Julie Bindel points out a few facts about JK Rowling for the benefit of Nick Hilton:

So when I read podcast producer Nick Hilton’s ignorant and vitriolic attack on J.K. Rowling in the New Statesman – the magazine of choice for champagne-swigging socialists – I was furious.

Hilton’s article, published earlier this week, is as bizarre as it is defamatory. It labels the author ‘Britain’s nastiest novelist’, attacks her most recent books and even finds time to bemoan ‘child abuse, murder and torture’ in the beloved Harry Potter series.

…

While Hilton has since claimed he was writing only about her books, it is very clear he was using them as a means of launching a thinly-veiled sexist rant against the author herself.

Would he have been writing “about her books” at all if there had been no political background? And would the New Statesman have published his writing about her books in that case? I think not.

As an investigative journalist, who has dedicated their entire adult life to campaigning to end male violence against women, I am lucky enough to have become good friends with Rowling. She is, without doubt, one of the kindest, most generous and empathetic people on the planet. She has tirelessly used her wealth and platform to help others and the must rank as one of the most generous philanthropists in the world…And yet, despite the immeasurable good she has done, Left-wing commentators such as Hilton continue to attack her character.

The vilification of Rowling has long been led by aggressive woke activists who accuse her of being ‘transphobic’. Rowling is not a transphobe. She simply believes in the importance of biological sex. As a result, she takes the view that men who identify as women should not be allowed in women-only spaces – be it a changing room, prison or rape centre. Neither should they be allowed to compete in women’s sport or take women’s roles in business. Most importantly, they should not be allowed to insidiously roll back centuries of female emancipation.

But the Nick Hiltons think they absolutely should be allowed to do that.

We see you.

One problem with being a Donald Trump is that you’re a Donald Trump. It means a lot of people will avoid you, not necessarily for political reasons but because you’re a Donald Trump.

Donald Trump lost three of his lawyers in one day when attorney Joe Tacopina filed a declaration requesting the withdrawal of his firm’s representation of the former president in multiple lawsuits.

…

Tacopina withdrew his firm’s legal services from the hush money case only two months before the trial was set to start, at the end of March. Tacopina also requested to withdraw his firm’s legal services from E. Jean Carroll‘s civil defamation and battery case against Trump, which awarded the former Elle columnist $5 million in damages last May.

…

Tacopina will no longer represent the former president in any appeals related to the Carroll case, nor will his firm be involved in a separate defamation case against Trump from Carroll, which is set to start Tuesday.

Maybe he just has a dentist appointment that day.

Michael McAuliffe, a former federal prosecutor and former elected state attorney, told Newsweek that an attorney might withdraw legal services for various reasons.

“A lawyer might attempt to withdraw as counsel of record for a client in a pending case for a number of reasons,” McAuliffe said. “The attorney-client relationship might have suffered a fundamental breach of confidence, running in either or both directions. A strong-willed client who thinks he or she is more of a lawyer than the actual lawyer can create an untenable scenario for that lawyer to continue representing the client’s interests.

“However, with Donald Trump, any lawyer who agrees to act as his counsel is on clear notice on that front,” McAuliffe said.

A “strong-willed client” – aka a pig-headed dim-witted client who thinks he knows everything and never shuts up.

Ooooh that’s a tough one, we’ll get back to you in 20 years or so when we have the data.

Sex Matters has a new report:

A major new report launched today by Sex Matters reveals in shocking detail that leaders in the women’s sector who advocate for female-only services are routinely subjected to investigations, ostracisation, bullying and employment loss, and have been pressured into adopting policies that compromise women’s welfare and safety. 

Yet a new poll has found that the British public strongly backs single-sex support for women who have been the victims of rape, sexual assault or domestic violence, with 84% believing such women should have access to female-only services.

I’m even more crazy-radical than that: I think all women should have access to female-only services.

The report, titled Women’s services: A sector silenced, is the first of its kind globally. It is based on interviews with 19 experts and leaders in the sector from a wide range of organisations providing support services to women. These include rape-crisis centres, domestic-violence refuges and support services, support for trafficked women and women in prostitution, and prison and probation services that engage with female offenders, many of whom are survivors of abuse. 

Interviewees warned that the issues go far beyond the risk that women may be put at risk or be attacked. When women victims of male violence are left doubting whether a service is truly single-sex, and when they are banned from using clear language to talk about this, they may be retraumatised and fearful, and lose trust. They may self-exclude from support services.

For the sake of the fantasies of a few men, women self-exclude from support services intended for women. Seems fair.

Another tribunal. ERCC is Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

MW is Mridul Wadhwa, the trans-identifying man who is the head of Edinburgh RAPE CRISIS Centre.

Didn’t we all.

The rape crisis centre run by a man told the woman who needed women-only group therapy was turned away. That’s progressive!

No, sorry, because women are all Karens and don’t deserve information and choice.

More about Hvaldimir:

On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.

When a commercial fisherman named Joar Hesten got a closer look, he realized that the whale was in fact wearing a harness: one strap girdling his neck and another gripping his torso just behind his flippers. Hesten contacted a local scientist, and word eventually reached the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, which dispatched an inspector, Jorgen Ree Wiig. After several failed attempts by Wiig and a colleague to free the beluga while onboard a dinghy, Hesten put on an immersion suit and plunged into the water. Though the whale was not quite as hefty as an average adult male of his species, he was still a formidable presence, by best estimates close to 14 feet long and about 2,700 pounds. Swimming beside him, Hesten managed to unclasp one of the straps. Together, they used a grappling-hook-like device to remove the rest of the stubborn harness.

A few days later, the beluga followed a boat to Hammerfest, one of the northernmost towns in the world, where he took up residence, frequently interacting with people in the harbor. 

He became a celebrity…which is not really what you want for a whale.

He’d been spying for the Russkies.

The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.

His future is uncertain and perilous.

H/t Harald Hanche-Olsen

The Holocaust Encyclopedia on Lebensraum:

The concept of Lebensraum—or “living space”—served as a critical component in the Nazi worldview that drove both its military conquests and racial policy.

…

Long before the Nazi period, many Germans looked to eastern Europe as the natural source of their Lebensraum. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the social and economic pressures of over-population in the German states had led to a steady colonization of Germanic peoples in eastern Europe. Increasingly by the twentieth century, however, scholars and the public alike began to view the East as a region whose vast natural resources were wasted on racially “inferior” peoples like Slavs and Jews. A biological view of Lebensraum resonated with an inaccurate historical view of the German role in the East during the ancient and medieval periods. Expansionists clung to this mythic German “history” in eastern Europe, arguing that these regions were actually lost German lands. As one German publication stated in 1916, “we Germanic people build up—create—the Slav broods and dreams—like his earth.”

…

In the Nazi state, Lebensraum became not just a romantic yearning for a return to the East but a vital strategic component of its imperial and racist visions. For the Germans, eastern Europe represented their “Manifest Destiny.” Hitler and other Nazi thinkers drew direct comparisons to American expansion in the West. During one of his famous “table talks,” Hitler decreed that “there’s only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”

…

The concept of Lebensraum was not solely responsible for the Holocaust, but powerfully connected a variety of imperialist, nationalist, and racist currents that would contribute to the murder of the Jews of Europe.

Not a word to deploy lightly.

A guy wrote a long piece in The New Statesman explaining how terrible JK Rowling is.

His smoking gun is that she…liked a tweet.

The NY Times looks at a Michigan bible college’s efforts to help Trump steal the election.

Last July, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, brought felony charges against all 16 of the state’s bogus Trump electors; she has said that her investigation remains open, raising questions about whether more charges might be coming. And while the Michigan indictments were the first stemming from the Trump campaign’s effort to seize electoral votes, at least four other swing states are now pursuing criminal investigations.

Hillsdale administrators declined to be interviewed for this article. But in response to written questions, the college said its officials had acted and spoken in a “personal capacity” regarding the 2020 election.

…

How did a small college in Michigan, self-defined by the idea that the project of American democracy is the realization of millenniums of Western wisdom, get mixed up in a plot to subvert it?

Millenniums? Have we given up on millennia? Just as we’ve apparently given up past-tense “forecast” for the clanging “forecasted”?

Anyway, yeah. Another way of putting it would be how could a conservative bible college see a Donald Trump as in any way acceptable? Don’t even conservative colleges and churches see the first and most basic filter as some form of human kindness? Don’t they have that initial screen that rejects mean angry hostile cruel venomous sadistic shits? If they don’t, why don’t they?

Maybe they cling to a tiny shred of that filter?

Like others in his intellectual camp, Arnn seemed to love Trumpism more than the man himself. (“There’s obviously a lot of things that are really great about that guy, but we don’t teach our students at Hillsdale College to act the way he does on all occasions,” he quipped during a 2017 speech.) 

Hurhur. So, not the “you can grab them by the pussy” part of him? The mocking a disabled reporter part? The threats, the sneers, the lies, the threats?

I don’t know. Journalism tends not to ask questions of that kind.

Reconstruction meets Trump:

[Last] Tuesday, in response to the federal case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith over Trump’s alleged role in the January 6 insurrection, Trump threatened a new round of violence – or “bedlam” – if he loses the election. In early February, the US supreme court will also rule on the Colorado supreme court’s decision to disqualify Trump from the state’s ballot for his part in the insurrection.

The two cases might appear to be disconnected, but they are inseparable in law and history. They are united by Congress’s Reconstruction-era action to enforce the 14th amendment’s extension of constitutional rights against the former Confederates’ campaign of racial and political violence – the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871.

Trump is a one-man KKK.

Smith has indicted Trump under the KKK Act, which incorporates the 14th amendment, section 3, of the constitution. The Colorado court’s disqualification comes under the third section of the amendment, which disqualifies from office anyone who has engaged in insurrection against the United States. There are clear and compelling reasons why Trump has been indicted under the KKK Act and disqualified under the 14th amendment, section 3. Those reasons are stated in the indictments and court rulings.

Trump has been charged on the same grounds that Klansmen were prosecuted, not only during Reconstruction but also during the civil rights era of the 1960s, and he has been removed from the ballot on the same basis as Confederate traitors were removed from elective office.

…

It is precisely under section 241 of the Ku Klux Klan Act, upheld by the supreme court in an opinion that establishes the broadest possible application, that the justice department indicted Donald Trump on 1 August 2023. The indictment was not restricted to Trump’s activities during the January 6 US Capitol riot, but to the period of his conspiracy to stage a coup, a span that began after the election to the day he left office.

To wit, count 4: “From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States – that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”

The special prosecutor then made clear that the law that Trump had violated was the pertinent section of the KKK Act: “In violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 241.”

Trump is the KKK brought back to life.

It’s massively depressing.

Tweeting from DragCon:

They’re no Karens.

From Fair Play for Women:

NEW REPORT: How trans inclusion in sport is harming women and girls

For years women and girls have been facing unfair, and sometimes unsafe, sport because of trans inclusion – which means male inclusion in women’s teams, events and changing rooms. You can read some background on that here and here is the timeline.

The scale of the problem, and its effect on women and girls, has been concealed by the fear around this issue. A culture of intimidation and silencing has forced women to keep quiet or walk away. This is not inclusion, it’s female exclusion.

That even understates it a little. It’s a culture of intimidation and silencing enforced by bullying, punishing, excluding, firing, arresting. It’s not just rhetoric, it’s not just threats of punishment, it’s punishment itself.

Fair Play For Women has heard personal reports from across 35 sports in the UK. From these, we have compiled around 50 personal testimonies representing 25 sports. We have protected their identities because they are worried about reprisals in their sport, or about the possible impact on relationships or on their jobs. Given that women have lost their jobs for expressing opinions about this, they are probably right to be cautious.

To put it mildly.

Our report gives them a voice. This, the first ever report on the impact of trans inclusion in the UK, shows a widespread problem, affecting many women and girls all over the country, at all levels, from juniors to masters and at all levels of competition and participation. Women and girls are being put at risk and their legitimate concerns disregarded. Their stories debunk the claims that this is a small problem, affecting only a few, and that it does no harm. They include big sports like football, athletics, swimming and cycling, and contact sports like judo, American football, ice hockey and roller-derby.

Read the report here

Oops.

Powerful ‘puberty blocker’ drugs given to hundreds of young people who are confused about their gender significantly risks lowering their IQs, a leading scientific expert has warned.

In an alarming study, Sallie Baxendale, professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London, called for ‘urgent’ research into the impact of the drugs on children’s brain functions.

NHS England stopped routinely prescribing the drugs, which halt bodily changes in puberty, last year after a damning review found that the treatment could interrupt the process of the brain maturing.

But private gender clinics are still giving puberty suppressants to under 16s in the UK – and trans activists insist the drugs are safe.

And if activists don’t know, who does?!!

All very well, but…I can’t help wondering about a parallel BBC news item on a two day blackface convention. Would that happen?

DragCon UK: Drag queens gather for two-day convention

What do we think? Would there be a headline reading

“BlackfaceCon UK: Blackface minstrels gather for two-day convention”?

No, of course there wouldn’t.

Would there be a headline reading

“TowelheadCon UK: Turban-wearers gather for two-day convention”?

Nope.

Why is it ok to mock women but not other despised groups?

The BBC provides photo after photo of men clownishly dressed and shod and made up and hair-puffed.

Around 180 queens “sashayed” down the pink carpet for the official opening of the event before being welcomed by one of the judges on Drag Race UK Michelle Visage.

Hur hur ha ha. Women don’t walk, they sashay, or “sashay.” They do it on a pink carpet. It’s all so hilarious.

Cheryl Hole, Drag Race UK series one contestant from Chelmsford, said the event was a “fabulous” weekend.

Haw haw. Women are holes. You slay us, Beeb.

Surely this has to be parody.

Children wanting to transition ‘can ignore parents’, says Civil Service diversity ambassador

Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a transwoman in the Department for Work and Pensions, compares puberty blockers to taking the contraceptive pill

Saorsa-Amatheia? Cod Irish plus cod Greek? Come on. Not to mention “Tweedale” – which gets us

Violet Tweedale, née Chambers (1862 – 10 December 1936), was a Scottish author, poet, and spiritualist. 

Saorsa-Amatheia’s granny no doubt.

So anyway:

Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a transwoman civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), told colleagues that children who want to transition have the right to ignore their parents’ wishes and compared taking puberty blockers to taking the contraceptive pill.

The official also claimed that the belief that sex is binary is not “the modern scientific view” and that “there are as many genders as there are individuals because we’re all unique individuals”.

Nah we’re not. We think we are, but that’s our vanity. We’re “unique” in some basic literal senses, but over all we’re much of a muchnness. This goon is a nice illustration of how predictable it all is. “I’m unique, I’m fascinating, look at me!!” No, dude, we’ve seen it all before.

Trans women have a HUMAN RIGHT to fantasize in public about kidnapping women in a van.

Trans women have a HUMAN RIGHT to threaten and mock women, while women have no right to say that men are not women.

Make a note of it.

Well whaddya know, Yaniv is back at the old grift.

[Update: No he’s not, this story is from Jan 7 2020. H/t Evenera Bowman]

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Older campers may recall 9/11/2001, when al-Qaeda activists kidnapped civilian airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center, in a dramatic protest against American neocolonialism and world trade.  Our British comrades immediately formed the Stop The War Coalition, to demand that the US declare a unilateral ceasefire with al-Qaeda.  We at PIMPLESL also insisted that the US refrain from any action other than quiet diplomacy, appeals to the UN, yoga, and aromatherapy.  We explained that if the US had a problem with the incineration of its airline passengers and office workers, that problem should be addressed at the root level by providing better dental care.  We also pointed out that it was hurtful to refer to the young activists who flew planes into the World Trade Center as “terrorists”.    

Unhappily, the US ignored all our demands.  It continued to use the term “terrorist”, and it employed military violence, going so far as to kill Mohammed Atef, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, Anwar al-Awlaki, Khalid Habib, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and numerous other al-Qaeda militants. 

The time has come for PIMPLESL to return to the struggle.  We now demand that the US issue an official apology for its failure to declare a ceasefire on 9/12/2001.  We further demand that the US refrain from any military action against the Houthi activists on the shores of the Red Sea , who are currently kidnapping merchant ships and firing drones and missiles at the ships as a protest against world trade.  The US and the UK must institute a unilateral ceasefire for the Houthis’ benefit.

While our Houthi comrades demonstrate by preventing the movement of ships at sea, our PIMPLESL demonstrations will prevent movement of cars on land by blocking bridges, streets, and Interstate Highways.  When workers cannot get to work, or cannot get home from work, they will then take the first step toward revolution by paying attention to us.  This tactic follows directly from the tenets of our philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Exhibitionism.  Our mottos are: no highway except our way, and from the river to the HOV lane, shut it all down.  We call our campaign the global interstateifada. 

From Courthouse News:

A Texas physician’s fears the Biden administration will cut federal funding for her medical practice for her refusal to treat transgender patients under 18 are unfounded, a Justice Department attorney told a Fifth Circuit panel Monday.

Dr. Susan Neese is an internal medicine specialist affiliated with a Baptist hospital in Amarillo, Texas.

She has several patients who are transgender or dealing with gender dysphoria, all of whom are in their 30s and 40s. She will not see transgender patients who are minors.

Unfortunately this is sloppily written. Is the doctor refusing to provide specifically trans “care” or is she refusing to provide any care at all? That needs to be made crystal clear at the outset.

Neese explained in court filings that she declined to help a 16-year-old get transitional hormones since she does not think minors’ brains are mature enough to fully understand the ramifications of their actions, and she was uncomfortable due to the complex medical and emotional issues involved.

“Dr. Neese is categorically unwilling to prescribe puberty blockers or hormone therapy to minors, or to assist a minor with transitioning,” she declared in a brief.

Ok so apparently the first three paragraphs are just wrong. Ffs people, refusing to provide quack gender “treatment” is not refusing to provide care of any kind. This is “courthouse news”?? Do better!

Doctors across the country are grappling with such scenarios as an estimated 1.6 million teenagers and adults in the U.S. identify as transgender — 43% of them under age 25, according to a June 2022 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute.

Identifying as transgender isn’t a medical issue. It’s a thought in the head.

U.S. Circuit Judge Catharina Haynes was candid with the plaintiffs’ attorney, Jonathan Mitchell. “I don’t even understand why they brought this case,” she told him.

Haynes, a George W. Bush appointee, underscored that both Hurly and Neese see transgender patients. So, she observed, it is not like they are saying “I can’t help you because you are transgender.” 

Exactly, and that should have been made clear up front.

It’s a very bizarre (and of course destructive) situation, that doctors are being forced to provide harmful quack “treatment” to people who think they’re in the wrong body.

Can people really not figure this out by themselves?

National police guidance allowing transgender officers to strip search people of the opposite biological sex has been temporarily withdrawn after the Government raised concerns about women’s safety.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council told The Telegraph that it was conducting a “thorough” review of its guidance on searches conducted by transgender officers. “In the meantime, forces have been advised to revert to their own policies on strip searches,” the body said.

The review came after Chris Philp, the policing minister, said transgender officers should be stopped from conducting strip searches on suspects of the opposite sex unless they have changed their legal gender.

Hah? What does changing their legal gender have to do with anything? It’s not going to stop men abusing the women they strip search, is it. “Changing legal gender” isn’t magic. If there were such a thing as changing one’s legal species, it wouldn’t be magic, and it wouldn’t change a human into a manatee.

This weekend, three prominent campaign groups wrote to Mr Philp praising the Government’s decision to ask the National Police Chiefs Council to “look again” at guidance but insisting that obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC) should not qualify a trans woman police officer to strip search a female detainee.

My point exactly.

How do the police of all people manage to be so clueless about this? Unless of course the answer is just they’re not clueless, they’re just mostly men, and they don’t give a shit.

The letter, signed by leaders of the Sex Matters, the Women’s Rights Network, and Fair Play for Women groups, stated: “We were pleased to hear you confirm to the Home Affairs Select Committee this week that the government does not support the policy of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) which allows male officers who identify as women to undertake searches, including strip and intimate searches, of detainees of the opposite sex.”

But they added: “We do not agree with your statement to the Home Affairs Select Committee that if a police officer has a gender-recognition certificate (GRC) they must be allowed to search detainees of the opposite sex. As you recognise, it is likely to be humiliating and frightening for a woman to be searched by a male officer. It is no different if that officer has a certificate.”

How could it be? It’s so churchy – but look, it’s written down, it’s on paper – obviously it’s true!

Addressing the Commons home affairs committee on Wednesday, Mr Philp told MPs: “The Pace [Police and Criminal Evidence Act] codes that govern stop and search and strip search in particular are very clear that those should be conducted by someone of the same sex. I am also very clear that, for reasons particularly of women’s safety, that means someone of the same born biological sex or in possession of a formal court authorised gender recognition certificate.

Which is magic! Because it’s formal! And court! And authorised! And a certficate! That’s four things, and four is enough to change reality!