Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Trump continues to bully us all.

Donald Trump has once again defended his supporters who participated in a caravan that swarmed a Biden campaign bus driving down a Texas highway on Friday.

One doesn’t consult Donald Trump on what is right and what is wrong.

The FBI confirmed yesterday that it was investigating the highway incident, after videos of the caravan sparked widespread safety concerns.

The president previously appeared to discourage the FBI from investigating the matter, saying in a tweet last night, “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!”

From the right and wrong files: he’s not supposed to interfere with the FBI that way. Presidents are not supposed to tell the FBI what to investigate and what not to investigate. See also: Richard Nixon.

I didn’t even know Johnny Depp was suing The Sun for libel. I barely know who he is, to tell the truth – I don’t think I’ve seen any of his work. Anyway, he was was suing The Sun for libel because The Sun called him a wife-beater, and he lost the suit because hey guess what it turned out to be true.

In the 129-page ruling, the judge, Mr Justice Nicol, said: “The claimant [Depp] has not succeeded in his action for libel … The defendants [the Sun and News Group Newspapers] have shown that what they published in the meaning which I have held the words to bear was substantially true.

The judge added: “I have found that the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms Heard by Mr Depp have been proved to the civil standard.” He also said he accepted Heard’s evidence that the allegations she made against Depp “have had a negative effect on her career as an actor and activist”.

Marvelous, isn’t it? He beats her up and her career is harmed because she said he beat her up.

In 12 out of the 14 incidents of assault reported by Heard, the judge said he found the allegations proved. “I do not regard [the Sun’s] inability to make good these allegations [in the other two incidents] as of importance in determining whether they have established the substantial truth of the words that they published.”

In his conclusion, Nicol cited an email sent by Depp in August 2016 as indicative of the actor’s true feelings towards Heard. Depp’s message said: “I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market … I can only hope that karma kicks in and takes the gift of breath from her … Sorry man … But NOW I will stop at nothing!!!”

Jeeeeeeeezus.

The visceral disgust a lot of men feel toward women never fails to creep me out. “The good one” is spared for a time when the man is infatuated with her, but once that’s over she’s just another dangling overused flappy fish market.

Way to inspire everyone to vote for Trump – start the bullying EARLY.

In a show of support of questionable political value, pro-Trump demonstrators clogged freeways Sunday across the country, from blue states like New Jersey, New York, and Washington state, to red-leaning Texas and purple Arizona. “WHOOO! We shut it down baby! We shut it down!” says one pro-Trump videographer as he pans the camera nearly 360 degrees, showing viewers the group of cars that had brought traffic to a complete standstill along the northbound Garden State Parkway in New Jersey.

Whoooooooo baby! Who knew that if a few people made a plan they could stop traffic on a freeway by simply forming a clump across all the lanes and then slowing to a stop? Besides everyone? The genius and skill and concern for others definitely make me want to vote for the mean blowhard from Queens.

Listen up Warsaw:

About one hundred thousand protesters took to the streets of the Polish capital, Warsaw, on Friday, in the largest demonstration of popular anger directed against Poland’s ruling rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS) since it assumed office in 2015.

Protests have been held across the country since Poland’s constitutional tribunal declared earlier this month that abortions in instances where a foetus is diagnosed with a serious and irreversible birth defect were unconstitutional. Such procedures constitute about 96% of legal abortions in Poland, which already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.

On Wednesday, pro-choice activists called a “women’s strike” that attracted over 400,000 people to protests in over 400 towns and cities across the central European nation.

The Warsaw protest was impressive.

Good, but not over yet: Texas court says no.

The Texas Supreme Court on Sunday rejected, without comment, a bid by three Republican candidates and a GOP activist to toss out almost 127,000 votes cast from drive-thru lanes in the emerging Democratic stronghold of Harris County.

But.

A federal judge will hold an emergency hearing Monday morning — less than 21 hours before polls open on Election Day — to hear arguments on a similar challenge filed by the same group of Republicans, who say that state law prohibits drive-thru voting, so every vote cast from cars during the early voting period should be tossed out as illegal.

At the same hearing, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen will weigh a request by Democratic organizations and the party’s U.S. Senate candidate, MJ Hegar, to join the case in defense of drive-thru voting — and the 126,911 votes cast that way.

The Democrats urged Hanen to reject the GOP lawsuit, filed two weeks after early voting had begun and four months after Harris County announced plans for drive-thru voting, arguing that the challenge was filed too late and that stepping in now would create mass confusion and disenfranchise voters whose ballots were legally cast.

Aw no it’s totally fair to wait until just before the election to file the suit so that there’s a better chance the voters won’t re-do their votes.

Women are a kind of accident that happens to men. Sometimes they can really spoil men’s whole lives!

Her name was Reeva Steenkamp. She was a 29-year-old model who was the face of an anti-bullying campaign and was about to return to her old school to talk to girls about gender-based violence. She was adored by her family. But on Valentine’s Day 2013 she was murdered by her violent, controlling boyfriend. He shot her four times through the locked door of a bathroom in his home, where she was cowering, petrified.

Poor guy. He must have been so upset!

Her future was stolen by a dangerous predator with a history of controlling and abusing women; a former girlfriend has said he used to lock her in his house with no food for hours at a time, call her parents many times a day to track her movements and physically abuse and threaten her to the extent that she feared for her life.

That is the story of Steenkamp’s horrific murder by the Paralympian Oscar Pistorius. But it seems our national broadcaster disagrees. Last week, the BBC began promoting a new four-part documentary series, The Trials of Oscar Pistorius. It launched a trailer that did not mention Steenkamp’s name, but instead featured Pistorius’s “remarkable” sporting achievements, praise from Nelson Mandela and his lie that “he didn’t do it”.

Well, you see, she doesn’t matter, and he does. Women are something that happens to men; they don’t count in any other way.

Accompanying this was a sickening BBC press release that boasted of a series telling the “extraordinary story” of “an international hero who inspired millions” until “he suddenly found himself at the centre of a murder investigation”. “According to Pistorius, the event was a tragic accident, but his troubled past and questionable testimony cast doubt on his innocence,” the BBC tells us. Amid the gushing, his murder conviction is not mentioned once. You could read it and think he got off.

Now if Steenkamp had had the good sense to be a trans woman the BBC would have been falling all over itself to Center her.

This is a dangerous mistake by the BBC that compounds the dominant narrative about men who murder their partners. So often, the stories that get told are of upstanding citizens, loving fathers and respected colleagues who, having been provoked, lose control and lash out in a moment of madness. The tragedy is theirs, not of the women they kill, who are so often cast as the spurned lover or unfaithful temptress.

The truth could not be more different. Professor Jane Monckton Smith, an expert on intimate partner homicide, reviewed 372 cases where men killed their partners. She found almost all these killings shared an eight-stage pattern that began with a pre-relationship history of stalking or abuse, which evolved into a relationship dominated by coercive control and an escalation in control tactics such as stalking or threatening suicide.

…

Two women a week are killed by their partners in England and Wales. Their lives could be saved if they, their loved ones and the police were more aware that coercive control does not just constitute psychological abuse at that time, but could be a red flag for what might happen. Yet the popular narrative perpetuates the idea that these murders are surprising and unpredictable, so there is little we can do to proactively keep women safe from dangerous predators.

Oh well, it’s only women.

What I’m saying. Brownshirts.

North Carolina news:

Alamance County sheriff’s deputies and Graham police pepper-sprayed people — including a 5-year-old girl and other children — who were participating in the “I Am Change” march to the polls on Saturday afternoon.

A march, that is – not a riot, not an invasion, not a terrorist attack, a march.

A racially diverse group of about 200 people walked with a police escort from Wayman’s Chapel AME Church to Court Square, where they held a rally encouraging people to vote. The event was organized by Rev. Greg Drumwright, a Burlington native who leads the the Citadel Church in Greensboro, according to his website.

Ah well there you go – racially diverse; they must be commie soshulist terrorists. Gas’em.

They had a moment of silence for George Floyd, then the cops told them to clear the road.

Then, deputies and police officers used pepper spray on the crowd and began arresting people. Several children in the crowd were affected by the pepper spray.

Melanie Mitchell said her 5-year-old and 11-year-old daughters were pepper-sprayed just after the moment of silence.

She said Graham police approached the crowd assembled in the street and told them to move onto the sidewalk and soon began spraying pepper spray toward the ground. Mitchell’s 5-year-old took off running, she said. Both kids threw up. … The crowd then moved to the courthouse where speeches were being given. But before the speeches concluded, Alamance County sheriff’s deputies began dismantling the sound system and telling the crowd to disperse.

And out came the pepper spray again.

I learned of this via David Frum, the conservative who was a speechwriter for Bush2 and is not a fan of Trump.

They’re his kids, I think. Nat Frum has the video of the woman being teargassed in her wheelchair.

Last days of Weimar.

More on the “Trump Train”:

According to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s Texas campaign, a Biden-Harris campaign bus was heading north on I-35 Friday afternoon on its way from San Antonio to a drive-by event with supporters at Texas State University in San Marcos, followed by a “closing argument” press conference at the Texas AFL-CIO headquarters in downtown Austin, when vehicles with Trump signs and flags surrounded the bus trying to slow it down in the middle of the highway or run it off the road.

Trump is the Bully candidate.

“Rather than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump supporters in Texas instead decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way,” Tariq Thowfeek, Texas communications director of the Biden campaign, said in a statement Saturday.

But by doing so they underscored the vision Trump has for the US, which is a future of endless bullying by Trump and his loyalists.

The Texas Department of Public Safety Saturday night referred questions to the Austin Police Department. The Texas Tribune reported that the FBI is looking into the incident, which occurred in Hays County south of Austin.

Will Barr tell the FBI to stop looking into the incident? I wouldn’t put it past him.

The Texas Republican Party tweeted a statement Saturday evening from Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West in response to an inquiry about the matter from the Texas Tribune. West denounced the implication of the reporter’s question as “more fake news and propaganda.”

“Abby Livingston from The Texas Tribune reached out to the RPT today and asked a question about a Biden campaign bus in her attempt to portray conservatives as violent radicals, even though it is leftists from Antifa and BLM who have been assaulting, robbing, and looting fellow citizens and their property,” the Texas GOP said in its statement, which included the following response from West:

“Three Trump supporters have been executed, one in Portland, one in Denver, and one Milwaukee. A leftist mob attempted to storm the house of the McCloskeys, threatened to burn their house down, rape Mrs. McCloskey, and then kill them both.”

Uh…that never happened. Did it? Last I heard a group of demonstrators walked past the house of the McCloskeys, and found themselves facing guns pointed at them.

“Where is the liberal corporate media’s concern about that real violence? Additionally, none of what your question implies is accurate. It is more fake news and propaganda.

“Prepare to lose…stop bothering me. Maybe (George) Soros can cut y’all another check in 2022.”

That’s the Texas Republican Party chairman, not some rando on the street.

From Ex-Muslims of North America:

A beautiful piece by Yemeni artist Boushra Almutawakel from her hijab series.

Jesus god. I want this nightmare to END.

Smirk smirk smirk goes Trump. His fans scream.

See also:

Hur hur. Political violence is such a hilarious joke.

CNN has more details on the dangerous and terrifying actions by Trump fans in big trucks on a busy freeway:

The Biden campaign bus was traveling Friday from San Antonio to Austin as part of a push to urge Biden supporters to cast their ballots on the state’s last day of early voting.

According to a source familiar with the incident, the vehicles were a “Trump Train group.” These groups are known in parts of the state and organize events that involve their cars with flags and Trump paraphernalia and drive around to show support for President Donald Trump. The group began yelling profanities and obscenities and then blockaded the entire Biden entourage.

At one point they slowed the tour bus to roughly 20 mph on Interstate 35, the campaign official said. The vehicles slowed down to try to stop the bus in the middle of the highway. The source said there were nearly 100 vehicles around the campaign bus. Biden staffers were rattled by the event, the source said, though no one was hurt.

This is early brownshirts territory. Early brownshirts weren’t plotting extermination camps, early brownshirts were engaging in political violence against everyone to the left of the brownshirts.

It seems that Trump vigilantes were out in force in Texas.

Multiple videos posted to social media on Saturday morning apparently show Trump supporters in trucks and cars harassing a Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaign bus in Texas, causing the campaign to cancel a planned event in Central Texas.

Harassing as in surrounding it on the freeway, tailgating it, and sideswiping a smaller vehicle.

A Biden campaign spokesperson told Forbes that the Trump supporters “attempted to slow the bus down and run it off the road.” And one local Democratic Party leader, Katie Naranjo, tweeted photos and said Trump supporters “followed the Biden bus throughout central Texas” and “ran into a person’s car, yelling curse words and threats.”

…

Texas State Rep. Rafael Anchía wrote on Twitter that the Trump caravan was encouraged by Eric Trump on Facebook and claimed that some of those involved were armed.

The police refused to intervene.

Trudeau says “Yes but.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended free speech on Friday, but added that it was “not without limits” and should not “arbitrarily and needlessly hurt” certain communities.

“We will always defend freedom of expression,” Trudeau said in response to a question about the right to show a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, as France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine did.

But. But but but but but.

“But freedom of expression is not without limits,” he added. “We owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and to seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.”

And what does “respect for others” mean? Does it require respecting all their beliefs and taboos and dogmas and fantasies? I ask because if it does, we really don’t have free speech at all.

We do not have the right for example to shout fire in a movie theatre crowded with people, there are always limits,” he argued.

Gee, did he think of that all by himself? I’ve never heard it before.

Distancing himself from the position of French President Emmanuel Macron, Trudeau pleaded for a careful use of free speech. “In a pluralist, diverse and respectful society like ours, we owe it to ourselves to be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others, particularly these communities and populations who still experience a great deal of discrimination,” he said.

Like girls married off at 12? Like women murdered for talking to a man or not wearing hijab? Like people slaughtered for “apostasy” and “blasphemy”? Or like the people who murder them. You can’t do both, and I’d rather respect the victims.

Glosswitch had a shrewd observation on this.

More of this evil:

A Greek Orthodox priest was shot Saturday while he was closing his church in the French city of Lyon, and authorities locked down part of the city to hunt for the assailant, authorities said.

The priest, a Greek citizen, is in a local hospital with life-threatening injuries after being shot twice in the abdomen, a police official told The Associated Press. The attacker was alone and fired from a hunting rifle, said the official, who was not authorized to be publicly named.

…

The reason for the shooting was unclear. It happened two days after an Islamic extremist knife attack at a Catholic church in the French city of Nice that killed three people, and amid ongoing geopolitical tensions caricatures mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad published in satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

…

Antoine Callot, the pastor at another Greek Orthodox church in Lyon, identified the wounded priest as Nikolas Kakavelakis, a 45-year-old father of two. Callot told The Associated Press that the Greek Orthodox community in Lyon has not received any threats, but said he immediately asked police for security protection at his church after the shooting. “We are anxious and anguished. It’s really horrible,” he said. “Now we need to hide and be careful.”

…

Seeking to calm tensions and to explain France’s defense of the prophet cartoons, President Emmanuel Macron gave an interview broadcast Saturday on Arabic network Al-Jazeera. Macron also tweeted that “our country has no problem with any religion. They are all practiced here freely! No stigmatization: France is committed to peace and living together in harmony.”

Therefore bang bang.

Emma Kelly in the Independent (Ireland):

LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) Alliance Ireland launched a Twitter account, claiming to fight for the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Ireland. For the casual social media user, this may seem pretty great. Of course we need people continuing the fight for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. However, note that the T for transgender has been dropped.

What does that mean, “dropped”? Is there some law that says the T must always be yoked to the L and G? No there is not. Lesbians and gay men are allowed to talk about lesbian and gay issues; they are not required to include trans people whenever they do so. Also: take careful note: the two are not the same. In some ways they’re contradictory. Trans dogma as it is currently promulgated is often in tension with lesbian and gay rights – like for instance when it insists that attraction should be to “gender identity” rather than to sexed bodies.

The LGB Alliance Ireland, an offshoot of the LGB Alliance founded in the UK in 2019, wants to “draw a line against the imposition of gender identity theory, which prioritises subjective ‘gender’ over biological sex”, which they believe “undermines the rights of people whose sexual orientation is towards others of the same sex”.

What I’m saying. Straight women don’t necessarily want to have sex with trans men, and lesbians don’t necessarily want to have sex with trans women. None of us should be bullied for it.

Allegations of transphobia are batted away when someone tweets ‘men aren’t women’ or that trans women shouldn’t have access to women’s-only spaces, under the guise of wanting trans people to have rights, but for their rights not to infringe on women’s rights, or that they don’t want children being forced to transition.

Well, I’m here to inform you – trans women are women. Trans men are men. A trans woman being treated as the woman she is does not infringe on my rights as a cisgender woman (that is, I was assigned as female at birth and identify as such) or a queer woman.

She can “inform” us all she likes, but that doesn’t make her claims true. Trans women are in fact not women, but men who identify as women. It’s quite simple, and can’t be vanished out of existence by a mere “are.”

A trans woman being granted refuge in a women’s-only space is not of harm to cisgender women. 

Unless it is.

Where these smug twerps get their confidence is beyond me. I guess Emma Kelly is confident enough that she’ll never need refuge in a women-only space to make such a fatuously sweeping claim, but lots of women don’t have that luxury. Emma Kelly doesn’t know that all trans women are safe around women, nor does she know that men won’t pretend to be trans for the sake of getting into women-only spaces. She can’t know that. Women’s safety isn’t hers to give away in that breezy fashion.

Statistically speaking, Trump’s rallies have probably killed about 700 people.

US researchers have suggested that a series of recent Trump rallies probably produced more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and “likely led to more than 700 deaths”.

The study, released on Friday by scientists at Stanford University, looked at “the effects of large group meetings on the spread of Covid-19 by studying the impact of 18 Trump campaign rallies” over “up to 10 post-rally weeks for each event”.

“Our estimate of the average treatment effect across the 18 events,” they wrote, “implies that they increased subsequent confirmed cases of Covid-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents.

“Extrapolating this figure to the entire sample, we conclude that these 18 rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of Covid-19. Applying county-specific post-event death rates, we conclude that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths (not necessarily among attendees).”

Heads of state inevitably make things happen, including causing deaths and saving lives. Policies have consequences. But holding rallies for one’s own personal benefit while flouting all medical advice on how to prevent contagion during a pandemic…that’s not inevitable, nor is it an outcome of government policy.

Trump decided it would be a clever wheeze to accuse doctors of falsely reporting COVID cases for $$$$$$$$$$.

President Donald Trump on Friday baselessly claimed that doctors are inflating the coronavirus death count for monetary gain while cases, hospitalizations and deaths surge across the country.

“Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say ‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of Covid,’ ” Trump said, without citing any evidence, at a rally in Waterford Township, Michigan.

More money how? How does that work? Where are the stats?

There is no evidence for the President’s claim and the statement represents a stunning attack on medical workers as the country faces its worst public health emergency in more than 100 years. As of Friday evening, more than 90,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19, a new daily high, and at least 929 deaths have been reported, according to a count from Johns Hopkins University. Two states, South Dakota and Wyoming, reported their highest daily death tolls on Thursday.

All so that doctors can take vacations in Paris and Florence…unless there’s too much COVID there of course.

The American Medical Association, without naming the President, condemned claims that physicians inflate the number of Covid-19 patients they treat — calling such rumors “malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided.”

Name him, or at least name his job title. There’s no point in being polite to a deranged evil crap like him.

“The suggestion that doctors — in the midst of a public health crisis — are overcounting COVID-19 patients or lying to line their pockets is a malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided charge,” Dr. Susan Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, said in a written statement.

“Throughout this pandemic, physicians, nurses, and frontline health care workers have risked their health, their safety and their lives to treat their patients and defeat a deadly virus,” Bailey added.

Maddow’s show last night took us inside an ICU in Montana and showed a long heartbreaking soliloquy by a nurse on how emotionally painful it is for the staff. This guy –

God rot Donald Trump.

Updating to add the clip

Ah he’s got a Facebook post on the subject too. Glutton for punishment this guy.

His profile has Seattle Pacific University right at the top. SPU is at the bottom of the hill from me (north side, away from downtown) and across the canal from Fremont, which is now Google city. It’s small, and Christian, and a little bit creepy. I always see invisible scare quotes on the “university” bit.

So I found the controversy button on social media. Pretty neat feature. There were some helpful comments at the beginning of the post. After that, Zuckerberg let the monkeys out.

No, Zuckerberg doesn’t assign people to comment on your posts, chum.

Here is what the Bible teaches. Ephesians 5:23 says, “The husband is the head of the wife.” It also says in verse 28: “Husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself.” The husband should love his wife as he loves himself. This means the husband is responsible for his wife and must take care of her as himself. This means he is responsible for how she votes. The husband should not be abusive or a jerk about this authority and he should seek counsel from his wife on elections. But at the end of the day he is responsible and should make sure she votes just like he does.

Here is what Middlemarch teaches, here is what To the Lighthouse teaches, here is what King Lear teaches, here is what the number 10 bus schedule teaches. Writing is just writing, and it’s useful to keep in mind who wrote the writing, and why, and when, and to what end. The Bible is just another book, compiled from a lot of smaller books, and it’s not something that anyone has to obey the way we have to obey the flight attendants when the plane is about to make a hard landing. It’s just a damn book. I don’t care what Ephesians number number says, and it doesn’t give anyone the right to tyrannize over other people.

The Bible also teaches that the wife is to submit to her husband. Titus 2:5 says: “Wives are to be obedient to their own husbands.” And Ephesians 5:24 says: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands” (ESV). Notice the language there: wives should submit in everything. That is really clear language. The wife should submit in voting issues.

“Blah blah blah blah look it’s right here IN THE BOOK.” We don’t care, sunshine. Act like an adult. Better yet, treat your wife like an adult. Do both.

Brothers, a friendly reminder for life: don’t tell women what to do.

“Make sure” how? Issue her express orders? Order her to show you her ballot before putting it in the drop box or the slot at the polling place?

The husband is not responsible for how his wife votes. Women are not children or dependents; women are responsible for themselves just as men are. The husband is not responsible for how his wife votes at the end of the day or the beginning of the day or at lunch time or at 3 a.m. Adults are adults, and adult couples are not half boss half slave.

Husbands don’t “let” their wives vote one way or another; it’s not their choice to make. Women don’t need permission from men to do normal adult things.

After that he goes into a bunch of boring Jesus crap. What a goon.