Now who knew there was a need for this?

https://twitter.com/charlmarx89/status/1142799457282605058

The price is the same, so the pwitty pink dogshit bags cost more.… Read the rest

There’s this brilliant French tv series about life under the Occupation, Un village Français. The station that ran it a few years ago fills in the gaps between the end of one show and the start of the next (gaps because they all start on the hour) with whatever fits, and sometimes that is a one of a set of interviews with witnesses that accompanied the French series. They ran one such clip last night, and the subject was…

…the separations of children from their parents that happened during the deportations To The East.

It was only about 5 minutes worth, but it was very affecting nonetheless. The separations were almost all final. The interviews are elderly people describing … Read the rest

A “burkini” protest in Grenoble:

Muslim women in France are disobeying the rules at a local swimming pool by wearing burkinis.

In a protest inspired by US civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, they bathed in suits covering their entire bodies – apart from the face, hands and feet – in the city of Grenoble on Sunday.

The Jean Bron swimming pool is among many in France that ban burkinis.

Leave Rosa Parks out of it. It’s not the same thing. Banning a garment is not the same as banning people.

After changing into burkinis, the Muslim members of the group were told by lifeguards that their swimsuits were not allowed.

Despite this, they entered the pool and bathed for

Trans girls are girls.
No one is hurt when trans people live authentically.
Not in the restroom.
Not in the locker room.
Not on the court, field or track.

We stand in solidarity with all trans people. pic.twitter.com/HcpuOmT3BJ

— ACLU of Connecticut (@acluct) June 20, 2019

I hope the ACLU of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Colorado, California et al. knows better than that.… Read the rest

This is somewhat puzzling.

A THREAD Today I’m delivering LGBT+ workshops to over 100 year 7s at a school in East London as part of my new @LondonFire Equalities Job. Before we started we were told 8 parents had contacted the school to pull their kids out specifically of my session “Cos of Birmingham” 1/6 pic.twitter.com/CvDusThBDD

— Abby Crawford (@Abby_Crawford_) June 20, 2019

I don’t get it. Why is the London fire department, or Fire Service as it’s called over there, giving LGBT+ workshops? Why is the Fire Service doing that any more than grocers or bus drivers or bankers or plumbers would?

Lots of people asked about that.

I'm very concerned about anyone giving lessons to children and would

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker reports that this week lawyers interviewed a lot of children being held in nightmare border prisons, in order to monitor compliance with Flores.

The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks.

That sounds…so…familiar.

It sounds, for instance, like the conditions at the work camp part of Auschwitz, where Margo and Anne Frank died of typhus. But this isn’t the Nazis. This is us. This is our government doing exactly, yes exactly, what the … Read the rest

Oregon’s one of those funny states with a reputation for granola hats and peace-loving recycle bins, but the reality is that it has a big share of right-wing god-n-guns types. Apparently they have seized the state legislature.

Oregon’s statehouse shut down for safety concerns on Saturday. But the threats weren’t coming from anonymous trolls or foreign fighters—they were coming from the state’s Republican senators, who have teamed up with right-wing militias to threaten violence over a climate change bill.

Eleven of Oregon’s Senate Republicans fled the state this week to avoid a vote on a bill that would cap greenhouse emissions. The group, believed to be hiding in Idaho, left the state senate with too few lawmakers to hold

The shunning is well under way.

Sarah Honeychurch, a fellow in the Adam Smith Business School at Glasgow University, was among more than 30 academics who signed the letter in last week’s Sunday Times. It registered “disquiet” over a programme run by the charity Stonewall in which “anti-scientific claims are presented . . . as objective fact”.

The guidance includes instructing academics on using gender neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “ey”, as well as insisting that “one in 100 are born with an intersex trait” and that trans women should be allowed to use female changing rooms.

…

Last week Honeychurch, an editor of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the managing editor,

Maybe it’s all a plot by Big Plastic Surgery.

Not really, but it’s certainly a gold mine for Big Plastic Surgery, also for Mid-size and Tiny Plastic Surgery. In the latter category is Dr. Beverly Fischer MD for instance. (Isn’t Dr./MD redundant? A bit trumpian?) Doc Beverly has a most alluring Twitter header.

Her profile is more advertisement than profile:

All your #PlasticSurgery needs! Lips, Face, Body. #Halo, #SculpSure, #BioTe & More. Get the best beauty tips, advice & special offers 👉http://bit.ly/2o0u9RZ

She urges us to get a facelift.

No matter how dedicated you are to your skincare routine, your skin will still age with time. Here's how a facelift can make all the difference. #facelift #plasticsurgeon pic.twitter.com/MhFmhMoEZo

I saw this on Twitter.

Apparently it’s from Edinburgh Pride. I’d love to know what the rest of the “BRICKS NOT” sign says, but the “NO MORE TERFS” sign with the picture of a woman’s mouth talking and the “fuck TERFs” are informative on their own. Pride is about hating feminist women now. Whoopdydoo.

What Gordon Ramsay has to do with it I don’t know.

Updating to add: MP Joanna Cherry also saw it.

Several women have drawn my attention to this photo taken at #PrideEdinburgh today. It makes me very sad. #Pride was never about #Hate. I marched on my first #Pride in London 30 years ago. It was diverse. Inclusive. This #misogyny is destroying our movement pic.twitter.com/ZP5XCXb7uv

If you knew…

If you knew of a child who was being forced by a parent or guardian to sleep on a cold concrete floor, in overcrowded surroundings, with screaming lights always on overhead that made it hard to sleep, with limited access to a bathroom, no way to brush their teeth, no soap and no towel — would you do something?

Of course you would. You would dial 911 (in the US) and report the circumstances and location.

But if the child is a migrant, it’s government policy to do that to them.

In 2014 — during the Obama administration, it should be noted — several young immigrants caught along the border said they had been given dirty water

Jeffrey Toobin tells us what Clarence Thomas has been up to lately, starting with a grotesque case out of Mississippi:

A Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine.

That’s the message of an astonishing decision today from the Supreme Court. The facts of the case, known as Flowers v. Mississippi, are straightforward. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, in his admirably blunt opinion for the Court, “In 1996, Curtis Flowers allegedly murdered four people in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers is black. He has been tried six separate times before a jury for murder. The same lead prosecutor represented the State in all six trials.” Flowers was

The Post reports on the childish chaos of Trump Playing War all day and then telling the world that he’s a Big Boy and he can Change His Mind.

The plans had been drawn, the targets set, and a single word from the commander in chief would have activated the U.S. military to strike a foreign adversary. But President Trump was having second thoughts.

After giving his top Pentagon officials permission to prepare for U.S. military strikes against Iran, Trump convened his top advisers in the Oval Office on Thursday evening and began asking crucial questions just minutes before the operation was set to commence, according to officials familiar with the episode.

Cool that he asks crucial questions, but the … Read the rest

Trump has (of course) put out a disgusting “statement” (that reads as if written in crayon on a cereal box) saying nuh-uh he never did.

Wow. The White House issues a statement from President Trump denying writer E. Jean Carroll's claim that he assaulted her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman 20 years ago. "I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book…"https://t.co/z2pFp8X9Ni pic.twitter.com/iNu6SGDq7G

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) June 21, 2019

CNBC has the text:

Regarding the “story” by E. Jean Carroll, claiming she once encountered me at Bergdorf Goodman 23 years ago. I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book—that should