How NOT to talk about the Holocaust on a tv news program.

As well as millions of others THAN WHAT?

They erase women by saying “people” and they erase Jews by saying “people” – and they do it right in plain sight.

It’s surrogacy day at the BBC.

A couple said they decided to document their journey to have a child via a surrogate after feeling there was “no information” available about the process.

Kevin Pittuck-Bennett, 46, and his husband Michael, 38, from Chelmsford, had their two-month-old daughter, Peggy, in 2024 via surrogacy, which is when a woman carries a pregnancy for another couple or individual.

…

Sarah Jones, the chief executive officer at Surrogacy UK, said: “The UK surrogacy community in the UK is really unique in the fact that we operate altruistically, so nobody is allowed to make profit, nobody is allowed to financially profit from surrogacy in the UK.”

It’s interesting how all the altruism is from women. Men can’t be surrogates either altruistically or commercially.

Helen Gibson, the founder of the campaign group, Surrogacy Concern, said: “We don’t support surrogacy for anyone, we understand that a lot of people want to have a genetic child of their own, but it is very exploitative for women.

“No-one looks at it from the perspective of the child” who needs their biological mother when they are first born, she said. “Fostering, adoption and co-parenting are all options before surrogacy.”

That is, instead of surrogacy.

H/t Freeminder

Originally a comment by Bruce Everett on A pause, a freeze, a ban, a cancellation.

This is going to be a pretty big global economic storm that Trump’s brewing. I’m kind of glad to be in Australia right now, where we certainly have economic problems, just not as fundamentally bad as a lot of other economies. We may be well positioned to mitigate a lot of the chaos.

That being said, we’ve got an opposition that’s great at talking up its economic cred, but hasn’t done a competent job since 2007, despite being in government for most of it, and they weren’t even that s**t hot when they were okay (The Howard Gov’t 1996-2007 coasted on Keating’s economic reforms and a long-lasting mining boom). Since 2007, the Labor party has been better at micro-tweaking the economy through catastrophe (see the Rudd gov’t during the GFC), and there’s every sign that they’re competent to do as best as possible through this current mess, barring perhaps some issues with the reserve bank and how it operates.

On cultural issues, Labor is actually doing alright here when dealing with Nazis and various anti-Semites, despite what the opposition (repeatedly) says. It’s not adopting the worst of the left, and it’s not losing its spine in response to demands from the right.

However, Labor isn’t doing at all well when it comes to the erosion of women’s rights by gender woo, and yet, the opposition is leaving this alone. It’s conspicuous that the conservatives aren’t focusing on this, but then perhaps they aren’t prepared to touch the issue after the way the party messed up in the way it treated Moira Deeming.

I’ve heard a number of local GCs express the view that a Liberal Party (our conservatives) will solve the issue, but I really, really doubt it. It seems like rank tribalism, or opportunism. Both of the major parties are serving up s**t sandwiches on this issue, sans bread.

And gawd. The lynch pin of the conservatives’ economic plan; building nuclear plants magically faster than more experienced, trained and infrastructure-rich nations ever did, in a country with a grid that’s ill-suited to using nuclear. I’m not anti-nuclear (where else are we going to get a constant supply of Molybdenum-99?), and if we had industries that required a constant, high level output (such as high volume silicon lithography), then we’d absolutely need to at least consider nuclear. But Australia doesn’t.

Australia has a grid that flip-flops all over the place when it come to demand, while the price to run nuclear reactors doesn’t scale well with output – they’re not cost-effective at lower outputs. And that’s before considering difficulties in ramping output up and down fast enough to respond to demand. (And before considering questions of proliferation, how that effects regional geopolitics, and where we’re going to store the waste).

Hugely expensive tech, a phenomenally unrealistic timeline for implementation, costings as substantial as crepe paper on a rainy day, and a completely poor fit for existing demands and infrastructure; that’s the conservative economic plan here. And they’re definitely in striking distance of wining the election this year.

Conservatives the world over are selling a lot of economic cockamamie. A lot more than I remember them selling in my youth. Yet for some reason they’re retaining an illusion of economic credibility like an echo from decades past.

The specter of “efficient” conservative administration similarly haunts bodies politic the world over. Both the Tories in the UK, and the GOP in the US handle their bureaucracies in a manner that would be best narrated with a string of Hanna Barbera sound effects, and yet adherents will still believe. Just one slip from a centrist government seems enough to get people into a fit of buyer’s remorse over the supposedly “progressive” regime they supported, and then you’re back with delusional clowns with fetishes for white elephants and firing people.

My apologies for the rant. Maybe it wouldn’t have built up so much if I commented here more often.

Trump is doing the deportations thing just as he said he would, but the reporting reveals that the Biden and Obama administrations did plenty of deporting themselves. It’s not clear to me that Trump is doing anything radically different.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants out of the US and the promise of “mass deportations”. To that effect, the defence department has said that it will provide military aircrafts to deport more than 5,000 people [who] have been detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

ICE statistics show that over 1,000 people were removed or repatriated on Thursday, the fourth day of the Trump administration.

…

Deportations are not unique to the Trump administration. Biden carried out deportations as well, with 271,000 immigrants deported to 192 countries in fiscal year 2024.

In total, Biden carried out 1.5 million deportations in his four years, according to figures by the Migration Policy Institute. That is around the same that was carried out under Trump’s first term. That number is lower than deportations carried out under Barack Obama’s first term, which added up to a total of 2.9 million.

Aka twice as many. Obama deported nearly twice as many as Trump in their respective first terms.

I gotta say, the reporting hasn’t always reflected that fact.

Pure oblivious selfishness on display as if it were completely normal.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want my own family. Even in my early twenties, as a gay man before gay marriage was legal, I imagined that I’d probably marry a woman to have a family and then sleep with men on the side. It might not have been the best scenario, but that’s how much I wanted kids. I’d originally had it in my head that I’d like to be a dad by the time I was 40. But here I am at 44 – still trying.

He thought he’d marry a woman so that he could “have” some kids, and that he would fuck around on the side, no doubt without telling the pesky woman and without protecting her from potential STDs. That’s how much he wants what he wants and doesn’t care about anyone else.

I first looked into surrogacy as a single person in 2016. I didn’t realise it wasn’t legal then to do it on your own. It wasn’t until 2019 that the law changed to allow single people to become legal parents of children conceived through surrogacy in the UK. 

Selfishness encoded into law.

It was important for me to have my own biological child. 

It wasn’t important to him for the child to have two parents.

I said to him: “Look, I want to pursue surrogacy.” Unfortunately, we split up. It wasn’t because I wanted to try for a baby, but I knew he wasn’t that keen. I just thought: “I’m not prepared to wait any longer [for the right partner], or to have a relationship get in the way of my dream of becoming a parent.” So within a couple of weeks, I decided to do it alone.

He just thought he wasn’t prepared to try to create the best situation for the baby, so he decided to saddle the baby with a selfish oblivious single father who bought the baby as he might buy a car or a sailboat.

I bought a large pack of 10 eggs rather than a standard pack of six – although they gave me 13. Then last April I did ICSI, a fertility treatment in which they inject live sperm into the eggs. All 13 of the eggs survived the thawing process – nine were fertilised. I’ve now got five viable embryos out of the 13 eggs. It cost me about £15,000 for the whole package including ICSI and the eggs.

I’m still looking for a surrogate. It is illegal to pay a surrogate in the UK, except for their reasonable expenses. I can’t find one abroad because it’s too expensive – in Mexico City it’s about £70,000 and in America it’s more like £100,000. I don’t want to go to a cheaper place with poor aftercare and take any risks. It was the same when I got a hair transplant – I did it in the UK and not Turkey.

Oh how sweet, he’s as careful with his future human as he is with his hair transplant.

How long will it take to have a baby via surrogacy ? I mean… how long is a piece of string? People often say the average is 18 months to two years. Some people get pregnant within a year. Other times it could be four or five years. And once you’ve found a surrogate, there’s no guarantee that they’ll fall pregnant. I’ve heard stories of people having two or three failed transfers, then a couple of miscarriages and finally getting pregnant. So of course just finding the surrogate is one of the first steps.

Ah look what a good guy he is – he’s careful not to call his hired uterus a woman, because the uterus-haver might very well idennify as a man. Peak virtue achieved!

It’s so hard not having a partner to bounce off and be buoyant for you, and help you make hard decisions. Am I ready for it? I don’t know. But I know I want it.

And that’s all that matters.

It’s always hate women day at Number 10.

A drag queen who criticised JK Rowling over her views on trans people was invited to celebrate Burns Night at No 10.

Sir Keir Starmer was pictured alongside Lawrence Chaney, a former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, in an event Downing Street said was intended to “honour the life and legacy” of Scotland’s national bard.

Starmer wanted to celebrate Burns so he invited a mockery of women to help the celebrating. It’s funny how men like Starmer don’t invite blackface comedians to help them celebrate things, but they do think it’s just fine to invite womanface comedians to do that. Women don’t matter, is that it? Women are obviously inferior so it only makes sense to jeer at them by putting on a skirt and wig?

The move provoked a backlash over controversial remarks previously made by Chaney, who was heavily made up and in Scottish dress for the event, including accusing the Harry Potter author of stoking up “hate” towards transgender people.

Chaney also recently shared a post on X which appeared to compare women concerned at the loss of single-sex spaces to racist segregationists in 1960s America.

So women are the equivalent of racists while men are the equivalent of the victims of racism. Women have all the power, and abuse it, while men have no power, and are punished for trying to get some. Is that what we’re saying now? Women are the all-powerful immovable oppressors and exploiters of men? Men are the brave determined underlings struggling to defend their dignity?

In the post shared by Chaney in November, an image of US Congresswoman Nancy Mace, in front of a sign which says “biological” in front of women on a bathroom door, is set alongside a woman smiling in front of a “white women only” bathroom door in 1962 Mississippi.

And there it is. The answer is yes. Women are now the oppressor class and men are their victims. Adjust your maps accordingly.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Down is up.

This important statement details why a sex based approach to violence against women is problematic.

Anything other than a sex based approach to violence against women endangers women and girls you idiot. It’s only “problematic” if you insist on “including” people who don’t belong, i.e. men. A clear boundary is only a problem for those who wish to blur it in order to violate it. Why do you hate women so much, Sally? Why do you find it more important to placate men than protect women?

A girl or woman is anyone who has lived experience as a girl or woman, or identifies as a girl or woman.

How does this help women Sally? The only people who benefit from your expanded “definition” are men. Under your terms, women lose. All of the people who have ever had or will ever have “lived experience as a girl or woman” are female. Being female is a state of being such that those born into it will always accumulate “lived experience” as a woman with no effort whatsoever. All they have to do is exist and metabolize. The rest comes automatically. On the other hand there is no way at all for a male to ever have such “lived experience”, whatever the effort put into the attempt. Pretending to be a women can’t do it. Being mistaken for a woman can’t do it. “Identifying” as a woman can’t do it. No choice of wardrobe, accessories, comportment, hormones, or surgery can turn a man into a woman, a male into a female. You can’t get there from here.

However convincing my costume, no amount of time dressed as a furry will give me even a fraction of a second’s worth of “lived experience” as a lion, tiger, or bear. The only way I can “become” one of them is to be eaten by one of them. If I want to fly away as a bird, my only real option is a sky burial. But then I can’t write home about it, or enjoy any of the “lived experience” that my molecules are now having as the new species of which they’re now inhabitants and constituents. You can’t have your cake and be it too.

Womanhood isn’t something that can be won, acquired, or conferred. There’s no “gatekeeping”. It’s not a matter of some kind of evaluation or recognition of how well a given male “performs” femininity. Being female isn’t a performance. It’s not filling up a bingo card. It’s not like a coffee card where, instead of getting a free latte when the last entry is punched or stamped, you “become” a woman. That’s not how reality works. There is no authority “excluding” them, or a committee failing to admit them, it’s just life. It’s nobody’s fault or decision. No authority or pronouncement can change that. A GRC is not binding on the universe. It means nothing whatsoever. It gives its bearer no rights or privileges, or at least it shouldn’t. Appealing to argumentum ad clownfish won’t help you, though such appeals are not surprising coming from a movement owing more to postmodern literary criticism than it does to natural science. Never bring a metaphor to a biology fight. Obfuscatory word salad is no match for a gamete.

Jane Clare Jones on Musk’s Nazi salute and the quarrels over whether it was or was not a Nazi salute.

There seems to be a common conviction among several commentators in and around the anti-woke sphere that Elon Musk’s ‘awkward gesture’ at Trump’s inauguration on Monday could not possibly have been a Nazi salute and that anyone who thinks it was is probably a) stupid b) nuts or c) a sanctimonious virtue-signalling wanker posturing for woke-points. I find this easy dismissal troubling. 

There’s a lot of that kind of thing around. I think the Left has lost its tiny mind when it comes to women and trans ideology, but thinking that doesn’t make me think Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be a Nazis-admiring ratbag.

JCJ points out that Musk did make the gesture and the gesture was what it looked like.

The claim that ‘that isn’t what that was’ can’t then be a claim that that isn’t what Musk did, or isn’t what people saw, but rather, a claim that that isn’t what he meant. That is, it’s an interpretative claim, and interpretation can be a somewhat nebulous business, and is probably not something people should be making such cut-and-dried pronouncements about.

As in…he did just happen to make a very Nazi Nazi gesture, but he didn’t make a Nazi gesture.

I don’t claim to know what is in Elon Musk’s soul. All I, and other concerned observers, can do, is interpret the performance of a particular gesture within its political context, and be explicit about why we are reading the context in a certain way. That context is enormous, and unpicking its strands is one of the main things I want to do with this project. It involves, among many factors, Musk’s turning of Twitter into an engine of far-right radicalisation, to the extent that the last two years have been like watching a lot of people you thought had their heads screwed on being slowly boiled in increasingly fascist-flavoured water. It includes his many recent interventions in European politics, his support of far right and populist parties, his efforts to whip up racially motivated civil unrest, and to undermine the democratically elected government of Britian (twice!). It includes what we know about the anti-democratic, techno-feudalist, anarcho-capitalist, white supremacist, neo-reactionary ideologies that inform the worldviews of Silicon Valley’s broligarchy, many of whom lined up, literally, behind Trump on Monday. And it includes Musk’s central role in an incoming administration that has already set about rounding people up, shredding government departments, threating other sovereign nations, and releasing convicted criminals who were involved in trying to violently overturn the results of a democratic election.

Read the whole thing; it’s excellent.

Rape Crisis Scotland still crapping on women.

Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS), the organisation which provides support to rape victims, has published new guidance on how it defines a woman – saying that this is anyone who self-identifies as one.

The new document, called Draft Guidance On Protected Spaces For RCS Member Centres, says a woman can also be “someone whose sex at birth was assigned as female and lives as a woman”.

Oh gee, thanks for the permish. A woman can be a woman, but it’s second-best; the ideal kind of woman is the male kind.

The document, which has taken almost a year to prepare, aims to set out detailed guidance on the provision of women-only spaces within Scotland’s 16 rape crisis centres, along with options for inclusion of trans people.

Why? Why along with options for inclusion of trans people? Why not just include female people and leave it at that?

In the document, RCS – which receives millions in public funding – explains that when it uses the word “female” it is “signifying an ordinary biological perspective on women.”

It states: “This language has been selected as it corresponds to the language of the Equality Act in relation to the protected characteristic of sex.

“When we use ‘woman’, we mean anyone who self-identifies as a woman. We use this language as it corresponds to a gendered perspective.”

So females are women but women are men and women.

Campaigners have now criticised RCS’s long-awaited new guidance, with one describing it as “just another set of ­weasel words allowing men to continue using the service.”

Former child protection officer Jane McLenachan, of women’s rights campaign group the Evidence-Based Social Work Alliance, said: “Rape Crisis Scotland continue justifying their belief gender ideology is more important than biological sex.

“Rape Crisis centres were set up to support women who have experienced violent assault and rape by men. Victims shouldn’t have to work out this nonsensical definition of female and women before accessing services. Clear words such as ‘men who identify as transgender’ should be used instead of the obfuscated language RCS has adopted.”

But that would hurt the men’s feefees. It’s far more important to make men happy than it is to make women safe.

Brindley said: “We are committed to ensuring that anyone who needs support can access it in a way which feels safe and right for them.

“Local rape crisis centres are independent organisations overseen by their own governing bodies, who are responsible for employing staff and the operation of their services. RCS do not employ staff in local centres.

“We are working with member centres to develop a shared approach, so that no matter where in Scotland someone lives, they know what they can expect when they reach out for support from what survivors describe as a lifesaving service.”

That is, male someones know they can expect to be welcomed into rape crisis centres whether women like it or not.

Norwegians don’t mess around.

Late on Monday night, in the bright sunlit tundra of the South Pole, another record is broken as 21-year-old Norwegian Karen Kyllesø stepped past the line of national flags and stood next to the red and white striped pole representing the southernmost point on Planet Earth.

After just under 54 days of trekking 702 miles through no man’s land, Kyllesø became the youngest person ever to reach the South Pole on Skis, solo and without assistance.

Not too shabby.

That’s the one that Scott and four of his men died trying to reach first. Amundsen and his team got there ahead of him and without casualties – on skis. Scott and his team didn’t use skis. Big mistake.

Born on May 9, 2003, Kyllesø has made it a goal of hers to reach the South Pole ever since she became the youngest girl to cross Greenland on skis in 2018, being 15 at the time.

Her mentor, Lars Ebbesen told AFP, “She had barely even arrived (in Greenland) before she asked me: ‘Do you think I can also go to the South Pole?'”

This feat is guaranteed to go down in history, as Kyllesø surpassed the previous record of youngest person to ski to the South Pole, solo and unassissted by a 5 year age gap. At 26, Pierre Hedan of France first broke the record in 2024, according to Guinness World Records.

High five, Karen Kyllesø!

Sally Hines is a menace to women.

The Guardian has a detailed backgrounder on Trump’s confusion plus lying about California v water.

On his first day in office, Trump directed the secretary of commerce and the secretary of the interior to develop a new plan that will “route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply”.

Cool plan, but then what to do about the people who will desperately need a reliable water supply after Trump “fixes” things?

In a memorandum titled “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California”, Trump directed the agencies to reprise the efforts of his first administration, which challenged the state’s environmental protection regulations, and allowed more water to be pumped for agriculture and cities.

Because who needs environmental protection? Environments aren’t a real thing, they’re just some fancy idea invented by a bunch of hippies. Pump that water into cities and almond orchards until it’s all gone and everybody moves to some place where there’s water.

[T]he order, which relied heavily on misinformation about the fire disaster in Los Angeles to give urgency to the directive, showed a sweeping disconnect between Trump’s view of the issues and the intricate and layered policies already in place.

Moreover, experts told the Guardian, it could bring a new layer of turmoil to California’s complicated negotiations over water use, derailing years of discussions between state and federal officials, water policy experts, tribes, conservationists and farmers over how best to steward and distribute water.

Here’s the thing: there isn’t enough water. There’s a disconnect between California and its agriculture and its cities on the one hand and its water supply on the other. California has acted as if it had access to infinite water, but it doesn’t. This isn’t the fault of lefty wackos.

Formed at the convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the delta flows through the San Francisco Bay and out to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the largest estuary on the west coast, supplying water to roughly 30 million people, irrigating 6m acres of farmland and supporting endangered species and threatened ecosystems. It has also long been center stage in complicated and protracted conflicts over the state’s essential and increasingly sparse water resources.

Plans completed by the Biden administration and California officials, only just announced last December, have already increased the amount of water flowing to urban areas and farms, even as delta species continue to decline.

The plans were years in the making, according to water officials, and the work to find paths forward that supply millions of residents, support swaths of the $49bn agriculture industry, and leave enough in the systems for threatened ecosystems and communities severely affected by the declining waterways – including tribes that closely rely on them for sustenance and cultural identity – has been an enormous challenge.

Why’s that? Because there isn’t enough. Magic Trump can’t change that just by babbling at it (or any other way).

In posts on Truth Social over the past two weeks, Trump brought up the battles from his first term and blamed state water policies for the catastrophic outcome of the Palisades fire, which killed at least 11 people in Los Angeles earlier this month.

In a press conference on Tuesday, he repeated the critique, saying California “created an inferno”, with its water policies. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn on the valve,” he said, a confusing mischaracterization of how water systems operate.

There’s this valve, see. It sits in the Golden Valve Hall, waiting for the golden man from Queens to turn it on.

Speaking on Fox News later on Tuesday, Trump went even further, threatening to deny California federal aid to recover from the wildfires over the issue.

“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down,” he said.

There’s that “down” crap again. “Down” from where? Is he thinking there’s a giant Mount Reservoir somewhere in California, with all the water in a tub on the peak?

Experts have refuted the claims that the fires could have been stopped with more water, and in particular with more water from the delta. Los Angeles gets most of its water from other sources, including Owens Valley and the Colorado River. There was also ample water available at the time the fires erupted.

Hoses went dry during the harrowing firefights in the Pacific Palisades, not because the city was out of water but because the municipal water systems are ill-equipped to handle multiple and simultaneous withdrawals at such a scale.

Because they’re not magic. We don’t think about them much because they mostly work, but the Palisades fire wasn’t a mostly fire.

“There is no need to increase water deliveries from the Bay-Delta or any other source from which LA imports water for the region to be able to fight the current fires,” the advocacy organization LA Water Keeper said in a resource page issued to the press, adding that the real threat to the region’s water supplies was climate change.

“The sources of our water imports – Mono Lake, Bay delta, Colorado River – are drying up due to climate change, and are themselves at risk of future interruptions due to natural disasters.”

Colorado River – that’s the one that used to flow through the Grand Canyon and out to the Pacific but has now dried to a trickle in some places. We done overused it. If Trump knew things he would know this.

“Despite recent misinformation, California is delivering more water to farmers and southern regions of the state than under the Trump administration,” the office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a statement, crediting strategic negotiations with the Biden administration. “Regardless, these water flows have zero impact on the ability of first responders to address the fires in southern California.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Just turn on the valve.

Dear god.

I’ve figured it out. It’s the map. On the map the Pacific Northwest is “above” California – so Trump thinks that means it’s literally above it – like, at the top of a slope that runs from Vancouver down to Malibu. He thinks he could get on a skateboard in Vancouver and just roll on down to Santa Monica without once having to kick.

“And it pours down naturally, it has for a million years.” Yep – it just pours down I-5 from Vancouver to LA just the way rain pours down a sloping roof. It’s downhill the whole entire way, as anybody who’s ever traveled that freeway can confirm. Downhill all the way from Vancouver, uphill all the way from Los Angeles. That’s why Seattle is 175 feet above sea level on average and Los Angeles is…er…305.

No more fire, the water next time.

Weekend rains threaten to trigger dangerous mudslides in hillside communities leveled by Southern California wildfires in the last two weeks.

The National Weather Service forecasts up to 1.5 inches of rain starting as early as Saturday morning. The precipitation could help firefighters combat new blazes across Southern California—but even a small amount of rain could cause mud and debris to course down steep slopes laid bare by the Eaton and Palisades fires. 

And 1.5 inches is not a small amount of rain.

California’s normal rainy season continues through March, with February the wettest month of the year. Now, dry and burned soil stripped of its native chaparral and grasses forms a glasslike layer, allowing rainwater that would normally be absorbed to cascade downhill. 

…

Heavy rains following a massive wildfire triggered a deadly mudslide in Montecito, Calif. in 2018.

After fire swept through the Santa Ynez mountains above the coastal town, located about 80 miles west of Los Angeles, nearly 4 inches of rain fell in two days. The deluge washed down barren slopes and sent house-sized boulders and debris through neighborhoods, killing 23 people and destroying 63 homes.

The terrain in Altadena is similar to Montecito. 

And now Trump is taking an axe to the federal government so there won’t be any help from that direction.

The Washington Post on the purge:

The White House late Friday fired the independent inspectors general of at least 14 major federal agencies in a purge that could clear the way for President Donald Trump to install loyalists in the crucial role of identifying fraud, waste and abuse in the government.

Which is kind of a bad idea from the point of view of wanting fraud, waste and abuse prevented. What you want in people identifying fraud, waste and abuse is not personal loyalty but disinterested dedication and skill.

The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general.

Which tells us that Trump is not a legitimate head of state but a criminal determined to trash the state.

Oversight of some of the government’s largest agencies was affected: the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.

…

The chairman of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency challenged the White House’s action in a letter late Friday to Sergio Gor, head of the presidential personnel office.

“I recommend that you reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss Presidentially Appointed, Senate Confirmed Inspectors General,” wrote Hannibal “Mike” Ware, inspector general of the Small Business Administration and acting inspector general at the Social Security Administration.

Ware, who was among those fired, cited a law Congress approved in 2022 that requires the White House to inform Capitol Hill 30 days before removing inspectors general and to provide a “substantial rationale” for the decision.

Trump doesn’t recognize laws, which makes him a dictator.

The emails informing the watchdogs of their dismissals rippled across the agencies Friday. Another fired inspector general learned of his ouster by reading the email for the first time while on the phone with a Washington Post reporter who had called to ask about it. The person reacted by saying the new administration “does not want anyone in this role who is going to be independent.”

“IGs have done exactly what the president says he wants: to fight fraud waste and abuse and make the government more effective,” that person added. “Firing this many of us makes no sense. It is counter to those goals.”

His purported goals are window dressing. What he wants is to bully as many people as possible and draw as much horrified attention as possible.

Some inspectors general are presidential appointees, while others are designated by the heads of their agencies. They serve indefinite terms and typically span administrations to insulate them from shifts in political winds. A president can remove them but must notify both chambers of Congress in advance.

“It’s a purge of independent watchdogs in the middle of the night,” [Senator Elizabeth] Warren said Friday in a post on social media. “Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse, and preventing misconduct. President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

And rubbing our noses in it.

It gets more terrifying with every headline. There are no guardrails.

Trump fires inspectors general from more than a dozen federal agencies

In theory he’s not allowed to do that – the whole point is that they’re independent. In reality, he does whatever he wants. There are no guardrails.

During Trump’s first term, he gutted his administration of independent government watchdogs he saw as disloyal. An IG conducts investigations and audits into any potential malfeasance, fraud, waste or abuse by a government agency or its personnel, and issues reports and recommendations on its findings. An IG office is intended to operate independently.

Which it can’t do if the presider can just bounce up and fire them all.

Partly in reaction to Trump’s last IG firings, Congress built new guardrails intended to protect them. A 2023 law requires the White House to provide substantive rationale for terminating any inspector general.

And it doesn’t matter, because Trump does whatever he wants.

So the BBC just outright lies now. I thought there were rules against outright lies in journalism – professional code of conduct, that kind of thing. But there’s this story from last month headlined Former police worker charged with firearm offences that simply lies from beginning to end, from

Zoe Watts, who had worked as a police community support officer for more than eight years, was arrested after armed police were called to her home in Lincoln on Wednesday

to

The 38-year-old, of St Helen’s Avenue, did not enter any pleas when she appeared at Lincoln Magistrates’ Court on Friday and has been remanded into custody until 13 January when she is due to appear at Lincoln Crown Court.

without ever once saying Zoe Watts is a man or even that he’s a “trans woman.” It just pretends he’s straight-up a woman.

This is such terrible reporting.

NHS Fife nurse allowed to call trans doctor a man during employment tribunal

Trans doctor? So this is someone with no medical training who idennifies as a doctor?

Subhead: Kirkcaldy nurse Sandie Peggie was suspended by the health board when she complained about sharing a changing room with Dr Beth Upton.

Let me guess – this “trans doctor” is a man pretending to be a woman and his name hasn’t always been “Beth” – am I right?

Note to journalists: it’s malpractice to tell all these lies. Stop doing it.

A nurse suing NHS Fife will be allowed to refer to the transgender doctor at the centre of the row as a man during an upcoming employment tribunal.

Still refusing to be clear – still refusing to say this is a male doctor pretending to be a woman. Clarity is the job.

Sandie Peggie is taking legal action after she was suspended for complaining about sharing a changing room with Dr Beth Upton, who identifies as a woman.

Still not clear. People not familiar with this long con will be puzzled by a Beth who “identifies as” a woman.

Dr Upton’s legal team claim this is disrespectful and warn the medic is deeply hurt at being misgendered.

Liar. He’s not “deeply hurt” at all. He’s not shallowly hurt, either. He’s having fun, making trouble for an actual woman.

Judge Kemp says it would be difficult for Ms Peggie to give evidence during the tribunal if she has to use terminology she sees as “inaccurate”.

But he warns the tribunal, being held in Edinburgh, will not hesitate to intervene if male pronouns are “used gratuitously and offensively on a repeated basis with no good reason to do so”.

So the fact that he is a man is not a good enough reason to refer to him as a man?

I wonder if we’ll ever be allowed to stop playing this stupid game.

New head of state shuts down the branch of government that works to protect public health. Good plan.

Health officials and experts said this week they are reeling after the new Trump administration on Tuesday abruptly halted external communication at the Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The pause extends through Feb. 1, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post. The Trump administration also issued a second order indefinitely halting the travel of HHS personnel, according to a second memo obtained by The Post.

Sure because who needs health? Or disease control? Or disease prevention? Those are just liberal frivolities. What we need is more disease and more contagion: it weeds out the feeble and useless, and makes the survivors tougher.

The decisions to pause communications and travel, which were not publicly announced — and which extended to reporters’ inquiries, with HHS media offices not responding to requests for comment for two days — trickled out as agency staff members and health-care workers across the country have tried to make sense of suddenly canceled briefings, updates and events.

These people are so spoiled, with their briefings and updates and events. Who needs all that? If they’re not handing out aspirin what use are they? Fire them all! Eat some spinach and you’ll be fine.

The CDC canceled a monthly call scheduled for this coming Monday with the entire clinical laboratory community — lab leaders, pathologists and laboratory scientists across the country, including at large health systems and hospitals — that had been intended to share updates about emerging threats and testing changes.

“It is hard to imagine a worse time to prohibit federal officials from communicating directly with the clinical laboratory community and the public health workforce,” one laboratory leader said, noting the slew of winter viruses and increasing risk of avian flu. “Viruses don’t care who the CDC director or HHS secretary is, or what spin newly appointed political leadership want to put on their agencies’ efforts.”

Well if viruses don’t care Trump is damn well going to make them care.

The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which provides clinical updates to health-care personnel and had published at its regular cadence after Trump’s first inauguration, did not appear at its regular time Thursday. This week’s edition was set to include updates on avian flu.

The list of postponed meetings has continued to grow, such as a planned meeting next week of the president’s council on how to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Federal researchers contacted by The Post on Thursday said they were still seeking answers about whether their workshops and discussions with external experts could proceed.

I have to say, I didn’t have this on my bingo card. I didn’t expect him to start killing us off the minute he returned. To start punishing us, yes, but just plain killing us, no.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room.

Ontario’s Conservatives have called an early election, more than a year sooner than would be expected of a party with a majority in the legislature. The reason? Trump’s tariffs, which will have a serious impact on the Canadian economy as a whole, along with Ontario. Here’s Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli talking about the reasoning behind the call, and the importance of Canadian trade for the US economy:

At one point in this clip, Fideli recounts a meeting he had with Newt Gingrich, who explained that what one has to do when dealing with Trump is to find out what he really wants, and give him something that will make him happy. Way to encourage future bullying, Newt.

If this behaviour is how Trump thinks “negotiating” or “diplomacy”, or even just normal human interaction is supposed to work, he’s a sociopath. You don’t start from an “initial position” of threatening to burn down your neighbour’s house when what you’re really after is a cup of sugar, or to borrow their lawn mower. Is that kind of approach likely to encourage friendly relations? Are the neighbours supposed to be so relieved when you don’t actually burn down their houses that they give you more than you originally wanted out of gratitude? In the normal course of events, these neighbours would have you arrested. This is harder to do when the person threatening you with immolation is the chief of police.

What happens when what Trump really wants is Greenland, or the Panama Canal, or Canada?* How do you make him happy then? Better yet, why would you want to? Why should anyone reward such behaviour?

This is not what a normal, adult head of state of a democratic nation does. This is how a tyrant or mob boss acts. Or a child who’s figured out that nobody really cares if he does hold his breath until he turns blue, and has graduated to threatening others, rather than himself, to try to get his way. I imagine Saddam Hussein “mused” about, or “suggested” making Kuwait another province of Iraq before he invaded it. Likewise Putin with Ukraine. For most of the rest of the world, neighbouring states aren’t treated as if they are a cake or pie that you can take at will if you can get away with it.

At some point I hope one of his team sits Trump down and explains to him that ruining the Canadian economy will take the American economy with it. Otherwise trying to keep Trump “happy” is going to end up being very costly. But then he can use the destruction of his own country and our “withholding” of all those things we used to sell to the US that he claims they “don’t need” from us as a pretext for even more drastic action. We’re just more pie, cake, and ice cream to him, and that he deserves all of it.

*Trump has said that as the 51st state, Canada would avoid the tariffs he’s going to impose, recieve a huge tax cut and, laughably, get improved health care. Does he really think that we’re all so jealous and envious of the US that we would jump at the chance to join? No thank you. What an absolute idiot.