You don’t get to blow off a subpoena just because you once worked for Trump.

A federal jury has found former Trump adviser Steve Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

The verdict: After nearly two days of hearing evidence and witness testimony, the jury reached a unanimous verdict on the two contempt charges in less than three hours.

Bannon smiled as the verdict was read, looking back and forth between the courtroom deputy and the foreperson. Bannon’s team did not mount a defense during the trial, and he did not take the stand. Speaking to reporters after the conviction, his attorney David Schoen said they planned to appeal the verdict, calling it a “bullet proof appeal.”

In a Justice Department news release touting the conviction, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves said that the “subpoena to Stephen Bannon was not an invitation that could be rejected or ignored.”

Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Jon Pike tweeted a link to an interesting study.

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials

Abstract

Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.

Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

…

Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.

Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

Read the whole thing.

I missed this one from September last year.

Not a fact. All people with periods are women. (Some are girls, but by some definitions once they have periods they’re women, and anyway this stupid tweet didn’t mean “Because some are girls!!”) No men have periods. We don’t need to “celebrate” the sexual “diversity” of “people who bleed.”

Also everyone bleeds – see Shylock: If you prick us, do we not bleed?

But men don’t menstruate. Men don’t gestate babies so they don’t need a place to gestate babies so they don’t need a uterus, and they also don’t need to feed gestating babies so they don’t need an endometrium so they don’t need to shed part of it once a month to make room for the next installment. Hope that helps.

Liz Cheney was talking to her fellow Republicans:

“The case against Donald Trump in these hearings is not made by witnesses who were his political enemies,” said Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and the committee’s vice chair. “It is instead a series of confessions by Donald Trump’s own appointees, his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for him for years, and his own family.”

Some of those people quit their Trump administration jobs on January 6.

The hearing on Thursday detailed Trump’s repeated refusal to quell the deadly mob, even when he knew that some of them were armed and that Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger. Cheney suggested the former President’s supporters should view his behavior related to that day as disqualifying for future office as many of Trump’s former allies do.

Why? Because he’s dangerous. He’d do anything. He’d invite Vladimir Putin to annex Boston and Seattle, and give him the weapons to do it.

The committee also showed video outtakes from Jan. 7, when Trump recorded a video message that aides had scripted to tell the public he knew the election had ended. He refused to go that far. “I don’t want to say the election is over,” Trump says to aides in the room, including his daughter, Ivanka Trump. “I just want to say that Congress has certified the results without saying the election’s over, OK?”

I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to!! Waaaaaaaah!

Greens Leader, MP for Melbourne, calls himself a “dad” in his Twitter profile.

Of course “birthing parent” excludes anyone. It excludes mothers, which is a word that applies only to women, so it excludes women. It excludes half of humanity, which is not a small or trivial exclusion.

It never stops taking my breath away to see how comfortable men are excluding and erasing women.

Here’s the clip that shows Trump discussing the Speech to the Seditionists before giving it. It doesn’t reveal any hitherto concealed intelligence or eloquence or rational thought or awareness of moral obligation.

The January 6 hearing was lively yesterday.

The committee used Thursday’s hearing to show how Trump not only failed to act, but chose not to as he watched the violent assault on the US Capitol unfold.

Several witnesses with first-hand knowledge of what was happening inside the White House on January 6 told the committee that Trump did not place a single call to any of his law enforcement or national security officials as the Capitol attack was unfolding, according to previously unseen video testimony played during Thursday’s hearing.

The panel said it “confirmed in numerous interviews with senior law enforcement and military leaders, Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, and DC government officials: None of them — not one — heard from President Trump that day,” Luria said.

The committee used that testimony to make the case that Trump’s refusal to intervene amounted to a dereliction of duty.

…

That testimony fit with other evidence presented on Thursday, like the outtakes of Trump’s videotaped speech on January 7, where he tried to water down some of the prepared language and told his aides, “I don’t want to say the election’s over, OK?”

No, sir, not ok. There are rules here.

See this is why it’s not a great idea to pick a flamboyant tv personality gang boss real estate hustler criminal as head of state. Laws don’t even make it into his consciousness: he sees everything through the one and only filter of What He Wants.

Updating to add what Representative Luria thinks of his speech:

The Women’s March…Their Twitter profile proclaims

Five years of resistance, five years of training, five years of building power. Together we will take the power back.

Take the power back. Somehow I don’t think so…

Originally a comment by Papito on Blowback for booking.

I horrified some tween girls (among whom, my daughter) the other day by saying just that: “There is no LGBTQIA+ community.”

They were stunned. They had never heard anybody say that before. They kept asking me if I’m an ally. I kept asking them what that means. And I told them that none of my gay friends want me to call myself an “ally,” because they think the word is stupid. They’re gay. I’m not. They’re my friends. That doesn’t make me special in any way. I don’t need a word for that.

The other parents with me backed me up. They’re old enough to remember history too. They pointed out that there is a gay community. And there is a lesbian community. And the two don’t really mix much. They pointed out that the two communities cooperate much more these days, after the AIDS crisis, when some of the only people who would take care of many dying gay men were lesbians. But it’s still not one community, it’s two communities that cooperate sometimes. The LGBTQIA+ (let’s just call it QUILTBAG) community is an absolute fabrication, and what’s more it was created for the benefit of people who aren’t even gay or lesbian. On the backs of people who are gay and lesbian. Look at the hatred about lesbian hiking groups. Look at all the apps that won’t let a person say they’re “same-sex attracted” anymore. That’s not a community, that’s subjugation.

All the other letters in the QUILTBAG are forced on those two communities. Sometimes people in those communities accept folks claiming other letters, sometimes not (I have friends who say they wouldn’t even talk to a guy who described himself as “queer,” let alone date him).

All this is what I told those tween girls. Because they have all already been force-fed the dominant dogma and didn’t have a choice in that. Sooner rather than later they should be able to hear different viewpoints. And the trans fad is coming for them.

In High School, they’ll either be part of the quiltbag or people will call them names. Every girl who is a tween now will have a classmate in High School who suddenly claims to be a boy. And they will bully other girls into agreeing they are, and are better for it, and if they don’t there’s names for that. At one school I know you can’t even attend the quiltbag group unless you claim an alternate sexuality or gender identity. And if you don’t… ya basic. Take your basic flag of black and white stripes and, no, wait, you can’t even have that, because it’s hateful. You get no flag, you just get insults and exonyms.

It was Humanists UK who originally reported on the falsified statement:

A UK Government-organised multinational statement committing to the fundamental rights of women and girls has been amended to remove references to ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ and ‘bodily autonomy’. The statement was issued by the UK as part of an intergovernmental conference it hosted in London on 5-6 July. A total of 22 countries signed the joint statement before it was amended. One – anti-abortion Malta – has first signed since. Humanists UK has expressed serious alarm at the changes. It is asking the UK Government for a full explanation, and if possible, a reversal.

That’s extremely shifty behavior. They got the signatures and then they secretively amended it so now the signatures are gone or invalid, or else the originally signers are simply being defrauded. Crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) has also expressed his dismay at the changes, saying that ‘Claims that FoRB can be invoked to deny women the enjoyment of their sexual and reproductive health rights… must be rejected as representing intolerant and patriarchal attitudes’. He says FoRB in fact guarantees such rights.

Your freedom of religion ends where it impinges on my rights. Get out of here.

The original statement was issued as part of the 2022 International Ministerial Conference on FoRB. It gave a commitment to abolishing discriminatory laws that ‘restrict women’s and girls’ full and equal enjoyment of all human rights, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, bodily autonomy’. It also said it would ‘support and build capacities of local religious and belief leaders to… ensure access to sexual and reproductive health and rights’.

However, it has now been revised, removing all references to ‘sexual and reproductive rights’ and ‘bodily autonomy’.

Funny kind of “commitment.”

Alongside this change, the 22 signatory countries has reduced to six. 17 have departed (and are presumably being asked to sign up to the new wording). The only country added since the change is Malta. In Malta there is an absolute ban on abortion in all circumstances, including rape, incest, and fatal foetal abnormalities.

This should be a major scandal.

H/t Gnu Atheism

Now there’s a headline:

Government quietly removes commitments to women’s rights after summit on freedom of beliefs

References to ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ and ‘bodily autonomy’ have been removed from the FCDO statement

References to repealing discriminatory laws that threaten women’s “sexual and reproductive health and rights” and “bodily autonomy” have been removed from a statement published on the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) website.

…

Lisa Hallgarten​, head of policy and public affairs at Brook, which specialises in sexual health for younger people, told i: “The whole point of the original statement is to recognise the need to support the right to religious belief and practice, but ensure it is not at the expense of the fundamental rights of women and girls.

“By changing the language, the purpose and effect of this statement are fatally undermined, and religion appears to trump human rights.”

Keep the religious freedom part, ditch the rights of women and girls part. What could possibly go wrong?

Make no mistake: many religious rules and strictures are all about controlling and limiting women and girls. It’s an obsession. Gotta control them baby-havers, because they’re all sluts so the real people might end up feeding some other guy’s brat. Amen.

Stella Creasy, the Labour and Co-operative MP for Walthamstow, said of the amendments: “I think it reflects a worrying trend behind the scenes in Government to trade women’s human rights. Because there is no ambiguity, either you make a commitment to them or you don’t.

“The original [statement] makes a very clear commitment to sexual and reproductive rights and health, bodily autonomy and other laws, and recognises them as a source of discrimination. The amended version doesn’t.”

That’s why they amended it. The hell with women’s sexual and reproductive rights.

Brave woman:

A female journalist says she was forced to publicly retract some of her reports about Afghanistan after being threatened with prison by the Taliban.

Lynne O’Donnell, an Australian columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, alleges that she was detained, abused and forced to post a series of tweets stating her articles were false.

She has since left Afghanistan.

The Taliban confirmed they had detained Ms O’Donnell and claimed she had falsified reports.

The Taliban confirmed, so the BBC could have skipped that “alleges.” The Taliban confirmed, so she didn’t allege, she said.

Afghanistan has become an increasingly hostile place for journalists, with the current regime cracking down on press freedoms, Human Rights Watch says.

Plus the Taliban hates women. It hates all women and it really hates uppity foreign critical professional intelligent heathen women.

She said she was accused of “breaking their laws” and “offending Afghan culture,” with the Taliban claiming articles she had written – including one about LGBTQ+ people in Afghanistan and another on the forced marriage practices of Taliban militants – were lies.

Ms O’Donnell – former bureau chief for news agencies AFP and AP in Afghanistan – stands by her reporting.

She said the Taliban had asked her to reveal her sources for these articles. But she had refused.

The Taliban foreign ministry said Ms O’Donnell was not asked to reveal her sources, but said she had failed to produce any proof which showed she had not fabricated the reports.

Catch 22 innit.

Once she was safely out of Afghanistan she retracted her retraction. She’s not planning to return.

The Community is Offended.

Comedian Dave Chappelle’s show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent jokes about transgender people.

Because jokes about trans people aren’t jokes, they’re blasphemy.

The venue had faced blowback for booking the legendary comedian for a surprise, sold-out performance in the months that followed his 2021 Netflix special, “The Closer,” in which Chappelle doubled down on jokes about the LGBTQ community after past accusations of homophobia and transphobia.

There’s no such thing as “the LGBTQ community.” The T doesn’t belong. The T is a wrong turn, which should fade away.

The storied venue, which is best known for its appearances in Prince’s 1984 film “Purple Rain,” added that while it believes in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression, “we lost sight of the impact” booking Chappelle would have on the community.

What impact? The storied venue doesn’t say.

See? No explanation, no detail, no information – just “we hear you, we’re sorry about the thing, we regret the thing, we feel guilty about the thing, we believe in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression but there’s the thing.”

The Post is a little more informative.

Chappelle has faced criticism for comments that LGBTQ advocacy groups say could incite harm against transgender people. As part of “The Closer,” Chappelle joked about transgender genitalia, said “gender is a fact” and told his audience he was on “team TERF,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. The comedian also defended J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” books, who has been criticized for making statements seen as transphobic. Chappelle has joked about the transgender community in the past, including in his 2019 special, “Sticks & Stones.”

The horror.

A tale of two news items:

First, Citrus County [Florida] Chronicle:

Inverness woman arrested for having inappropriate relationships with minors

An Inverness woman was jailed for allegedly having inappropriate relationships with several minors she also sent explicit images to.

Citrus County Sheriff’s Office authorities arrested Diana Elizabeth Guevara July 13 on a warrant charging the 33-year-old with transmitting harmful materials to minors, having unlawful sexual activity with minors, and four counts of lewd and lascivious battery.

…

A second victim, a teenage boy, told investigators Guevara performed a sex act on him in June while he was at her home, and a third teenage boy told Ricci that Guevara had sexual contact with him four separate times.

Both teens said Guevara told them she was younger than her actual age.

Second, Reduxx:

Trans-Identified Male Arrested After “Manipulating” Minors Into Sexual Abuse

A trans-identified male who “manipulated” children into sexual activities was arrested last Wednesday in Citrus County, Florida. According to police, 33-year-old Diana Elizabeth Guevara fostered a relationship with one child in order to “identify [his] next victims.”

Guevara sent multiple explicit photos and videos on social media to children between the ages of 12 to 17, law enforcement officials said, adding that he also had sexual relations with a number of the children at his home in Inverness.

…

Guevara’s crime received little coverage by mainstream outlets, and he was referred to as a “woman” by both police and local news.

In 2017, Guevara, a former Miami-Dade Police Officer, was featured in both print news and television reports advertising the benefits of ‘gender affirming’ medical interventions through the LGBTQ Clinic at the University of Miami. In an article published by the Miami Herald, Guevara lauds having a breast augmentation as “life-changing” experience.

The Citrus County story never once mentions that Guevara is a man or that he is trans.

Someone said what?

The intersection of Twitter and Reddit begets monsters, or something.

Let’s tease out the meaning.

Well, there’s a lesbian walking group (advertised on meetup.com) near me and I really want to go out and meet other dykes so I decided to sign up…

‘this group is for LESBIANS ONLY. Lesbian is defined as same-sex attracted biological woman.’

WHY DO PEOPLE EVEN DO THIS. The absolute nastiness of a group of lesbians, who ought to know better, saying, in essence, ‘haha we’re going to go out and have fun and you can’t come because you’re trans and we don’t want to get trans germs all over us.’ I’m really pissed off and quite frankly upset and I’m not even trans!

But that absolutely isn’t what the group is saying, not in essence or in any other way. It’s not “because you’re trans,” it’s “because you’re men.” LESBIANS ARE ALLOWED TO GET TOGETHER WITHOUT MEN.

I’ll say that again, this time without shouting. Lesbians are allowed to get together without men. That’s legal, and acceptable, and reasonable, and not unfair or discriminatory or any other pejorative. By the same token, gay men are allowed to get together without women.

It’s nothing to do with “trans germs.” It’s to do with sex, and who is which, and the power differential between the two. Men who identify as lesbians remain men, and thus are not in fact lesbians. Men can identify as traffic lights if they want to, but nobody else has to pay any attention.

The comments on the Reddit post all share the poster’s shock-horror at this monstrous exclusion of men from a lesbian group. The Reddit groups is called…”butch lesbians.”

Girl Guides is “inclusive.”

We want every member of Girlguiding to feel like they belong.

Well that makes sense. There wouldn’t be much point in having members you make feel as if they don’t belong.

It’s why we have an Equality and diversity policy, training for volunteers on how to include everyone, and why we love to share stories from all our members on what it means to feel included. We hope it helps you as volunteers feel empowered to welcome everyone to our organisation.

Well they can’t welcome everyone to their organization, surely. It’s Girl Guides – so they can’t welcome adults or boys. Right?

We’re sharing the true story of Rainbow (all names have been changed), a girl who joined our youngest section and knew Girlguiding was a space for her.

‘My husband and I are lucky enough to be parents of a seven-year-old girl, Rainbow,’ says Jane. ‘She loves LEGO, climbing trees, reading, playing with her friends and not listening to us when we ask her to wash her hands before dinner.

‘She might sound very much like your children, and she is the same, except when she was born, we assumed she was a boy.’

Ah. In other words Rainbow is a boy. “Girl” Guides is being inclooosive by incloooding a boy, which means all the girls are deprived of being in a Guides group for girls. Why is one boy privileged over a group of girls?

The rest of it is the usual fatuous drivel.

Be sure to report all this in a cheerful optimistic manner:

About 100 million Americans from California to New England were sweating through heat advisories and warnings from the National Weather Service on Wednesday, with a brutal heat wave across the central part of the country showing no signs of letting up.

Oh that sounds harsh. Let’s not say brutal heat wave, let’s say misunderstood heat wave.

Heat warnings and advisories were in place for parts or all of 28 states. People in the Southeast and the Southern Plains faced the most oppressive temperatures, with triple digits forecast for Wednesday and beyond across parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, said Andrew Orrison, a Weather Service meteorologist.

Oklahoma City broke a daily heat record dating back to the Dust Bowl era on Tuesday with a temperature of 110 — tied for the state’s highest-ever July temperature, the Weather Service said — and Austin is set on Wednesday to see its 40th straight day of highs over 100 degrees.

“These are definitely dangerous heat conditions,” Mr. Orrison said.

Well, only if you’re not a reptile.

It’s only slightly less bad in New York and New England.

It’s difficult to blame any particular heat snap on climate change without extensive scientific analysis, but heat waves like the ones in Europe, Asia and North America this summer are typical of what scientists expect as the globe warms — more frequent, longer lasting and more dangerous.

Heat waves in the United States jumped from an average of two per year in the 1960s to six per year by the 2010s. And it’s all part of an overall warming trend: The last seven years have been the warmest in the history of accurate worldwide records.

But don’t talk about it, because that’s a downer.

So – John – I want us to be happy about the weather and everything is – I don’t know whether something has happened to meteorologists to make you all a little bit fatalistic and and [giggle[ harbingers of doom.

Gee I can’t imagine what it might be.

Originally a comment by Papito on Can’t a guy get a sunburn in peace?

I see three things going on here:

Sound familiar? I definitely hear echoes of that old, regressive belief that sinister people are responsible for weird weather in today’s attempt to pin heatwaves on the rich or on coal-mining or on motorists. Environmentalism has rehabilitated in pseudo-scientific form the age-old instinct to find the witch or the sinner who is to blame for society’s misfortunes.

One part is just sticking his thumb in the liberals’ eye. This is a big part of why we got Trump in the US and you got Brexit in England. There’s no real calculation among these followers, just spite. I thought of them as the “South Park Republicans,” people who wanted to be offensive, cuss, and make fun of people, and resented Mommy and Daddy for telling them it wasn’t nice. There is no end to their rhetoric: it can always be made more hyperbolic, more ridiculous, and the mob will scream all the louder. Nor is there any need for consistency among the verses, as long as the refrain remains “F the Liberals!”

Another part is the way in which the left makes a kind of religion about every putatively correct belief. We all deal with this in the case of gender ideology. Witches to be burned, starting with JKR. The left also has its mobs of dumb followers who just repeat whatever cant they’re told to. Black Lives Matter! Trans Women Are Women!

In the case of climate change, we have some folks on the left who are very much “Ready, Fire, Aim!” In my area, where most heating is provided by natural gas if not oil, there’s a town that’s working to outlaw installation of natural gas heating and cooking in new buildings. Everybody is supposed to use electric heat pumps. But the state as a whole gets the vast majority of its electricity from gas, which is half as efficient when burned to produce electricity as it is when burned to produce heat. Virtue-signalling about dubious improvements (the recycling bin in my town really just gets dumped in with the trash at the other end of the ride) does not improve anything, and inflames the opposing mob more.

I agree that the evidence supports the idea that coal burning should flat out stop. But the left also got nuclear power dismantled in Germany, which is what put Germany in the bind it’s in today, beholden to Russia for natural gas and burning far too much coal. Germany tore down nuclear plants and built coal plants, and that was not really an improvement. Let’s get the policy right before we enact it.

A third thing going on here, which we can’t discount, is the differential burden of higher fossil fuel taxes. In my family, we are firmly in the zoomocracy. Nobody in my house has to go to an office very often, and we use cars only for out of town travel and shopping trips for large things. I live in a nice part of a nice city, and my kids can ride their bikes to school, camp, college, everything. I can go two weeks without getting in a car. Does this make me virtuous? No. I’ve got a contractor coming today to see about fixing a bathroom that has some problems. Will he ride his bicycle here? No. Will any one of the guys working for him not drive here if he takes the job? No; they’ll commute, by car, from even farther away, because it’s very expensive to live in my city. This means that the cost of gas falls most heavily on them, not on me. This is the reason the gilets jaunes got all rowdy in France.

Ritualistic blaming of the wealthy does nothing to solve global warming; they can laugh it off, or buy a tropical forest and claim absolution for their yachts. Meanwhile, the people who actually have to go to jobs – who can’t do their jobs from the other side of the internet – pay at the pump. And if their jobs happen to be mining coal, then they’ll pay twice. Global warming is a problem, and we have to respond to it, but it is politically – and morally – idiotic to put the heaviest burden on the working poor. We have to solve social problems at the same time we solve environmental problems. The working poor must be lifted up by our policy solutions to global warming, or they will be self-defeating.

And, yes, that puts us in a terrible position, because we have other political factions who don’t give a damn about either problem, and are counting on us to screw up one or both.

Brendan O’Neill’s empty formulaic “Look at the lefties making a big fuss about climate change which everyone knows isn’t a thing” piece:

Is anyone else tiring of all this green hysteria over the heatwave? There is something medieval about it. There is something creepily pre-modern in the idea that sinful mankind has brought heat and fire and floods upon himself with his wicked, hubristic behaviour. What next – plagues of locusts as a punishment for our failure to recycle?

Cute, but beside the point. Literary criticism isn’t the right tool for doing away with global warming. It really doesn’t matter whether or not Brendan O’Neill is bored by talk of climate change, what matters is that it’s happening and there is a great deal of research that shows how it’s happening. It’s not something people just kick back in their chairs and say, it’s what climate scientists discover by digging up core samples and measuring the Colorado River (when they can find it) and comparing weather statistics. It’s not a story. The permafrost isn’t thawing to annoy Brendan O’Neill, it’s just thawing.

The unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become. Climate-change activism is less and less about coming up with practical solutions to the problem of pollution and more about demonising mankind as a plague on a planet, a pox on Mother Earth.

It’s not just about “pollution” ffs, and there are no “practical solutions” that will just make climate change disappear. Tipping points can’t be untipped.

To my mind, there could be no better proof that climate-change activism has become an End of Days cult than the fact that its chief ideologues are now even incapable of enjoying hot weather. 

Oh ffs. He’s not really this thick, it’s an act, but it’s such a stupid act.