The theocrat’s veto:

If the Turkish man on trial for burning a copy of the Quran loses his case on Tuesday, the Trump administration is preparing to offer him political asylum in the United States.

According to the Telegraph, State Department officials are already making plans to help him leave the country. Let that sink in. A man who came to Britain as a refugee — fleeing the Islamic terrorism that, as he puts it, destroyed his family’s life in Turkey — may soon have to flee Britain itself and seek asylum in America because we cannot protect his human rights. I cannot think of anything more embarrassing for Sir Keir Starmer.

So what’s this case about? On 13 February last year, Hamit Coskun — a Turkish-born atheist of Armenian-Kurdish descent — travelled to the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge and set fire to a Koran as a political protest against what he considers the Islamification of his homeland.

A passer-by, Moussa Kadri, attacked him with a knife before kicking him to the ground. Kadri received nothing more than a suspended sentence, but Coskun was convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence — another name for blasphemy, an offence Parliament abolished eighteen years ago.

Only eighteen years ago.

And only to replace it with a new form of blasphemy, which being interpreted is the audacious refusal to believe that men can be women.

The Free Speech Union, which I run, and the National Secular Society took up his cause. At Southwark Crown Court in October, his conviction was overturned.

Mr Justice Bennathan ruled that while burning a Koran might be something many Muslims find deeply upsetting, the right to freedom of expression must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.

But the Crown Prosecution Service, which originally charged Coskun with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to “the religious institution of Islam”, is now appealing to the High Court to get that acquittal overturned. The hearing is tomorrow.

How is it possible to cause alarm or distress to a religion or a “a religious institution” called Islam? A religion is an abstraction; it doesn’t have feelings. Islam did not quiver all over when Coskun burned the Koran; Islam in fact had no reaction at all, because it can’t, because it has no body and no brain.

If the CPS succeeds, it will establish a chilling principle: that breaking an Islamic blasphemy code — whether by burning a Koran or showing schoolchildren cartoons of Mohammed — will become a religiously aggravated public order offence, provided the blasphemer is violently attacked by a Muslim fanatic.

You’ve heard of the heckler’s veto. This would create a stabber’s veto. It would sound the death knell for free speech in Britain.

…

The FSU and the National Secular Society are jointly funding Coskun’s legal defence because this case is about far more than one man and one Koran.

It is about whether the criminal law can be used to enforce a de facto Islamic blasphemy code. It is about whether violent thugs get a veto over what the rest of us are permitted to say, write, draw, or burn.

And it is about whether Britain remains the kind of country in which political dissidents from tyrannical regimes can seek refuge — or the kind from which they flee.

Mind you, I don’t recommend fleeing to Trump’s US. He may welcome rebels against Islam, but rebels against the Maga version of Baby Jesus are a whole other story.

One small item from a Mother Jones piece about Trump and Epstein:

Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal’s response rips the hide off Trump’s case on many levels. For instance, it contends, rather reasonably, that reporting Trump was pals with Epstein before Epstein was busted is not defamatory. But the killer argument is that the WSJ article was “consistent with plaintiff’s reputation.” Trump, Murdoch’s lawyers maintain, “admitted to instances of using bawdy language when discussing women. Plaintiff thus cannot allege that the Article damaged his reputation.”

“Bawdy” is doing a lot of work here. Murdoch’s lawyers could have gone with “sleazy” or “lecherous” or “misogynist.” But they landed on a Benny Hill-ish description that’s less offensive in tone. 

Of course they do. Always. Mainstream bros writing and talking in mainstream media always minimize sexual harassment this way. They think it is minimal. They think it’s trivial, and they think women don’t matter enough to make it not trivial. Just bitches whining, amirite?

Murdoch asks the court to “take judicial notice of both the extensive public reporting of [Trump’s] past comments” and notes that Trump “has a well-documented reputation for bawdiness based on his past statements about women.” The complaint serves up examples starting with Trump’s infamous remark: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

There it is again, in the very next paragraph. “Bawdiness.” Not misogyny, not sexism, not contempt for and belittlement of women; just the playful and forgivable “bawdiness” that’s just good beefy fun for all concerned.

Once you notice this kind of thing you see it everywhere. That’s because it is, in fact, everywhere.

Peter Tatchell longs to see women’s rights demolished.

Peter Tatchell wishes women were required to have “a legitimate reason” for not taking our clothes off in the presence of male strangers. It looks as if he thinks simply not wanting to take our clothes off in the presence of male strangers is not a legitimate reason. All the tender concern is for men who want to watch women taking their clothes off; none is for women who don’t want to oblige.

Priorities.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s relationship with U.S. Coast Guard officials has become strained throughout her first year leading the department, according to two U.S. officials, a Coast Guard official and a former Coast Guard official.

The tensions between Noem and the only branch of the U.S. military overseen by DHS stem from some early decisions she made that rankled Coast Guard officials, including a verbal directive to shift Coast Guard resources from a search-and-rescue mission to find a missing service member, the sources said.

So she’s the “let them drown” kind of Coast Guard boss.

Noem’s focus on meeting the Trump administration’s deportation quotas appears poised to further impact Coast Guard operations in the coming months, according to new guidance recently issued to Coast Guard Air Station Sacramento this year. Based on DHS priorities, the air station, which is among those responsible for a majority of deportation flights, has designated its first priority to be the transport of detained immigrants on its C-27 aircraft within the U.S., according to multiple U.S. officials familiar with the orders.

The new orders moved search-and-rescue operations, which have long been the Coast Guard’s core mission, to a lower priority, the officials familiar with the orders said. They said counternarcotics efforts and Coast Guard training are prioritized above search-and-rescue operations.

A word of advice: stay away from bodies of water until the Trump regime is over.

The dissonance between Noem’s priorities and senior Coast Guard officials is a lesser-known part of the fallout from President Donald Trump’s mass deportations policy, and is largely playing out behind the scenes. Coast Guard officials have privately raised concerns with each other and confided in former officials about some of Noem’s directives and use of Coast Guard resources to service her and the administration’s priorities, the current and former Coast Guard officials said.

At times, the tensions have escalated into confrontations, the sources said. In one contentious incident in May, Noem’s top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, berated Coast Guard flight staff and threatened to fire them for taking off without one of the secretary’s personal items on board — a heated blanket, according to the current and former Coast Guard officials.

Let people drown, but don’t you dare forget to pack Noem’s heated blanket.

“The primary mission was search-and-rescue,” the former Coast Guard official said. “And now the number one stated mission of the Coast Guard is border security, that is a cultural change that the culture hasn’t quite caught up to.”

The official added that under Noem’s leadership “you never know what’s going to happen” and that morale at Coast Guard headquarters “is terrible.”

Same applies to Trump and all of us.

The Daily Mail on the fall of Lynsay Watson:

A transgender activist who accused Father Ted co-writer Graham Linehan of harassment has been arrested outside court over a separate case. Former police officer Lynsay Watson was detained by officers near Manchester Civil Justice Centre, with pictures of the appearance outside court widely shared online.

Widely shared because Watson turns out not to be a harmless slender wisp of a girl.

Former PC Watson was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.

Watson appeared for an oral permissions hearing for judicial review of a Cambridgeshire Police decision not to prosecute Helen Joyce for misgendering another trans activist, Freda Wallace. Watson was arrested after the hearing on the basis of outstanding arrest warrants for online harassment.

The ex-police officer was previously accused of reporting Linehan to police over posts on X that prompted the writer’s arrest at Heathrow airport last September.

Linehan later had action against him dropped. He was convicted last November, in a different case, of criminal damage after throwing a phone belonging to 18-year-old Sophia Brooks, though [he] was cleared of harassment.

“Sophia” Brooks is that other persistent nuisance and pest.

Watson had posted on X under the account name ‘SEEN police OFFICIAL Open Public Network’ before this was suspended. A subsequent similar account on rival platform Bluesky also no longer exists.

Ah, that explains why I couldn’t find SEEN police the other day when the news broke.

Watson was sacked for gross misconduct by Leicestershire Constabulary in October 2023 after trolling another free speech campaigner online, branding him a woman beater and a Nazi.

Watson has also been behind a large number of legal challenges related to gender and trans rights, including against three police forces, British Transport Police Federation and the Ministry of Defence.

Watson sent former police officer Harry Miller more than 1,200 messages over an 18-month period, describing him as a fascist and a bigot and labelled his campaign group Fair Cop ‘domestic terrorists’. Ex-PC Watson targeted Mr Miller because his views about gender identity were ‘in direct contradiction to her own’ a police misconduct panel was told.

In the messages Watson made ‘factual assertions that Mr Miller was violent towards women’. The panel heard Watson initially sent messages as a police officer – prompting Mr Miller to complain to Leicestershire Police.

And so on. The charge sheet is long. Watson is not a nice man.

Andy Borowitz yesterday:

Can the attorney general of the United States go to prison?

The answer, of course, is yes: John Mitchell, who served under Richard M. Nixon, later served 19 months behind bars for crimes related to the Watergate cover-up.

Will the toxin known as Pam Bondi follow in his footsteps?

It’s worth considering in light of her appearance before Congress on Wednesday, a performance that Kimberly Guilfoyle might call “too shouty.”

Her testimony was unquestionably obnoxious. But was it criminal?

When you examine the evidence, it doesn’t look good for Pam.

This was the pivotal moment: responding to a question from California Rep. Ted Lieu about the Epstein scandal, Bondi snapped, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime. Everyone knows that.”

Lieu, who must have been tickled that Bondi was dumb enough to step into the weasel trap he set for her, responded that the attorney general might have just committed perjury. Which, as every Watergate superfan knows, is exactly what earned her Republican predecessor, John Mitchell, a trip to the pokey.

She promptly blew a fuse, but the law is the law, an oath is an oath, perjury is perjury.

When the Trump shitshow is finally over, two things must happen. First, there must be a solid month of dancing in the streets. Second, there must be a reckoning: ideally, Nuremberg-style trials of the corrupt quislings who enabled this unprecedented crime spree. With those enjoyable tribunals in mind, let us now consider the case of Pam Bondi.

Remember when Trump nominated Matt Gaetz to be attorney general? We were so much younger then—although, it should be added, not young enough for Matt Gaetz.

At the time, I observed that Gaetz’s nomination was not what QAnon had in mind when they said they wanted to bring pedophiles to justice. In the end, Matt turned out to be as reckless with Venmo as he was about the age of consent, and Trump quickly withdrew his name.

Pundits claimed that Trump never expected Gaetz to pass muster with the Senate. By their reckoning, he was a “sacrificial lamb”—an odd way to describe a man who, in his personal life, had consistently behaved like a wolf. But by shitcanning Gaetz, the theory went, Trump was sending a signal to his Senate toadies that they’d better confirm all his other nominees, no matter how idiotic, incompetent, or drunk. When it came to Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Dr. Oz, Kash Patel, and myriad other passengers in Trump’s clown Cybertruck, the gambit seemed to pay off.

Is it clown Cybertruck, or cyber Clowntruck? I would have thought the latter.

As for the job of attorney general, Democrats and Republicans alike seemed relieved that it would not be filled by a summer-stock version of Jeffrey Epstein. Surely, whoever Trump named as Gaetz’s replacement would be an improvement.

Instead, Trump picked Pam Bondi.

In 2016, when she was Florida attorney general, Bondi secured her place in Trump’s heart with a speech at the Republican National Convention. Her bloodcurdling attack on Hillary Clinton inspired the GOP mob to break into a familiar chant, which prompted Bondi to comment, “Lock her up? I love that.” And so, by approving the incarceration of a woman who had never been charged with a crime, Bondi displayed an attitude towards due process that would someday serve her splendidly as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

She would, of course, have another opportunity to assert her preference for imprisoning innocent people with the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. On April 14, 2025, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump’s accomplice in the world’s most notorious administrative error, joined him in the Oval Office, receiving a much warmer welcome there than was offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After chummily congratulating each other on the abduction and deportation of a non-criminal, the two men started workshopping how their brilliant strategy might be applied to innocent American citizens.

“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”—a stroke of branding so cringe, it’s amazing it didn’t come from Elon Musk. “You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump advised him.

Billions for me, the gulag for thee.

It’s not that Bondi is bad at her job—it’s that she’s outstanding at the exact opposite of her job, that is, using the DOJ to subvert justice whenever possible. Bondi’s Department of Injustice, a mutant creation worthy of George Orwell and Lewis Carroll, has proven inhospitable to career DOJ lawyers, who have struggled in court to defend the indefensible.

One such staffer, senior immigration attorney Erez Reuveni, committed what Bondi apparently considers a cardinal sin: uttering a truthful statement within earshot of a judge. After acknowledging what was obvious to any thinking person (but seemingly elusive to Messrs. Trump and Bukele)—that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a mistake—Reuveni was put on indefinite leave and then fired.

Meanwhile, Liz Oyer, a longtime DOJ pardon attorney, was fired for refusing to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost them after pleading no contest to domestic battery charges in 2011. Apparently, Trump believes Mel Gibson needs lethal weapons more urgently than Ukraine.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see Trump standing up for the rights of domestic abusers, since a sizable number of the January 6 rioters he pardoned fit that description. He doubled down on his support for this cohort by appointing a crony accused of domestic violence, Herschel Walker, ambassador to the Bahamas.

And so on. Trump and his enablers are so horrible in so many dimensions that we literally can’t keep track, not if we want to eat and sleep and get a breath of fresh air too.

H/t Gnu Atheism

Krauss says let’s not go crazy here.

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

Notice anything missing?

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia:

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

Do we think that’s too harsh?

Even Republicans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well said.

Peter Baker on Trump’s personality cult:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And by “stuff” he meant “everything”.

Let the cars run free!

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re special. It makes us so proud!

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

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

Dirty air is better! It builds character.

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

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

Hoooooooooly cow – he didn’t – did he?

He did.

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

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

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

That is unusual! Also revolting.

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

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

Even better.

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

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

No bromance.

Gee, I wonder what that could be about.

Investigations underway after alleged sexual assault during wrestling match

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still not saying. Four evasive paragraphs: impressive!

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

Welllll who cares about female athletes? Yawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, maybe they welcome the publicity.

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

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

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

Brilliant news!

First of all what a dopy title.

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

What the hell is a carnage of concern?

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fintan O’Toole is on fire:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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