Let them eat…grouse? Truffles? Caviar? Foie gras? Saffron-infused fish and chips?

Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Unicef of “playing politics” after the charity launched a campaign to help feed children in the UK.

The Tory MP said the charity was meant to look after people in the poorest countries and should be “ashamed”.

It comes after Unicef said it would pledge £25,000 to a south London charity to help supply breakfast boxes over the Christmas holidays.

Unicef said every child deserves to “thrive” no matter where they are born.

Surely even Jacob Rees-Mogg can grasp that living in a rich country is compatible with being personally very poor. If you live in a rich country with crap social services … Read the rest

I keep thinking “imagine trying this bullshit with race – imagine white guys saying they ‘identify as’ black and trying to bully black people into agreeing.” Now we can see an actual example in the wild.

.@Critic_Speak asked me to contribute to a podcast discussion around the subject of race in the Welsh Arts scene.

They wanted me to talk about how I might have suffered, as a Black artist, from the gatekeeping White hierarchy that has dominated Welsh culture forever.

Instead/ https://t.co/QIuO58NaNb

— Sonya Douglas (@SonyaDouglas) December 17, 2020

That is, simply, How Do I Live?

How do I live when women and girls are subjected to such violence on their bodies, their psychology, their education and choices?

Trump longs and craves and pines and yearns to see a special counsel investigate something something something Hunter Biden, but it’s a little tricky in the last weeks of a lame duck presidency.

President Donald Trump is pushing extensively for the appointment of special counsels to separately investigate his baseless allegations of voter fraud and allegations surrounding Hunter Biden, the son of the President-elect, according to people familiar with the matter.

I wonder if it ever occurs to him that an investigation of his baseless allegations would simply underline the fact that they’re baseless. “Please please please investigate my fake claims! You’re sure to find something even though my claims are fake!!”

Justice Department rules say a special counsel must

Beware “wellness.” It’s always bullshit and sometimes it’s worse than that.

Another day, another ‘clean eating’ instagramer posting images of toxic flowers on food.

It may not contain dairy or gluten *gasp* but it does contain the toxic plant alkaloid, lycorine.

Symptoms: Itching, swelling, (and in quantity) nausea, vomiting & convulsions. pic.twitter.com/CH4zLMnS1i

— James A Wong (@Botanygeek) January 28, 2018

From 2018 but “wellness” promoters who tell us to poison ourselves haven’t gone away yet.

Yes, whilst this “pudding” is free from gluten and the milk we’ve drunk for centuries, any health benefits would be heavily offset by the terrible diarrhea you would likely get from lycorine, found in the deadly Narcissus flowers sat prettily atop the glass. You

I missed this news item from DC a couple of years ago:

The Cuba Libre restaurant in Penn Quarter has agreed to institute civil rights training for employees and pay a $7,000 fine following an incident in June in which two staff members attempted to prevent a transgender woman from using the ladies bathroom.

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced today that his office had reached a settlement with the Washington location of the chain following an investigation that found Cuba Libre DC violated the city’s Human Rights Act by discriminating against Charlotte Clymer’s gender identity and failing to educate its employees on customers’ rights.

Customers’ rights? Or customers who are trans women’s rights. Clearly women’s rights are not … Read the rest

The Great Man quotes himself.

"I've moved a long way in my conceptualisation of what privilege really means, and quite how extraordinarily stupid and thoughtless and arrogant my tribe can be" https://t.co/TjJbNspeav

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) December 15, 2020

He hasn’t though. Or maybe he has, in the sense that he was even worse before. I don’t know, I didn’t know of him before. But in the sense of actually becoming thoughtful and not arrogant? No. No, there he has failed utterly.

In fact, amusingly, the very act of tweeting this vain “Look how awesome I am” self-quotation demonstrates that failure. His habit of blocking anyone who disagrees with him no matter how politely just underlines it.

Updating to add … Read the rest

Grace Lavery in action just a few hours ago.

I mean, the tactic of SAYING NUMBERS VERY LOUDLY in support of a minor criticism about citation? Smacks of self-knowledge. This may be the first time Jesse has had to confront how petty, pedantic, obscure, and obscene he seems to those who aren’t part of his little cult.

— Prof. Grace Lavery (@graceelavery) December 16, 2020

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1339282593901142025

Grace Lavery’s graceful response?

“Grace” Lavery gets a pile of crap published at Foreign Policy. Why FP is that gullible is beyond me. It’s about the Tavistock ruling (so that makes it suitable for FP because it’s in Another Country?).

In effect, the courts intervened in the transition-related care of children experiencing gender dysphoria, putting those children and their families in the position of having to seek care abroad.

But calling it “care” assumes the very thing that is at issue – that puberty blockers are a legitimate treatment for a genuine medical condition that needs treatment. That’s a very shaky assumption, and for Keira Bell, for instance, it turned out to be entirely wrong. Lavery is cheating by treating it as obvious … Read the rest

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

So I had to go looking for what Burchill said.

It seems to have started here.

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

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