Reuters tells us

California on Tuesday denied President Donald Trump’s claim that the U.S. military entered the state to release more water in the wake of deadly wildfires.

In a Truth Social post late on Monday, Trump wrote: “The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.” California’s Department of Water Resources responded hours later.

“The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful,” the agency said early on Tuesday in an X post.

On Sunday, he ordered the federal government

Wut?

The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water,…

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 28, 2025

Wtf is that even supposed to mean? Is there a giant faucet in Redding or somewhere that a couple of majors “turned on” to send all the water here to LA County?

No, so what’s he babbling about?

Also it’s not a Fake Environmental argument that the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades gets more rain than LA County, it’s just reality. LA … Read the rest

Trump’s revenge:

The Justice Department said Monday that it fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting Donald Trump, escalating the president’s campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies.

The employees worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that led to now-dismissed indictments against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Two extremely serious crimes that he committed basically in front of our faces, especially the attempted theft of the election.

As a country we’re rolling around in the mire like a herd of hyperactive pigs.

“Today, Acting Attorney General James McHenry terminated the employment of a number of

Trump is not messing around: he’s already bullying Denmark to underline his rude demands that it give him Greenland.

Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.

Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described [as] aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

He doesn’t get to order any head of state to give the state to him. Who does he think he is?

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed

There’s this fella named Philip Low who knows Elon Musk all too well. He has this to say about Musk and the Nazi salute:

Elon is not a Nazi, per se.

He is something much better, or much worse, depending on how you look at it.

Nazis believed that an entire race was above everyone else.

Elon believes he is above everyone else. He used to think he worked on the most important problems. When I met him, he did not presume to be a technical person — he would be the first to say that he lacked the expertise to understand certain data. That happened later. Now, he believes he has all the solutions.

All his talk about

How NOT to talk about the Holocaust on a tv news program.

“Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay, or belonged to another ethnic group.”

The statement actually doesn't make sense as spoken. It's as if an editor read the…

— Dr. Henry Silverman (@PropagandaBuff) January 27, 2025

As well as millions of others THAN WHAT?

They erase women by saying “people” and they erase Jews by saying “people” – and they do it right in plain sight.… Read the rest

It’s surrogacy day at the BBC.

A couple said they decided to document their journey to have a child via a surrogate after feeling there was “no information” available about the process.

Kevin Pittuck-Bennett, 46, and his husband Michael, 38, from Chelmsford, had their two-month-old daughter, Peggy, in 2024 via surrogacy, which is when a woman carries a pregnancy for another couple or individual.

…

Sarah Jones, the chief executive officer at Surrogacy UK, said: “The UK surrogacy community in the UK is really unique in the fact that we operate altruistically, so nobody is allowed to make profit, nobody is allowed to financially profit from surrogacy in the UK.”

It’s interesting how all the altruism is from women. … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bruce Everett on A pause, a freeze, a ban, a cancellation.

This is going to be a pretty big global economic storm that Trump’s brewing. I’m kind of glad to be in Australia right now, where we certainly have economic problems, just not as fundamentally bad as a lot of other economies. We may be well positioned to mitigate a lot of the chaos.

That being said, we’ve got an opposition that’s great at talking up its economic cred, but hasn’t done a competent job since 2007, despite being in government for most of it, and they weren’t even that s**t hot when they were okay (The Howard Gov’t 1996-2007 coasted on Keating’s economic reforms … Read the rest

Trump is doing the deportations thing just as he said he would, but the reporting reveals that the Biden and Obama administrations did plenty of deporting themselves. It’s not clear to me that Trump is doing anything radically different.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants out of the US and the promise of “mass deportations”. To that effect, the defence department has said that it will provide military aircrafts to deport more than 5,000 people [who] have been detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

ICE statistics show that over 1,000 people were removed or repatriated on Thursday, the fourth day of the Trump administration.

…

Deportations are not unique to the

Pure oblivious selfishness on display as if it were completely normal.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want my own family. Even in my early twenties, as a gay man before gay marriage was legal, I imagined that I’d probably marry a woman to have a family and then sleep with men on the side. It might not have been the best scenario, but that’s how much I wanted kids. I’d originally had it in my head that I’d like to be a dad by the time I was 40. But here I am at 44 – still trying.

He thought he’d marry a woman so that he could “have” some kids, and that he would fuck … Read the rest

It’s always hate women day at Number 10.

A drag queen who criticised JK Rowling over her views on trans people was invited to celebrate Burns Night at No 10.

Sir Keir Starmer was pictured alongside Lawrence Chaney, a former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, in an event Downing Street said was intended to “honour the life and legacy” of Scotland’s national bard.

Starmer wanted to celebrate Burns so he invited a mockery of women to help the celebrating. It’s funny how men like Starmer don’t invite blackface comedians to help them celebrate things, but they do think it’s just fine to invite womanface comedians to do that. Women don’t matter, is that it? Women are obviously inferior so … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Down is up.

This important statement details why a sex based approach to violence against women is problematic.

Anything other than a sex based approach to violence against women endangers women and girls you idiot. It’s only “problematic” if you insist on “including” people who don’t belong, i.e. men. A clear boundary is only a problem for those who wish to blur it in order to violate it. Why do you hate women so much, Sally? Why do you find it more important to placate men than protect women?

A girl or woman is anyone who has lived experience as a girl or woman, or identifies as a girl

Jane Clare Jones on Musk’s Nazi salute and the quarrels over whether it was or was not a Nazi salute.

There seems to be a common conviction among several commentators in and around the anti-woke sphere that Elon Musk’s ‘awkward gesture’ at Trump’s inauguration on Monday could not possibly have been a Nazi salute and that anyone who thinks it was is probably a) stupid b) nuts or c) a sanctimonious virtue-signalling wanker posturing for woke-points. I find this easy dismissal troubling. 

There’s a lot of that kind of thing around. I think the Left has lost its tiny mind when it comes to women and trans ideology, but thinking that doesn’t make me think Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be … Read the rest

Rape Crisis Scotland still crapping on women.

Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS), the organisation which provides support to rape victims, has published new guidance on how it defines a woman – saying that this is anyone who self-identifies as one.

The new document, called Draft Guidance On Protected Spaces For RCS Member Centres, says a woman can also be “someone whose sex at birth was assigned as female and lives as a woman”.

Oh gee, thanks for the permish. A woman can be a woman, but it’s second-best; the ideal kind of woman is the male kind.

The document, which has taken almost a year to prepare, aims to set out detailed guidance on the provision of women-only spaces within

Norwegians don’t mess around.

Late on Monday night, in the bright sunlit tundra of the South Pole, another record is broken as 21-year-old Norwegian Karen Kyllesø stepped past the line of national flags and stood next to the red and white striped pole representing the southernmost point on Planet Earth.

After just under 54 days of trekking 702 miles through no man’s land, Kyllesø became the youngest person ever to reach the South Pole on Skis, solo and without assistance.

Not too shabby.

That’s the one that Scott and four of his men died trying to reach first. Amundsen and his team got there ahead of him and without casualties – on skis. Scott and his team didn’t use … Read the rest

Sally Hines is a menace to women.

This important statement details why a sex based approach to violence against women is problematic.

Deadline to sign Monday 27 Jan

SIGN ON: Joint Statement Concerning the Call for Input by the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls https://t.co/QRiKNHtyNt

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) January 26, 2025

… Read the rest

The Guardian has a detailed backgrounder on Trump’s confusion plus lying about California v water.

On his first day in office, Trump directed the secretary of commerce and the secretary of the interior to develop a new plan that will “route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply”.

Cool plan, but then what to do about the people who will desperately need a reliable water supply after Trump “fixes” things?

In a memorandum titled “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California”, Trump directed the agencies to reprise the efforts of his first administration, which challenged

Dear god.

I’ve figured it out. It’s the map. On the map the Pacific Northwest is “above” California – so Trump thinks that means it’s literally above it – like, at the top of a slope that runs from Vancouver down to Malibu. He thinks he could get on a skateboard in Vancouver and just roll on down to Santa Monica without once having to kick.

Trump: "I'm signing an executive order to open up the pumps and valves in the north. We want to get that water pouring down here as quickly as possible … you're talking about unlimited water coming up from the Pacific Northwest, even coming from parts of Canada." pic.twitter.com/4tn5K8RaXt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 25,

No more fire, the water next time.

Weekend rains threaten to trigger dangerous mudslides in hillside communities leveled by Southern California wildfires in the last two weeks.

The National Weather Service forecasts up to 1.5 inches of rain starting as early as Saturday morning. The precipitation could help firefighters combat new blazes across Southern California—but even a small amount of rain could cause mud and debris to course down steep slopes laid bare by the Eaton and Palisades fires. 

And 1.5 inches is not a small amount of rain.

California’s normal rainy season continues through March, with February the wettest month of the year. Now, dry and burned soil stripped of its native chaparral and grasses forms a

The Washington Post on the purge:

The White House late Friday fired the independent inspectors general of at least 14 major federal agencies in a purge that could clear the way for President Donald Trump to install loyalists in the crucial role of identifying fraud, waste and abuse in the government.

Which is kind of a bad idea from the point of view of wanting fraud, waste and abuse prevented. What you want in people identifying fraud, waste and abuse is not personal loyalty but disinterested dedication and skill.

The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general.

Which tells us that Trump is … Read the rest