So people voted for Trump thinking he would make housing cheaper?
Do they know what he’s been doing for the past half-century? His day job, if you like? His one skill?
Is Trump serious about massive tariff hikes that could increase prices for US consumers as soon as he begins a second presidency, which was won partly because voters were so frustrated with inflation and costs of housing and groceries?
And they thought Trump would lower the costs of housing? Really?
Just curious.
In honor of Yay Blasphemy hour here’s this week’s Jesus and Mo.
Labour MP Tahir Ali has today advocated for blasphemy laws during Prime Minister’s Questions.
The MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley asked Keir Starmer if he would “commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Speaking in the Commons, Ali added that “November marks Islamophobia awareness month,” and that “last year the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts, including the Quran, despite opposition from the previous government.”
Then the UN Human Rights Council needs to have a word with itself. Goddy rights are the enemy of human rights. “Prophets” are the fictional goon squad that enforces bad retrograde misogynist religious laws and we have every right to say what we think of them. MP Tahir Ali has no right at all to impose his religion on anyone else (including his own children), any more than trans ideologues have a right to impose trans ideology on anyone.
The Prime Minister replied that the Government is “committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division”, including Islamophobia and antisemitism.
Oh did he now. Listen up, Mr Starmer: we get to dislike Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism. We get to dislike the “Abrahamic” religions. We get to say what we dislike about them. They’re all forms of illegitimate power, and it’s not a secular official’s job to put up a fence around them.
Ali said that “mindless desecration only serves to fuel division and hatred,” with the Prime Minister adding: “desecration is awful.”
Oh shut up. Theocracy is awful. The imaginary Eternal Prime Minister we can never vote out, never dissent from, never correct, never tell to fuck all the way off, is not something secular heads of secular governments should be shielding from the people.
Trans-identifying man Brianna Wu tells women we’ve never been denied anything so we just don’t get it.
Yes he actually wrote that. Women have never been denied any area of expression, he says, blithely ignoring all the many many areas of expression we have been denied, and in some cases punished for trying to enter. Man lectures women on how we have never been told “No” so we just don’t understand.
…you’ve never been denied any area of expression, there’s a lot women take for granted. You’re not punished every time you act in a way that is feminine. You don’t know what it’s like to be forced into a lot of toxic male social dynamics that feel terrifying. You don’t know what it’s like to feel your brain malfunctioning on testosterone.
Now let’s talk about all the things you don’t know what it’s like, Mister Wu.
Jack Smith left the door open just a fraction.
In fact, this move could be an effort to keep the cases alive in the long term. An interesting tell in each motion is Smith’s request to dismiss the cases “without prejudice.” That means that the cases can be filed again. By dismissing the cases now on his own terms, Smith blocks Trump’s attorney general from dismissing the cases for all time.
Which of course Trump’s attorney general would be required to do.
In addition, by filing his motions pre-emptively, Smith was able to explain his reasons for dismissing the case, rather than allowing Trump’s future AG to mischaracterize them. According to Smith, he was dismissing the case not because of the merits or strength of the cases, but because he had to. As Smith explains, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are “binding” on the special counsel, has concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or criminally prosecuted under the Constitution…
But Smith was careful to note that this relief from criminal prosecution is “temporary,” and ends when the president leaves office. Smith cites OLC as concluding that this form of immunity for a sitting president “would generally result in the delay, but not the forbearance, of any criminal trial” That is, Trump gets a reprieve, but only during his term in office.
But the statute of limitations would be in effect by January 2029. But there’s a fix for that.
Smith’s brief contains another tell when he writes that OLC has “noted the possibility that a court might equitably toll the statute of limitations to permit proceeding against the President once out of office.” That is, a court could call a timeout, pausing it on Trump’s inauguration day on Jan. 21, 2025, and then restarting the clock when Trump leaves office in 2029. That would give prosecutors plenty of time to refile charges. Certainly, the tolling issue would be litigated, but by dismissing the case now, Smith preserves this issue for future prosecutors to argue.
It won’t happen, but it’s a nice thought.
As OLC has written, the bar on prosecuting a president is not forever — a president “is ultimately accountable for his misconduct that occurs before, during, and after his service to the country.” As Smith writes, “the president lacks the prerogatives of a king and his protection from prosecution.”
Officially, maybe, but unofficially, he has one hell of a lot of prerogatives he shouldn’t have.
Does Amnesty Hate Women?
Well duh. Of course it does. Obviously.
It’s not a human rights issue to pretend to be something you’re not and force everyone else to play along with your pretense.
It’s glaringly obviously not a human right to force women to agree that men are women if they say so, welcome men into all our spaces, give them all our prizes, put them in charge of all our organizations, make them CEO of all our rape crisis services.
Amnesty is garbage.
I was thinking Jack Smith shut down the Trump case because he had to, but Adam Schiff implies he didn’t.
“I think this is a serious mistake by the department,” Schiff told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, saying that while Smith sought to dismiss the cases without prejudice — meaning they can be brought against Trump once his term is over — it now means that the “status quo” is to not bring any charges against the president.
If it’s a mistake, that implies it wasn’t mandatory.
“But it is nevertheless a very serious distinction, because the status quo now is no charges against the president,” Schiff, who served on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, continued. “You would have to upset that status quo to later bring charges again, as opposed to merely postponing the proceedings, in which case the presumption is they continue when he leaves office.”
…
Schiff added that the “mistake” by Smith’s team to pull the plug on the cases is compounded by a host of other concerns.
“It compounds the mistake that you alluded to, which is they waited a year before they even brought this case forward or began the investigation,” the California Democrat told Psaki, President Biden’s former press secretary. “And then you have the Supreme Court with this immunity decision.”
“And now you have a potential nominee in Pam Bondi, who is saying she’s going to prosecute the prosecutors,” he continued, adding that “all of that goes against what Jack Smith said in his brief motion, which is that no one’s above the law. So, we’re hearing that phrase a lot, but we’re not giving validity to it by these actions.”
Well quite.
Can ya fix it?
Why Bad Kennedy should not be the boss of Health and Human Services, by former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey S. Flier.
RFK Jr. was nominated precisely because of his stated positions on a wide range of health and scientific matters: vaccines, AIDS, the reputed harms of electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi and cell phones, and many other topics. So these views are central to assessing his suitability for the role.
The scientific process requires skepticism about prevailing consensus. Some Kennedy supporters see his skepticism on a wide variety of scientific and medical issues, including policies during the Covid epidemic, as a positive that will enable him to disrupt the medical and research establishment.
But there’s informed skepticism and there’s crank skepticism. Bad Ken is crank rather than informed.
Our task is to evaluate his qualifications as a potential leader of HHS. I argue that by repeatedly making claims about important issues that are known to be false or that are devoid of evidence, RFK Jr. has disqualified himself from this position.
Well, yes. That seems like a pretty good rule.
For decades, RFK Jr. has been a vocal advocate of the anti-vaccine movement. He was founder and chair of Children’s Health Defense, an organization that campaigns against childhood vaccinations whose beneficial effects on children’s health are firmly established.
Most remarkable among his repeated claims is that childhood vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella has caused the increase in autism. Just last year he said on Fox News: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” This is long after the 1998 paper that advanced the idea was retracted as fraudulent in 2010. The author of the paper has been stripped of his medical license. Kennedy’s willful ignorance of this evidence should disqualify him from leadership in the health and research ecosystem. He has promoted a fear of vaccines that has—and will—lead to the return of diseases like measles and polio.
Aka diseases that can kill.
RFK Jr. repeatedly challenged the now well-established fact that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, a discovery that led to a Nobel Prize and highly effective treatments that save millions of lives.
In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy repeated his concerns about this discovery, saying he takes “no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. Then, in a 2023 interview with New York magazine, he said that research into the causal connection between HIV and AIDS was “phony” and “crooked.” This is scientific ignorance, not the healthy skepticism that some supporters allege. No one who asserts such nonsense should be at the helm of Health and Human Services.
Which is why Trum appointed him.
Dang. The BBC wins another prize for maximum hatred of women.
It’s the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
UN Women (which doesn’t always know which people are women) tells us:
Violence against women and girls remains one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations in the world. Globally, almost one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both, at least once in their life.
For at least 51,100 women in 2023, the cycle of gender-based violence ended with one final and brutal act—their murder by partners and family members. That means a woman was killed every 10 minutes.
So are we talking about women here? Or about women plus men who pretend to be women? It does make a difference, because men kill women more than women kill men.
I think maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention to Brianna Wu, a 6’4″ man who calls himself a woman and wants to make himself safe by putting women in danger. Like…
See what he does there? Apparently without even noticing? Claims he would speedily be raped and/or assaulted if he used the men’s restroom, in order to defend his right to threaten women with rape and/or assault by barging into their restroom. He doesn’t want to be around men so he forces women to be around him. Men get to trample over women to make themselves safe from men, but women don’t get to do anything to be safe from men.
Did I mention that Wu is 6’4″?
This is so sick.
Jack Smith files to drop Jan. 6 charges against Donald Trump
Not because he didn’t do it, not because there’s no evidence he did it, but because there’s a law that says he can’t be prosecuted.
Special counsel Jack Smith has filed a motion to drop all four felony charges against President-elect Donald Trump in connection with his effort to overturn his 2020 presidential election in the lead-up to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S Capitol.
Trump was first indicted on four felonies in August 2023: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. The case was then put on hold for months as Trump’s team argued that Trump could not be prosecuted.
…
“The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed. But the circumstances have,” Smith’s office wrote in Monday’s filing, adding that it is seeking to dismiss the charges ahead of Trump’s inauguration, in line with the Justice Department’s longstanding position that it can’t charge a sitting president.
“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” the special counsel added.
So he’s an absolute monarch. What a brilliant system we’ve set up here.
I can hear the shrieks of laughter all the way over on the left coast.
So declaring a particular month “Pride” month is now mandatory, and refusal is a human rights violation? Really?
The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal has found the township of Emo will have to pay damages after refusing to proclaim Pride Month back in 2020.
I do love it that the township is Emo. No YOU are.
Borderland Pride requested Emo to declare June as Pride Month and display a rainbow flag for one week but the township refused, resulting in a years-long process in which the tribunal ruled against the township. The tribunal ruled Borderland Pride will be awarded $15,000, with $10,000 coming from the township itself and the other $5,000 coming from Emo mayor Harold McQuaker.
Another apt name. Could they find anyone named McHedonist to balance things out?
But anyway. I’m not seeing it. Emo should support and defend LGB rights by all means, but should it be required by the government to declare a “Pride Month” for one small segment of the population? There’s no “Pride Month” for women you know. Should governments be requiring Pride Month for Catholics, Mormon, Baptists? Buddhists, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses? You can see where this is going: there aren’t enough months. More broadly, it’s just not obvious or clear that naming months after something to promote it or defend it or celebrate it should be mandatory for reasons to do with human rights. It’s not clear at all, in fact it’s quite foggy.
Doug Judson is a lawyer in Fort Frances and one of the directors on the board of Borderland Pride, and said they’re elated to have finally brought it to a close and is a significant victory for the organization.
“We didn’t pursue this because of the money. We pursued this because we were treated in a discriminatory fashion by a municipal government, and municipalities have obligations under the Ontario Human Rights Code not to discriminate in the provision of a service,” said Judson.
But discriminatory how? Does Emo have a Straight Month? If it does then I might agree with Judson, but I’m pretty confident it doesn’t, on account of how 1. that’s not a thing and 2. it would be asking for trouble. Assuming there is no Straight Month, how exactly is it discriminatory to turn down the opportunity to have a Pride one? It may be churlish, but discriminatory? I call that language-creep.
“The tribunal’s decision affirms that. That is the important thing we were seeking here was validation that as 2SLGBTQA plus people, we’re entitled to treatment without discrimination when we try to seek services from our local government.”
But naming a month isn’t a service. It isn’t among the services local governments provide. It’s also not discrimination not to provide it; see above. Naming a month is something else – a display of solidarity or a display of virtue or a bit of both.
Judson said one of the messages it sends to other townships and municipalities is that Pride needs to be in the smallest and most remote communities just as it is in larger cities, and in some of the places “where it can be really hard to help people understand why it’s so important”
“I hope that it emboldens and strengthens people in communities like Emo and other places like that across Ontario to know that they have entitlements from their government,” said Judson.
But this is all symbols. It’s just wrapping paper. It’s a display of CorrectThink. It’s advertising, it’s public relations. There’s a place for that kind of thing, certainly, but that doesn’t make it an “entitlement from their government.” Pride months and weeks and days and years are very old news at this point, and kind of stale. We have more urgent things to quarrel over.
The British Transport Police (BTP) is facing legal action over new guidance that allows
transofficers to strip-search women.
No, stupid: guidance that allows male officers to strip-search women. The issue is not that they’re trans but that they’re male.
Revealed by The Telegraph, the guidance allows male staff identifying as female to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC).
Why not give out species recognition certificates to bears so that they can intimately search humans?
Cathy Larkman, retired police superintendent and national policing lead for the WRN, said: “The letter before action to British Transport Police by Sex Matters is a significant development in this sorry tale of police forces putting ideology, and the unjustifiable self-interest of very few individuals, before the dignity, privacy and safety of women.
“Men are not women and men cannot become women. That applies to police officers too. A vulnerable woman being strip-searched is presented with a man in front of her, regardless of whatever £5 official piece of paper he holds.
“Strip-searching by its very nature can be degrading and embarrassing, for the woman being searched, and for the policewoman doing the searching.
“When the state allows men to strip women and touch them, then that in my view is state-sanctioned sexual assault. It beggars belief that police leaders view this as a carrot to dangle to get more trans-identified men into the service.”
She’s not wrong.
Amnesty UK kicks women again.
No wonder they dragged their feet.
So the thinking is that women in the UK are spoiled pampered bitch Karens because they’re not Syrian refugees? Safety and privacy are not a general need and right but a privilege, which Karens haven’t earned? Is that it?
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.
I don’t claim any expertise on social media algorithms, but I assume they are basically designed to maximize the number of clicks by applying heuristics like “people who clicked on X in the past were more likely than expected by chance to also click on Y” (I am sure there are others here who can correct me if I’m completely off the mark). If so, it’s telling that the YouTube algorithm started suggesting a lot more Right-wing crap after I began specifically looking for gender critical material. There’s a twist to the story, however. Recently (for reasons I hope are only too obvious) I have, once again, been watching a lot of material on the threats to liberal democracy from the MAGA crowd. And, what do you know, suddenly there’s noticeable uptick in TERF-bashing material in my suggestions!
As I have previously said, I have no doubt that this is largely due to the fact that Right-leaning sources tend to be the only ones willing to give a platform to anyone not 100% uncritical of gender ideology (just like Left-leaning sources tend to be the most welcoming platforms for material critical of Trump). Once again, we’re not in the luxurious position of having lots of attractive options to chose from, and sometimes you have to make a common cause with Stalin to defeat Hitler. But as I pointed out back then, some of the people on the gender critical “side” had already been saying things that made me uncomfortable (usually along the lines of “Trump may not be perfect, but…”), and many others have joined them since then.
It would be one thing if these people were consistently portraying Trump as the lesser of two evils (I would still think they were wrong, but “reasonable people can disagree” and all that), but in many cases their ethical standards seem to have been adjusted to the point where Trump is no longer considered an obvious “evil” at all. Once again, I think cognitive dissonance is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Even if you just make an entirely “pragmatic” decision to work with the MAGA crowd to stop the medical experimentation on children, the destruction of female-only spaces etc., you now have a stake in defending your choice (“if they really were that awful, a decent person like myself wouldn’t be working with them”). You also have a stake in keeping the alliance together, not antagonizing your new bedfellows etc., and, before you know it, you’re in a justification spiral pushing you ever further to the Right, until attempts to overturn an election, inciting a violent insurrection, sucking up to Putin, a lifetime of crime and corruption, grabbing women by the pussy, suggesting that the “Second Amendment People” take care of one’s political rival etc. are all within your standards of acceptable behavior.
I also suspect there’s a justification working in the opposite direction: We can’t defeat the Trumpist assault on liberal democracy alone, and the only realistic alternatives* are the same people who endorse medical experimentation on children as well as biological males in women’s toilets, changing rooms, sports, prisons, rape and domestic abuse shelters etc. But since the latter, at the very least, remain dedicated to basic democratic rules of the game, like accepting the outcome of elections, you decide to support them against the MAGA crowd, which, once again, means you have a stake in defending your choice: “if they really were that awful, a decent person like myself wouldn’t be voting for them”, so you start making excuses for the excesses of gender ideology, and, once again, you’re in a justification spiral pushing you ever further towards the (woke) left. Either way, liberal values, the respect for evidence and logic etc. lose.
*Obviously the American two-party system makes this problem a whole lot worse.
So, looking for a few specks of gold in the giant pool of dung, we find Bad Kennedy saying Big Sugar and Big Salt are not all that good for us.
The former environmental attorney – who still must face confirmation by the Senate – is considered by many to be a controversial pick, given his history of making baseless health claims, including that vaccines can cause autism and that wifi technology causes cancer.
Yet some of his ideas around reforming the FDA have found support from health experts, lawmakers and concerned consumers alike – including some Democrats.
…
Leading up to the election, Kennedy – a former Democrat – offered several ideas for tackling chronic diseases under his slogan “Make America Healthy Again”.
He has frequently advocated for eliminating ultra-processed foods – products altered to include added fats, starches and sugars, like frozen pizzas, crisps and sugary breakfast cereals, that are linked to health problems like cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
There. Finally. An advocacy that’s not completely wacko. The thing about those ultra-processed foods is that in addition to being empty calories, they are also addictive. Bad combination. They’re not addictive like heroin, of course, but they are in the sense that they make it all too easy to keep munching away – they’re engineered to do that.
Part of Kennedy’s new mandate will include overseeing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has over 18,000 employees.
The agency is in charge of ensuring the safety of pharmaceuticals and the US food supply, but has come under fire in recent years from some lawmakers and consumer groups, who have accused it of a lack of transparency and action on food safety.
…
“There are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA … that have to go, that are not doing their job,” Kennedy told MSNBC this month.
But then he also promotes drinking raw milk, so we’re back in the giant pool of dung.
Exactly so.
New monster much like the old monster.
Elon Musk is so excited to start his new gig ruining the federal government that he’s getting an early start by goading his millions of followers to cyberbully government employees.
This week, Musk took aim at Ashley Thomas, the director of climate diversification for the U.S. International Finance Corporation—a highly technical role that involves developing ways of securing agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather, one agency official told The Wall Street Journal.
Well we can’t have that. We mustn’t do anything to make sure agriculture and infrastructure can withstand extreme weather. Who needs agriculture and infrastructure?
Speaking of fake jobs, last week, Donald Trump announced that Musk would be co-heading the Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory board set on slashing the government budget by a trillion dollars, hoping to cut personnel and essential government services … so they can be snatched up by government contractors or outsourced to private companies … owned by billionaires … like Musk.
As long as the billionaires are making more billions, everything is fine.
