who identified as transgender three years ago.

But Ali said she was targeted. In a Facebook post last week, one parent wrote:

“Did you know… that Galesburg High School is allowing a male student (who identifies as a female) to be in AND a change in the same locker room as the girls while they are changing?? #GHS “

“It wasn’t derogatory towards me necessarily.

Professor Alice Roberts again, professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, linking to a bad article on Vox and pissing on feminists:

Beware biological essentialism: the latest frontier in civil rights, and the unholy alliance between gender-critical feminists and the far right:

It’s not “biological essentialism.” That would be claiming that liking to wear skirts=being a woman, and that’s not what we claim.

Francis Wheen asked:

Why are you trashing your academic reputation by promoting this slipshod, defamatory and unscientific drivel? Clearly you don’t know any GC feminists, or you’d realise how grotesque it is to smear them as agents of the “far right”. Shameful.

Hadley Freeman was tactful but firm:

I’m sure

People have lost their minds.

Meet the first gender neutral penguin at aquarium Sea Life London.

Staff have decided not to describe the Gentoo penguin as male or female because they say gender is more of a human construct. Expert Aquarists say it would be normal for it to grow up as genderless in the wild as male and female penguins look almost the same until they mature and reach adulthood.

Not almost the same, just plain the same. Lots of birds are not visibly dimorphic at all and nobody knows what sex they are. That’s nothing to do with “gender neutral” though, it just means the sex is unknown. Animals don’t have “genders.” Of course gender is a … Read the rest

Typical Trump admin: when in doubt, go for the kill everything option. If there’s a choice, always choose death and destruction.

The Trump administration said Tuesday that it is expanding hunting and fishing in 77 national wildlife refuges in a move that critics contend is deferring management to states and could harm wildlife.

Not much of a refuge if you kill them, is it.

The Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said hunters and anglers can shoot and cast their rods on 2,200 square miles (5,700 square kilometers) of federally protected land in 37 states, much of which is considered critical habitat for waterfowl and other birds to rest and refuel during their migration.

“This is the largest