Difference? What difference? I don’t see any difference? Do you see any difference?

The Catholic church is evil chapter eleventy billion.

Washington’s Catholic leaders sued state leaders and county prosecutors Thursday, alleging that a controversial new law requiring priests to break the confessional seal to report suspected child abuse is “a brazen act of religious discrimination.”

Oh piss off you evil theocratic shits. Your “confessional seal” has protected who knows how many child rapists and torturers.

The new law adds clergy to a list of other professions, such as health care workers and school personnel, who are mandatory reporters of abuse. But the church’s lawsuit pushes back on a provision of the law that does not allow carve-outs for things said during confession, and exposes priests to potential arrest. 

Long overdue. The church is a goddy Mafia, and it’s about damn time for it to be subject to the same laws as everyone else.

That decision by lawmakers violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, alleges the lawsuit filed in Tacoma’s federal court by leaders and priests in Washington’s three archdioceses, including Seattle archbishop Paul Etienne. It names Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown and a host of local law enforcement officials, who could be tasked with enforcing the law.

Tensions remain over the balance between what the church says violates the sacramental seal of confession and a duty to report child abuse or neglect. The Catholic church has been wracked by a decades-long clergy abuse scandal that led to generations of trauma and the bankruptcy of the Spokane diocese. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice declared the law “anti-Catholic” and worthy of a federal investigation.

The law is anti-priestly rape and official secrecy around and protection of same.

“I’m disappointed my Church is filing a federal lawsuit to protect individuals who abuse kids,” Ferguson said in a statement to The Seattle Times.

That’s how his church is though.

Terrence Carroll, a retired King County judge who co-founded Heal Our Church, an alliance of practicing Catholics seeking reforms, said the lawsuit filed Thursday is part of a “broader resistance to transparency” by the church.  “The issue comes down to what’s more important here, transparency on the part of the church and the protection of children, or this small part of the confession?” Carroll said. 

Carroll said that while confession is part of religion, the actual protection of children is not that separate from the practice of religion, and he believes the church should be prioritizing the protection of children.  He noted that the Washington state Constitution guarantees religious freedom, “except for licentious behavior,” and said he believed the DOJ’s claims of anti-Catholic bias are “propaganda” that may have encouraged the bishops to file the lawsuit. 

Because Trump and his people are in favor of protecting Catholics who abuse children.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, has previously said the bill was crafted after she read a 2022 InvestigateWest article detailing how Washington Jehovah’s Witnesses hid child sexual abuse for decades. Similar versions of the bill had failed in previous legislative sessions and were the subject of heated lobbying by child advocates and the Catholic church during the 2025 session.

It’s in the nature of religious sects to do this. Religion is special, it’s mysterious, it’s magical, it’s holy, it’s taboo. It mandates belief in supernatural beings and events, and it protects itself first and people later. It’s a very long con.

Fake fake fake fake.

A US government report on children’s health cited “totally fabricated” studies to back up its findings, academics wrongly listed as the authors of those studies have said.

First released on 22 May, the report detailed causes of a “chronic disease crisis” among children in the US. An amended version was issued on 29 May after digital outlet NOTUS found it had used seven non-existent sources.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there were “formatting issues” and the report would be updated, but it did “not negate the substance of the report”.

Uh, no, citing sources that don’t exist is not a “formatting issue” – and citing sources that don’t exist very much does negate whatever the “substance” of the report may be. Why? Because fakery=fakery. Fictional sources=a zero grade.

Katherine Keyes, an epidemiology professor who told news agency Reuters she was also wrongly named as an author, said: “It does make me concerned given that citation practices are an important part of conducting and reporting rigorous science.”

Because of course they are, because for one thing they’re a red flag for other cheating, and for another thing they cast doubt on the truth of the claims.

Hmmm. Who is really biased and abusing power?

A federal appeals court on Thursday granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily pause a lower-court ruling that struck down most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The Trump administration had earlier told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that it would seek “emergency relief” from the Supreme Court as soon as Friday if the tariff ruling [were] not quickly put on pause.

The judgment issued Wednesday night by the U.S. Court of International Trade is “temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers the motions papers,” the appeals court said in its order.

…

The three-judge trade court panel — which included a Trump appointee — had invalidated all of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs and other duties.

The judges found that the 1970s-era law Trump had invoked to enact those tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, does not “confer such unbounded authority” to presidents.

The nationwide, permanent block they imposed covered all of the retaliatory tariffs that Trump issued in early April as part of his sweeping “liberation day” plan to reshape international trade with the rest of the world.

And by “sweeping” they mean lawless, reckless, dictatorial, and grotesque.

At the same time, the Trump administration aimed a barrage of criticism at the trade-court judges, accusing them of bias and abusing their power.

“The Supreme Court must put an end to this,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday afternoon. “These judges are threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage.”

Uh, no, sorry. It’s Trump who is doing that, with the help of bozos like you.

Guest post by Ryan Richter

At this point I hope we have all imagined the possibility of a future with economic prosperity and without fossil carbon-based motor fuels. You can use electricity and renewable sources for most things. OK, but what about everything else? Motor fuels and fossil carbon electricity generation aren’t the whole story by a long shot. There’s steel and aliminum, oh and also cement. And then there’s organic chemistry more generally – can’t you do that without burning the oil? Well, no, not today you can’t. This is what I want to take the knife to. We have the tools, but I don’t hear many people talking about how to really use them to full effect.

I’m talking about nuclear power of course. We certainly want to take the fullest advantage of solar power and other renewable sources as well. I want to additionally propose the use of radioisotope heater units to replace a number of unobvious carbon sources in today’s heavy industry. Nuclear advocates have recommended the reprocessing of fuel to extend the nuclear fuel cycle in the past, but relatively little has been done so far. This lackadasical effort needs to end yesterday, of course. I fully recommend an expanded nuclear fuel cycle including reprocessing and fast breeder reactors, and maybe also a thorium cycle. But in addition to that, I want to re-propose an old idea (I don’t know where it originates) in a new context – not only extracting and fully using the actinides in the fuel cycle, but also extracting the fission products to make Fission Product Radioisotope Heater Units, FPRHUs.

Now let me change tack for a bit and talk about some very nasty fossil CO2 sources in heavy industry today. We use coal to make iron and steel. We use petroleum coke to make aliminum. We have lime kilns which release the CO2 from carbonate rocks, which is perhaps the very worst. And then there’s the awful oil-powered oil refinery. If you’re not familiar with the industry (I have never been any part of it), you may not have heard any of the details, so let me try to explain from what I’ve been able to piece together.

My explanation of the oil refinery will focus on what I consider to be the two fundamental processes in a refinery that’s not dedicated to motor fuels, which is a difficult thing to imagine based on what engineers build today. One is called the hydrotreater, which is an industry name for the high-pressure hydrogenation of hydrocarbons[1][3][4][5]. The so-called naphtha hydrotreater seems to operate somewhere around 100 atmospheres and maybe 300-400 celcius ([1][3][5] – this is difficult. According to [1] and [3] the hydrocarbons are pressurized to ~40atm and by [5] the H2 to ~200atm, which makes sense as H2 is cheaper to compress. A similar process is Hydrocracking [9] which is around 120atm). There is also a diesel or lube oil hydrotreater which operates at more extreme conditions [5] and processes a smaller feed. These hydrotreaters are fed with hydrogen from a reaction which overall is basically

CH4 + 2 H2O -> 4 H2 + CO2 (where does the CH4 come from? – not natural gas)

The second fundamental process is called the olefins unit pyrolysis furnace [8], which operates at more like 30 atmospheres and maybe 800 celsius. This is simply the thermal decomposition of hydrocarbons, in this case only the lighter naphtha mixture. The feeds to both of the fundamental precesses are highly miscellaneous mixtures of hydrocarbons, although not exactly the same. The hydrotreater in effect comes first, after the main fractionation (called the crude unit [1][2][7]). The feed from the crude unit typically still includes organic sulfur and nitrogen, and the hydrotreater is the sledgehammer for dealing with that, as sulfur comes out as H2S and N as NH3. But the other effect of the hydrotreater is to add hydrogen across carbon-carbon double bonds to make single bonds, although this makes it sound far more surgical than it is. On the other hand, the pyrolysis furnace in effect cooks hydrogen out – how many things can a hydrocarbon decompose to? So in that one you make double bonds, and also triple bonds, and some coke too no doubt, and some hydrogen, and also some methane. Well, more than a little bit in fact. The hydrotreater is also a prodigious producer of methane, being a hydrogenator after all. So that’s where the methane comes from. As it happens, only a little of it is needed to make the hydrogen that’s needed. A third process is called Hydrocracking [9], essentially a combination of the above two in one reactor, said to occur around 450 Celsius and 120 atmospheres.

So neither of the fundamental processes is especially chemically efficient. And if you’ve looked at the reaction conditions you can see that some thermal and mechanical power inputs are required also, not a small amount. What a horrible mess. How can you ever make money doing something like that – OH WAIT. You can burn the methane. So at the inlet to the hydrotreater there’s a jet engine the size of a large truck burning, in effect, the same methane that’s cooking out of the reaction. The naphtha hydrotreater at a medium size refinery costs over 200 megawatts to run (I swear I saw this number somewhere but now I can’t find it again) – but not in money. The pyrolysis furnace is a very similar story. This is where ethylene for plastics comes from. And the big embarrasment is that you have to send the same oil to the hydrotreater fisrt even though the pyrolysis furnace undoes the single bond-double bond thing. The cruse unit – the tallest tower – also has a house-sized burner fed by the so-called refinery fuel gas mix. All the other hundreds of other smaller towers also have their fuel gas-powered preheaters or compressors. It’s said that you can turn crude oil into anything, but it you want to turn all of it into polyethylene you have to, basically, burn half or more of it first, counting carbon atom by carbon atom. But in every case what you need is a concentrated heat source, and so I propose the FPRHU. There is a question about the effect of ionizing radiation on the chemical process, but I have a surprising answer for that.

What’s needed is a convenient high-temperature heat transfer material, and I have no idea what chemical engineers would propose based on that criterion alone. But I will propose the use of molten silicates for another reason. The Radioisotope Silicate Foundry (RSF) can be the basis of a carbon-free construction industry. The idea is that the RSF is located at a nucear fuel reprocessing facility and uses its freshest isotopes to produce both a high-temperature heat source for co-located heavy industry and a precast building material to replace concrete. This may not sound remotely believable based on the scale of recently-imagined nuclear reprocessing efforts, but I propose a great increase in that. Another benefit here is that all of this activity, together with the complete nuclear fuel cycle for actinides, reduces the final amount of nuclear waste produced for each ton of uranium mined.

It starts to become clearer what the overall picture looks like. Let me say a little bit about the metals first before sharpening the chemistry picture a little more. You need a reducing agent to make metals. One possibility is a electrical/nuclear biomass charcoal furnace. What biomass you would want and how much would be available is an interesting question I don’t know much about, as the chemical quality of the charcoal is important. An interesting alternative is hydrogen produced either by electrolysis of water or the pyrolysis of fossil carbon methane, not yet fully developed.

The steel mill coke ovens also produce a coal gas which is now called coke oven gas [6], and is used in the steel mill to het furnaces much the same as the oil refinery fuel gas. This would also be replaced by FPRHU/RSF. Preparing aluminum ore is mainly mechanical and wet chemistry, but iron ores are roasted and that’s a nut to crack. Heat is no problem with abundant FPRHUs, but some carbonates are decomposed here also. This may be on a scale that can be accepted if all other main sources of fossil CO2 are really eliminated. The other possibility is to treat carbonates with a wet chemistry, i.e. to use an acid to release CO2 and then a mineral base to absorb it. That would require support from the chloralkali process, more or less.

Finally, what would carbon chemistry look like? You will still need things like oil and coal to produce a number of things including asphalt and lubricants. Polymers and chemical feedstocks are also needed. Some of this can come from biomass, e.g. you can easily make ethylene from ethanol, although competing with food sources is not necessarily a good idea. Some real new chemical enginnering is needed, to say the least. I would presume butadiene still comes out of oil and coal. You can picture a refinery that processes heavy inputs with FPRHU/RSF heating, and which uses pyrolysis to destroy the methane which is the ultimate waste product. The hydrogen can be used liberally for anything, making iron, whatever. The carbon black has to end up in steel, tires, carbon fibre materials, and on printed pages I guess. There’s another interesting engineering question as to the overall balance between electricity usage and FPRHU, the point of which is that the FPRHUs need to be available on a real market. So in a little more detail, in a nuclear powered oil refinery the compressors would be powered by electricity but the feed preheat would be done by direct radioisotope heating. As I understand, the rule of thumb is that the fission products release about 10% of the heat that the original reactor produced. The thermal efficiency into electricity at a large reactor is around 40%. Waste heat at a power reactor is in the form of low-temperature steam, although some fast breeders may allow for something better – I’m not really sure.

OK, so I hope I’ve shown that it’s basically possible to do things this way, and emit only the smallest amount of fossil CO2 while making all the things we expect to make and have. The extensive handling of radioisotopes within the heavy manufacturing centers will necessitate an increase in automation, but the industry was really heading in that direction anyway. The big question is the capital expenditure. Of course the answer to that is state involvement to some degree – it’s just a question, politically, of what kind of future we want.

My data source for petrleum industry stuff are the reports of the CSB (which has an annoyingly long name), which investigates fatal accidents in the chimical industry in the US. They were created out of the EPA in the Clinton years with a subpoena power to reveal industry secrets. I downloaded personal copies of these when Trump was elected, having seen previous EPA reports disappear under Bush. This turned out to be a good idea, as the older reports are no longer linked from the main page. Other people have made archives. Report number 1 is particularly revealing. If you read only one report about a fatal accident at an oil refinery, make it that one. Number 2 is really shocking in the details and has a hilarious photo. 6 and 7 are weirdly macabre, seeming to describe the same accident at two different places.

[1] BP-Husky Toledo Refinery 2022

[2] Husky Superior Refinery 2018

[3] Tesoro Anacortes Refinery 2010

[4] Silver Eagle Woods Cross Refinery 2009

[5] BP Texas City Refinery 2005 (RHU Unit)

[6] Bethlehem Steel Chesterton 2001

[7] Tosco Avon Refinery 2001

[8] Shell Chemical Deer Park 1997

[9] Tosco Avon Refinery 1997

Paul Krugman is verklempt.

It will take me a while to digest this:

Quoting from the NY Times article then commenting:

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding in two cases that he vastly overstepped his ability to issue those expansive duties under federal law.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump in his campaign to strike a series of agreements that reorient the nation’s trading relationships, setting up a legal fight that could soon reach the Supreme Court.

The cases centered on the president’s use of a 1977 federal economic emergency law to issue many of his steep duties, including some of his tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, and his “reciprocal” rates on much of the rest of the world, which Mr. Trump announced and then suspended in April.

The thing is, it has been obvious all along that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act to justify Smoot-Hawley level tariffs was a massive abuse of power. I mean, since when are 4 percent unemployment and 2.5 percent inflation an emergency justifying the reversal of 90 years of policy? But I guess I just assumed that things like that didn’t matter anymore.

Don’t we all.

A fool named Kate Nash lectures JK Rowling and the rest of us on feminism.

Germ, a spoken word track, consists of a repeated declaration that an unnamed “girl” is “exclusionary, regressive, misogynist” for raising concerns about transgender issues.

Nash has said it is transphobic to exclude trans women from female-only lavatories and sports, and declared in the track that she had “never felt threatened by a trans person”.

The track appears to reference the Harry Potter author posing with a cigar to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are legally male.

It states: “you can call a cigar a cigar” but “a cigar cannot be compared to a human being can it, you f—ing idiot”.

Who is the fucking idiot here? JK Rowling who knows that men are not women, or Kate Nash who thinks men can be women?

Nash also posted this on Instagram:

Since the photo is of JK Rowling I think the Telegraph is being over-cautious in saying the track “appears” to reference her. See the photo? Yeah it’s referencing her. While calling her “GERM” and “it”.

Trans ideology is so enlightened.

Jolyon telling us what feminism is and what we must do and when we must shut up.

Who gets to define an emergency? Why, Donald Trump, of course. No one understands emergencies the way Donald Trump understands emergencies.

The Trump administration blamed “activist judges” on Thursday for blocking Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs as it looks to overturn a major legal blow to the president’s signature economic policy.

On Wednesday a US trade court ruled Trump’s tariffs regime was illegal, in a dramatic twist that could block the US president’s controversial global trade policy.

The ruling by a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority, leaving US trade policy dependent on the president’s whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.

Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress but Trump has so far bypassed that requirement by claiming that the country’s trade deficits amount to a national emergency. This had left the US president able to apply sweeping tariffs to most countries last month, in a shock move that sent markets reeling.

There you go. It’s his job to decide when there’s a national emergency. The rest of us, aka the peasantry, know nothing about it.

The court ruling immediately invalidates all of the tariff orders that were issued through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a law meant to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during a national emergency. The judges said Trump must issue new orders reflecting the permanent injunction within 10 days.

However, the Trump administration has already appealed against the ruling and asked for a pause because it “jeopardizes ongoing negotiations with dozens of countries”. White House officials have hit out at fumed about the court’s authority. “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to Reuters.

…

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, hit out at raged about the ruling in a social media post claiming “the judicial coup is out of control”.

Wrong coup, Deputy.

Some men refuse to take no for an answer.

Imane Khelif is preparing to return to competitive women’s boxing in Eindhoven next month, threatening another major international controversy in a sport still reeling from the Algerian’s gold medal at the Paris Olympics.

Promoting this year’s Eindhoven Box Cup, Dutch organisers have released a poster declaring: “Proud that Imane Khelif is there again to defend her title.”

Don’t be. Enabling a man to cheat his way into a women’s match is not something to be proud of. And it’s his title he’s “defending” aka stealing.

While Khelif has made dramatic legal threats against Elon Musk and JK Rowling, accusing them of “cyberbullying” for their comments on the gender row, the welterweight has still not agreed to a cheek swab test that could resolve the issue beyond doubt.

Huh. You’d think he’d jump at the chance to do a cheek swab test. Unless, of course, he knows he would flunk it.

The Telegraph informs us:

Kate Nash has taken an apparent swipe at JK Rowling in a new pro-trans single. Germ, a spoken word track, consists of a repeated declaration that an unnamed “girl” is “exclusionary, regressive, misogynist” for raising concerns about transgender issues.

Nash has said it is transphobic to exclude trans women from female-only lavatories and sports, and declared in the track that she had “never felt threatened by a trans person”.

And as we all know, if one person has never felt threatened by X, that is irrefutable proof that X is safe for everyone on the planet. There’s a bear racing toward you looking hungry, but don’t worry, I don’t feel threatened by that bear, therefore it won’t eat you.

Aw look at Jolyon telling us how to feminist.

A classic from The Boys’ Book of Feminism.

Trump fires all the historians.

An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history — especially classified and covert actions — remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.

President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.

These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States — or the FRUS, as insiders call it — and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online.

The volume began in 1861, when Congress demanded a full account of Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. More than 450 volumes have been printed since.

Later accusations that the documentation was partisan or incomplete were addressed with a congressional statute requiring the setup of an advisory committee of diverse historians.

Without proper oversight, “a great many of the important facts of recent history still remain secret long after security requirements have expired,” Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) wrote in a June 1953 editorial in the Rutland Daily Herald, pointing to huge gaps in the historical records from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the early 1930s.

“Instead, the American people have had only the charges and counter-charges of political campaigns on which to base their impressions,” Smith said. She said she was worried that the historical narrative will “rely on the politically-colored partisan accounts of some of the participants.”

Sarah B. Snyder, a history professor at American University who specializes in the Cold War and was one of the historians fired by Trump, says the FRUS is “important for historical scholarship.”

“But it’s also important for the reputation of the United States in the world, to be seen as forthright about our country’s history,” she said after receiving the one-line message the other committee members received in April:

“On behalf of President Donald Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position on the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” said one of the termination emails obtained by The Washington Post and sent on April 30 by Cate Dillon, the White House liaison to the State Department.

It’s destruction for the sake of destruction.

Golly. I just cast my tiny vote in this and thus got to see the vote count, which is 96% Yes.

VOTE: Should biological male athletes be banned from competing in women’s sports?

See also: lions and tigers should be banned from kindergartens.

When it becomes too obvious that climate change is real, the thing to do is say we can’t do anything about it.

The world is facing a new form of climate denial – not the dismissal of climate science, but a concerted attack on the idea that the economy can be reorganised to fight the crisis, the president of global climate talks has warned.

André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat who will direct this year’s UN summit, Cop30, believes his biggest job will be to counter the attempt from some vested interests to prevent climate policies aimed at shifting the global economy to a low-carbon footing.

Sort of the way you want to prevent firefighters from fighting the fire.

As the climate crisis has gathered pace, temperatures have risen and the effects of extreme weather have become more obvious, scientists have been able to draw ever more clearly the links between greenhouse gas emissions and our impacts on the planet. So the argument has shifted, Corrêa do Lago believes, from undermining or misrepresenting the science to attempts to counter climate policy.

“It is not possible to have [scientific] denialism at this stage, after everything that has happened in recent years. So there is a migration from scientific denial to a denial that economic measures against climate change can be good for the economy and for people.”

The rise of populist politicians around the world has fuelled a backlash against climate policy, most clearly seen in the presidency of Donald Trump in the US, where he has set about cancelling policies intended to boost renewable energy and cut greenhouse gases, and dismantling all forms of government-sponsored climate-related institutions, including scientific research labs.

It’s not his problem, it’s his grandchildren’s problem, so why should he care?

Bad Kennedy informs us that all the scientific journals are “corrupt” and it’s only the fake ones that are any good, so he’ll be the all-fake boss of Medicare and the rest of it.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he may bar government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, instead proposing the creation of “in-house” publications by his agency —the latest in the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific institutions.

“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast. He also described the journals as being under the control of pharmaceutical companies.

The three journals he named, all established in the 1800s, publish original, peer-reviewed research and play a central role in disseminating medical findings worldwide. JAMA, published by the American Medical Association, and the Lancet each say they receive more than 30 million annual visits to their sites, while the New England Journal of Medicine says it is read in print and online by more than 1 million people each week.

Well exactly, that why we have to ignore them and instead turn to Bad Kennedy’s chosen quacks.

The podcast episode was released soon after Kennedy bypassed the CDC and declared that his department would stop recommending the coronavirus vaccine for healthy pregnant women and children.

Last week, the administration released what it called a “MAHA report” that challenged mainstream medical consensus on issues such as vaccines. Medical experts said some of the report’s suggestions stretched the limits of science, The Washington Post reported, while several sections of the report offered misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.

Science-based medicine is too elitist, is that it? Good medicine is the medicine endorsed by rich brainless monsters like Kennedy and his bloated puppet-master.

Men in women’s toilets: yes or no?

Murdo Fraser sees lawsuits in the future.

The announcement last week from the author JK Rowling that she has established a women’s fund to support legal cases for women who wish to protect their sex-based rights should be causing sleepless nights for Scottish Government ministers, and for the finance directors of public bodies such as local authorities and NHS boards.

All these organisations are now at risk of litigation which could see extensive payouts of taxpayers’ cash to women whose rights have been denied. Rowling’s generosity is entirely in character with her robust stance in speaking up for women who have suffered discrimination because of their gender-critical views.

This latest initiative will mean that those, like NHS Fife nurse Sandie Peggie, who have lost out simply because they refused to quietly share spaces with biological men, will now be able to access funds to help them stand up to authorities who have endless sums of taxpayers’ money to defend legal cases.

All this just to get back to the normal state of things where men didn’t go into women’s toilets unless they felt like risking arrest.

One body which moved quickly, and appropriately, to ensure that the law was complied with was the Scottish Parliament itself. Earlier this month the Presiding Officer, Alison Johnstone MSP, set out an interim position in response to the court ruling, making it clear that toilets designated as male or female only are to be interpreted as meaning biological sex, whilst ensuring that there will be gender-neutral facilities available to everyone, including members of the trans community.

Why call them “members of the trans community”? Why not just “trans people”? Why do they get that extra bit of cuddling? He didn’t say “members of the male community” or “members of the female community” so why the trans one? Why do people keep on giving them extra hugs of this kind?

This ruling has now been challenged by some 17 MSPs from the SNP, Green, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties (no Scottish Conservatives were daft enough to sign up) in an open letter expressing “deep concern” about the decision, which they claim risks exposing trans and non-binary individuals to humiliation, harassment or worse.

What about the risks of exposing women to humiliation, harassment or worse? Why is that risk totally acceptable while the putative risk to men in skirts is not? Why are there still two sets of laws and norms and concerns, one for those tiresome people known as women and the other for members of the communniny communniny?

The letter has been written on the basis of legal advice from the ironically titled Good Law Project, headed up by the one-time fox-killer Jolyon Maugham KC, currently involved in an online spat with Rowling which might well end up with him being on the wrong end of a writ for defamation.

Far better lawyers than either I or the Good Law Project have been clear that the EHRC’s interim guidance accurately interprets the Supreme Court judgment, and it is disappointing to see this group of MSPs relying upon such poor-quality legal advice.

I would choose a stronger word than “disappointing.”

NPR is suing.

National Public Radio on Tuesday sued President Donald Trump over his executive order to cease all federal funding for the nonprofit broadcaster.

Trump’s May 1 order violates the First Amendment’s protections of speech and the press and steps on Congress’ authority, NPR and three other public radio stations wrote in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C.

The order “also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information,” according to the legal complaint against Trump and a handful of top officials and federal agencies.

NPR and three of its member stations — Colorado Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio and KSUT Public Radio — want Trump’s order permanently blocked and declared unconstitutional.

It “expressly aims to punish and control Plaintiffs’ news coverage and other speech the Administration deems ‘biased,'” attorneys for the news outlets wrote. “It cannot stand.”

Unless the whole system is already so hamstrung by Trump that he can do whatever he wants no matter how unconstitutional it is.

It’s odd to see a human rights lawyer admitting that it didn’t occur to him to think about the trans issue from the point of view of a woman.

I am a human rights lawyer and professor at King’s College London. Until 2018, I supported all the demands of the transgender-rights movement. But since then, I have changed my mind.

Why? Because I finally understood that some demands conflict with the rights of women and are therefore unreasonable.

That’s quite the admission – that it took him a long time to realize that some trans demands conflict with women’s rights. It’s not as if we’re a tiny niche demographic, like Shaker biracial left-handed Indigenous lesbians or something. Women are quite noticeable in the population, and yet still men forget to look at things from our point of view.

I assumed that whatever the transgender community demanded must be reasonable.

They knew what they needed. It did not occur to me, as a man, to put myself in the shoes of a woman, encountering a “legal woman” with male genitals in a women-only space.

That’s so odd. It’s good that he admits it, but it remains very odd. Why are we so invisible? How do even human rights lawyers forget to take our views into account?

All the same bad stuff only much worse this time.

In President Trump’s first term, the Pentagon opposed his desire for a military parade in Washington, wanting to keep the armed forces out of politics.

But in Mr. Trump’s second term, that guardrail has vanished. There will be a parade this year, and on the president’s 79th birthday, no less.

The current plan involves a tremendous scene in the center of Washington: 28 M1A1 Abrams tanks (at 70 tons each for the heaviest in service); 28 Stryker armored personnel carriers; more than 100 other vehicles; a World War II-era B-25 bomber; 6,700 soldiers; 50 helicopters; 34 horses; two mules; and a dog.

Yay! The dictator gets to parade the toys this time! There’s nothing like a Stalinist military display to make us all feel safe.

The Army estimates the cost at $25 million to $45 million. But it could be higher because the Army has promised to fix any city streets that the parade damages, plus the cost of cleanup and police are not yet part of the estimate. While $45 million is a tiny fraction of Mr. Trump’s proposed Pentagon budget of $1.01 trillion for fiscal year 2026, it comes as the administration seeks to slash funding for education, health and public assistance.

Not to mention its shutting down of USAID.