Hey kids, let’s have martial law!

Virginia state senator Amanda Chase [has thrown] her support behind President Donald Trump‘s refusal to concede to former Vice President Joe Biden, going so far as to say that the commander in chief should declare martial law and let the military oversee another election.

Is that fascist enough yet?

While some of Trump’s closest allies have acknowledged Biden’s victory, the president himself has not indicated he has plans to give up the fight to stay in power.

Chase, who is looking to garner the Republican nomination for governor, also refuses to accept the results, writing in a Tuesday Facebook post that Biden “is not my president and never will be.” She praised

… Read the rest

The locusts might return for a second round.

New swarms of desert locusts are threatening the livelihoods of millions of people in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of control efforts, the United Nations has warned.

The UN says there have been good breeding conditions in eastern Ethiopia and Somalia, with Kenya also at risk.

And breeding underway on both sides of the Red Sea poses a new threat to Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

This is after the worst locust invasion in 70 years.

Between January and August this year East Africa saw billions of the insects destroying crops across the region. “We lost so much of our pastures and vegetation because of the locusts

… Read the rest

Trump lost but the Republican party remains the Republican party.

Today, to be an aspiring Republican politician in good standing, one must espouse a set of core beliefs that are either entirely baseless or provably untrue: the climate crisis isn’t real; gun safety laws don’t reduce gun violence; masks don’t reduce the spread of Covid-19. To many observers, embracing a conspiracy theory about corrupted voting machines or late-night “ballot dumps” would represent a break with reality. But for much of the Republican elite, that’s not a problem. They broke with reality long ago.

The Republican establishment is also increasingly willing to disenfranchise eligible voters if it helps them win. Between 2008 and 2016, America lost 10% of its polling

… Read the rest

About all this gender stereotyping…

“Harmful” gender stereotyping has helped fuel the UK mental health crisis afflicting the younger generation, an influential report has warned, adding that it is at the root of problems with body image and eating disorders, record male suicide rates as well as violence against women and girls.

And maybe the hot new fashion for claiming to be the other sex?

Stereotyped assumptions also “significantly limit” youngsters’ career choices, in turn contributing to the gender pay gap, according to the findings of an influential commission set up by the leading gender equality campaigning charity the Fawcett Society.

Warning that stereotyping persists in parenting, education and the commercial sector – notably toys, books and

… Read the rest

Trump’s neighbors would really rather not.

Next-door neighbors of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., that he has called his Winter White House, have a message for the outgoing commander in chief: We don’t want you to be our neighbor.

Mister Rogers would have said the same.

That message was formally delivered Tuesday morning in a demand letter delivered to the town of Palm Beach and also addressed to the U.S. Secret Service asserting that Trump lost his legal right to live at Mar-a-Lago because of an agreement he signed in the early 1990s when he converted the storied estate from his private residence to a private club.

Yes but everybody knows that Trump’s signing an … Read the rest

She really doesn’t care.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1339002069345325062… Read the rest

Lawyers should not be making decisions on trans issues! Except when they should!

It’s been two weeks since three High Court judges in London ruled that trans children would not be able to consent to the reversible treatment of puberty blockers, a landmark decision that sent waves of anxiety through the trans community.

It’s not reversible, and it’s not treatment. That’s the issue. Lying about the issue in the first paragraph does not bode well.

It also caused shock at the Good Law Project, a non-profit campaign group launched in 2019 with the objective of using legal scrutiny to challenge abuses of power and injustices.

“None of the lawyers that I had spoken to thought that the case

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Kayleigh McEnany is still helping Trump get his lies out there.

Asked about the electoral college vote, McEnany said: “The president is still involved in ongoing litigation related to the election. Yesterday’s vote was one step in the constitutional process so I will leave that to him.”

…

Asked whether Trump would support the Senate taking up Biden’s cabinet nominees before he is sworn in on 20 January, McEnany called the scenario a “hypothetical” and said Trump has taken all steps to ensure a “smooth transition or a continuation of power.”

There is no “or.” Transition is the only option. The dish is baked and done.… Read the rest

Mitch McConnell has finally, weeks after the election was declared, admitted that Biden was elected. Big of him.

The Republican leader had for weeks declined to acknowledge Biden as the winner of the presidential election.

Declaring that the Electoral College “had spoken,” McConnell congratulated Biden in a speech delivered from the Senate floor on Tuesday morning.

Trump on the other hand is still committing treason in full public view.

The president re-tweeted a conservative lawyer who suggested Trump jail Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, after they certified Biden’s victory in the state.

So that’s Trump agreeing that he should jail state officials for doing their jobs.

The officials, both Republicans, resisted pressure and verbal

… Read the rest

So I had to go looking for what Burchill said.

It seems to have started here.

https://twitter.com/BoozeAndFagz/status/1338183890364747776

40 years old. Khadijah was a widow, educated, and a successful merchant when she married, ya donkey.

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) December 13, 2020

https://twitter.com/BoozeAndFagz/status/1338220134360551433

Maybe it was “ya SOW” that did it. It is a lot ruder than “ya donkey,” which to me just suggests ya fool, twit, twerp, clown. “SOW” is both sexist (ironically) and a pork-related taunt, which has been a popular category in religio-cultural battles since forever – it works for taunting Jews as well as Muslims.

I think it’s worth Twitter putting her on the naughty stool for a bit. Worth a publisher dropping her book? Hardly. It’s … Read the rest

Another clash – another book “canceled” – another taboo violated – another uproar roaring.

The Guardian reports, with startlingly squeamish ineptitude:

The journalist Julie Burchill has had a book contract cancelled after her publisher said she “crossed a line” with her Islamophobic comments on Twitter.

Notice the lack of quotation marks on “Islamophobic,” and notice also the use of the word “Islamophobic,” which is a notoriously and obviously ambiguous and trouble-making and slyly theocratic word. What is the Guardian saying? Did Burchill’s tweets express hatred of Islam? Or was it hatred of Muslims? The Guardian of course never says.

Burchill’s publisher, the Hachette imprint Little, Brown, said it had decided not to publish Welcome to the Woke Trials because

… Read the rest

Fair Play for Women has a distressing account of a hearing on gender bullshit:

If the latest inquiry into Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reform by the Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) is to be productive and worthwhile, it needs to be conducted in a genuine spirit of inquiry and neutrality. Our analysis of the questions asked in the first two hours of oral evidence suggests there is still work to do. Everyone was asked how to make things better for trans people, while the needs of women were not raised with trans panellists. The sympathetic tone and framing of questions to the transgender panellists was in marked contrast to the challenging approach taken with the academics asked to

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Barr is leaving. The cover story is that he wants to spendmoretimewiththefamily.

NPR has a rundown of his more unsavory actions.

In March 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton called Barr’s handling of the Mueller report “distorted” and “misleading.” Walton, a George W. Bush appointee who was presiding over a lawsuit seeking redacted portions of the Mueller report, said Barr’s actions raised questions about the attorney general’s credibility.

…

Democrats bristled over Barr’s statement that he believed the Trump campaign was “spied on” during the 2016 race, and his decision to appoint a veteran prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate the origins of the Russia probe.

…

He didn’t show up for a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee during

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Some people regret the whole thing.

By age 14, Eva became convinced she was a transgender boy. By 16, she had come out to her teachers and classmates.

Her family wasn’t pleased but trans activists and a Toronto therapist had a solution.

She could move into the Covenant House youth shelter, and then freely go on hormones to push ahead with medical transition.

Hell yes. Mess with your body at age 16; what could go wrong?

“They thought it was so important for me to be on testosterone that it was OK if I left home and probably didn’t graduate high school,” recalled Eva, who asked that her last name not be published to preserve her privacy around sensitive

… Read the rest

Trump is tantrumming because a baseball team is going to stop calling itself an insulting name.

The team has been known as the Cleveland “Indians.” Needless to say the team did not restrict its members to Native Americans.

Native American groups and some sections of the team’s fanbase have argued the name is racially insensitive for years. The move, which was first reported by the New York Times and later confirmed by ESPN, is likely to be formally announced in the coming days. Washington’s NFL team decided to stop using a name considered a slur towards Native Americans earlier this year and are now known simply as the Washington Football Team. Cleveland may follow a similar convention while the

… Read the rest

Another one of these. Spotify updated its “new policy around hate content and conduct” in June 2018.

The second part of our policy addressed hate content. Spotify does not permit content whose principal purpose is to incite hatred or violence against people because of their race, religion, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation. As we’ve done before, we will remove content that violates that standard. We’re not talking about offensive, explicit, or vulgar content – we’re talking about hate speech.

Again – race, religion, disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation are protected from content whose principal purpose is to incite hatred or violence on those grounds, but sex is not. People who have a “gender identity” are protected, but women … Read the rest

There’s the bone density issue.

https://twitter.com/MLaidlawMD/status/1338242568446824448 https://twitter.com/MLaidlawMD/status/1338242572330835968 https://twitter.com/MLaidlawMD/status/1338242578840387584 https://twitter.com/MLaidlawMD/status/1338242583147888641 https://twitter.com/MLaidlawMD/status/1338242584775258112

That seems very undesirable indeed.… Read the rest

This is rather galling:

White House staffers to receive Covid-19 vaccine ahead of general public

The people who have been busily spreading the virus as widely as they can are going to get the vaccine before we do, we who have been following the pandemic rules for the past nine months.

High-ranking White House officials are set to receive some of the first coronavirus vaccines in the United States, according to a White House official and a person familiar.

Those vaccinations, which could begin as soon as this week, would come while the vaccine is in extremely limited supply and only generally available to high-risk health care workers.

…

The President and other White House staff have regularly flouted US

… Read the rest

Northwestern University wipes its hands of Joseph Epstein.

Joseph Epstein has not been a lecturer at Northwestern since 2003.

While we firmly support academic freedom and freedom of expression, we do not agree with Mr. Epstein’s opinion and believe the designation of doctor is well deserved by anyone who has earned a Ph.D., an Ed.D. or an M.D.  

Northwestern is firmly committed to equity, diversity and inclusion, and strongly disagrees with Mr. Epstein’s misogynistic views.

Freedom of expression is a value, but there’s also such a thing as editorial discretion. Editors at the WSJ should have rejected that one, or at least required a searching re-write. (Then again maybe a polite argument that Dr. Jill Biden should not use … Read the rest

I daresay non-Doctor Joseph Epstein is happy, because even the BBC is reporting on his rude sexist pugnacious attack on Dr. Jill Biden. Global notoriety!

Joseph Epstein called Jill Biden “kiddo”, comparing her doctorate in education to an honorary degree.

“‘Dr Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

But social media users argued that the article reflected sexist attitudes faced by many women in academia.

Well, yes – calling her “Jill” and then “kiddo” for example.

Let’s be clear about this – it was obviously very deliberate. He knew it would cause outrage, and that must be why he did it, because why the hell else would he … Read the rest