Euan certainly is illiterate for a purported “journalist”.

“deminish” “dissolutioned” – he needs to repeat second grade.

Wasn’t the BBC supposed to be getting over this? Learning better? Getting a clue about the relentless campaign to shove women aside? Stop mocking and insulting women? Stop obsessing about one tiny demographic while ignoring half of all human beings?

I thought it was, but apparently the drag desk did not get the memo.

Top of the page is a huge photo of four men in drag.

It’s been nine months since the Dragonfly Lounge’s stage lights first went on, the music played and its doors opened to everyone in Colchester. It is an inclusive LGBTQ+ bar and community space that hosts drag cabaret, live music and space for local producers to showcase their crafts.

Co-owner Jo Palmer-Tweed describes herself as an ally of the community. “The motivation is to provide a safe space for people that’s properly inclusive. So I don’t care if you’re a squaddie, if you are a ‘trans person to be’, whatever you are, you are welcome here.”

Of course, if you’re a woman, you probably won’t feel very welcome there.

The story is actually about the Budget and taxes, but hey, drag queens anyway.

Hahahaha classic Trump.

Trump offered praise for New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on Friday after the two men met for the first time at the White House to discuss the growing issue of affordability.

While the Republican president and the Democratic mayor-elect have hurled searing attacks at each other in the recent past, they repeatedly shrugged off those words while appearing side by side in the Oval Office.

At one point, when Mamdani was asked for the second time about having called Trump a “fascist,” the president gave him cover. “That’s OK, you can just say yes,” Trump said after Mamdani began to respond. “It’s easier than explaining it.”

Trump also appeared to backtrack on his prior threat to withhold federal funding for New York City if Mamdani became its mayor. “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Trump said.

There, that’s the classic bit – “going to happen” – as if he’s talking about some mysterious ungovernable external entity, as opposed to his own shabby pathetic self. He talks about the mysterious external entity a lot.

Trump is smitten.

Zohran Mamdani visited Trump today at the WH, and it did not go the way most Republicans thought it would. Trump has always recognized and fawned over star power, and that is exactly the way he treated Mamdani. Fox reporter to Mamdani: “You referred to Trump as despot… Trump interrupts: I’ve been called much worse than a despot. So it’s not that insulting.”

Ok then. We’ll call him the despot from here on out.

Trump: “I tell you, the press has eaten this thing up. I have had a lot of meetings with the heads of major countries, nobody cared. The biggest people come over from other countries and nobody cares but they did care about this meeting, and it was a great meeting.”

Q to Trump – “Would you feel comfortable living in NYC under a Mamdani admin? Trump: Yeah, I would.”

Republican campaign consultants built their entire midterm strategy around making Mamdani into the devil incarnate and the face of Democratic Party, then Trump slobbers all over him today in the Oval!

The heart wants what it wants.

Trump then proceeded to end Elise Stefanik’s campaign for governor: Q – “Stefanik has campaigned on calling Mamdani a jihadist. Do you think you’re standing next to a jihadist? Trump: No… but she’s out there campaigning. You say things sometimes in a campaign. You’d have to ask her about that. I met with a man who is a rational person.”

Ahhhhhh you say things sometimes in a campaign. So you confirm you said a lot of things that weren’t true and we should feel free to ignore what you say in future. Sounds good.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Other minds.

There’s something about gender expression and magical thinking that seems remarkably consistent across cultures, at least in boys, if not as often in girls. Males who exhibit atypically feminine interests or behaviours are often deemed to have extra-mystical souls. They’re more connected to the spiritual world than other men and women. They’re often made out to be shamans, or priests, or are assigned to ceremonial or ritual duties. They aren’t treated as entirely human.

It accidentally exposes how primitive the thinking is among “gender identity” believers: for all the trans activists’ window dressing about spectrums, they still envision men and women as essential castes. Men and women are material after all; the “spectrum” is the liminal space between the essential man and the essential woman — it’s an opening into the spiritual domain, whose inhabitants transcend the material world.

These are precious beings who must be protected and revered, because they aren’t quite material; they are outside the corporeal sexes.

Therefore it’s immaterial what we do to a trans person’s body. The body is merely the vessel that this magical being occupies. It is not the being himself; it is a vulgar carapace. All the better to enhance it — to shape it to reflect the beauty of his soul.

All of this is an outcropping of our species’ innate instinct to tell men and women apart. As always, the transgender phenomenon only proves how fundamentally we distinguish between males and females. It’s just that the trans believers process the stereotypical outliers in a radically superstitious framework, and the “gender criticals” don’t.

Watching this stirred up a question for me – not a new question, but one that never really gets answered so probably never will.

The question is not about the fluffy teddy bear conspicuously at her elbow.

(But now I mention it what is that fluffy teddy there for? What she’s talking about in the clip is her having been struck off for giving blockers to children – so why remind everyone of herself & children by having a teddy sitting next to her like a support animal?)

The question is about what she and trans ideologues in general think is going on with “trans children” and “trans” anybody. What does it mean? It’s not physical; it’s in the mind. Trans people “feel like” the opposite sex. Trans people “feel as if” they are in the wrong body. It’s about feeling and feeling like; it’s about ideas and self-something – explanation? description? understanding? It’s interior, and it’s emphatically not physical. It’s in the mind.

So the question that occurred to me, that is not new but never gets answered, is how does anybody know? It’s 100% subjective so how can other people be so certain that it’s reliable and we absolutely must honor it and treat it as true, and not only true but true in defiance of the obvious visible reality?

We don’t know this stuff about other people. Nobody does. That’s just not how it works. This is why lying works, it’s why fraud works, it’s why perjury works. Other minds are notoriously a black box. So how can a purported mental state that contradicts physical reality strike so many people as convincing enough to put a torch to existing laws and rules governing sex-based rights?

It’s just weird. It ignores one of the most basic things we know about human relations: that we can never know for sure exactly what other people are thinking. People can say one thing but be thinking its opposite. We can’t pry open the skull and take a look to make sure.

So here I am wondering what’s going on in the minds of people who take the ideology seriously.

More on the descent:

Trump has yet again suggested that his political opponents deserve to be executed. And yet again, he’s basing this argument on a rather novel legal theory and a dubious interpretation of the facts.

A half-dozen congressional Democrats cut a video this week urging members of the military not to obey unlawful orders that Trump might issue. Trump then responded by issuing a series of social media posts suggesting these members had committed sedition and possibly even deserved to die.

Trump went from saying they should be arrested, to re-posting someone who said George Washington would “HANG THEM,” to saying “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

But unlawful orders really are a thing and they really do happen.

“defying the chain of command” isn’t just something military servicemembers are allowed to do in such cases; it’s something they’re often required to do.

The section of Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice dealing with failing to obey orders states that members can only be sanctioned for disobeying lawful orders. And servicemembers are generally obligated to not follow orders that are “manifestly unlawful.”

Remember the code red? Manifestly unlawful.

Those guys obeyed an illegal order, and they were dishonorably discharged. The film included a short sharp conversation between them on why it was or wasn’t unfair.

Trump has repeatedly proposed doing things – with the military and otherwise – that appear to be illegal. People who served with him have said he suggested illegal action. And Trump is certainly testing the bounds of the law with his use of the military even as we speak.

The big example right now is Trump’s strikes on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean – strikes that have killed more than 80 people without a legal process.

…

CNN has reported that both the United Nations and top allies like the United Kingdom regard the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has echoed those claims, while other GOP senators have questioned their legality as well.

It’s hard to come up with a way they can be legal.

Another lurch downward.

Trump accused six Democratic lawmakers of “seditious behaviour, punishable by death”, after they released a video urging US service members to refuse unlawful commands.

“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???,” Trump wrote on social media.

No. Not lock them up. Lock you up. You’re what’s dangerous to the country and the world. Illegal orders are the short road to war crimes. You aspire to be a war criminal; decent people don’t aspire to that.

The six lawmakers, all of whom have served in the military or intelligence community, called the remarks dangerous and said they amounted to threats against elected officials.

“No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation,” they said in a joint statement.

The video, shared on Tuesday by Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, features Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Representatives Chris DeLuzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Jason Crow of Colorado.

A message from Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, who served in the Navy and is a former astronaut says: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

And you should, because war crimes are bad.

The response from Trump on Thursday morning came from a set of TruthSocial posts.

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET,” he wrote in one post on Thursday.

He went on to say: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???”

In a third post, he wrote: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

It’s like being in a car on a steep narrow mountain road, driven by a toddler.

Ooh Novara Media has a new recruit. They are welcome to him.

Former Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle has defected to the Greens, marking a “profound” shift in British politics as Zack Polanski’s party looks to replace Labour at the ballot box. Russell-Moyle was suspended from the Labour party in May 2024 after a complaint about his behaviour that he described as “vexatious and politically motivated.” “Lloyd and tens of thousands like him have not left the Labour party; the Labour party has left them,” Polanski said.

The Green party has surged in popularity and its membership has exploded to over 150,000 since Polanski became leader in September, pledging to supplant Labour as the go-to party for progressives.

Wellll not progressives so much as…what’s the word? Women-hating loonies? More than one word, but you can always use hyphens.

Bristol is another battlefront.

The conflict goes back to July 2022, when Bristol City Council passed a motion to “recognise and affirm trans men are men, trans women are women”.

Why stop there? Why not pass motions that say trans children are children, trans rabbits are rabbits, trans apples are apples? Why not just stamp everything “trans”?

It was concerns like these that led Stephenson and several others to join the Women of Wessex. “We wrote to the council, we attended meetings, we showed them legal evidence that the motion was unlawful. We did everything we could.”

But their efforts seemed to fall on deaf ears – until spring of this year, when the Supreme Court ruled that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological sex, not gender identity, and that biological women have the right to single-sex spaces. “After that, we started paying attention again,” Stephenson says.

The Women of Wessex began attending council meetings and using the public forum, a 30-minute window in which residents can put questions directly to elected officials. What they encountered, they say, was not a chamber interested in dialogue but one intent on closing ranks.

According to the group, Green councillors in particular have worked to shut down scrutiny and punish dissent, creating an atmosphere so hostile to disagreement that even asking a lawful question has become precarious.

See that’s one of the effects of promoting and enforcing a legal fiction aka a lie – to protect it you have to bully dissenters, because bullying is all you have.

When the Women of Wessex first stood up in July to ask what the council had done in response to the Supreme Court ruling, it became immediately clear what they were up against. Before they had even finished their question, a group of councillors rose, filed out of the chamber and only returned once the women had sat down. “I was shocked,” says Stephenson. “I didn’t think that they could take themselves out of the democratic process, because that public forum in the council is there for local residents to have a voice.”

Sorry, if you think women have rights, you forfeit your voice.

When the next opportunity to ask questions at a meeting in September came, Stephenson says that councillors mounted another “orchestrated attack”. As in July, the women had planned to stand up and ask about single-sex spaces; in response, 18 councillors “walked out each time one of us got up to speak and then came back in when we’d finished speaking”.

Again, the whole process was rendered absurd. In one instance, a member of the public, Stephen McNamara, former head of legal at the council, posited a situation where a 6ft 2in trans woman could be sharing bathroom space with a 14-year-old Muslim girl. “The Lord Mayor responded: ‘Please stop. No. That is incredibly offensive. Please stop. Get to the question.’ A councillor shouted from the floor: ‘You don’t have to take these questions, they’re offensive,’” recalls Stephenson. “[We were] asking reasonable questions in lawful language, describing biological sex.”

But what about the huge adult men and the 14-year-old girls, Muslim or not? Why is it offensive to ask the question but not offensive to create the situation?

By November’s council meeting, the situation had escalated. Not only was Helen’s question on predatory males banned entirely, but during the course of the meeting, numerous councillors held up placards with slogans such as “Trans women are women” and “Protect the dolls”.

Seriously? Grown-ass adults?

One council officer, who didn’t give her name for fear of being identified, agrees that an “unhealthy” ideology has taken root at Bristol City Council: “I wouldn’t dare mention that I believe that sex is binary and immutable,” she says. “When some councillors walk out of the chamber or wave placards when members of the public simply quote from a Supreme Court ruling it sends a very clear message about which opinions are welcome within the council and which aren’t. I don’t think that’s healthy for an organisation.”

All the women point out that for the chamber to be a place of democracy, they need it to be a neutral zone – without any form of protest. “We think about what questions we’re going to ask,” says Stephenson. “The law is behind us. Sensible people are behind us. And we come into this chamber and it’s just humiliating. They’re not playing by the rules at all… They’re laughing at us.”

Well, see, you’re women. Women are garbage. This is very progressive.

The Beeb has learned nothing.

Award declined after trans women not included

A cycling influencer nominated for a list of top 100 women cyclists said she has declined the honour due to the decision not to include trans women.

Cycling UK, a charity promoting the sport, has compiled its 100 Women in Cycling list for the last nine years, but this year decided only to include biological women following the recent unanimous UK Supreme Court ruling defining a “woman” and “sex” in law.

Or to put it more truthfully and clearly: but this year decided to include only women rather than women plus men who call themselves women.

The label “biological women” is absurd. There is no other kind.

Claire Sharpe, a cycling guide and coach from Bristol, said: “If they don’t want to ride with all women, then it’s not the kind of ride I want to be part of”.

But of course they do want to ride with all women; what they reject is riding with women and some men who call themselves women.

But the BBC remains the BBC.

Ms Sharpe said she is one of four Bristol riders who have declined to feature in the ranking.

Speaking to BBC Bristol, Ms Sharpe said: “[The list] was originally set up to celebrate women who inspire, encourage and empower people to experience the joy of cycling. By excluding trans and non-binary people, it’s just not doing what I think it was set up to do. It excludes people that have helped create the community that I was nominated for.”

Ms Sharpe said trans women were important players in the sport and urged them not to be disheartened by Cycling UK’s decision. “They’re not a reflection of the communities that we’ve built and certainly in Bristol, there are so many options to go out and ride with people who aren’t taking this stance. You’re very welcome,” she added.

Blah blah blah. The BBC has learned nothing.

Trump plays yet another round of No YOU are.

Trump has accused a group of Democratic lawmakers who served in military or intelligence roles of “seditious behaviour” over a video they made telling those currently serving that they must refuse illegal orders. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday.

No Don. They get to do that. You on the other hand do not get to issue illegal orders.

“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???”

Thank you for asking. No.

Six Democrats on Capitol Hill, led by senator Elissa Slotkin, on Tuesday released a video saying that Americans’ trust in their military is at risk, accusing the Trump administration of “pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens”. The Democrats told active-duty troops and those in the intelligence community that they “can” and “must refuse illegal orders”.

Which is true. Does “Lieutenant Calley” ring a bell?

We want more extinctions, not fewer. Stamp out those species!!

The Trump administration presented a new plan to roll back regulations in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) on Wednesday, a move experts fear will accelerate the extinction crisis if adopted.

The proposed changes would allow the federal government more power to weigh economic impact against habitat designations, remove safeguards against future events – including the impacts from the climate crisis – and rescind the “blanket rule” that automatically grants threatened species the same protections as those designated as endangered.

Under the plan, newly listed animals and plants could face years without protections as details in tailored regulations are ironed out, delays that would only be exacerbated by the deep cuts to staffing at agencies charged with the work. The definition for “critical habitat” would also be narrowed, excluding areas that species don’t currently occupy, even if it was once considered their habitat.

The proposal is one of many attempts Donald Trump has made to dismantle critical wildlife protections in order to boost energy extraction and industrial access, even in the most sensitive and vulnerable wilderness areas across the US.

Does wildlife vote for Trump? Does wildlife give Trump money? Does wildlife try to overthrow the government on Trump’s behalf? No? Well then.

The proposal comes amid an extinction emergency, as the climate crisis adds new challenges to recovery for scores of species already close to the brink. Roughly 1m species are threatened with extinction, according to a 2019 assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), including roughly 40% of amphibians, and a third of reef-forming corals, marine mammals and sharks. Insects, considered the bedrock to biodiversity and the foundation of most ecosystems on Earth, are in rapid decline. About 80% of insect species have yet to be identified and some are disappearing before they can be named.

Impacts to habitat can threaten a broader network of interconnected species and ecosystems. Landscape modification can trigger a devastating domino effect, where the loss of one species leads to the extinction of others that depend on it.

Blah blah blah. Does habitat put money in Trump’s pocket? Do species protect Trump from the law? No? Well then.

Trans people could be banned from single-sex spaces based on how they look

And?

It’s not as if before 2010 or so there were guards at the doors of every public single-sex space demanding to see our papers. That’s why men who were determined to spy on women in the toilet were often able to get away with it, and it’s also why they could face charges if they didn’t run fast enough. It was an imperfect system but it was certainly better than this one where we have to welcome men in our changing rooms and potties. We know what they look like, don’t worry.

The guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was handed to ministers almost three months ago but has so far not been published by Bridget Phillipson, the minister for women and equalities.

The Times has been passed a copy of the final guidance, which aims to preserve the dignity and safety of women, by Whitehall figures who are concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential political backlash.

Or to maintain their cred as tranz alliez and avoid being shouted at.

Councils, NHS trusts and businesses are still allowing trans women — men who identify as women — to use single-sex spaces despite a Supreme Court ruling in April that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is defined by biology, not gender identity.

They say they are waiting for the new guidance before taking action, despite warnings that they may be breaking the law.

Guidance shmuidance. Remember what we did before? Do that. See how easy?

Under the new guidance, places such as hospital wards, gyms and leisure centres will be able to question transgender women over whether they should be using single-sex services based on how they look, their behaviour or concerns raised by others.

Well duh. If they can’t, then the FWS ruling is useless and might as well not have happened.

Huh. Even BBCers don’t like the BBC.

The Tim Davie-appointed director of BBC Sport has been warned of “very low” staff morale amid suggestions his controversial reforms are breaching employment law.

Complaints were shared with Alex Kay-Jelski after he sent an internal memo saying those unhappy with change, and their options, could seek voluntary redundancy.

Aka if you don’t like it here you know where the door is.

A recent email to staff from Kay-Jelski that mentioned redundancies alongside options including training and extra support has further unnerved staff. “If the thought of more change is something that concerns you or you feel the direction we’re heading in is not the right fit for you, please have an open conversation with your line manager or Catherine Littler in HR to discuss all available options, including potential voluntary redundancy,” wrote Kay-Jelski, who arrived as director of sport last year.

Aka if you don’t like it here you can always leave.

It’s not a subtle message.

Oliver Brown talks to Sharron Davies:

For a decade, Davies has been preoccupied with the pursuit of fairness on a different front, becoming a relentless advocate for women’s right to their own category in sport. Where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was seduced by the activist fallacy of “trans women are women”, Davies had no qualms about pointing out that they were, in fact, men, using the immutable advantages of male physiology to deprive female athletes of records and titles. It has often felt a lonely fight, with many governing bodies more inclined to appease militant trans lobbyists than to protect half the population.

And, to expand on the point, with many governing bodies more inclined to bully and blame and demonize women than to accept that women have rights.

At 63, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-two, she is in no mood to ease off in her quest. Which is why, today, alongside round-the-world yachtswoman Tracy Edwards, she is launching the Women’s Sports Union, a foundation that will specifically target sports still failing to ensure fairness for women at all levels, suing them if necessary.

“We realised that we couldn’t just keep verbally lobbying,” she explains. “We needed to create an umbrella organisation that people could join and donate to, so that we could go down a legal route. What we would like it to be in the future is a voice for women’s sport.”

…

The star power behind the union is formidable, with Olympic legend Daley Thompson, boxing’s Barry McGuigan and Judy Murray, tennis’s ultimate tiger mother, all joining the advisory board. Davies has enlisted lawyers to work pro bono, emphasising: “Lawfare is not off the table.”

There are still 34 sports in Britain – including swimming, gymnastics and ice skating – that continue to let males into their grassroots female competitions according to their self-declared “gender identity”. It is this type of schism – restricting the female category at elite level to biological females only but leaving mass-participation sport as a free-for-all – that, they argue, the Supreme Court verdict should have stopped. But many sports say they are waiting for “guidance” before implementing change across the board.

Guidance shmidance! Men are not women: there’s your guidance. Do the right thing.

She’s not a fan of the IOC. It failed to do anything about the East Germans’ doping, which cost her the gold, and now it’s failing to do anything about men invading women’s sports.

It was the IOC who gave Manfred Ewald, mastermind of the East German scheme, its highest award, the Olympic Order, in 1985. And it was the IOC who, only last year in Paris, presided over one of the bleakest scandals in Olympic history, allowing Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan to sweep to gold in women’s boxing, despite the fact that previous sex tests had indicated male chromosomes. Italy’s Angela Carini withdrew from her bout against Khelif after just 46 seconds, claiming she had never been punched so hard in her life. “I am here for gold,” the Algerian told the BBC. “I will fight anybody, I will fight them all.”

“I’m astonished that the IOC survived what happened last summer, because to me, that was almost criminal negligence,” Davies says. “I think, for the last 10 years, we’ve been waiting for a woman to be paralysed or killed.”

She reveals that this perspective was far from popular at the BBC, for whom she has worked at 13 Olympic Games as a poolside interviewer. She continues to juggle her broadcast duties alongside her online personal fitness company and her increasingly demanding campaign work. “I was warned several times about my tweeting on Khelif, even though it was factual.”

The corporation has come under sustained fire in recent days over its coverage of these issues, with The Telegraph revealing internal staff messages that raised concerns over several years about the number of BBC “puff pieces” on biological males in female sport, with little or no balancing coverage of the women affected.

She was incandescent that Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC director of sport, had written a 2019 article for The Times dismissing Davies and nine-time Wimbledon champion Martina Navratilova as “not experts” on the subject, suggesting her views were tantamount to saying, “Don’t let black men in the same shops as you or they’ll rape your women”. Davies was married for six years to sprinter Derek Redmond, the son of Caribbean immigrants, and had two children with him. They divorced in 2000.

I’d be incandescent and beyond. How extremely disgusting.

“It was absolutely ludicrous, and I did call him up on it,” she says. “I told Tim Davie, the director-general [who resigned last week] that if he didn’t apologise, I would sue him. We got an assurance at the time that, in future, he would leave his politics at the door.

“To try to imply that I was racist, that this was the same as a situation involving a black person? My daughter’s black. How stupid and ignorant was that? There are a large number of activists in the BBC, imposing trans ideology, language and agendas.”

And kicking women in the teeth every chance they get.

Trump angrily rebukes journalist for being mean to the nice murdering Saudi bigwig sitting next to him.

Occupy Democrats reports:

NPR scores massive victory against Trump — CPB FORCED to restore $36 million deal after judge shreds their excuse.

Donald Trump’s crusade to kneecap public media just suffered a massive legal humiliation — and it’s one that exposes the breathtaking corruption behind his attempts to silence reporters who refuse to bow to him.

On Monday, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting quietly crawled back to court and agreed to revive a $36 million contract with NPR — the very contract it killed after intense pressure from the Trump White House.

This reversal didn’t happen because CPB suddenly rediscovered its mission. It happened because a federal judge all but laughed CPB’s defense out of the courtroom.

Judge Randolph Moss told CPB lawyers point-blank: their story wasn’t credible. Their excuse? That they suddenly dumped NPR to “foster digital innovation.”

Sure. Totally normal to discover a passion for innovation the day after a top Trump official told them not to “do business with NPR.”

The truth spilled out in depositions: CPB’s board chair and executives met with a White House budget officer who openly declared her “intense dislike for NPR.” And within 48 hours, CPB reversed a decades-long partnership — clearly terrified of a president hell-bent on censoring journalists who report facts he doesn’t like.

I have to say, I don’t like NPR either – but that’s not because I think it’s too lefty. It’s because I think it’s too goopy, too touchy-feely, too dumbed down, too convinced that we’re all a bit childish. I went off it years ago. If it were too lefty I would like it a lot more; it’s the sentimentality and the slushy language I got sick of.

But if the alternative is a Trump version? Then long live NPR!

BBC still banging the same stupid drum. Bang stupid drum, win stupid prizes.

A cycling influencer nominated for a list of top 100 women cyclists said she has declined the honour due to the decision not to include trans women.

Oh yay, good for her, how very plucky and brave and stand your ground-y. Women are such greedy sluts; of course they shouldn’t have prizes just for them.

Cycling UK, a charity promoting the sport, has compiled its 100 Women in Cycling list for the last nine years, but this year decided only to include biological women following the recent unanimous UK Supreme Court ruling defining a “woman” and “sex” in law.

Claire Sharpe, a cycling guide and coach from Bristol, said: “If they don’t want to ride with all women, then it’s not the kind of ride I want to be part of”.

They do want to ride with all women; they don’t want to ride with men. See the difference?

Ms Sharpe said she is one of four Bristol riders who have declined to feature in the ranking.

Speaking to BBC Bristol, Ms Sharpe said: “[The list] was originally set up to celebrate women who inspire, encourage and empower people to experience the joy of cycling.”

Check; to celebrate women who do that. Not people in general, not women and men, but women. Specifically women.

“By excluding trans and non-binary people, it’s just not doing what I think it was set up to do. It excludes people that have helped create the community that I was nominated for.”

But it’s a thing for women. We’re allowed to do things that are for women.

They’re exploiting an ambiguity in the word. Exclusion can mean unreasonable cruel “we hate you” action but it can also be entirely morally neutral. Researchers working on disease X exclude people who don’t have disease X because they’re working on disease X. Not all exclusion is “You’re not invited to my birthday party because we all hate you and you’re ugly.” Much exclusion is like excluding whipped cream as a building material. It’s not that whipped cream is being punished, it’s just that whipped cream is unstable in hurricanes.

This is like that. A list of top women cyclists is a list of top women cyclists. There is no need to include fish or hammers or the BBC or the space station. That’s not an aspersion on fish or hammers or the BBC or the space station, it’s just having a list that is what it says on the tin.

Larry “women are stupid” Summers is back in the news.

When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he sought guidance from a longtime associate: convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.

In a sequence of texts and emails between November 2018 and July 5, 2019, Summers turned to Epstein for advice on his pursuit of the woman. Epstein was quick to chime in with assurance and suggestions, describing himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man.”

How cute and amusing.

Wednesday’s documents also revealed messages where Summers, whose speculation that innate differences between men and women could drive women’s underrepresentation in science contributed to the end of his Harvard presidency in 2006, joked about women’s intelligence and what he described as excessive penalties for men who “hit on” women in the workplace.

In an October 2017 email to Epstein, Summers retread the same terrain that had proven treacherous for him in the past, writing that he “observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population….”

Haw haw haw – where would we be without men sharing jokes about how stupid women are with their bro friends?