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.id it sarcastically. Something like that. You can’t say he didn’t make the gesture, you can only try to explain why he didn’t mean it that way. You know: the Nazi way.

Or maybe the bad Nazi way? He didn’t mean it the bad Nazi way, he meant it the good Nazi way? Will that do?

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.

Dana Milbank at the Post assures us that it’s much worse than we think.

The crush of vindictive, cruel, unconstitutional and just plain bonkers orders and actions coming from the restored Trump administration in its first week makes even the worst-case predictions look conservative.

…

NBC News’s Peter Alexander asked Trump about why he had just pardoned D.J. Rodriguez, who shocked a police officer with a stun gun at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and later boasted that he “tazzzzed the f— out of the blue.” The judge who sentenced Rodriguez to more than 12 years called him a “one-man army of hate, attacking police.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Trump replied. “Was it a pardon?”

Alexander reiterated that it was.

“Okay. Well, we’ll take a look at everything,” Trump said, though his pardons of this and other cop-beaters are irrevocable.

We’ll take a look at everything after acting on it? Why not before? Sir, sir, why didn’t you take a look at it before you did it? Do you walk down the stairs that way? If so, please continue.

Trump soon moved on to demanding that California “turn the valve” to allow more water to reach Los Angeles, where, he said, residents of Beverly Hills have been limited to 38 gallons of water per day. “When you’re a rich person, you like to take a shower. Thirty-eight gallons doesn’t last very long.”

The valve is in Santa Barbara, a stone’s throw from Harry and Meg. They use it to hose down the kids.

Most ominous of all is that Trump is already back to making life-and-death decisions based on his whims. He had said he would pardon those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, on a “case by case” basis, and Vice President JD Vance had said that “if you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Yet Trump issued a blanket pardon, including to many of those who assaulted police. Why? A Trump adviser told Axios that, as Trump’s team was debating the issue, “Trump just said: ‘F— it: Release ’em all.’”

Because he’s not just stupid and mean, he’s also lazy and incompetent.

The most unwelcome feature of Trump’s return this week, more than any individual action, is his abiding ignorance, even after all these years. This is what allows unscrupulous figures such as Stephen Miller to run amok. It’s also the source of the constant chaos that is Trump’s trademark.

This week alone, Trump botched — either out of ignorance or mendacity — claims about World Health Organization funding, the trade deficit, opioid deaths, inflation, birthright citizenship, Biden’s pardons, illegal immigration, the Jan. 6 committee and more. In a typical pronouncement, Trump alleged that no president imposed tariffs on China “until I came along.” George Washington would beg to differ.

It’s only day 4.

Trump has a great new plan: let’s just get rid of disaster relief altogether! Real Ummairikkns don’t need any help with anything, so just let them get on with it while we eat peanuts and watch.

President Donald Trump, on a tour of two states reeling in recent months from hurricanes and wildfires, pledged on Friday to upend how the country has responded for decades to natural disasters, saying that he wants to eliminate FEMA and threatening to withhold federal assistance to California unless it passes a new voter ID law.

Also: new rule: if you get sick, you can’t have medical attention. Incentive to make you stay healthy, see? Also saves $$, which will go into Trump’s pocket because the saving was his idea.

“I’d like to see the states take care of disasters,” he said. “Let the state take care of tornadoes and hurricanes and all the other things that happen. I think you’re going to find it a lot less expense. You’ll do it for less than half and you’re going to get a lot quicker response.”

How will you do it for less than half? By waiting until at least half the victims are dead. That’s how they did it with Katrina; worked like a charm.

At a time when disasters are becoming more frequent and less predictable, Trump’s rhetoric thrust a new element of volatility into federal responses during times of disaster. And disregarding attempts to avoid politicizing disaster responses, he said that Michael Whatley, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, would help lead recovery efforts in his native North Carolina.

Well duh. You expect trumpians to put politics aside just because people are dying? You sweet summer child.

After finishing his trip to Western North Carolina, in an area of the state that largely supports him, Trump boarded Air Force One to California to tour wildfire damage in the Los Angeles area. In his remarks starting the day, however, he threatened to withhold federal assistance to California if the state doesn’t change its voting laws.

“In California I have a condition. In California we want them to have voter ID so the people have a voice … And we also want them to release the water.”

Trump has often complained about the blue state’s water policies, but water experts have said his suggestion that California could turn on a valve to let water flow from the north is incorrect.

Wait what? It is? You mean there’s no giant spigot the size of a 747? Somebody needs to get on that.

Cathy Young on Trump and DEI:

Trump’s DEI and affirmative action ban has received at least partially positive reviews not only from the MAGA right and the anti-woke commentariat but from liberal centrists like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith (“an idea whose time has probably come”) and even some leftists who regard DEI as feelgood corporate flimflam.

These reactions reflect the fact that diversity programs in the workplace and on campus have come under intensive criticism in recent years, both for enforcing progressive groupthink and for substituting pseudo-progressive verbiage for meaningful change.

That’s an interesting point. Verbiage is such a convenient alternative to actually doing something. It’s also a necessary first step, but still – there is a lot of all talk and no action, aka all hat and no cattle, in political controversies. (I doubt that applies solely to the left.)

The New York Times, which the Trumpian right regards as the Pravda of the Democratic left, reported a year ago that many companies were backing away from more controversial DEI initiatives such as mandatory anti-bias trainings that can turn into hectoring and struggle sessions. More recently, the Times also ran a long investigative article on the polarizing and demoralizing effects of an aggressive DEI initiative at the University of Michigan.

Adds to reading list

Academic, writer, and podcaster John McWhorter, a longtime critic of the progressive antiracism model who has also been scathingly critical of Trump, told me by email, “With reluctance, I find myself agreeing with Trump on this one, including the idea that imposing it on the government will set a model/mood for the rest of the country including private institutions to follow.”

While McWhorter once believed that race and gender preferences in the corporate world (though not in academia) had value as a way to offset traditional biases, he now thinks that in practice, DEI amounts to lowering standards and overfocusing on skin color: “It’s the way it comes out too often to be ignored.” He also thinks that “general awareness of the value of looking beyond white men has settled in over the past thirty years enough that we need not fear that the end of DEI programs will return us to Mad Men.”

Ah, Mad Men. I only saw a few episodes of that, but I think I get the drift. Sometime last year I watched The Apartment for the first time in decades, and yeah – the race thing simply staggered me. It’s not a surprise in Gone With the Wind, but The Apartment is not 1939, it’s 1960.

What race thing? This: there are precisely two Black characters in the entire movie. The first one we see is a man crouching on the floor shining a white boss’s shoes while the boss has an important conversation. At the end of the chat the boss (Fred McMurray) throws a coin at the guy crouching on the floor. The second one we see is a janitor pushing a cart; a white-collar white guy who has just quit (Jack Lemmon) takes off his office-drudge fedora and puts it on the janitor’s head, yanking it down hard.

In short both appearances are absolutely cringe territory, and there are no others.

It’s a Billy Wilder film. Wilder of course fled the Nazis, and yet…

It was a salutary wake-up call, I guess.

Back to Cathy Young’s piece later.

H/t Sackbut

Oh really?

Anyone can’t. It isn’t possible.

Trump is going to California to turn the water on.

It will be Trump’s first presidential trip since his return to office, and it will be to a state with Democratic leaders he has repeatedly blamed for persistent blazes, arguing that wildlife protections have impeded access to water.

Speaking to reporters before departing the White House on Friday, Trump said the fires “could have been put out,” but “they still haven’t for whatever reason.”

“It would be fine if they turned the water on,” Trump said. 

Those California hippies are so silly, not turning the water on. Maybe they’re too stoned to find the tap.

Trump spent much of an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday railing against a response that he said makes the country look “helpless” and “weak.”

He suggested federal aid to California could be withheld over state efforts to protect the Delta smelt, a small fish that has become a fixation of Trump’s and even the subject of a Day One memorandum. The directive, which calls for “putting people over fish,” would upend the state’s water policy.

Trump has blamed water shortages in the Los Angeles region on policies meant to preserve the endangered fish, arguing more water needs to flow from Northern California to Southern California.

Very true, and more water needs to flow from the oceans to the deserts, because the oceans have way more than they need and the deserts have hardly any. Once we get that imbalance straightened out everything will be fine. You’ll have your golf condos stretching to the horizon north south east and west.

“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let the water run down,” he said in the Fox News interview.

Damn right. Let it burn.

At the university just a few miles from me the other evening:

Over 200 counter-protesters gathered Jan. 21 on King Lane Northeast outside Thomson Hall to rally against Turning Point USA (TPUSA) guest speaker Olivia Krolczyk.

TPUSA cancelled the scheduled event after unknown individuals pulled Thomson Hall’s fire alarm and threw noisemakers into the building’s entryway. After the building was evacuated and reentered, unknown organizers broke a window in the lecture hall and threw noisemakers into the lecture hall via the broken window. 

The police shut the whole thing down. This has been another evening of Protest Theater, please remember to take all your belongings with you as you leave the scene.

“The University of Washington is committed to free exchange of ideas and the principles of academic freedom, in accordance with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, including some whose views may be considered controversial,” UW spokesperson Victor Balta said in an email Jan. 22. 

…

Balta concluded that these disruptions may have been an attempt to access overly-dramatized content.  

“Informed discussion and debate are encouraged on our campus, however, it is clear that presenters and disruptors are, in some cases, seeking to antagonize one another in ways that provide dramatic content for their social media feeds,” Balta said in an email. “Tuesday’s scheduled speaker told the student newspaper that she was ‘excited‘ the event was shut down.”   

Or to put it another way, Team Fake Women Are Women took the bait.

H/t J.A.