From last week:

The Trump administration delivered an ultimatum to leaders of Columbia University on Thursday, threatening to end a portion of its federal funding unless the school implements strong controls over an international studies department and makes significant changes to student discipline standards and other university policies.

In a letter obtained by NPR dated March 13, federal officials from the U.S. Education Department, Department of Health and Human Services and General Services Administration demanded Columbia place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years,” requiring them to create a full plan to do so by March 20. The letter didn’t explain why this department was targeted for an academic receivership, an unusual move in which the control of a program is placed in the hands of university administration.

Hmm. What do Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African have in common. Hmmm, that’s a tough one. Oh I know!

Brownitude. Lack of pallor. A certain beige note to the skin, sometimes shading to umber.

It’s been a tumultuous week at Columbia as the Trump administration appears to have set its sights on the university. His administration has already canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the school, claiming that Columbia failed to police antisemitism on campus in the wake of pro-Palestinian demonstrations last spring. And the high-profile arrest of a former student involved in those protests continues to keep the school in the public eye.

You know, it’s ironic. Columbia used to be considered a bit…how shall I put this…a bit not out of the very top drawer. A bit regrettable. Not sufficiently Yale-like. Can you guess why? [whispers] Too Jewish, dalling.

So they found Edward Said and they went all yay-Palestine and what did it get them. There’s no justice.

Much of the turmoil at Columbia began last spring after university leadership clashed with pro-Palestinian protests on campus, sparked by the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Columbia students, for their part, established encampments on school grounds and took over a university building as they called on university leaders to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Maybe they should focus on something else. Greenland? That’s looking intriguing these days.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a Jewish and pro-Israel advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., called the the Trump administration’s targeting of higher education part of “an all-out assault on the norms of our democracy and against the very existence of critical institutions, programs and services across all sectors of our society.”

By taking this step, and justifying it as protecting Jewish students, the Trump administration is abusing real fears of Jewish Americans about rising antisemitism, Ben-Ami said in a press release.

“That is why it is so painful to see the very real fears of Jewish Americans about rising antisemitism being abused by the Trump Administration to advance a nefarious agenda that undercuts key pillars of the Jewish experience – from civil rights to immigration and higher education,” Ben-Ami said.

Maybe Jared could tell daddy-in-law to shut up about it.

So “DEI” includes discussion of the Holocaust? I did not know that.

Articles about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness, sexual assault and suicide prevention are among the tens of thousands either removed or flagged for removal from Pentagon websites as the department has scrambled to comply with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to scrub “diversity” content from all its platforms.

A database obtained by CNN shows that more than 24,000 articles could be purged, with many gone already. The scrub goes well beyond just the removal of images from the Pentagon’s visual database, known as DVIDS, and includes articles from across more than 1,000 websites hosted by the department.

The Pentagon previously said in a memo last month that it would be removing news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.

Well, those are three inherently squishy words, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Trump’s Pentagon defines them very broadly. The Pentagon bosses don’t want him yelling at them or telling Musk to purge them.

At least half a dozen articles already removed are about the Holocaust and now have the word “DEI” in their URL.

So mentioning the Holocaust is trendy far-lefty bleeding hearty lefty bullshit, is that the thinking? So the Holocaust was not a bad thing?

The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, told CNN that “we are concerned by reports that the Department of Defense has removed Holocaust-related content, including survivor stories, under the label of ‘DEI.’”

“Honoring the memory of the Holocaust and those who survived is not a matter of political ideology — it is a moral imperative and a vital component of education, remembrance, and the fight against antisemitism,” Greenblatt said.

Well it is also a matter of political ideology. How can it not be? The Holocaust is entirely a project of a warped crazed ideology. The Nazis were ideologues down to their toenails. It’s not really possible to “honor the memory” while walling off the originating ideology. The two are necessarily intertwined.

This photo from the US Air Force shows Kitty Saks, a Holocaust survivor, displaying the star she wore during the Holocaust to distinguish her Jewish faith in her home in Norfolk, Virginia, in April 2016. An article about Saks posted to a US Air Force website has been removed as part of the Pentagon’s effort to remove “news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.” This photo is still available on the military’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.

That makes me feel profoundly ill.

I sometimes burble about the jaw-dropping beauties of Seattle and its suburbs, so maybe it’s time for a look at the other side.

A black metal fence, topped with coils of razor wire, surrounds Lam’s Seafood Asian Market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood.

The fencing, which cost $50,000, went up in summer 2023 to stop people from pitching tents and building fires in the parking lot after-hours and breaking into the grocery store and warehouse next door. Security cameras are mounted inside and out, so far costing $15,000 as more are added to cover every checkout lane and newly discovered blind spot.

 “This is the last thing we wanted to do,” said Teizi Mersai, Lam’s business operations manager, gesturing to the fence along South King Street. “It makes us look like a prison. It’s not very welcoming.”

I saw that store and the razor wire just a couple of weeks ago, when I was heading for a massive Goodwill store in the nabe. Just before seeing that, I had seen a knot of police cars and a much bigger knot of people hanging out doing who tf knows what. The combination of the two was very squalid and disgusting and depressing, and also all too common. There’s another hot spot of that kind on another edge of downtown, that I see almost every day because it’s on the bus route from my nabe to the center. The hot spot of that hot spot is another grocery store and I wonder every time I look at it from the bus how it can possibly be surviving. I never see any knots of cop cars there though.

While the fence has done its job keeping people out when the market is closed, it hasn’t deterred the throngs of people, often numbering in the dozens, who gather on the sidewalk to smoke fentanyl or shoot up other street drugs. The fence also can’t stop the rampant EBT fraud that plays out daily in the store and parking lot, with some shoppers agreeing to give cash in exchange for purchases made with state-provided benefits to low-income people, often for 20 to 50 cents on the dollar, said Mersai, who has aided police and state investigators.

Just so. This is what I see from the 2 bus as well: about four blocks crowded with people just hanging around, some with junk laid out on a blanket apparently for sale though I can never figure out who tf would want to buy junk off a blanket on the street.

I’m not a nice person. Seeing this doesn’t cause me to well up with compassion; all it causes is disgust and loathing. I know it shouldn’t, but it does anyway.

Community members in Little Saigon, a roughly eight-block neighborhood on the east end of the Chinatown International District, are grappling with the despairing effects of crime, public drug use, shuttered storefronts and concentrated homelessness. Led by neighborhood group Friends of Little Sài Gòn, residents and business owners have teamed up with Seattle police and other city and county departments to develop a safety plan that addresses root causes of crime and street disorder.

Great. Do that. But in the meantime – why do the police and city and county departments do nothing about the ongoing mess on the streets?

David Tran, whose family bought Lam’s Seafood from the original owners a decade ago, wonders if they can hold out long enough for the Phố Ðẹp funding and safety plan’s interventions to come to fruition.

“It might be a little too late,” he said. “There’s not a lot of community members left to get involved.”

According to Tran, many of his customers have been scared away by people loitering, doing drugs, blocking traffic and sometimes acting aggressively or erratically on and near his property — a situation that saw the store’s February sales plummet to the lowest ever in a single month.

Well quite – so why is nothing done about it? I realize it’s cruel to move people along when they have nowhere to go, but it’s not exactly kind to shrug and let them rot on the street while scaring off everyone else.

While Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan has cleaned up Third Avenue and Pine Street in downtown and 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street, Tran said there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency by the city to address the social issues that have been pushed to the streets south of the latter intersection.

Yes and the streets north of the former intersection – that’s the area I regularly have to navigate.

Seattle’s dirty big secrets.

Terrorism. Knowing men are not women is terrorism if you go public with this dangerous knowledge.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

Institute of Peace violently invaded by the dictator.

Officials at an independent institute dedicated to promoting peace will ask a federal judge on Wednesday to block Trump administration officials and Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting team from mounting what they called a “lawless assault” against it.

The organization, the U.S. Institute of Peace, sued President Trump and others on Tuesday, asking the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia to intervene against what it said was an illegal “takeover by force.”

A standoff on Monday between the institute and Mr. Musk’s team ended when police officers helped evict staff members from the institute’s headquarters in Washington. That came after the White House has in recent days gutted the institute’s board and appointed a new acting president.

How do Musk and his “team” get to do whatever they want? Why do the police do their bidding?

Mr. Trump signed an executive order last month directing the institute to reduce its operations to the “statutory minimum.” But institute officials have said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk do not have the authority to dismantle its operations because the organization is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch.

In the lawsuit, the institute said that the executive order incorrectly labeled the organization as a “government entity.” It accuses members of Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and others of having “plundered” the agency’s office “in an effort to access and gain control of the Institute’s infrastructure, including sensitive computer systems.

But of course Musk and friends said they can do whatever they want and we can’t stop them.

So many people having so much fun bullying women.

From men who are happy to see women pushed out.

That’s quite the broad sweeping incloosive lie.

Not deprogram, not persuade, not silence, not rebuke, not contradict, not reason with, not quarrel with, not shout at, not remonstrate with, not convince, not turn around – but exterminate.

Jonathan Willoughby is a disgusting human being.

Athel Cornish-Bowden alerted us to this gem.

Headline and subhead:

Police and courts allowing criminals to choose their gender

Fears that allowing criminals to self-identify without legally changing sex is skewing crime statistics

Fears that? Of course allowing criminals to self-identify their sex is skewing statistics – how could it not?

Police forces and the courts are allowing criminals to self-identify their gender if they have not legally changed sex.

Surely the Telegraph means even if they have not legally changed sex. Surely the Telegraph doesn’t mean cops and courts are forbidding criminals to self-id if they have legally changed sex.

Nitpick nitpick nitpick, I know, but honestly, this subject is so full of obfuscation and lying all by itself, journalism ought to be careful not to help with the obfuscation.

Criminals who believe they are a different gender are routinely referred to by their preferred identity by police and in court.

No, criminals who say they are a different gender. We don’t know what they believe; other people’s beliefs are a black box. We can know what they claim; we can’t know what they really think.

That bit of basic epistemology is particularly important with this subject because it’s so very susceptible to deceit. Anybody can claim to be the opposite sex, and the current social norm is to punish people who question the claim. Donald Trump could claim to be a woman and we’d be told not to raise a skeptical eyebrow.

It had previously been revealed that some forces record transgender rapists as female but guidance issued by forces and the courts indicates that criminals of all kinds can self-identify.

It is feared that the self-ID policy – which remains widely in force despite a series of high-profile trans cases – skews crime statistics.

Rapists should never ever be recorded as female. The Telegraph does go on to say that.

Other forces, including South Yorkshire Police, require transgender suspects and criminals to have first acquired a GRC before they can be recorded under their trans identity.

But if criminals do have one, the force will recognise their gender transition even in sexual offence cases which can only be committed by biological males, such as rape.

Yes such as rape, that crime against female people that is rarely reported, rarely investigated if reported, rarely prosecuted if investigated, rarely convicted if prosecuted.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which represents senior police officers, advises forces to do the same.

“Policing should refer to a person’s sex, the law determines that where an individual holds a GRC, they have legally changed their sex,” a spokesman for the NPCC said.

Oh go to hell NPCC. Think about what you’re saying.

The policies have prompted critics to demand a change in approach across the criminal justice system. Maya Forstater, chief executive of Sex Matters, said female victims were being treated “with utter contempt”.

“The recording of male rapists as female is surely one of the most heinous consequences of trans ideology being embedded in our public institutions,” she told The Telegraph.

Damn right.

There’s a private Facebook group called UK Women’s March. Its “About this group” is public.

We are a women’s organisation dedicated to empowering women and girls, advocating for their rights, and championing their autonomy. We stand in solidarity with women globally, recognising the strength they show in the face of daily challenges. Our movement is inclusive, supporting the rights of all women, including trans women, in the fight for equality. We are committed to tackling all forms of violence against women, including domestic abuse, sexual violence, and femicide, while pushing for stronger laws and better support for survivors.

We focus on closing the gender pay gap, ensuring fair pay, and promoting equal opportunities for women in the workplace. Our advocacy extends to addressing the health needs of women and tackling the compounded discrimination faced by women from ethnic minority and LGBTQIA+ communities. Through education, grassroots activism, and collaboration with male allies, we aim to create a world where every woman can live free from violence, control her own life, and have her rights fully respected and protected.

It has rules.

1 Be Kind and Courteous

We’re all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Let’s treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required.

2 No Hate Speech or Bullying

We want to ensure that this group feels safe for everyone. Therefore, bullying or degrading comments about race, culture, sexual orientation, gender or identity will not be tolerated.

4 No Discrimination. No Transphobia.

This is a women’s support march which includes anyone born female, identifies as female, or just wants to support other women. This is an inclusive space. Discrimination or transphobia will not be tolerated and will result in a permanent ban.

So they’re a women’s organisation dedicated to empowering women and girls, advocating for their rights, and championing their autonomy, but they’re also a group dedicated to pretending that men are women if they say they are and expelling women who don’t agree that men are women if they say they are.

You can’t do both.

Which twin is the real minstrel show?

I was willing to overlook your cringe and frankly sexist TikToks. You were a child. You’re not a child anymore. You have talent. Please channel it in another way.

Dude. You’re the slightly more intellectualized minstrel show. That’s all the difference there is. You’re both insulting women.

Luxury idenniny seems to have a nasty side effect of extreme fragility.

Staff working in Holyrood “do not feel safe” because of the “often disrespectful tones of discussion,” a Green MSP has claimed.

Ariane Burgess is to use a question on Thursday to ask the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) to “offer support” to any LGBTQ+ staff “whose welfare may be negatively impacted by any increase in the use of language in the Chamber and committees that may be perceived as trans-exclusionary.”

“Negatively impacted” ffs – of course the luxury idenniny crowd also resorts to luxury jargon like “negatively impacted” instead of the crude plebian “harmed” or “damaged.” Bad thinking begets more bad thinking. No, Ms Burgess, we won’t be in awe of your brain because you use two stupid words instead of one useful one, we’ll think you’re a pretentious goon with no ear for language.

Ms Burgess told The Herald: “The Scottish Parliament is a place of work, where staff and visitors to the building should feel safe and welcomed. 

“The Scottish Parliament is already trying to ensure that it is supporting LGBTQ+ staff, but the rise of exclusionary language, and often disrespectful tones of discussion within the Chamber and committees, especially on issues such as trans rights, is undoubtedly impacting staff, directly and indirectly. There are LGBTQ+ workers in almost all parts of our building, and there are staff who have family or close friends within the community who feel unsafe and devalued.”

Well, here’s the thing. You say “especially on issues such as trans rights.” I suspect you don’t actually mean “such as”; I suspect you don’t have any other example. I think you just mean “especially on the issue of trans rights.” I think this is just more of the usual hyper-protective special treatment of the trans communniny. Why might the language around trans “issues” be somewhat acerbic? I think it could be because the claims and the explanations of the claims and the demands based on the claims are so full of exaggeration and petulance and narcissism that unbelievers simply lose patience. I know I lose patience regularly when trying to make sense of the claims. I’m doing it now. Trans ideology tries our patience.

Does it make you feel unsafe and devalued when people point out the incoherence and unreality of trans ideology? Maybe the problem is not the people pointing it out but the ideology itself.

Worth considering.

I wish they would notice the contradiction. They never notice the contradiction.

Illinois public school administrators tried to force a 13-year-old girl to change clothes in front of a biological male, in accordance with the district’s “inclusive” bathroom policy that allows transgender students to use whichever locker room corresponds with their chosen gender, the mother of the girl said at a Deerfield School District 109 School Board meeting on Thursday evening.

When Nicole Georgas’s 13-year-old daughter came home from Shepard Middle School on February 5, she was frightened and upset: A boy had been in the girl’s bathroom.

Georgas’s daughter was told by Deerfield administrators that because the male student identified as a female, he could use the girl’s locker room and bathroom, Georgas said. Although Georgas expressed to the school that the district was “in clear violation” of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order that restricts males from participating in female sports and using female changing rooms, her daughter’s teachers and principal reiterated that under direction from the district’s legal counsel, the male student could use whichever bathroom corresponded to his chosen gender.

The contradiction is obvious, right? By letting a boy use the girl’s locker room and bathroom, the administrators are preventing all the girls from using whichever bathroom corresponds to their chosen gender. They no longer have a girls’ bathroom so they can’t use the one that fits their gender. Why does what the boy wants matter more than what the girls need? Why is his correspondy bathroom so important while theirs doesn’t matter at all? One boy gets what he wants at the expense of who knows how many girls who lose what they need. They’re not even following their own damn rule.

Deerfield is “committed to inclusive practices that ensure equitable outcomes across educational environments for all students,” the district says on its website, and places priority on “identity development and equity best practices,” and ensuring “inclusion of diverse populations and perspectives.”

But it isn’t. It isn’t. It isn’t at all committed to inclusive practices that ensure equitable outcomes for all students. It’s committed to special luxury practices that ensure lopsided unfair outcomes for all students except that one kid who says he’s a girl. If it really gave a shit about all students, as opposed to giving a shit about looking on trend and superior, it would come up with a solution such as for instance building a couple of new locker rooms for pretend girls and pretend boys. Forcing tens or hundreds of female students to give up the right to stay clothed in the presence of boy students is not the progressive outcome the goonies think it is.

Willoughby plunges to a new disgusting low.

We can ignore him, but I think it’s worth noting and keeping track of how low some lifeforms will plunge.

Roberts says no that’s not how this works.

In an extraordinary display of conflict between the executive and judiciary branches, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rejected calls for impeaching federal judges shortly after President Donald Trump demanded the removal of a judge who ruled against his deportation plans.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a rare statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

But of course Trump has no truck with “normal.” Trump despises normal unless it’s his own very particular brand of normal. Trump considers himself the arbiter of what’s normal and what’s an outrage against Trump and thus the enemy of normal.

In a Tuesday morning social media post, Trump described U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg as an unelected “troublemaker and agitator.” Boasberg recently issued an order blocking deportation flights under wartime authorities from an 18th century law that Trump invoked to carry out his plans.

Well now we could have a long and strenuous conversation about exactly who is the real troublemaker and agitator in this dispute.

Wait what?

NY Times subhead:

In an echo of the Yalta Conference in 1945, the American and Russian leaders will talk on Tuesday about who gets what in the process of ending the war in Ukraine.

How is that an echo of the Yalta Conference???

At the Yalta Conference, the three heads of state were allies, however uncomfortably. At Yalta, the other team was the aggressor.

Here’s a shocker: Russia is not a US ally. I know Trump doesn’t get that, but the Times certainly should. Here’s another shocker: Russia is the aggressor in this war.

Trump handing Ukraine bound and gagged over to Putin does not resemble the Yalta Conference.

But talking to reporters on Air Force One while returning from Florida on Sunday night, Mr. Trump made clear that his scheduled phone conversation with Mr. Putin on Tuesday would be focused on what lands and assets Russia would retain in any cease-fire with Ukraine.

He will, in essence, be negotiating over how large a reward Russia will receive for its 11 years of open aggression against Ukraine, starting with its seizure of Crimea in 2014 and extending through the full-scale war Mr. Putin started three years ago. White House aides have made clear that Russia will certainly retain Crimea — in one of those odd twists of history, the location of the weeklong Yalta Conference in February 1945 — and strongly suggested it would get almost all of the territory it holds.

…

Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC over the weekend that he expected the talks with Russia to be pragmatic, and he deflected any discussion of whether Russia was being rewarded for its aggression. (As a member of Congress, Mr. Waltz was a vocal defender of Ukraine and its sovereignty. As the head of Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, he has avoided stating the obvious, that Russia began the war.)

I hope he has trouble sleeping.

The ominous conclusion:

In an interview, Professor Toft said that land expansion “is what Putin wants, and it’s obviously what Trump wants — just look at Greenland and Panama and Canada.”

She continued: “This is what these leaders think they need to do to make their countries great again.”

“The big question mark is China,” she added. The outcome of the negotiations — and particularly the question of whether Mr. Putin is rewarded for what has been a brutally expensive war, “may indicate what will happen if Xi Jinping decides he wants to take Taiwan.”

That Trump will say “Go right ahead.”

Ah well we may not like what Trump is doing, but Chinese state media think he’s fabulous.

Chinese state media has welcomed Donald Trump’s move to cut public funding for news outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which have long reported on authoritarian regimes.

The decison affects thousands of employees – some 1,300 staff have been put on paid leave at Voice Of America (VOA) alone since Friday’s executive order.

Critics have called the move a setback for democracy but Beijing’s state newspaper Global Times denounced VOA for its “appalling track record” in reporting on China and said it has “now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag”.

That settles it then. “Nothing about us without us” – so when China’s state newspaper says so, we outsiders are required to nod in agreement.

Trump’s cuts target the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is supported by Congress and funds the affected news outlets, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.

They have won acclaim and international recognition for their reporting in places where press freedom is severely curtailed or non-existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.

Ssssshhhh – those are our dear allies now. They don’t like press freedom, so shut up.

RFA has often reported on the crackdown on human rights in Cambodia, whose former authoritarian ruler Hun Sen has hailed the cuts as a “big contribution to eliminating fake news”.

It was also among the first news outlets to report on China’s network of detention centres in Xinjiang, where the authorities are accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims without trial. Beijing denies the claims, saying people willingly attend “re-education camps” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”. VOA’s reporting on North Korean defectors and the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged cover-up of Covid fatalities has won awards.

We’ll be having re-education camps here soon, at the rate we’re going. I do hope the food is good.

The National Press Club, a leading representative group for US journalists, said the order “undermines America’s long-standing commitment to a free and independent press”.

Founded during World War Two in part to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches some 360 million people a week in nearly 50 languages. Over the years it has broadcast in China, North Korea, communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. It’s also been a helpful tool for many Chinese people to learn English.

VOA’s director Michael Abramowitz said Trump’s order has hobbled VOA while “America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”.

They might as well save their billions. We’re doing a brilliant job of discrediting ourselves.

This Alex Staniforth fella really wants to punish women.

More from Team Women May Not Have Anything Just For Women:

Councillors in Edinburgh are considering whether to remove funding from a service that does not support trans women.

What kind of service, you evasive schmucks?

Alex Staniforth, a Scottish Greens councillor, has lodged a motion calling for a review of how the local authority allocates funds to domestic abuse services.

Oh that kind. Well guess what: sometimes women-only services are necessary for women who have experienced domestic abuse. Sometimes that need matters more than the frivolous desire to play Let’s Pretend on the part of selfish demanding entitled doods.

The move is a reaction to an announcement from Edinburgh Women’s Aid (EWA), one of Scotland’s largest domestic abuse charities, that it will not allow trans women or non-binary males to use its 24-hour refuges or group counselling services.

It’s women’s aid. It says so on the tin. It’s for women, so it’s not for men, so men don’t get to use the service, which is for women. Women are allowed to have that; women are allowed to provide that. Men have no right to bounce up and demand services that have never been intended for them. Build your own you pathetic bullies.

Staniforth expressed the concern that if trans women are not welcome to use single-sex services they have no alternative provision. “If there is a blanket ban on trans people accessing the service that is not acceptable,” the councillor said.

The ban is on men. That is entirely acceptable. Men are not a shunned neglected oppressed exploited class.

“It would be completely inappropriate for [a trans woman] to try to access men’s services. We wouldn’t allow any other minority women to be just cast aside completely like that.”

Men are not “minority women.” Men are men.

Lisa Mackenzie, of the policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, said councillors from other parties should unite to reject Staniforth’s motion.

Mackenzie said: “This is a moment for all the mainstream parties to back the courage of the leadership at EWA in standing up for the needs of women they serve, and pushing back against the pressure to adopt self-ID polices, based on poor legal advice.

“We hope that parties on the council that really listen to women will take the chance to distance themselves from this motion.”

Men who playact being women should not have a veto on women’s need for women’s services. Ever.

Ralph Nader on the steadily worsening horror:

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Hm. Debatable. Surely some people elected him to do all that and worse.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

In short why isn’t the Resistance forming? Why aren’t people who have the power to form it, forming it?

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

Allons enfants.