It’s all so dignified.

• Key hearing: Attorney General Pam Bondi is testifying at a heated House Judiciary Committee amid ongoing controversies related to the Jeffrey Epstein files release, investigation into President Donald Trump’s political foes and the handling of the fatal shootings of two US citizens in Minnesota by immigration enforcement officers.

• Clashes with lawmakers: Bondi called Rep. Jamie Raskin – a former constitutional law professor and the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee – a “washed up loser lawyer,” as the clash between her and committee Democrats escalated over her approach to their questions.

Yep. Peak dignity right there.

Huh. Pam Bondi is going to stop people telling the truth about Trump. That seems a tad authoritarian.

Not Our Crimes yet again. Not Our Mass Murders.

Switzerland doesn’t have a prime minister.

Who knew that tariffs are for punishing people who aren’t deferential enough to Trump?

Slow down. Take a step back.

The National Prayer Breakfast was founded in 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower accepted an invitation to join members of Congress to break bread together. Every president since has participated, regardless of party or religious persuasion. It offers an opportunity, according to its organizers, for political leaders to gather and pray collectively for our nation “in the spirit of love and reconciliation as Jesus of Nazareth taught 2,000 years ago.”

And that’s a bad thing, because it’s a gross violation of religious freedom, aka the separation of church and state. It’s not really an “opportunity” for “political leaders” aka the government to gather and pray collectively, is it, it’s a conspicuous push to do so. Government needs to be secular. The “National Prayer Breakfast” is wildly anti-secular, aka theocratic. Theocracy=there’s no way to vote the god in question out.

It is testimony to the marketing genius of Donald Trump that he never sold himself to Christians as one of them—pious, devoted, merciful, forgiving, irenic, biblically literate, a faithful husband and father, a man of high moral standards.

Is that marketing genius? Or is it just the familiar fact that Trump is a foul human being who loves to shove his foulness in our faces all day every day?

More news from nursery school:

The National Governors Association (NGA) has canceled its annual White House meeting after President Trump only invited Republican governors to the gathering. 

The yearly meeting is traditionally bipartisan and offers a chance for state leaders to convene with one another and the president. 

Sigh. It’s a meeting of governors, not a meeting of Republican governors. It’s not for him to change that.

“Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) wrote in a Monday letter announcing plans to forgo the meeting, according to The Associated Press.

Stitt said the Trump administration’s decision to exclude Democratic governors would not divide the association. 

Political affiliation is not all there is to people. It’s not that simple. Nothing is that simple. There’s a lot of life that has nothing to do with political affiliation, so it’s not always necessary to sort people into BigEnders at this end and LittleEnders at the other end. Furthermore, it’s healthy for people with different political views to talk, because they can learn from each other.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s move to not invite Democratic governors to the meeting during Tuesday’s briefing.  
 
“I just spoke with the president about this,” Leavitt told reporters. “It is a dinner at the White House. It’s the ‘People’s House.’ It’s also the president’s home, and he can invite whomever he wants to dinners and events here at the White House.” 

No it isn’t. When he’s playing host at official events he’s not in his “home”; he’s at work, in a house that belongs to the government, or the country as a whole if you prefer. Part of the White House is his temporary “home” but the rest of it is his and other people’s workplace, and a government building that belongs to all of us. No he cannot invite whomever he wants, not morally or legally.

Jolyon Maugham pretends not to know the difference between post hoc and propter hoc. (Maugham or someone else at “Good Law” Project, but I doubt the someone elses are allowed to deviate from the party Jolyon line.)

A freedom of information request by Good Law Project has found that deaths by suicide of trans young people under 18 surged following the withdrawal of gender-affirming healthcare

For years, successive governments have denied an increase in suicides among trans youth following the withdrawal, and criminalisation, of gender affirming healthcare. And, when Good Law Project raised the alarm about rising deaths, health secretary Wes Streeting responded with a review that criticised our figures and attacked our reporting as “dangerous”.

Those of us in or close to the trans community have been to the funerals of those we love. And we have wept together for those we have been unable to save on Trans Day of Remembrance. We know the truth – we see it with our own eyes. And, to us, the decision by Wes Streeting to commission a review into suicides which downplayed the scale of these tragedies was unforgivable. His report denied the reality of trans deaths, as Streeting’s ban on puberty blockers denied the reality of trans lives.

He doesn’t actually say the ban on puberty blockers caused the purported rise in suicides, but he implies it as heavily as he possibly can. Very lawyerly of him, I suppose.

To silence those raising the alarm on rising trans suicides as “dangerous” while ramping up the policies correlating with that rise is an act of grave moral wickedness.

And it’s not an act of grave moral wickedness to act on a new and peculiar idea of what human sexes are by helping teenagers harm their own bodies?

Guest post by Dr. Phage.

We  are all aware of the special alignments of particular academic disciplines.  In “Gender Studies” departments, for example, the listed requirements for majoring in the subject never include any Biology coursework; this is because scholars in this subject do not believe that “gender” has anything to do with Biology.  Similarly, none of the various “This or That Studies” departments require any education in Statistics, because scholars of these disciplines typically define “knowledges” (plural, and including indigenous folk-traditions) in a sense that is independent of what elsewhere is called “data”.  

   Departments are free to define their own subject matter, but I submit that US universities committed a category error when they assigned these departments to the Faculties (or Schools) of Arts and Sciences.  The Sciences, of course, all concentrate on knowledge of the physical world.  And the Arts are no less deeply connected with the physical world: visual Art through the physical materials it uses in painting, sculpture, ceramics, and so on; musical Art through the instruments it uses, and in the physics of sound.  But how, then, can disciplines which assert their complete separation from analysis of the physical world be part of an A & S Faculty?  

   The solution is obvious.  Academies should define a separate School or Faculty of Rhetoric, to include the department of Communications, all the “Studies” departments,  and some other units.  Rhetoric has a venerable academic history, going back to ancient Athens at its height, and much later becoming part of the classic medieval Trivium of university studies.  

Once  “Studies” departments are placed in the Faculty of Rhetoric, their majors will of course receive undergrad degrees of BR rather than BS or BA, better informing putative employers about the nature of their training.  The names of advanced degrees in these disciplines will also be modified to provide such improved information.  Finally, inclusion of these departments in the Faculty of Rhetoric will provide the departments with an intellectual environment appropriate for them.  

   In short, this simple reform of the Faculty assignment of departments will cure 40 years of of ambiguity and confusion in and downstream of the groves of academe.    

 The author was formerly a professor at the University of Washington, first in the A & S Faculty, then in the School of Medicine.  He is currently experiencing an advanced case of emeritis.  

Fascinating. The man who calls himself a woman who is the Greens candidate who wants to use the women’s toilets is this very reasonable and non-threatening fella here:

Always push the lie.

Greens candidate in bid to lift Holyrood’s trans toilet ban

Wait, what? Trans toilet ban? You mean Holyrood has banned trans people from all the toilets?

I bet that’s not what they mean.

A Scottish Greens for the Holyrood election has pledged to work to persuade the Scottish Parliament to lift its ban on trans people using toilets in their lived gender in the building if she is elected in May.

Ah, there it is. After the obfuscatory bilge has misled the reader. Nobody is banning trans people from toilets; the ban is on using toilets for the other sex. No men in women’s toilets, capeesh?

Iris Duane, who is the party’s candidate for the Glasgow Kelvin and Maryhill constituency, in the poll in May, made the call in an interview with The Herald.

Ms Duane, 23, who spoke last week to The Herald’s Unspun podcast, would be the first openly trans woman to become an MSP if she is elected in May.

But would he be the first man to become an MSP? Er, no.

Some firsts, and purported firsts, are not significant. Being the first person to become an MSP while having a tattoo of a stoat on the left buttock is not significant. Pretending to be the opposite sex is equally irrelevant, and vastly more obnoxious, especially when the stolen sex is female.

The rest of the article is a torrent of rehashed bilge, all in the cause of promoting men who pretend to be women. Where are the adults?

Trump throwing his toys out of the crib again.

President Donald Trump says he will not allow the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor to open unless Canada makes significant concessions to the U.S.

Trump said in a Feb. 9 post on Truth Social that the U.S. will open negotiations with Canada, which has footed the entire bill for the $5.7-billion bridge construction project, but believes the U.S. should probably take ownership of at least half of it.

In fact, the bridge is jointly owned by Canada and the U.S., with Canada intending to recoup its upfront construction costs over time, through bridge tolls.

While the US enjoys a free ride, but Trump is pissed off anyway.

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the U.S. with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote.

“With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset.”

We should learn, perhaps, how to use commas like a literate grownup.

Anyway, Canada paid for the construction and Trump still thinks it owes us? How does that work?

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the U.S. with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote.

That’s an F for the semester. “importantly” is not a synonym for “what’s important is”. In fact “importantly” is not anything; it’s not an idiomatic way of saying anything.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Reassigned and replaced by a man.

“While the American people had always rejected the radical-feminist so-called ‘Equal Rights Amendment,’ Team Obama could fast-track their social engineering through the military’s top-down chain of command.”

And replacing women from these positions is not social engineering? All and only men is a neutral, apolitical, unprejudiced position? And each of these women has more experience, talent, and skill than a hundred thousand Hegseths and Trumps.

As Nora Bensahel, a scholar of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, told me, the firing of Davids and other women “is deliberately sending a chilling message to the women who are already serving in uniform….”

I wonder how this effects the morale of the armed forces as a whole? While I can imagine some Trumpistas among the military, there are going to be plenty who will resent the culling of female officers by a know-nothing dweeb like Hegseth, and I can’t help but think that Trump’s vendetta against diversity in all its forms is not going to help with unit cohesion amongst serving minority members, whose existence is to be ignored and hidden behind their Aryan White comrades in arms. Will they be that much less willing to follow illegal orders issued from Berlin Washington? If those tasked with defending the regime no longer feel they are part of the regime, they might be less inclined to fight for it, die for it, or kill for it. This could become very important.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Take notes.

As much as I dislike the wokeism that got our hostess bullied off FTB, I take issue with the frequently repeated trope about how it killed the atheist and skeptics movements. The Men’s Rights Activists who flooded Watson, McCreight, Ophelia, and so many others with personal attacks, cyberbullying, harassment, and threats had dealt these movements their mortal blow long before that. If anything, wokeism just put them out of their misery.

Since the #MeToo movement (remember that?) was briefly mentioned, I was positively surprised to see the #MeToo hashtag gain the traction it did after seeing so many comparable campaigns fizzle out. I was not surprised to see the backlash to #MeToo, which I take to include the “Karen” meme, the “white feminist” meme, the “TERF”/”SWERF” memes, the “sex negative” meme, and, more recently, the “AWFUL”* meme. Nor, for that matter, was I surprised (depressed and disgusted, yes, but not surprised) to see Donald “Grab Them By the Pussy” Trump elected president a few years later. These things are not “fringe”! I predict already now that we will see a similar backlash to the Epstein scandal. As Victoria Smith puts it in HAGS:

It is only when you have witnessed several such Great Reckonings that you start to get suspicious. There is a pattern: everyone chants the slogans and uses the hashtags; a few ritual sacrifices are made; certain voices start to worry things are going too far; in one or two very well publicised instances, things do indeed go too far; the ‘going too far’ incidents are considered far greater tragedies than all the instances in which women have never seen justice at all; people start to talk about things being ‘post-#MeToo’ or ‘after Rotherham’, as though we have witnessed an irreversible cultural shift; everyone will shake their heads at the fact that ‘no one’ ever noticed the problem before. In practice, very little changes.

Be prepared for the inevitable moment when the current focus on the the horrific abuses of women and girls by powerful men once again starts giving way to the “gone too far” narrative, the “hysteria” narrative, the “witch-hunt” narrative etc.

* Affluent, White, Female, Urban, and Liberal.

Is the shift starting to happen?

Vote for the bomb guy.

A man who was convicted of a terrorist offence has defended standing in local elections this year, saying he understands “people’s speculation and concern”.

Shahid Butt was found guilty of a plot to blow up the British consulate in Yemen in 1999, but said the charges were fabricated and that he was tortured into making a confession. Both Labour and Conservative politicians raised concerns about his suitability when he announced his plan to stand as an independent candidate, in the Sparkhill ward on the Birmingham City Council.

…

Speaking to BBC Politics Midlands this week, Butt said: “I’ve always maintained from day one, that these were false, fabricated charges that were put against me, I was tortured into signing a confession.”

What’s he been up to lately? Good peaceful friendly things?

Butt has been a controversial figure more recently, when he encouraged Birmingham Muslims to protest against a football match in November between Aston Villa and the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv. He was accused of using language which might have encouraged physical confrontations.

Social media footage from the protest showed Butt saying: “Muslims are not pacifists… if somebody comes into your face, you knock his teeth out.”

Protesting the football match why? Because…Jews?

Not someone I would feel happy voting for, I must say.

Sureena Brackenridge, the Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East, said: “I am stunned that someone who was found to be a terrorist, who planned to blow up a British consulate, is now putting himself in a position to represent people of Sparkhill.”

Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Yardley in Birmingham told ITV News: “The idea that people who have been convicted of terror offences underplaying that as having had a colourful past and standing to represent part of my family in that area, I find that absolutely appalling.”

Think of him as quirky.

Trump explains all.

Trump admitted on Friday night that he did direct aides to post a racist video on his social media account that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, but claimed that he did not see that part of the video, which was near the end of a 62-second clip that otherwise repeated conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss.

Although the White House initially defended the video in a statement from the press secretary, the clip was later deleted and reporters were told that it had been posted, without the president’s knowledge, by an aide.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump undercut those efforts by his aides to explain away his own behavior, telling reporters that he did approve posting the video. “I looked at it, I saw it and I just looked at the first part,” the president said. “I didn’t see the whole thing; I guess during the end of it there was some kind of a picture that people don’t like. I wouldn’t like it either.

Classic. He didn’t see it, he guesses there was some kind of a ??, people don’t like it, he wouldn’t like it either. He doesn’t know what it is but he does know he wouldn’t like it. He contradicts himself every 5 or 10 or 20 words.

But I didn’t see it, I just, I looked at the first part … then I gave it to the people. Generally they look at the whole thing, but I guess somebody didn’t and they posted – and we took it down.”

Dang, there was a mob in there in the soshul meedeea room. The people posted it, and we took it down. You’d think they were building a luxury yacht, not pasting a link onto a screen.

Asked whether he would apologize, as even Republican officials have suggested he should, Trump bristled. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” the president who approved the posting of a racist meme on his social media account said. “I mean you give, I look at a lot of, thousands of things,” he added, apparently suggesting that his posts, which are official statements from the president of the United States, are not something he takes much care about.

Which is so funny because he doesn’t have to post anything at all from soshul meeja. It’s not part of his job. It’s something he does to promote himself, not something he does for our benefit. He looks at thousands of things and understands none of them. He could just…stop.

“I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time,” Trump told another reporter who pressed him on whether posting a racist video was a wise political move.

That is, by the way, the least true thing anyone has said in a long time.

Pedantic note: This thing about “depicting” people as apes – news flash: we are apes. Chimps and gorillas are our closest relatives. We’re all Hominidae.

More from Jeffrey and co:

The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.

A typical email from Epstein to a man in his network will say: “Head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee Thorbjorn Jagland will be staying in ny with me. You might find him interesting.” Epstein is writing to Richard Branson in characteristic style, combining some casual showing off with an offer to share access to someone else influential.

A typical email from Epstein to a woman might say: “Take a selfie of your pussy and send.”

…

For women, these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded. They provide salutary insights into what a set of distinguished global figures think and say about women when they assume the women aren’t listening.

Salutary but not exhilarating.

There are two groups of people in the Epstein files. The men: the billionaires, the tech entrepreneurs, the bankers, statespeople, politicians, leaders, people who need to be cultivated because they offer Epstein ways to strengthen his network of influence. And the women, who exist as insignificant plus-ones, or as people to whom he doles out money because they are providing him with services. Women feature as objects to be looked at and improved – teeth seen to, weight lost, STDs treated, features fixed. (“You might want to see a doctor about reducing the nose a little before you turn 23,” Epstein suggests to an unnamed woman in July 2017.) The emails show that Epstein is often irritated by the women.

People who matter on one side, and people who exist to serve the people who matter on the other.

It’s very master and servant. The rich, the landowners, the squires, the archbishops – they are real, and they matter. The people who do the laundry of the squires and archbishops – they are not real in the way of the squires. They exist, they’re there, but they’re like shadows, or the undead. You couldn’t possibly have a conversation with them, because what would they say?

Pete Hegseth has kicked all the women out of top jobs in the military. Yes all of them.

The Naval Academy was founded in 1845, but didn’t admit its first class of women until 1976. The head of the school is known as the superintendent, and Annapolis would not get its first female admiral in that position until 2024. Now the first woman to serve as the “supe” has been reassigned and replaced by a man, and for the first time in the academy’s history, the role went to a Marine. Last week, the Navy removed Vice Admiral Yvette Davids from her post and replaced her with Lieutenant General Michael Borgschulte.

…

Trump and Hegseth have been on a firing spree throughout the military, especially when it comes to removing women from senior positions. This past winter, the administration fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female Coast Guard commandant; and Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, who was serving as the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, all within weeks of one another. I taught for many years at the U.S. Naval War College, where I worked under its first female president, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. In 2023, she became the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee—and then she was fired in April, apparently in part because of a presentation she gave on Women’s Equality Day 10 years ago.

At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military’s top jobs. They are not likely to be replaced by other women: Of the three dozen four-star officers on active duty in the U.S. armed forces, none is female, and none of the administration’s pending appointments for senior jobs even at the three-star level is a woman.

It’s better that way. Women are inferior.

Discerning this pattern does not exactly require Columbo-level sleuthing. Hegseth’s antipathy toward women in the armed forces was well documented back in 2024 by none other than Hegseth himself. In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth decried what he believed was “social engineering” by the American left: “While the American people had always rejected the radical-feminist so-called ‘Equal Rights Amendment,’ Team Obama could fast-track their social engineering through the military’s top-down chain of command.”

Women, plus Obama. Can you blame Hegseth for being furious?

As Nora Bensahel, a scholar of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, told me, the firing of Davids and other women “is deliberately sending a chilling message to the women who are already serving in uniform, and to girls who may be thinking about doing so, that they are not welcome—even though the military would not be able to meet its recruiting numbers without those very same women.”

Never mind, all those fired women will have extra babies and soon the recruiting numbers will be back up.

I’m seeing a lot of discussion of Rebecca Watson’s video about Epstein and Lawrence Krauss and Dawkins and the string of women Dawkins has burned through and CFI and That Conference and and and.

It’s worth a watch.

Wait.

First six seconds of this:

“But as he said, it wasn’t him, he’s got a big group that’s posting”

Stop right there.

WHY?

Why has he got a big group that’s posting on his social media?

Why has he got a big group that’s posting on his social media?

He doesn’t have to post anything on social media. It’s not part of the job. It’s not a requirement. And if he’s going to do social media he sure as hell should not be farming out the job to random occupants of the West Wing.

And if this is a random bunch of aides why do they do a torrent of posting late at night and nothing the rest of the time?

Do we really believe it’s not Trump staying up late and sharing every rude obnoxious unfunny tedious bit of garbage he can find before crashing?

No we do not.