Don’t worry, folks, it’s all just hysteria.

During opening statements at the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) repeatedly dismissed concerns that Kavanaugh will play a key role in restricting women’s reproductive rights as mere “hysteria.”

Is it time to remind Ben Sasses that the root word of hysteria means “uterus”?

Also, is Ben Sasses seriously claiming that Kavanaugh will not tip the balance of the Court? Because nine is really not such a big number that he should be confused about it.

Referring to a string of protesters who were thrown out of the hearing while yelling things like, “stop the oppression of women!“, Sasse said, “People are going to

The Guardian has a piece by Hannah Mouncey, an Australian trans woman who plays Australian rules football.

 Graham Denholm/AFL Media/Getty Images

That’s Mouncey in the red jersey.

Late last week, the AFL released its long-awaited policy on transgender participation in Australian rules football. In it are a set of requirements trans women need to follow if they aim to play at AFLW level. These include having your testosterone below a certain level for two years, which I have no problem with, as well as the requirement that trans women undertake number of physical tests designed to ascertain if they have an advantage over cis women playing AFLW – the presumption being that this is because they are trans.

Oh lord, so confused. About those “pronoun badges” offered by the Edinburgh Student Union…

While I personally see this as a fantastic step forward on EUSA’s part, the wider reaction on Facebook has been less than encouraging. In a poll, 81 per cent of people (at the time of publishing) said that they don’t think the pronoun badges are a good idea, with only 19 per cent of respondents voting in favour.

While the results of this poll surprised me, many of the comments on both the original article and the poll unfortunately did not. In response to the original article, one Facebook user simply responded with a gif which stated “we need a new plague”. On the

There’s the dreadful news from Rio:

The stately national museum, once home to Brazil’s royal family, was still smoldering at sunrise on Monday when scores of researchers, museum workers and anthropologists began gathering outside, dressed in black.

Some sobbed as they began taking stock of the irreplaceable losses: Thousands, perhaps millions, of significant artifacts had been reduced to ashes Sunday night in a devastating fire. The hall that held a 12,000-year-old skeleton known as Luzia, the oldest human remains discovered in the Americas, was destroyed.

…

In recent years, state and city governments in Brazil have failed to pay police officers and doctors on time. Public libraries and other cultural centers have shut down. The ranks of the

The word “lesbian” used to be considered ooky because lesbians were considered ooky. Then there was Stonewall, and activism, and increased visibility, and Alison Bechdel, and Ellen, and Maddow. And then the word somehow became ooky again, apparently because it was somehow not “inclusive” enough. So when York Civic Trust put up a plaque to honor Ann Lister it carefully avoided That Word. It said “Gender-nonconforming entrepreneur. Celebrated marital commitment, without legal recognition, to Ann Walker in this church. Easter, 1834.”

And there was a stink, and a petition, and it worked.

A draft of the new wording will be proposed and opened for public comment in the coming weeks.

An online petition calling on York Civic Trust to

James Kirkup on Greens and Challenors and Terfblockers:

Aimee Challenor was a prominent Green activist. She was the party’s spokesperson on equalities issues and a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership. Aimee Challenor was a Green candidate in the 2017 general election and the 2018 local government elections. In both elections, her election agent was her father, David “Baloo” Challenor.

David Challenor was last month convicted of torturing and raping a ten-year old girl in the attic of the family home. He was charged with those crimes in 2016. So Aimee Challenor was nominated for public office for the Green Party by a man awaiting trial for the most serious sexual offences against a child. (Read more about this 

Now David Remnick has changed his mind and canceled the Bannon gig.

There are many ways for a publication like ours to do its job: investigative reporting; pointed, well-argued opinion pieces; Profiles; reporting from all over the country and around the world; radio and video interviews; even live interviews. At the same time, many of our readers, including some colleagues, have said that the Festival is different, a different kind of forum. It’s also true that we pay an honorarium, that we pay for travel and lodging. (Which does not happen, of course, when we interview someone for an article or for the radio.) I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns.

Hmmm this seems pretty nuts: Steve Bannon Headlines New Yorker Festival.

Readers of The New Yorker prize the magazine for its wide-ranging collection of perspectives. From Oct. 5 to 7, The New Yorker Festival, now in its 19th year, will bring some of these voices to venues around New York City.

Political figures feature prominently in this year’s lineup, which includes Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, who will be interviewed by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, a frequent critic of the administration.

“I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Mr. Remnick said in a phone interview.

And of giving even more publicity and platform space … Read the rest

Commenter Kalyani alerted us to another massacre in Burma, this time by the Rohingya rather than to them. There’s nothing surprising in that, of course – no magic law makes the victims of massacres, let alone members of the category of people targeted for massacres, perfect.

Amnesty International reported last May 22:

A Rohingya armed group brandishing guns and swords is responsible for at least one, and potentially a second, massacre of up to 99 Hindu women, men, and children as well as additional unlawful killings and abductions of Hindu villagers in August 2017, Amnesty International revealed today after carrying out a detailed investigation inside Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

Based on dozens of interviews conducted there and across the border

Reuters has a detailed story on the framing of the two Reuters reporters in Burma.

Time and again, Myanmar’s government appeared at risk of blowing its prosecution of two young journalists who had exposed a massacre of 10 Muslim men and implicated security forces in the killings.

On April 20, a prosecution witness revealed in pre-trial hearings that police planted military documents on Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo in order to frame them for violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. That admission drew gasps from the courtroom.

A police officer told the court that he burned notes he made at the time of the reporters’ arrest, but didn’t explain why. Several prosecution witnesses contradicted the police account

Robert Reich points out the well known fact that most people are not doing well in this economy and that there’s a huge gap between the rich and everyone else. Then he points out the not quite so well known consequence.

Last year, about 40 percent of American families struggled to meet at least one basic need – food, health care, housing or utilities, according to an Urban Institute survey. 

All of which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had in 2008, and possibly as bad as 1929.

Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and

The Des Moines Register has a guest column by Rob Tibbetts, father of Molly Tibbetts, the University of Iowa student who was murdered and hidden in a corn field last month.

Ten days ago, we learned that Mollie would not be coming home. Shattered, my family set out tocelebrate Mollie’s extraordinary life and chose to share our sorrow in private. At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas. We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.

Sadly, others have ignored our request. They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration;