Interesting…

In a new bombshell report, the New York Times says the US intelligence community has concluded Russia offered Afghan militants bounties to kill US troops.

What? Trump’s darling sweetheart Putin did that?

From the Times:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

Trump apparently doesn’t care.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

I guess he’s been too busy fuming about monuments and…uh…monuments.

The bosses still being irresponsible and reckless with the health of the population. “Do what seems best to you, it’s your choice, we wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do, freedom freedom freedom, we couldn’t possibly comment.”

Vice President Mike Pence was asked what message he wanted to offer on wearing masks, as evidence suggests face coverings can limit the spread of coronavirus.

“Well, we think that the first principle is that people ought to listen to their state and local authorities,” the vice president said, declining to offer a federal endorsement on wearing masks.

What kind of stupid “first principle” is that? It’s geographic, it’s not a principle. The virus is the virus, it doesn’t care about state and local and national. How about just giving the best medical advice and never mind whether it’s local or national?

Assholes.

I’ve just seen a 5-word tweet that makes my blood run cold.

“Work is introducing pronoun pins.”

I think “is introducing” here means “wearing them is not optional.”

Why stop at pronouns? Why not pins to point out all the obvious? How about species? Nationality? Height and weight? Age? Address? Politics? Voting record? Grades? Tax history? Religion? Favorite foods?

Grown up people don’t want to walk around wearing labels telling the world what brand we are. I wouldn’t want to wear a pin saying “woman,” either, because duh. Plus…it’s work. It’s not home, it’s not the coffee shop, it’s not a clubhouse. It’s work. It’s already a place where people get to tell you what to do (unless you’re the owner or CEO), because that’s the nature of work, so adding creepy “pins” to the mix is not appropriate.

What’s Trump doing while Pence tells us everything is awesome on the pandemic front? Trump is raging about white supremacist statues again.

Moments ago, Trump sent a tweet sharing an FBI notice seeking information about those suspected of defacing the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette Square near the White House.

It’s interesting that the FBI thinks vandalization of a statue is a matter for the Violent Crimes Task Force. Don’t we consider violent crimes to be crimes against sentient beings? As opposed to statues?

But of course it’s even more interesting that Trump is so energized about vandalism against a statue of the man who committed a major genocide against the original inhabitants of the southern US, and so indifferent to a spreading pandemic that has killed over 120 thousand people in the US already.

Pence is holding the first coronavirus briefing in two months.

The vice president opened the briefing by heralding the progress made in hard-hit states like New York and New Jersey.

“We have made truly remarkable progress in moving our nation forward,” Pence said.

However, Pence then shifted to noting the high level of new cases in many parts of the country, which the president has sought to downplay in recent days.

…

Echoing the president, Mike Pence blamed the rising number of new coronavirus cases on increased testing.

…

However, public health experts have said the rising number of cases is more attributable to states reopening and Americans relaxing social distancing practices.

It’s also important to note that coronavirus hospitalizations are rising in many states, indicating the crisis is worsening.

Not just “more testing.”

Also, Pence says there is plenty of hospital capacity, which is also not true.

Striking a notably different tone than Vice President Mike Pence, Dr Anthony Fauci warned some parts of the country are facing a “serious problem” in terms of the spread of coronavirus.

The infectious disease expert applauded the states that have safely reopened their economies in a “prudent way that’s been effective.”

But Fauci ominously added, “We are facing a serious problem in certain areas.”

And it’s not just More Testing.

So, Trump says to himself, there’s a novel virus cutting a swathe through the country, what should I do? Take away people’s health insurance, that’s what.

In a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump administration has reaffirmed its position that the Affordable Care Act in its entirety is illegal because Congress eliminated the individual tax penalty for failing to purchase medical insurance.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco, the government’s chief advocate before the Supreme Court, said in a brief that the other provisions of Obamacare are impossible to separate from the individual mandate and that “it necessarily follows that the rest of the ACA must also fall.”

Shortly after the brief appeared on the court’s docket late Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement: “President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.”

In a speech on the lawsuit Thursday, Vice President Pence said he was proud of the ACA and denounced the administration’s position. “It’s cruel, it’s heartless, and it’s callous,” he said.

Wait, what? Pence said that? What’s happening? I literally had to read that paragraph three times to be sure I wasn’t misreading it. Since when does Pence denounce an administration position? Since when does he care that an administration position is cruel, heartless, and callous?

Eliminating the ACA would end medical insurance for more than 20 million Americans. It would also end widely popular provisions of the law, such as extending parents’ coverage to children up to the age of 26 and prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.

Normal prosperous democracies want their people to have health insurance, and make laws accordingly. The US is not that kind of democracy.

Yes but how do they know? How do they ever know? It’s never ever explained. If we don’t know how we know, and we can’t figure out how we can know because the rules don’t add up, then…how do we know what we’re supposed to do, and not do? If the rules contradict each other, how do we avoid thoughtcrime? Where is the island we can stand on, safe from sharks and strong currents?

The Women’s Institute is not the Women’s Institute now, it’s the Women’s and Men Who Say They Are Women’s Institute.

But let’s not go crazy here. There are rules. It’s just that they make no sense.

That bonkers instruction is in this two-page Transgender WI membership policy statement.

This policy has been written to provide guidance for members who have questions relating to transgender WI members. Transgender is an inclusive, umbrella term used to describe the diversity of gender identity and expression for all people who do not conform to common ideas of gender roles. Anyone who is living as a woman is welcome to join the WI and to participate in any WI activities in the same way as any other woman.

That’s all you need: Living Azza Woman. But what does that mean? Shut up.

What does gender reassignment involve?

It might involve surgery, hormone treatment or simply a permanent decision to live and dress as a member of the opposite sex.

Live and dress as – that’s quite funny. The airy unexplained vastness of “live as” coupled with the absurd tiny literalness of “dress as.” “Live as” could mean anything or nothing, so I guess for safety they added “and dress as”…but does that mean a man in jeans and a frilly blouse will be asked to explain himself at the door to the WI?

Is there a legal difference regarding whether someone has had gender reassignment surgery?

No and it is very unhelpful to think about anyone in those terms. Some transgender people may never have any kind of gender reassignment surgery but everyone is entitled to be treated in the same way, in the gender in which they identify.

Why? Why is everyone entitled to that? And why did “live as” get changed to “in which they identify”? They’re not the same thing, after all.

Can male to female transgender people join a WI and attend WI events?

Yes – anyone living as a woman is welcome to join the WI and take part in all WI activities. They should be treated in exactly the same way as all women who are part of your WI.

What about anyone identifying as a woman?

And then it ends with the bit Maya quoted.

Can crossdressers join the WI?

No – only those living as women can join the WI and take part in all WI activities.

And how in hell do you know which is which?

Can we ask for written evidence to prove that someone is a transgendered individual?

No – this could be very offensive and hurtful.

So then how do you know? How do you know who is a crossdresser and thus not entitled to join the WI and take part in all WI activities? How do you know anything about any of this?

It’s such an insult, not just to our intelligence, but to our ability to think, to reason, to question, to try to figure out where we are and who these people are and how we should behave around them. It orders us, with menaces, to stop knowing what we have known from earliest childhood, and to enter a world of arbitrary assertions and self-contradicting rules. I won’t fucking do it.

Excuse me?

They deserve more recognition, do they? Ok here’s step one: don’t call them not-men, as if they were a weird mutant failure.

Updating to add:

Not a very philosophical response.

From an interview yesterday with Nikole Hannah-Jones on Fresh Air, on the subject of reparations for slavery:

HANNAH-JONES: Reparations to me – and if you notice in the piece, which is quite long, we don’t even use the word reparations until the very end section of the piece because it’s such a charged word. But what it means to me is, it is restitution. It is when a country or a community or a corporation that has done something egregious to a person or a group of people tries to restore or repair the damage that was done. And that is what reparations is to me.

Which is not an eccentric or personal understanding; that is what it means. Reparations are owed. Why? Because of 2.5 centuries of slavery. The thing about 2.5 centuries of slavery, you see, is that it leaves the enslaved people very badly off, so they can’t just wave bye-bye to their former owners and go off to have a fine new life.

In the context specifically of Black Americans, reparations has to do with 250 years of chattel slavery, followed by another 100 years of legalized segregation or apartheid and racial terrorism and how that impacted the economic well-being of Black Americans, how that prevented generation after generation Black Americans from acquiring the type of wealth or foothold in the economy that allows you to live a life that is much more typical of white Americans, that allows you to truly take advantage of the bounty of this country. So reparations to me is about repair.

Which should have happened a long long time ago. Instead, guess what – the opposite happened. More exploitation, more deprivation, more terrorism.

HANNAH-JONES: Well, actually, the concept of reparations for slavery begins even before emancipation. Enslaved people who had gotten their freedom had begun trying to sue to get some kind of compensation for their enslavement even during slavery. But what happens at emancipation – we are often taught in this country that Black people are emancipated, and then everyone is on an even footing. We don’t often question, what does that mean to be emancipated after 250 years of bondage, to be emancipated with no job, no home, no money, no clothes, no bed, no pots, nothing? Enslaved people were unable to own anything or to accrue anything at all.

And so what happens at emancipation is this expectation that the government should help formerly enslaved people to get a foothold. And what Black people wanted more than anything was land. They didn’t want dependency on the government. They wanted to be given some of the land that they had worked for generations so that they could become independent, so that they could make their own money and be independent of the white people who had ruled over them.

And there were Black men who had served in the Union army – there was a meeting that was held between some of these men and some generals from the Union army. And they asked, well, what do you want? And what they said is, we want land. We want land so that we can be prosperous and be our own people. So General Sherman takes that to heart, and he issues Field Order No. 15. And Field Order No. 15 declares that Black families will get 40 acres of former Confederate land, and that they will be able to work that land. And actually at the time, it was a loan. It wasn’t even being given to enslaved people. It was on loan, and they would eventually make enough money and pay for the land. And for a brief period of time, this is what happened. A small number of formerly enslaved people in the Georgia Sea Islands and in coastal South Carolina had the land that they had once worked for white people turned over to them, and they began to farm it.

But Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson replaced him, and Andrew Johnson was a shit. He grabbed the land and gave it back to the Confederates, the ones we have all those statues to.

HANNAH-JONES And that ended the only real effort in the history of this country to provide reparations for those who had been enslaved. And it really left formerly enslaved people in absolute, devastating poverty. There are stories of mass starvations of Black people after they had been freed, you know, having to leave the plantation and find shelter in burned-out buildings, of trying to forage for food in burned-out fields. It was a devastating period for Black people, and this country decided that it was going to do nothing, that it owed these people nothing.

GROSS: And the Black people who had been enslaved had worked their lives for no pay, no property, no right to keep their family together. And slavery ends, and they get nothing; they’re left with nothing.

HANNAH-JONES: Exactly. I mean, think about this great wealth that was created, was literally created through their labor and the way that the laws around slavery were, that Black people could not own property. As property, they could not own property. So anything that they accrued, everything that came from their labor, went automatically to the people who owned them. Their children belonged to the people who owned them. It was illegal for Black people in many places to even make a will. You could not have heirs if you were Black. You could not bequeath anything onto your children. So everything that you earned, that you made, all of the products of your labor went to the enslavers.

And none of that has ever been paid back.

The niece’s book hasn’t been stopped, so far.

An attempt to block publication of a book by Donald Trump’s niece has been dismissed by a court in New York.

Ted Boutros, an attorney for Mary Trump, tweeted that a court in Queens dismissed a lawsuit brought by the president’s brother, Robert Trump.

“The court has promptly and correctly held that it lacks jurisdiction to grant the Trump family’s baseless request to suppress a book of utmost public importance and concern,” Boutros said.

“We hope this decision will end the matter. Democracy thrives on the free exchange of ideas, and neither this court nor any other has authority to violate the constitution by imposing a prior restraint on core political speech.”

He wasn’t a political figure when she signed the NDA. He wasn’t the lying corrupt bullying incompetent criminal reckless murderous president of the US when she signed the NDA.

A brother of Trump’s thinks it’s “a disgrace.” Are they taught that word at birth, the Trumps?

In a statement to the New York Times after he left hospital the 72-year-old said: “Her attempt to sensationalize and mischaracterize our family relationship after all of these years for her own financial gain is both a travesty and injustice to the memory of my late brother, Fred, and our beloved parents. I and the rest of my entire family are so proud of my wonderful brother, the president, and feel that Mary’s actions are truly a disgrace.”

He’s not wonderful. They shouldn’t be proud of him.

Again. Again the Trump monstrosities refuse to wear masks during a raging lethal pandemic because they’re just that shitty.

Members of the Trump administration, including Donald Trump himself, have frequently declined to wear masks throughout the coronavirus pandemic despite CDC recommendations to do so.

It’s as if they strolled around the White House and Congress firing guns every few minutes. Sometimes people are injured, sometimes they’re killed, just part of the game when you’re in Trump World.

People are nuts.

A major incident was declared after tens of thousands of people defied pleas to stay away and descended in their droves on beaches in Bournemouth and other stretches of the Dorset coast.

The local authority, BCP council – covering Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole – said it was forced to instigate a multi-agency emergency response to tackle issues ranging from overcrowding on the beaches, traffic gridlock and violence. Security guards had to be used to protect refuse collection teams.

The Bournemouth East MP, Tobias Ellwood, said half a million people had flocked to the beaches and said the situation was so overwhelming that the UK government should step in to help the council deal with the crisis.

He said: “A lot of people have chosen to be not just irresponsible but dangerous. We’ve made such progress tackling this pandemic. I’d hate to see Bournemouth be the one place in Britain that gets that second spike.”

And it wasn’t even a chance to watch Trump do a crap stand-up act.

Apparently it was because the lockdown had been eased?

So that’s the UK’s stats about to soar.

Contagion is freedom! Masks are tyranny!

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell encouraged Americans to wear masks to limit the spread of coronavirus, as more than half of US states report increases in new cases.

“I think that’s what people ought to do,” the Kentucky Republican told an ABC News reporter. “That’s what we’re doing in the Senate, and that’s what I’m counseling other people to do.”

Some other Republicans have said similar things, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio among them.

However, other congressional Republicans have taken a much more laissez-faire approach to encouraging mask usage.

Because that’s how contagion works – it’s all a matter of choice. You choose to let the virus infect you, or you choose not to. The virus chooses you, or it chooses the person beside you. Your immune system chooses to blow everything up, or it chooses not to. You choose to die, or you choose not to.

Freedomfreedomfreedomfreedom

At the end of a House freedom caucus press conference moments ago, caucus chairman Andy Biggs was asked whether his Arizona consitutents should wear masks. “It’s up to them,” Biggssaid.

Up to them. Choosy choice. Choose to infect people, or choose not to. Up to you.

Oops.

All of President Donald Trump’s campaign staffers who attended his rally in Tulsa on Saturday are quarantining this week after interacting with several colleagues later tested positive for coronavirus, CNN has learned.

Now about all those people in the audience…

After eight staffers tested positive, several of the campaign’s top officials decided to quarantine for the week instead of going into the office, two sources familiar with the situation told CNN. Staff had only recently returned to the office after months of working from home because of coronavirus restrictions.

They’re working to re-elect the guy who put them in harm’s way for his own selfish purposes.

The fallout from Trump’s push to hold a rally with thousands of attendees has continued in the days since he returned from Tulsa — and as the nation as a whole remains engulfed by the pandemic. The three most populous states set records for new coronavirus cases daily and there are fears of “apocalyptic” surges in major Texas cities if the trend continues.

Can we quarantine Texas?

Florida and Texas announced Wednesday that they’d recorded more than 5,000 new Covid-19 cases the prior day, a new daily record. California reported more than 7,000 cases, obliterating a record hit a day earlier.

On Wednesday night, CNN confirmed that multiple Secret Service officers were also instructed to self-quarantine after two of their colleagues who were on site for the rally tested positive.

Well just stop testing them and everything will be fine!

Trump plans to have a fireworks & sojers party at “Mount Rushmore” next month. What a disgusting idea in every way.

Trump’s plans to kick off Independence Day with a showy display at Mount Rushmore are drawing sharp criticism from Native Americans who view the monument as a desecration of land violently stolen from them and used to pay homage to leaders hostile to native people.

Desecration and uglification. That thing is a monstrosity.

The event is slated to include fighter jets thundering over the 79-year-old stone monument in South Dakota’s Black Hills and the first fireworks display at the site since 2009.

Loud noises! Bangs! Roars! He can understand those.

Trump has long shown a fascination with Mount Rushmore. South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, said in 2018 that he had once told her straight-faced it was his dream to have his face carved into the monument.

Oh ffs. What could matter less? It’s about as significant as a Paul Bunyan statue outside a diner.

The National Park Service stopped staging pyrotechnics at Mount Rushmore in 2010 out of concern that it could ignite wildfires under drought conditions, the Washington Post reports. The memorial is surrounded by 1,200 acres of forested lands, including ponderosa pines, and lies next to the Black Hills national forest’s Black Elk Wilderness.

A multi-state effort was focused on Thursday on fighting a wildfire that started in nearby Custer state park on Wednesday, burning about six miles from Mount Rushmore, the Rapid City Journal reported.

So by all means let’s start a new wildfire so that we can have some loud bangs.

The monument was conceived in the 1920s as a tourist draw for the new fad in vacationing called the road trip.

What I said. It’s like a Paul Bunyan statue, not like the Lincoln Memorial. It’s tacky as well as ugly and intrusive and kind of white supremacistish. (Behold our Giant White Faces, Lakota people, and be overawed.)

Oh what do you know look at that – the Independent in 2018 doing a whole piece on the need for girls’ toilets in schools.

Unesco is urging governments around the world to prioritise providing single-sex toilets in schools, warning as many as 1 in 10 girls in some countries are missing out on lessons because of their period.

The UN’s education body surveyed 189 countries as part of its sixth annual gender review, obtained exclusively by The Independent ahead of International Women’s Day.

While the report found some progress had been made in gender equality in education, it said one in three countries still failed to allow equal numbers of boys and girls into primary school.

…

One “obstacle” to girls attending school was a lack of segregated toilets in schools, review director Manos Antoninis said, adding the agency found there was “little focus” on menstrual hygiene in schools in 21 low and middle income countries.

So sex-segregated toilets are needed for girls to be able to attend school? Is that what we’re saying?

“Improved sanitation to address adolescent girls’ concerns over privacy, particularly during menstruation, can influence their education decisions,” he said. “Single-sex toilets are desperately needed to overcome girls’ barriers to education.”

Huh. But we’ve been told it’s the worst kind of transphobia for women to say that women and girls need privacy in the toilets.

In Bangladesh, 41 per cent of schoolgirls aged between 11 and 17 reported missing three days of school every month because of a lack of adequate sanitary care, according to the report.

Meanwhile, in rural areas of west African nations including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia, less than a fifth of schools had four or more of Unesco’s five recommended menstrual hygiene services. These include separate sex toilets with doors and locks, water and rubbish bins.

And one more thing…

Unesco also for the first time recommended children be taught about power dynamics between boys and girls in school.

Teaching children about the relationship between the genders in sex education classes would not only tackle gender-based violence, but also help reduce teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, Unesco said.

Not a word about trans girls in the whole piece. Was anyone sacked?

M. K. Fain on that election in Queens:

Emilia Decaudin, a man, has won the Female District Leader position for New York City’s 37-A district, which resides in Queens. Last year, Decaudin successfully petitioned to eliminate the sex parity rule in New York Democratic Leadership Council roles—a rule which was put in place by feminists to ensure women’s fair and equal participation in the democratic process.

And along came a man to say no, let’s not ensure women’s fair and equal participation in the democratic process. Let’s keep women out, instead.

Decaudin, who identifies as transgender and non-binary, defeated Deirdre Feerick, a woman, for the female position by a margin of about 5.5 points. Feerick was an experienced politician who enjoyed the endorsement of the Queens Democratic Party. Decaudin appears to have only recently moved to the district after residing in Westchester County.

In October, City Democrats insisted that changing the rules “would NOT affect the gender parity of (half of the seats reserved for women) outlined for elected office seats such as District Leaders.” This has proven to untrue—as was expected by feminists. District 37A will now be represented by two white men, despite the fact that the District as a whole is a “majority minority” District, largely consisting of Hispanics, and does, in fact, also contain women, who have now been deprived of a representative.

Sorry, wims, sucks to be you.

They have another scalp.

Damian Barr is leading a charge of writers, including one former Booker prize winner, who are calling on the Booker Foundation to remove the allegedly “homophobic” peer Emma Nicholson from her position as vice-president.

Lady Nicholson of Winterbourne, who voted against the same-sex marriage bill in 2013, is the widow of the late former chairman of Booker, Sir Michael Caine, who helped establish the prize. She is currently a vice-president of the Booker Foundation, and a former trustee of the prize.

Barr, a novelist, memoirist and host of the Literary Salon, learned of her association with the prize earlier this week, after Munroe Bergdorf, the model and transgender activist, said she was referring Nicholson to the Parliamentary Standards Conduct Commissioner over Nicholson’s posts on social media about the trans community. The peer also drew fire earlier this month over her views on same-sex marriage.

What “posts on social media about the trans community”? The issue is whether or not men can become women by saying words, not gossip about some mythical entity called “the trans community.”

Also, Munroe Bergdorf? That’s who’s leading the charge?

Barr immediately challenged the Booker on Twitter, writing that “as a gay writer I feel very concerned that a person who is actively and publicly propagating homophobic views holds a position of such power & prestige in your rightly esteemed organisation”.

As major writers including the Booker prizewinner Marlon James and the bestselling novelist Sarah Perry lined up to condemn Nicholson’s position with the Booker prize, the foundation released a statement on Tuesday in which its trustees said that “the views expressed by Baroness Nicholson on transgender issues are her own personal views”.

“Baroness Nicholson has herself recently said that she retired as a trustee of the foundation in 2009,” the statement continued, “and was then made an honorary vice-president. She has no role in the governance or operations of the foundation. She is not involved in selecting the judges nor in choosing the books that are longlisted, shortlisted and win.”

Doesn’t matter. The point is to punish her. The point is to hold her up for everyone to throw things at her. The point is to wound, to shame, to bully, to sideline, to ostracize, to monster.

Barr had a tantrum about the statement, calling it shocking.

Nicholson, who now sits in the Lords as a Conservative peer, told the Guardian she would “very much regret any move to remove me from an organisation I have been associated with for so many years” and rejected the accusation of homophobia.

“I did indeed vote against same-sex marriage in 2013,” she said. “I have not yet learned from my critics how I am offending by perceived homophobia. In other words, they have offered no evidence.”

I disagree with the vote, but I don’t think it establishes homophobia.

Former winner Marlon James, who took the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, also slammed the Booker’s response. “While we’re at it, as a Booker prize winner myself, lets talk about your shitty response to having a hate monger on your board,” he said on Facebook. “It’s not enough to distance yourself from her views, you have to distance yourself from her and condemn HER. There’s certain kind of supposed liberal/moderate who still thinks that speech calling for my erasure deserves as much rights as speech call for my survival. Don’t be those people.”

See? “You have to distance yourself from her and condemn HER.” Kill the witch.

The Guardian understands that members of the Booker’s advisory board are unhappy with the current situation and response. A spokesperson for the prize said that “the trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation will be reviewing the situation again today”.

And they did, and they’ve now done the deed. The shits.

Statement on behalf of the Booker Prize Foundation:

We, the Trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation, met today and wish to reiterate that the views expressed by Baroness Nicholson on transgender people are her own personal opinions.

The issues are complex, but our principles are clear.  We deplore racism, homophobia and transphobia – and do not discriminate on any grounds.

They don’t deplore misogyny though. Lucky for them! Makes it easy to punish a woman for not agreeing with every claim of trans ideology.

Literature is open, plural and questioning. We believe every author’s work should be approached by readers in the same spirit. Integrity is central to both Booker Prizes, whose judging process is conducted at all times in keeping with these values.

Upon her retirement from the Board in 2009, Baroness Nicholson was made an honorary vice president, a role that gave her no say in the governance or operations of the Foundation or prizes. In recent days there has been some confusion about the nature of honorary titles used by the Foundation. Too many believe that these titles in some way symbolise the prizes. That is not the case.

We have today decided that these titles and roles should, with immediate effect, cease to exist. Those holding them have been informed and thanked for their longstanding interest.

Bam.

The absolute shits.

Another ignorant twerp jumps, very belatedly, on the Let’s All Monster JK Rowling train.

Since J.K. Rowling published “Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues” to JKRowling.com, Harry Potter fans, Wizarding Worldfilm stars and LGBTQ+ organizations have been speaking out against Rowling’s statement. Fans of Rowling’s work are questioning how to move forward, whilst LGBTQ+ organizations are publishing responses aiming to combat misinformation within the author’s essay.

No, the responses aren’t aiming to combat misinformation, they’re aiming to enforce a novel and stupid orthodoxy and to destroy yet another woman who doesn’t adhere to it.

Whilst some have defended Rowling’s right to an opinion, others, including Forbes.com Diversity & Inclusion Contributor Dawn Ennis, have illustrated the dangers of opinions and misinformation within her statements.

Gee, imagine being so benighted as to think Rowling has a right to an opinion. It should be pried out of her with a crowbar and then all traces washed away with acid.

The implications of Rowling’s statements and backlash on the future success of the Wizarding World franchise have also been questioned. Scott Mendelson, Forbes.com Hollywood & Entertainment Contributor, questions the future of the Fantastic Beasts film franchise, whilst Dani Di Placido, Forbes.com Arts Senior Contributor, says Rowling is “destroying” her legacy.

Also this guy waiting for the bus this morning said he’d never heard of her, and my neighbor’s dog barked.

George Washington University has issued a statement on William Barr:

The George Washington University Law School released a statement on June 23, 2020 calling for Attorney General William Barr to resign, for Congress to censure him, and for the Justice Department’s Inspector General to investigate him.

Barr received a juris doctorate from the Law School in 1977, served on its board of advisors, and has previously been honored by the school.

Most of the faculty signed.

The Law School’s statement cites the following as instances of Barr’s failure to uphold his constitutional oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The signers assert that Barr

• Deliberately misled Americans about the contents of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report,
• Intervened in Roger Stone’s sentencing,
• Interfered with the prosecution of Michael Flynn,
• And violated civilians’ First Amendment right to assemble and protest at Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020.