Peak Comerford.

Women are telling him we don’t talk about bras, actually, but he knows better.

Do what?

UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy is coming under fire for wearing a black t-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Protect the Dolls’ at Wigan Pride on Sunday.

If you keep up with trans-activist trends, the ‘Protect the Dolls’ slogan might sound familiar. Celebrities such as Pedro Pascal, Tilda Swinton, Alan Cumming and Madonna have all worn t-shirts bearing the phrase. According to the t-shirt’s creator, a New York-born fashion-school grad now living in London, ‘the dolls’ supposedly in need of protection are transwomen. In other words, blokes.

So men need protection and women don’t?

‘In queer communities, “doll” is a term of affection, pride and belonging – a coded word that speaks volumes without explanation’, claimed a piece in Forbes when the t-shirt first appeared at London Fashion Week earlier this year. Apparently, the term is ’emotional, not clinical, protective, not patronising’.

If it’s coded how can it speak volumes without explanation? That makes zero sense.

And I still want to know why men and not women.

Nandy’s fashion statement is merely the latest proof that when it comes to trans ideology, Labour really hasn’t learned a thing. Last year, Jess Phillips, ironically the women’s safeguarding minister, said that she would be ‘happy to refer to transwomen as women’. Work and pensions minister Andrew Western responded to the UK Supreme Court ruling on gender by raising ‘the fear and distress’ that men might suffer if they are barred from using women’s loos.

Carefully not mentioning the far more realistic fear and distress of half the population if men are not barred from women’s loos. On and on it goes.

Yosemite Biologist Who Hung Trans Pride Flag From El Capitan Is Fired

Real biologist or self-idennified?

The National Park Service has fired a wildlife biologist at Yosemite National Park who helped drape a large transgender pride flag from El Capitan in May, saying that the demonstration had taken place in a prohibited area and lacked the required permits.

The former employee, Shannon Joslin, 35, who studies bats and has a Ph.D. in genetics, received a termination letter from the Park Service on Aug. 12.

A PhD in genetics but thinks people can change sex.

In the letter, the park’s acting deputy superintendent, Danika Globokar, wrote that Dr. Joslin, who is gay and identifies as nonbinary, had “failed to demonstrate acceptable conduct” by taking part in the May 20 demonstration.

Wait what? How can you be gay and nonbinary? If you’re nonbinary what can “gay” even mean? You’re either both sexes or neither, so you can’t be a lesbian or a gay man.

Is this just greedy grabbing everything you can reach before somebody smacks your hand? The ice cream and the pie and the cake and the chocolates?

On May 21, the park’s acting superintendent signed a new rule outlawing the display of large flags, banners and signs at El Capitan — the park’s iconic cliff — and most of the California park altogether. The move coincided with a broader push by the federal government to limit political demonstrations on public lands, especially those critical of the policies of the Trump administration.

Frankly I’m surprised this hasn’t always been a rule. Who the hell wants to see banners in national parks in the first place? It seems like draping advertising over all the paintings in the Rijksmuseum.

The spokeswoman, Rachel Pawlitz, said that the Park Service would not comment about personnel actions or criminal investigations.

“Several unauthorized demonstrations involving El Capitan generated numerous complaints from visitors,” Ms. Pawlitz said. “Yosemite National Park was designated by Congress to highlight the beautiful natural and cultural features of the area. No matter the cause, displaying signs, banners, and flags outside of designated First-Amendment areas detracts from the visitor experience and the protection of the park.”

Even if this is Trump-approved or Trump admin-approved, I agree with it. Don’t be sticking personal tat on natural beauty or human works of art. Leave them alone.

In February, before the rule took effect, a small group of protesters hung an inverted American flag — a signal of distress that began with sailors — off the side of El Capitan to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to the Park Service.

Plenty of eyes were already fixated on El Capitan for the annual phenomenon known as firefall, when the light from the setting sun causes a seasonal waterfall to glow orange.

The display occurred shortly after at least 1,000 Park Service employees were abruptly dismissed from their jobs, part of a sweeping federal work force downsizing initiative that was once overseen by President Trump’s now-estranged ally Elon Musk.

Welllll that’s a little different. The flag was at the side, which I take to mean it didn’t obscure what people go there to see, and it was about an issue that does affect Yosemite and national parks in general.

But in general? Don’t stick your tacky posters on the sunset.

Another man takes steps to cancel women’s rights.

The UK’s first transgender judge has launched a case against the UK in the European court of human rights challenging the process that led to the supreme court’s ruling on biological sex.

The retired judge Victoria McCloud, who is now a litigation strategist at W-Legal, is seeking a rehearing of the case, arguing that the supreme court undermined her article 6 rights to a fair trial when it refused to hear representation from her and did not hear evidence from any other trans individuals or groups.

Why should people who are wrong about what sex they are be singled out for “inclusion” on a supreme court ruling?

The move comes as For Women Scotland, the gender-critical campaign group that brought the supreme court case, announced it was suing the Scottish government, accusing it of refusing to abide by April’s judgment, in particular around schools and prison policy.

The UK supreme court ruled in April that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs). Subsequent guidance from the equality watchdog amounted to a blanket ban on trans people using toilets and other services of the gender they identify as.

As it has to. It’s either let men use women’s toilets and other services, or don’t. The first option is unfair to women. Women are half. Men who claim to be women are a handful.

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.”

But that’s a lie. He’s talking about a “right” to respect for who he IS NOT. That’s not a thing. His human existence is one thing and his pretense of being a woman is quite another.

So apparently Trump is mad at us because we’re not impressed by his diplomatic chops.

“I am totally convinced that if Russia raised their hands and said, ‘We give up, we concede, we surrender, we will GIVE Ukraine and the great United States of America, the most revered, respected, and powerful of all countries, EVER, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everything surrounding them for a thousand miles,’ the Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners would say that this was a bad and humiliating day for Donald J. Trump, one of the worst days in the history of our Country,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday.

So his point is that Russia is the injured party here? Meaning, Ukraine invaded Russia, not the other way around? Has no one told him the facts?

“But that’s why they are the FAKE NEWS, and the badly failing Radical Left Democrats. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”

Erm. I knew he was abusing that “thank you for your attention” catchphrase but I didn’t realize he doesn’t even get that it’s the punchline to an order or demand that somebody do something. It’s the punchline to “Pay up!” or “Get out!” or “Give it back!” or “Go fuck yourself!” It’s not the punchline to “Here’s what they’re doing!” or “I hate them!!!” It’s a passive-aggressive emphasis that accompanies a “Do this or else.”

How it went:

Before meeting with Zelensky, or any other world leaders in town for the event, Trump was already telling reporters that peace could come “almost immediately” if Zelensky ditched NATO and gifted Putin Crimea – the diplomatic equivalent of telling someone to end a mugging by handing over their wallet and the deed to their house.

Jeezus, of course the war would be over if Zelensky surrendered; everybody knows that.

And then it went on. And on, and on, and on. Asked directly about what was happening in Ukraine, Trump would wheel out an irritated, detail-free “We’re going to have lasting peace,” before going right back to his own agenda.

“I used to get great publicity. Now I get the worst publicity that anyone’s ever had in office,” he said, after an unconnected question. Moments later, apropos nothing: “Joe Biden’s a very corrupt politician — not a smart man, by the way. Go back 40 years and he wasn’t smart then, either.”

Says the stupidest adult on the planet.

This tirade continued for a while, took a left turn into how the 2020 election was supposedly stolen from him, and ended with a Biden jab: “He was a horrible, corrupt president!” Zelensky had only minutes before been talking about a one-and-a-half-year-old child who had just been killed in Kharkiv by Russian missiles.

And Trump continued on. He was going to end “corrupt” mail-in ballots and “the machines” (never mind the defamation lawsuits already lost by right-wing media spreading conspiracy theories about voting machines giving inaccurate results.) Mail-in voting is “a fraud” and “the Democrats want it because it’s the only way they get elected.” By the way, they also want “transgender for everybody.” And “they love crime”.

Sir sir sir sir sir we’re here to discuss Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, sir.

And so, somehow, Biden — who isn’t even in the room, who hasn’t been for months — became the central villain of the narrative, eclipsing both Putin and the ongoing missile strikes killing civilians. It’s a remarkable inversion: the man praising the aggressor, lecturing the victim and saving his deepest rage for his domestic rival. If you want to know what obsessions animate Trump’s foreign policy, don’t look to maps of Ukraine; look to the 2020 election.

I’ll admit to believing that it couldn’t get worse than the school bully-style treatment of Zelensky last time he visited Washington, but this was worse. To listen to this press conference, you’d think Biden really was the one rolling tanks into Donetsk. A grievance recital that used the background of war for the foreground of Trump’s hurt feelings is so much less than what the world deserves.

We all saw the red carpet on Friday, the festival-style “ALASKA 2026” and the photo-ops. We all saw the apathy today. Civilians die in Kharkiv, Europe flies in en masse to prop up Ukraine and Trump still finds a way to make the story about his ratings, his stolen thunder, his petty personal rants. If Friday was Broadway-style theater, today was a tragicomedy. And somehow, in the midst of war and mourning, the only thing that got center stage was Trump’s ego.

Well, it does blot out the sky, so…

Daniel Sanderson in The Sunday Times (UK):

Scotland’s national librarian is facing mounting pressure to reinstate a gender-critical book which she banned from a major exhibition, after a key donor joined a revolt against the move.

Alex Graham, who has given around £300,000 to the library, said he had been “shocked and angry” to learn that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht had been excluded from an exhibit that he personally supported with a donation of about £20,000.

Graham, the creator of the television show Who Do You Think You Are, urged Amina Shah, Scotland’s chief librarian and the chief executive of the National Library of Scotland, to reverse her decision.

He said that if she did not, he would have to consider whether or not to continue to provide lucrative donations to the library, as he has done for the past 12 years.

…

The Times revealed on Wednesday that it was pulled after a backlash by the library’s internal LGBT staff network, which claimed it contained “hate speech” and that displaying it would cause “severe harm” to workers.

They threatened to “notify LGBT+ partners of the library’s endorsement of the book” if management did not cave in.

This concept of “severe harm” could do with some inspection. Is it true that displaying a book that rejects trans ideology would necessarily cause severe harm to anyone? How do they know? What’s the chain of causality?

We know they don’t like being told that men are not women, but is not liking something “severe harm”? That seems to be the assumption, but I wonder if they’ve poked at it hard enough.

“I think this was a fundamental mistake and the correct thing for the library to do would be to put up their hands, admit that and reinstate the book,” Graham said. “Instead, there have been weaselly responses.

“The library is not saying they have taken it out because it contains hate speech, because it does not. They’ve taken it out because of some ill-conceived notion that someone might be upset by its presence. That’s not a good enough reason for me.”

“Someone might be upset by this” is not a very powerful argument, because it applies to everything and anything. People can have hissy fits for very flimsy reasons, and for no reasons at all.

An insider within the cultural sector in Scotland said the decision was symptomatic of a wider trend of managers being seen to cave in to demands of young, activist staff members who have little resilience or tolerance of views different to their own.

And who have learned that they can get their way by driveling about harm and upset and severe harm.

It’s time to put them back in the box.

Ostensible v real:

European leaders may have rushed to Washington ostensibly to throw a protective arm around President Zelensky and head off any repeat of February’s Oval Office bust-up.

But their real aim is to stop US President Donald Trump threatening long-term European security after his abrupt change of course over how best to end the war in Ukraine.

They’re much the same thing though. They don’t want to link arms with Zelensky because he’s their poppet, they want to do it because Putin is a massive threat. It’s not personal, it’s geopolitical.

Not only did Trump drop calls for a ceasefire as a prerequisite for talks about long-term peace, he also – diplomats say – made clear he had no intention of imposing further economic sanctions on Russia.

In short, the travelling European heads of government – plus EU and Nato leaders – want to avoid not just confrontation, but also capitulation.

Exactly, so maybe don’t frame it as a matter of cuddling Zelensky.

Meanwhile – hey it’s August. Everybody is at the beach. When they all abandon the beach to go spend time with His Majesty The Baby you know it’s serious.

The French leader was enjoying water sports on the Riviera. The Italian leader, Georgia Meloni, had been in Greece.

But such was the scale of President Trump’s change of strategy after meeting President Putin – and the consequent potential threat to Europe – that the European leaders changed their plans fast.

Trump of course is hugging himself like Tweedledum because of how important he must be to get all these people to quit the beach.

The risk for the Europeans today is that they push Trump too hard, that he thinks he is being bullied, and that the meetings go badly.

Or to put it less tactfully, the risk is that Trump pitches a fit and then makes even more generous offers to Volodya.

Lugosi?

More from CNN:

President Donald Trump called today a “big day at the White House” ahead of his meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders.

“A big day at the White House. We have never had so many European Leaders here at one time. A great honor for America!!! Let’s see what the results will be,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Errrrr no. No, it’s not an honor of any kind, let alone a great one. They’re there to try to prevent Trump from handing Ukraine over to Putin. They’re there to try to minimize the damage Trump is doing. They’re there because Trump is both malevolent and an idiot.

The nightmare continues.

CNN:

Donald Trump is rewarding rather than punishing Vladimir Putin for failing to meet the US president’s own deadline for agreeing to a ceasefire, according to a leading Russia analyst.

“It’s profoundly disconcerting what’s happened in the past two weeks,” Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told CNN. Gould-Davies said Trump chose to “reward” Putin with Friday’s summit in Alaska after the Russian president shirked Trump’s latest ceasefire-or-sanctions deadline a week earlier.

Since the summit, he said, Trump has “completely abandoned his demand for a rapid ceasefire, and his threat to impose sanctions, and is increasingly taking Putin’s view that instead the war (in Ukraine) can only be ended by a ‘comprehensive settlement.’”

Such a settlement would address what Putin regards as the “root causes” of the war in Ukraine, which Gould-Davies said is “much more fundamental” than issues of land and aims to deny Ukrainian statehood and identity.

The “root causes” are that Putin wants Ukraine to be just a little piece of Russia while Zelensky and Ukraine do not want that.

It’s quite similar to Trump’s insulting suggestions that it would be cool for Canada to become the 51st state in the US.

Less makea deeel.

The big picture: White House advisers claim that Monday’s crucial meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington is evidence of momentum from the summit with Putin.

…

“There’s a way to make a deal: get the buyer and the seller in the same room at the same time discussing it,” said one of the Trump advisers familiar with the talks. “What we’re trying to figure out is if both sides really want a deal and what the contours look like.”

Yes, right, that’s exactly what this is, it’s pure unadulterated deal-making, like when you go to a yard sale and try to get the price down on a toaster.

There are going to be a lot of adult supervisors this time.

This time, when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine arrives in the Oval Office, he will come with backup.

An array of European prime ministers and presidents are flying in for the meeting on Monday to make sure that a viable, defensible Ukraine survives whatever carving up of its territory is about to happen at the negotiating table.

But they are also there to make certain that the trans-Atlantic alliance emerges intact. President Trump’s instant reversal on the critical issue of obtaining a cease-fire before negotiating over land or security guarantees has left many of them shaken, and wondering whether Mr. Trump had once again been swayed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Golly gee, ya think?

By most accounts, the European officials want to ensure that Mr. Trump has not pivoted too close to the Russian side, and does not try to strong-arm Mr. Zelensky into a deal that will ultimately sow the seeds of Ukraine’s dissolution. And they want to safeguard against the risk of the United States, the linchpin of European security since NATO’s creation in 1949, undermining that interest.

They want to make sure Trump doesn’t burn the house down, blow up the barn, and sow the fields with salt.

This should be interesting.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make his second visit to the White House on Monday with the daunting task of reversing the damage done to Ukraine’s security prospects by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

Zelenskyy will not, however, be alone as he was on his first trip to the White House in February when he was ambushed and humiliated by Donald Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, who sought to bully him into capitulation to Moscow’s demands.

This time the Ukrainian leader comes to Washington flanked by a dream team of European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who combine economic and military clout with proven rapport with Trump.

Also, unlike Trump, they’re not stupid.

It’s naive of me, I suppose, but I keep being surprised by how easily Trump wins everything when he is such a vacuum. He’s an overstuffed clown doll who can’t utter an adult sentence, but he wins anyway. Wah.

Their mission will be to try to use their individual and combined influence to coax the president out of the pro-Russian positions he adopted after just a couple of hours under Putin’s sway in the sub-Arctic on Friday.

And no doubt they will fail, because Trump is Magic. Can they at least make him look bad? Please?

“A lot of people have learned the lessons of Trump, in terms of how you handle him,” said Kim Darroch, who was the UK ambassador to Washington in Trump’s first term. “There will be a lot of flattery. It’s tiresome but it’s necessary: it gets you to first base. You tell him how well he’s doing, how glad everyone is that he is leading the west to find a solution to the war. But then you get on to the substance.”

How embarrassing is that? You have to flatter him, because he’s a giant baby too stupid to know that the flattery is not 100% sincere.

The fact that all these leaders have cleared their diaries to fly to Washington at short notice is a measure of how alarmed they were by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage. The Russian president, wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes in the wake of his unprovoked full invasion of Ukraine, was feted with a red carpet and a personal round of applause from Trump, who allowed him to speak first after the truncated abortive meeting and abruptly dropped his previous insistence on a ceasefire.

Revisit the personal round of applause:

When Approved Views clash.

Does this make any sense?

One item: mentally ill and deluded are not the same thing. It’s horribly easy to be deluded without being mentally ill. It happens to everyone, all the time – we can get things wrong at first glance, we can have bad or incomplete information, we can have loyalties or hatreds that push us toward mistakes, und so weiter.

Another item: if believing you are the other sex is a mental illness, then that’s what it is.

Another item: if an ideology is based on a delusion, then that’s what it is.

Another item: if an ideology is based on a delusion and hugely destructive of women’s rights and of normal maturation, then that’s what it is.

Let’s get real: the whole point of trans ideology is to treat a delusion as a branch of progressive reform. The problem is there is nothing progressive about pretending men are women. Claiming that men can be women is either a lie or a delusion. However “cruel” it may be to say so, it’s better than pretending it’s true.

It’s hard to believe we have to keep litigating this crap.

A gender-critical lawyer has avoided punishment from the barristers’ watchdog for “misgendering” a trans person in court.

Naomi Cunningham, an employment barrister, said she had been told by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) that she will face no further action over the “meritless” complaint that she repeatedly referred to a transgender female by a male pronoun during a hearing.

In other words that she repeatedly referred to a man by a male pronoun. Gee, you don’t say.

The BSB’s decision is significant because it signals the watchdog does not view it as professional misconduct to “misgender” a person during a court hearing, she told supporters.

“It has been my practice in a number of hearings over the last year or so to use correct-sex pronouns for trans-identifying men whose sex is material to the case,” she said.

It should be everyone’s practice. Doing the other thing upholds a lie, and not a trivial lie but a very significant one. It is not a good plan to systematically lie about what sex people are, much less force everyone else to lie about it.

Punks do what punks do.

A British female sailor has criticised a musical based on her life story after the cast members used their platform to stage a pro-trans fundraiser.

Tracy Edwards made history in 1989 when she captained the Maiden, leading the first all-female yacht crew in the Whitbread Round the World Race.

But she has criticised the musical based on the race, called Maiden Voyage, after cast members used a curtain call to fundraise for a charity that supports transgender inclusion in women’s sports on the night she attended.

That is, a charity that supports male inclusion in women’s sports. Note that a policy of male inclusion in women’s sports would end up removing women from women’s sports entirely.

Ms Edwards has been public with her opposition to the inclusion of transgender women – biological males – in women’s competitions and changing rooms.

That’s better. Do that first; don’t put it off to the fourth paragraph.

Footage from the night showed one performer urging the audience on Aug 12 to give to Pride Sports, the “LGBTIQ+ inclusion charity working to make sports a welcoming place for everyone”.

This charity publicly opposed moves to ban transgender women from female competitions, including the FA’s new rules barring trans players from women’s and girls’ football leagues.

Let men take over women’s sports! It’s the progressive thing to do!

Ms Edwards said: “They had not done it before, or on other dates. It was for my benefit.”

She added: “They are in a little bubble, and I don’t think they think for themselves. They are not activists; they are sheep. The irony of spending 90 minutes singing and dancing in celebration of women fighting for their rights in sport, only to trample all over those rights at the end, is off the scale.”

It’s a perfect illustration of the disdain for women at the heart of this ridiculous ideology.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on What has made it fester.

In the early nineties of the last century, Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro made formal apologies to a variety of Asian nations for Japan’s having conducted wars of aggression in East and Southeast Asia, and for the brutal manner in which these wars were waged.

There are, however, strong nationalist forces in Japan, and in particular the influence of families of soldiers who died in that war is strong over the Liberal-Democratic Party, which won back power after Hosokawa’s coalition, which was difficult to hold together, and fell.

I am in no way seeking to excuse the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese, which were appalling, but, all too often, Westerners refuse to recognise the atrocities that they themselves perpetrated in their colonial wars. The Dutch take over of Bali is a case in point, as well as its attempt to take back Indonesia after the Japanese defeat; British behaviour after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and, subsequently, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, not to mention the destruction of the economy of India as a whole and the numerous famines under British rule; the genocide perpetrated by the Germans in Namibia, Belgian behaviour in the Congo, American behaviour in the Philippines (about which Mark Twain was so eloquent) and American behaviour towards the indigenous people of North America… one could go and on.

Japan’s proposal to abolish racial discrimination at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was not accepted, and this led to increasingly racist ideas about the virtues of the Japanese race within Japan – ideas that certainly persist in certain quarters (as of course they persist elsewhere, as we may see from the activities of the Trump regime). There is a lot of bad faith in Western attitudes towards Japan, and this derives from the fact that the Japanese were the first non-white people to challenge and defeat “white” powers, beginning with Russia (although, of course, they were ultimately defeated in World War II). And, as Omar rightly points out, the Japanese broke the “mystique” of the white powers.

Since Omar mentions kamikaze pilots and gives us a very good story, here is a true story from my first days in Japan, oh, hundreds of years ago, before I could speak Japanese. My wife & I were in a taxi in Tokyo, and the driver asked my wife where her husband was from. From Britain, my wife replied. “Oh,” exclaimed the taxi-driver, “I love the British! You see, I was a kamikaze pilot and we were attacking a British ship and I got shot down. The British fished me out of the ocean and looked after me. I love the British. Driving a taxi in Tokyo is far more dangerous than being a kamikaze pilot!” Indeed, in those days, taxis really did scoot around in Tokyo. They are rather more careful these days, though, still, in the southern city of Fukuoka, taxis dash madly about.

Classic.

CNN news item: global warming is giving us bigger faster hurricanes.

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