Throwing a pinch of Stalin into the mix:

Prosecutors are expected to ask a grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey in the Eastern District of Virginia in the coming days, two sources briefed on the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

The exact charges remained unclear, and it was uncertain whether the grand jury would return an indictment against one of Trump’s longtime political antagonists.

There’s nothing to indict him for, but Trump has ordered them to come up with something.

One of the sources said some prosecutors within the Eastern District of Virginia have presented new U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan with a memo explaining why charges should not be filed, saying the case lacked evidence to show probable cause that a crime was committed.

Evidence shmevidence. Trump said to indict him so indict him! That’s an order, Corporal!

Trump, in a social media post on Saturday, urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring charges against Comey and other political rivals of Trump, including U.S. Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump chided Bondi for not moving fast enough to bring criminal charges against his most prominent antagonists, saying “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW.”

Which is very much something presidents are not allowed to do, but Trump don’t care.

Well, he’s not wrong.

The slogan “trans women are women” is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said.

It’s silly that that’s even news. What are trans women? Men who say they are women. Of course it’s false – scientifically and otherwise – to say that men are women. It’s false and it’s absurd. It’s like saying elephants are rabbits or houses are airplanes.

In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.

“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.

“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on. So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”

…

At London Pride demonstration in 2023, Sarah Jane Barker, previously Alan Barker, told a crowd, “If you see a Terf punch them in the fucking face.”

Dawkins said: “I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left than the other she aspires to join.”

Well I use such language all the fucking time, and ain’t I a woman?

Another entry for the President Baby file.

Trump has added a “Presidential Walk of Fame” to the exterior of the White House, featuring portraits of each of the previous commanders-in-chief – except for one.

Instead of a headshot of Joe Biden, the Republican incumbent instead placed a photo of an autopen signing the Democrat’s name – a reference to Trump’s frequent allegation that the former president was addled by the end of his term in office and not really the one making decisions.

The snub is the latest attempt by Trump to delegitimise a predecessor he routinely belittles, including in front of more than 100 world leaders on Tuesday at the UN general assembly gathering. Trump has never acknowledged his own defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, instead falsely chalking up the outcome to voter fraud.

It’s not a snub. A snub would have been omitting Biden. It’s an insult or taunt or stupid childish bit of mockery.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Dang. Talk about going out of your way to insult and dismiss women.

Chris Northwood is a man.

“This prize acknowledged an exceptional woman in Cllr Chris Northwood. The message it sends to women members and voters is that the Liberal Democrats honour and value all of our women members.”

And what they mean by that, of course, is that the Liberal Democrats honour and value men who pretend to be women and have nothing but contempt for actual women.

I really don’t get it. After all this time, I still don’t get it. Why would people who label themselves liberals and democrats carefully deliberately calculatedly insult women by bestowing a women’s prize on a man? After all, giving a women’s prize to a woman wouldn’t do any harm to men who pretend to be women. It’s not as if women are not even eligible for a women’s prize. There are still far more women than there are trans women. There’s no real reason to give a women’s prize to a man other than deliberately saying “Fuck you, bitches.” Why do liberal democrats want to do that?

I don’t get it. I suppose I never will.

Sorry, kid, no dice.

Nope.

Julie Burchill in the Spectator:

‘I was born to play Lady Bracknell,’ Stephen Fry swanked recently, in an interview to mark a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, running until January. I can’t be the only one to greet the idea of another round of Fry interviews with a desire to go to bed and not come out till it’s all over. But that would be a long hibernation. For Stephen Fry pronouncements are like professional tennis; it’s always open season.

You can’t get away from the clown, particularly when he’s lecturing women on how they should feel about having great hairy men in mascara sharing their private spaces. Magnificently, J.K. Rowling denied they had ever been friends after Fry came out with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger lecture about how his previously amiable alleged-mate had been ‘radicalised’ by evil Terfs and had become a ‘lost cause’. Then there was the time we had to listen to him threatening to leave a private members’ club that didn’t admit women – after having been a member for decades under these conditions ‘Oopsie!’ as Fry himself might exclaim, if in Adorably Awks Mode.

…

Maybe I was spoiled by seeing Maggie Smith play Lady Bracknell as a youngster. But surely all can see there’s something off about Fry wearing comedy breasts; it’s a wonder that it took the crass old fraud so long. I can’t help thinking – nay, hoping – that Fry has gone too far this time, and that in his over-reach will reveal himself as the grasping, shallow sell-out that he is. That is, the type of person that Oscar Wilde thoroughly loathed. It may well be true that ‘to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance’ – but surely the love story between Stephen Fry and himself has delighted us long enough.

He was a perfect Jeeves. Other than that…

Obama is stealing Trump’s thunder.

Barack Obama has said Donald Trump’s claims linking paracetamol to autism in infants is “violence against the truth” that could harm pregnant women if they were too scared to take pain relief.

Obama, who was being interviewed by David Olusoga at the O2 Arena, told the audience that Trump’s claims about paracetamol – branded as Tylenol in the US – had been “continuously disproved” and posed a danger to public health.

“We have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved,” he said. “It undermines public health … that can do harm to women.”

That “my successor” is a dig. He was there first and Trump can’t change that. He’s not all that, he’s just Obama’s successor.

Obama argued there was a “tug of war” between two visions for the future of the US and humanity. On one side the progressive view where change came through democracy, the other driven by populists including Trump wanting a return to an older, more conservative worldview.

He said: “My successor has not been particularly shy about it. That desire is to go back to a very particular way of thinking about America, where ‘we, the people’, is just some people, not all people. And where there are some pretty clear hierarchies in terms of status and who ranks where.”

Brainless crooks from Queens are at the top. Everything else is just flotsam.

Originally a comment by Sackbut on The point is.

This topic brings to mind a number of things that are related in my mind, if not in anyone else’s.

JK Rowling was verbally attacked and threatened. People talking about it seemed frequently to say “I don’t care for her writing, I didn’t like Harry Potter, but…”

Harvard University was attacked by Trump and his lackeys, and the university resisted doing what was demanded, under threat of restrictions and reduced funding. Many people seemed to find it necessary to say, “Harvard has all these problems, I disagree with what they were doing, but…”

Jimmy Kimmel was recently (temporarily) pushed off the air. People found it necessary to say “He’s not funny, but…”

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with criticizing Kirk’s statements and expressed views, or the writing of Harry Potter, or the actions of Harvard, or the comedy of Kimmel. There seems to be some unspoken assumption, though, that if you defend XYZ you must therefore like XYZ, so people take pains to clarify, right then and there, at the moment of expressing defense, that this is not the case. Maybe that kind of assumption is widespread, and so must be countered immediately. Or perhaps the fact that XYZ is currently noteworthy means all topics about XYZ are equally noteworthy right now. I don’t know. Sometimes these discussions about XYZ feel like two valid conversations that don’t really need to happen at the same time, but that’s just the way I think about things. Many other people merge topics together that to me seem better separated. I get in trouble with that all the time.

Ah yes, Trump has “learned more” and “changed his position.” Trump has not however learned to stfu when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, which is always.

President Trump on Tuesday shifted his position on whether Ukraine should hold out for all the territory seized by Russia, saying on social media that he thinks Ukraine is in a position to win it all back.

Social media of course is the perfect place to air his uninformed musings.

It’s a reversal from his long-held position that Kyiv would need to give up some of its territory to Moscow to end the war – such as Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

But now, “after getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation,” Trump said he believes Ukraine – backed by the European Union and NATO – can win back all its territory.

Ah. How fascinating. He admits he didn’t bother to get to know and fully understand the sitch before picking a side and sticking to it. We knew that, but it’s helpful of him to confess it in writing.

Well then let’s look at the Aims page; maybe they get more informative there.

The Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group (SSQRG), was established in 2006 and aims to:

▼ Encourage geographic research and scholarship on topics related to sexualities and queer studies

▼ Promote educational ways for communicating geographic perspectives on sexualities and queer theories that will inform both curriculum and pedagogical needs

▼ Promote interest in geographies on issues related to sexualities and queer studies and promote the exchange of ideas and information about geographical intersections between sexualities and queer studies, where involvement of early-career researchers is maximised

Erm. No help. It’s just more repetition of labels without saying what’s behind them. What the flaming hell are “geographies on issues related to sexualities and queer studies”?

Last bullet point:

Offer a supportive environment for the exchange of ideas and the development of social and activist networks to fight forms of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or practices, sexual and gender identity and expression, and other forms of sexual and gender prejudice

You mean like the “gender prejudice” that knows men are not women?

Do you have a map handy?

So of course I had to find out more about the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society, because the what what and what research group??? Why would the RGS have such a research group?

So here they are.

Welcome to the virtual site of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group (SSQRG), a Research Group established in 2006 as part of the learned Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

The SSQRG is a leading study group dedicated to the promotion and support of research, scholarship and scholar activism regarding sexualities and queer geographies. The Research Group works across interests and disciplines within the academe, and beyond. As such, it supports the production and application of knowledge to pursue a critical dialogue amongst academic and non-academic research-user parties, including policymakers, professionals, and members of the public.

Within the academe? It should be either “within academe” or “within the academy.”

But much more to the point – there is no information in that pompous paragraph. It’s just jargony handwaving. What scholarship “regarding sexualities”? And what does “scholarship regarding sexualities” have to do with geography? Why is this part of the RGS instead of sociology or the like? Outsiders would like to know. Cool about the “across interests and disciplines” and the “production and application of knowledge” and the “critical dialogue amongst academic and non-academic research-user parties” but if you look closely you will see that that doesn’t tell us anything. What exactly is geographic sexualities scholarship?

There’s one more paragraph; maybe they explain there.

This platform contains information about SSQRG’s remit, Committee, communications, and activities, including international conference forums, symposia, workshops, and other critical reading and knowledge exchange events, as well as ways for active involvement and collaboration.

Nope. We are none the wiser.

I recommend watching the video. It’s much worse than it sounds. Kadri lunges at Hamit Coskun while holding a very large knife in the stab position. Coskun tries to run away from him but falls down, and Kadri proceeds to kick him repeatedly. Kadri doesn’t actually stab Coskun, so props for that, but he’s extremely violent and threatening. Coskun was threatening a book, a book of which there are billions of copies in existence; Kadri was threatening a human being. The judge told Kadri what a great guy he is.

Aw how sad. It turns out that gender dogma that fails to attract paying customers will be shown the door.

An honours course covering “queer and trans geographies” has been dropped by Edinburgh University one week into the semester as the institution seeks cuts of £140 million…Edinburgh University said it had paused the unit due to the small number of students who had signed up.

It’s not a good combination, is it – small number of gullible customers plus utter nonsense.

Part of an undergraduate geography degree programme, the “Queer Geographies: Spatialising Sexuality and Gender” class was described as an opportunity for students to “critically, and self-reflexively, consider how sexuality and gender inform and unfold in the everyday spaces we inhabit”.

What the hell is “self-reflexively” supposed to mean? The fool who wrote that probably meant “reflectively” but wanted to make it more pretentious, so stumbled into incoherence.

Assessment was in the form of a 4,000-word journal.

Oh yay! Your homework is to talk about yourself!

Self-reflexively of course.

Martin Zebracki, chair of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society, said: “This type of course would help students understand the processes of social marginalisation, including in relation to legislation, and encourage students to consider how social norms could be challenged — not only in theory but also in everyday life. Courses like this really seek to develop critical thinkers of the future.”

Chair of the what???

And how would this type of course do any of that? And what does obsessing over one’s very own personal “gender” aka idenniny aka soul have to do with developing critical thinkers? If you want critical thinkers you want them to look outward, not inward.  The world is there, other people are there, and they’re not about Me and My Ego.

He warned that losing the unit risked further marginalising minority topics and groups… 

When your minority topic is so minority that it’s just about the self-involvement of the students signing up to your minority topic, you’re just engaged in flattering the students and encouraging them to be even more self-obsessed than teenagers usually are.

A university spokesman stressed that the course had not been permanently closed. He said: “The university regularly reviews and refreshes its degree programmes and courses to ensure that they meet the needs of our community. We have made the decision to pause Queer Geographies: Spatialising Sexuality and Gender for the 2025–26 academic year due to the level of demand not being sufficient to enable us to deliver the course and ensure an excellent student experience. Students who had enrolled on the course will be reallocated to another within their programme.”

The university did not disclose how many students had registered for the unit this academic year.

Five? Two? One?

The dignity of the man.

It’s strange when for-profit commercial entertainment becomes an arm of the resistance, but then it’s strange when corrupt violent law-breaking real estate tycoons are voted into the boss job, too.

Jimmy Kimmel returned to his late-night stage Tuesday night and urged viewers to stand up to President Trump’s threats. Shortly before Kimmel’s show aired, the president sent out a new missive against Kimmel’s network, ABC.

Of course he did. He’s a corrupt violent law-breaking real estate tycoon with zero education or experience relevant to being a head of state, so of course he tries to destroy anyone who doesn’t kiss his festering ass.

In an eloquent and emotional monologue, Kimmel assailed “anti-American” efforts to curtail free speech in the United States and signaled that he won’t temper his criticism of the president after a nearly week-long suspension of his show amid pressure from the Trump administration.

“This show is not important,” Kimmel told viewers. “What’s important is that we live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”

Again – we don’t generally look to entertainers for the job of talking back to power, but then Trump wouldn’t be where he is if it weren’t for The Apprentice.

Kimmel predicted that ABC and its parent company Disney would come under further scrutiny from the Trump administration for reinstating his show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” days after Trump wrongly said Kimmel had been “fired.”

Noting that Trump has openly rooted for Kimmel’s cancellation — and thereby the loss of work for his staffers — the comedian said, “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.”

Then Kimmel noted that Trump has also called for NBC to fire “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon.

Anything else, Mister Sir? A few burnings at the stake? Exiles? Torture sessions?

About an hour before the broadcast, Trump weighed in on ABC’s restoration of the show for the first time, commenting on Truth Social that “the White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!”

Oh poor Donny! That’s so unfair! They promised!

Trump once again used his political platform to threaten ABC, saying of Kimmel, “He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this.”

“Let’s see how we do,” Trump continued. “Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative.”

Disney agreed to pay Trump about $16 million last December to settle a defamation lawsuit that he had lodged against ABC.

Money money money, it’s a rich man’s world.

Trump got some things wrong.

Trump’s poll numbers: The president claimed, “I was very proud to see this morning I have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had. Part of it is because of what we’ve done on the border. I guess the other part is what we’ve done on the economy.” It’s theoretically possible Trump saw some private polling that gave him dramatically better numbers than public polling has produced, but his standing in public polling is nowhere near his highest ever — in fact, it’s down substantially from the beginning of this year.

Hmm, what happened at the beginning of this year? Oh yes, Trump started presidenting! Remember when he released all that water that California farmers needed for irrigation and just pissed it away in the Central Valley? Great start.

A New York Times polling average put Trump’s approval rating at about 43% as of Tuesday (with 54% disapproval), down from 52% approval in the first week of his second term in January (with 43% disapproval).

Yes but that’s the New York Times. Ask the Trump Bullshit Gazette and you’ll get a totally different polling average.

Trump also claimed that under his leadership, “grocery prices are down.” False. Average grocery prices have increased during Trump’s presidency, though the prices of some individual items have fallen; Consumer Price Index figures show that average grocery prices were about 1% higher in August than they were in January, when Trump returned to the White House.

That’s what he said! He just used different words, that’s all.

Trump said electricity in Europe is much more expensive than in China or the US, which is generally correct. But then he added, “And our bills are coming way down.” In fact, US electricity prices are spiking, rising more than twice as fast as overall prices; Consumer Price Index figures show they were about 6.2% higher in August than they were a year prior and about 4.9% higher in August than they were in January.

That’s what he meant by “coming down.” Sheesh, reporters just can’t give Trump a break, can they.

Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and he also referred to “the global warming hoax.” He didn’t precisely explain what he was calling the con job or hoax, but global warming is a demonstrated fact. Trump also baselessly suggested that scientists now use the phrase “climate change” instead of “global warming” so that they can’t be accused of getting things wrong if the world ends up cooling; in reality, climate scientists use both phrases, often saying “global warming” when referring to the long-term trend of increasing global temperature and “climate change” when referring to the numerous effects the world is experiencing because of that trend.

Whatever. It was cold somewhere today. Did they check Alaska? Greenland? The top of Chomolungma?

NASA says on its website: “‘Climate change’ encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet. These include rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.”

For example, a 2023 report from the UN’s climate change panel, titled “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report,” said this: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.” In a section titled “Future Climate Change,” the report also said this: “Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming, with the best estimate of reaching 1.5°C in the near term in considered scenarios and modelled pathways. Every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards (high confidence).”

These are all just trivial details that don’t matter. Bigger picture: Trump is a brilliant genius who should have multiple Nobel Prizes and his very own fire engine.

Erm…getting to know? Now? Having not known before?? What were you doing all this time????

After meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and the president of the European Union, President Trump appears to have shifted his view on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. No longer is he claiming that Ukrainian lands have been lost for good to Russia.

“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Just like that, he comes out and admits that he hasn’t bothered to “get to know” the Ukraine/Russia military and economic situation until today. What a genius. Nobel Peace Prize, coming right up.

Instead of seeking to broker a peace, President Trump appears now to be washing his hands of the conflict in Ukraine. He expressed confidence that Ukraine could win back its land, even though it was unable to do so even when the United States was providing tens of billions of dollars in support. Trump offered to keep selling weapons to Europe, which they can then give to Ukraine, but he said nothing about providing new support from the United States. He ended with the words, “I wish both countries well.”

He finally “got to know” it but don’t go thinking that means he’s going to do anything about it. He has his own agenda. Getting the Nobel Peace Prize, appearing on late night talk shows, getting more money, firing people, yelling at us, supervising the building of the White House ballroom, reminding everyone how important he is, getting the Nobel Peace Prize while doing nothing to earn it, whining about Obama, getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Pliny calls it.

Trump is pestering the UN.

He says “Now after ending all of these wars and also earlier negotiating the Abraham accords which is a very [long pause] big thing for which our country received no credit, never receives credit, everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize”

Well which is it? The US never receives credit, or everyone says Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize?

It can’t be both.

Especially not in the same sentence.

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

In retrospect, it is lamentable that the US labored under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the early 1940s.  Think of how glorious things might have been if, instead, the US of 1941 had had a president with all the qualities of its present chief executive, Donald H.Trump.  Let us imagine such a scenario.

  In 1940, our ideal President would have campaigned for America First, against entanglement with European affairs, and against Lend-Lease and all the various rip-offs that Winston Churchill had been able to extract from the US under FDR’s presidency.  Our candidate explained that there would have been no war at all if he had been President in 1939; and he insisted that he would end the war (which Poland had started) in 24 hours once he was elected.

  After assuming office in January of 1941, our ideal President invited both leaders of the Axis powers to a summit meeting with him to discuss Peace, and to restore friendly relations with the US.  The summit meeting was held at a US installation in formally neutral Iceland.  After US soldiers laid out a long red carpet for Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, our President in person cordially welcomed them both, and led them past posters that proclaimed “the Pursuit of Peace”.   After a brief meeting with no tangible outcome, the three leaders held a short joint press conference to praise each other.

  Later, an advisor to the US President announced that a Peace deal based on “land swaps” was imminent.  The German Foreign Office then issued a summary of the “land swap” deal.  It called for the US and Great Britain to officially recognize German annexation of Czechoslovakia and the western half of Poland; and to recognize German occupation and administration of Yugoslavia, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, not to mention northern France.  In return, the Third Reich would issue a paper affirming that the German Reich would not, in future, lay claim to the North Pole, the South Pole, or the Himalaya mountain range—unless it was forced to do so by urgent, legitimate security concerns.

   Next, our US President thanked the Third Reich for its pursuit of Peace, and hinted that a ceasefire with Britain might expedite further negotiations.  He added that it would take a lot of time to consider the details of this complex suggestion, so he wouldn’t mention it again for a year or two, or maybe five.  The German dictator thanked our President for his proposal, and confided that it would be examined at length by himself together with his colleagues Herr Himmler, Herr Goering, Herr Goebbels, and Herr Ribbentrop.  And then, the Reich Führer added that he, speaking personally as Adolf Hitler, would now nominate the US President for a Nobel Peace Prize.