Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Krauss says let’s not go crazy here.

As Epstein was nearing the end of his thirteen-month jail sentence in 2009, he called me. He had learned that I had moved to ASU and that I was hoping to establish the Origins Project program there. Jail time, he said, had convinced him that making money should no longer be his primary goal. He wanted to support science and science education, and he wanted advice about where to direct his money. He expressed interest in supporting the ASU effort. I told him that the conduct for which he had been convicted had been, aside from its illegality, highly inappropriate and plainly stupid. I also thought that his plan was laudable and possibly redemptive. 

Notice anything missing?

No mention of the trauma of the girls caused by “the conduct for which he had been convicted”. Tut tut it was illegal and highly inappropriate and plainly stupid – dear me how naughty. Nothing about the harm done to the girls. No mention of the girls. No horror at what his friend did to the girls. No empathy for the girls. No mention of the girls. Abstract hand-wringing, but the real guts and gore of the matter left tactfully out. What a horrible man.

The nature of the crime of which Epstein was convicted—soliciting a prostitute who was under the age of consent in Florida (which he claimed not to have known)—didn’t seem, at the time, to be sufficiently monstrous to justify prohibiting him from further worthwhile social activity.

Note the “at the time.” I suppose that’s because nobody happened to say so in Krauss’s hearing at the time. Apparently he was and is incapable of figuring it out for himself.

Lawrence Krauss says we’re making too much fuss over Jeffrey Epstein.

Wikipedia:

In 2005, police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein after a parent reported that he had sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter. Federal officials identified 36 girls, some as young as 14 years old, whom Epstein had allegedly sexually abused. Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He was convicted of only these two crimes as part of a plea deal agreed by Alexander Acosta of the U.S. Department of Justice, and he served 13 months in custody which included extensive work release.

Do we think that’s too harsh?

Even Republicans.

Trump’s most unbridled critics at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference have not been Europeans but Americans – and not just Democrats.

A few Republicans, out of earshot of the US president’s favoured Fox News, have had the courage to challenge Trump’s diet of tariffs and unpredictability.

If only that were all. There’s also the diet of stupidity and egomania and brutality and greed and the list goes on.

Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, accused Trump of “doubling down on stupid”. He said: “Never in the history of the US has there been a more destructive president than the current occupant of the White House in Washington. He is trying to recreate the 19th century. He is a wholly owned subsidiary of big oil gas and coal.”

There it is. The stupidity part must never be overlooked or obscured.

Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor warned: “Trust is built over generations and it can be lost fast. In the last 14 months we have done a lot of damage. If you say no to Canada, you say yes to China.”

A Republican in attendance, Senator Thom Tillis, echoed her, warning the law of economics tariffs were going to cause damage. Strikingly, he also challenged Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest Republican allies, who recently said, “who gives a shit who owns Greenland?”

Appearing at the conference, Tillis said: “The 85,000 Indigenous people in Greenland give a shit about who owns Greenland. And at the end of the day, we need to show respect.”

Well said.

Peter Baker on Trump’s personality cult:

After a year back in the White House, Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote himself as the singularly dominant figure in the world have become so commonplace that they no longer seem surprising. He regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.

One thing that’s interesting about that is the focus on quantity as opposed to quality. Trump is going for the Too Dumb to Notice crowd as opposed to the Not That Dumb one. The more he leans into the vulgar boasting the more he disgusts the kind of people he wants flattering him.

While Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime promoting his personal brand, slapping his name on hotels, casinos, airplanes, even steaks, neckties and bottled water, what he is doing in his second term as president comes closer to building a cult of personality the likes of which has never been seen in American history. Other presidents sought to cultivate their reputations, but none went as far as Mr. Trump has to create a mythologized, superhuman and omnipresent persona leading to idolatry.

Not least because it doesn’t work, because it can’t work. See above. It’s grotesquely trashy and absurd behavior, so it’s only going to appeal to trashy absurd people and crooks.

Many presidents have enjoyed being the center of attention. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth notably said her father “always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” Others struggled with that kind of politics. George H.W. Bush painfully tried to avoid the first-person singular “I” in sentences because growing up his mother taught him that it sounded boastful.

Boastful is not something Mr. Trump ever learned to avoid, nor can he fathom why predecessors passed on self-promotion. When he visited Mount Vernon during his first term, he expressed surprise that Washington did not name the estate for himself. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” Mr. Trump told people.

And by “stuff” he meant “everything”.

Let the cars run free!

The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official.

The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.

That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped on Thursday by its killing of the “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.

Oh who cares about human health. What a silly thing to protect! The important health is the health of cars! They need to run free every day.

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups.

“Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”

We’re special. It makes us so proud!

Car buyers could still vote with their wallets, demanding more fuel-efficient cars. California has vowed to sue to maintain stricter standards. And the Department of Transportation still regulates fuel economy under rules meant to conserve oil.

But last year, the Trump administration proposed weakening the fuel economy standards to largely irrelevant levels. The Republican-controlled Congress also set civil penalties for violations at $0, essentially making them voluntary for automakers. In addition, Congress last year blocked California’s clean-car rules.

Dirty air is better! It builds character.

Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, called the end of the finding “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” He accused Democrats of having launched an “ideological crusade” on climate change that had “strangled entire sectors of the United States economy,” particularly the auto industry, which has struggled to sell electric vehicles.

While pretending climate change/global warming is fictional or trivial or both is not ideological at all.

Hoooooooooly cow – he didn’t – did he?

He did.

Back in July 2019 the NY Times gave us Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.

Jeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier who is accused of sex trafficking, had an unusual dream: He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.

Mr. Epstein over the years confided to scientists and others about his scheme, according to four people familiar with his thinking, although there is no evidence that it ever came to fruition.

That is unusual! Also revolting.

Mr. Epstein, who was charged in July with the sexual trafficking of girls as young as 14, was a serial illusionist: He lied about the identities of his clients, his wealth, his financial prowess, his personal achievements. But he managed to use connections and charisma to cultivate valuable relationships with business and political leaders.

Interviews with more than a dozen of his acquaintances, as well as public documents, show that he used the same tactics to insinuate himself into an elite scientific community, thus allowing him to pursue his interests in eugenics and other fringe fields like cryonics.

…

Mr. Epstein attracted a glittering array of prominent scientists. They included the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark; the theoretical physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking; the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling author; George M. Church, a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans; and the M.I.T. theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate.

The lure for some of the scientists was Mr. Epstein’s money. He dangled financing for their pet projects. Some of the scientists said that the prospect of financing blinded them to the seriousness of his sexual transgressions, and even led them to give credence to some of Mr. Epstein’s half-baked scientific musings.

…

The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he was invited by colleagues — including Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and biology, and the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss — to “salons and coffee klatsches” at which Mr. Epstein would hold court.

While some of Mr. Pinker’s peers hailed Mr. Epstein as brilliant, Mr. Pinker described him as an “intellectual impostor.”

“He would abruptly change the subject, A.D.D.-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack,” Mr. Pinker said.

Good. I like Pinker, so I’m glad he wasn’t suckered.

At one session at Harvard, Mr. Epstein criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who was there. Mr. Pinker said he had rebutted the argument, citing research showing that high rates of infant mortality simply caused people to have more children. Mr. Epstein seemed annoyed, and a Harvard colleague later told Mr. Pinker that he had been “voted off the island” and was no longer welcome at Mr. Epstein’s gatherings.

Even better.

However impressive his roster of scientific contacts, Mr. Epstein could not resist embellishing it. He claimed on one of his websites to have had “the privilege of sponsoring many prominent scientists,” including Mr. Pinker, Mr. Thorne and the M.I.T. mathematician and geneticist Eric S. Lander.

Mr. Pinker said he had never taken any financial or other support from Mr. Epstein. “Needless to say, I find Epstein’s behavior reprehensible,” he said.

No bromance.

Gee, I wonder what that could be about.

Investigations underway after alleged sexual assault during wrestling match

The U.S. Department of Education is investigating the Puyallup School District after a high school athlete accused a transgender athlete of sexually assaulting her during a wrestling match in December 2025. 

What kind of transgender athlete? Of course they don’t say. Nor do they say a male athlete is accused of sexually assaulting her. They never do.

A wrestler from Rogers High School claims she was sexually assaulted during a wrestling match in December by a wrestler from Emerald Ridge High School.

“The Puyallup School District contacted our school resource officer at Rogers High School on January 30 and had stated there was a video that needed to be reviewed due to these allegations that were made,” said Deputy Carly Cappetto, with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office.

The criminal investigation included interviews with the alleged victim and her mother, as well as video of the alleged assault. This week the sheriff’s office referred a rape charge to the prosecutor’s office.

Cappetto said because of state law, it has not been able to interview the accused athlete. The law protects minors from police interrogations when they haven’t talked to an attorney first.

Still not saying. Four evasive paragraphs: impressive!

On Friday the U.S. Department of Education announced it is investigating the Puyallup School District to see if leaders there didn’t do enough when the allegations came to light. The department is also investigating whether the district violated the civil rights of female athletes by allowing trans athletes to participate in a female sport.

Welllll who cares about female athletes? Yawn.

Well…apart from women, that is. But no matter, women are obviously such a tiny insignificant group that it’s pointless to pay attention to them.

‘The most vulnerable people in our society are trans people. The ones who are most likely to get beaten up are trans people….’ – Labour’s Emily Thornberry. pic.twitter.com/upHOKEw0RF

— Jill Foster (@JournalistJill) February 15, 2026

I’ve realized who[m] he reminds me of which.

So after all that, Theo Upton just quits and moves to the far side of the planet.

Ms Peggie, 56, blew the whistle after being forced to share a changing room with male-to-female doctor Beth Upton, who undressed in front of her.

And news that Dr Upton, 30, has quit the NHS will be “a relief to female patients”, a campaigner has claimed.

The blast came as sources revealed Dr Beth Upton may have flitted 10,000 miles to Australia in the wake of the high-profile court battle.

Couldn’t he have just done that in the first place instead of pissing away all that money and time and effort, all in aid of his game of Pretending to Be a Laydee?

A furious insider said last night: “Staff at the hospital found out he had left and that he was thinking of heading to Australia. Whether that’s for a break or to work there, no one knows.

“But the health board in Fife has spent a fortune in taxpayers’ cash defending themselves and him in the tribunal — and he’s not even an employee any more.”

Never mind. It was fun for him, and that’s what matters.

Susan Smith, director of For Women Scotland, said it would be “a relief to female patients”.

She added: “What came out at the tribunal was that Dr Upton said if a patient requested a female doctor, he would be quite happy to go and treat them. This is someone who put ideology ahead of the welfare of colleagues and patients.

I’m not sure someone like that should have a place in the NHS.”

I’m more dogmatic about it. I think he absolutely shouldn’t.

Ms Smith added: “A lot of chaos has been caused, a lot of money has been spent on this — and more money is going to be spent because Sandie is appealing. I hope anywhere that employs Dr Upton in future is aware of the risks they run with someone who clearly thrives on creating trouble.”

Well, maybe they welcome the publicity.

Scots Tory shadow equalities minister Tess White last night said Ms Peggie was “still waiting for a satisfactory conclusion”. The MSP added: “This disgraced and discredited health board has blown a small fortune trying to silence a nurse who stood up for women’s rights.

“The UK Supreme Court’s verdict last April was crystal-clear — women are entitled to single-sex spaces. But the SNP are still dragging their heels. NHS Fife should apologise for squandering taxpayers’ cash to defend the indefensible and John Swinney should finally grow a backbone and order every public body to follow the law.”

But it’s so much fun to demolish women’s rights and then watch the bitches fume.

Brilliant news!

Finally! This is the guy who got me arrested at the airport, finding out. https://t.co/McgjjAGHgB

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) February 14, 2026

First of all what a dopy title.

‘Carnage of concern and upset’: Women’s Institute groups close after transgender ban

What the hell is a carnage of concern?

You’d think a Guardian subeditor would have a better vocabulary than that. The root word – the “carn” bit – is the same as the one in carnivore. Meat. Carnage is bloody slaughter, it’s not distressing disagreement.

Anyway.

At least 12 Women’s Institute (WI) groups are closing or considering closure after the organisation barred transgender women from membership.

Members say more groups are likely to close, and that the federation’s decision has opened up a toxic, traditionalist culture that will deter younger women from joining.

Ahhhhhhh toxic and traditionalist is it. It’s traditionalist to know that men are not women. It’s comparable to thinking racism is ok, or slavery is ok, or torture is ok.

Branches said they felt forced to shut after the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) confirmed that, from April, membership will be restricted to those registered female at birth. Several plan to relaunch as independent social groups.

Imagine that! A group for women is restricted to women! How dare they! Why, that’s like restricting a labor union to the relevant laborers!

Emma Hawley, chair of Social Lites WI in Urmston, Greater Manchester – a group with nearly 140 members that has run for 13 years – said her entire committee has decided to step down.

“None of the other members want to take our places – many immediately said they weren’t even going to renew their membership,” she said. “We’re all heartbroken. I’ve put 13 years into running this amazing group but I can’t, ethically or morally, be a member of something that excludes transgender women,” she said.

She says she can’t, ethically or morally, be a member of a women’s group that excludes men. Women must not be allowed to conspire amongst ourselves. That way witchcraft lies.

Clementine Dexter, vice-president of Seven Hills WI, said the group received about 220 abusive online comments after posting that they were closing. “Out of 250 comments, there were just 30 that were supportive,” she said. “The rest were really abusive and awful.

“The NFWI’s decision has emboldened certain members to speak their minds and I think the federation has a serious issue as a result,” she said. “It’s going to struggle even more than it already does to attract younger members, and the more conservative members are going to be more emboldened to stick to what feels like a toxic culture.”

So it’s conservative for women to want a women’s group to continue being a women’s group, and it’s progressive to want a women’s group to include some men on the basis that those particular men are women, which we know because they say so.

Sophie Hossack, president of Ladies of the Lock WI in Kentish Town, London, said the venue they have used for nearly a decade has refused future bookings because of the policy.

“They said they did not feel comfortable renting their room to us because they are a trans-inclusive space,” she said.

How progressive. Tell women to go away because they want to hold meetings without men present. It’s as if we’re living in 1826 rather than 2026.

Fintan O’Toole is on fire:

Epstein’s cult demanded human sacrifice, preferably that of young virgins. (“He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Donald Trump smirked in 2002.) The scale of the demand was vast: the US department of justice estimated that Epstein sexually abused more than a thousand girls.

Those girls were, in this system, fungible assets, their value interchangeable with that of the dollar. They functioned as currency in an elite gift economy, passed around as tokens of status – to be granted the right to use their bodies was to be in with an ultimate in-crowd, a charmed circle of mutual enrichment and reciprocal advancement.

Sexual predation was not a mere perk of membership. It clearly functioned as a rite of passage. Either directly through participation in the abuse of these girls, or indirectly through choosing to ignore what we might call ambient rape – the muzak of misogyny that played all the time in every room of Epstein’s mansions – collusion was established and maintained. Guilt was shared – but so was the sadistic pleasure of male domination. “Pain,” writes one of Epstein’s anonymised scientific correspondents, “is interesting.”

The Epstein files (and we should remember that millions of documents are still being withheld, presumably to protect the guilty) are the underground waste disposal system of a very open and massive construct: the backlash against feminism. These are secret histories of a counter-revolution. Epstein and all those within his astonishingly expansive sphere of influence – bankers, speculators, political players, but also scientists, intellectuals and artists – are culture warriors. The war is being waged on women.

And some of the warriors are men we (women) thought of as friends or allies or both.

At one level, this is all about unrestrained power. But at another it is very much about restraint: on women’s right to object to sexual predation. “Just as the Me Too movement has gone too far so has Botox” (Soon-Yi Previn to Epstein). “Bugs me a little the metoo (sic) entitlement What does an actress think if she goes to a producer hotel at 2am?” (Name of sender blanked out). “MeToo. MeNotTrue” (physicist Lawrence Krauss). “Good news btw is that woman on conciliation committee seems like a sweetie.. she is old.. not some young metoo bitch” (Krauss to Epstein on a hearing into his behaviour at Arizona State University). “The hysteria that has developed about abuse of women” (Noam Chomsky to Epstein). And so on.

Ah yes. We know what “young metoo bitches” Krauss had in mind. It’s so bitchy of women to object to sexual abuse and generalized subordination and contempt.

Violent misogyny never went away, of course – it is literally at home in every society. Yet it needs to be validated as an elite practice, a way of life not just for unkempt thugs but for the rich and famous. It needs its own cloak of glamour.

What the Epstein files show is that there is no jarring contradiction between, on the one side, high-flown discourse (pretentious discussions on the nature of consciousness), ostentatious philanthropy, private jets, private islands, gorgeous mansions – and on the other side, the cannibalistic consumption of young female lives.

The grammar of wealth meets the vocabulary of the brothel. One indelible image from the files is a photograph of a wall-sized mirror from one of Epstein’s houses on which is imprinted in big capital letters: “F— ME LIKE THE WHORE I AM.”

It’s as Germaine Greer said decades ago – “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”

Golly. I know it seems silly to be surprised by anything about Trump at this point, but still, this caused me to manage it.

I can’t imagine saying this ONCE, let alone so many times it goes on for two minutes and ten seconds. His fans would say it’s just theatrics, just being The Donald, yadda yadda – but there’s no space between just being himself and this grotesque string of claims to be omniscient. Any possible space has been obliterated as we’ve watched him performing Man Who Thinks He’s Best At Everything And Knows More About Everything Than Anyone.

Also, it occurs to me, it’s sort of explanatory. This is why nothing gets through to him, ever. He really does think he knows more than anyone else, and not just about his chosen subjects but about everything. He knows more about designing a stealth battleship than anyone – what you do is, you make the hull bigger, you make it beautiful. He and he alone knows that. He’s like a god, only better, because he knows more than any god.

Remember when one of the popular mantras was how crucial it is to have high self-esteem? Yeah.

A must-read:

This is How a Child Dies of Measles

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Might as well fall faster.

Pessimistic grouchiness? Alright then.

(Rolls up sleeves, cracks knuckles, begins to type.)

What these idiots throw out with their dismissal of science is the understanding of the nuance and complexity of what is happening. One might normally expect “nuance and and complexity” to be about subtle, unlikely edge effects, or rare cases, but the complications of climate change (and the destruction of Earth’s biodiversity) are likely to be sudden, extreme, and mutually reinforcing. Our entire planet has become an edge effect.

We have pushed the Earth system beyond the envelope of conditions that allowed the origin and evolution of human civilization itself. These are the conditions upon which civilization depends. Correction: upon which civilization depended. Those conditions no longer obtain. Growing seasons; weather patterns; water tables; vegetation zones; biomes. These are all now disconnected from each other, and that more-or-less stable pattern of interconnectedness, which allowed human numbers to grow eightfold in just over two centuries*, is gone. These basic parameters will not be re-established in any way until some sort of new equalibrium arises, and any such new constellation of biogeographic relationships may not be as useful to humans as the one we’ve just destroyed. But that is still (centuries? millenia??) in the future. In order for any such stable pattern to crystalize, we have to stop our continuing interference and disruption. With things in flux, expecting any kind of reliable stability is like trying to find a parking spot on top of an avalanche. Until then, we’re going to be rapidly approaching the point at which we will have eight billion people who don’t know where there next meal is coming from.

For other parts of this picture, the future is now, or at least a lot sooner than the parasitic money grubbers who are demolishing the few, thin protections that the United States has managed to throw together in the two generations they had to do so expected. Fires and floods are happening now, as are droughts and deglaciation. Fisheries are depleted. Climate refugees are on the move now, and with large areas of the tropics becoming unihabitable as temperatures rise, that mass migration, mostly northward, will only grow.

The hyper-rich are all living on the same planet as the rest of us, dependent upon the same ecological systems and infrastructure. They have to eat too. They are as vulnerably human as the rest of us, and if it comes down to the crunch, can they depend upon the mercenary loyalty of their guards and retainers? Money doesn’t grow on trees, but food does, and in extremes, people will have to choose which is more important.

The current, grotesque wealth inequality is as temporary and unstable as our current civilization. Such a corruption and exploitation of the social contract cannot last. It requires everyone else’s awe, fear, and obedience to continue. These too are contingent, finite, ephemeral resources. Values change; so do fears. If everyone stops imagining that they can become billionaires, or worse, realizes that they can never become billionaires, how will they feel about actual billionaires when they themselves can’t afford to eat, or there is no food to buy? What happens to all that cryptocurrency when the lights go out? Who will still accept money when they’re nowhere to spend it? Who will respect (or indeed protect) their “property rights” when desperate people arec faced with starvation and death? And in their mansions, on their estates, up in their penthouses, just how much security can the wealthy buy? Every wall can be breached, every fence can be pushed over. Now and then the yachts have to come into port. If they don’t like “socialist wealth redstribution” wait ’til they see the alternative.

*All by itself, the presence of eight billion humans, along with their collective agricultural/technological footprint, is an environmental disaster. Any such global civilization of eight billion of us, based on our current patterns of production, consumption, and destruction was only ever going to be a flash in the pan. Something truly sustainable wouldn’t have ballooned to such population figures, and would not be on the verge of committing omnicide.

The Telegraph on that ruling that has Jolyon in a snit:

Employers can legally ban transgender women from using female toilets and changing rooms, the High Court has ruled.

Employers can legally ban men from using women’s toilets. Remember when it was just taken for granted that men were banned from using women’s toilets? Remember when men could be arrested for perving on women that way? I do.

Activists had challenged interim guidance from the equalities watchdog that said public bodies and organisations should segregate toilets, changing rooms and sports teams by biological sex rather than self-declared identity.

But on Friday a judge dismissed their claims that the guidance was unlawful because it conflicted with previous human rights and equalities legislation.

Activists shmactivists. They’re no more activist than we are – we’re all activists, because we’ve been forced to be by this utterly stupid ideology.

There is now no legal obstacle to prevent employers from implementing the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) advice, published in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that the word “sex” in the Equality Act does not refer to biological sex.

Women’s rights groups will use the ruling to urge Bridget Phillipson to publish the EHRC’s final version of the guidance following months of delays, and take action against employers who flout the rules.

Ms Phillipson has so far refused to publish the EHRC’s final guidance, claiming that she is concerned about the potential cost to businesses.

Subtle hint that actually she’s just another Idiot For Trans Ideology.

Maya Forstater, the chief executive of gender-critical charity Sex Matters, said: “The law is clear. There was never any excuse for the Government, public bodies, regulators, charities or businesses to delay in implementing the Supreme Court judgment.”

No excuse, but plenty of reason. What reason? Contempt for women.

The judge rejected Ms Phillipson’s argument that the EHRC guidance, which said trans women – biological men – should not use female facilities, could be “trans exclusive”.

We do not care. We do not care about trans, we care about men perving at us. It’s that simple. We’ve all experienced it, starting around age 8, and we are embittered after years of watching men in government flattering and encouraging those men at our expense.

Lawyers from the Good Law Project had launched a judicial review against interim guidance from the EHRC. They had argued that the guidance was rushed, legally flawed and overly simplistic.

Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, said the rules “violated” trans people’s right to privacy.

See? Like that. Jolyon pretending that women are violating men’s privacy. If it weren’t so foul it would be funny.

Classy people.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly had a Coast Guard pilot fired because she was missing a blanket – only to realize there was no one else to fly her home.

The former South Dakota governor had been forced to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket was not moved to the second plane, those familiar with the incident told the Wall Street Journal. She then reportedly had her special advisor Corey Lewandowski fire the US Coast Guard pilot, who was told to take a commercial flight home once they reached their destination.

But when staffers learned there was nobody else available to fly the plane, the unidentified pilot was reinstated, the Journal reports.

It’s all so very grownup, don’t you think?

This. I have been wondering/fuming about this for YEARS.

…one day soon, drag artists will be about as politically acceptable as the Black and White Minstrels are today. Right now, you cannot turn on your TV without being assailed by some hideous gurning goon in a garish dress and ludicrous make-up lampooning the female sex – the BBC, in particular, seems obsessed with drag queens. They are even invited into our schools to disseminate filth masquerading as sex education to kids.

For some reason, a reason hard to comprehend, the objections made about ‘blacking up’ do not apply to drag artists. They are, of course, two sides of the same coin, or perhaps the same side of the coin. Drag artists are not paying homage to women, they are parodying and belittling them for the purposes of humour. They dress in the manner of slappers and tarts, with short skirts and fishnets and vast, bulbous cleavages perpetually on display. Their names are usually a parody, too, of women’s names: they are rarely called Anne or Sarah, but more usually Roxanne or something similar which denotes, somehow, a comedic and perhaps repellent sexual voracity.

The reason isn’t hard to comprehend once you become aware of how deeply ingrained contempt for women is.

The Black and White Minstrels were castigated for being a cruel parody of blackness – and indeed that white make-up around the eyes and the mouth is a little weird and demeaning. But compared to the appearance of the drag queen, the Minstrels were an object lesson in respect and even reverence. With both the drag queens and the notion of ‘blacking up’, it is a case of a tranche within society which has power mocking a tranche within society which does not. That, at least, is the Marxist way of analysing it and it is certainly why nobody blacks up any more.

Marxist? Is that Marxist? It doesn’t sound very Marxist to me.

It’s right though. Men mock women because they can. Men hate women because women are contemptible, or otherwise men wouldn’t mock them. It’s an endless loop.