A new player arrives on the scene.

Note: XXX and XX are the same person; the XXX was a typo.

The first thing that strikes me about this remarkable overture is the casual rudeness of “Hi Sarah” as if they were old buddies instead of complete strangers and as if the overture were a friendly one. “Hi Sarah, we’ve sent a bunch of sinister lies about you to the bar standards board, I have some questions, many thanks, Alice” – SERIOUSLY? What kind of bazoo sends a rude hostile sinister message of that kind and starts with “Hi Sarah” and ends with “Many thanks, Alice”???? It’s as stupid as it is offensive and vice versa.

The content of the message is of course grotesque and disgusting.

Trump says he has power without limit.

In a televised cabinet meeting that lasted more than three hours, Mr. Trump attacked Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat who has pushed back against a threat by the president to deploy troops in Chicago in an expansion of the crackdown on crime he is conducting in Washington.

“You have a guy in Illinois, the governor of Illinois, saying that crime has been much better in Chicago recently and Trump is a dictator,” Mr. Trump said. “Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants’ — I am not a dictator, by the way.”

Most people are not saying that. He is himself a criminal, by the way.

About half an hour later, Mr. Trump said that he “would have much more respect for Pritzker” if the governor approved a National Guard deployment in his state.

“Not that I don’t have — I would — the right to do anything I want to do,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”

He probably can in the sense of getting away with it, but he can’t do it in the sense of legally or constitutionally. He is not officially a dictator. He may be de facto a dictator, but legally he’s not. Yet.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will send the Guard into Chicago, where he may have limited ability to deploy the show of force as he did in Washington, a federal district where the president controls the local National Guard. In Los Angeles, when he deployed the Guard in June to quell protests against his immigration crackdown, he invoked an obscure statute letting presidents call the Guard into federal service during a rebellion against the authority of the federal government.

But in recent days he has spoken of deploying the Guard in other cities led by Democrats, including Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York. And his remark on Tuesday is his latest assertion of his maximalist view of presidential power. During his re-election campaign last year, Mr. Trump said that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”

Because on Day 1 he would issue a secret order that says nothing he does is illegal so he can do whatever he wants without being a dictator.

Trump still shit-stirring in Greenland.

Denmark’s foreign minister had the top U.S. diplomat in the country summoned for talks after the main national broadcaster reported Wednesday that at least three people with connections to President Donald Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland.

Trump has repeatedly said he seeks U.S. jurisdiction over Greenland, a vast, semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. He has not ruled out military force to take control of the mineral-rich, strategically located Arctic island.

You can’t just “seek jurisdiction” over other countries as if it were normal.

Denmark, a NATO ally of the U.S., and Greenland have said the island is not for sale and condemned reports of the U.S. gathering intelligence there.

Danish public broadcaster DR reported Wednesday that government and security sources which it didn’t name, as well as unidentified sources in Greenland and the U.S., believe that at least three Americans with connections to Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in the territory.

One of those people allegedly compiled a list of U.S.-friendly Greenlanders, collected names of people opposed to Trump and got locals to point out cases that could be used to cast Denmark in a bad light in American media. Two others have tried to nurture contacts with politicians, businesspeople and locals, according to the report.

Well the good news is these are Trump people, so their efforts are probably inept. The bad news is that Trump’s ineptitude hasn’t hindered his war on all of us for a single second.

“We are aware that foreign actors continue to show an interest in Greenland and its position in the Kingdom of Denmark,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said in a statement emailed by his ministry. “It is therefore not surprising if we experience outside attempts to influence the future of the Kingdom in the time ahead.”

“Any attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of the Kingdom will of course be unacceptable,” Løkke Rasmussen said. “In that light, I have asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to summon the U.S. chargé d’affaires for a meeting at the Ministry.”

Cooperation between the governments of Denmark and Greenland “is close and based on mutual trust,” he added.

Between the governments of Denmark and the United States, not so much.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Who actually.

Trans activists learned early on that if you call yourself something enough times, people will start to believe it. “Fake it ’til you make it” has become the central tenet of the movement.

Fake that they’re women enough, people will eventually capitulate.

Fake being a legal clinic long enough, lazy journalists will start treating it like an authoritative source.

Fake academics have spun a citation-laundering ring, endlessly citing one another in a closed loop. “Gender identity” is the Ivies’ yellowcake uranium: a complete fiction, yet deadly enough to justify their attacks.

Even the grand, pompously titled “World Professional Association for Transgender Health” is just a rebranding of a once-puny little outfit formerly called something like the Harry Benjamin Association — a successful rebranding, given that journalists now revere it like it’s the Trans W.H.O.

They’re building a parallel world out of make-believe.

It’s the journalists I’m mad at, though. And really, the editors above them. Trans la-la land exists entirely — entirely — on the media’s approval. Its authority survives only because it’s propped up by those we trust to separate fact from fiction.

The three people on Earth most responsible for the trans mania are David Remnick, Kath Viner, and Dean Baquet — Editor of the New Yorker, Editor-In-Chief of The Guardian, and former Executive Editor of the New York Times, respectively.

Oh come on, Beeb.

The BBC has defended its use of female pronouns to describe a transgender killer who stabbed their partner to death with a samurai sword.

Joanna Rowland-Stuart, who was born male and was known as John Stuart, attacked Andrew Rowland-Stuart at their Brighton home in 2024, in what a jury found was an unlawful killing. The couple had married in a civil partnership but reporting on the court hearing earlier this year, BBC News headlined one story “Wife killed husband with samurai sword” and began: “A woman killed her husband…”.

The BBC used the pronouns “she” and “her” throughout its coverage.

A number of people contacted the BBC to complain. One wrote: “Using female pronouns to refer to a man is not accurate.”

And that’s all the more true when the female pronouns are in reporting on a very violent, physical murder of a kind a woman would be extremely unlikely to undertake.

In a written response, the broadcaster’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) said: “The BBC recognises the debate around sex and gender identity involves deeply held and sometimes conflicting views. The BBC’s approach, therefore, is to use terminology which is clear and appropriate to the context.”

HOW IS THE TERMINOLOGY CLEAR????

Calling a man a woman is not clear; calling a man who chops up his spouse with a sword a woman is not clear; calling a man who chops up his spouse with a sword a woman is in no way APPROPRIATE TO THE CONTEXT.

Uh oh, trouble in paradise. Magaworld is seriously pissed off at Trump.

President Donald Trump seemingly caught his loyal conservative base off-guard and sparked backlash by saying he would allow 600,000 Chinese students into American universities.

That would be a departure for the Trump administration after it added new vetting for student visas, moved to block foreign enrollment at Harvard and expanded the grounds for terminating international students’ ability to study in the United States.

That is, after Trump pitched fit after fit after fit about immigration and foreigners and communists and our precious bodily fluids.

Trump’s announcement Monday adds to the confusion about the administration’s restrictive visa policies and its approach to China as the superpowers tussle over trade and intensifying tech competition. It also marks another divide with figures in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base, who tout an “America First” agenda and had contested the U.S. inserting itself in the recent Israel-Iran war.

It will turn out to be a simple mistake. He meant to say Texan students and somehow it came out Chinese. Or somebody else did it. Somebody falsified the record.

During a meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump was asked by reporters if he would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“President Xi would like me to come to China. It’s a very important relationship. As you know, we are taking a lot of money in from China because of the tariffs and different things,” he said. “I hear so many stories about ‘We are not going to allow their students,’ but we are going to allow their students to come in. We are going to allow it. It’s very important — 600,000 students.”

Trump doubled down at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, sitting next to Rubio, where he said he was “honored” to have Chinese students in the U.S. and said they help colleges stay afloat.

“I told this to President Xi that we’re honored to have their students here,” Trump said. “Now, with that, we check and we’re careful, we see who is there.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry also said that Trump told Xi in a June phone call that “the U.S. loves to have Chinese students coming to study in America.”

It was a shift after the State Department announced in late May that it would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections with the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

Why yes, that is a shift, which is to say it’s the opposite of what he’s been saying for the past six months.

After decades of growth, the number of Chinese students in the U.S. peaked at 372,532 in the 2019-2020 academic year, just as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. The number slipped to 289,526 in 2022 and further dipped to 277,398 in 2023.

In the past year, several U.S. universities, including the University of Michigan, have ended their joint partnerships with Chinese universities after Republicans raised concerns that U.S. dollars have contributed to China’s tech advancement and military modernization.

And now he goes and pulls the rug out from under them. He is such a prankster.

For some reason the name Ponzi keeps drifting through my brain. Like when re-reading the Guardian piece from yesterday about Victoria McCloud.

McCloud, who is supported by Trans Legal Clinic and W-Legal, said the application was brought under articles 6, 8 and 14 of the European convention on human rights, “essentially the rights to respect for who I am, my family, my human existence, my right to a fair trial in matters determining my own freedoms and obligations without discrimination.”

See, the reason that rings the Ponzi bell is because I’ve just been reading about how “Trans Legal Clinic” is…an empty shell. It’s another “Lemkin Institute”. When people are citing empty title pages as backup you want to take a close look at their claimed expertise.

I take it that the thing about the incline on which they work getting more steep and the thing about not having the resources indicates that they don’t actually do anything, aka they are just a name. I could be wrong! But that “Oh gosh we just don’t have the _______ to do this thing we say we do right now, so sorry, we’ll get back to you as soon as um er enough of you have sent us enough donations” does rather look like [whispers] Ponziness.

Judge to Trump: No.

A federal judge on Tuesday threw out an aggressive, unusual lawsuit the Trump administration brought earlier this year against all 15 federal judges in Maryland, rejecting a bid by the Justice Department to limit court power in fast-moving immigration cases.

The opinion on Tuesday framed the lawsuit as a major constitutional standoff, with Judge Thomas Cullen writing the Justice Department couldn’t pursue a “constitutional free-for-all.”

The ruling from Cullen, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump during his first term and brought in from another district to handle the case in Maryland, said the government lacked the legal right — known as standing — to bring the challenge and that the judges are immune from such suits brought by the executive branch.

“Any fair reading of the legal authorities cited by Defendants leads to the ineluctable conclusion that this court has no alternative but to dismiss. To hold otherwise would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law,” Cullen wrote in the 39-page decision.

Of course all those are exactly what Trump wants to do.

“Dismissal of the Executive’s suit is appropriate because it has not pointed to a cause of action that permits this court to entertain a lawsuit between two coordinate branches of government, and this court will not be the first to create one,” he wrote.

…

In finishing his opinion, Cullen underscored the unusual nature of the lawsuit, which came as the Trump administration faced a slew of immigration-related cases amid its effort to deport an unprecedented number of undocumented immigrants from Maryland and elsewhere.

“Much as the Executive fights the characterization, a lawsuit by the executive branch of government against the judicial branch for the exercise of judicial power is not ordinary,” he wrote. “Whatever the merits of its grievance with the judges of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, the Executive must find a proper way to raise those concerns.”

Judicial rulings can be very enjoyable to read.

Yosemite is not thriving.

Home to more than 400 species of animals, 1,500 species of plants, and roughly 4 million annual visitors, the park has stood, since President Abraham Lincoln first preserved it, as a radical idea: that some landscapes are too magnificent to belong to private individuals, and instead should be given to the nation.

Today, this legacy is at risk. Over the past six months, permanent staff at the National Park Service (NPS)—which is the agency that governs the park—have been cut by 24 percent. It’s the result of layoffs, buyouts, and a hiring freeze from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This year, of the 8,000 seasonal positions allotted by President Donald Trump’s budget, barely 4,500 were filled by July. At the same time, the government has moved aggressively to open more public land to mining, logging, and energy extraction.

…

Speak to workers, and the prognosis is alarming. In Yosemite, there is growing unease that a diminished ranger corps will struggle to manage not just the impact on wildlife, but on people. The park averages around 200 search and rescue operations per year, and many warn these lifesaving missions will soon be dangerously understaffed, and therefore slower and less effective. While emergency medical workers are technically exempt from the Trump administration’s funding cuts, staff from other divisions are generally brought in to support large emergencies—so falling head counts elsewhere will have spillover effects.

Meanwhile, Doug Burgum, the Trump-appointed Secretary of the Interior who oversees the National Park Service, seems determined to bury his head in the sand. Earlier this year, Yosemite chose not to open its campground for early reservations; with too few staff, park management decided to wait and see how many people it could welcome. Secretary Burgum had other ideas. He issued a directive requiring parks to remain fully open, placing enormous strain on a skeletal workforce.

While many rangers voice concerns about basic safety, Burgum seems focused on their cultural heritage. In May, he issued a directive requiring all 433 NPS-managed sites to post signs encouraging visitors to report any park information that tells a “negative story about the site or its history.” The impact has already been felt. At Muir Woods, in northern California, signs explaining the conservation history of the park’s redwoods—and the role played by Native Americans—were recently taken down.

Interesting. So conservation is negative? So I guess it follows that destruction is positive? And positive means good? So ideally developers should be building expensive condos all over the national parks?

Adults thinking, or pretending to think, like toddlers.

“discriminatory to trans women because they deny the possibility that individuals born into male bodies can feel and identify as women.”

People can “feel and identify as” anything and everything. The issue is not feeling and identifying, it’s being. We can all “feel as” planets or stars or the universe or a worm or a particular semi-colon on a particular page of a particular book or any other damn thing we think of. What we can’t do is be any and every damn thing we can think of. This distinction is crucial, we learn it very early in life, and seeing adults trying to imagine it out of existence is one of the more nauseating aspects of the gender cult. Be a woman in your head all you want, but don’t expect me to endorse what’s in your head, and really don’t try to force me to do that. What’s in your head is your problem, not mine.

Oliver Brown talks to Tracy Edwards:

Even today, 35 years on, you can still detect the magnitude of Maiden in Edwards’ Putney home, a beautiful Victorian house just yards from the Thames. A painting of the boat takes pride of place in her front room, while in the conservatory, boxes of documents from her trailblazing life are piled high, ready to be digitised for the National Maritime Museum.

Although she is uneasy with adulation – “I find compliments hard and my daughter, definitely the grown-up in our relationship, tells me off for it,” she says – she has grown used to the attention, even gracing the Hollywood red carpets when a 2018 documentary about her defining voyage was nominated for an Oscar.

It was in this spirit that she attended this month’s musical about Maiden at the Southwark Playhouse. But what should have been a fulfilling, flattering evening turned instead into an ambush from which she has still not quite recovered. For no sooner was the final song performed than one of the young actresses, wearing the pink shorts that Edwards and her crew-mates in 1989 made their signature, hijacked the curtain-call to read awkwardly from a piece of paper, urging the audience to donate to the “LGBTQIA+ inclusion charity, working to make sports a welcoming place for everyone”.

The gesture was anything but altruistic in its intentions, designed primarily as a rebuke to Edwards’ gender-critical – or, as she prefers to describe it, “sex-realist” – perspective that men have no place in women’s sport.

Thus not only do men who claim to be women invade women’s sports and steal their firsts and their prizes, they also get to have women publicly shouting at women who resist the theft of their sports and prizes. Imagine a play about the courage of Ruby Bridges protested by a cast member blithering about the sorrows of white people. Seriously: imagine it. What the hell could be the point? The only possible point is “Shut up about the generations of abuse and oppression of this set of people and talk about something else instead.”

Edwards observes:

“The whole protest was so uncomfortable, thrown together at the last minute. You could see the actress’s hands were shaking. I’m so disappointed in them. That might sound patronising, but it’s not meant to. I’m disappointed that they spent months reading those words, being those people, and that they still didn’t get it. That’s sad.”

It is sad. They have been bullied into thinking women are the oppressor class, and that’s incredibly sad and destructive.

The actresses appeared oblivious to the supreme irony that, having spent 90 minutes singing and dancing in tribute to women who had toiled so fiercely to assert their rights, they then trampled all over these same rights by endorsing Pride Sports, a charity lobbying for biological males to be accepted in female competition.

Think about it, kids. Pride Sports would have had several males on the Maiden, so that would be the end of that milestone for women. You can’t do both. You can’t do feminism and do inclooosion of men in everything women do. If you pick inclooosion of men you’re an anti-feminist, and I say the hell with you.

Two members of the production team, she reveals, resigned over Edwards’ gender-critical beliefs before the opening night. Certain crew members, she was told, were worried about being introduced to her at the after-party. “Truly,” she says, “there aren’t enough eye-rolls in the world. It was just the vindictiveness of it, the nastiness. They didn’t protest the night before, or the night after, only the night I was there.

“They don’t understand the rights they are giving away, or how hard we had to fight for those rights. What I wish they would realise is that they stand on the shoulders of giants. It is not just me, but the Maiden crew, the people who got us there, my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s generation. They have all given something to the movement for the 100-plus years since the suffragettes. All have done one or two things that have pushed us that little bit further.”

And these nasty pipsqueaks are spitting on all that.

In May, tireless work by the For Women Scotland campaign led the Supreme Court to rule unanimously that the legal definition of a woman was based on biological sex. That ruling has had profound consequences across sport, with football, cricket and netball rewriting their policies within hours to uphold female fairness and safety. Even Mumbles Sailing Club – Edwards’ local club while growing up in south Wales, and a place that until two weeks ago still allowed men into women’s changing rooms – has had to fall into line.

“I always thought that sport would be the jimmy that forced the whole thing open,” Edwards says. “The problem is expressed so visually in sport, by the sight of a huge man towering over a tiny woman on a cycling podium.”

Oh yes, we were just talking about him.

The legs. The massive tree-like legs.

Fascist regime continues to do fascist things.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who reunited with his family last week after 160 days apart following his mistaken deportation to El Salvador, was taken into ICE custody on Monday after an immigration check-in, his attorney said.

The check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Baltimore was part of the conditions of his release from federal custody on parole on Friday.

While such meetings are usually routine and are meant for case updates, Abrego’s attorneys said they expected he would be taken into ICE custody during the check-in after the Trump administration announced over the weekend its intention to deport him to Uganda.

To Uganda ffs – why not Antarctica or a tiny atoll in the Pacific?

“There was no need to take him into ICE detention. … The only reason they took him into detention was to punish him,” for using his constitutional right to speak up and fight proceedings, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Abrego’s attorneys, said Monday morning.

Sandoval-Moshenberg said on Friday that a notice said the 8 a.m. meeting on Monday would be for an interview. “Clearly that was false,” he added.

As far as I know none of this is legal. ICE isn’t supposed to lie about what it’s doing or where it’s sending people.

“The fact that they’re holding Costa Rica as a carrot and using Uganda as a stick to try to coerce him to plead guilty to a crime is such clear evidence that they’re weaponizing the immigration system in a matter that is completely unconstitutional, and specifically weaponizing the decision of which country they send him to,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

And this is what an authoritarian state does. The US is not supposed to be an authoritarian state! It has not always lived up to its own ideals, to put it mildly, but this Stalinist crap is a whole new level.

Oh gawd he’s back.

He’s found a new way to cheat women in sports; isn’t he adorable.

Remember that decidedly mediocre women-hating comedian who won an award the other day?

Here he is in the women’s toilet with his award.

Bro journalist writes in the Herald Scotland about the awesomeness of standing up for men who claim to be women at the expense of women. There are women who would like a word, but he’s blocked them.

Rebecca Don Kennedy runs the Equality Network. She talks candidly to our Writer at Large about the attacks, abuse and hate she’s suffered campaigning for trans people

It was around 2018 that Kennedy, by then a policy officer for the Equality Network, began raising her voice in defence of trans people. It resulted in the first of countless “horrific social media pile-ons” where she was attacked en masse.

I wonder if she’s aware of the countless horrific social media pile-ons that gender critical women have been subjected to.

Kennedy, a feminist who has campaigned for women’s rights throughout her life, started to be called a “misogynist”.

“As a woman, who has been harmed by men and suffered prejudice, discrimination and misogyny, why would I fight for trans rights if I thought it was impacting women’s rights in a negative way? I wouldn’t. It’s frustrating people don’t recognise that.”

You know what’s frustrating? Seeing women who claim to be feminists defending men who pretend to be women and help themselves to everything that belongs to women. That’s what’s frustrating.

Kennedy sees the battle over trans rights as an “imported culture war”, which came along with “a rise in right-wing rhetoric, the rise of fascist tendencies, and a return to patriarchy. It manufactured fear and anxiety and made marginalised people scapegoats for the ills of the world”.

But what are “trans rights”?

If she means “rights” such as the “right” for men to be in women’s spaces, win awards intended for women, play in women’s sports, take jobs reserved for women, then those are not legitimately rights, because they destroy the rights of women. It’s quite obvious once you notice.

Talk of threats from trans women means society fails to concentrate on “the dangerous behaviour of men. We know there’s an outrageous, horrific rise in violence against women, sexual crimes and rape. Now there’s the rise of incel culture and the likes of Andrew Tate pushing ideas of men’s power and what they’re entitled to. It’s really sad that those pushing the anti-trans narrative don’t realise that’s exactly what they’re playing into”.

Is she really that stupid? Or just a liar? Trans women are men, so when we talk about the dangerous behavior of men that includes trans women, because they are men.

She adds: “The power that men have is continuing. The rise in violence against women is continuing. So, the idea that people who are against trans women or against trans rights are feminist is abhorrent to me. It drives me mad when people say that, as there doesn’t seem to be any concern for feminist issues or for protecting women.”

That would make sense if trans women were women but they aren’t, they are men. If you pay attention to the way they talk to and about women that might become clear to you. Check out India Willoughby or Sophie-Molly: they despise women.

SHE points to widely-held views such as “claims that ‘they’ are going to let men into women’s changing rooms now”. “They” being the government. Kennedy adds: “If that was the case, I would be against it, but that isn’t what’s happening. It’s categorically not what’s happening… Trans women have been using these spaces for decades without any problem.”

What? It’s categorically not happening, it’s been happening for decades.

As for “without any problem” – well fine then, we’ll just send a few hundred random men to live in her house with her, we’re sure that will be without any problem.

Kennedy described it as a “dog whistle – suggesting that trans women are dangerous. They’re not”.

And she knows that how? She knows that all trans women are without question non-dangerous? How could she know that? How could anyone?

The piece goes on and on and on in this vein; it’s astoundingly long for a newspaper op-ed. The bro journalist, Neil Mackay, has been blocking dissenters on twit-x.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Referred to.

Interesting that team trans’s defence here is that transwomen are male after all — or this particular one at least is — and that there is a clearly visible difference between males and females.

Watkin’s lawyers said she saw and presented herself as female but was “visibly and audibly” male, so it would have been “blindingly obvious” to the man that Watkin was not biologically female.

It’s notable that they only ever admit this when it’s advantageous to their side to do so. Still, this is one of those items that’ll make a handy bookmark. It can be deployed to show that transactivists are never consistent in what they profess to believe. They’ll readily change their tune and even completely flip their arguments right around, depending on whatever side benefits them the most.

Interesting, too, that this case establishes that sexual orientation is based on biological sex and not “gender identity”. It didn’t take the jury very long to agree with the prosecution that deception about one’s biological sex can violate people’s deeply-held sexual instincts. I think that principle is very easy for people to grasp and to agree with.

It also goes to highlight how bizarre it is that we still can’t openly state our biological sex-based boundaries on dating apps like Grindr. This ruling says biological sex matters so much that it’s potentially criminal to mislead people about it, but the dating apps’ policies state the opposite — that biological sex is so inconsequential it’s practically criminal to even mention it. Effectively, dating app users are not allowed to reject a sexual advance on the basis of someone’s sex until they’re face-to-face IRL. Within the confines of the apps, they’re obligated to lie, potentially putting both sides in legal danger.

I wonder if that will change…

This ruling puts the gay male transgender culture in a bind in another way: it’s all about assimilating into “femaleness” as much as possible, especially for the purposes of gaining sexual attention from males. See, for example, Kim Petras, the gay male transwoman of “Slutpop” fame, whose entire persona consists of bragging about how fuckable he supposedly looks in the eyes of straight men.

See also the actor Hunter Schafer (who I just read about this morning, as he’s been cast in the upcoming Blade Runner TV series). I wrote about him here last year. He wants to be cast in roles that don’t mention his transgender status. But in reality, such “stealth” transness is illegal, once dating and mating become a part of one’s life.

The entire puberty blockers and pediatric gender medicine regime is built upon the total erasure of feminine boys’ biological sex.

But if they’re still legally obligated to inform potential partners of their sex, then what’s the point of all that deception? In this particular case, the fact that the defendant hadn’t had surgeries and hadn’t changed his appearance enough was what their entire defence rested on. The strange corollary of that is that the more transwomen “pass” the more liable they are to be found guilty of sexual assault by deception.

Seemingly, according to this ruling, transwomen always have to disclose to their sex partners that they’re male, which is going to make a lot of them question why they were put through this regime in the first place.

Hmm, there’s a lot to think about here…

Just a slight misunderstanding.

A transgender woman “deceived” a man into thinking she was a biological female so he would have sexual relations with her, a court has heard.

Ciara Watkin, 21, told the man she was on her period to stop him discovering she was biologically male, prosecutors told Teesside Crown Court…Ms Watkin, who was referred to by female pronouns in court, denies three counts of sexual assault.

He shouldn’t have been referred to by female pronouns in court. Courts shouldn’t allow lying, let alone encourage it or enforce it.

The defendant, who was born male, had used the name Ciara since the age of 13 although had not undergone any medical treatment or surgery, the court heard.

That’s how the BBC is dealing with the pronoun issue now? Just not using any pronoun at all?

The trial hasn’t ended yet.

Correction! “Ciara” was found guilty.

Chicago’s turn:

The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago as President Donald Trump seeks to crack down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, in a model that could later be used in other major cities, officials familiar with the matter said.

Trump on Friday touted his ongoing National Guard intervention in D.C., where more than 2,200 Guard members have been deployed in what he has cast as an overdue effort to crack down on crime. He zeroed in on Chicago as the next target.

“Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent,” Trump said, in remarks that were immediately dismissed by Chicago’s leaders as unfounded. “And we’ll straighten that one out probably next. That’ll be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”

The officials familiar with the matter said that a military intervention in Chicago has long been in planning, probably in conjunction with expanded operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to search for undocumented migrants.

This is of course in violation of the law, to wit the Posse Comitatus act. The president is not supposed to unleash the military on cities unless there’s a genuine crisis.

[Illinois Governor JB] Pritzker said in a statement Saturday night after this story was published that the state of Illinois had received “no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”

He added that there is “no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”

And that means he is violating the law by doing it.

Trump deployed both the National Guard members and a battalion of Marines in California in June while citing “incidents of violence and disorder” that had occurred during ICE operations to round up undocumented immigrants. Under the law Trump used, Title 10, the troops are generally prevented from being involved in law enforcement.

The California deployment was contested in court, with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and other officials questioning whether Trump had violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that prohibits U.S. troops from carrying out civilian law enforcement actions. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Trump’s orders violated the law, but his decision was halted by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.

So here we are.

Here’s a funny little circle. The other day I found a book in a Little Free Library titled The Sociopath Next Door. When I see or hear the word “sociopath” I always wonder how it differs from psychopath, so I snapped it up. Reading it last night I naturally noticed that Trump meets every criterion for both, and that that doesn’t get said all that often. So this morning I googled, and turned up The White House has become the Bates Motel by Robert Kahn from last April.

As a student of Ancient Rome, I am disturbed that the reign of Donald Trump.2 so closely resembles the reigns of Nero and Caligula. By some measures, Trump.2’s is worse. After all, Nero and Caligula knew what they were doing, once in a while.

But why is it worse, and how is it worse? I find four major reasons. We shall attempt to discover which of his flaws is the worst: Is it that he’s a moron, a narcissist, a sociopath, or a psychopath?

In my view there is no one worst; they’re all worst. It’s futile trying to rank them, because they’re all as bad as they could possibly be. So anyway. He starts with stupidity and narcissism and concludes the narcissism is multiplied by the stupidity. Then:

As for Trump’s sociopathy: In an excellent 2005 book, “The Sociopath Next Door,” Martha Stout shows that the traits of a sociopath — lack of conscience, habitual lying, aggressive and manipulative behaviors, and absolute unconcern for people one has injured — are also, or could be, in many ways, the “attributes” of a “successful” businessman.

Which is funny because that’s the very book that prompted me to seek out more information on sociopathy and psychopathy.

I wonder why he doesn’t get called a psychopath more often. I suppose it’s that silly taboo on armchair diagnosing? But bloody hell, if ever anyone ticked the “could not possibly care less about other people” box it’s Donald Trump and it’s necessary to say so. Not that it will do us any good – we turn out to be the nation that loves having a psychopath in charge.

Wo. Just happened to notice the headlines about this and read further and wtf.

SEATTLE — The Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) arrested the captain of the container ship MSC on Wednesday for allegedly operating the vessel while intoxicated.

I can see the container ships gliding past from where I’m sitting, so I take an interest. I can see them in detail at the terminal every time I take a bus to West Seattle (which I do often), so I take an interest.

The incident began when watchstanders at Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound received a report from a Puget Sound Pilot aboard the MSC Jubilee IX, a 333-meter container ship operating under the Liberian flag.

The Liberian flag signals, among other things, less stringent rules.

The pilot reported that the ship’s captain was showing signs of intoxication.

During the transit from an anchorage near Everett, Washington, to Terminal 5 at the Port of Seattle, the pilot and first mate took over the ship’s operation, ensuring a safe passage without incident.

Upon the ship’s arrival at Terminal 5, a Coast Guard boarding team and CGIS agents began an examination.

The captain underwent a field sobriety and breathalyzer test, which revealed he was impaired at more than six times the legal limit for commercial mariners.

Six times!!!

He’s now in jail.

Thanks Coast Guard!