Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Serial suitcase guy who works for the government:

An energy department official is accused of stealing luggage from Harry Reid International Airport, the 8 News Now Investigators learned Thursday.

A felony warrant was issued for Sam Brinton, a deputy assistant secretary, sources said. The charge is for grand larceny with a value between $1,200 and $5,000, records showed.

Brinton is a deputy assistant secretary of the office of spent fuel and waste disposition, according to the Office of Nuclear Energy’s website.

Brinton faces charges for a similar incident at the Minneapolis airport. He was on leave after charges were filed in connection with that incident, an energy department spokesman said in November.

Brinton is a non-binerrreeee lifter of other people’s suitcases. Pride! The Daily Beast is more polite about his pronouns than the AP:

 Sam Brinton, who was recently appointed head of spent nuclear fuel management, has allegedly been accused of grand larceny with a value of between $1,200 and $5,000, 8 News Now reports. The accusation comes after Brinton—who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns—was charged with stealing someone else’s bag from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in April. Court filings in that case claim Brinton said they initially denied taking the suitcase belonging to another person before later contacting airport authorities to say they were “tired and took the suitcase thinking it was theirs.”

The airport authorities are adamant that they were not tired and did not take the suitcase thinking it was theirs.

She Identifies As an independent.

Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced Friday that she now has registered as an independent…

But she was elected as a Democrat. Wouldn’t it be more fair to the voters to wait to go all mavericky up in there until her next election?

In a video explaining her decision, she said: “Registering as an independent and showing up to work with the title of independent is a reflection of who I’ve always been. … Nothing’s going to change for me.”

Then why did she run and get elected as a Democrat?

I found myself thinking about topsoil and the west so I went to the search engine. Nebraska Public Media has a piece from last April:

A few years ago, Isaac Larsen attended a wedding at a pioneer church in Minnesota. After the ceremony, he wandered around a cemetery by the church.

He noticed the cemetery, which had never been tilled, was at least a foot higher than a corn field just on the other side of a fence.

Tilling erodes soil.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst geosciences professor and his co-researchers have released a new study that found topsoil in the Midwest is eroding at an average rate of 1.9 millimeters per year. They measured elevation differences between native prairie and farm fields at about 20 sites, the majority in central Iowa, with some in Illinois, Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska.

The researchers estimate the Midwest has lost 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil since farmers began tilling 160 years ago. This erosion, Larsen said, makes it more difficult and more expensive to grow crops.

“We’re going to need to feed more people in the future,” he said, “and degraded soils that have lost their organic rich horizons just aren’t as productive.”

We might not need to feed more people in the future though. The consequences of the other ways we’ve eroded and degraded the world we live in are already thinning populations and it’s not looking as if we’re going to slow that down much.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights continues to talk complete nonsense about women and our rights.

Feminism isn’t a fucking narrative. Human rights are not a narrative. You’d think the UN High Commissioner for them would know that. Gender is a trap that is getting narrower and tighter by the day. Of course women’s rights are human rights but what on earth does “Gender equality must be addressed holistically” mean? That women should “holistically” forget about our rights and focus on men’s right to pretend to be us instead? If so, fuck that.

Trump has been staying home lately.

He spoke at a friendly think tank conference held at Mar-a-Lago and a for-profit gala, also at Mar-a-Lago. He had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with two prominent antisemites, drawing widespread criticism, including from top Republicans.

Conference at Mar-a-Lago, gala at Mar-a-Lago, dinner with anti-semites at Mar-a-Lago. Festive but samey.

He’s done some video appearances and some fundraising and some dropping in, but it was all still at Mar-a-Lago. No heads of state to push out of the way, no royalty to bore, no rallies in half-empty arenas.

The early announcement [that he’s running again] — which advisers said was planned in part to clear the field of potential rivals and help Trump get ahead of a potential indictment — appears to have failed or backfired on both fronts. Rather than declining to run against Trump, a crowd of other Republicans have become more vocal about their possible moves to challenge him for the nomination. And Trump’s formal declaration of his candidacy prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to oversee the federal criminal probes circling the former president into his campaign’s efforts to submit phony electors in 2020 and into the mishandling of sensitive government secrets at Mar-a-Lago.

Maybe we finally get to watch him taken apart bit by bit over the next few months.

A hilariously scathing thread on That Report:

I’ll just quote the rest.

1. The paper is, presentationally, very poor with numerous typographical errors and infelicities of expression. May we kindly suggest that next time you proof read your paper prior to submission. Our readers are not there to provide copy editing services.

2. The paper has a tendency to assert rather than argue the case, indeed so much so that the paper veers towards unsubstantiated monologue. There are several places where instead of using authoritative sources on the law – or indeed even academic concepts – your paper relies on dictionary definitions. See particularly the definition of gender critical. Quite frankly, there is no excuse in academic work to rely on a dictionary definition when there is both case law (please see the EAT in Forstater V CGD) or a reasonably extensive body of academic literature. We are happy to provide a reading list of appropriate sources to help improve your thinking on this matter. See also your footnote 29 where you assert – without further discussion – that gender critical beliefs contain the same logic errors as those espoused by members of the BNP – namely trading in negative and highly prejudicial stereotypes of an entire category of individuals. Had you argued rather than merely asserted your case here, you might have seen the irony in your footnote.

More concerning however is the fact that you state that your paper provides a balanced analysis of the situation viz-a-viz balancing academic freedom, freedom to protest and harassment in universities viz trans inclusivity. The problem the reviewers had is that your description of the law contains far too many factual errors for the paper to be treated seriously. Please see the very illuminating analysis of @akuareindorf (whose work I believe you may be familiar with) and @AudreySuffolk. Both these analyses show that your understanding of the Equality Act 2010 is highly problematic – in fact we suggest your demonstrated understanding would not even merit a bare pass at UG level. There are three more issues though that lead to the decision to reject.

One would assume in any attempt to publish an authoritative analysis of the balancing that Universities must do in this area would require at a minimum a detailed consideration of s26(4) Equality Act 2010. Yet this is wholly absent.

Your inclusion of the concept of ‘contagion’ and ‘contamination’ goes beyond legal analysis and veers into the realm of rhetoric.

Your chosen examples seem to work against you. We believe that at @Uni_of_Essex there were indeed campaigns of the type you describe that resulted in unlawful actions. #ReindorfReport

Thus, the substandard presentation, combined with lack of authoritative sources and lack of informed discussion of key legal framework means that this report is simply not up to the requisite academic standards for peer review. That said, it is a great exemplar paper that can be used for teaching purposes. It provides students with a great example of what not to do.

Wallop!

Now the gender fundamentalists are doing the “don’t you just hate women’s screechy voices???” thing. So progressive it makes me dizzy.

Oh no, she’s onto us! We’re shrill. We whine. We sound like a dentist’s drill – as in the My Fair Lady lyric: “I’d be equally as willing For a dentist to be drilling Than to ever let a woman in my life.” [“Than” should be “As” but never mind.]

Her mates all agree.

That last one is a real gem – converting her ugly misogynist malice into girlish niceness with “cosy” and “big skies” and “our souls.”

What a shower.

JL at the Glinner Update goes into the BBC’s history of inclooooding men on its lists of women to celebrate:

In 2013 the BBC pledged that it would better represent women in its international news output and launched its 100 Women List.

A good idea! But so briefly.

But only a year later this initiative was totally undermined when the list included a drag character, Conchita Wurst, the onstage persona of an Austrian man called Thomas Neuwirth.

With a full beard and Fabulous eyelashes.

In 2016 The 100 Women List included trans-identified male, Seyan Arman, a DJ and entertainer from Turkey. In 2018 it featured trans-identified male, Ophelia Pastrana, “An outspoken transgender media personality” from Columbia. In 2019 it included trans-identified male, Nisha Ayub, a transgender rights campaigner from Malaysia.

So, a drag character, a DJ & entertainer, a transgender media personality, a transgender rights campaigner – in other words not one of them did anything useful or particularly noteworthy apart from campaigning for a cause that harms women. Soooooooo why are they on the list?

In 2020 The 100 Women List included model, Lea T. Amongst all the inspirational and pioneering female scientists, teachers, sportswomen, politicians, aid workers, artists and activists etc was a trans-identified male who performs stereotypical femininity to model swimwear in Vogue and Marie Clare.

What I’m saying. The women on the list do big things, often dangerous things, things that benefit others. The Beeb puts models and media personalities on the list simply because they pretend to be women. It’s doubly insulting and belittling. The women accomplish something (a lot), all the men have to do is pout.

Last year there were two, this year were two. Maybe next year there will be fifty.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Yes, really, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said this. Not a random “activist,” not a confused journalist, not a once reasonable science blogger, but the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said this.

Reading the Essex Report Universities’ Legal Obligations in the Context of Trans Inclusion, Trans Equality,
and ‘Gender Critical’ Activities on Campus [pdf]. It’s as annoying as I expected (and probably more so).

The right to freedom of expression, established under the European Convention on Human Rights, ensures that individuals can access information in order to form their opinions and identity…

Already we’re talking about idenniny.

Freedom of expression does not exclusively protect a monologue: it protects the exchange of ideas and opinions, including both speech and counter-speech…

That’s a stupid and tendentious way to put it. Of course it doesn’t exclusively protect a monologue; who said it did? That’s like saying “There will be no throwing of alligators at this table” before starting dinner with friends.

Public debates in the context of trans rights tend to focus on the (often ‘gender critical’) speaker’s right to freedom of expression.

Guess why! It’s because of those shouting screaming window-banging “protesters” who gather whenever a feminist dares to open her mouth. Trans “activists” are hell bent on removing freedom of expression from feminist women. Trans ideologues aren’t the ones being silenced and shouted down in this controversy.

Freedom of expression is also restricted when the expression violates criminal law: for example, because the speech is an explicit or implicit threat or encouragement to kill or to use unlawful violence against a particular (type of) person or group.

The threats and encouragements to kill are not coming from the feminists. These three should watch videos of trans “activists” confronting feminists as a matter of urgency.

Ah yes, women=pollution. Beware beware, bring plenty of bleach to throw in their faces.

Essex reports on the report:

In light of recent debates surrounding freedom of expression, trans inclusion, and ‘gender critical’ debates on university campuses, lawyers and academics at Garden Court Chambers and the University of Essex have prepared a new report: ‘Universities’ Legal Obligations in the Context of Trans Inclusion, Trans Equality, and ‘Gender Critical’ Activities on Campus’.

Already the asymmetry is apparent. Scare quotes on gender critical but no scare quotes on trans inclusion. Obligation in the context of trans inclusion and trans equality but nothing about female inclusion and female equality. Trans people matter; women are worthless at best, a demonic enemy at worst.

The report provides an accessible overview of how the law treats disputes on the limits of freedom of expression in a University, focusing in particular on issues relating to freedom of speech disputes in regards to trans inclusion, trans equality and ‘gender critical’ speech.

But what about issues relating to freedom of speech disputes in regards to inclusion of women, women’s equality, women’s speech?

Shut up. Nobody cares about that.

David Renton, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers, and the report’s lead author notes that, “Many university administrators are fearful of disputes spinning out of control, but actually their legal duties are straightforward. They must promote freedom of expression but not to the point where it becomes an excuse for the harassment of trans staff and students.” 

Trans staff and students only. The harassment of female staff and students is fine.

Maggie Haberman underlines what a bad day Trump had.

First came the events in the city where he was born and raised.

Translation: his own NYC bit him in the ass.

In New York, the jury that heard the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, deliberated over two days before returning guilty verdicts on all 17 counts related to a tax-fraud scheme, a sweeping condemnation of the company that bears Mr. Trump’s name.

…

The company will face a seven-figure fine, and the verdict could hinder its future endeavors. While convicting a company is not convicting a person — Mr. Trump himself was not charged in connection with the case — the taint of criminality is something that the former real-estate developer and promoter has sought to avoid for decades.

He’s sought to avoid the taint of criminality while engaging in criminality with enthusiasm and zeal.

On Tuesday night, as the trial’s impact sank in, attention turned to Georgia. Herschel Walker, a former professional football player who was a member of the New Jersey Generals, a United States Football League team owned by Mr. Trump in the early 1980s, was waging an uphill battle in the state’s Senate runoff against incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat. In the end Mr. Warnock prevailed in a tight election.

Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Walker early in the campaign, even as some Republicans in Washington were squeamish about a personal history that included allegations of abuse. Yet Mr. Trump was adamant that Mr. Walker would not face consequences with voters for his history, appearing to see the athlete as living proof that the ex-president himself, who survived one scandal after another, had changed the alchemy of campaigns.

Because in Trumpworld and Trumpbrain, abuse doesn’t matter, it’s only the allegations that matter. If you can hide or laugh off the allegations then there’s no problem. It doesn’t matter at all that the dude you want to see elected to the Senate has a long history of abusing women, because women don’t matter and abusing them is a perk of being a famous rich guy. Trump was sure Walker wouldn’t face consequences for his history, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the history itself.

We can add US Rowing to the list.

Replies are incensed. Not a single “Yay great inclusive awesome yay” to be seen.

Trump had a very bad day yesterday. First his company was found guilty on all charges – all nine or eleventy hundred or whatever it was. Then his candidate for Senator from Georgia lost lost lost lost lost lost lost.

One of 12 children born to a father who was also a pastor and a mother who once picked cotton, Warnock reflected on the unlikelihood of his path to the Senate. His mother was with him at his victory party, after she had the opportunity to again cast a ballot for her son.

“I am Georgia,” Warnock said. “I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its pain and its promise, of the brutality and the possibility. But because this is America, because we always have a path to make our country greater against unspeakable odds, here we stand together. Thank you, Georgia.”

Well, but, also because this is America the odds can be unspeakable. Warnock can say that if he wants to but people who aren’t descended from enslaved people don’t get to. It makes me cringe when people who don’t have that kind of heritage boast about America as the land of hope or ultimate liberation or whatever it is.

Walker’s defeat will probably intensify questions over Trump’s standing in the Republican party. Overall, Trump-endorsed candidates fared [badly] in this election season, prompting questions from some of the former president’s critics over whether he has pushed his party to an unpopular extreme.

Ya think?

Maya annotates Emma Barnett’s hostile interview of Hadley Freeman on Woman’s Hour:

I am so tired of the dishonest way journalism frames the issue of men ruining women’s sports. For instance Reuters/The Guardian:

Transgender athletes will be able to participate in community sport in New Zealand in the gender they identify with and not need to prove or justify their identity, according to new guiding principles released by Sport New Zealand.

The guidelines do not apply to elite sport and it will be up to individual sports to define where and how transgender athletes participate, the governing body said.

“An inclusive transgender policy allows individuals to take part as their self-determined gender and not as the sex they were assigned at birth,” Sport New Zealand (SNZ) said. “It does not ask people to prove or otherwise justify their gender, sex or gender identity.”

The issue isn’t “transgender athletes,” the issue is male athletes. The issue isn’t “gender identity,” the issue is male bodies. The issue isn’t “self-determined gender” versus “sex assigned at birth,” it’s male bodies versus women’s bodies. They all know that perfectly well, the journalists and editors, and they choose to obfuscate it and lie about it for the sake of this idiotic narcissistic ideology. I am so tired of it.

Transgender participation has proved controversial at amateur and elite levels, with women’s groups and some athletes saying transgender athletes should be banned from female categories to ensure fair competition.

The fourth paragraph: that’s how long it took them to hint at the real issue, but only hint at it without spelling out the part about men being bigger and stronger and faster than women are.

Journalism really needs to stop lying about this subject.

That BBC list of women does of course have heroic brilliant women on it, a fact which I shouldn’t lose sight of in objecting to the Beeb’s inclooosion of men who claim to be women.

Aye Nyein Thu is a front-line volunteer in crisis areas of Myanmar, focusing on the remote and poor Chin State. She built a makeshift hospital with a small operating theatre in November 2021 and has since been treating sick and injured people.

Working in a remote area of Indonesia, Velmariri Bambari has been fighting for victims of sexual violence in Central Sulawesi. She has persuaded members of the local council to break with customary law and not impose fines on survivors of sexual abuse.

In customary law, the sanction of “washing the village” establishes that perpetrators who are thought to have polluted traditional values should pay a fine. This rule is also applied to victims. Because of her campaigning, Bambari is often the first person contacted by the police when sexual violence is reported. She has dealt with several cases this year.

In her spare time, she travels to other regions where medical treatment is mostly unavailable, to support local patients including internally displaced persons. In the course of her work, she has had charges of ‘causing incitement to violence’ brought against her by the Myanmar military, who accused her of supporting local anti-government militia groups known as People’s Defence Forces.

A renowned Russian journalist, Taisia Bekbulatova founded the independent media outlet Holod in 2019. The organisation has reported extensively on the war in Ukraine, as well as publishing stories about inequality, violence, and women’s rights. The website was blocked in Russia by authorities in April, during a crackdown on independent media.

Despite this, Bekbulatova and her team have vowed to continue their work, and have seen their readership increase. Bekbulatova, who left Russia in 2021 after being labelled a “foreign agent”, has travelled to Ukraine herself to report on the war from the front line.

Heroes all of them.

This guy thinks people are obliged to want to “date” him.

Nobody is obliged to want to date anyone. Beyond that, no one should even consider for a second “dating” this guy. He’d be drinking your blood within seconds.

Trump organization found guilty on all counts.

The counts are still being reviewed in the courtroom, but it is substantively over. The jurors are confirming one by one that their verdict has been read accurately. Donald J. Trump’s company has been found by a Manhattan jury to be a felon.

The Trump Organization has been in legal trouble for years, but this is the biggest rebuke yet. The company faces more than $1 million in penalties and it could receive blowback from its lenders and business partners.

Maggie Haberman observes:

Even without Trump personally being charged, this is a devastating day for him. He has long sought to avoid having criminality attached to his name in any way shape or form.

Trump and his children and his company now face a civil suit filed by the New York attorney general accusing them all of widespread and pervasive fraud over a decade.

Dare we hope to see them bankrupted? Having to go live in studio apartments in Kansas and work in a chicken processing plant?

Trump became a presidential candidate for a third time just three weeks ago, a move he made in part as a shield against other investigations he is facing, including one in Georgia and two by the Justice Department.

I’m thinking it can’t be all that healthy for a political campaign to have the candidate’s company found guilty on multiple fraud charges.