Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Size is not everything.

Sometimes more is less.

Donald Trump himself forecast the epic length of the State of the Union address that he planned to deliver to Congress on Tuesday evening. “It’s gonna be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” he had said beforehand.

No, it was gonna be long because he loves the sound of his own voice.

Trump is all about superlatives. Everything he does has to be the biggest, the strongest, the mostest. Who cares that he managed to say almost nothing with all those words?

Quantity over quality; that’s Trump in a nutshell. There’s lots of it and it’s all shit.

The problem for Trump at such a moment is that he’s not a persuader; he’s a pitchman, the kind of salesman who transmits in exclamation points all the fantastic, terrific, unbelievable features of the new car that he wants you to buy.

That’s one way of putting it. Another is that he’s just too stupid now to do anything else. I say now because I don’t know if he was better at it in the past, but I can certainly see in the present that he’s not what you’d call eloquent.

CNN’s latest survey had Trump at a sixty-three-per-cent disapproval rating, and just a thirty-six-per-cent approval one; other surveys show similarly brutal numbers. Trump, in other words, has sunk close to post-January 6th territory with the public—not exactly the moment for a speech that leaned hard into the President’s Panglossian conviction that a country with him as its leader must be doing pretty damn great.

Well Trump doesn’t think about it in those terms. Trump thinks about it as another awesome opportunity to strut his stuff, the way he did when he blathered at the captive military bigwigs back in September for a very very long time.

Trump’s default setting is triumphalism. He is never more animated than when he’s touting his own accomplishments, even if they are not actually his accomplishments. His eyes positively glowed as he launched into a long riff with an imagined interlocutor about how “our country is winning so much” under his leadership “that we really don’t know what to do about it.” A few seconds later, the doors to the visitor’s gallery above the House floor opened and the American men’s Olympic hockey team, wearing matching U.S.A. sweaters and gold medals, marched in. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” rang through the hall.

And that was his doing! He made them win gold medals! He trained them! He gave birth to them!

First as tragedy, then as farce.

Banning transgender women from lesbian group could ‘undermine their dignity’, court hears

How fascinating. Now let’s think about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group.

Think think thinky think

Done that?

Here’s what I come up with: what about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group? Eh? What about them? Eh? Why is the “dignity” of men who want to force themselves on lesbian groups more important than the dignity of the women who don’t want them to?

Why is the purported dignity of men who pretend to be women so vastly more important than the dignity of actual women? Why do men get to hog the camera while women are pushed out into the shadows somewhere?

Transgender women could have their dignity “undermined” and be made to feel “inferior” if a lesbian group is allowed to ban them from events, a court has heard.

How does that work? You could say the same about, say, musicians. The dignity of someone with zero musical training could be undermined if professional musicians banned people who are not any kind of musicians from events. So what? Things are what they are. We’ve always done it that way, for compelling reasons.

Self-declaration is just that. We can all announce that we’re surgeons, engineers, opera singers, pilots, architects, but if we don’t have the relevant education and experience, then it’s a mistake to accept our claim. We can all announce that we’re rabbits, stones, daffodils, but since we all have background knowledge that none of those entities can announce such a thing, such announcements fall flat.

Unless it’s men announcing that they’re women.

The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) has been in the Federal Court this week, appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) that ruled the group could not legally exclude transgender women from its public events.

The LAG does not believe people can change sex and wants to hold political and social events exclusively for “lesbian born females”. This means no males or transgender women could attend.

To do this, it must get an exemption to the Sex Discrimination Act, which ordinarily protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

Which is insane. Protecting _____ on the basis of a fictional idenniny is a contradiction in terms. You can’t protect women from sex discrimination if you refuse to let women organize and argue and protest as women, without any men. If you force women to let men join in then there is no protection against discrimination.

The HRC opposes the appeal and today told the court banning trans women from such events would go against the purpose of the Sex Discrimination Act and come at “too great a cost”.

“Trans lesbians see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as women and lesbians. The exclusion here seeks to perpetuate the view that actually they are neither of those things,” senior counsel for the commission, Celia Winnett, said.

Because they are neither of those things. Men are not women. Men are not lesbians. That’s not a “view”; it’s a tautology. Men are men. Men being men, they cannot be women. Not being women, they cannot be lesbians. It does not matter what they “seek to manifest themselves to the world” as. They can seek to manifest themselves as various things as a hobby or a game or a kink, if they like, but they can’t force it on other people, much less alter our understanding of women and men because of it. Play your games, but don’t try to force everyone else to play along.

Ms Winnett gave examples of exemptions, such as those issued to Australian lead mining companies in the 1990s which allowed them to only employ men because lead exposure could put women’s fertility or unborn babies at risk.

She said this was different to the current application, which had the purpose of excluding trans women just because they were transgender.

Wrong. Because they are men. Get cute all you want, but that’s the reason.

More on the possible small or medium size hole in the dam:

These statements were released days after a woman named Fox Varian became the first person to win a malpractice case after undergoing gender transition care and later regretting it. Ms. Varian and her lawyer argued that her psychologist and plastic surgeon in suburban New York, despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity, failed to safeguard her by going forward with a double mastectomy when she was 16.

That last clause should be “went ahead with a double mastectomy when she was 16, thus failing to safeguard her despite her serious mental health problems and apparent ambivalence over her transgender identity.”

In short it’s “when in doubt, do the drastic life-altering surgery.”

The most striking finding of the Cass review, a 2024 British inquiry that found “remarkably weak” evidence to back up the practice of youth gender medicine, was the shoddy quality of the professional guidelines for this treatment.

Researchers at the University of York, who provided underlying work for the Cass review, found that rather than being linked to careful, independent evaluations of the evidence, these guidelines relied heavily on other organizations’ guidelines. 

Ahhh yes, isn’t that illuminating. Of course they did. It’s like the people of Pharyngula, relying heavily on each other’s rage and venom instead of pausing for a minute to wonder how they got here. Somebody under this huge pile of words must be right, right? They can’t all be wrong, not when they shout so loudly.

A 2018 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides a useful example of how these documents can go wrong. At one point, it argues that children who say they are trans “know their gender as clearly and as consistently as their developmentally equivalent peers,” an extreme exaggeration of what we know about this population.

Not to mention what we know about that word. “Gender” is as sacred and taboo as any other core religious word, so of course it tricks medical academies into talking childish drivel about children “knowing their gender.” You might as well say children know their nervous systems or how to get from Tulsa to Winnipeg without looking at a map.

The document also criticizes the “outdated approach in which a child’s gender-diverse assertions are held as ‘possibly true’ until an arbitrary age” — the A.A.P. was instructing clinicians to take 4- and 5-year-olds’ claims about their gender identities as certainly true.

Bam. This kind of thing is what I’ve been scribbling about for far too many years – people who should know better, people who used to know better, people who probably do know better but can’t face the fallout. All so that they won’t get yelled at. News flash: getting yelled at is a lot better than throwing your own brains into the septic tank.

Policy statements like this one can reflect the complex and opaque internal politics of an organization, rather than dispassionate scientific analysis. The journalist Aaron Sibarium’s reporting strongly suggests that a small group of A.A.P. members, many of whom were themselves youth gender medicine providers, played a disproportionate role in developing these guidelines.

No conflict of interest there!

The shakiness of the guidelines didn’t matter, though — they were cited numerous times in news accounts and court documents as evidence that the most important pediatric association in the country supported youth medical transition.

So round and round and round we go, getting stupider with every circle.

Jesse Singal in the NY Times:

Medical Associations Trusted Belief Over Science on Youth Gender Care

What even is “gender care”? I know what they mean by it, of course, but it’s so silly.

American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and were more likely to have complex mental health conditions than those who had come to clinics in years earlier, complicating diagnosis.

And there’s another thing: these younger kids grew up in a culture that was increasingly steeped in the rhetoric of trans ideology. Ideas can be contagious, and trans ideology is nothing but a set of ideas, most of them absurd. Those ideas were not stored in a vault somewhere, they were and are up in our faces all day every day. It’s hardly surprising that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared: the ideology has been hard at work making the number soar all this time.

 “The science is settled.” The Human Rights Campaign says on its website that “the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth and adults is clear.”

What kind of “efficacy” are we talking about? It can’t be making people who call themselves trans more calm, reasonable, thoughtful, slow to anger.

The reason these advocates were able to make such strong statements is that for years, the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune: “The science” was supposedly codified in documents published by these organizations. As GLAAD puts it on its website, “Every major medical association supports health care for transgender people and youth as safe and lifesaving.”

Well obviously people who claim to be trans should have health care. Or do they mean health care specifically to “treat” gender dysphoria? Of course they do, but is that really even health care? Especially when it includes amputation of breasts and genitals, cross-sex hormones, and other adventurous appearance-tweaks? Singal says some of this is getting through.

But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

After expressing concerns about the evidence base in 2024, on Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major American medical group to publicly question youth gender medicine since its widespread adoption. The organization published a nine-page “position statement” advising its members against any gender-related surgeries before age 19 and noting that “there are currently no validated methods” for determining whether youth gender dysphoria will resolve without medical treatment. 

And, again, can elective amputation of healthy body parts for the sake of gender-belief really be called medical treatment? Are we sure?

The next day, the American Medical Association — which has long approved of such procedures — announced that “in the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

Do we suspect that being able to say “agrees with A.S.P.S.” made it a lot easier and safer to say that? “Don’t hit us, we’re just agreeing with the plastic surgeons!”

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on After everything collapsed.

We are living in a post-analytical world on many issues and this leads to social ills that can’t be sustained for long. I fear that rising nationalism in the US and the UK is a symptom of a lack of trust in our institutions and the presumption that “someone must be held to account.” The rise of transgenderism is a result of the backlash against feminism, but once removed, as males who do not want to fit in with the toxic masculinity that prizes “alphas” over people are being led to believe that women have it easier because they don’t have to participate in that garbage (but of course they really don’t know what prices women pay for selfsame garbage.) And they glom onto the permission granted to fetishists to call themselves women, allowing them to pretend they are “expressing their true selves.”) This leads to an erosion of trust in our scientific communities due to an academic embrace of transgender belief. So, we can’t trust anyone to tell the truth, and lash out against the easiest targets. I don’t think transgenderism is the cause of nationalism, but I think it is contributing to it.

I don’t know where this is all going to end, but I do see people I consider friends being seduced by nationalism and focusing on immigrant communities in England as the source of a rise of violence against good British girls and that by expelling entire communities to clear the country of grooming gangs England will once again be safe from harm. In the US, resistance to ICE is considered to be supporting the rapes and murders committed by “illegals” and so people don’t trust liberals and are okay with the detention centers where detainees are not afforded the dignity that we extend even to the livestock in our industrial farms.

I’m afraid we are headed for worse times before we come to our senses and restore a semblance of civilization, and that may be what it takes even for people to recognize what a wrong turn we have taken on gender, among other problems.

Birdwatching group disbands after new members made shooting birds for target practice a priority.

In other news –

Manchester Women’s Institute to fold after members quit over new transgender ban

Really? Transgender ban? Or ban on men who claim to be trans?

Manchester Women’s Institute is to fold after a ‘majority’ of its members quit over new rules which exclude transgender women. 

Ah. There you go. It’s about men who claim to be women, not a “transgender ban”.

When you don’t have good reasons, lies come to the rescue.

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Use them or else.

Pronouns are like waiters: done right, they’re efficient but unobtrusive, showing up when needed, helping things flow smoothly, rarely drawing attention to themselves. English has a pretty good pronoun system, but with an obvious gap in the second person–the loss of “thou” in most English dialects has led to awkward, attention-grabbing workarounds like “y’all”, “youse”, “yinz”, “you guys”. Those are the waiters that loudly announce their names when they first approach the table, interrupt the flow of conversation, spill the pizza on your lap, and disappear when you most need them (which is to say, typical American waiters)*.

The whole pronoun movement is simultaneously attempting to make the English pronoun system more complex and more ambiguous. More complex with all the bespoke pronouns, more ambiguous with the promiscuous use of singular “they”. Proponents of the latter make two dubious arguments in its defense. The first is that we have no trouble dealing with singular “you”, but see the bad waiters. The second is that we’ve been using singular “they” for, like, ever, which is true, but only in limited contexts, where the sex of the referent is unknown or unimportant (“Someone called but they didn’t leave a message”); not in reference to a specific, known person.

For the record, I use pronouns. I just used one (and there goes another). I use all the pronouns that my dialect of English puts in my toolbox, and occasionally some from other dialects. But my toolbox is pretty much full, and I’m not going to use a hammer when I need a screwdriver, no matter how much you insist I do.

*And, of course, if you’re a decent person, you tip them anyway while cursing the tipping culture.

The grotesquerie is off the charts. Every word of this is drivel.

Transgender women could have their dignity “undermined” and be made to feel “inferior” if a lesbian group is allowed to ban them from events, a court has heard.

That makes no sense. How can men’s “dignity” depend on permission to join lesbian groups? It’s the other way around in fact. It’s grotesquely undignified for men to slap on some lipstick and demand to join lesbian groups.

The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) has been in the Federal Court this week, appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) that ruled the group could not legally exclude transgender women from its public events.

Which amounts to ruling lesbians can’t have lesbian groups, which surely is not legal.

The LAG does not believe people can change sex and wants to hold political and social events exclusively for “lesbian-born females”. This means no males, even those who identify as women, could attend.

Why “even those who idennify as women”? If anything this means men who idennify as women are the last people who should be allowed to attend. It’s rude, it’s intrusive, it’s demanding, it’s dishonest, it’s manipulative, it’s fucking outrageous. All good reasons for not allowing them to attend.

The community organisation, which has about 15 members, has been denied this exemption twice before — once by the HRC and again on appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART). It has now appealed to the Federal Court, arguing lesbians have unique needs and interests and should be able to hold events without “biological males” present.

What possible reason do men have for wanting to attend anyway? Other than the fun of pestering and persecuting women?

The HRC opposes the appeal and today told the court banning trans women from such events would go against the purpose of the Sex Discrimination Act and come at “too great a cost”.

“Trans lesbians see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as women and lesbians. The exclusion here seeks to perpetuate the view that actually they are neither of those things,” senior counsel for the commission, Celia Winnett, said.

Blah blah blahdee blah. Trans sharks see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as fish and sharks. But they are not sharks; that’s what the “trans” bit means. Humans can be wrong about how they see themselves. Look at Trump for instance – he thinks he’s brilliant, funny, charming, strong, brave – the list is long. He’s wrong about all of it.

Ms Winnett gave examples of exemptions, such as those issued to Australian lead mining companies in the 1990s which allowed them to only employ men because lead exposure could put women’s fertility or unborn babies at risk.

She said this was different to the current application, which had the purpose of excluding trans women just because they were transgender.

Wrong. So wrong. So stupid. Not because they were “transgender” at all: because they were men.

I’m sure it’s just random.

Millions of pages of Epstein files have been released to the public, but an NPR investigation reveals a gap: The Justice Department has removed or withheld dozens of pages related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor decades ago. The Justice Department declined to answer NPR’s questions on the record about these specific files, what’s in them, and why they are not published.

Well they would, wouldn’t they. Trump has power over them, and he’s not the principled type who would take great care not to meddle with the Justice Department’s files on him. He’s the opposite of that. He’s the type who would cut all their throats before letting them investigate let alone prosecute him.

NPR’s Stephen Fowler tells Up First that an NPR review of the files found an FBI email from last July listing various claims and tips it received about Trump. One report accused Trump of sexually abusing a minor around 1983, when Jeffrey Epstein also allegedly abused her. A field office investigated the report, and the records show the FBI interviewed the accuser four times. Only one of the accuser’s interviews was made public, but it doesn’t mention Trump. According to the DOJ’s tracking system, the Justice Department did not make at least 50 pages of the files public. The White House and the Trump administration have consistently stated that nothing in the documents incriminates the president.

Again, of course they have. They consistently lie through their teeth whenever it suits them.

The Daily Mail [sorry]:

More than half of local authorities are still failing to comply with the ‘crystal clear’ Supreme Court ruling on biological sex almost a year after the landmark judgment.

Some 159 of the 317 councils in England are still ‘waiting for guidance’, despite the Equalities Minister saying that the ruling was ‘crystal, crystal clear’.

Well we can’t expect them to give up the chance to make life worse for women overnight, now can we.

Astonishingly, some councils even ‘made it clear they did not agree with the Supreme Court judgment’ and have maintained trans-inclusive policies, it adds.

It comes as Bridget Phillipson said on Sunday that the landmark ruling ‘set out very, very clearly what sex means’, adding: ‘It means biological sex.’

The Equalities Minister told Sky News: ‘My message to employers, for the avoidance of any doubt, is that they should understand the Supreme Court ruling and take action.’

It’s not really all that hard to understand…

The Women’s Rights Network (WRN) submitted Freedom of Information requests to 317 councils, unitary authorities and London boroughs to produce the report. Its investigation found that more than half are ‘misunderstanding or misrepresenting’ the law.

It’s only women.

WRN founder Heather Binning said it is ‘shameful’ that so many local authorities are still failing to comply with the judgment as they have a ‘moral and legal duty to protect women’s rights’.

She added: ‘It is now 10 months since the Supreme Court confirmed what every right-thinking person has always known – sex means sex, not a self-declared gender identity. There is no need for further guidance, the law is the law.’

Well but how can we be sure what they meant by “sex” and “women” and “means”? It will take several years to work it out.

WRN has highlighted more than a dozen councils whose policies are ‘problematic’ or ‘fail to uphold women’s rights’. Among them is Coventry Council, which the report states has ‘no plans to review its policies and practices in light of the Supreme Court judgment’.

Norwich Council ‘told its staff to keep using the toilets with which they feel most comfortable’, the report adds, while the London Borough of Haringey said it ‘has no plans to review its policies’.

Or to put it another way, those three councils told women “fuck you”.

Cath Dyson, one of the report’s authors said, the findings left her ‘horrified’. She added: ‘This is wrong on so many levels. Local authorities are failing the women they represent, they are failing the women who work for them and they are failing the women who use their services.’

And they’re not doing it by accident.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Use them or else.

I have to wonder if at some level, some of this madness is a symptom of the executives and those in power not caring enough about “the gender thing”, rather than them being utterly preoccupied with it.

The heads of these institutions don’t believe in gender nonsense. Rather, they consider their actions: they do an ad-hoc cost/benefit analysis in their heads, comparing the cost of taking one side over the other. If they side with the gender critics, the actions required to put a stop to gender lunacy signal immediate cost to themselves — unrest and pushback from within the institution; headaches from activists. The appearance of being “anti-LGBTQ”, etc. It would all just be so terribly unpleasant for the brass to stop it.

On the other hand, the costs involved in playing along with it are paid downstream: they’re paid by women, they’re paid by vulnerable people, they’re paid by those who don’t have power.

This is the same shape of so many catastrophes playing out right now: there are collective action problems that cannot be solved because of the power imbalance in society, and because whatever checks and balances were once in place to at least try to correct against these kinds of imbalances have eroded. There were supposed to be watchdogs and regulators to put a stop to these kinds of collective-action runaway trains.

I compare it to the real estate crisis in Canada:

Everyone sees that the country’s caught up in an absurd system that doesn’t make any sense. We’ve built literally hundreds of thousands of “investment vehicles” — more-or-less fake apartments, units so small and uninhabitable that virtually no one will occupy them. But stopping the system — admitting that we were just slapping up towers of fake housing for immediate profit — would have required those in power (the banks and the real estate developers) to pay a cost, whereas keeping the scheme going offloaded the cost downstream to those less in-the-know, mom-and-pop investors and such. It didn’t take long before most people at the top figured out it was bullshit, but by then a kind of pyramid scheme had emerged, so the system kept going anyways, because as long as other people still hadn’t caught on ot the scam, the safer, more lucrative bet was to go along with it — for now. Well, “for now” was then. Now now, the whole thing’s gotten so out of hand that the entire country’s economy is on the brink. The game’s over and the pyramid’s collapsing.

I think that structure maps almost perfectly onto gender nonsense: they’re building up fake “genders” — even fake genitals — that nobody’s really buying. But stopping it at this point would incur too much cost at the top. Each individual executive sees it as a problem better dumped on those below. It may be bullshit, and it may be doing catastrophic harm to those below you, but if you’re an executive, your short-term cost/benefit says it pays to play along, for now. The cost to women’s rights, to gay and autistic people’s bodies, to freedom of speech… those costs are beginning to add up, and the pyramid of gender is beginning to wobble.

I fear that only after everything’s collapsed will they admit they were cowards.

It seems Trump thinks he can overrule the Supreme Court. One wonders what he thinks “Supreme” means.

Trump on Monday threatened countries around the world to abide by any tariff deals they agreed to, despite the U.S. Supreme Court striking down many of his far-reaching taxes on imports.

Any country that wants to “play games” with the Supreme Court decision, Trump posted, will be met with “a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to.”

So it’s playing games to heed the Supreme Court, but it’s not playing games for Trump to pretend he can ignore the Supreme Court?

He really doesn’t get the separation of powers thing, does he.

Trump has already signed an executive order enabling him to bypass Congress and impose a 10% tax on global imports, starting on Tuesday, the same day as his State of the Union speech.

He should impose parking tickets on them too. Why not?

Oh goody, pronouns guidance.

An NHS trust has said the pronouns “Xey/Xem” can be used by staff at work.

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in south London also urged staff to apologise if they used the “wrong” pronouns for colleagues.

Well don’t stop there. What about Mey/Mem? Zey/Zem? Key/Kem? Is the NHS trust being alphabetically exclusionaryist?

A training document called Pronouns and the LGBTQ+ Community lists several examples of pronouns, including I/me, She/her, He/him, They/them, Ze/Zir, Xey/Xem or It/Its.

The trust said it was “up to each individual to identify what their pronouns are”, stressing it was a great way “to create an inclusive environment and demonstrate inclusion in the workplace”.

But, as I’ve said a billion times, there’s no such thing as “their” pronouns. We don’t own the pronouns used to refer to us. What they are is impersonal and a matter of grammar, not personal and a matter of rights or idenniny or extra-special specialness.

It adds that if pronouns “aren’t important to you, it’s even more important to use them”.

I see. If you recognize what bullshit this is, you have to be bullied even harder.

The training, revealed in a freedom of information request, also urges trust employees to correct others if they see or hear them misgendering someone.

Yeah good idea. Do this especially during a surgery, downing tools and giving the miscreant a good old sermon on the subject.

The document emerged after Jennifer Melle, an NHS nurse, was threatened with the sack for “misgendering” a transgender patient.

Ms Melle would not call the patient “she” while working at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, Surrey, in May 2024. The patient was a serving inmate from a men’s prison.

All the more reason to call him “she”! Poor lamb he she must have been so traumatized.

Trump is busy micromanaging…uh…Netflix?

Trump on Sunday threatened Netflix, suggesting it would “pay the consequences” if it didn’t “immediately” fire Susan Rice, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under the Obama administration.

I don’t think he’s the president of Netflix. I don’t think government bosses are supposed to order businesses to fire people the government bosses don’t like.

On Sunday, the president posted on Truth Social that Netflix should “fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences.”

• “She’s got no talent or skills – Purely a political hack! HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK. How much is she being paid, and for what???” he added.
• The president’s words came in response to a post from right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who criticized Rice and called Netflix an “anti-American” and “woke” company for having her on its board.

Yes that’s a big thing with Trump – see someone on Team Him spitting venom at Person X and enthusiastically join in, but with 100 times the amount and toxicity of venom.

Reality check: The president doesn’t have direct authority to kill media deals, except for those that could pose a national security threat.

…

Yes, but: President Trump’s comments could still have an impact on investors and regulators who might feel pressure from the executive branch.

And he knows that, so he happily subverts the rules governing his job in order to give his malice a good airing.

The fix is in.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report describing President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and allegations that he obstructed government efforts to reclaim them.

Of course she did. She’s the underqualified judge who owes her promotion to Trump, so of course she’s going to reward him when she gets the chance.

The Trump-appointed judge said releasing the report now would “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice” and amount to a “manifest injustice” because the case never reached a jury. It could also risk revealing information protected by attorney-client privilege and grand jury secrecy, she said.

Speaking of basic notions of fairness and justice, has she been following the career of one Donald Trump, real estate mogul from Queens?

Cannon has drawn scrutiny for rulings that favor Trump and cut against longstanding practice and precedent. She delayed the classified documents case for months when she installed an independent overseer to review materials seized from Mar-a-Lago — until a federal appeals court overturned her decision.

Of course she did. She owes him.

A new crazy.

Trump just shared a bizarre AI video of himself as a hockey player winning Olympic gold for Team USA.

His numbers are sinking like a rock, so now he’s gotta insert himself into other people’s wins. Beyond pathetic pic.twitter.com/bjcObgFMk5

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) February 23, 2026

Greenland to Trump: No thanks.

Greenland has said it does not need medical assistance from other countries, after Donald Trump said he was sending a hospital ship to the autonomous Danish territory he wants to acquire.

The US president said he would dispatch the vessel in a social media post on Saturday, claiming that Greenlanders were not getting the healthcare they needed.

“Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“It’s on the way!!!” he added.

That’s so funny because here lots of people are “not being taken care of” because they can’t afford it and there is no National Health service or similar. I don’t see Trump sending “boats” to them.

“That will be ‘no thanks’ from us,” Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Greenlandic prime minister, wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday.

“President Trump’s idea to send a US hospital ship here to Greenland has been duly noted. But we have a public health system where care is free for citizens,” he said.

Quite unlike the US, where illness is a source of profit.

Hmm. An article in the Nation assumes matters not in evidence.

Rather than do something, anything, about the abysmal state of healthcare in the United States, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services has doubled down on its attacks against trans youth, their families, and the web of providers who work to ensure young people can live comfortably and fully in their truths.

Their whats? What does “in their truths” mean?

Aw come on, we know what it means. It means their fantasies about themselves. It seems to me that people’s fantasies about themselves are not something anyone else has to do anything at all to assist or affirm or publicize. They’re personal and individual; they’re the opposite of social.

Of course it’s not just HHS. Last summer, the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court ruled that it isn’t discriminatory to discriminate against trans youth.

No it didn’t. The issue wasn’t “discriminate against trans youth: yes or no?” – it was “puberty blockers and hormone therapy for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors: yes or no?”.

It’s interesting how consistently reporting on magic gender has to distort the facts in order to…well, distort the facts.

Daaaamn this is nuts. I can’t look away.

The Human Rights Tribunal affirms that hateful statements or publications are not shielded from the Human Rights Code because they are part of public or political discourse, re: BCTF v. Neufeld. To read the full statement please visit: https://t.co/VVQbTr93go pic.twitter.com/LTnShBfGtv

— BC's Office of the Human Rights Commissioner (@humanrights4BC) February 19, 2026

Commissioner welcomes decision protecting LGBTQ people from hate speech

For the millionth time: what on earth are LGBTQ people? There are no such people, because it’s not possible to be both a lesbian and a gay man, let alone be lesbian and gay and bi and trans and whatever tf Q means at any given moment.

Forced teaming. Way to sneak the T in there whether the L and the G and the B like it or not. The Q is just a decorative whorl.

The BCTF v. Neufeld case began when the BCTF filed a complaint with the Tribunal after Barry Neufeld, a then-Chilliwack School Board Trustee, made a series of statements about trans and queer-inclusive education. The Tribunal found that some of these statements amounted to hate speech and that Mr. Neufeld discriminated against LGBTQ teachers based on their sexual orientation and gender identity and expression in relation to their employment, given Mr. Neufeld’s role as a school trustee.

The Tribunal found that six of Mr. Neufeld’s publications expose LGBTQ people to hatred or contempt based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, and 24 were in violation of discrimination protections. The Tribunal differentiated between statements constituting hate speech and those that indicated discrimination, although some statements fell into both categories. The Tribunal agreed with the Commissioner’s submission that a political opinion that is based on mis or disinformation and that is expressed publicly may cause harm by seeking to promote laws and policies that entrench barriers for equality-seeking groups and that such opinion can be discriminatory or hateful.

So men who claim to be women are an “equality-seeking group” now?

The Commissioner intervened in this complaint before the Human Rights Tribunal to provide submissions on the legal test for discriminatory speech. Previously, it was not clear that publicly expressed political opinions could be considered discriminatory, as opposed to just offensive speech that does not breach B.C.’s Human Rights Code. The decision makes clear that all forms of public speech that cause harm to a person based on a protected characteristic may be found to be discriminatory, even if they do not name that specific person.

Well doesn’t that just sum it up. “Before, we hesitated, because we’re not supposed to squelch political speech, but now we’ve come up with a way to squelch political speech every day and twice on Sunday. Go us!”

Jolyon still grifting.

Good Law Project fundraising without having a case….?

Have @Girlguiding or @WomensInstitute authorised this fundraising for them to breach their charitable objects ? pic.twitter.com/vC4TWP8o0q

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) February 21, 2026

What does that even mean, “they don’t want to”? How does he know? Who are “they”? Is he claiming that every single woman in the Women’s Institute longs to have men in flouncy dresses take it over? What business is it of his anyway?