Originally a comment by iknklast on Full circle.

Again the sublime indifference to the futures of their children and grandchildren.

One class I had to take for my Ph.D. in Environmental Science was Economics, specifically Economics of Natural Resources. It was interesting to note that in the class, every thing he taught was about maximizing profit right now. In Economics, there is no future, there is only today. The idea that someone else ends up making the money once you’re dead is anathema. You must make as much money as is possible, and that means cutting the forests down, drilling the oil, and in general making mush of the environment right now.

It’s really all about the discounts. What do you predict the future is going to be in terms of the value of a property or commodity? Depending on how you determine the discounts (which is far from scientific, though it is hyped as scientific), you either harvest resources now, or wait until the future. In general, the discounts always tell you to harvest now.

The value of resources such as trees in their living state is never figured into the bottom line. Why? Because a huge percentage of that value accrues to society as a whole. The air we breathe is out there for everyone, and they can’t monetize it. They’ve managed to monetize water, oil, lumber, and food…not to mention many other resources…but protecting the air is not important, because it belongs to everyone, not to them alone. Since they can close their doors against pollution, and use air conditioners and air filters, it isn’t important to them. It never occurs to them that a day might come when that isn’t enough, and if it does ever occur to them, they assume it is so far in the future that it won’t matter. They’ll be in prosperity-gospel heaven, lording it over the little souls just as they lorded it over the little people on earth.

I think they do, in a sense, care about what happens to their children and their grand-children, but they just think the best thing for the next generation is to be able to pass down a whopping inheritance. They don’t worry about their kids and grandkids because they think the money they leave behind will protect them just as it is protecting the wealthy today.

Meanwhile today –

The MP in question is Zöe Franklin.

So, good policy – if you banish all the lesbians who raise the subject, no one will ever mention it or hear about it again.

Also, completely irrelevant but hilarious – she’s got the umlaut in the wrong place in her own name!! It’s supposed to be on the e, so that people know it rhymes with showy as opposed to show.

Via Tim Harris in comments, Paul Krugman in conversation with a couple of scientists, a few snippets thereof.

Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened. Transcript follows…

I felt like maybe we climate scientists had something to offer in terms of experience and insight, into how to deal with a sort of coordinated, orchestrated anti-science of the sort that Peter and Tony Fauci and others in the vaccine world were dealing with.

Like I said, we climate scientists were being vilified and attacked decades ago, before it became fashionable

Hotez: I think it was also when there was that big pile on in 2023 from Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk, pressuring me to debate Kennedy to kind of elevate his stature. And they dangled $100,000 or something like that and I was saying, “what the heck is going on here?”

As a pediatric vaccine scientist, that’s not the kind of thing you expect. It was Michael who really helped me connect the dots and say, “hey, this is what you’re going through, Peter. And welcome to the club.” You’ve been attacked now for a number of years. “This is what, as climate scientists, we’ve been dealing with now for at least a decade prior to that, and here’s some of the places where it’s coming from.” And in time, we compared notes and noticed that if you think of the attacks on climate science and the attacks on vaccines and biomedical science as two circles of the Venn diagram, they don’t completely overlap. But there’s a lot of overlap. And the more we talked, the more we realized in many cases, they were coming from the same sources. And that’s when we decided to do this.

Team Republican has been anti-science in a broad sense for decades, so in that sense this is nothing new, but sometimes more is so much more that it becomes a new thing under the sun.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s been quite something. Although I suspect neither of you had any idea that RFK was going to be dismantling America’s health system.

Hotez: Well I knew he wanted to, that’s how I got involved in getting into this in the first place. I’m a vaccine scientist and I’ve developed new vaccines for parasitic and neglected diseases. But I also have four adult kids, including Rachel who has autism and intellectual disabilities. And years ago, the NIH asked me to have long discussions with Mr. Kennedy and explain to him why vaccines don’t cause autism.

And so I had a year of discussions with him by phone and then online and mediated by a third individual. And I saw how deeply conspiratorial and dug in he was and equally how uninterested he was in the actual science. He couldn’t care less about the science of autism. And so I saw how dangerous he could become if he were ever put in a position of power, which unfortunately, he is right now.

Naturally. Much of the point of Trumpism is to do whatever pisses off the Libs no matter how broadly destructive to everyone that “whatever” is. Trump is the kind of guy who would enjoy watching a shark eat one of his grandchildren if it upset someone he hates.

Mann: Yeah and more than a decade ago, I would do interviews with him. He was a host of a radio program. And he was a fierce advocate for climate action and the environment. He was an environmental lawyer for NRDC for a number of years. And so the sort of Bond villain arc here is pretty remarkable.

Maybe The Devil got to him.

Hotez: Which is actually a recurring pattern. Someone will target a specific area of climate science or biomedicine and gain a reputation, get their foot in the door on that. Then they quickly pivot to targeting everything climate science and mainstream biomedical science because they get reinforcement from the libertarians, from the far right, from the health and wellness industry, and so it becomes a thing. So, once they sign up for one aspect of promoting anti-science, then they buy the whole farm. And that’s been a recurring story.

Mann: It’s the same funders behind these things. The Koch brothers funded the early sort of anti-lockdown rhetoric that ultimately became the anti-vax movement as well with Covid-19. And obviously, they have funded and promoted much of this sort of climate denial infrastructure for decades.

…

Hotez: Before we go to the five categories, I’ll say at least from the vaccine side, and I think a lot of it is the climate side, as there are both political and financial drivers. The political driver initially began around vaccines with assertions that vaccines cause autism. That’s how I got involved to counter that. But then it pivoted to this concept of health freedom, medical freedom: “You can’t tell us what to do about our kids.”

Yes but there’s a catch to that. If we can’t tell you what to do about your kids we can’t tell anyone what to do about anyone’s kids and that means that your kids will be vulnerable to a slew of horrible diseases. Going all freedom freedom freedom on the vax issue means you too can bury your children before they hit puberty just as people did in the 19th century.

As a scientist, we don’t like to talk about politics. We want to be politically neutral. But the reality was, the anti-vaccine activist groups were getting PAC money from the Texas Tea Party, as it was called at that time, to lobby for candidates to run on anti-vaccine platforms and to file anti-vaccine legislation. They came off the rails during Covid when 40,000 to 50,000 Texans needlessly died because they refused Covid vaccines during the Delta and BA1 wave in 2021, 2022. It was a targeted health disinformation campaign, and we document the role Fox News and the Murdoch media empire took in promoting that every night. Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity…

Mann: Elon Musk.

I still wonder how they sleep at night.

Mann: The lockdowns were a real threat to the fossil fuel industry, to Koch Industries, because it meant decreased transportation, decreased energy usage. It was going to hurt them. That is when they stepped in, they realized that the lockdowns and the social distancing that was necessary to deal with the pandemic was a threat to their bottom line.

Krugman: Sorry I’m interrupting. But I had a simple story that I told ten years ago which was, fossil fuel interests want to deny climate change because they want us to keep burning fossil fuels as long as possible, and that everything else flowed from that.

I think it was Naomi Oreskes who did the study, “What proportion of scientific climate denial articles are financed by the fossil fuel industry?” And the answer is 100%. But I didn’t expect it.

Again the sublime indifference to the futures of their children and grandchildren.

Mann: There’s something else going on here that I think is really important. For decades, the fossil fuel industry’s playbook was literally what the tobacco industry had used. And so we see the continued use of this playbook and the modus operandi is to discredit scientists and to discredit science.

It’s part of a larger effort to discredit expert opinion, to discredit experts, and we see that now. That’s metastasized into what we’re seeing in the United States right now where expertise itself—science—is a threat to the conservative movement, to the MAGA movement.

And so it makes sense that you would see this sort of libertarianism intersect with this rejection of intelligentsia, rejection of science, rejection of authority. It’s all come together in this perfect storm that we’re dealing with now.

Libertarianism plus greed.

Hotez: In fact, we look at historical precedents in the book. And that brings us right to what Stalin did in the 1930s and 40s, where he threw the Mendelian geneticist Vavilov in the Gulag where he ultimately perished, one of the leading geneticists of his day, in favor of Trofim Lysenko, who promoted these phony baloney, vernalization Lamarckian theories that you sow the Russian wheat in snow and then you toughen it up and all of this nonsense.

It didn’t matter if 2 million Soviet peasants died from famine. It was a way of authoritarian control. Stalin would go after the theory of relativity and physicists. And then you start reading the works of people like Anne Applebaum or Ruth Ben-Ghiat or even going back to Hannah Arendt, this is what authoritarianism or totalitarianism is all about. As Michael says, you target the intelligentsia, but you begin first with the scientists because they are the top threat.

Trump is the Stalin of the 21st century. There’s glory for you.

We might as well give up. It’s all women’s fault, always, all the time, no matter what. He didn’t hit her, she provoked him, end of story.

Police are investigating claims that a leader of the For Women Scotland campaign group harassed a pro-trans activist by vandalising his rainbow umbrella.

They’re not investigating, or just plain recording, the obvious fact that an anti-women activist harassed women who dared to speak up for their own rights.

Police Scotland has faced intense criticism from gender-critical campaigners and MSPs for allowing Tom Harlow, of the Cabaret Against the Hate Speech group, to disrupt a rally outside Holyrood on Thursday by attempting to drown out speeches with amplified music.

The force defended its stance, claiming that the music, which included Lily Allen’s F*** You and a Kate Nash song that refers to gender-critical activists as “germs” did not meet the threshold of a serious public nuisance, which would have justified intervention.

Because loud music intended to drown out speeches is not a serious public nuisance?

Well, see, the speeches were women-speeches, and the drowning out was man drowning out, so the man wins, because he’s a man.

However, it said inquiries were continuing into a complaint lodged by Harlow against Susan Smith, a For Women Scotland director and rally organiser. Harlow complained that she had “harassed and intimidated him” during a confrontation and broke his umbrella.

He complained. He was there to disrupt, he did disrupt, and still he is complaining?

Some of those at the protest claimed they were left with hearing issues as a result of the music being played by Harlow, who at times sat on a deck chair while being shielded by Police Scotland officers.

Pam Gosul, a Conservative MSP who spoke at the rally, said she had been “appalled” at the way police had handled the counterprotest, citing legislation that gives officers legal powers to order someone playing loud music to desist if it is causing annoyance.

He was playing the loud music for the purpose of causing annoyance. He didn’t just rock up with his amplified music because he wanted to hear some tunes. He was there to disrupt.

JK Rowling claimed that it was clear that Police Scotland had taken an ideological position that “women defending their rights are in the wrong and must pay the penalty by having their legal right to assemble and protest disrupted by trans activists”.

LOUD trans activists.

On and on it goes: the rule that says women are of no importance at all and can be bullied and slandered at will, while men who claim to be women are saints, diamonds, gods, martyrs, angels.

Look at Ian Bristow for example.

A Liberal Democrat councillor has been suspended after posting a threatening image aimed at gender-critical women.

Ian Bristow, a councillor in Hertfordshire, tweeted a picture of a girl aiming a gun, alongside the words “Shut the f— up, Terf”.

A councillor did that. A man grown up enough to be elected to office.

The image was sent to Natalie Bird, a gender-critical party member who was removed as a prospective parliamentary candidate for Wakefield in 2018 because of her views.

Her views? What views? Oh yes, her “views” that men are not women. Woman prevented from being a candidate for Parliament because of her awareness that men are not women and women are not men. So only people who are either profoundly ignorant or profoundly deluded about the most basic fact about humans are allowed to be in Parliament? Awkward.

Cllr Bristow also offered an apology, saying: “I apologise for my tweet, which I have since taken down. On reflection I accept that the tone and graphic used were inappropriate.”

On reflection.

What a horrible toad he must be. He has to stop and think carefully for a long time to grasp that a man telling a woman to shut the fuck up about women’s basic rights and realities is not appropriate?

I’m so tired of having pervasive automatic unrepentant hatred of women shoved in my face all day every day.

Mr Bristow’s tweet, which was posted on Monday, was taken down on Thursday morning.

He needed all that time for reflection did he?

So fucking tired of it.

PBS has a few samples from Kennedy’s deranged testimony.

From a public Facebook post:

I’m no political expert, but I’ve lived inside the Beltway for the last 30+ years, worked briefly on the Hill as a mere child, and have had a backseat to a lot of what DC has to offer—I don’t think I’ve ever had a political experience quite like the RFKjr hearing today.

I couldn’t take a lot of photos because I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to kick me out for causing a disruption. Clips you may have seen on TV cannot possibly recreate the sheer extended bizarreness, dystopia, and surrealism of this event.

RFKjr has absolutely no respect for anyone at all, not even for FOTUS, the hand that feeds him. He is hell-bent on destroying medical research and scientific standards because, I suspect, his ego has been bruised by folks who’ve actually spent time, energy and effort studying, writing and practicing medicine or microbiology or organic chemistry or genomics. He’s using DHHS as his revenge tour.

He lied and obfuscated and shouted and told other people they were liars and confabulists and fearmongers. He called female senators “hysterical.” Unlike some other politicians who are masters of dissembling, he’s like a feral cat forced into a basket that jumps and yowls and scratches at the slightest provocation. No ability to keep his composure.

I often joke that, due to all Rob’s medical interventions, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Well RFKjr couldn’t even play one on TV.

I couldn’t tell if he had any grip on reality, or if he had an actual brain condition that affected his short term memory and his cognitive filtering.

He claimed he never said things he’d just said 10 minutes earlier. He doesn’t seem to understand the job of being a cabinet secretary. He seems to think that anyone can get a Covid vaccine who wants one and said they were free. He doesn’t appear to grasp that when the CDC, on his orders, does not “recommend” the vaccine for people under 65 that that, in fact, prevents people from accessing the vaccine. When pressed, he told one senator that of course the vaccine was available to all Americans should they choose to have it, but that, no, he was not going to “recommend” a “product” that he didn’t believe in. Dude—you aren’t a spokesmodel for tanning beds or cleanses—you’re the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You have the power to make rules and also to destroy stuff. He claimed no money had been cut from Medicaid—that the U.S. was pouring money into it.

He behaved like a person who didn’t, as he told Congress during his confirmation hearing, just want to allow more freedom of choice with vaccines—his words, tone, body language and pugilistic demeanor made it clear to all that he wants to force his own uninformed beliefs on the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

Great choice for the job, yeah?

I still wonder why he keeps advertising himself this way, as if he were charismatic and irresistible instead of toe-curlingly creepy. That stuck in the throat voice is torture to listen to, and his posh boy demeanor is torture x 10.

Also the “our founder” bit as if he were not talking about himself.

So there’s this fella Tom Harlow who calls himself “Cabaret Against the Hate” and chats about it as if it were a group but it’s really just the one guy. His thing is to make noise where women are talking and/or protesting. That’s it, that’s the cabaret: just drown out women talking. I wrote a post about him in October 2023.

He was in Glasgow yesterday making noise to drown out women talking and protesting.

Yesterday at Westminster Magistrates’ Court:

A trans campaigner would have won “kudos” over the arrest of Graham Linehan, a prominent gender-critical activist, a court heard.

The Father Ted and IT Crowd creator is on trial accused of harassing a trans teenager with social media posts and damaging their mobile phone in October last year.

The 57-year-old told police his online posts about 18-year-old Sophia Brooks did not constitute harassment, Westminster magistrates’ court heard on Thursday.

Sophia Brooks aka Tarquin. He’s a male “trans teenager”.

During cross-examination, Sarah Vine KC, defending, said Brooks, a former police volunteer, wanted to get Linehan arrested for “kudos”.

She said that, as a prominent gender-critical campaigner, getting Linehan arrested would have been a “massive scalp”. The teenager did not deny that but said she would also get “a lot of harassment from his supporters”.

He. He would get harassment. This ridiculous deference to the rules of trans ideology means it can’t even be reported on accurately.

Shortly before her evidence concluded, Brooks was asked if she believed it was “hateful” that trans women were not allowed to use female only spaces. She replied: “Yes it is.”

Fuck off, kid. You forcing yourself on women is what’s hateful.

This is a very nice Jolly Old England-type souvenir.

Trump Claims the Power to Summarily Kill Suspected Drug Smugglers

Cool. In a few months or weeks it will be people who criticize Trump.

By ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.

Mr. Trump is claiming the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules. The police arrest criminal suspects for prosecution and cannot instead simply gun suspects down, except in rare circumstances where they pose an imminent threat to someone.

By contrast, in armed conflicts, troops can lawfully kill enemy combatants on sight.

But Trump doesn’t give a damn about lawfully. Trump does things Trumpully, and that’s good enough.

“It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked as a Pentagon lawyer in 2015 and 2016.

…

Martin Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who helped write legal memos on counterterrorism drone strikes as a Justice Department official in the Obama administration, said that interpreting the law as allowing Mr. Trump to kill people who are not attacking the United States would require an “alarming” expansion of presidential power.

“Even if it were true they were ‘terrorists,’ the president doesn’t have authority to go around killing terrorists anywhere in the world, let alone to kill drug smugglers,” he said. “The targets of lethal force would have to either be in an armed conflict with us or otherwise be threatening a use of force that would justify self-defense.”

Whatever. He does what he wants.

Circular firing squad.

A former Detective Chief Inspector at the Metropolitan Police is not impressed by recent events.

Is the Met on an inadvertent campaign to make Nigel Farage the Prime Minister? Politically he is the only winner from the arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on Monday, for a series of posts made on the social media platform X earlier this year.

The circumstances behind the arrest, by armed officers, are so bizarre that they almost beggar explanation. As a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police I have a fairly good sense about what happened in this case – and how it could have been avoided.

By not having damn fools running the place is one way.

The three offending posts were made on the 19^th and 20^th April 2025. In one of the posts, Linehan wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

It would appear that Trans-activists seeking to use the authorities to wage their latest sally against those in the “gender-critical” or “gender-realist” movement chose to report Linehan to the police.

Ideally at this point the Met would have closed the case as a waste of time and resources. While the posts by Linehan – who is best known for writing the television series Father Ted – are hardly his finest comedic work, it is difficult to see what about them could have led the police to conclude that they were worthy of criminal investigation.

Oh but sir, you’re forgetting that our trans siblings are the most tragic vulnerable persecuted people on earth.

Much has been made of the arresting officers being armed – the reality, as we have seen in other cases, is that airports are unique jurisdictions where the threat means that most officers do need to carry firearms. The more relevant issue is who approved the circulation of Linehan as being “wanted” on the Police National Computer, and what checks did the arresting officers make with the original investigators to ensure this was a case where an arrest was genuinely necessary? It seems unlikely that the threat posed by Linehan in that moment was so egregious that the arresting officers needed to be merely a slave to the machine and make an immediate arrest without checking with the originating officers first.

But sir it was twanzfobeea.

In this case specifically, a senior police officer with a functioning brain cell should have reviewed the investigation and ended the fiasco before it escalated to the point of Linehan being arrested as he stepped onto the tarmac at Heathrow. It is, however, an unfortunate reality that policing is a large organisation where the leadership at every level is, to say the least, of “mixed ability”.

In other words – not even one brain cell.

I go outside for a few hours and all hell breaks loose.

A disgraced transgender police officer is believed to have reported gender-critic Father Ted creator Graham Linehan to the police over his social media posts.

Former Pc Lynsay Watson, who was born Alex Horwood, was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.

An anonymous social media account, believed to be linked to Watson, boasted in April this year of reporting Linehan, the Father Ted writer and gender sceptic, to the police over several social media posts he made about transgender issues. The account encouraged other transgender activists to do the same.

Watson has a well-documented history of calling on police forces to pursue criminal investigations of campaigners who are sceptical of the belief that self-identification, and not biological sex, determines what a man or woman is.

…

Watson was sacked by Leicestershire Police after being found guilty by a misconduct hearing of sending former police officer Harry Miller more than 1,200 messages over an 18-month period, branding him a “Nazi”, a “bigot” and a “wife-beater”.

I know, we know all that, but I for one did not know the next bit.

Helen Joyce, a writer and women’s rights campaigner, said she was also reported to the authorities and now has a police investigation for “harassment” on her record.

The best-selling author of Trans, a book critical of gender ideology, she took part in a panel discussion with transgender activist Freda Wallace in 2023. Afterwards, she made several social media posts about the experience and Wallace’s “exhibitionism”.

The scare-quoted exhibitionism was very real. He sat in a very short skirt and crossed his legs. It was an exhibition.

Unbeknown to Joyce at the time, these Twitter posts were reported to the police. Court documents stated that Watson was behind these reports.

Joyce’s record shows she was initially looked into over a potential “non-crime hate incident” relating to “malicious communications”, but officers soon began investigating the possibility of “harassment”.

This is recorded against her name and could show on an advanced DBS check, despite police taking no further action against the author.

So how fucking outrageous is that?

She was unaware of this police activity until earlier this year, when Watson asked the High Court to review the police decision not to pursue a criminal investigation into Joyce’s social media posts.

Men ruining women’s lives for rejecting the lie that particular men are women.

Sarah Phillimore explains why women don’t get the anxious tender obsequious concern and protection that is lavished on our trans siblings:

The police have long lived in the shadow of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the righteous anger directed at their failure to act promptly or at all to find his killers. The Macpherson report of 1999 was clear that as the police were institutionally racist, they could not be trusted to make proper assessments of any report of racial hatred and must therefore simply accept all complaints and investigate them thoroughly.

The ‘investigate’ bit often got neglected and soon a two tier system gained root – criminal offences and the ‘non crime hate incidents’ where any complaint, no matter how ridiculous made by a member of a ‘monitored strand’ would be accepted at face value and recorded on a ‘crime report’, using the words ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ There was no clarity about when or where that recorded information would be disclosed.

…

There are five monitored strands and they mirror some of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act – race, religion, disability and sexual orientation. ‘Transgender identity’ which is not in the Equality Act was added in 2012 – see discussions below.

Notice anything missing? Yes of course.

If you commit a crime against a ‘monitored strand’ resulting out of your hatred for them, you are looking at a higher sentence; these groups are deemed worthy of enhanced protection.

The interplay between protected characteristics and monitored strands has itself caused immense confusion with some believing that the police are following the Equality Act protected characteristics. They are not. A notable omission is ‘sex’. There are longstanding concerns that requiring police to record misogynistic hate crimes would overwhelm them.

Ohhhhhhhh I see – women are left out because there are too many crimes against us and thus it would be too much trouble to do anything about those crimes. Ok that’s fine then.

This explains in part why women’s complaints of violent threats from trans identifying men did not get the traction when it was vice versa. Women are not seen as a group requiring enhanced protection but the trans identifying man is.

Is that fucked up enough yet?

NY Times sums up the Kennedy v public health hearing:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced a withering barrage of questioning from a Senate committee on his vaccine policy and his record as President Trump’s health secretary, responding at times with clear disdain for the senators, public health data and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which he oversees.

That’s just great, isn’t it? He has disdain for senators, public health data, and the CDC. He has confidence and pride in…his own unaided hunches.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy blamed the C.D.C. for the number of American deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, and said he did not trust the data that showed vaccines saved millions of lives in the United States and elsewhere during the pandemic. Mr. Kennedy also falsely asserted that there were no cuts to Medicaid in President Trump’s domestic policy bill, and rejected bipartisan criticism that his actions were making it harder for people to obtain vaccines.

And where does he get all this? Nowhere. It just comes from his own brain, which is empty. Trump might as well have strolled into Lafayette Square and grabbed the first person he saw to be the federal health secretary.

A few snapshots, in reverse temporal order:

Kennedy has been remarkably salty and dismissive with the senators. As Senator Wyden, who was sharply critical of him from the start, made some closing remarks, Kennedy took out his phone, looked down at it, and began to scroll.

…

Kennedy disputed Susan Monarez’s account of her firing as C.D.C. director. “I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said no,” he said. Kennedy has previously refused to discuss his interactions with Monarez, saying he would not talk about personnel matters. He said she was “lying” when she said he had fired her because she would not accede to his demands on vaccine policy.

…

Kennedy’s heated back and forth with Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire just now was the most striking example yet of his disdain for members of the committee, and his disregard for Capitol protocol.

“This is crazy talk. You’re just making stuff up,” Kennedy said to Hassan as she accused him of reducing transparency around health data and limiting access to vaccines.

“Sometimes when you make an accusation, it’s kind of a confession, Mr. Kennedy,” the Democratic senator replied.

You in particular, Mr. Kennedy.

Somebody is feeling left out…

This one paragraph in a Telegraph piece on trans ideology and the gun-toting police abuse of Graham Linehan…

Look at the health service. In Scotland, a nurse named Sandie Peggie has taken NHS Fife to a tribunal after it suspended her for complaining about a male trans colleague using the female changing room. This week, lawyers representing NHS Fife argued that there’s “no evidence” that women, Ms Peggie aside, “have a problem” sharing female-only spaces with male trans people.

Really? Has it not occurred to NHS Fife that, if women don’t complain, it might just be because they’re scared? Not least because complaining might get them punished by their employer?

That.

Trans “activism” is uniquely privileged among social justice movements in the way it is protected by governments and cops, protected so fiercely and thoroughly that most dissenters are silent because they don’t want to be ferociously punished for not being silent.

Why are the police and the state so extremely intent on protecting trans ideology and its believers when the police and the state were not at all quick to defend feminism or socialism or anti-imperialism?

I don’t know. All this time, and I still don’t know.

The NY Times cautiously tests the heat.

Britain’s most senior police officer has called for the government to change or clarify the law regarding free speech amid intense public debate over the arrest of an Irish comedian on suspicion of inciting violence against transgender people on social media.

Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, which serves the London area, said his officers had been put in an “impossible position” in which laws were drawing them into “toxic culture-wars debates.”

Some toxic culture-wars debates.

When, I wonder, is the last time 5 UK cops arrested a man for social media threats against women.

Have any UK cops ever done that?

They don’t arrest rapists, so it seems unlikely that they pay much attention to threats, let alone remarks that have to be scrutinized very hard in order to detect any genuine threatening quality to them.

In short I don’t think so. Violence against women goes unpunished, so talking smack wouldn’t even register.

Why is it, I wonder for the millionth time, that “trans women” are considered so enormously much more vulnerable than actual women?

Quoting this bit for the second time today – it gets on my nerves a tad.

Mr. Rowley defended the arrest in his statement, saying that the law “dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offense” and that “most reasonable people would agree that genuine threats of physical violence against an identified person or group should be acted upon by officers.”

But you don’t. You don’t agree, and you don’t do it. Women get threats of physical violence on social media all the time. How often do you investigate it? Ever?

Mr. Linehan’s arrest has reignited a debate over the policing of speech in Britain, an issue the Trump administration has fiercely criticized.

Blah blah blah, yes, we know, but what about this two-tier thing? Why do you see trans people as victims and women as making a fuss about nothing?

I would really like to know.