Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • The latest example

    But wait there’s even more.

    The Justice Department presented evidence to a federal grand jury this weekin a case against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was a key witness for a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to two people familiar with the matter.

    Federal officials have accused Hutchinson of lying to lawmakers when she testified about the events surrounding the Capitol attack, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

    …

    The active federal grand jury investigation against Hutchinson in D.C. is the latest example of the Justice Department wielding its law enforcement powers against perceived foes of President Donald Trump. The investigation around Hutchinson began under then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired by Trump in April in part because he thought she was moving too slowly in cases against his adversaries, the people familiar said.

    Move fast and break things, right?

  • An implicit rebuke

    Trump fails to win Nobel Peace Prize again.

    In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a leading international lawyer and judge, the Nobel Committee has affirmed the importance of international law at a moment when it is under threat, in what amounts to an implicit rebuke of President Trump and other world leaders who are increasingly hostile to that system.

    “In awarding this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wants to remind the world that the rule of law — national and international — underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace and resolve conflicts nonviolently,” the committee said in its prize announcement on Friday. But today, it continued, the judges on international courts who “guard the thin red line between order and chaos” are “sanctioned, and their institutions are attacked.”

    …

    At a brief news conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Navi Pillay said she dedicated her award to “the survivors of international crimes and to the defenders of international justice.” She mused that “perhaps it was meant to be” that she received the news in a city whose famous post-war trials of Nazi leaders were foundational to creating the modern international justice system. But she offered a warning, too, saying that efforts to undermine the system “risk returning us to a world in which power rather than law determines whose suffering matters.”

    Trump is seeking his revenge.

    Hours after the prize was awarded, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions on the International Criminal Court. “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate,” he said in a statement.

    The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, condemned the action, calling it a “serious blow to our collective pursuit of international criminal justice, of which the I.C.C. is a key pillar.” Earlier Friday, he praised the Nobel committee for awarding the Peace Prize to Pillay, a former I.C.C. judge. Guterres’s dual statements captured the challenges he has faced in dealing with the United States, once regarded as the pillar of international order and law.

    But now just a playpen for the worst human on the planet.

    One of Navi Pillay’s contributions to international law is her pioneering work on the gravity of sexual violence during conflict. As a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she pushed from the bench to define the rape of women and children as a weapon of war instead of “collateral damage.” In 1998, when that tribunal found a former Rwandan mayor guilty of genocide, it was the first time that rape had been defined as part of genocide. Sexual violence has since been integrated in international law as a potential war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide.

    Women are, after all, human.

  • To any of our beloved prophets

    Hmm. If Dr Aladwan is a medical doctor I recommend not going to her with your flu/migraine/GI disruption.

  • No blasphemy laws thanks

    Naughty man says what now?

  • an election “plan”

    This seems a tad dangerous…

    They’re making a plan to steal the election and trigger a civil war?

    I can’t help thinking that’s not a very good plan.

  • Sir, most people do know

    This is hilarious but also horrifying. It’s called perseveration and it is NOT a good sign.

  • Calling for the cancelation

    You get used to these things.

  • All these other people

    Sir yes sir, that is indeed discrimination.

  • All he expected in return

    Listen, if you get the guy a pardon, you deserve a little respect, know what I mean?

    Last year, Donald Trump pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who was under indictment for federal bribery charges. All he expected in return was that Cuellar, out of gratitude, would immediately switch parties and become a Republican. To his shock, Cuellar never did. “Many considered this to be a tremendous act of disloyalty,” Trump fumed on Truth Social last night, “and certainly showed him to be an extremely ungrateful person.”

    Don Don Don Don. You’re not supposed to say these things in public! You’re not supposed to admit you expect a quid pro quo when you pardon people!

    He then encouraged Texas voters to vote Cuellar out in November. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: It’s genuinely amazing how little Trump tries to hide his own mob-boss style.

    It’s beyond even how little he tries to hide it, it’s at how much he tries to advertise it.

  • Dignify

    The US Ambassador to Greece:

  • Stock up on the popcorn

    Another lurch downward:

    The Defense Department said in a statement Thursday that the firing squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be live-streamed for the public to watch.

    Oh come on. That’s barbaric.

    The announcement came after earlier comments Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made indicating he wanted the execution to be public.

    “He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers. As it should be,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with far-right political activist Jack Posobiec. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

    …

    Hasan, an American-born Muslim, killed 13 people and injured 32 others at the Central Texas Army post where troops were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.He shouted “Allahu akbar!” meaning “God is great,” before targeting soldiers with a handgun he had fitted with laser sights.

    Serious consequences are one thing, and showing the serious consequences on television is another thing.

  • To the highly accepted

    Also

  • Tick tock

    This right here? This should be enough to Article II him. More than enough.

    Saying “I can do whatever I want” should get him impeached because it is wildly, blatantly, grotesquely unconstitutional – it’s like burying the Constitution in shit and then setting fire to it. No, dunghead, you can NOT do whatever you want. You’re not an absolute monarch, you’re a presider.

    The fact that you spray us with this verbal incontinence every day demonstrates that you should be yanked out of that chair and that building right this second, because you are a lawless tyrannical reckless vindictive pile of shit.

  • Women exist

    Women’s Rights Network Scotland on Facebook:

    Today BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour marks 80 years by broadcasting from Glasgow Women’s Library. A programme built on women’s voices, from a library that no longer means women.

    GWL’s own policy is clear: trans and non-binary people are welcome, and “women-only” events include men who say they are women. In 2019 they walked away from the Audacious Women Festival rather than accept a women-only rule that followed EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces.

    Eighty years of Woman’s Hour. A library founded so women’s history would not be erased. And the BBC chooses a venue that treats sex as optional.

    Women are a sex class. Single-sex spaces, services and history exist because of that. Calling a man a woman does not make him one, and hosting the anniversary there does not make the erasure invisible.

    Women exist as a sex. Single-sex spaces, services and history exist because of that. We were outside in April. We have not gone away.

  • The what department?

    The Free Speech Union wrote on Facebook:

    There is a cover-up at the heart of Government. Ministers have been forced to admit that the “missing” Islamophobia definition documents do exist.

    After pressure from the Free Speech Union and Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy, Angela Rayner’s Communities department has conceded that documents that helped shape the “anti-Muslim hostility” definition still exist, despite previously saying they had been destroyed.

    It now seems almost certain that the Government tried to bury evidence that could show whether Islamist extremists helped draft what amounts to Britain’s de facto Islamic blasphemy law.

    Wtf is a “communities department” anyway? Why are UK governments and institutions so obsessed with putative communities, and so intent on forcing everyone into them? People have things in common with other people on some axes while having nothing in common with them on other axes. Having one idea or project or motive for organizing in common does not automatically amount to a community. It’s stifling and presumptuous, all this shoving people into fake communities whether they like it or not.

    The Free Speech Union has warned that this non-statutory definition will be used — and is already being used — by activists, public bodies and authorities to silence legitimate criticism and debate about Islam, its history and its practices.

    Indeed it is. Of course it is. Bullying over putative “Islamophobia” has been a thing for decades.

  • 5 pillars too many

    Headline:

    John Cleese doubles down as Muslims try to get him arrested for his comments about Islam

    Remember when it was stuffy conservatives who didn’t like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and its stars? Ah, those were the days.

    No, seriously. Those really were the days, because whatever John Cleese and Co. endured from the establishment in the 1970s and 1980s, at least they weren’t trying to drag him into court. Not so much with the British left, which is now in thrall to radical Islamists.

    …The hardcore Muslims are hopping mad. The problem is that in Merrie England, there’s not exactly robust protection for free speech — and now, one prominent Muslim group wants the law to intervene.

    5 Pillars, an Islamist activist outlet in the United Kingdom, reported that there was a “referral to the government’s counter-extremism scheme Prevent concerning comedian John Cleese” because he made fun of Muslims.

    Why so it did.

    Right and that’s bad because Islam is not at all violent in the slightest ever under any circumstances.

  • He don’t like it

    Oh hooray, we’ll get more on his thoughts.

    I can see why the more thoughts won’t be forthcoming until later this month. It must have taken him ages to produce the thoughts we’ve already been privileged to view. It’s dated! Full of harmful narratives! My god the level of insight and verbal dexterity is overwhelming.

  • An episode

    The monks are simply helpless to control themselves.

    The director of the company running the Eiffel Tower will step down at the end of the year, the company said, after an episode this month in which men replaced female employees while members of a prominent Hindu group visited.

    The director, Patrick Branco Ruivo, has run the Eiffel Tower Operating Company since 2018. He is resigning after an internal inquiry “uncovered a series of problems and shortcomings” that “led to the exclusion of female staff” during the tour by members of the Hindu group, the company said in an emailed statement.

    Mr. Branco Ruivo had been under fire since Sept. 5, when union leaders said that female employees had been told to wait out of sight during the tour. Monks of the group, Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, take vows of celibacy that prohibit them from speaking to or touching women, according to its website.

    Wait. Celibacy means not fucking. It doesn’t mean not speaking to.

    What is the matter with these men that they can’t be in the same building as women without putting their vow of celibacy at risk?

    Do these pious guys think women are nothing but objects to fuck? Nothing but that distracting hole?

    Why do vows of celibacy translate to vows of total exclusion of women from everything if there happens to be a monk somewhere nearby? Why do men who take vows of celibacy get to exclude women instead of excluding themselves? What is all this crap? Anyone would think women are rocks or logs or coconuts – just objects to be thrown around by men, as opposed to being human beings just as men are. We’re not a little bit or sort of human like men, we are every bit as human as men. We’re not just walking penis-clutchers, we’re people, and we can talk and think just as men can.

    The decision to sideline the female workers prompted a staff strike that closed the Eiffel Tower to tourists for a day. It also led to apologies from both the tower’s management and the Hindu group.

    Good. Stop pampering these bros who think their religious promises mean that women have to be treated like vermin.

    H/t Mostly cloudy

  • Green as bile

    Suzanne Moore on the Greens:

    This year’s Green Party conference in Brighton, with its obligatory keffiyeh-wearing and performative bans on dissenting groups, was the complete opposite of the tolerant, kind and radical ethos that the Greens believe themselves to embody. The delusion is off the scale. They banned women for thinking that men are not in fact women. They banned a list of everyday words (mothers, fathers) from being uttered by members. They even banned journalists from being present at the actual vote on Israel.

    Maybe by “green” they mean nausea.

    There is no appeasing these people. Worst of all, the Green leadership seems scared of them. Gaza has become the central issue and, incredibly, this vote means that the Greens have gone further than the Palestinian Authority in wanting a one-state solution, which means, of course, the destruction of Israel. And all Israelis.

    The events of this weekend are disgusting. But then this is a party that will not allow women to talk about women’s issues (pelvic health and incontinence) without a load of men protesting that this is not “inclusive”. This is a party in which a woman asked by the journalist Julie Bindel about her views on Hamas said they were simply a “resistance group”. Asked about the Jewish women raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7, the woman replied: “What rapes?” She said this three times.

    The Jew hate has of course been laundered by Zack Polanski, who happily cites his Jewish heritage to help excuse his failure to root out anti-Semitism. He would it appears, betray his own Zionist family in order to cosplay as a political leader. Polanski – ever the coward – skipped the vote as his priority was getting elected in Holborn and St Pancras.

    The belief in the Jewish homeland is core to much Jewish liturgy and the Greens’ new policy deeming that belief “racist” means declaring that the practices of most Jews, secular or believers, are racist.

    No such purity test would ever be applied to Muslims or Christians and not one part of this saves a limbless child in Gaza. This combination of atavistic hatred with fashionable activism is deadly.

    And horribly familiar.

  • Not your call

    Men trying to supervise how women do their feminism.