So the municipal pool in Grenoble has been closed.

According to a statement from the town hall, the lifeguards at the pools asked for the shutdown because “they are there to maintain safety and they can’t do that when they have to worry about the crowds”. It added: “We are working towards a positive solution.”

Meaning the protests were a distraction, I guess.

Seven burkini-clad women, accompanied by activists, went to the Grenoble pools on Sunday demanding the right to bathe despite the facility’s rules. They said the ban was discriminatory.

The women said they wanted the public pools, which currently require men to wear swim briefs and women to wear bikinis or one-piece swimsuits, to change their regulations

Have a feel-good item. We need one.

… Read the rest

This is game over – the Supreme Court giving the green light to Republican gerrymandering from here to eternity (or terminal global warming). The Republicans hold the power now and they have permission to gerrymander to their hearts’ content so they will never be out of power, because they won’t allow it.

In a pair of cases out of North Carolina and Maryland raising the question of whether extreme partisan political gerrymanders can ever violate the Constitution, the five-justice conservative majority finally answered a decades-old question: The federal courts will have no role to play in overseeing whether political lines were drawn for the gain of the majority in violation of the Constitution.

Short version: we’re fucked.

To be sure,

It turns out that what Louis CK did was a kink.

I am saying: #metoo has been weaponized against non-normative sex practices in some contexts.

I'm not sure what you mean by "express consent," but if you mean verbal only, then yes I am arguing against that requirement.

I'm saying: being an exhibitionist is a kink. https://t.co/ej70P24cVR

— Heidi Matthews (@Heidi__Matthews) June 26, 2019

It’s kink-shaming and mainstream (not in a good way) to say that a powerful man shouldn’t trap two less-powerful women in his hotel room and masturbate in front of them.

Kink shaming has absolutely fed the “he’s so creepy” mainstream take, which has fed the “he’s a harasser and/or assaulter” mainstream conclusion.

The law does not

Department of we can sell it but you can’t say it.

It’s real.

It’s another real-life joke! This is the story. This is part of the Billy Connolly routine. And this is a recent screenshot from Asda’s online store:

Go there to see the screenshot.

J and M on Patreon.… Read the rest

Holy shit.

Politico:

Mark Morgan, the White House choice to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said during a Fox News interview earlier this year that he can judge the likelihood that an unaccompanied minor will become a gang member by looking into that child’s eyes.

“I’ve been to detention facilities where I’ve walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under,” Morgan said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in January. “I’ve looked at them and I’ve looked at their eyes, Tucker — and I’ve said that is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member. It’s unequivocal.”

That knocked the breath out of me for a second. It’s staggering. It’s worthy of Göbbels.

The view that unaccompanied minors are more

All the tomboys are being converted into trans or enby.

Julie Bindel looks at a character of Enid Blyton’s who is getting the treatment:

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I took pleasure in rejecting feminine frippery such as frilly pink frills and girly shoes. I refused to have bows and ribbons in my hair, and I was not the only one in my friendship group that preferred dungarees to dresses.

I kept good company in a character from Enid Blyton, who was also a hard-core tomboy. Wilhelmina, better known as Bill, was the girl in Malory Towers – a series of books based on a fictitious all-girls boarding school, which chronicled the adventures of

Shallow Princess Ivanka’s shallow husband Shallow Prince Jared has a Plan for Peace in the Middle East, gleaned from his several years of experience renting overpriced apartments.

The Middle East Economic Plan, dubbed “Peace to Prosperity” is the brainchild of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump. Its 136-pages read like a glossy magazine, with photos of children walking to school and smiling farmers adorning the document.

But the images come from USAID development projects that were stopped due to massive cuts imposed on the agency’s funding in the West Bank and Gaza.

Well…yes, but…the photos are meant to be of future children walking to school and smiling farmers. They’re not supposed to be documentation, they’re supposed to … Read the rest

Princess Ivanka gives us commoners a glimpse into her rarefied royal life.

Great keynoting the Senate’s weekly policy lunch and discussing workforce development policy, Higher Ed Act reauthorization, childcare affordability, and paid family leave. https://t.co/4SkmGksBe8

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) June 25, 2019

Will you look at that? Can you imagine a single other “senior adviser” issuing a glam shot of Self Entering The Chamber?

And then there’s the whole “what the hell do you know about it?” problem. What is that spoiled vain shallow fashion model doing prancing into the Senate and giving a “keynote” on a grab bag of subjects she has zero expertise in?

Also, as Joyce Vance points out, how dare she.

Yesterday, Ivanka discussed “childcare affordability”

More personnel turnover:

The Trump administration official in charge of diplomatic protocol plans to resign and isn’t going to Japan for this week’s Group of 20 meetings, where he would have played a sensitive behind-the-scenes role, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump has a protocol boffin?? Who knew? He doesn’t seem to have been doing much of a job…

Sean Lawler, a State Department official whose title is chief of protocol, is departing amid a possible inspector general’s probe into accusations of intimidating staff and carrying a whip in the office, according to one of the people.

Ah. So Trump has a protocol boffin who carries a whip in the office. Makes sense.

The protocol chief assists

More finger-pointing hissing venomous garbage from Pink News:

The Harry Potter author JK Rowling has been heavily criticised for following the “self-professed transphobe” YouTuber Magdalen Berns on Twitter.

Berns has uploaded numerous anti-trans videos to YouTube with titles including, “There is no such thing as a lesbian with a penis,” “Gender is NOT a social construct,” and “Non binary bullshit.”

Berns has also called for people to stop using the term TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist), saying it is an attack on free speech.

Berns is a hero. You regular readers here got to know about her well before her videos made her famous. I wrote about her back in October 2015 when she was running in an Edinburgh … Read the rest

But have you done the RESEARCH? Where is your RESEARCH?

More on TERFs and white supremacy: https://t.co/Sv0zPbZgR2

— Dr. Dorothy Kim (@dorothyk98) June 24, 2019

That’s how you do RESEARCH. You read an article in Jezebel and a thread on Twitter. That’s RESEARCH.

She’s a bizarre character, Dr. Dorothy Kim. She has an…impoverished vocabulary, to put it politely, and she’s free with the epithets. She’s also an academic, in the English department at Brandeis.

As you just commited violent misgendering in your tweet, exactly what is your point. Like the litany of other TERFs you are anti-trans and support violent conspiracy theories. So why do you even want to hold onto “feminism” b/c you are not.

— Dr. Dorothy Kim

Obvious but worth reminding us:

A UN expert has warned of a possible “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape from hunger, “while the rest of the world is left to suffer”.

It seems more inevitable than possible. Remember the hours-long queues for water in Chennai? It’s clear how money would make a difference in that scenario. Money pays people to stand in the queue for you, money pays for bottled water, money can get you out of Chennai altogether.

A key warning was that the world’s poor are likely to be hardest hit by rising temperatures – and the potential food shortages and conflict that could accompany such a change.

Developing nations are expected to suffer at

“Well why didn’t you say so?”

Border Patrol and the Trump administration are shocked, shocked, to hear of the horrific conditions at the Clint Facility. They had no idea. They have moved 300 children to the nearest Trump hotel.

Not really. They’ve been taken to a tent facility. In Texas. So that will be a huge improvement.

Almost 300 migrant children have been removed from a border patrol facility in Texas after media reports of lawyers describing “appalling” and potentially dangerous conditions, Department of Homeland Security officials told NBC News.

…

The children have been taken to a tent detention camp also in El Paso, Texas, where they will remain under the custody of Border Patrol until they can