Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think tariffs are supposed to be used as aids to extortion.

Trump said Saturday that he would impose a new 10% tariff on Denmark and seven other European countries until “a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The other countries affected would be Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland.

Trump said the duties would increase to 25% if a deal is not reached by June 1.

That seems like not so much a tariff as like a bunch of guys with baseball bats and guns holding up a 7-11.

“We will not allow ourselves to be blackmailed,” said Sweden’s prime minister Ulf Kristersson in a statement. “Only Denmark and Greenland decide on issues concerning Denmark and Greenland.”

Blackmailed or bullied or beaten up.

So what do Norwegians think?

Norwegian lawmakers reacted with shock and dismay over Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado’s decision to present U.S. President Donald Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize medal.

“It’s completely unheard of,” Janne Haaland Matlary, a professor of international politics at the University of Oslo and former state secretary in the foreign affairs ministry, told public broadcaster NRK on Friday. She called Machado’s gesture “disrespectful” and “pathetic,” saying it undermined the value of the prize, which the Norwegian Nobel Committee awards annually.

It does rather. It’s just so silly. The object is merely an object; the fact that the award was to Machado and not in any way to Trump makes the object irrelevant.

Only someone as childishly literal-minded as Trump could think the object=the prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute had previously said: “The facts are clear and well established. Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others. The decision is final and stands for all time.”

Unless Trump.

There is no power on earth more powerish than the power of Trump.

From the Department of Weird Manipulative Headlines:

Emma Watson up for national award after JK Rowling comments

Weird because “after” anything and everything. Time is what it is, so pretty much everything is “after” any given X. Emma Watson up for national award after brushing her teeth, after lunch, after someone in China eats lunch, after everyone in China eats lunch – you get the idea.

It’s sly and sneaky, is what it is. They don’t want to say “despite” or similar, because it might make trouble, so they fall back on the neutral “after” and thus say something absurdly devoid of meaning.

Beware of “after”.

Poor Euan Weddell. He’s just not very bright.

Pointless question, bro. Knowing that men are not women is not comparable to racism. Even if you disagree with that knowing, even if you think it’s mean and harsh to act on that knowing, it’s still not comparable to racism.

And to look at it from the other angle, campaigning to force women to agree that men can be women is not comparable to campaigning to force segregationists to stop segregating people by race.

Random comparisons of non-comparable things are not a clever way to make a point.

War fever heightens.

The Trump administration has opened a criminal investigation into elected Democrats in Minnesota, according to a senior law enforcement official familiar with the matter, a major escalation in the fight between the federal government and local officials over the aggressive immigration crackdown underway in the city.

Or to put it another way, Trump and his administration are treating a disagreement about immigration policy as a criminal matter. We know that Trump thinks it’s a crime to dispute his assertions, but we get a little edgy when he says it out loud.

The investigation would focus on allegations that Gov. Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, had conspired to impede thousands of federal agents who have been sent to the city since last month. Last week, one of those agents killed a 37-year-old woman, Renee Good.

Or to put it another way, Trump and his hirelings have conspired to violate the human rights of thousands of immigrants and their neighbors since last month.

“Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” Mr. Walz said in a statement released by his office, which said it had not yet received notice of an investigation. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”

Mr. Frey described the investigation as an “obvious attempt to intimidate” him, but vowed it would not work.

Unless Trump and co make it work, by whatever means they can find. We know they’re not going to fret about laws or constitutionality.

News of the investigation, which was reported earlier by CBS News, came only two days after Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, posted an incendiary message on social media, accusing Mr. Walz and Mr. Frey of “encouraging violence against law enforcement” and referring to their actions as “terrorism.”

While both the governor and the mayor have criticized agents involved in the immigration crackdown and have at times urged local residents to document their actions, there is no public evidence that either man has explicitly encouraged violence — let alone engaged in acts of terrorism. Both have urged protesters to remain peaceful.

Yes but all Trump and co have to do is interpret criticism of agents as terrorism, and there’s your explicit encouragement of terrorism.

Federal officials have already signaled that they are not likely to bring criminal charges against Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Ms. Good. At the same time, the officials have said that law enforcement would most likely investigate Ms. Good’s partner, Becca Good, and any possible connections the women might have had to local activists.

That decision prompted at least six federal prosecutors to resign this week from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis.

Federal officials are only as good as the Big Boss lets them be.

The BBC takes a detailed look at the Darlington ruling.

Hospital bosses never considered ‘female discrimination’, ruling says

When talking to the nurses, NHS managers did discuss “discrimination”, the tribunal found.

But they only ever referred to it in relation to Rose, they added.

Ah. That’s quite the punchline. It’s only the man who claims to be a woman who suffers discrimination. Women who don’t want him leering at them are the lords of the manor spitting on the peasantry.

Tribunal says ruling shouldn’t detract from transgender vulnerability

In its judgement, the panel said the purpose of the Trust’s Transitioning in the Workplace policy was “to create an environment that gave transgender employees comfort and reassurance that they would be accepted and supported in the workplace”.

“This is an admirable and noble purpose,” the panel said, adding: “All good employers will look to ensure that all its staff are treated with respect. We are only too aware that transgender people are vulnerable to exclusion, abuse, mistreatment, lack of respect and misunderstanding in society. Nothing we say in this judgement should detract from that or be seen as diminishing the values that the Trust espouses in supporting its transgender staff.”

Ok but all that applies to women too you know. It’s not the case that feminism has simply shut all that kind of thing down. Furthermore many men who call themselves trans are themselves very hostile to women. We’ve been documenting this fact for years. The purported vulnerability of trans people [meaning mostly trans women i.e. men] does not cancel the vulnerability of women.

Mmmmmmno.

No, see, because the Jews in question were not being told they were not Jews, they were being genocided for being Jews.

That’s a very big difference.

They didn’t “identify” into being Jewish and they couldn’t “identify” their way out. They couldn’t identify their way out of Auschwitz. They couldn’t identify their way out of the six million.

Sophie Molly’s pretending to be comparable to Jews in the Holocaust is about as disgusting as it gets.

And now for the cringe.

Political leaders in Norway have condemned the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s “absurd” decision to present her Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump, accusing the US president of being a “classic showoff” who takes credit for other people’s work.

Good. It is absurd, of course. That’s not how this works. The whole point of it is recognition of Person X. Giving a physical emblem of the recognition to someone else entirely is dividing zero by zero. It’s like children pretending to be royalty or astronauts or moovee starrz.

Kirsti Bergstø, the leader of Norway’s Socialist Left party and its foreign policy spokesperson, said: “This is, above all, absurd. The peace prize cannot be given away.”

Absurd, pathetic, contemptible, embarrassing, childish, delusional, did I mention pathetic?

Trump’s recent threats to invade Greenland, she said, demonstrated why he was not a worthy recipient. “Trump will no doubt claim that he has now received it, but it cannot be transferred, and Trump’s repeated threats toward Greenland clearly demonstrate why it would have been madness to award him the prize,” Bergstø said.

Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, the leader of the Centre party, said: “Whoever has received the prize has received the prize. The fact that Trump accepted the medal says something about him as a type of person: a classic showoff who wants to adorn himself with other people’s honours and work.”

And a damn fool.

Flatterers!

Hmm.

Ah it’s only the KCs “with an axe to grind” who know that men are not women. What’s the axe? Knowing that men are not women, of course.

Yet another that’s not how it works.

Trump said Friday he may impose tariffs on countries “if they don’t go along with Greenland.”

Tariffs aren’t about forcing other countries to accept one rogue nation’s aggression.

Also wtf is “go along with Greenland” supposed to mean? They are “going along with Greenland”; it’s Trump’s plan to annex Greenland that they’re not going along with, for obvious reasons. Saying “Greenland” when he means “my determination to attack and absorb Greenland” is typical of his mind-blind sloppy way of assuming everyone sees what he sees, even when our refusal to see things the way he sees them is the very thing he’s talking about.

The Trump administration has previously said it is weighing multiple options, including utilizing the U.S. military, in order to take over the Danish territory.

Sir, sir, Denmark is an ally; you’re not supposed to take over territory that belongs to an ally.

Oh good god.

Darlington nurses win

A group of nurses who complained about a trans colleague using single-sex changing rooms at work suffered harassment, an employment tribunal judge has ruled.

The judge found the nurses’ dignity was violated and they encountered “a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment” at work.

The seven female nurses, who work at Darlington Memorial hospital, brought a claim against their employer, County Durham and Darlington NHS foundation trust. It stemmed from their objection to another nurse, Rose Henderson, a trans woman, being allowed to use the women’s changing facilities.

It stemmed from their objection to a man, who calls himself Rose Henderson and claims to be “trans”, being allowed to use their changing facilities.

In a judgment handed down to the parties on Friday, Judge Sweeney said: “The trust subjected the claimants to harassment related to sex and gender reassignment by permitting the claimants’ biological male, trans woman colleague to use the female changing room and requiring the claimants to share that changing room without providing suitable alternative facilities.”

The ruling said the trust also subjected the nurses to harassment by not taking their concerns seriously. “This included referring to the need for the claimants to be educated on trans rights and to broaden their mindsets, the later provision of inadequate and unsuitable changing facilities for those who objected to sharing the female changing room with that colleague.”

Sweeney said: “The above conduct had the effect of violating the dignity of the claimants and creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment for them.”

All because they’re women who don’t want a man watching them change their clothes at work.

In a judgment handed down to the parties on Friday, Judge Sweeney said: “The trust subjected the claimants to harassment related to sex and gender reassignment by permitting the claimants’ biological male, trans woman colleague to use the female changing room and requiring the claimants to share that changing room without providing suitable alternative facilities.”

The ruling said the trust also subjected the nurses to harassment by not taking their concerns seriously. “This included referring to the need for the claimants to be educated on trans rights and to broaden their mindsets, the later provision of inadequate and unsuitable changing facilities for those who objected to sharing the female changing room with that colleague.”

Sweeney said: “The above conduct had the effect of violating the dignity of the claimants and creating a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment for them.”

Which is part of the point, isn’t it. It’s part of the fun of being a “trans woman”. It doesn’t work that way for women who claim to be men, but for men who dislike women it’s a gift.

The tribunal also upheld the nurses’ complaint of indirect sex discrimination in that women were more likely than men to experience fear, distress or humiliation if they were required to change in front of a member of the opposite sex.

Exactly so. Good to see someone finally notice.

The Darlington nurses win.

NHS bosses discriminated against a group of female nurses by allowing a trans colleague into their changing room, a tribunal ruled on Friday.

In what the eight nurses’ legal team described as a “landmark judgment”, a specialist employment law judge also said the women were harassed by managers at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, who unlawfully required them to share the female-only facilities with Rose Henderson, who was born a man but identifies as a woman.

It shouldn’t take any kind of specialist to know that.

Judge Seamus Sweeney said that trust managers had “engaged in unwanted conduct”, that the policy had the effect of “violating the dignity” of the nurses and that it created “a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment”.

And all this on behalf of a grotesque, unfair, women-hating dogma that men’s pretend-gender gets to cancel women’s rights to safety, privacy, dignity.

The judge, who was part of a three-strong panel, said the trust had behaved unlawfully “by not taking seriously and declining to address” the nurses’ concerns, which had been raised in 2023 and 2024.

And why did the trust do that?

Don’t look at me for an answer; I’ll never understand it. It’s just a silly greedy whim on the part of men who like to dress up as women, while for women it’s the most basic and necessary right to safety from men in general.

Rallying.

Several European NATO countries are deploying small numbers of military personnel to Greenland to participate in joint exercises with Denmark as US President Donald Trump ramps up his threats to forcibly annex the Arctic island.

Trump’s declarations have thrown Europe’s decades-old, US-led security alliance into crisis, raising the prospect of NATO’s largest and most powerful member annexing the territory of another.

And that another is very far from being NATO’s next largest and most powerful.

Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s defense, has warned an attack on Greenland would all but end NATO, and announced on Wednesday that it was expanding its military presence “in close cooperation with NATO allies.”

Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands and Finland have all since confirmed they are sending military personnel to Greenland this week.

Canada and France have also said they plan to open consulates in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, in the coming weeks.

The Magnificent Seven for bureaucrats.

News of European deployments to Greenland came as Danish and Greenlandic officials met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance Wednesday, hours after Trump said on Truth Social “anything less” than US control of Greenland is “unacceptable.”

“NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the UNITED STATES,” Trump wrote early Wednesday, arguing US control of Greenland would also benefit NATO.

With Trump at the helm? I think not.

France will open a consulate in Greenland on February 6, a move that has been in the works since last year, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on RTL radio Wednesday, according to Reuters news agency.

Barrot urged the US to stop threatening Greenland, Reuters reported.

“Attacking another NATO member would make no sense, it would even be contrary to the interests of the United States … and so this blackmail must obviously stop,” Barrot said on RTL.

But it won’t. Once Stupid starts a fight, Stupid keeps going.

Oh ffs.

Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, has “presented” Donald Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize as she attempted to woo the US president. 

Sigh. Look. That’s not how this works. The object is not the point. It takes someone pathetically literal-minded and obtuse to think it is. In fact, if you think about it for five seconds, it becomes obvious that being in possession of someone else’s prize is more a disgrace than an honor. It’s like being a toddler whining about not getting any presents at another toddler’s birthday party.

Mr Trump has made no secret of his desire to be awarded the honour, which has been bestowed on several former presidents including Barack Obama.

Yes, he’s made no secret of his infantile greed, in other words he’s made a public fool of himself many times by whining about it.

Ms Machado, whose liberal Vente Venezuela party is widely believed to have won the 2024 election, was given the award for “promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela”.  

Which is not a reason anyone is ever going to cite for giving an award to Donald Trump.

Days earlier the Nobel Institute had ruled against Ms Machado’s previous suggestion of transferring last year’s peace prize to Mr Trump. Earlier in the day the Nobel organisers posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”

Last week, Mr Trump said he could not think of “anybody in history that should get the Nobel Peace Prize more than me”.

Well no shit, he can’t think of anybody in history period.

Trump is spoiling for a fight.

Trump threatened on Thursday to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces in Minnesota after days of angry protests over a surge in immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis.

Confrontations between residents and federal officers have become increasingly tense after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a U.S. citizen, Renee Good, in a car eight days ago in Minneapolis, and the protests have spread to other cities. Trump’s latest threat came a few hours after an immigration officer shot a Venezuelan man the government said was fleeing after agents tried to stop his vehicle in Minneapolis.

Rumor has it that immigration officers aren’t empowered to shoot people who are fleeing. They’re not cops.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT,” Trump wrote on social media. Trump, a Republican, has for weeks derided the state’s Democratic leaders and called the Somali community in the area “garbage” who should be “thrown out” of the country.

That’s interesting, because lots of people think that a guy who calls groups of people “garbage” is himself quite garbage-like.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 is a law allowing the president to deploy the military or federalize soldiers in a state’s National Guard to quell rebellion, an exception to laws that prohibit soldiers being used in civil or criminal law enforcement.

Well this isn’t that. Rebellion is what the Southern states tried to do; this is not that.

If Trump sends soldiers to Minnesota, he would almost certainly face legal challenges by the state. The Minnesota attorney general’s office has already sued the Trump administration this week, saying the ICE surge was violating Minnesotans’ rights, and on Wednesday asked U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez to issue a temporary order restraining it.

Brian Carter, a lawyer for Minnesota, told the judge that Trump’s agents were engaged in a “pattern of unlawful, violent conduct,” including racial profiling and forced entry into residents’ homes without warrants. “They are foisting this crisis onto us,” Carter said.

In a social media post on Thursday morning, Trump said incorrectly that the judge had “declined to block” the ICE surge. In the hearing, Judge Menendez ordered the Trump administration to respond by Monday to Minnesota’s complaints, saying she would rule after that, calling the issues raised by Minnesota’s lawsuit “enormously important.”

Telling the truth is for lesser mortals.

What a bizarre headline:

Trump would want military action in Iran to be swift and decisive, sources say

Oh, so he doesn’t want it to be slow and futile? What a surprise!

Dumb headline aside, the subject is the usual Trump failure to grasp reality.

Trump has told his national security team that he would want any U.S. military action in Iran to deliver a swift and decisive blow to the regime and not spark a sustained war that dragged on for weeks or months, according to a U.S. official, two people familiar with the discussions and a person close to the White House.

Yes, bro, so would anyone, but somehow the other team never gets the message. That’s why there are so few three hour wars in the history books.

“If he does something, he wants it to be definitive,” one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

But Trump’s advisers have so far not been able to guarantee to him that the regime would quickly collapse after an American military strike, the U.S. official and two people familiar with the discussions said, and there is concern that the U.S. may not have all the assets in the region it would need to guard against what administration officials expect would be an aggressive Iranian response.

Have so far not been able to guarantee him – but if you just give them a few more days they’ll be able to say it?

Much as I hate having to agree with Josh Hawley…god almighty “Doctor” Verma is a smug lying evasive enemy of women.

Mike Haubrich at Miscellany Room:

Hey, there’s even more alarming fuckery coming from the Trump admin, from the EEOC no less. They are demanding a list of Jews at UPenn.

The Guardian:

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

Daily Kos:

I hope that I don’t sound disrespectful or glib when I suggest that handing over any information about one’s religious identity to this administration almost guarantees that it’s ended up in the wrong hands in the first place, never mind with whom it might share that information without notification or consent. 

Even if the EEOC’s ostensible original motivation for seeking this information is a response to a wave of anti-Semitic protests on campuses following Israel’s invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s 7 October 2023, attack, it gets hard to square that motivation with so many of Trump’s own statements and those of members of his administration, and the statements and actions of so many of his supporters. To put it mildly, their commitment to stamping out antisemitism is mixed, at best. 

Back to the EEOC’s subpoena. It requests, in part, the following:

a list of all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation
groups (hereinafter referred to as “organizations”) related to the Jewish religion, faith,ancestry/National Origin. For each organization listed, produce the followinginformation:

a. Name of organization;
b. Indicate if the organization is run by employees and/or volunteers;
c. Identify the organization Point of Contact by first and last name;
d. Produce the organizations Point of Contact’s contact information to includephone number, email address and mailing address;
e. Produce a roster of organization members. For each member listed, indicate ifthey are a University employee or volunteer;
f. For employees identified on the roster, produce their last known contact information to include personal phone number, email address and mailing address; and,
g. Produce the organization’s website, if applicable.

If EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas is unfamiliar with why Jewish citizens would feel deeply uneasy at the idea of a federal government demanding such an extensive, detailed list of Jewish Americans, she is either (a) unfit to lead an agency known as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, (b) stunningly ignorant of Jewish history, or, dare I say it, (c) both. 

Both. It has to be both.

Well, yes.

Any attempt to “modify” Greenland’s territorial or constitutional status would not only violate international law, but could also “undermine” regional stability, the experts, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, said in a statement Wednesday.

“Assertions suggesting that a territory can be taken, controlled or ‘owned’ by another state in pursuit of perceived national security or economic interests evoke a logic of colonial domination that the international community has long rejected,” the UN experts said on Wednesday.

Of course it does. There’s no other way to describe it. “I want this country, you have to give it to me or else” is colonial domination on stilts.

We’re going backward in time.