Chase Strangio is just straight-up libeling people now.

I hope JKR has a word with Chase. She’s not bashful about introducing her lawyers to libelers.

An old acquaintance continues to contribute to the gaiety of nations.

That’s the erstwhile Jessica Yaniv, of course, after another whimsical name change. It seems there’s a celebrity Jessica Simpson, so no doubt Yaniv will be suing her for impersonation soon.

He did sue his local health service just a couple of weeks ago, so while he was also harassing the Langley fire department. Busy guy.

A Langley woman known for her controversial legal and human rights challenges is now suing Fraser Health and the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) for allegedly breaching her personal health information.

Jessica Simpson, formerly known as Jessica Yaniv, filed a small claims case in Surrey Provincial Court against the two health agencies on Monday, Jan. 18.

And then went home to take a bath and summon the fire department.

Simpson has also been arrested and found guilty of one charge of possession of an unauthorized weapon after she brandished an electric stun gun-style weapon on a YouTube livestream. She was sentenced to probation and a firearms prohibition in September of 2020.

She has also attempted to sue the Township of Langley over her alleged treatment by Langley RCMP after her arrest on the stun gun charge.

Now he can attempt to sue the Township of Langley over his treatment by Langley Fire Services. It’s an exciting life he leads.

This seems like a bad idea.

Hunter is writing a book about himself.

When Joe Biden first launched his presidential bid, inquiries about his son, Hunter, were so taboo they were met with the full fury of the campaign.

“Ask the right question!” Biden snapped at a reporter early in the campaign who asked about Hunter Biden’s business interests in Ukraine.

That’s bullshit. As I said about 5 thousand times during the campaign, Biden should have stopped him. Biden should have told his son he couldn’t leverage his daddy’s job into a highly lucrative job for himself for which he had no particular qualifications. It was sordid at best and corrupt at worst. Joe Biden had no right to snap at people asking about it.

Now, it’s the president’s son who is revealing his own story — and, along the way, opening himself up for more scrutiny — just as his father’s presidency is taking hold.

So, again, he’s leveraging his daddy’s job into profit for himself.

Hunter Biden’s new memoir, “Beautiful Things,” to be released April 6, details his struggles with addiction.

But it also piggybacks on his daddy’s job.

[T]he Biden family on Thursday said they stood by his decision to pen the book.

“The shared feeling is that telling this story takes a hell of a lot of strength and courage,” said a close Biden ally. “And right now when [the American public’s] substance use has increased during the coronavirus outbreak and when so many families are feeling the pain of the opioid epidemic, this is especially meaningful and could help others find the support they need. “

But also it will sell more copies because of who Daddy is.

Yes the Republicans exploited the Hunter issue during the campaign, but they didn’t create the issue. Hunter did that.

The Biden campaign adopted a strategy to forcefully push back on media questions about Hunter Biden, arguing it was a distraction from Trump’s conduct and likening the scenario to the media’s fixation on Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016.

So corruption is ok then.

The upcoming memoir is being portrayed as a way to further those conversations around addiction. But it could also open up Hunter Biden to charges that he is once more using his last name for profit.

Because he is.

Such criticism was directed at Ivanka Trump, when she published “Women Who Work” in 2017, months after Trump took office and she started working as a White House adviser to him. She said at the time that she’d donate the unpaid part of her advance and any royalties to charity. It is unclear what Hunter Biden plans to do with his earnings.

Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, released “Triggered” and “Liberal Privilege” while his father was in the White House. The Republican National Committee bought copies of both books to give to donors, shelling out more than $100,000 on copies of “Triggered.”

Note to the DNC: don’t do that.

Well shown and said.

Marjorie Greene has been stripped of her committee duties, and she’s exploiting her rebuke as a way to get people to give her money. Very trumpy.

Greene defended herself ahead of the vote in a speech on the House floor and attempted to distance herself from the dangerous and debunked QAnon conspiracy theory, which she has previously embraced.

But Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez of California, who has introduced a resolution to expel Greene, told reporters he still believes she should be removed from Congress even after watching her floor remarks. The congressman said of his resolution, “I’m committed to bringing it up, and I said that to leadership that there needs to be a vote sooner rather or later on this.”

Gomez said that the reason why he is pursuing a resolution to expel Greene “is to send a message that this kind of discourse in our politics is not acceptable, inciting political violence, threatening people as is not acceptable and a person like that should not hold a position in the House of Representatives.”

But the voters voted her, so that’s that.

The Constitution gives Congress the ability to impeach federal officials and judges, but not its own members. They can only be removed by expulsion, which requires a 2/3 vote, a high bar that would be unlikely to be cleared with Democrats holding only a narrow majority.

Hey, all she did was threaten to kill them.

Greene, meanwhile, has been highlighting how much she has been able to fundraise amid the controversy sparked by reports over her past conduct, including from CNN’s KFile that she repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress.

That’s democracy.

The Pioneer Plaque…

Not really transphobic, because hey, it doesn’t say who is which or how anyone identifies.

Anyway. Ignoring Satiria’s satir, I’m mildly intrigued by the image. It was launched in March 1972. It’s a little odd that they chose that nice young couple from Connecticut to represent all of humanity. No infants, no children, no old crocks, and no people from Shanghai or Kolkata or Mombasa.

Also, down to finer detail…it’s only the man who is doing something, the woman is just standing there passively. The man stands solidly while the woman is pointing her toe for no apparent reason. Advertisers do this – if a woman’s bare feet are visible in an ad she has to be pointing them. No relaxed neutral-position feet for them, no sir, it’s ballet-style pointing or gtfo. And then the hair – since the intended audience is Beings From Spaaaaaaace you’d think the plaque-makers could have put a little more thought into the hair. Also the raised hand is out of proportion; it’s as big as his head.

Quote of the day:

I’m looking forward to the ACLU’s fight for the inclusion of sawhorses, seahorses, and pommel horses in the next running of the Kentucky Derby.

–Your Name’s not Bruce?

The current right-wing gotcha is claiming that Ocasio-Cortez lied about being in the Capitol during the attack. “She wasn’t even there!! She was in her office next door!!! Doesn’t count!!!!”

But some have questioned her story, with conservative critics mentioning that her office is in the nearby Cannon House, not the main Capitol building. GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, whose office is close to Ocasio-Cortez’s, tweeted: “Insurrectionists never stormed our hallway.”

That’s fascinating, but how would AOC or anyone else have known that at the time?

Ocasio-Cortez has vigorously defended her account of the day. She shared a tweet by the alt-right activist Jack Posobiec, who claimed that the congresswoman was “not in the Capitol building at the time of her ‘near death’ experience.”

She wrote that these comments were part of a move by the right who were “manipulating the fact that most people don’t know the layout [of] the Capitol complex. We were all on the Capitol complex—the attack wasn’t just on the dome. The bombs Trump supporters planted surrounded our offices too.”

Her account was supported by Ari Rabin-Havt, former deputy campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders‘ tilt at the Democratic presidential nomination last year. He tweeted that he was at the Rayburn Tunnel in the Capitol complex during the attack.

“Trying to find a hiding place, I moved to [Cannon]. A swat team came running through the tunnel intersection yelling it was not safe & I should find a place to hide. Anyone suggesting @AOC is exaggerating is ignorant or a liar.”

Or ignorant and a liar and a misogynist and a reactionary.

In another tweet he compared the attack with the evacuation of the Capitol complex on 9/11. “I’ve witnessed dozens of protests and security situations at the Capitol. I have traveled with two presidential campaigns. The only moment in my career I have been scared was in [Cannon] that day.”

I was jumping out of my skin that day and I was three thousand miles away.

Speaking of carefully choosing photos for your “Hooray for transwomen in sport!” tweets…

Hiding the hecox there.

H/t guest

The Guardian reported a few days ago that Maajid Nawaz (who, from what I’ve seen, has been moving ever farther to the right lately) has been talking up trumpish conspiracy theories.

The prominent radio presenter and activist Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of a respected British anti-extremist thinktank and a one-time government adviser, has alarmed former admirers and academics with his interest in conspiracy theories about the lockdown and voter fraud in the US election on his Twitter account.

As an LBC radio host, he regularly takes provocative stances, but now a string of controversial and potentially harmful tweets is prompting further questions.

Followers were initially alarmed when Nawaz, who set up the Quilliam Foundation in 2008, inspired by his own move away from Islamic extremism, retweeted a “fascinating thread” in November last year on how the “myth” of a killer coronavirus pandemic had been spread. Nawaz adds he has no opinion on this claim.

No opinion on it but retweets it anyway, regardless of the harms of treating a lethal pandemic as a “myth.”

After the US presidential election, Nawaz tweeted a series of claims that fraud had taken place, questioning the credibility of the voting machines and reproducing some of the arguments put forward by Trump’s former legal cheerleader, Sidney Powell, whose claims proved so outlandish that she was eventually disavowed by the former president.

Following the attack on the US Capitol, Nawaz retweeted false claims that it was antifa, or anti-fascist groups, who orchestrated the raid, rather than Trump supporters.

…

Last week Nawaz also challenged Facebook to explain why it had marked one of his posts as false. He had drawn attention to allegations that America’s chief medical adviser to the president, Dr Anthony Fauci, had invested in the Wuhan laboratory suspected by some of leaking the virus into the human population. The wild allegations about Fauci – for which there is no evidence – were contained in a Fox News report from Steve Hilton, the British former public relations adviser to David Cameron.

If you’re promoting loony claims from Fox News, you’re not an anti-extremism campaigner any more.

Sunder Katwala, the director of the thinktank British Future, is one of those who has been attempting to hold Nawaz to account for spreading unproven theories and scare stories. He argued that the presenter poses more of a problem than conspiracists because of his LBC platform, the fact that he leads a counter-extremism thinktank and is also a prominent British convert from extremism. Katwala, a former general secretary of the leftwing Fabian Society, believes Nawaz’s public profile makes such references to “conspiratorial propaganda more worrying”.

“It has been alarming to witness this evolve from unusual misreadings of the US constitutional process into an interest in electoral fraud conspiracies,” said Katwala. “I cannot conceive of a benign explanation for participating in and spreading QAnon-inspired online conspiracies.”

A wacky sense of humor?

Well knock me down with a feather – a Washington Post cartoonist gets it.

I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not, until I scrolled down and saw that she’s blocking anyone who asks, so that’s a no. She actually means this.

It’s national women and girls in sports day, so she’s celebrating the “bravery” of men who beat women in sports by claiming to be women. Also their “strength,” which is kind of the issue.

This just in: women talk too much.

The president of the Tokyo Olympics has refused to resign after igniting a storm of criticism by saying that women do not belong on committees because they talk too much.

Yoshiro Mori, the 83-year-old former prime minister and president of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee, made the remarks at a meeting of the Japan Olympic Committee on Wednesday.

…

Speaking at an online JOC meeting about proposals to increase the number of female directors, Mr Mori said that in his experience at the Japan Rugby Football Union, women made meetings last too long.

“It takes twice as long. Women have a strong sense of rivalry. If one raises her hand to speak then all the others feel they have to do the same. So it ends up with everybody talking,” Mr Mori said in comments first reported by the Asahi newspaper.

People were annoyed. He held a press conference to say sorry but also he’s not going anywhere.

Mr Mori, who was prime minister for a year from 2000-01, has a long history of committing gaffes and making chauvinist remarks, including attacks on women who did not have children and athletes who failed to sing the national anthem loudly enough.

I know of a guy in Palm Beach he would really get along with.

Facebook targets pro-violence advertising to – naturally – the people most likely to use it.

As part of my research while working as a consulting producer on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, I made many pro-Trump social media accounts. The accounts were a window into the Trump echo-chamber, where the unhinged threats and vitriol posted by radicalized users are chilling. Yet as shocking as the posts can be, they make perfect sense if you look at the ads that bombard those accounts.

Roughly four out of five ads shown to my pro-Trump profiles sell tactical gear clearly intended for combat. This is not a new thing – it has been going on since I started looking at these accounts in June 2019, and it was probably going on much longer than that.

You have to wonder why tactical gear intended for combat is a private market thing at all. Are there ads for nuclear weapons? Fighter jets? Tanks? Should war equipment really be a consumer item?

Despite not actually selling guns, the vast majority of the ads nevertheless display military-style weapons somewhere in their design. An automatic rifle slides into the tactical backpack. The body armor is worn by someone actively poised to shoot a semi-automatic weapon. A black T-shirt presents an image of a medieval crusader in full armor holding a contemporary handgun, accompanied by a biblical quote: “Blessed be the lord my rock who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Capitalism—>marketing the tools of war: fabulous!

Ad revenue is the lifeblood of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and ads from companies peddling military-style gear are key to creating the hateful communities we see online today. To change the violent online world Facebook has created for “Trump’s Army” will require changing the algorithms themselves, the basic architecture of Facebook’s advertising – a market that is projected to bring the company nearly $100bn in the coming year.

And Zuckerberg isn’t about to mess with that.

The ACLU is digging in.

But that’s not a “fact.” It’s an ideological construct, of a peculiarly fatuous kind, and it’s not true; it’s the opposite of a fact.

Nonsense.

Include trans people on sports teams by all means, just not male people on female teams, because it’s unfair.

USA Today reports:

A group of high-profile women athletes and women’s sports advocates is taking on the contentious issue of transgender girls and women in sports by proposing federal legislation to exempt girls’ and women’s competitive sports from President Joe Biden’s recent executive order that mandates blanket inclusion for all transgender female athletes.

In the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, signed on Inauguration Day, the Biden administration said that any school that receives federal funding must allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face action from the federal government.

But the group of women’s sports leaders, including tennis legend Martina Navratilova, several Olympic gold medalists and five former presidents of the Women’s Sports Foundation, is asking Congress and the Biden administration to limit the participation of transgender girls and women who “have experienced all or part of male puberty (which is the scientific justification for separate sex sport),” while accommodating and honoring their sports participation in other ways. Options could include separate heats, additional events or divisions and/or the handicapping of results. 

Now why would they do that? Oh yes, the reason’s obvious, isn’t it.

“We fully support the Biden executive order, ending LGBT discrimination throughout society, including employment, banking, family law and public accommodations,” Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX attorney and one of the leaders of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, told USA TODAY Sports in an exclusive interview. “Competitive sports, however, are akin to pregnancy and medical testing; these areas require a science-based approach to trans inclusion. Our aim has been on protecting the girls’ and women’s competitive categories, while crafting accommodations for trans athletes into sport wherever possible. 

“While the details of President Biden’s executive order remain fuzzy, asking women — no, requiring them — to give up their hard-won rights to compete and be recognized in elite sport, with equal opportunities, scholarships, prize money, publicity, honor and respect, does the cause of transgender inclusion no favors,” Hogshead-Makar said.

And even if it did do the cause of trans inclusion favors, it would still be outrageously unfair to women and girls, which ought to make it a non-starter.

While the controversy over transgender girls and women in sports is not new, the issue bubbled to the surface in the United States a few years ago when two transgender girls were allowed to compete in state track and field meets in Connecticut, winning a combined 15 girls’ state indoor and outdoor championship races from 2017-19…

Which is 15 wins they took away from girls, which is grossly unfair.

Why was NPR talking about “multiracial whiteness”? Because of a Washington Post think piece by Cristina Beltrán, who is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU.

The Trump administration’s anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has made it easy to classify the president’s loyalists as a homogenous mob of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI’s posters showing people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African American.

So! Rather than try to figure out how brown people manage to be fans of murderous bullies who despise brown people, we have to decide that that’s “whiteness.”

Yes, Trump’s voters — and his mob — are disproportionately White, but one of the more unsettling exit-poll data points of the 2020 election was that a quarter to a third of Latino voters voted to reelect Trump.

Ever heard of Cuba? Miami? Florida? It’s not news that there are a lot of very conservative Cubans or descendants of Cubans in Florida and that they are why Florida is all but impossible for Democrats to win. Latino doesn’t mean automatically on the left, to put it mildly.

The chairman of the neo-fascist Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio, a Latino raised in Miami’s Little Havana who identifies as Afro-Cuban; when he arrived in Washington for the Jan. 6 march, he was arrested for allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church the month before.

What are we to make of Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.

Why? Why do you call it that? You might as well call it rice pudding, or Vladivostok.

Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.

Of course, there are existing words that actually mean that, but no, let’s call it whiteness, because it sounds so insidery.

Multiracial whiteness offers citizens of every background the freedom to call Muslims terrorists, demand that undocumented immigrants be rounded up and deported, deride BLM as a movement of thugs and criminals, and accuse Democrats of being blood-drinking pedophiles.

…

America’s racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites. Thinking in terms of multiracial whiteness helps us recognize that much of today’s political rift is a division between those who are drawn to and remain invested in a politics of whiteness and those who seek something better.

What? If the racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites then why say it’s between whiteness and something better? Why not use a different word, that would make that paragraph less startlingly incoherent?

We witnessed this very divide in Georgia, when a significant segment of White voters broke with Georgia’s White majority, joining a multiracial coalition that sent Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate, following the leadership of Black women whose organizing made that electoral victory possible.

And that’s because…whiteness.

No wonder Alison Phipps is on board.

It’s not just Alison Phipps – it’s a whole new item. “Whiteness” now means…you know…everything. All the bad things.

Oh yes, “multiracial whiteness.” That’s kind of like multisex karenness.

A clean sweep at the Pentagon:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has dismissed every member of the Pentagon’s advisory boards in a sweeping move fueled by concern that the Trump administration had rushed through a series of last-minute appointments, defense officials said Tuesday.

Along with a concern that those appointments were highly likely to be stooges for him as opposed to people who ought to be on a Pentagon advisory board.

The move affects several hundred members of about 40 advisory boards, including dozens of people who had been named to the posts in the closing days of former President Donald Trump’s tenure.

Among those who were dismissed are highly partisan figures such as Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign manager; David Bossie, a former Trump deputy campaign manager; Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; and retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata. Instead of singling out Trump appointees, the move applies to all board members, including those appointed before Trump’s presidency.

…

The advisory boards, whose members are not paid, offer guidance to the Defense Department about policy, science, business and numerous other topics. To make way for new pro-Trump loyalists, the Trump White House in some cases removed longtime board members.

Meaning, probably, members with substantive knowledge to offer as opposed to unquestioning adoration of Trump.

“There is no question that the frenetic activity that occurred to the composition of so many boards, in just the period of November to January, deeply concerned the secretary and certainly helped to drive him to this decision,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters.

Another cunning plan foiled.