Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Shared realities.

The book in question is called Open Play: The Case for Feminist Sport, by Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford. One of the blurbs quoted on its Amazon page says:

“Sport has been in desperate need of a fresh, nuanced approach to gender, one which has women, nonbinary, and trans people at its core. Open Play challenges the patriarchal system that has dictated women’s participation in sport around the world. Its philosophy is simple yet revolutionary amongst the status quo of so-called ‘feminist’ approaches to sport. This book is not just a must-read, it should become foundational in the future of women’s sport from the grassroots to professional levels.” — Flo Lloyd-Hughes, sports writer and broadcaster

Sport doesn’t need any approach to gender, desperate or otherwise. Someone wanting to introduce this kind of “nuance” into this topic wants to see men on women’s podiums, and in women’s changing rooms. It’s not gendered souls out on the track, it’s not one’s innermost, true self doing laps in the pool, we’re not seeing how high a bar someone’s “identity” can clear, it’s sexed, physical bodies of flesh, blood, and bone that are reliably known to actually exist, that are competing. The concept of “gender identity” can’t muster enough substance to hold the kind of Gordian Knot that gender ideology, to the exclusion of all others, claims to be able to unravel. Please. You can’t tie a knot in either jello or smoke, and they’re both more real than “gender identity” will ever be.

It is not possible for women, and nonbinary, and trans people to be simultaneously at the core of anything. There’s no room at the inn, and trans identified males want to play Jesus and hog the manger. In practice, attempts to do this have always centered men’s wants and desires over women’s rights and needs. Women get shunted to the side whenever “gender” has to be taken into consideration, which, unlike sex, is a completely invisible, immaterial, undefinable, unmeasurable “entity” that is likely nothing more than an aspect of personality. Do we segregate sports by whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert? No. That’s not a salient criterion. Sex is, and no amount of handwaving is going to hide that fact.

“Nonbinary” females and trans identified females are still female; nothing that they do can change that. Hormone “treatments” that render them ineligible for participation in female sports are not the concern of female sports leagues; it’s a completely understandable consequence of the choices they’ve made, and nobody is obligated to make any accommodation for them whatsoever. Find a team or league that will accept you as you are, assuming you can make the cut. Similarly “nonbinary” males and trans identified males remain males. If the “treatments” they have chosen to subject themselves to result in their no longer being good enough to play on a men’s team, that’s too bad; join the billions of other men not good enough to make men’s teams. Don’t expect women to admit you to their leagues, because you’re not women, and never will be, however much you suppress your testosterone levels. Women are not just “men with low testosterone.” It’s insulting to women to pretend they are, and that monkeying around with T is all you need to do to become female.

It looks like the authors are trying to portray women’s sport as some kind of patriarchal ghetto to which women have been unfairly and unjustly “confined”, rather than a precious refuge which they have had to carve out for themselves against centuries of opposition, ridicule, and hostility. The basic physiological differences between male and female bodies (whatever the degree of overlap there may occasionally be within some parameters when comparing men and women) are real. They are not “cultural constructs” that can be overcome by women trying “harder.” It is not in any way “victimizing” or “infantilizing” women to acknowledge these physiological differences between the sexes. These differences call for separation of sport by sex, to ensure safe, fair competition, particularly for women. This is not a punishment. It is, to use the terminology of gender identity, an actual safe space for women, and a hard won space at that. But if you don’t know (or worse, refuse to acknowledge) what a woman even is, you’re not going to be able to understand (or you’re going to pretend to not understand) this need. Any “inclusive” definition of “woman” is solely for the benefit of men. They’re going to pretend to be “liberating” women from these patriarchal “cultural constructs” of imaginary physical differences between men and women in order to let men into women’s sport. That’s the only point of all of this, and there’s nothing in it for women. They can only lose.

Its philosophy is simple yet revolutionary amongst the status quo of so-called ‘feminist’ approaches to sport.

Uh-oh: “SO-CALLED ‘FEMINIST’ ALERT”. Presumably meaning the boring kind of feminism that wants to reserve women’s sport to women. How shameful! They want to “exclude” non-women from women’s sport, like Lammy’s feminist “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights.” The authors of this book are the fun, intersectional kind of “feminist” (see, we can use scare quotes too), who want to prevent women from having anything of their own demand inclusivity above all. Tell me: which group of feminists actually has the real interests and safety of women in mind as their first and only priority? Not the one who thinks that “gender” needs to be at the “core” of sports.

Are we sleepwalking?

Eviscerating the federal government and subjugating Congress; defying court orders and delegitimising judges; deporting immigrants and arresting protesters without due process; chilling free speech at universities and cultural institutions; cowing news outlets with divide-and-rule. Add a rightwing media ecosystem manufacturing consent and obeyance in advance, along with a weak and divided opposition offering feeble resistance. Join all the dots, critics say, and America is sleepwalking into authoritarianism.

I don’t think sleepwalking is the right word, on account of how we’re not asleep. It’s more that we’re helpless. We would stop him if we could, but we can’t.

The 45th and 47th president has wasted no time in launching a concerted effort to consolidate executive power, undermine checks and balances and challenge established legal and institutional norms. And he is making no secret of his strongman ambitions.

Trump, 78, has declared “We are the federal law” and posted a social media image of himself wearing a crown with the words “Long live the king”. He also channeled Napoleon with the words: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And JD Vance has stated that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”.

Trump quickly pardoned those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, placed loyalists in key positions within the FBI and military and purged the justice department, which also suffered resignations in response to the dismissal of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams after his cooperation on hardline immigration measures.

The president now has the courts in his sights. Last weekend the White House defied a judge’s verbal order blocking it from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, to justify the deportation of 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador, where they will be held in a 40,000-person megaprison.

…

Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, noted that Democrats and their allies have filed more than 125 cases against various attacks on the rule of law and obtained more than 40 temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.

“We’re in the fight of our lives,” he told the Guardian. “This is not a two week, two month or even two year fight that we’re in. This is going to take us many years to defeat the forces of authoritarian reaction and the Democrats are rising to the occasion.

“If you look at he way democratic societies responded to fascism a century ago, it just takes time for people to realign and refocus and mobilise a concerted and unified response. Are we there yet? No. But are we going to be in a place where we can stand together and defeat authoritarianism in our country? Yes, we are going to get there.”

Here’s hoping.

What I’m saying.

What is belief, what are views, what is a concept?

From The Times:

As a scientist at Porton Down developing technology to secure Britain’s defences, Peter Wilkins never imagined he would be considered a threat because of a belief in biology.

But when he stated his gender-critical views and support for the concept of immutable sex, Wilkins was reported for his “ideology” and labelled by colleagues as transphobic, “sad and pathetic” and “a rubbish employee”.

It’s all so weird. What is a “belief in biology”?

Knowing that men are not women is not a belief, it’s just awareness of an obvious and ubiquitous reality. Humans come in two sexes; one of each is required for the manufacture of all humans. That’s not a belief, it’s how things are. We don’t need any effort from the organ of belief to be aware of this fact. It doesn’t involve prayer or faith or an odd costume or weeks of fasting or a holy book.

An employment tribunal has found there was a “clear hostile animus” towards gender-critical beliefs at the top-secret Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). It found that an intimidating atmosphere resulted in the harassment and discrimination of Wilkins, 43, who was forced to leave as a result.

That is, a clear hostile animus toward the truth at a science and technology lab, which forced a scientist to leave because he was aware of the (obvious, familiar, part of the fabric of life) truth. Bully the scientists out because they’re cognizant of basic facts. Much sensible.

Speaking after he won a two-year legal battle with DTSL, Wilkins still appears slightly bemused that he had to have the argument. “It’s a scientific organisation,” he said, “so it shouldn’t be unacceptable to use the phrase biological sex.”

My point exactly.

“And it was pretty hurtful, really, having spent 15 years working for DSTL on some things which were high-security, to be told that we think you’re a security risk because you have these fairly normal, run-of-the-mill, factual beliefs about sex and genders.”

Not so much fairly normal as utterly completely absurdly normal. So normal that it’s laughable. Did a woman and a man make you? Or did a miracle occur? Which “belief” is more wack?

The case underlines how parts of the civil service have been affected by the debate, with abuse of gender-critical philosophy waged on an internal blog that DSTL employees would use to discuss the issue, often during work time. At least one other person has left the ­organisation over “spats” on the blog.

Oh gosh, Porton Down sounds like the UK branch of Pharyngula.

Wilkins had worked for DSTL for 15 years, including secondments to support operations in Afghanistan and a role attracting innovative technology into defence. In August 2021, when the neuroscientist Sophie Scott was awarded the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize, a DSTL employee wrote on the internal blog that it was “pretty disheartening” given that Scott was “well known for her non-inclusive views on trans and non-binary people”. Another wrote that it emboldened transphobes.

Yep. Pharyngula goes to Wiltshire.

Wilkins complained to moderators that this was “deeply unfair” to Scott, who had simply applied her scientific expertise to her views. It left the implication, he warned, that anyone with gender-critical beliefs should not receive public recognition for their work.

His concerns were not properly acted upon. In the following months a string of blog posts demeaned people with such views. One DSTL employee wrote that explicitly stating gender-critical beliefs was “abusive”. Another describ­ed gender criticism as bigotry and one said those who supported gender-critical views led “sad pathetic little lives”.

Been there, seen that.

Paul Kealey, head of counterterrorism at Porton Down, was singled out for criticism. He told Wilkins that while staff were permitted to hold gender-critical beliefs, it was “not OK to express such views in the workplace”.

It’s not ok to express, in a scientific workplace, “views” that men are not women and women are not men. It is ok to express in a scientific workplace that men can be women and women can be men. How does that make sense?

Wilkins resigned in November 2022, citing a hostile, intimidating and ­degrading environment. The tribunal concluded that he was constructively dismissed.

For the crime of knowing which sex is which.

Erm…

As a few thousand people are pointing out, it’s not really a brilliant idea to send babies and toddlers and young children off to a swim night that’s “inclusive” of adults. It looks more like procurement than like jolly splashy fun with your friends.

Waaaaaa Columbia wouldn’t give him $400 million waaaaaa it’s not fair.

Columbia needed to expand, which is tricky in Manhattan. Trump wanted Columbia to buy a patch he had more than two miles away. He wanted Columbia to pay $400 million for it.

As the discussions dragged on, many people from Columbia grew frustrated with their dealings with Mr. Trump. Still, the two sides set up a meeting in a Midtown Manhattan conference room with the intention of moving a transaction forward.

A few trustees and administrators arrived with a report prepared on their behalf by a real estate team at Goldman Sachs, which attended every meeting between Columbia officials and representatives of the Trump Organization. It outlined what the investment bank considered a fair value for the land.

Mr. Trump showed up late, was informed of the university’s property analysis and became incensed.

Goldman Sachs had assigned a value in the range of $65 million to $90 million, according to a person who was in the room. In an attempt to soothe Mr. Trump, a trustee offered that the university would be willing to pay the top of the range.

It didn’t matter. A furious Mr. Trump walked out less than five minutes after the meeting had started.

How dare anyone refuse to pay Donald Trump way more than the value of a property in the wrong location?

Mr. Trump also shared his indignation in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Years after the deal fell through,” the newspaper said, “Trump is still irate. ‘They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,’” Mr. Trump told the reporter and called Mr. Bollinger a “total moron.”

Mr. Trump was perhaps staying true to principles outlined in “How To Get Rich,” an advice book he co-wrote a few years after his deal with Columbia went sour.

One chapter is titled “Sometimes You Have to Hold a Grudge.”

In short he’s always been a mean ignorant swine but now he has real power. All we can do is hope his brain explodes sooner rather than later.

Bahahahahaha Trump the salesman. Oh hai allies, we’re selling you dud fighter jets, you’re welcome.

Another small item from the Horror Files:

The Trump administration has sidelined a senior Defense Department spokesman, defense officials said Thursday, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure in which he clashed with colleagues and journalists who cover the Pentagon, and aggressively defended the agency’s purge of government-produced content recognizing the contributions of minorities in the military.

He’s a bit too aggressive for the spokesy thing, but he’s not gone, he’s just moved.

Ullyot’s removal followed an uproar Wednesday over the Pentagon’s removal of an online article about the military background of Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in 1947, after serving in the U.S. Army. As news of the article’s removal drew widespread condemnation on social media, Ullyot released a statement attempting to explain the administration’s rationale — striking an unusually combative tone for a spokesman representing the view of a government agency with a nonpartisan national security mission.

“Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” his statement said in part, “ … Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.”

Geddit? DEI. Hurhur, that’s so witty.

Trump and the political appointees he’s positioned throughout the federal government have worked vigorously to end initiatives that promote diversity, equity and inclusion within the workforce, and to scrub from government websites and social media accounts most references to those terms. The Pentagon issued its order last month, days after Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired several senior military leaders they deemed overly focused on diversity.

I hate to be all both sidesy about it but sometimes it can’t be helped. Some DEI stuff is overdone or intrusive or self-admiring or all those, but that doesn’t mean equality and diversity and inclusion are bad in all forms on all occasions. Not even close. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with educating the public about talented women or immigrants or people of color.

The Jackie Robinson article was restored on the Defense Department website later Wednesday, but the reversal did little to quell the furor. On Thursday morning, ESPN television personality Stephen A. Smith took up the issue, saying he does not think the article was removed in error and that it follows what he called a pattern of the president’s supporters ignoring why DEI efforts existed in the first place.

Smith, who is Black, said on ESPN’s “First Take” that the administration is “going about the business of trying to scrub history” to the point that even Robinson is targeted. Smith noted that Robinson was drafted into military service in 1942, court-martialed in 1944 for refusing an order from a superior officer to move to the back of a bus, and honorably discharged from the Army.

See, I didn’t know that about the court martial or the disgusting order.

The Washington Post offers a refresher course on due process:

The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.

“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”

How did this guy pass his citizenship test?

As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.

More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, convinced the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”

Yebbut what about when a judge gives a legal opinion contrary to the will of Donald Trump? Or Elon Musk? Whole different kettle of fish, babe.

[Musk and friends] have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times.

…

There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Which being interpreted means: This is a dictatorship.

Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic,” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”

Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.

Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do these things.

“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.

For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned … except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man … should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.

If only we could.

At least Trump is paying attention to the important stuff.

Trump on Friday escalated his administration’s threats against those who destroy Tesla vehicles, pondering on social media whether he should send them to a prison in El Salvador where officials last week sent more than 200 Venezuelan migrants who they allege are members of a violent gang.

Trump also wrote that people who vandalize or destroy Tesla vehicles — made by the company owned by Trump ally Elon Musk — could get lengthy jail sentences.

“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote on social media. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

Hur hur. Why is that so funny? Because it’s Trump who has been sending migrants to those very prisons, which is why they’ve “become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.” His hilarious joke is about his own all-out war on human rights. Foreign Policy has details:

When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Central America in February on his first official trip abroad, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele made him an unusual offer: El Salvador would receive and detain people deported from the United States, as well as U.S. citizens convicted of crimes. Rubio described Bukele’s proposal as an “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country” and said on X that it would make the United States safer.

Last weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump took Bukele up on his offer. The White House used an oblique 18th-century law written during wartime to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, violating a federal judge’s ruling to halt the expulsions. The United States reportedly paid El Salvador $6 million to detain the migrants.

…

El Salvador and its prison system operate under what is known legally as a “state of exception.” In 2022, at Bukele’s request, the Salvadoran legislature authorized an emergency declaration to combat gang violence. The declaration suspended basic due process rights for Salvadorans and foreign nationals whom authorities accuse of being affiliated with gangs. Since then, the police and military have detained at least 85,000 people without judicial warrants, according to El Salvador’s legislature.

El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2 percent of the population in prison. The country’s prison population has exploded from an already overcrowded 38,000 people at the beginning of Bukele’s administration in 2019 to an estimated 120,000 people today. Most prisoners have not yet been convicted of any crime.

…

If the bodies of the 85,000 people detained without warrants bear any marks, they are more likely those of scabies and torture rather than tattoos. Testimonies gathered by Cristosal from former prisoners describe horrific overcrowding, disease, and systematic denial of food, clothing, medicine, and basic hygiene in El Salvador’s older prisons.

Cristosal and other human rights organizations have documented credible evidence of sexual assault and rape against women and children detained under the state of exception. The combination of harsh conditions and systematic physical torture has caused the deaths of at least 367 people, according to documentary, photographic, and forensic evidence gathered by Cristosal’s investigators. Salvadoran authorities deny that torture and killings occur in the country’s prisons.

In the majority of those cases, our researchers found that detainees had no criminal records and no evidence of gang tattoos. None had been convicted of any crime at the time of their deaths.

Trump is publicly gloating about threatening to send people who damage Musk’s toys to that hell. That’s where we are.

Erm…isn’t that called extortion? Isn’t it a crime?

Trump rescinds executive order after law firm agrees to provide $40m in free services

Donald Trump rescinded an executive order targeting a prominent Democratic-leaning law firm after it agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support his administration’s goals.

The White House has targeted law firms whose lawyers have provided legal work that Trump disagrees with. Last week, he issued an order threatening to suspend active security clearances of attorneys at Paul, Weiss and to terminate any federal contracts the firm has.

But the president suddenly reversed course following a meeting between Trump and Brad Karp, the chair of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, over the White House order.

In other words Trump extorted $40 million in free legal services by threatening a law firm. That’s technically known as a “crime.”

Trump’s order singled out the work of Mark Pomerantz, who previously worked at the firm and who oversaw an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into Trump’s finances before Trump became president. Pomerantz once likened the president to a mob boss.

To avoid the consequences of Trump’s order, the White House said, the firm had agreed to “take on a wide range of pro bono matters that represent the full spectrum of political viewpoints of our society”. The firm reportedly agreed to disavow the use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its hiring and promotion decisions and to dedicate the equivalent of $40m in free legal services to support Trump administration policies on issues including assistance for veterans and countering antisemitism.

The firm, the White House claimed, also acknowledged the wrongdoing of Pomerantz, the partner involved in the investigation into Trump’s hush-money payments to an adult film actor. It was unclear whether Karp was aware of that claim.

In a statement issued by the White House, Karp said: “We are gratified that the President has agreed to withdraw the Executive Order concerning Paul, Weiss. We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration.”

They are gratified that Trump succeeded in extorting their humiliating surrender. Sure they are.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

It seems as if the Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.

Today, members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” team showed up at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which helps to fund libraries and museums across the country and whose elimination Trump called for in an executive order last week. They sent employees home, swore in a new acting director in the lobby, and proceeded to cancel contracts and grants.

So we can’t have libraries and museums? Why not?

Even as this dismantling was going on, District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander was blocking the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing data at the Social Security Administration and ordering them to destroy copies of any personal information they have already accessed. “The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”

Also today, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who said the government could not use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify sending migrants to a prison in El Salvador, appeared to be out of patience with the government’s obfuscation of what actually happened in the process of that rendition last weekend. Boasberg’s order today laid out that he had repeatedly asked the government to provide information about the flights but that the government had “evaded its obligations,” providing only general information about the flights and appearing to cast about for further delays.

“This is woefully insufficient,” Boasberg wrote. He required that the government explain by March 25 why its failure to return the flights as ordered did not violate the court order to do so. Far from backing down, the administration appears to be considering escalating its fight with the courts. Devlin Barrett of the New York Times reported today that lawyers in the Trump administration believe the 1798 Alien Enemies Act Trump used to deport migrants also permits federal agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant, an assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Trump White House and its MAGA supporters appear to be trying to cement their power to control the government by undermining the rule of law and the judges who are defending it. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday called Judge Boasberg a “Democrat activist,” although he was originally appointed by President George W. Bush, and badly misrepresented Boasberg’s order. She also attacked Boasberg’s wife for her political donations.

In Talking Points Memo this morning, David Kurtz recorded how MAGA supporters Elon Musk and Laura Loomer have attacked Boasberg’s daughter, and in Rolling Stone, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng noted that that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, accused Boasberg of “attempting to meddle in national security,” adding: “This one federal judge thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country, and he cannot.”

Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” trying to obscure that it is the role of courts to determine whether or not the power the executive is claiming is, in fact, legitimate. On the Fox News Channel, “border czar” Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”

So they don’t care what the laws are. So they’re telling us right up front they’re dictators and we can’t stop them.

Kurtz noted that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings on the many injunctions against the Trump administration. Kurtz also noted that angry Trump supporters have called in bomb threats against judges who have stood against Trump’s excesses, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and have sent anonymous pizza deliveries to the homes of judges and their relatives as a way to demonstrate that “we know where you live.”

Perez and Suebsaeng reported that the White House’s strategy is to “move fast” before courts can stop them. In the end, one source close to the president told them that the president’s ultimate power over judges comes from the fact that they do not command an army, while he does. “Are they going to come and arrest him?” the advisor asked, apparently confident that the answer is no.

The attack of Trump and his MAGA supporters on the courts and the rule of law has illustrated how quickly the United States is sliding from democracy to authoritarianism. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky told Amanda Taub of the New York Times. Along with his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote How Democracies Die. “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” Levitsky said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the courts, and thus the country’s legal system, appears to have kicked the alarm about the dismantling of the U.S. government into a new phase. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times ran op-eds today from law professors detailing the lawlessness of the Trump administration and warning that the courts will not be able to stop Trump and his administration from their authoritarian takeover of the government.

In the New York Times, Georgetown University professor of law Stephen Vladeck has faith that the courts will try to rein Trump in, while in the Washington Post, Harvard Law School professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale University professor of law and history Samuel Moyn are less convinced that the judges Trump himself appointed will stand against him, but all three of them warn that stopping Trump will require the people to demand “far more aggressive oversight from members of Congress,” as Vladeck puts it. Doerfler and Moyn wrote that “real resistance must take place in Congress, at government workplaces, and in the streets.”

That the courts are in the position of trying to stop a president who is ignoring the Constitution reflects that Republicans in Congress appear to have taken off the table impeachment, the political remedy the Constitution’s framers put into our system for such a crisis.

Stick a knife in us, we’re done.

I found a nice paperback The Best American Travel Writing 2010 in a Little Free Library a few days ago, and opened it yesterday evening all eager for the treat. Until I read the contents page.

Twenty one articles.

Twenty of them written by men.

One whole entire article out of 21 was by a woman.

Really dude? One?

Because women don’t travel? Because women can’t write? Because you forget that women exist? What? What’s the problem here?

The editor for this one was Bill Buford; the series editor is Jason Wilson. Wouldn’t you think one of them would have noticed? I would.

So I’ll be putting that book back in the LFB, or perhaps the recycle bin, unread.

From last week:

The Trump administration delivered an ultimatum to leaders of Columbia University on Thursday, threatening to end a portion of its federal funding unless the school implements strong controls over an international studies department and makes significant changes to student discipline standards and other university policies.

In a letter obtained by NPR dated March 13, federal officials from the U.S. Education Department, Department of Health and Human Services and General Services Administration demanded Columbia place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years,” requiring them to create a full plan to do so by March 20. The letter didn’t explain why this department was targeted for an academic receivership, an unusual move in which the control of a program is placed in the hands of university administration.

Hmm. What do Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African have in common. Hmmm, that’s a tough one. Oh I know!

Brownitude. Lack of pallor. A certain beige note to the skin, sometimes shading to umber.

It’s been a tumultuous week at Columbia as the Trump administration appears to have set its sights on the university. His administration has already canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the school, claiming that Columbia failed to police antisemitism on campus in the wake of pro-Palestinian demonstrations last spring. And the high-profile arrest of a former student involved in those protests continues to keep the school in the public eye.

You know, it’s ironic. Columbia used to be considered a bit…how shall I put this…a bit not out of the very top drawer. A bit regrettable. Not sufficiently Yale-like. Can you guess why? [whispers] Too Jewish, dalling.

So they found Edward Said and they went all yay-Palestine and what did it get them. There’s no justice.

Much of the turmoil at Columbia began last spring after university leadership clashed with pro-Palestinian protests on campus, sparked by the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Columbia students, for their part, established encampments on school grounds and took over a university building as they called on university leaders to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Maybe they should focus on something else. Greenland? That’s looking intriguing these days.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a Jewish and pro-Israel advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., called the the Trump administration’s targeting of higher education part of “an all-out assault on the norms of our democracy and against the very existence of critical institutions, programs and services across all sectors of our society.”

By taking this step, and justifying it as protecting Jewish students, the Trump administration is abusing real fears of Jewish Americans about rising antisemitism, Ben-Ami said in a press release.

“That is why it is so painful to see the very real fears of Jewish Americans about rising antisemitism being abused by the Trump Administration to advance a nefarious agenda that undercuts key pillars of the Jewish experience – from civil rights to immigration and higher education,” Ben-Ami said.

Maybe Jared could tell daddy-in-law to shut up about it.

So “DEI” includes discussion of the Holocaust? I did not know that.

Articles about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness, sexual assault and suicide prevention are among the tens of thousands either removed or flagged for removal from Pentagon websites as the department has scrambled to comply with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to scrub “diversity” content from all its platforms.

A database obtained by CNN shows that more than 24,000 articles could be purged, with many gone already. The scrub goes well beyond just the removal of images from the Pentagon’s visual database, known as DVIDS, and includes articles from across more than 1,000 websites hosted by the department.

The Pentagon previously said in a memo last month that it would be removing news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.

Well, those are three inherently squishy words, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Trump’s Pentagon defines them very broadly. The Pentagon bosses don’t want him yelling at them or telling Musk to purge them.

At least half a dozen articles already removed are about the Holocaust and now have the word “DEI” in their URL.

So mentioning the Holocaust is trendy far-lefty bleeding hearty lefty bullshit, is that the thinking? So the Holocaust was not a bad thing?

The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, told CNN that “we are concerned by reports that the Department of Defense has removed Holocaust-related content, including survivor stories, under the label of ‘DEI.’”

“Honoring the memory of the Holocaust and those who survived is not a matter of political ideology — it is a moral imperative and a vital component of education, remembrance, and the fight against antisemitism,” Greenblatt said.

Well it is also a matter of political ideology. How can it not be? The Holocaust is entirely a project of a warped crazed ideology. The Nazis were ideologues down to their toenails. It’s not really possible to “honor the memory” while walling off the originating ideology. The two are necessarily intertwined.

This photo from the US Air Force shows Kitty Saks, a Holocaust survivor, displaying the star she wore during the Holocaust to distinguish her Jewish faith in her home in Norfolk, Virginia, in April 2016. An article about Saks posted to a US Air Force website has been removed as part of the Pentagon’s effort to remove “news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.” This photo is still available on the military’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.

That makes me feel profoundly ill.

I sometimes burble about the jaw-dropping beauties of Seattle and its suburbs, so maybe it’s time for a look at the other side.

A black metal fence, topped with coils of razor wire, surrounds Lam’s Seafood Asian Market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood.

The fencing, which cost $50,000, went up in summer 2023 to stop people from pitching tents and building fires in the parking lot after-hours and breaking into the grocery store and warehouse next door. Security cameras are mounted inside and out, so far costing $15,000 as more are added to cover every checkout lane and newly discovered blind spot.

 “This is the last thing we wanted to do,” said Teizi Mersai, Lam’s business operations manager, gesturing to the fence along South King Street. “It makes us look like a prison. It’s not very welcoming.”

I saw that store and the razor wire just a couple of weeks ago, when I was heading for a massive Goodwill store in the nabe. Just before seeing that, I had seen a knot of police cars and a much bigger knot of people hanging out doing who tf knows what. The combination of the two was very squalid and disgusting and depressing, and also all too common. There’s another hot spot of that kind on another edge of downtown, that I see almost every day because it’s on the bus route from my nabe to the center. The hot spot of that hot spot is another grocery store and I wonder every time I look at it from the bus how it can possibly be surviving. I never see any knots of cop cars there though.

While the fence has done its job keeping people out when the market is closed, it hasn’t deterred the throngs of people, often numbering in the dozens, who gather on the sidewalk to smoke fentanyl or shoot up other street drugs. The fence also can’t stop the rampant EBT fraud that plays out daily in the store and parking lot, with some shoppers agreeing to give cash in exchange for purchases made with state-provided benefits to low-income people, often for 20 to 50 cents on the dollar, said Mersai, who has aided police and state investigators.

Just so. This is what I see from the 2 bus as well: about four blocks crowded with people just hanging around, some with junk laid out on a blanket apparently for sale though I can never figure out who tf would want to buy junk off a blanket on the street.

I’m not a nice person. Seeing this doesn’t cause me to well up with compassion; all it causes is disgust and loathing. I know it shouldn’t, but it does anyway.

Community members in Little Saigon, a roughly eight-block neighborhood on the east end of the Chinatown International District, are grappling with the despairing effects of crime, public drug use, shuttered storefronts and concentrated homelessness. Led by neighborhood group Friends of Little Sài Gòn, residents and business owners have teamed up with Seattle police and other city and county departments to develop a safety plan that addresses root causes of crime and street disorder.

Great. Do that. But in the meantime – why do the police and city and county departments do nothing about the ongoing mess on the streets?

David Tran, whose family bought Lam’s Seafood from the original owners a decade ago, wonders if they can hold out long enough for the Phố Ðẹp funding and safety plan’s interventions to come to fruition.

“It might be a little too late,” he said. “There’s not a lot of community members left to get involved.”

According to Tran, many of his customers have been scared away by people loitering, doing drugs, blocking traffic and sometimes acting aggressively or erratically on and near his property — a situation that saw the store’s February sales plummet to the lowest ever in a single month.

Well quite – so why is nothing done about it? I realize it’s cruel to move people along when they have nowhere to go, but it’s not exactly kind to shrug and let them rot on the street while scaring off everyone else.

While Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan has cleaned up Third Avenue and Pine Street in downtown and 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street, Tran said there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency by the city to address the social issues that have been pushed to the streets south of the latter intersection.

Yes and the streets north of the former intersection – that’s the area I regularly have to navigate.

Seattle’s dirty big secrets.

Terrorism. Knowing men are not women is terrorism if you go public with this dangerous knowledge.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

Institute of Peace violently invaded by the dictator.

Officials at an independent institute dedicated to promoting peace will ask a federal judge on Wednesday to block Trump administration officials and Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting team from mounting what they called a “lawless assault” against it.

The organization, the U.S. Institute of Peace, sued President Trump and others on Tuesday, asking the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia to intervene against what it said was an illegal “takeover by force.”

A standoff on Monday between the institute and Mr. Musk’s team ended when police officers helped evict staff members from the institute’s headquarters in Washington. That came after the White House has in recent days gutted the institute’s board and appointed a new acting president.

How do Musk and his “team” get to do whatever they want? Why do the police do their bidding?

Mr. Trump signed an executive order last month directing the institute to reduce its operations to the “statutory minimum.” But institute officials have said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk do not have the authority to dismantle its operations because the organization is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch.

In the lawsuit, the institute said that the executive order incorrectly labeled the organization as a “government entity.” It accuses members of Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and others of having “plundered” the agency’s office “in an effort to access and gain control of the Institute’s infrastructure, including sensitive computer systems.

But of course Musk and friends said they can do whatever they want and we can’t stop them.

So many people having so much fun bullying women.

From men who are happy to see women pushed out.

That’s quite the broad sweeping incloosive lie.

Not deprogram, not persuade, not silence, not rebuke, not contradict, not reason with, not quarrel with, not shout at, not remonstrate with, not convince, not turn around – but exterminate.

Jonathan Willoughby is a disgusting human being.