Lugosi?

Wake up babe, new Covfefe just dropped pic.twitter.com/QQXIQ3jCzH

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 17, 2025

… Read the rest

More from CNN:

President Donald Trump called today a “big day at the White House” ahead of his meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders.

“A big day at the White House. We have never had so many European Leaders here at one time. A great honor for America!!! Let’s see what the results will be,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Errrrr no. No, it’s not an honor of any kind, let alone a great one. They’re there to try to prevent Trump from handing Ukraine over to Putin. They’re there to try to minimize the damage Trump is doing. They’re there because Trump is both malevolent and an idiot.

The nightmare continues.… Read the rest

CNN:

Donald Trump is rewarding rather than punishing Vladimir Putin for failing to meet the US president’s own deadline for agreeing to a ceasefire, according to a leading Russia analyst.

“It’s profoundly disconcerting what’s happened in the past two weeks,” Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told CNN. Gould-Davies said Trump chose to “reward” Putin with Friday’s summit in Alaska after the Russian president shirked Trump’s latest ceasefire-or-sanctions deadline a week earlier.

Since the summit, he said, Trump has “completely abandoned his demand for a rapid ceasefire, and his threat to impose sanctions, and is increasingly taking Putin’s view that instead the war (in Ukraine) can only be ended by

Less makea deeel.

The big picture: White House advisers claim that Monday’s crucial meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington is evidence of momentum from the summit with Putin.

…

“There’s a way to make a deal: get the buyer and the seller in the same room at the same time discussing it,” said one of the Trump advisers familiar with the talks. “What we’re trying to figure out is if both sides really want a deal and what the contours look like.”

Yes, right, that’s exactly what this is, it’s pure unadulterated deal-making, like when you go to a yard sale and try to get the price down on a toaster.

… Read the rest

There are going to be a lot of adult supervisors this time.

This time, when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine arrives in the Oval Office, he will come with backup.

An array of European prime ministers and presidents are flying in for the meeting on Monday to make sure that a viable, defensible Ukraine survives whatever carving up of its territory is about to happen at the negotiating table.

But they are also there to make certain that the trans-Atlantic alliance emerges intact. President Trump’s instant reversal on the critical issue of obtaining a cease-fire before negotiating over land or security guarantees has left many of them shaken, and wondering whether Mr. Trump had once again been swayed by

This should be interesting.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make his second visit to the White House on Monday with the daunting task of reversing the damage done to Ukraine’s security prospects by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

Zelenskyy will not, however, be alone as he was on his first trip to the White House in February when he was ambushed and humiliated by Donald Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, who sought to bully him into capitulation to Moscow’s demands.

This time the Ukrainian leader comes to Washington flanked by a dream team of European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who combine economic and military clout with proven rapport with Trump.

Also, … Read the rest

When Approved Views clash.

Breaking news: "Transfest" has been cancelled

TLDR: They found out *ONE* of the organizers was a Zionist and everyone went cuckoo bananas

Check out their (hilarious) Instagram page for all the drama https://t.co/1nOtnfJtyx pic.twitter.com/LZufMLLaFR

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) August 16, 2025

… Read the rest

Does this make any sense?

In other words, they are trying to "protect" c i s women by choosing a strategy that is LESS protective of them than simply acknowledging the reality of trans women and saying why sports are an exception where sex matters.

And this is because they enjoy insulting trans folks.

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) August 16, 2025

One item: mentally ill and deluded are not the same thing. It’s horribly easy to be deluded without being mentally ill. It happens to everyone, all the time – we can get things wrong at first glance, we can have bad or incomplete information, we can have loyalties or hatreds that push us toward mistakes, und so weiter.… Read the rest

It’s hard to believe we have to keep litigating this crap.

A gender-critical lawyer has avoided punishment from the barristers’ watchdog for “misgendering” a trans person in court.

Naomi Cunningham, an employment barrister, said she had been told by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) that she will face no further action over the “meritless” complaint that she repeatedly referred to a transgender female by a male pronoun during a hearing.

In other words that she repeatedly referred to a man by a male pronoun. Gee, you don’t say.

The BSB’s decision is significant because it signals the watchdog does not view it as professional misconduct to “misgender” a person during a court hearing, she told supporters.

“It has been

Punks do what punks do.

A British female sailor has criticised a musical based on her life story after the cast members used their platform to stage a pro-trans fundraiser.

Tracy Edwards made history in 1989 when she captained the Maiden, leading the first all-female yacht crew in the Whitbread Round the World Race.

But she has criticised the musical based on the race, called Maiden Voyage, after cast members used a curtain call to fundraise for a charity that supports transgender inclusion in women’s sports on the night she attended.

That is, a charity that supports male inclusion in women’s sports. Note that a policy of male inclusion in women’s sports would end up removing women from women’s … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on What has made it fester.

In the early nineties of the last century, Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro made formal apologies to a variety of Asian nations for Japan’s having conducted wars of aggression in East and Southeast Asia, and for the brutal manner in which these wars were waged.

There are, however, strong nationalist forces in Japan, and in particular the influence of families of soldiers who died in that war is strong over the Liberal-Democratic Party, which won back power after Hosokawa’s coalition, which was difficult to hold together, and fell.

I am in no way seeking to excuse the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese, which were appalling, but, all too … Read the rest

Classic.

CNN news item: global warming is giving us bigger faster hurricanes.

Advertisement: Cruises are awesome!!

One weird little tidbit from yesterday’s picnic in Alaska:

The Russian leader’s transparent manipulation of the US president and Trump’s credulity will worry Ukraine. On Fox, Trump said Putin praised his second term, saying the US was “as hot as a pistol” and he had previously thought the US was “dead.”

Putin also publicly reinforced Trump’s talking point that the invasion three years ago would “never have happened” if he had been president. “I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” said Putin.

And we all know that Putin would never lie about anything.

Trump told Fox’s Sean Hannity that he was “so happy” to hear validation from Putin and also that the Russian leader

Trump just wants Ukraine to surrender, that’s all.

Russian officials and commentators were especially enamored by Trump’s unusually warm red-carpet greeting to Putin on Friday in which they saw an opening to pull America away from its traditional allies in Europe. 

Of course they were. Every time Trump goes belly-up to Putin, that “opening” gets wider.

Within hours of the meeting, Trump had discarded his previous position — and that of Ukraine and Europe — that a full ceasefire was required to allow the details of a peace agreement to be hammered out. The move enables Russia to keep fighting without the risk of U.S. sanctions, and puts pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to Russian terms

Donny’s Day Out in Anchorage:

The two leaders took no questions. Perhaps Mr Trump knew he would be asked about his pre-summit threats of “very severe consequences” if Russia did not end the conflict. Just before landing Mr Trump had told Fox News: “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of ceasefire.” There was no immediate sign of a three-way summit with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Mr Trump had previously floated.

…

Ever the showman, Mr Trump took care to impress Mr Putin. Their planes parked close to each other; the two men stepped out more or less simultaneously, shook hands warmly and walked towards a rostrum as a B-2 bomber, escorted by

Great.

Trump says he agreed with his Russian counterpart in talks Friday that the Ukraine war will end with land swaps and some type of security guarantee from the US.

Asked by Fox News’ Sean Hannity about territorial concessions that would give Russia land it didn’t have previously and potential US security assurances for Ukraine, Trump said it was a point of agreement with Vladimir Putin.

“Well, I think those are points that we negotiated, and those are points that we largely have agreed on,” he said. “Actually, I think we agree on a lot. I can tell you, the meeting was a warm meeting.”

He called Putin a “strong guy” and “tough as hell,” but said the meeting

Taliban celebrating:

Thousands of men gathered across Kabul on Friday to watch flowers being scattered from helicopters to mark the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power – a celebration that women were barred from attending.

Naturally. Men are people, so they get to attend; women are things that make people, and of course things are not invited to parties.

Three of the six “flower shower” locations were already off-limits to women, who have been prohibited from entering parks and recreational areas since November 2022.

For obvious reasons. If women were allowed to enter parks and recreational areas they would always be flopping down and spreading their legs, and then their husbands might find themselves raising other men’s … Read the rest

Another preening withdrawer steps up.

Last week, I withdrew my nomination from the longlist for the Polari first book prize. The awards had become mired in controversy due to the nomination of the Irish author John Boyne, best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for the main prize for his novel Earth. Four days before the longlist announcement, Boyne had written in the Irish Independent, celebrating JK Rowling “as a fellow terf” and saying of women who had “pilloried” her for her gender activism: “For every Commander Waterford, there’s a Serena Joy standing behind him, ready to pin a handmaiden down as her husband rapes her.”

I think such a viewpoint is abhorrent, but

Daniel Kodsi and John Maier say Philosophers Shouldn’t Duck the Gender Debate.

Over the last decade, elite academia has uncritically embraced gender-identity ideology, according to which self-identification as a boy or girl, or a man or woman, takes priority for all practical and legal purposes over whether one actually is male or female. No doubt a contingent of true believers in gender-identity ideology exists within academia. But mantras like “trans women are women” became accepted in universities in part because many academics who don’t agree with gender-identity ideology failed to speak up against it. However expedient or harmless it may have seemed to give gender-identity ideology a free pass, doing so was a serious mistake.

I can’t really figure … Read the rest

Is the tide turning?

An NHS board has admitted breaking equality rules by allowing a transgender doctor into a women’s hospital changing room without assessing the consequences.

NHS Fife has confirmed it carried out no impact assessment regarding the provision of single-sex changing facilities for staff, the UK’s equalities watchdog has disclosed.

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Baroness Falkner, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has now said an impact assessment was a requirement to meet the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). In an unprecedented intervention, she said the EHRC had ordered the board to produce an assessment, and anticipates it will be published by Sept 30.

She said the watchdog had also made clear that NHS Fife must comply with