The NY Times has another KABLOOEY about Trump’s tax returns and what they reveal.

He opened a new Trump Sewer in Chicago in September 2008, just as all the wheels were falling off. The new Sewer did not flourish.

…the skyscraper became another disappointment in a portfolio filled with them. Construction lagged. Condos proved hard to sell. Retail space sat vacant.

Yet for Mr. Trump and his company, the Chicago experience also turned out to be something else: the latest example of his ability to strong-arm major financial institutions and exploit the tax code to cushion the blow of his repeated business failures.

The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the

… Read the rest

It’s so impressive when men who say they are lifelong feminists announce that men are women if they say they are, and that they will block any stupid obstinate women who disagree.

https://twitter.com/Paul_Ilett/status/1321166271090667525

It’s not his call though. He can swear he’s been a feminist since his first breath, but if he feels it necessary to say that men who “identify as” women are women and that he won’t listen to dissent…then I’m not going to believe him about the being a feminist part.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on You’re going to have to.

What exactly do “nonbinary” people believe themselves to be? They are still men or women, male or female, aren’t they? They can’t be “neither.” If they’re rejecting the stereotypical, sexist roles that society has historically tried to box men and women into, then bravo, they can knock themselves out. But am I nonbinary because I do not conform to many of the stereotypically masculine, sexist, gendered preferences and behaviours that patriarchal society expects men to adopt? I don’t drive. I don’t follow sports. I don’t drink beer. I do some cooking and housework (though still not half). I consider myself relatively gentle and sensitive (but … Read the rest

These bullies of Edinburgh Labour Students are now whining because their point-hiss at a disobedient woman wasn’t 100% well received.

We stand by the Trans community and our concerns about Ann, but protecting the safety and well-being of our members, particularly our trans and non-binary members, must come first. pic.twitter.com/SsvynRSNFy

— Edinburgh Labour Students (@EdLabStudents) October 27, 2020

Wawa we are receiving abuse, targeted harassment, and threats.

How much did they worry about the abuse, targeted harassment, and threats that would likely rain down on Ann Henderson after they posted a “statement” explaining how wicked she is (and contemptuously calling her “Ann” six times, as if she were their servant girl)? Obviously not at all or they wouldn’t have posted … Read the rest

Ohhhhhhhh no I’m not, sunshine. I’m not “going to have” to do anything to or about or with regard to you. I don’t know you, and I don’t recognize any obligation I have toward you just because you say so on Twitter.

no

https://twitter.com/thejeffreymarsh/status/1321175950483169284

He gets that because he’s non-binary he’s confusing to people, he says, but we are going to have to respect him. No we’re not. We’re free to ignore him.

You need to see my humanity, he says, you need to respect me and talk to me like a human being.

But I don’t. We don’t. Don’t nobody have to.

He could have argued that people should respect other people by default, in the minimal sense of … Read the rest

Awww Donnie wanted to make it that the mean woman (not his actual language) couldn’t sue him for defaming her because he’s Too Important and Federal, and the judge says he can’t.

A federal judge on Tuesday denied the Justice Department’s effort to effectively end a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump brought by a longtime magazine columnist who has alleged he raped her in a luxury department store dressing room, paving the way for the case to proceed.

The DOJ had sought to intervene in the case and substitute itself as defendant in the lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a move that likely would have curbed the proceedings, since the federal government can’t be sued for defamation.

… Read the rest

Once again people lose their damn minds over a long-dead guy who called himself a “prophet.”

Tens of thousands of people have marched through the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, demanding a boycott of French goods amid a row over France’s tougher stance on radical Islam. They burned an effigy of President Emmanuel Macron, who has defended cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Police blocked the marchers from reaching the French embassy. Mr Macron has become a target in several Muslim-majority countries after his defence of French secularism.

Muhammad is gone; he’s been gone for centuries. There are more important things to worry about.

On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also called for a boycott of French goods. In a televised speech,

… Read the rest

The student inquisitors had Kevin Price in their sights a month ago:

Cambridge University Liberal Association (CULA) released a statement last Sunday (27/09) condemning the “shocking and pervasive” transphobia among leading members of the Cambridge Labour Party, including prominent councillors.

“Liberal”! Ha!

The statement accuses the Cambridge Labour Party, who currently control Cambridge City Council, of “tolerating a stream of transphobia by leading members of its council group.”

CULA particularly highlights that the Labour Party have failed “to take action against former Cambridge Deputy Leader, Councillor Kevin Price, who has been regularly retweeting anti-trans content for at least six months.”

Except of course the content is not “anti-trans,” it’s pro-truth.

Price has retweeted accounts which call trans people “fetishists”

… Read the rest

James Kirkup has more on the persecution of Kevin Price:

Mr Price is now facing the sort of ‘hostile response’ he spoke about – calls for his employer to dismiss him from his job, because of his thoughts on sex and gender and ultimately, because of his reluctance to say the holy words.

According to Varsity, a student paper, the Union of Clare Students has condemned him and demanded the college authorities act against him. By discussing issues of policy and law at a council meeting, Mr Price had jeopardised the ‘safety’ of the college’s trans and non-binary students, the union suggested in a statement.

Varsity further quotes one Clare student as saying Price is ‘unfit both to

… Read the rest

Now we go from Edinburgh students to Cambridge students:

A Labour councillor of 10 years and former deputy leader at Cambridge City Council has resigned over a motion on transgender rights.

The motion, brought by the Liberal Democrats to a session of the full council on Thursday (October 22), began with the words: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary individuals are non-binary.”

In other words the brainless reality-denying mantra that people are being forced to agree to or be shunned and possibly fired. This situation is grotesque – that people are being forced, on pain of losing their jobs and facing persecution, to say they agree with a stupid reality-denying lie.

The mantra being forced … Read the rest

They’ve found another witch.

https://twitter.com/EdLabStudents/status/1320681076185014281

The statement via Facebook:

Edinburgh Labour Students strongly condemns the recent behaviour of our University Rector, Labour NEC Equalities Chair and NEC candidate Ann Henderson. There is evidence that Ann attended a Woman’s Place UK meeting two weeks ago, whereby she made a comment implying that the party rulebook should require members to state their birth/legal sex for official party records. Such a comment implies opposition to self-identification as a principle; yet, self-identification is a principle that the Labour Party officially supports.

In August 2018, we reached out to Ann as she failed to comment or respond to concerns from a Labour Party member as to why she followed Woman’s Place UK on twitter.

… Read the rest

Donald Trump recently called Sacha Baron Cohen a “phony” and a “creep.”

The comedian responded with a job offer:
https://t.co/UmiTiwZtok

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 26, 2020

“To me, he’s a creep," adds @POTUS about @SachaBaronCohen. #Borat2

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) October 24, 2020

Donald—I appreciate the free publicity for Borat! I admit, I don’t find you funny either. But yet the whole world laughs at you.

I’m always looking for people to play racist buffoons, and you’ll need a job after Jan. 20. Let’s talk!https://t.co/itWnhJ8TQF

— Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) October 24, 2020

Speaking of Trump and Baron Cohen, a video has resurfaced of a 2003 interview between the two: https://t.co/UmiTiwZtok pic.twitter.com/tOIXtEuJ7z

— Los Angeles Times

… Read the rest

Erase erase erase erase.

There’s a Twitter account named FemCare Community Health Initiative. It’s a puzzle that it hasn’t done something about that “Fem” yet, because elsewhere they’ve been scrubbing dutifully.

https://twitter.com/FemCare_CHI/status/1311697734819250176 https://twitter.com/FemCare_CHI/status/1313872050814099457

A menstruator doesn’t menstruate during pregnancy, so is it still virtuous to call her a menstruator?

https://twitter.com/FemCare_CHI/status/1314234224837263366

Stupid menstruator. They’re so incompetent, having all these miscarriages all over the place. Clearly FemCare is the wrong name altogether, it should be MenCare.… Read the rest

These “revolutions” keep happening because…the problem never goes away.

For women and girls in Egypt, sexual assault has long been endemic – but victims are now fighting back like never before, writes Salma El-Wardany.

Except we’ve heard that before.

It began in July when claims were shared online against student Ahmed Bassam Zaki. Nadeen Ashraf, a 22-year-old fellow student, set up the Instagram account Assault Police to share these allegations and received an outpouring of messages from women claiming that Ahmed Bassam Zaki had blackmailed, assaulted, harassed and raped them.

Within days he was arrested and is on trial charged with “sexually assaulting three girls under the age of 18 and threatening them, along with blackmailing a fourth girl”.

… Read the rest

Erdoğan says Macron is crazy for not being a fan of political Islam.

France has recalled its ambassador to Turkey for consultations after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insulted his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

He said Mr Macron needed a mental health check for pledging to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.

Mr Macron has spoken out forcefully on these issues after a French teacher was murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.

That is, for showing cartoons of Mo as part of a class on freedom of speech. The BBC should have included that instead of making it sound as if Paty showed the cartoons just for the hell of it.

Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad

… Read the rest

Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books on William Barr’s passion for authoritarianism:

There is, however, a very strong connection between Donald Barr’s hard-line Catholicism and [his son] William Barr’s present position as the main (perhaps the sole) intellectual buttress of Trump’s presidency. That connection lies in the idea of authority. Authoritarian rule is a defining feature of hierarchical institutional Catholicism. The magisterium of the church flows from the pope, who, on matters of faith and morals, may create doctrines that are infallible and therefore unquestionable. These include the bans on contraception, divorce, abortion, homosexual sex, and same-sex marriage. As a devout Catholic with links to the powerful Opus Dei movement, which galvanized the successful reaction against

… Read the rest

Hugh Schofield at the BBC wrote a piece last January on a tv confrontation in 1990 between a Paris literary dude who boasted of “seducing” young girls and a woman who pointed out it wasn’t something to boast of.

The footage can easily be found on the internet. In a jocular tone the programme’s respected presenter, Bernard Pivot, asks Matzneff (then aged 53) what it is like to be a serial “collector of young chicks”.

All bald-headed suaveness, Matzneff explains how he prefers school-age girls who have yet to be “hardened” by disillusionment over men. He says they come to him because he listens and takes them seriously.

The panel nods understandingly. A Catholic woman who is there to

… Read the rest

That’s how to do it.

Protesters have disrupted church services across Poland in the latest show of discontent against a court’s near-total ban on abortion. The protesters staged sit-ins and held pro-abortion banners, interrupting Sunday Mass at some churches.

The protests are considered unusual in a country where the Roman Catholic church has great influence. They follow a ruling by Poland’s top court that ending the life of a deformed foetus is unconstitutional.

…

Poland’s abortion laws were already among the strictest in Europe, with an estimated 100,000 women seeking a termination abroad each year to get around the tight restrictions.

The Catholic church as an institution hates women, whatever some nuns and priests may think.

In a park

… Read the rest

The Sydney Morning Herald tells us:

Four in ten young men do not consider punching and hitting to constitute domestic violence, a national survey has found.

The survey of 1074 adults for anti-violence campaign group White Ribbon found 42 per cent of men aged 18 to 34 did not consider “hitting, punching or restraining” another person to be “a type of domestic violence”.

Were they raised by wolves? In what world is punching not violence? Also in what world is it ok for men to hit women?

The research found older men were more likely to recognise domestic violence. The proportion of men who did not consider hitting and punching to be domestic violence dropped to less than a

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Omar on Here for you.

It is at times like this that I am reminded how improbable our individual lives are against the backdrop of human history and evolutionary biology.

My maternal great-grandmother Mary-Ann Connor was a refugee from the Irish potato ‘famine’ of the 1840s, when social arrangements in Ireland somehow resulted in the export of a large part of its agricultural produce. She went as a refugee to New Zealand, where by chance she met my great grandfather, who was a sailor.

Mary-Ann had eleven children in all, ten of whom died in infancy: probably of TB, which was raging at the time. My grandmother was the only survivor of those eleven children. … Read the rest