Women and girls who don’t like it should just go away and find something else to do.

Former Australian cricket captain Alex Blackwell says female players who do not want to play alongside a transgender athlete should find another sport to play.

…

In an exclusive interview with Macquarie Sport Radio‘s Cam Reddin, Blackwell urged women and girls who did not feel comfortable playing or changing alongside trans players to play something else.

“They can choose to go to a sport they’re more comfortable with. It’s up to them,” Blackwell told Macquarie Sports Radio.

“To deprive [transgender people] of access to sport would be wrong. We won’t be discriminating based on trans or gender diverse identity,” she said.

Blackwell rejected suggestions some female players may feel disadvantaged under these rules.

But it’s not about just feeling disadvantaged, let alone “uncomfortable.” It’s about being at a disadvantage: the well-known physical disadvantage without which men would never have been able to dominate women in the first place.

Grame Wood at the Atlantic tries to figure out That Photo from El Paso – the one in which Trump is grinning and thumbs-upping.

First there are the smiles, so chipper in the aftermath of mass murder. For some reason, this Trump smile calls to mind the one in his famous tweeted portrait in which he’s eating a taco bowl (“I love Hispanics!”) served by Trump Tower Grill. Then there is the thumbs-up, also present to signal approval of the taco bowl, and in this case to signal approval of what, exactly? The narrow survival of the infant? The heroism of the hospital staff and first responders who cared for the wounded? Somehow neither of these possibilities seems quite right, and contemplation has brought me no closer to a better answer.

Wood is overthinking it. Trump is not complicated. He’s just doing an inappropriate bizarre insulting thing because he’s too stupid to do anything else. Camera – pose – do thumbs-up and grin like a good sport. It’s no more than that. He doesn’t connect things, so he doesn’t connect the hospital photo with the reason he’s at the hospital, he just sees a camera and some people arranged in front of it. It’s hard to overestimate how thick he is; he’s always thicker than we can believe.

In the immediate bereavement of an infant’s parents, nothing is needed but respectful silence. This is never truer than for a man like Trump, who cannot speak without giving offense and enjoying it. The photograph was released by Melania and could have been taken in the spirit of mourning that the occasion deserved, or it could have been taken not at all. It is one of the most twisted things I have seen in a long time.

Yes but he did the same thing in Parkland. I remember posting some of those photos, and they were exactly the same.

This one for instance:

Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Two years ago Taylor Dumpson was elected student government president of American University –

the first black woman president in the school’s history. The day she took office, several bananas with racist messages were found hanging from nooses.

The nooses drew headlines, which got the attention of white supremacist Andrew Anglin, the founder and publisher of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

Four days after the bananas were found on the American University campus, Anglin encouraged his followers to troll Dumpson in a Daily Stormer post.

Alongside her picture, Anglin posted links to Dumpson’s personal Facebook page and the AU student government Twitter account, encouraging his readers to “let her know you fully support her fight against bananas.”

So they did. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Anglin and one of his followers have to pay Dumpson over 700k.

In her decision, US District Judge Rosemary Collyer said that Anglin’s actions “were racially motivated and intentionally resulted in a campaign of racial and gender harassment.”

“The extent of the troll storm was significant and Mr. Anglin, through the Daily Stormer, intended that result or was reckless in his actions,” said Collyer.

This ruling comes a day after a Montana judge entered a final order that Anglin pay $14 million to another woman he encouraged his followers to harass.

Anglin appears to be in hiding.

Lindsay Shepherd tweeted a video clip of Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv in the act of planning a new way to harass minority women in service jobs.

What Yaniv says in the clip:

I was just at the Pacific Center, Mall, and I went to New York Fries, and this is going to be on my next human rights complaint, but I asked for some fries, and they literally said
“Not for you, sir, you’re, uh, you’re trans gender” – they put it like that.

Notice the stumble at “you’re” – is that a tell that he’s making it up? Did he stumble because he forgot what he’d planned to make “them” say?

Shepherd’s commentary:

I just called the manager of New York Fries to see if this was true. It’s not. The manager witnessed this interaction. All that happened was that Yaniv approached (surprise, surprise) a female Indian cashier, ordered & then left quickly, & Yaniv’s mom came & yelled at them

Yaniv already filed a complaint with New York Fries head office. Manager said his staff doesn’t even really know the word “transgender” so they wouldn’t have said that, and that working in downtown Vancouver they are accustomed to serving transgender and disabled people

When are Yaniv and his mama going to be arrested for harassment and making false allegations?

Maaaaybe we can begin to see the problem now?

No, of course not, that’s just silly.

Guy walks into a Walmart carrying an assault rifle and wearing body armor. April Fool! In August! 6 days after another guy murdered 20 people in a Walmart with an assault rifle while in body armor. It was a test. That’s all, just a test. What’s everybody so riled up about? He was testing Walmart’s loyalty to the sacred right to carry assault rifles everywhere.

“I wanted to know if that Walmart honoured the second amendment,” the 20-year-old told police after his arrest.

Prosecutors have charged him with making a terrorist threat.

If found guilty, the charge could result in a four-year prison sentence and a fine of $10,000 (£8,300), Greene County prosecutor Dan Patterson said in a statement.

I bet he scared the bejeezus out of everybody in that store.

Prosecutor Dan Patterson said that while residents of Springfield, Missouri, were allowed to carry weapons, “that right does not allow an individual to act in a reckless and criminal manner endangering other citizens.”

Oh really. How, exactly, does that work? If they’re allowed to carry weapons, how are they supposed to know they can’t carry them into Walmart? If they are allowed to carry them into Walmart, how can all the people there avoid terror and panic and shock? What does it mean to be allowed to carry weapons but not allowed to carry weapons? What were you assholes expecting to happen?

CNN reported yesterday:

The Environmental Protection Agency told staff scientists that it was no longer opposing a controversial Alaska mining project that could devastate one of the world’s most valuable wild salmon fisheries just one day after President Trump met with Alaska’s governor, CNN has learned.

It’s not really “could,” from what I’ve been reading. It’s will. It’s there is no way it won’t.

The EPA publicly announced the reversal July 30, but EPA staff sources tell CNN that they were informed of the decision a month earlier, during a hastily arranged video conference after Trump’s meeting with Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The governor, a supporter of the project, emerged from that meeting saying the president assured him that he’s “doing everything he can to work with us on our mining concerns.”

And “everything he can” is unfortunately a lot, because he considers himself a dictator and acts accordingly and it seems that no one can stop him.

Dunleavy met with Trump aboard Air Force One on June 26, as the President’s plane was on the tarmac in Alaska. The President had stopped there on his way to the G20 summit in Japan.

Four EPA sources with knowledge of the decision told CNN that senior agency officials in Washington summoned scientists and other staffers to an internal videoconference on June 27, the day after the Trump-Dunleavy meeting, to inform them of the agency’s reversal. The details of that meeting are not on any official EPA calendar and have not previously been reported.

Those sources said the decision disregards the standard assessment process under the Clean Water Act, cutting scientists out of the process.

So in other words the decision is illegal, but that won’t matter.

The same day Trump and Dunleavy met in June, the EPA publicly announced that it would begin reconsidering whether to withdraw the Clean Water Act restriction on the Pebble Mine. EPA scientists and staff believed that they would then have weeks or months to reassess previous findings and potentially permanently stop the project, according to the sources.

Instead, immediately after Trump met with Dunleavy, EPA officials received an invitation from EPA headquarters to attend the video conference the next day, June 27.
During that video conference, EPA General Counsel Matthew Leopold said that a decision had been made to lift the restriction on the Pebble Mine proposal and that no further consideration of the matter was needed, sources said.

“I was dumbfounded,” an EPA insider said. “We were basically told we weren’t going to examine anything. We were told to get out of the way and just make it happen.”

Even some Republicans think this is outrageous.

Christine Todd Whitman, who served as an Environmental Protection Agency administrator during the George W. Bush administration, said the EPA’s decision to lift the restriction on the mine before the agency’s scientists fully reviewed the matter could violate the Clean Water Act.

“It’s politics trumping policy and good science,” said Whitman, who in 2017 joined two other former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents in opposing the mine due to its estimated environmental impacts. “If this goes forward now with all the holes and the insufficiencies … there’ll be a lawsuit, no question about that.”

Let’s hope it’s successful.

Remember the IPCC report the other day on threats to the food supply? This is a new one, and one that we could easily avoid by just not doing it.

So there won’t be testimony from Jeffrey Epstein. He hanged himself again, and this time he succeeded.

Following news of his death, his alleged victims condemned his suicide and what they described as a lack of justice for them and other accusers.

“I am extremely mad and hurt thinking he once again thought he was above us and took the easy way out … I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that’s really true,” Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, an alleged victim of Epstein when she was 14 in Florida, said in a statement. “God will have his judgement now.”

Jennifer Araoz, 32, who claimed that Epstein raped her when she was 14, called on authorities to “pursue and prosecute his accomplices and enablers.

“I am angry Jeffrey Epstein won’t have to face his survivors of his abuse in court. We have to live with the scars of his actions for the rest of our lives, while he will never face the consequences of the crimes he committed the pain and trauma he caused so many people,” Araoz said.

Michelle Licata, an alleged Florida victim of Epstein when she was 16, said she didn’t want anyone to die.

“I just wanted him to be held accountable for his actions. Simple as that,” she said.

Law enforcement sources told ABC News the criminal case against Epstein will not end with his death. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan will continue to evaluate the evidence and hear from his accusers, the sources said.

But he got away with it almost unscathed for 66 years.

There’s a feeling that maybe maybe maybe just possibly when you go to visit people injured in a mass shooting you shouldn’t pose for photos grinning broadly and making “yeeeha!” gestures. Maybe.

A backlash is building over a picture posted by Melania Trump on Twitter that showed her and Donald Trump smiling broadly while holding a baby who was orphaned in the mass shooting in El Paso.

On a visit to El Paso this week, the president flashed a thumbs-up when posing with the two-month-old, whose parents Andre and Jordan Anchondo were shot dead last Saturday. When the picture was posted on the first lady’s Twitter account on Thursday, it prompted outrage.

What, because it was crass and tasteless and staggeringly unfeeling? But this is Donald Trump and the woman who is still married to him.

The orphaned child, named Paul, had been brought back to the hospital – reportedly at the request of White House during the visit by the Trumps on Wednesday. The baby’s uncle, standing next to Donald Trump, is reportedly a Trump supporter, as was the deceased father.

The baby was injured, breaking his fingers, in the shooting, after his mother died trying to protect him and her body fell on him. His father had dived to try to shield her as bullets flew.

I’m sure the baby enjoyed the outing very much.

Doctors at the Del Sol medical center in El Paso, where some of the survivors are still being treated, later said the president appeared to “lack empathy” after he boasted during the visit that he drew a larger crowd at a January rally in the city than one held by “crazy” Beto O’Rourke.

Yes, that does seem like an appearance of lacking empathy.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on “Cis lesbians…aren’t always into that”.

I have never encountered a CIS woman who thought she was entitled to sex. I have never read an article by a CIS woman who thought that having a vagina meant that lesbians should be attracted to her, nor have I seen any articles by women claiming that having a vagina means that men should automatically find her attractive.

You know who does think that there is some magical formula which obliges women to have to have sex with them? Douchebags.

Common, garden variety and very male douchebags, who women can’t leave alone with their drink.

It doesn’t matter why someone doesn’t want to date you, it doesn’t matter what you feel about them, if they don’t consent they don’t fucking consent, and trying to pressure them into it? That’s not just stereotypical male behaviour, that’s stereotypical fucking rapist.

About those ICE raids on Wednesday…

US immigration officials say they have temporarily released about 300 people who were arrested in a massive raid in Mississippi on Wednesday.

Democrats and rights groups have condemned the arrests as “cruel”.

Nearly 700 workers from seven agricultural processing plants were arrested for allegedly not having proper documentation to be in the US.

Pictures emerged of children crying after being separated from their parents.

The thing about illegal immigration is…it’s not the kind of crime that is powered by greed or malice or aggression…the kind of crime that Trump, for one, commits regularly and without turning a gilded hair. It’s not a real “crime” (as we generally use the word) despite the illegality.

It seems to me it ought to be possible to enforce immigration laws in a humane way as opposed to the cruelest way possible.

Not this way:

Ever since his father was rounded up in the massive immigration work site raids in Mississippi this week, 6-year-old Nery, who is autistic, has refused to eat, according to his older sister.

“He hasn’t eaten anything, he looks at the food and he doesn’t eat,” Stefany, 18, told NBC News on Friday.

…

Stefany said her father was driving his sister to work Wednesday morning, with his 3-year-old daughter Ingrid in the car. They then saw that the food processing plant in Morton, Mississippi where they both worked was being raided by ICE.

Stefany, a high school senior in Morton, said she was in school when she heard the news.

Her aunt called them crying and told her that immigration authorities had found them hiding in their car, she said.

She said could hear her father telling someone “he has six kids and one with autism.”

“I just heard screaming, people screaming at him that they’re going to take him to jail,” she said. “I was just crying.”

Her father and aunt were detained in front of Ingrid, who was sitting in the backseat of the car, Stefany said. It wasn’t until about two hours later that the little girl was released to another aunt, she said.

Stefany said her little sister now keeps saying, “Daddy. Where is Daddy?”

It’s also interesting that the US news media keep calling them “agricultural processing plants” or “food processing plants.” The BBC called them what they really are:

The raids took place just hours before Mr Trump arrived in the majority Latino city of El Paso to mark a mass shooting which left 22 people dead.

About 600 ICE agents arrived at the chicken processing plants, owned by five different companies, in the towns of Bay Springs, Canton, Carthage, Morton, Pelahatchie and Sebastopol.

Ohhh, chicken processing plants. Those places are hell on earth, and they are also one of the most dangerous workplaces in the country.

We don’t have to be this way.

Another sport buckles to the pressure.

Cricket Australia entered the fraught debate about gender identity and sport yesterday, releasing­ separate policies for the inclusion of transgender players in elite and community cricket.

The policy for elite cricket, consistent with the approach taken by the International Cricket Council, requires transgender players to keep their testosterone levels below a prescribed concentration for a 12-month period, sign a statutory declaration committing to their gender identity and to have their cases assessed by an expert panel.

The policy provides a pathway for a transgender woman to one day represent Australia in an Ashes series or World Cup.

That is, the policy provides a pathway for a man who identifies as a woman to displace a woman in an Ashes series or World Cup.

Cricket Australia chief executive Kevin Roberts said the requirements struck a balance between letting transgender players participate and preserving the integrity of women’s competitions.

A balance. In other words, women’s competitions have to give up the “women’s” part for the sake of letting transgender players participate as the sex they are physically not. Must balance the two. Can’t just say no, men cannot play on women’s teams because it would be grossly unfair to women who have only just recently even been allowed to have teams. No no, must “balance” the two.

The policy also advises local clubs and competitions to “give consideration” to players who are transitioning during a season. This means that a cricketer could start a summer playing as a male and end the season as a female.

It makes clear that any club or competition that fails to follow the policy could face prosecution.

Too bad, girls and women; sucks to be you.

The twin policy was welcomed by transgender cricketer Erica James, who didn’t play for many years because she felt uncomfortable sharing a field with men. She now plays for the Universities Women’s Cricket Club in Sydney.

“I think the hardest thing is my own fear about what could possibly happen,’’ she told The Australian. “I have to say my experience has been entirely positive.”

Well, that’s the important thing – that this one guy who wants to live as a woman has had a positive experience displacing a woman from the Universities Women’s Cricket Club in Sydney.

Kirsti Miller, a transgender footballer who plays with NSW country club Broken Hill, said allowing­ transgender players into local cricket clubs would ease the isolation felt by gender diverse people. “We lose our families, we lose our jobs, we lose our houses and quite often our only family left is a sporting family,” she said.

And what about women? What about any isolation a woman might feel when she loses her place on a team to a man who identifies as a woman? What about any frustration and despair at the injustice a woman might feel when a man pushes her out of a women’s team? Does that not count at all? Are women that privileged now?

During his visit to El Paso Trump babbled to people in a hospital about…

…

…his crowd size.

And the visit is now a campaign ad featuring grinning Trump and his nightmare thumb.

Not just any old logic but exciting new trans logic.

Particularly stupid is the “What? Like, they won’t date you just because you’re trans?”

No, fool. Not “just because you’re trans”; because you’re male, with a male body. “Cis lesbians” i.e. lesbians “aren’t always into that” because lesbians are into women, with female bodies. Bullying lesbians for being attracted to women is just plain old homophobia.

If Aisha wants to “date” how about Aisha dates other “trans lesbians”?

Also Pheobe’s final panel is rich. “To turn around and hate trans girls just for being trans, and for loving who they love?” Not wanting to “date” i.e. have sex with male bodies is not hatred. It’s a sexual orientation, which is what lesbian and gay are about. It’s desperately homophobic to try to mandate that that doesn’t apply when it comes to trans people.