Of course he said that.
That’s Trump in a nutshell. You don’t need to talk to other people, you’re the boss, you decide everything all by yourself, you don’t need a team, you don’t need information, you don’t need advice, you don’t need understanding, you don’t need a range of views, you don’t need to think – you just do the Big Boy Pants thing, end of story.
A bump in the road for Bad Kennedy:
A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked federal health officials from cutting the number of vaccines recommended for every child, and said U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likely violated federal procedures in revamping a key vaccine advisory committee.
The decision halted an order by Kennedy — announced in January — to end broad recommendations for all children to be vaccinated against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis and RSV.
On the one hand you have your medically trained people and on the other hand you have a stupid conceited hack who thinks he knows better than everyone despite having zero medical training or education. Wattyagonna do.
Sale ends at midnight! Don’t delay! Offer comes with bag of popcorn!
Nyah nyah I didn’t want to ride your rusty old bike anyway.
Trump on Monday disparaged American allies who have responded coolly to, or outright rebuffed, his call to send warships to escort merchant vessels in and out of the Persian Gulf, complaining that the United States had been defending other countries for decades.
“You mean for 40 years we’re protecting you, and you don’t want to get involved in something that’s very minor?” Mr. Trump said, speaking about the war at a White House event with the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
He went on to say, “We don’t need anybody; we’re the strongest nation in the world,” adding that his request for international help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was really a loyalty test for U.S. allies.
We don’t need your bike, we’re so strong we can go faster without any bike.
“I’m almost doing it in some cases not because we need them, but because I want to find out how they react,” he said.
The “almost” is very good. He’s almost a functioning adult. He can almost find his ass in the dark. He almost doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him.
Mr. Trump’s appeal for an international naval escort, which he issued on Saturday, was the first time he sounded eager to build a broad coalition against Iran. But he was asking for backup from allies who had not been consulted ahead of the U.S.-Israeli decision to begin bombing Iran last month, and who have been mocked by Mr. Trump in the past.
Mocked and worse. Mocked and everything else on the menu. Trump isn’t shy about flinging shit at people.
The United States appears to have been unprepared for the extent of Iran’s retaliation and the need to protect ships in the strait, which also carry fertilizer and other products that help fuel the global economy. Mr. Trump has been pressuring NATO to help, with a sharp warning.
It’s not the US that was unprepared for Iran to refuse to lie down and die. It’s Trump who was unprepared for that obvious possibility.
Trump called on China to send naval escorts, too, but Beijing has little incentive to cooperate; Iran, which sells oil to China, is letting its ships pass safely.
It’s so sad that none of this was obvious until just a few minutes ago. If Trump had known he wouldn’t have attacked Iran! Poor guy, nobody tells him anything.
Trump says reporters who cover his war on Iran in a negative manner should face charges of “TREASON”—a crime punishable by death.
The 79-year-old president posted a nearly 400-word Truth Social rant on Sunday slamming Iran for “feeding” the “very appreciative Fake News Media” in the U.S. and even resorting to AI to spread “false information.”
Nobody can compete with Trump in the false information department.
The president also took swings at a reporter from ABC, calling them “one of the most corrupt news organizations on the planet” before refusing to take any more questions from the outlet. When a female reporter asked Trump why the U.S. is sending 5,000 marines and sailors, the president shot back. “You’re a very obnoxious person,” he said, and took a different question from a male reporter.
Just another Monday.
George Chesterton at the Telegraph talks to Rachel Rooney about the Trans Board of Censorship.
“This is the book that ended my career,” says Rachel Rooney, holding a copy of My Body is Me, a picture book for three to six-year-olds published in 2019. You could not find a more innocuous, inclusive and warm-hearted children’s paperback if you tried, yet it led to bitter recriminations for its award-winning creator, a torrent of abuse and ultimately her cancellation by the publishing world.
Her “crime” was to be a gender-critical feminist voice in an industry that was, and largely remains, adherent to a rigid gender ideology.
Rigid, yes, but more to the point, batshit crazy. I think the batshit crazy part should always be at the top of the page. It’s an ideology that flatly denies physical reality and embraces magic. It’s like a brand new Catholic church but without the cookies.
Rooney, now 63, found that being out of step with trans orthodoxy and publicly declaring a belief in the binary nature of biological sex – even when the book in question made no reference to gender or sex – was fatal for the career she had always dreamt of, as well as her livelihood.
Except it’s not a belief. It’s an awareness, an acceptance, a refusal to deny a plain physical reality that everyone is aware of despite all the lies. We don’t “believe” that women are not men, we know that women are not men.
“In 2018, when gender self-ID was being discussed [as part of a consultation on reforms to the Gender Recognition Act], I thought, ‘I can’t not say something. It’s ridiculous.’ So I started speaking up very quietly, just a few things here and there, to people around me or on social media.”
At about the same time, she was contacted by the children’s illustrator, Jessica Ahlberg, on behalf of Transgender Trend, a gender-critical organisation, to ask if she would collaborate on a picture book about body positivity. Ahlberg – the daughter of authors, Janet and Allan Ahlberg, described by Rooney as “children’s literature royalty” – asked her to provide the words for the picture book that became My Body is Me. Rooney’s work was provided for free, and she receives no royalties for any sales.
…
Even before it was published, Rooney was already being attacked by fellow authors on social media for her unfashionable views. In the summer of 2019, she contacted the Society of Authors, her trade union, to point out that the list of “protected characteristics” on its website included gender and gender identity but not sex, which was legally incorrect, and the society agreed to change it.
But, after the book came out, “it just went ballistic among the children’s publishing community, especially following the criticism of [children’s author], Clara Vulliamy”.
In December 2019, Vulliamy posted a succession of messages on X vilifying Rooney and encouraging the organisation that promotes author visits to schools, Authors Aloud UK, not to endorse My Body is Me, saying it propagated an “extreme ideology” that “targets children”.
The “extreme ideology” that says boys are not girls and girls are not boys. The extremiosity is hard to endure.
Rooney used to visit two or three schools a month to supplement her income, but once the attacks became widespread, these bookings stopped completely. She was told by a publisher that some booksellers were refusing to stock her work.
Rooney contacted the Society of Authors to complain that the criticism could constitute restraint of trade because it could potentially damage her ability to make a living, but the official response was that it couldn’t get involved in disputes. It has since transpired from internal emails, after a subject access request Rooney made in 2023, that the matter was passed to the former chief executive, Nicola Solomons, a lawyer who admitted that Vulliamy’s comments were “potentially defamatory”.
But Vulliamy is one of the cool kids, so keep it under wraps.
Is that true?
It’s true that Ireland is very…shall we say delayed, on this matter. That’s why it’s been known to let women die rather than terminate a premature birth. But is it so very delayed that women have no rights specific to women at all? Is rape legalized then?
Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Bureaucracies love euphemism.
[“Kinetic”] could certainly be an abbreviation of “fucking hectic”, but what interests me about the word (in the way it’s used by Hegseth & others) is its scientific aura, its suggestion that what is happening is both violent and an index of overwhelming, god-like power, but also that it is mindless (which of course it is in a sense other than the sense I am trying to establish) and mechanical and has nothing to do with human intentions, decisions or responsibility (“kinetic energy” is, according to the OED, “energy which a body possesses by virtue of being in motion”), and so cannot be understood at all in human terms. War has been refined, as it were, into a sort of natural happening that can be understood only through physical laws. What violently happens just happens – it is what used to be called in more religious eras “an Act of God”, as at Sodom and Gomorrah. No-one is responsible for what is happening, particularly not the Trump regime and the Netanyahu regime, so no-one should feel upset or guilty.
I am reminded of how the interesting fascist writer Ernst Jünger represented in his book “Der Friede. Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas. Ein Wort an die Jugend Der Welt” (“The Peace: A Word for the Youth of Europe; A Word for the Youth of the World”) the Nazis’ seizure of power, the Shoah, the destruction of World War 2 as fundamentally a cosmic calamity for which nobody was responsible. That is why I characterise the word “kinetic”as “euphemistic” since it seeks, as does the term “enhanced interrogation”, to conceal actions taken by human beings, and the responsibility for these actions, beneath a quasi-scientific veneer.
“The Peace”, by the way, was intended for Allied readers, not for the German people. Typescripts were circulated, and the authorised version was finally published in Amsterdam in 1943. An English translation was published in 1948 from the right-wing publisher Henry Regnery Company, Hinsdale, Illinois,
The Facebook commentator I Fucking Love Australia is not unduly impressed by Trump’s efforts to summon help with the Strait of Hormuz thing.
BREAKING: President Trump says the US in conjunction with “many countries” is sending war ships to the Strait of Hormuz to keep it “open and safe.”
Trump also calls on China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others to send war ships to Hormuz.
Oh. Oh this is beautiful. This is the geopolitical equivalent of the guy who starts a bar fight, gets his head put through the pool table, and then looks up at the bouncer with blood pouring out of his nose going “Are you gonna DO something about these guys?!”
Let me get this straight. You bombed Iran. YOU started this. You launched Operation Epic Fury like a kid naming his Nerf gun. You flattened their cities, cratered their infrastructure, killed God knows how many civilians, and now that they’ve done the ONE thing that every single analyst on Earth said they would do… close the Strait of Hormuz… you’re asking CHINA for help?
CHINA. The country you’ve spent three years tariffing into oblivion. The country you called an enemy of civilisation. You want THEM to send warships to protect YOUR oil supply chain? In what universe does Xi Jinping take that phone call and not just put it on speaker so the whole room can laugh?
And here’s the bit that should be printed on a plaque and hung in the Smithsonian under the heading “Weapons Grade Cognitive Dissonance Dipshit.” Direct quote from the man himself:
“We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability.”
Next sentence. LITERALLY the next sentence:
“But it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway.”
100% except for the drones and mines and close range missiles, Smartypants! They don’t count as military capability. Because they don’t, that’s why.
Originally a comment by Artymorty on An unusually crass opinion.
I’m of the mind that crass language and blunt, confrontational talk is a great tool for smashing bullshit. Too often, people use politeness and euphemism as a shield to hide behind, as deflection to avoid responsibility. When confronted with blunt reality it’s often a lot harder for people to avoid facing their complicity in bad things. I see it in office culture all the time, and I can’t stand it. Bureaucracies love euphemism and they hate bluntness. Especially bureaucracies that are propping up bad things.
In the 2000s, for example, it was euphemism and politeness that enabled unscrupulous financiers to repackage and sell junk mortgage debt: they danced around the blunt facts with pretty language, and by 2008 the ruse collapsed and nearly brought down the global economy with it. It was the pretty language that those bad mortgages were packaged in that gave everyone all up and down the financial chain of command permission to look the other way for so many years, even as many individuals within the system had surely, privately, caught on that it was a scam. More than a year before the subprime mortgage fiasco began to unravel, Harper’s magazine ran a cover story with blunt language, exposing the whole thing. But of course, finance bros don’t read Harper’s. If only more industry insiders were more plainspoken about the scam earlier on, if only they’d been more crass and called those financial instruments what they were — bullshit for suckers — all that financial destruction and the human suffering it caused might have been prevented.
I come from poor neighbourhoods, and I feel like an outsider in environments that fetishize politeness to the point of ignoring higher principles. If I worked in law, I’d be more like Erin Brockovich than, say, Barack Obama.
With respect to the transgender mess, the legal system could do with a whole lot more blunt talk, Erin Brockovich-style, to shake some sense into those cowardly, complicit phonies. This issue really comes down to men’s genitals and men’s sexual entitlement.
When I see people get outraged over crude language even when it’s being deliberately deployed to call attention to more fundamental, higher-order problems, I immediately suspect it’s because the crude language is hitting them in a sensitive spot, and it’s about to uncover a hypocrisy they don’t want to face. I’ve been the one calling bullshit bluntly to people who don’t want to hear it, more than once.
When judges panic about crude language around penises, maybe it’s because they can’t face the fact that they’ve been complicit in allowing those penises in places they absolutely shouldn’t be.
Why did Trump fire Kristi Noem?
Her tenure was marked by high-profile immigration enforcement operations that were often publicised on social media, with Noem at times accompanying federal agents during arrests.
During this sweeping immigration crackdown across the US, two US citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, were fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.
Not fatally shot in self-defense or to defend others, but fatally shot for no detectable reason other than panic and/or bad temper.
The announcement came following controversy over a $220m border security advertising campaign featuring Noem on horseback. After Noem told Congress that Trump had approved the campaign, Trump denied involvement.
In a phone interview with the Reuters news agency, he said: “I never knew anything about it.”
If he had he would have put the kibosh on it. No horseback! Makes him look bad! Golf cart or nothing!
Trump’s decision to reassign Noem followed a two-day congressional hearing on Capitol Hill, during which the Homeland Security Secretary faced questioning about her actions from members of both parties. Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher said Noem was “destroyed under questioning”, citing a series of controversies that made her continued leadership difficult.
Look, Trump doesn’t need any help with the controversies. He can create them all by himself, thank you very much.
Noem was grilled about a roughly $220m border security advertising campaign that prominently featured her, including promotional footage of her on horseback near Mount Rushmore.
Hahahahahaha that’ll be it. There’s no need for any other reason. How dare she pose on horseback?! She did it to make Trump look bad! Get her out yesterday!
Yes that’s the way to talk about the slaughter of war.
Trump says US strikes have “totally demolished” much of Iran’s Kharg Island oil export hub and threatened that “we may hit it a few more times just for fun”.
It is fun, isn’t it? It’s as much fun as driving Dad’s car into a brick wall.
Ick.
The administration plans to issue a $1 coin with President Donald Trump’s likeness on it next year, despite a century-old precedent of not honoring sitting, or even living former, presidents on coins.
Instead of quarters honoring the abolition of slavery, granting women the right to vote and the Civil Rights movement, the Treasury will instead issue historical quarters featuring white men from the 18th and 19th centuries who were already well represented on currency and in historical tributes.
It’s DEI-evil to honor the abolition of slavery, granting women the right to vote, and the Civil Rights movement.
The new coins, coming after the administration stopped issuing new pennies earlier this year, underscore Trump’s drive to put his own stamp on the presidency far beyond the confines of the White House – whether it’s by putting his own face and name on US institutions or by pulling back on diversity efforts to reframe the story of America itself.
Win-win. More about Trump, less about anyone else, much less about people ignored or persecuted for generations by rich powerful pale males like Trump.
The US Mint told CNN on Friday that instead of the previously recommended tribute quarters to abolition, suffrage and the Civil Rights movement, the new designs celebrate “American history and the founding of our great nation.”
Hey. Guess what. Abolition, suffrage, and the Civil Rights movement are American history. They’re much more significant to American history than a bonehead real estate hustler from Queens.
The panel recommended an abolition of slavery coin featuring Fredrick Douglass, a leading abolitionist and Civil Rights leader of the 19th century, on the front. A hand and arm breaking free of chains were on the back.
The women’s suffrage coin would have shown a woman carrying a banner calling for “Votes for Women.”
And the Civil Rights coin would have shown Ruby Bridges as a six-year-old girl, carrying her schoolbooks close to her chest as she integrated an elementary school in New Orleans in 1960. She and three other Black schoolmates were accompanied to class by federal marshals. The back of the coin showed Civil Rights marchers locked arm-in-arm.
The panel’s designs, developed over years, stemmed from legislation that Trump himself signed his final week of his first term in 2021.
He’ll be making his horse a senator soon.
From the Broadcast News Gossip department:
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an appearance on the now Donald Trump–friendly CBS News because of the actions of the network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.
The progressive Democrat Mamdani, to whom the president has taken an unlikely shine, had been in talks to do a sit-down interview with Robert Costa for CBS News Sunday Morning.
However, Mamdani has now backed out because Weiss has stirred CBS News to launch wave after wave of negative press coverage of the mayor, Vanity Fair’s Aidan McLaughlin first reported in his Party Animals newsletter.
Hostile press coverage, they mean. The euphemistic word “negative” is so useless there; I wish journalists or their editors would stop using bland empty adjectives like that.
This includes Weiss reposting a CBS News clip of Iranian dissident and activist Masih Alinejad criticizing Mamdani’s description of U.S. strikes on Iran as “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” along with a fire emoji on X.
Part of the problem there is that Trump is the wrong guy to be helping Iranian dissidents and activists. He’s doing what he’s doing because he likes to blow people up.
Status recently reported CBS News staff were concerned that Weiss—an outspoken supporter of Israel and a fierce critic of progressive “woke” ideologies—was trying to steer the network toward the same editorial stance as The Free Press, the media company she founded, which is also highly critical of the New York mayor.
What a surprise: she has the same views in two different places. Who saw that coming?
Peak trolling. The world points out how disgusting it is for Trump to exploit one of the soldiers he got killed by wearing one of his own vulgar baseball caps while saluting the coffin, so Trump exploits the disgust at his disgusting behavior.
Not content with wearing his own merchandise at a dignified transfer, President Donald Trump is now doubling down on the “shameful” insult by attempting to cash in on the controversial photo op.
In a twisted turn of events, the 79-year-old has used an image of himself saluting the coffin of a soldier killed in his war on Iran to drum up cash for his own campaigning.
Last week, Trump became the first president in history to wear a baseball hat while honoring returning service members who made the ultimate sacrifice. The move drew condemnation from across the political spectrum.
Why? Because it’s not a party, much less a party for Trump, much less a party for Trump to advertise both himself and his trashy merchandise.
It’s as if there is a god after all, and this god wants to punish us for being such a crass money-grubbing shameless bunch of vulgarians.
In an email to his supporters on Friday, Trump doubled down on the disrespect by using a shot of the transfer to promote a private newsletter group receiving “national security briefings.”
He what???
“This is President Donald J. Trump,” the email reads. “I made a special announcement to the public an hour ago.”
“For the very first time ever, I’m opening up spots on the National Security Briefing Membership.
“CLAIM YOUR SPOT. VERY FEW SPOTS REMAINING!”
For the very first time ever because that is not what you do with national security briefings!!! As even he must know perfectly well – not least because of course everyone will have told him so in terms that underline how powerful and special that makes him.
I’m not enjoying this journey downward. Can we hit bottom already?
A trans-identified male politician who previously attempted to have a woman imprisoned for “misgendering” him was elected as president of the Women’s Rights Committee. Felipe Santos Silva, who has adopted the name Erika Hilton, told the Chamber of Deputies that the Committee should focus on women “without exception in their dignity and plurality,” and included transvestites in his definition.
Plurality is one thing and calling men “women” is another.
“We will discuss projects here, we will discuss the lives of women here, we will remember that, whether they like it or not, cis women, trans woman and travestis [transvestites] will not be abandoned in this discussion, and I don’t care about anyone’s wishes,” Hilton, of the Socialism and Liberty Party, stated.
That’s a good stance for a political figure to take. Not caring about anyone’s wishes is the straight road to popularity and landslide elections.
Upon accepting the role of President of the Women’s Rights Commission, Hilton blasted his critics as “LGBTphobes” and “defenders of pedophilia.”
Sir, sir, sir, you’re taking a role that should be a woman’s. You shouldn’t do that, nor should you bully the women who tell you you shouldn’t do that.
And so they fall into the trap.
A Donald Trump-appointed federal appellate judge invoked the term “swinging dicks” three times in an unusually crass opinion involving a nude, female-only Korean spa, drawing sharp rebukes from 29 of his colleagues.
“This is a case about swinging dicks,” began a Thursday dissenting opinion from Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the US Court of Appeals. He said he would have ruled in favor of Washington state’s Olympus Spa, which had sought to bar transgender women from its spa facilities on free speech grounds.
“You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong,” he wrote. “But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa— some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.”
He went on to say that it “feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds” and criticized “woke judges’ willingness” to sacrifice constitutional rights “on the altar of ‘social progress.’”
VanDyke’s dissent prompted a harsh rebuke from more than two dozen of his colleagues, who wrote separately to say that the US legal system “is not a place for vulgar barroom talk” and that VanDyke’s dissent “ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeans this court.”
“That language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts. The lead dissent’s use of such coarse language and invective may make for publicity or entertainment value, but it has no place in a judicial opinion,” wrote Senior Judge M. Margaret McKeown, joined by 26 other Ninth Circuit colleagues.
True. So, if the words “big swinging dicks” have no place in judicial opinions, are we really truly completely sure that actual dicks belong in female changing rooms?
They walked into his trap. The crude language was a trap. Guess what, colleagues: if the mere words upset you that much, why are you so relaxed about the actual physical dicks themselves in the actual physical presence of girls and women who are changing their clothes?
Please do explain, in your most dignified judicial language. We’ll wait.
A serial upskirter whose phone contained more than 100 videos of young women secretly filmed in public toilets has heard of his lecherous behaviour’s “profound impact” on one of his victims.
Bao Phuc Cao, 23, a Vietnamese biomedicine student at The University of Melbourne, appeared for sentencing in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court after he was caught filming a woman in a public toilet at a Docklands shopping centre in February 2025.
Cao pleaded guilty on Thursday, March 5, but his hearing was adjourned as the court awaited a victim impact statement…The statement was not read before the court, but magistrate Michelle Mykytowycz said Cao’s victim had been deeply affected by the incident.
“This has had a profound impact on the complainant,” Ms Mykytowycz said. “She remains hyper vigilant … it affects her ability to use public rest rooms at work and in public space.”
…
The court was told Cao had been sentenced to a community corrections order in May last year for “effectively identical offending” against one known victim. The prosecutor said police had seized Cao’s phone containing “over 100 different videos” of unknown people whom he had secretly filmed.
…
Since his previous sentencing, Cao had been complying with orders, not missing any appointments, and had been referred to an offence-specific program, the court was told. A conviction wasn’t recorded against Cao, but he must comply with a good behaviour order and his already-in-place community corrections orders.
That’s it. He doesn’t get any actual punishment, he just has to refrain from doing it again. More than 100 of these revolting sex crimes and he gets away with it.
Would it help to issue all males with a plastic or rubber model of the female genitalia for their very own?
This is astounding.
And who’s that up near the top of the table on the left? None other than Mridul Wadhwa, the man who ran the Edinburgh rape crisis centre for way too long. Why did Olivia Bailey MP go out of her way to insult women and why does she look so happy about it?
Reactions are intensely hostile.
Update:
Oh guess what, it’s not one man pretending to be a woman in that snap, it’s two. On the left side, with bangs/a fringe – that’s “Helen” Belcher. 11 people in the photo, and two of them are men pretending to be women. How representative. So feminist.
New low achieved.