Rolling Stone on one of Trump’s more hideous triumphs:

By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch.

In short Trump is a serial killer. The killings were legal, but they were far from legally required. Trump and … Read the rest

Now there’s someone who really knows how to woman.

Slopping at the hair dressers, drinking tea, reading mags. pic.twitter.com/RYBq7qa4YU

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) February 1, 2023

… Read the rest

So it’s done.

Seven US Western states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River have failed to reach an agreement on cutting water consumption.

California, the largest user, did not join a water cut proposal put forward by six others by a federally requested 31 January deadline.

…

The government had asked for a plan to reduce water use from the Colorado River basin by two to four million acre-feet, or one-third of the river’s yearly average flow.

Six of the states agreed on a plan that would bring it down by two million acre-feet of water. Under that plan, California – the state with the largest water consumption rate – would need to cut more than one million

Victoria Smith has a brilliant piece about male anger and how women experience it.

Years ago, I lived with a man who hit me, though not most of the time. Sometimes he would only shout at me, but again, not most of the time. I couldn’t predict when things would go wrong, though I tried to work out a pattern. One day, you’d say something and it would be fine; the next, you could say the same thing and you’d know, instantly, that you’d ruined everything. 

…

Sometimes it would end in physical violence; sometimes it would not. This made little difference to the initial terror because, of course, you didn’t know. Afterwards, if no blows had actually been

Can’t anybody get it right? Not even firefighters? The people who rescue us from burning buildings and smashed cars?

A fire chief has promised a full independent inquiry into claims firefighters took photos of car crash victims and shared them on WhatsApp.

Male firefighters at Dorset and Wiltshire Fire Service (DWFS) are alleged to have made degrading comments about the women in a group chat.

A female firefighter told ITV news she had heard comments about the type of underwear women had been wearing.

Had been wearing before they were killed in a crash.

Why would anyone do that? Whence comes the impulse to mock dead women for their underwear? There’s no tangible payoff the way there is with rape … Read the rest

Oh really?

A school district in Virginia said it received a peculiar report last week from one of its junior varsity girls’ basketball games: An assistant coach for the Churchland High School Truckers had stepped on the court on Jan. 21, and played against teenagers.

The assistant coach and the head coach are no longer working at the school, the Times tactfully adds.

Details of how exactly an adult coaching staff member had managed to put on a jersey and play alongside the teenage athletes in their game against Nansemond River High School were still unclear on Tuesday as the district continued its investigation.

Yes you’d think it would be kind of obvious, wouldn’t you, and yet…

Churchland High School

Alex Massie in the Times on Sturgeon and TWAW:

The first minister’s shock at discovering that her own government’s prison policy allowed male rapists to be incarcerated in a woman’s prison is transparently convenient, self-serving and bogus. Once you swallow the mantra “trans women are women” no different to any others, there is nowhere to go. Self-ID is an all or nothing proposition but if not everyone claiming to be a woman should be treated as one, the policy collapses in a heap of its own contradictions. This is the point we have now reached even if the first minister does not appear to realise it.

Exactly. He’s talking about that exasperated “Well yes.” Those two little words … Read the rest

Cultural appropriation stunning and brave.

(Continued)
Antikainen previously competed in the 2020 Juna Cup in a performance titled "Geisha," during which he painted his face white, dressed in kimono, and skated to traditional Japanese music. pic.twitter.com/N51YQIKJAF

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) January 29, 2023

… Read the rest

The BBC solemnly tells us what to think about Sam Smith and his new video – well no they tell us what to think about “their” new video, but you know how it is, it’s hard to remember to use the “correct” i.e. incorrect hence hard to remember ProNouns.

And with their latest video, Sam Smith has certainly caused a bit of stir.

If you haven’t watched it, the singer spends most of it wearing a corset and nipple tassels while performing some spicy moves with backing dancers.

Is this the BBC or Pink News?

One scene in particular has upset some people – it shows Sam in that corset and nipple tassel look, posing suggestively while being showered with

Also running out…

The seven states that rely on water from the shrinking Colorado River are unlikely to agree to voluntarily make deep reductions in their water use, negotiators say, which would force the federal government to impose cuts for the first time in the water supply for 40 million Americans.

If you kids can’t stop fighting over the cookies/toys/puppy/front seat/ice cream Mommy and Daddy will just have to take it all away.

The Interior Department had asked the states to voluntarily come up with a plan by Jan. 31 to collectively cut the amount of water they draw from the Colorado. The demand for those cuts, on a scale without parallel in American history, was prompted by precipitous

Maggie Haberman reports that Trump is running out of tricks in his battles with the legal system.

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida wrote this month in fining the former president and one of his lawyers nearly $1 million for filing a frivolous civil suit against Hillary Clinton and F.B.I. officials.

Trump promptly dropped his similar suit against New York AG Letitia James. Tick tick tick…

The Manhattan district attorney’s office began presenting evidence on Monday to a grand jury about his role in paying hush money to a porn star

The Tongass National Forest in Alaska is protected again.

Trump rescinded a measure blocking logging and road-building on nine million acres of land in the Tongass in 2020.

…

The decision follows a years-long conflict between Alaskan Republican officials – who have argued the rule has slowed economic development and that renewing it will hamper efforts to connect remote communities by road, among other concerns – and conservationists, indigenous groups and others who say the measure is key to protecting the environment.

Spanning nearly 17 million acres – an area slightly larger than the state of West Virginia – the Tongass stores 44% of all the carbon dioxide contained in national forests across the country, according to the Alaska

Journalist Jean Calder dared to see a film.

The other day I attended a screening in Brighton of the critically acclaimed film Adult Human Female. It explores the challenges posed to women’s rights by sexist trans activism, including the way that gender “self-identification” can be used by abusive males to target women and children.

…

Women in this city, as elsewhere in the UK, have for several years been unable to freely discuss this issue without fear of sanction, harassment and threats. Elsewhere in the country, screenings of this film have regularly been sabotaged.

I did attend but not without hindrance because of the security measures in place. Every person who booked tickets had to be checked and the

Sturgeon really does give the whole game away here.

Falling apart isn’t it…

Simple questions. Deeply confused answers.

(via @PeterAdamSmith) pic.twitter.com/y8MUjYVpEr

— Tom Swarbrick (@TomSwarbrick1) January 30, 2023

Journalist: Are all trans women women?

Sturgeon: That’s not the point we’re dealing with here, trans women are women but in the present context, there is no automatic right for a trans woman –

[Journalist cuts her off, which he shouldn’t have; we needed the rest of that sentence.] There are contexts where a trans woman is not –

Sturgeon: No there is [frustrated half-laugh] circumstances where a trans woman will be held in the male prison estate.

There. She gave the whole thing away. That’s what all the sane people … Read the rest

Oh my – Sturgeon admits it. At 34 seconds she says an emphatic “Well yes” – and of course rightly so, but it’s what she’s been denying and ignoring and acting as if No all this time.

Does Scotland’s First Minister believe all trans women are women?

Scottish Gov has just implemented an effective ban on trans prisoners who’ve committed sexual & violent crimes against women being moved to a women-only prison. @itvnews pic.twitter.com/DRbvItHZ3i

— Peter A Smith (@PeterAdamSmith) January 30, 2023

… Read the rest

Another woman loses a place* to…

*See first comment… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Calling all bullies.

To use my go-to example I see “god(s)” exactly the same way I (and practically everyone else) see the Midgard Serpent.

I don’t call myself an “amidgardserpentist”, so why should I call myself an “atheist”? If anyone honestly wants to know what I think, they’re going to have to stick around for the actual content. And if they don’t have time for that, then no real understanding is going to be conveyed by me giving them a label. This is also part of the reason* I no longer call myself a “feminist”. Julie Bindel and Laurie Penny are not different kinds of “feminists” any more than Kate … Read the rest

Pompeo has written a book.

It’s a master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics.

Mike Pompeo is a smart man — first in his class at West Point, Harvard Law Review — with a sharp tongue. In March 2016, as a four-term tea party congressman from Kansas, he warned that Donald Trump, if elected, would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.” 

And he was absolutely right, and he was part of the authoritarian’s administration. Why is that? It has to be because he’s an immoral man doing what’s useful for him as opposed to what’s good for everyone else. A smart man and a very bad one.

Pompeo disdained America’s career diplomats. He describes them,

The NY Times has an opinion piece on demographics and shrinking populations.

China, the most populous country on the planet for centuries, this month reported its first population decline in six decades, a trend that is almost certainly irreversible. By the end of the century China may have only around half of the 1.41 billion people it has now, according to U.N. projections, and may already have been overtaken by India.

The news has been met with gloom and doom, often framed as the start of China’s inexorable decline and, more broadly, the harbinger of a demographic and economic “time bomb” that will strain the world’s capacity to support aging populations.

There is no doubt that a shrinking

Men brag in public of taking a baby away from her mother as if she were a jacket or an umbrella.

Men using women to gestate babies for them has nothing whatever to do with either democracy or equality.… Read the rest