And there’s also all the influence of financial interests and mergers and terrorist lawsuits to make everything even worse. Trump punishes journalism for reporting the truth about him, and much of journalism says “Yes sir yes sir” because it doesn’t want to lose that sweet deal it has with _____.

CBS News and Stations CEO Wendy McMahon is leaving the network, the latest casualty as its parent company tries to broker a truce with Donald Trump.

McMahon alluded to the network’s battles with the president in a memo to staff on Monday, less than 24 hours after 60 Minutes aired its season finale, and admitted “the past few months have been challenging.”

Her exit comes as CBS’ parent company Paramount Global negotiates a settlement to Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against the network over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is hoping for a quick settlement so as to not provide a roadblock to Paramount’s merger with Skydance.

Lawyers for Trump and Paramount entered into settlement talks last month.

It’s just blatant hijacking. Trump sues and everybody dives for cover.

The news rankled staff on Monday, with some pinning the departure on CBS CEO George Cheeks for letting top leaders leave to appease the parent company. “I think people are very disappointed” in Cheeks, one CBS staffer told the Daily Beast. “He is letting some truly amazing people walk out the door.”

Because Trump. And money.

Trump sued the network, initially for $10 billion last year, after CBS promoted a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in October that included a clip on Face the Nation that featured one part of an answer on Israel’s war in Gaza. But when the episode aired the next day as part of a special edition of 60 Minutes—one Trump refused to participate in—it featured a different part of the answer.

Trump claimed the network engaged in a form of news distortion, though CBS News said its interview followed standard journalistic practice and defended its interview on First Amendment grounds. Trump upped the lawsuit to $20 billion earlier this year. Incidentally, the Harris interview was subsequently nominated for an Emmy Award in the Best Editing category.

Still, despite legal experts’ opinions that the lawsuit is flawed, Paramount Global entered into settlement talks with Trump’s legal team last month as controlling shareholder Shari Redstone seeks to merge the company with David Ellison’s Skydance, which would net her a $2.4 billion payout for her family’s share.

Redstone’s aggressive pursuit of securing the Trump administration’s blessing included demanding Cheeks notify her about negative Trump stories last month, according to Bloomberg.

It came after Trump rebuked 60 Minutes over an episode that covered his pursuit to take Greenland and featured an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 60 Minutes never amended any of its programs, and it aired a story last month that examined Trump’s attacks on law firms.

CBS staffers have chastised Redstone both publicly and privately.

Bill Owens, 60 Minutes’ executive producer, told staff in his exit announcement he lost his ability “to make independent decisions” on the show’s programming after he refused to apologize for the Harris interview.

He praised McMahon for her leadership, and she said in her memo on his departure that it was “an easy decision” to stand by Owens despite company pressures.

So Trump is the boss of 60 Minutes now. Brilliant.

Trump is still noisily raging at Harvard, clueless as to how obvious he’s making his jealousy and resentment.

In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump said the home countries of some of Harvard’s international students are “not at all friendly to the United States” and “pay NOTHING toward their student’s education.”

He added that the administration wants to “to know who those foreign students are” and that “Harvard isn’t exactly forthcoming.”

That’s not how any of this works.

Trump’s latest attack against Harvard comes two days after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the administration from being able to revoke the university’s ability to enroll international students.

The university had argued that the Trump administration’s revocation was a “blatant violation of the First Amendment” and punished the school for rejecting “the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

I suppose the reality is that Trump has literally no idea what the boundaries of his job are. I suppose the reality is that he sees himself as the CEO of us which translates to the absolute boss of us which entails no limit whatsoever on what he can demand and order and require. He thinks he has all the powers of a dictator or absolute monarch.

He doesn’t.

That won’t stop him acting as if he does though.

I mentioned a few days ago in a comment that a bonehead error a lot of people make is confusing “minority” with “oppressed” when the two are not the same at all. Here’s Hamza Yousaf making that exact mistake.

“The way we handled that, it clearly was a mistake.”

Humza Yousaf concedes that the way the SNP handled self-ID was a “mistake” but making life easier for trans people was “the right thing to do.” @AdamBoultonTABB | @HumzaYousaf | #TimesRadio pic.twitter.com/PZBzjEXKPo

— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) May 25, 2025

…advancing people’s rights, I think that’s really important, I never demured [he means demurred] from that view, I’m a passionate advocate for minority rights, being a minority myself, but – I mean all minorities, whether sexual minorities, people who are transgender, whoever…

Spot the problem? Women are not a minority. “People who are transgender” are a tiny minority, but that does not mean they are necessarily at a disadvantage in relation to women. It’s not the case that women are the powerful privileged oppressors in relation to men who make themselves into parodies of women and take women’s jobs and awards and organizations. The word “minority” is not a magic excuse-all.

Even federal disaster relief is not safe from Trump.

Public officials have started pleading with the Trump administration for help in recovering from deadly disasters as President Donald Trump triggers frustration in states struck by tornadoes, floods and storms by taking no action on requests for aid.

Trump has left states, counties and tribes in limbo as he delays making decisions on formal requests for millions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding. Some areas that are still reeling from extreme weather are unable to start cleanup.

“We’re at a standstill and waiting on a declaration from FEMA,” said Royce McKee, emergency management director in Walthall County, Mississippi, which was hit by tornadoes in mid-March.

You’d think tornadoes would be apolitical, but apparently not.

The county of 13,000 people can’t afford to clean up acres of debris, McKee said, and is waiting for Trump to act on a disaster request that was submitted by Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, on April 1 after the tornadoes killed seven people, destroyed or damaged 671 homes, and caused $18.2 million in public damage.

Sorry, Trump is too busy talking to Fox News and shutting down whole departments to pay attention to some dreary county in Mississippi.

The frustration over Trump’s handling of disasters is the latest upheaval involving FEMA. Trump recently canceled two FEMA grant programs that gave states billions of dollars a year to pay for protective measures against disasters. The move drew protests from Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

On May 8, Trump fired FEMA leader Cameron Hamilton and replaced him with David Richardson, a former Marine Corps officer who has no experience in emergency management.

…

Eleven of the 17 pending disaster requests were sent to Trump more than a month ago.

“This looks to me like, until FEMA’s role is clarified, then we’re just going to sit on it,” said a former senior FEMA official who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Trump has indicated that he wants to shrink the agency, which distributes about $45 billion in disaster aid a year, helps with as many as 100 disasters at a time and, he said, “has been a very big disappointment.”

“It’s very bureaucratic and very slow,” Trump said in January during a visit to disaster-stricken western North Carolina.

So the solution is to make it even slower until it grinds to a halt.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the administration wants state and local governments “to invest in their own resilience before disaster strikes, making response less urgent and recovery less prolonged.”

And his way of making this happen is just to ignore requests for help. He’s such a sweetie.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What makes them experts?

It points to a problem in the ruling, however. Maybe it could be exploited. I don’t know.

Activists are claiming the ruling is unclear/flawed/wrong anyway, so the heel-dragging and nose-thumbing is happening without reference to the ruling in any case. They need no reason or excuse. They’re still following Stonewall Law and its unlawful guidance, which was made up to suit what activists claimed and wanted despite the original intent of the Acts it was supposedly embodying. They’ve never argued their case; why would they feel the need to start now?

If a woman is fool enough to make herself look convincingly male, that’s not anyone else’s problem to fix.

While I see women trying to escape the demands and expectations of an increasingly sexualized, patriarchal femininity as a completely different and unrelated demographic from the AGP males who have roped them into the chimerical “trans community” by way of forced teaming, they chose this path for themselves, and shouldn’t expect or demand the rest of the world to go along with their delusional beliefs, just as secular society cannot be forced to follow the rules and strictures of a particular religion or denomination thereof.

My alma mater, Western University, has an “inclusive” washroom policy, featuring the following incoherent and gaslighting sticker on many washroom doors:

“Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom appropriate for them. Trust the person using this space belongs here”.

The first sentence is vitiated by the second. Resistance to this policy is characterized as “gender policing”:

Gender policing is where someone imposes or enforces normative gender expressions – i.e., the narrow definitions of what a man or a woman should do or look like – on an individual who they perceive as not adequately performing, through appearance or behaviour, the sex that was assigned to them at birth.

Gender policing a washroom is inappropriate and is contrary to Western’s policy on non-discrimination and harassment.

It is up to the individual to decide what washroom they wish to use based on their lived identity.

It is not up to anyone else to decide who can use, or who should use, any particular washroom facility.

[Read it and rage here: https://www.uwo.ca/hro/doc/inclusive_washrooms.pdf ]

Of course the activists who foisted this policy on us have to do this, because if they admitted that segregation of facilities by sex is the whole point of separate toilets, it would halt the whole gender project before it got out of the gate. Washroom segregation is not a way of enforcing “normative gender expressions”, or punishing “inadequate gender performance” but an attempt to KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN”S BATHROOMS. They see “gender inclusivity” as a continuation of efforts at accommodating people with disabilities and facilities with change tables for family use. But these are vastly different “inclusivities”. “Gender inclusivity” in anything other than single-user washrooms is potentially open season for women, with the guiding ethos of “trusting” the judgement of the person entering a (nominally) women’s washroom, supporting male aggressors invading female spaces, rather than women’s safety and privacy.

Someone who decides to go into a bank wearing a mask and carrying a realistic looking toy gun should not expect to feel welcomed by the staff, other customers, or bank security. Someone dressing like a bank robber is going to get treated as a bank robber, because the stakes are too high to offer anyone the benefit of the doubt. Bank robbing is a thing. Similarly, women can’t be expected to second guess whether or not a trans identified female is actually male or not. Predatory males assaulting women in washrooms is a thing. The safest course of action is to assume that a “male presenting” individual is male. This might not be the kind of “passing” TiFs want, but it’s a matter of safeguarding, not out of any respect for the TiF’s “identity”. Women’s safety should always come first. Trans activism has never admitted or accepted this, demanding women sacrifice their own wellbeing for the sake of validating gender cosplay. If some TiFs get caught in this as “false positives”, like sheep in wolves’ clothing, that’s not women’s problem. In situations where women are vulnerable, disguises that conceal or alarm are warning flags. “This person is not to be trusted,” stickers be damned. Women shouldn’t be forced to risk their safety for women pretending to be men, any more than they should be doing so for men pretending to be women. Your precious “identities” aren’t worth it.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Jam tomorrow.

Women are just an annoying little faction, and can safely be ignored.

Strange how Labour (or much too large a chunk of it) is deathly afraid of that 0.1% of “women with penises” and their friends, as opposed to brushing off half the population. This minority has that power over them because Labour gave it to them. Labour might feel it’s gone too far to step away from this parasitical “alliance”, but doing so would probably win them more support than it would cost. It’s too bad they can’t see this. If they don’t, their statements in support of genderism over the last few years are going to be held up as examples of lunacy and extremism for decades to come. Forget the “wrong side of history”; how about the wrong side of reality. Ironic that this stance completely guts any pretense that Labour really supports women’s rights, handing this issue to Tories on a silver platter, like Democrats and Republicans in the US.

Trans activism has been much more successful at selling itself as a “progressive” movement, than it has at convincing people that men can be women, as many seem to go along with the former in order to “be kind” (or to avoid the attentions of gender goblins), who nevertheless reject the latter. Its “progressive” status is taken as a given, despite the evidence of its inherent misogyny, homophobia, and its reliance on lies, bullying, and intimidation.

However it managed to work its way into the progressive platform, the real question is how do we get it out? It is a blight and cancer that needs to be excised. Genderism as it is exemplified in its current form, is a drain of resources, and a distraction from more important matters. It forces women to needlessly re-fight battles that had just barely been won, while adding this additional burden of invasive, predatory, trans activism to their already ongoing struggles. How do we shut down this shit show?

Found it. Found these women-hating fuckers. Home page:

Formerly known as the Women, Influence & Power in Law UK Awards, the newly reimagined Leadership, Influence & Inclusivity in Law Awards reflect the evolving legal landscape—where values-led leadership, collective impact, and cultural transformation are more important than ever.

And where women are not. It was an award for women, and now it’s not, because it reflects the evolving legal landscape where women just aren’t worth mentioning, let alone giving awards.

These awards honour individuals and teams across the legal profession who are driving meaningful change—whether through visionary leadership, inclusive culture-building, groundbreaking client work, or community-focused initiatives.

We continue to celebrate the legacy of women who have shaped the profession, while now recognising a broader community of changemakers committed to creating a more progressive, accessible, and equitable legal industry.

No they don’t. It was an award for women and now it’s not; that is not “continuing to celebrate the legacy of women” blah blah blah. It’s that other thing. It’s studiously concealing the legacy of women, and patting themselves on the back for doing it. It’s saying women don’t get to have awards just for women, because women don’t matter enough. Women are too narrow, and we’re all about the broader community.

I see. Paying attention to women is not incloosive; ignoring and disappearing women is incloosive. If you want to be a good incloosive justicey person you will immediately stop talking about women. If you are a woman you will of course shut up entirely.

Dear Sarah,

We are proud to announce the launch of the Leadership, Influence & Inclusivity in Law Awards a dynamic evolution of what was formerly the Women, Influence & Power in Law UK Awards.

This year, the awards take on a broader and more inclusive scope, recognising the outstanding contributions of individuals who are shaping the future of the legal profession—whether through innovative leadership, impactful influence, or meaningful advancement of inclusion within the field.

Why the change?

As the legal sector continues to evolve, so too must the ways in which we celebrate excellence. While we remain deeply committed to highlighting the achievements of women and under-represented groups in law, the new Leadership, Influence & Inclusivity in Law Awards reflect a more expansive vision—one that embraces leaders of all identities who are making a tangible difference.

We look forward to celebrating the trailblazers and allies who are redefining leadership in the legal world!

There it is, in all its stunning idiocy and regressiveness.

Imagine one of these buffoons saying “As the legal sector continues to evolve, so too must the ways in which we celebrate excellence. While we remain deeply committed to highlighting the achievements of Black people and under-represented groups in law, the new Leadership, Influence & Inclusivity in Law Awards reflect a more expansive vision—one that embraces leaders of all identities who are making a tangible difference.”

It would never ever happen. But when it’s women? Oh well, that’s completely different. Women don’t get to be highlighted because women don’t matter, women don’t count, women have to make lunch, women have to spread their legs, women have to shut that fucking baby up right this second, women are stupid, women are bitches, women are cunts, women should be ignored and buried.

Here’s to celebrating the trailblazers and allies who are redefining leadership in the legal world hurrah!!

Hmm. So can Trump murder someone as long as it’s on his own “personal time”?

President Trump is refusing to release the guest list of his pay-to-pay crypto dinner, as his press secretary Karoline Leavitt argues that the dinner is in his “personal time.”

“On the president’s dinner tonight, will the White House commit to making the list of the attendees public so people can see who’s paying for that kind of access to the president?” a reporter asked Leavitt at the White House press briefing on Thursday.

“Well as you know, Garret, this question has been raised with the president. I have also addressed the dinner tonight; the president is attending it in his personal time, it is not a White House dinner, it is not taking place here at the White House,” Leavitt responded, ignoring the specific question about who was going to be at this dinner. “Certainly I can raise that question and try to get you an answer for it.”

Presidents don’t have their “own personal time” in that sense. Presidents are expected to refuse bribes 24/7, even if the bribes are offered outside the White House.

The dinner will be held at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia on Thursday evening for the top 220 holders of the president’s cryptocurrency—after an auction that brought in $147,586,796.41. The event is being promoted as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world,” according to an email about the event. The top 25 buyers will get an “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with the president.

In other words Trump is frankly and openly selling his position. $148 million dollars is a pretty hefty bribe.

The president is having a private dinner for anonymous foreigners who bought his cryptocurrency—a scam in and of itself—and is acting as if he’s just taking a personal day that will have no impact on American politics.

And he’ll get away with it.

Trump hates Harvard.

Gee I wonder why.

If he were a more Harvard kind of guy he would realize what he looks like, picking fights with the top of the heap university that did not beg him to become one of its graduates. Jealous much, Queens boy?

Attacks by President Trump and his lackeys against the country’s oldest university have been relentless, and come from all corners of the administration.

They include multiple bogus investigations, including one from the Justice Department into whether Harvard has been lying to the government about its admissions policy; billions in federal research funding cuts and freezes at the school and its partners for various reasons, from the school’s purported failure to stem antisemitism on campus, to discrimination against white students, to its failure to include enough conservative faculty and orthodoxy to satisfy the administration.

Of course “discrimination against white students” is the only possible explanation for why Trump is not an alumnus of Harvard Harvard Harvard.

The university has received juvenile threats from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, including a May 5 letter that reads like a late-night Trump rant, calling Harvard “a mockery of this country’s higher education system,” and decrying its large numbers of foreign students: “how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country — and why is there so much HATE?” The administration has threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status. And Homeland Security head Kristi Noem has demanded that it turn over detailed information on its 6,800 foreign students, including disciplinary records.

On Thursday, deeming Harvard insufficiently cooperative, Noem suspended the school’s ability to enroll any foreign students, and put other schools on notice that they could be next. In addition to being unspeakably cruel to students, the move would further pressure Harvard’s finances, given that a quarter of its students are from other countries, and many pay higher tuition.

Win-win! Hassle foreign students and make trouble for Harvard. That’ll show them snotty elitists who look down on people like Trump just because they’re pig-ignorant and stupid with it.

As I’ve written before, this administration does notgive a flying fig about antisemitism. Trump is cozy with white supremacists and straight-up Nazis, and even has a few on the payroll. Fifty of the people who bought their way into a private audience with Trump at his Virginia golf club on Thursday night own crypto assets with names only white supremacists could love, including many named for racist meme Pepe the Frog, one whose name is an unprintable attack on Jews, one named for the n-word, and a few with names that are variations on the word “swastika.” The guests were all thoroughly vetted, according to the White House.

Blergh. I did not know that.

Jill Foster at the Telegraph on Labour v women:

Last month, when the Supreme Court ruling clarified that sex in law meant “biological sex”, some naively assumed that it might finally put to rest this thorniest of issues in Labour’s side. But it seems that if anything, tensions have been ramped up rather than tempered.

This week, the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) voted that women officer roles and all-women shortlists would be limited to biological women. It was a remarkable volte face from its 2018 decision that “self-identifying” trans women (biological men who could simply declare themselves women without any surgery or medical treatment) were eligible for Labour’s all-women shortlists and other roles.

In a further twist, the NEC also decided to postpone the women’s conference planned for September – leading to criticism from both trans activists (who had been planning to protest at the event) and women’s groups alike.

Wellll look at it from their point of view – you can’t just let women have a conference whenever they feel like it. They’re underlings, and they’ll have a conference when we say they can.

Labour Women’s Declaration, which campaigns for women’s rights, said that while it was pleased that the party “had at long last decided to follow the advice we had been giving them since 2019 and comply with the Equality Act 2010”, it added that the cancellation of the conference was “ridiculous and unnecessary”.

“The absence of the democratic process for women this year, as a result of this postponement, is appalling and fails to recognise the importance of women’s voices within the Labour Party,” they said in a statement. “The party must now address this as a matter of urgency.”

Nah. Women are just an annoying little faction, and can safely be ignored.

Mandy Clare, a former Labour councillor from Cheshire, was elected onto Labour’s National Women’s Committee in 2020 but left the party after being deselected and taken through a disciplinary for alleged transphobia.

“I highly suspect the cancellation of the women’s conference this year is yet another cynical, controlling and possibly vindictive move by the party, at the behest of activists, to again remind women of their place,” she says. “Women within the Labour Party have to dance to the men’s rights tune or expect to be abused and discarded.”

Well of course they do. Men are the real people, and women are a bizarre afterthought who don’t really count.

Steven Pinker on Trump v Harvard:

In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. My 2014 essay “The Trouble With Harvard” called for a transparent, meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief.” My 2023 “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I. Last fall, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, I explained “how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel,” calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. Two years ago I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes.

In short, he’s a stone in Harvard’s shoe, but that’s not the same thing as being the mashed potatoes-throwing toddler at Harvard’s dinner table.

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”

This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just moved to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as 15-fold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status.

And we all know why. It’s because Harvard is the top of the tree and Trump did not go there.

Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions. In 2021 the biologist Carole Hooven was demonized and ostracized, effectively driving her out of Harvard, for explaining in an interview how biology defines male and female. Her cancellation was the last straw that led us to create the academic freedom council, but it was neither the first nor the last.

…

How to achieve an optimal diversity of viewpoints in a university is a difficult problem and an obsession of our council. Of course, not every viewpoint should be represented. The universe of ideas is infinite, and many of them are not worthy of serious attention, such as astrology, flat earthism, and Holocaust denial. The demand of the Trump administration to audit Harvard’s programs for diversity and jawbone a “critical mass” of government-approved contrarians into the noncompliant ones would be poisonous both to the university and to democracy. The biology department could be forced to hire creationists, the medical school vaccine skeptics and the history department denialists of the 2020 election. Harvard had no choice but to reject the ultimatum, becoming an unlikely folk hero in the process.

Still, universities cannot continue to ignore the problem. Though obsessed with implicit racism and sexism, they have been insensitive to the most powerful cognitive distorter of all, the “myside bias” that makes all of us credulous about the cherished beliefs of ourselves or our political or cultural coalitions. Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness. To these ends, a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives would not hurt. As the economist Joan Robinson put it, “Ideology is like breath: You never smell your own.”

What is Trump’s ideology? Trump. That’s it: that’s the ideology.

Half a century ago Harvard failed to invite the young Donald Trump to partake of its services, therefore Harvard has to go.

Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious.

Later Friday morning, at the university’s request, a federal judge in Boston moved swiftly to block implementation of the federal government’s order.

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order against the federal edict, agreeing that Harvard had shown that its implementation would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to the university.

Well duh. That’s why Trump is doing it.

The lawsuit, which accused the Trump administration of a “campaign of retribution” against the university, followed an announcement on Thursday that Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, halting the university’s ability to enroll international students.

…

A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, responded to the lawsuit with a statement.

“If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, antisemitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. Harvard should spend their time and resources on creating a safe campus environment instead of filing frivolous lawsuits,” the statement said.

It’s not really frivolous for a university to resist government meddling with its admissions.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant homeland security secretary, issued a statement saying that the lawsuit “seeks to kneecap the president’s constitutionally vested powers,” adding that it is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students.

Is it? Who says? Under what definition of rights?

The wider academic community was shocked at Thursday’s move by the Trump Administration. In a statement, Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called it a “grave moment.”

“I write to you in profound disbelief,” she wrote in a community email late Thursday. “The action the federal government took today to bar Harvard from having international students is devastating for American excellence, openness, and ingenuity.”

If Harvard can’t have international students how come Trump gets to have Elon Musk?

Originally a comment by maddog on What makes them experts?

“The judgment does not remove the legal protections trans people currently enjoy under the Equality Act,” the experts said. “But it may be used to justify exclusionary policies that further stigmatise and marginalise an already vulnerable population, as well as human rights defenders working to protect and promote transgender rights.

So much to unpack here!

The judgment “may be used to justify exclusionary policies . . . .”

What do you mean by ”exclusionary”? Who gets to say what policies are ”exclusionary”? You imply a universal pejorative to the word ”exclusionary,” as if ”exclusion” is always bad. Is that really true? I mean, if you classify or categorize anything, you are making decisions or selections — i.e., discriminating — between what things are “in” a category (included), and what things are “out” (excluded).

Human beings routinely make such decisions dozens or hundreds of times a day, if not more. We decide whether something “is” or “isn’t” what we think it is, All. The. Time. We have to, or we’d be dead. Neither “discrimination” nor “exclusion” is inherently bad; they are essential for our survival.

So, “exclusionary” in this context means “excluding men (the sex that women are not) from the spaces, facilities, resources, opportunities, offices, competitions, etc. that are specifically set aside for women (the sex that women actually are).” In that case, where divisions are based upon actual sex, it is necessary to “exclude” men from anything afforded to women as a sex class. “Men” are the other sex from “women.” The word “women” necessarily excludes “men.” Everyone used to know this. It is mind-blowing how many people, who I used to think were intelligent and kind, have expunged these facts from their memories. Like 1984’s doublespeak and doublethink, T dogma has managed to destroy many people’s mental access to what was formerly “knowledge;” the erasure is astonishingly and chillingly complete. The whole reason for “women’s” anything is that women — because of their sex — have historically been systematically excluded from full rights of participation in society. You want to talk about “exclusionary policies”? That’s your exclusionary policy right there. Women have been “excluded” from most rights in most places for most of history. Women’s sex-based rights are relatively recent “INclusionary policies,” to allow women to finally have some say in civic life. Then along comes T and destroys what little women have (grudgingly) won for themselves.

The judgment “may be used to justify exclusionary policies that further stigmatise and marginalise an already vulnerable population . . . .” Really? ”Stigmatize” how? “Marginalize” how? ” Vulnerable” in what way? The men who call themselves “trans women,” are kings of the roost as far as I can tell. They and all their sycophantic allies and enforcers have had almost everything their own way for a decade or more. The rapidity and completeness with which T has captured all major social institutions puts the lie to any claims of “vulnerability” or “marginalization.” Any group that can snap their fingers and get police — the State — to punish people for a sticker that says, “Woman = adult human female” or for photographing a suffragette ribbon, is neither vulnerable nor marginalized.

I don’t see anything to the claim of “stigma,” either. Trans women (men) have been so aggressive and bullying and public and “out there,” that there’s nothing new or surprising about seeing guys in frocks running in packs with their black pampers enforcers. The institutional capture has been so successful for so long that there’s no particular stigma in being a trans woman per se. However, when all these trans identified males keep bullying, terrorizing, and attacking women, there’s a certain stigma attached to being a sexual pervert. If the men (trans women) stuck to using men’s facilities instead of insistently invading women’s spaces, the stigma of sexual perversion would be minimized. Win-win. Women get their own spaces, and trans identified men reduce stigma against themselves.

As to “human rights defenders working to protect and promote transgender rights,” those people are not being ”excluded”; afaict, those people aren’t stigmatized or marginalized or vulnerable in any way. They are just an army of misogynistic bullies who like to stick it to women.

As to what the T army of “human rights defenders,” who are “working to protect transgender rights,” are really advocating for, are not human rights at all. There’s no such thing as a “human right” to lie about your sex, and to falsify government and medical records.

The entire T enterprise is a lie founded upon lies. Human beings cannot change their sex. It’s a monstrous lie to say that men can be women. The T movement is a men’s rights movement, meant to terrorize and punish women, with the added bonus of public adulation for doing so.

So, yeah, you’ve got entirely the wrong people being unfairly “excluded,” or “stigmatized,” or “marginalized,” or “vulnerable.” As always, the real victims are women.

Sure. It’s just like mixing chocolates with nuts and chocolates without nuts. It’s like wearing a red shirt and black jeans. It’s like reading Pride and Prejudice one day and Middlemarch the next.

#HormonesAreAmazing#TransRightsAreHumanRights#transformation

Trump is a stinking liar chapter eleventy billion.

JOHANNESBURG, May 22 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump showed a screenshot of Reuters video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of what he falsely presented on Wednesday as evidence of mass killings of white South Africans.

“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by the picture during a contentious Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

In fact, the video, published by Reuters on February 3 and subsequently verified by the news agency’s fact check team, showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot following deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.

Hey now. They were in Africa. That’s close enough.

The footage from which the picture was taken shows a mass burial following an M23 assault on Goma, filmed by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty.

“That day, it was extremely difficult for journalists to get in … I had to negotiate directly with M23 and coordinate with the ICRC to be allowed to film,” Al Katanty said. “Only Reuters has video.”

Al Katanty said seeing Trump holding the article with the screengrab of his video came as a shock.

“In view of all the world, President Trump used my image, used what I filmed in DRC to try to convince President Ramaphosa that in his country, white people are being killed by Black people,” Al Katanty said.

And to try to convince everyone else and to pin the blame on Ramaphosa.

UN press release on the who gets to be a woman question:

A group of independent human rights experts* today expressed concern about the implications of the recent UK Supreme Court judgment interpreting the definition of “woman” under the Equality Act 2010.

While the ruling was limited to a question of statutory interpretation, the experts warned that it risks entrenching legal uncertainty and undermining the rights of transgender persons in all aspects of life, including education.

But what about the way the bogus “definition of woman” to include men risks undermining the rights of female persons in all aspects of life, including education?

Why does sweaty concern for the purported rights of trans people (“rights” such as being endorsed as the other sex) cancel concern for the genuine rights (rights such as single-sex spaces and medical care) of women? Why do purported trans rights matter more than women’s rights? Why do people like these “experts” always always always ignore that conflict?

I have no idea what the answer is. I have no idea how they manage it.

“The judgment does not remove the legal protections trans people currently enjoy under the Equality Act,” the experts said. “But it may be used to justify exclusionary policies that further stigmatise and marginalise an already vulnerable population, as well as human rights defenders working to protect and promote transgender rights. We are deeply concerned that the application of this judgment may lead to increased discrimination and exclusion of transgender women in various sectors, including the workplace, at a critical time when employers should be striving to foster and maintain inclusive environments for all employees.”

But that would include women. If you let men use the women’s toilets and changing rooms then you have ruled out any “inclusive environment” for women. If you keep insisting that trans people’s rights should cancel women’s rights then you’re not being inclusive of women.

They also raised concerns about how interim guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission has interpreted the ruling, allowing – and in some cases requiring – organisations to exclude individuals from single-sex spaces based on biological sex. This could lead to situations where both trans women and trans men are barred from facilities aligned with their gender identity, or even excluded altogether, the experts warned.

But, again, allowing men to use women’s facilities is unsafe for women, and effectively excludes them.

Round and round and round it goes.

BBC headline:

Sex offender jailed for contacting young girls

Tell us more, Beeb.

A registered sex offender who breached a prevention order by sending sexually explicit messages to schoolgirls has been jailed for four years and eight months. Katie Birtles was arrested on 16 January after trying to meet a 14-year-old girl at the railway station in Grantham, Lincolnshire.

Birtles, of Wroxall Drive, Grantham, breached a 10-year sexual harm prevention order (SHPO), preventing any contact with children, which was put in place in 2017 for previous offences. Lincolnshire Police said messages on Birtles’ phone over a two-week period in January found the offender was planning to meet victims for sex and had offered to buy gifts such as wine and chocolates. At Lincoln Crown Court on Monday, the 40-year-old was ordered to remain on the sex offenders register for life and will be subject to the SHPO indefinitely.

Etcetera.

The entire longish piece never once admits that “Katie” Birtles is a man. It includes a photo, but the wording is strenuously gender-neutral throughout.

Trump to CDC: shut up.

To accomplish its mission of increasing the health security of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that it “conducts critical science and provides health information” to protect the nation. But since President Trump’s administration assumed power in January, many of the platforms the CDC used to communicate with the public have gone silent, an NPR analysis found.

Many of the CDC’s newsletters have stopped being distributed, workers at the CDC say. Health alerts about disease outbreaks, previously sent to health professionals subscribed to the CDC’s Health Alert Network, haven’t been dispatched since March. The agency’s main social media channels have come under new ownership of the Department of Health and Human Services, emails reviewed by NPR show, and most have gone more than a month without posting their own new content.

Interesting. What’s the thinking here? The usual Trump-Musk substitute for thinking? “Government is bad, close it all down”? Is that it?

Health emergencies have not paused since January. Cases of measles, salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A and C have spread throughout the country. More than 100 million Americans continue to suffer from chronic diseases like diabetes and breast cancer. The decline in the agency’s communication could put people at risk, said four current and former CDC workers, three of whom NPR is allowing to remain anonymous because they are still employed by the CDC and believe they may be punished for speaking out.

But being put at risk is good for people. It toughens them up, makes them hardier, teaches them lessons about life. Besides, communication costs money. That’s money that could be in Trump’s pocket instead.

“Social media is one of the main ways the CDC communicates plain language, life-saving messages to America,” said one CDC employee.

But now, many of those messages have stopped being sent out. Changes to communication at the CDC began shortly after Trump was inaugurated in January, when HHS instructed the CDC and other health agencies to pause any sort of collaboration with people outside the agency.

“So at that point we stopped pretty much all communications,” said a CDC employee who works at the agency.

It’s efficiency. The less communication there is, the more efficiently things run. Everyone gets to go home early.

Two CDC employees who work in communications told NPR that fewer than half of the public health posts they’ve sent to HHS for approval have been cleared for publication on social media. Even posts that include basic information about recent disease outbreaks, like the number of people sickened or hospitalized, have not been posted as requested by employees, NPR confirmed after reviewing posts submitted for approval by an employee. Communications workers say they are also suggesting fewer health posts because they anticipate that their posts will be rejected.

“Everything is getting bottlenecked at the top,” said a worker. “It is extraordinarily time-consuming and backlogs us by weeks, if not months.”

The consequences could be deadly, experts said.

“When you have an outbreak of something like listeria, if you are a person who is pregnant and you consume food items that might have listeria in it that CDC should be warning you about, you run the risk of the baby that you are carrying dying,” said Guest. “And so that information needs to get out there.”

Oh well done, NPR, do be sure to distract us from this quite important disaster to make a big show of your enlightened refusal to say “pregnant woman.” We’re all massively impressed, and we no longer care about the Trump administrations war on medical information. Good luck in the future, Person Who Is Pregnant!

Sonia Sodha on the obstinate refusal to accept that men are not women:

A few weeks on, it’s becoming clear that despite the exceptional clarity of a judgment handed down by the highest court in the land, implementing it is a different matter. The rule of law, it seems, depends on most people choosing to follow it.

Some organisations, like Britain’s biggest union, are brazenly flouting it. Unison is allowing a male member who identifies as female to stand for election for its national council positions reserved for women. Last year its president accused a group of nurses from Darlington of “anti-trans bigotry” for standing up for their right to female-only changing rooms at work.

So what kind of unison is that? “All together now: women don’t get to have any rights!”

It’s not just Unison: the National Education Union has called on employers — presumably including schools — to support the rights of people to “use gendered facilities which match gender identities”, which would be unlawful. A train company, Southeastern, has wrongly told employees the ruling does not stop them using facilities designated for those of the opposite sex. Police forces still have policies allowing male officers who identify as female to carry out strip searches on female detainees. Even leading law firms have sent out analysis that badly misrepresents the law.

All this lying and refusing and bullying for the sake of men who call themselves women. Not men who give their all to ending racism or poverty or disease, but men who want to shove women aside and take their place. Why? Why are so many people so enthralled by this destructive counter-reality ideology?

What’s obvious from this soup of legal misinformation is that women are going to have to continue crowdfunding for expensive legal action to enforce their rights in the face of institutions hostile to the judgment. At least the more legal wins they clock up, the more likely it is that insurers will insist on organisations following the law or invalidating their liability policies.

Please also put the refuseniks on the naughty step for a minimum of ten years.