Stewart Rhodes was arrested last week.

From Day One of the Jan. 6 investigation, the FBI was after Person One — the Justice Department’s legal term for Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, a Yale-educated military veteran who founded the extremist group Oath Keepers.

He was not among the hundreds charged in the year after the attack with crimes ranging from assaulting a police officer to unlawfully entering the Capitol.

But he made frequent appearances in prosecutors’ court filings, which said that “Person One” was in regular contact with those who allegedly attacked Congress, pushing his disciples to prepare for an apocalyptic confrontation with those who would acknowledge Joe Biden’s presidential victory and the end of Donald Trump’s time in office.

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A good watch:

Andy tells us (which I didn’t know) that Aaron Rabinowitz writes regularly for The Skeptic, not the Shermer one but the UK one. Comes as a bit of a shock after his performance in that letter exchange.… Read the rest

This one is funny, in the usual “but horrifying” way Trump things are funny.

In 2015 and 2016, Trump boosted his balance sheet by tripling the size of his Trump Tower penthouse and overinflating its value about $200 million. After he was elected president, he reported the correct value. pic.twitter.com/8oMEXqVyLO

— Seth Hettena (@seth_hettena) January 19, 2022

Heh heh heh. In 2015 his apartment was 30 thousand square feet, in 2017 it was 11 thousand square feet. Did it shrink in the laundry or what?… Read the rest

Nothing says Land of the Free like mandatory patriotism.

FORT MYERS, Fla. – A proposed law would require all professional sports teams to play the National Anthem before the start of every sporting event. 

A law requiring pro sports to play The Patriotic Song before doing the pro sports thing. Observers are pointing out how like North Korea this is.

What the hell is the point of forced patriotic display anyway? If it’s forced, you don’t know if it’s genuine or not, so what do you gain? Besides the thrill of forcing people to do what you think is good – which I guess answers the question. You will sing the song and you will like it, or out … Read the rest

A press release from the New York state Attorney General:

New York Attorney General Letitia James today took legal action to compel Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump to appear for sworn testimony as part of the office’s ongoing civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial dealings. The motion to compel filed today seeks a court order enforcing testimonial subpoenas issued to Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump, as well as the production of documents held by Donald J. Trump. As the papers filed today make clear, each of the individuals was directly involved in one or more transactions under review. Earlier this month, the Trumps filed a motion to quash these interviews,

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Does the value of free speech mean we have to let for instance Joe Rogan tell his massive audience lies about Covid?

One said it was the vast size of his audience that made him so dangerous. Another suggested it was the fact the average age of his listeners was just 24, and hence particularly persuadable.

Another expert said he appeared to have a cult of personality. One said he had repeatedly spread misinformation about Covid, and ignored calls to stop.

These were among just some of the accusations levelled at Joe Rogan, podcaster, influencer and sometime actor, from more than 150 scientists, doctors and healthcare professionals who have said the 54-year-old was “extraordinarily dangerous”.

They sent an open letter … Read the rest

The 21st Century Salonnière explains that there are universal conditions such as anxiety, and there are culture-bound explanations for those conditions.

It’s really easy to point this out when it happens in other cultures. Only if you live in a culture where the extreme anxiety related to becoming a cannibal is “a thing” is it possible for your own wired-in extreme anxiety to find a home in that fear.

It’s harder to point this out in our own culture, though. Only if you live in a culture where cutting yourself to express your emotional pain is “a thing” is it possible for your own emotional pain to find a home in cutting yourself. That seems less [more?] intuitive because it’s

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How ugly.

When the Supreme Court justices emerged from the red drapes at the front of the courtroom last Friday and took their seats — to hear arguments about President Biden’s vaccine mandate — all but one of the justices there were wearing masks. The exception was Neil Gorsuch.

That Gorsuch would resist mask wearing is no surprise. He is a conservative judge with a libertarian streak who has spent his life around Republican politics. In conservative circles, masks have become a symbol of big-government subjugation.

But that is surprising. It’s surprising because it’s so dumb. It’s like seeing it as “big-government subjugation” to stop at red lights, or not serve weed-killer to your guests, or not beat your … Read the rest

Do what now?

Then call them hormone-history categories, don't call them gender categories. That's all I ask.

— Alice Dreger, Ph.D. (@AliceDreger) January 17, 2022

Hormone-history categories???

We’re right back with “folks with vulvas” but even more ludicrous. Somehow it’s radioactive to call male people “men” and “boys” but it’s fine to call them…what…testosterone-history-havers? That’s an improvement how exactly?

Maybe this is all a way to deal with the approaching catastrophe. Never mind the metaphorical comet, just lose yourself in fantasies of being the other sex, a bird, a castle, the North Sea, chocolate, the library at Alexandria, music, a sunset, drunk, the sky…… Read the rest

About women but never mentioning women.

Nope, Planned Parenthood is definitely not erasing WOMEN. 38 tweets in the last 30 days, many about WOMEN or directed to WOMEN. The word "women" has not been used even ONCE. @PPFA pic.twitter.com/oG0dJZwQXp

— Logic Illustrated (@LogicIllustrat) January 18, 2022

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San Francisco has a place called the Gender Confirmation Center, where people can go to get bits of themselves cut off or reshaped so as to Confirm their Genders. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a group practice of three plastic surgeons who specialize in slicing or shaping people for cosmetic gender purposes.

One of their menu items is Top Surgery with No Nipple Grafts.

We’ve seen an increase of patients at The Gender Confirmation Center who want to get top surgery but do not want to keep their nipples. We’ve developed this content to raise awareness that this is a viable option and to communicate that choosing no nipples is a completely valid choice.

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Jo Bartosch on the bullying of yet another disobedient woman:

During Lisa Townsend’s campaign to become Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner last year, the subject that most frequently came up on the doorstep wasn’t gang crime, burglaries, or car theft. It was Stonewall, and the lobby group’s influence on policing policies, such as the placement of males who identify as transwomen in women’s prisons.

Townsend was elected. She’s an outspoken critic of Stonewall.

But while her constituents greeted her comments with admiration, the reception from other quarters was hostile: she has faced calls for her resignation, an inquiry by Surrey Police and Crime Panel (PCP) and a slew of anonymous threats to her life. After [she received] over forty

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Said by a prominent libertarian rebel-troll-smartass guy:

If you’re saying “I’m not allowed to” in regard to any normal thing you might do, like go to a restaurant, you should be furious with, first, yourself for pretending to accept this BS, and, second, whatever municipal or corporate clown pretended to have the authority of allowance.

Is that so.

What’s he assuming there?

That going to a restaurant is “normal.”

Of course in one way it is, that one way being the fact that it has been normal in some places for some people for several decades. But in another way it’s not the slightest bit normal; on the contrary it’s abnormal, and entirely dependent on a whole massive network of … Read the rest

Well…I guess Alice Dreger is more of a believer than I had any idea of. From 2006:

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that New York City “is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificates even if they have not had sex-change surgery.” Under the new plan “being considered by the city’s Board of Health… people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.” No more need to get

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I’m having trouble believing what I’m seeing.

I feel so old because feminism has apparently become biological essentialism and it lost me there

— Alice Dreger, Ph.D. (@AliceDreger) January 17, 2022

Because they are not sexually dimorphic. Sheesh.

— Alice Dreger, Ph.D. (@AliceDreger) January 17, 2022

They’re…not? They’re so not that the question gets a “sheesh”?

I don’t understand. I expect it from your Frances Coppolas and Bethany Williamses, but not from your Alice Dregers.… Read the rest

After the dinosaurs were wiped out:

Reporting today in the journal Science, Miller’s team, led by vertebrate paleontologist Tyler Lyson, has uncovered an enormous cache of fossils from Colorado’s Denver Basin that include the first million years that followed the asteroid’s arrival. The site’s thousands of plant and animal remains chart out an extraordinarily detailed timeline of ecosystem recovery, pinpointing the rise and fall of species at a resolution of hundreds of thousands of years—mere seconds on the geologic clock.

In the millennia following the impact, five-foot crocodiles and keg-sized turtles re-entered the waters to stretch their leathery legs. Plants unfurled their roots into the once-scorched soil, sprouting nutrient-rich beans and small, fast-growing leaves. No longer threatened

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I suppose they think this makes them look up to date and aware, or down with the kids, or something, but you’d think they’d also be able to see that it makes them look like complete fools to most adults. Planned Parenthood, that is.

We’re in the midst of a sex-positivity boom that’s dispelling long-held beliefs about who can and should experience pleasure—which is, of course, all humans. But up until recently, that sexual-pleasure narrative centered almost entirely on people with penises, rooted first in the belief that non-procreative sex was taboo for people with vaginas, and later, in an evolved (but not any less sexist) understanding that, while folks with vaginas could find pleasure in sex, orgasm for

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Some women collapse into actual sexism when trying to bully other women into agreeing that trans women are women. Frances Coppola for one.

She cited one case which the prison service admitted it badly mishandled and has since changed its procedures. As I've already pointed out, anecdote does not equal evidence.

— Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola (@Frances_Coppola) January 16, 2022

Yes it is an anecdote. Anecdotes are real, of course.

MoJ figures show 7 sexual assaults by trans prisoners in female prisons between 2010 and 2020, two of them by the same person. In the same period there were 117 other sexual assaults in female prisons. I wonder who did them?

— Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola (@Frances_Coppola) January 17, 2022

I have

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The Times checks Trump’s lies at that “rally” in Arizona.

“The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.”

False. There is no evidence that white Americans are being denied access to vaccines or treatments.

Mr. Trump referred to a Wall Street Journal opinion column criticizing New York State’s guidelines on two limited antiviral treatments that ask health providers to prioritize the therapies for immunocompromised patients and those with risk factors. The guidelines, which were released in late December, said, “Nonwhite race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be

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Just outright abusive, like some drunk angry psycho on the street corner.

https://twitter.com/BethanyinCBR/status/1482816611849744384 https://twitter.com/BethanyinCBR/status/1482815217507594241

Just vulgar abuse.

https://twitter.com/BethanyinCBR/status/1482547259233693696

Where does she get the “white supremacists” bit? Nowhere. Just vulgar abuse.

https://twitter.com/BethanyinCBR/status/1482989546568822787

“Maggots.”

This person calls herself a “political commentator” and plans to run for office.… Read the rest