Musk learns that it’s illegal to bribe voters in the US.

After receiving a warning from the Justice Department, Elon Musk has stopped his $1 million giveaway to swing voters from his super PAC.

The tech CEO pledged Saturday to give away the hefty sum each day to one registered voter in a battleground state who signed America PAC’s pro–First and Second Amendment pledge. Every day since then, a winner has been announced: three Pennsylvania voters and one North Carolina voter.

Trouble is it’s a federal crime to pay people to register to vote.

Then the DOJ sent a warning letter to America PAC Wednesday, and there hasn’t been a giveaway since. Musk has also been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject.

Fuck around and find out Lonners.

The way to persuade women to embrace men who say they are women is to…er…threaten them. Yeah that’s it, threaten them and grin happily while doing it. And be a state senator.

Originally a comment by Rob on Quick, hide the data.

There are days when I just wish I could tell someone to hand over their science card. There’s always been bad science (especially in medicine and social ‘sciences’ frankly), but the neoliberal trashing of universities, research institutions, and education to make nearly all science demonstrate a commercial applicability or to have regular output has been especially corrosive. Now, if you don’t publish on the regular you’re toast. If you publish negative or ambiguous results, you’re toast. If your work is interesting, but doesn’t have a commercial application, you’re toast.

It’s resulted in not just fraudulent work, but a massive rise in sloppy, poorly thought out work designed to deliver quickly produced small papers that appear to show a good or promising result, but require further study. It’s about career continuity, not quality of thought. A side effect is that there is far less fundamental and pure exploratory research being done in pretty much every field of endeavour. That’s a shame because many of our greatest leaps forward have been built on such seemingly abstract work, and then sometimes years or decades later. Knowledge does have an intrinsic value.

Eliza Mondegreen at Unherd on the hiding of the research:

In today’s New York Times, reporter Azeen Ghorayshi investigated a leading gender clinician’s decision not to publish the results of a study into the effects of puberty suppression on the mental health of patients with gender dysphoria.

At the outset of the National Institutes of Health study, principal investigator Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the most vocal advocates of “gender-affirming care” in the United States, expected that young patients put on puberty blockers would experience “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality” and “increased body esteem and quality of life over time”. But that’s apparently not what the evidence showed. Rather than revise her hypotheses and share her findings with the scientific community, Olson-Kennedy and her team decided to sit on the results. Olson-Kennedy told Ghorayshi that she worried the study’s disappointing findings would be “weaponised” by critics.

That is, critics would point out that the evidence fails to show that blockers relieve suffering and that the reason for using them was to relieve suffering so maybe just maybe doctors should stop prescribing them. That kind of “weaponising.”

Blocking puberty is a very drastic thing to do. The reason for doing it has always been about helping young teenagers cope with getting older and dealing with changes to their bodies. If it turns out that the evidence shows it doesn’t really help with that, what is the point of continuing to do it?

Researchers and clinicians have decided — in advance — that “gender-affirming care” is safe and effective, no matter what the evidence shows. At the European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Killarney, Ireland, in April 2023, researchers presented an array of discouraging findings, bracketed by statements like “as you all know, there are improved mental health outcomes following puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” — even when the research being presented suggested the opposite.

…

Sometimes, research findings get a glossy makeover before being presented to the public, like a 2022 study that reporter Jesse Singal summarised thus: “Researchers found puberty blockers and hormones didn’t improve trans’ kids mental health at their clinic. Then they published a study claiming the opposite.”

Like Macbeth, they’re in so far they can’t go back.

Much discussion today of the NYTimes article about puberty blockers and the possibility that they…er…don’t achieve the desired goal.

The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

Brilliant, isn’t it? The findings might motivate people to point out that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress, and we can’t have that, can we. Oh god no, we have to keep that secret, because…er…

…er…

…er…because transphobia! Yeah, that’s it! It’s all the fault of those pesky transphobes!

Keep taking the blockers, kids.

The Heritage people get to decide who hears what.

You could hear the spittle fly as the Heritage Foundation shouted out its latest intellectual assault on the Naval Academy. All over Ruth Ben-Ghiat and a lecture the midshipmen likely will never hear.

She’s a New York University historian with a book on what happens to the military when authoritarians take power. She shows up as a commentator on MSNBC, connecting former President Donald Trump to some of the dictators she’s studied.

The academy’s history department invited her to speak about her work at the annual Bancroft Memorial Lecture. Then she was disinvited. Her politics were the problem, not her lecture.

…

Deep within Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 925-page roadmap for the next Republican president, its authors say they want the service academies scrubbed of anything and anyone deemed insufficiently pure of thought — exactly what they did to Ben-Ghiat.

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination,” they wrote in the section on the U.S. military, “eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.”

I thought the Heritage Foundation aspired to a certain intellectual gravitas, but I guess not if it slaps a meaningless “Marxist” on any content it doesn’t like or even predicts it won’t like if it ever gets around to reading or hearing it.

Ben-Ghiat uses her newsletter to connect Trump’s actions to the autocrats she studies. The day she announced the lecture, her essay was, “The Real Reason Donald Trump Insults the U.S. Military.”

She explored the Trump campaign’s confrontation at Arlington National Cemetery, where a campaign staffer shoved a cemetery employee who tried to stop a political video shoot, and put his history of derogatory comments about the military in context.

“This allowed the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist, Rep. [Keith] Self and others to extrapolate, incorrectly, that the Bancroft Lecture would be an occasion to attack Mr. Trump,” the historian wrote.

And that it’s somehow “Marxist” to discuss Arlington Cemetery and the military codes and ethics that govern behavior there.

“Families whose sons and daughters are attending this august military institution should be outraged by the academy’s partisan indoctrination of future officers of the U.S. Navy,” Heritage Foundation mouthpieces Hans von Spakovsky and Cully Stimson wrote.

Foundation “researchers” Matthew Lee and Wilson Beaver made the connection a month after Ben-Ghiat’s announcement and simply made up the rest, assuming she planned to attack Trump.

“One can debate the hallucinations that apparently inhabit the mind of this so-called historian from New York University,” Spakovsky and Stimson wrote, “but the more important point is that her venomous, partisan attack on a political candidate involves the Naval Academy, which is sponsoring her lecture in direct violation of Defense Department rules.”

No doubt that’s because the Naval Academy is run by Marxists.

Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis ends membership of Rape Crisis Scotland

“This is not a decision we have taken lightly. We have done so to hold fast to our principles and to best serve the women and girls that need our support.

“We were created to provide support by and for women. We believe, and women have consistently told us, that single-sex services delivered by an all-female workforce are crucial to help them heal from sexual trauma. This approach remains our priority but is at odds with RCS’.”

Glasgow is the biggest city in Scotland and the 5th biggest in the UK.

Disgusting and creepy beyond your wildest dreams.

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the Football Association, has said he is “deeply concerned” that the governing body he used to lead is “not providing women and girls with fair, safe sport” because of its policy of allowing biological males to compete in the female category.

In a sharply critical letter to Debbie Hewitt and Mark Bullingham, the FA’s chair and chief executive respectively, Lord Triesman, who served as the organisation’s first independent chairman from 2008 to 2010, argues that his successors’ approach is not only compromising the integrity of women’s football but creating an atmosphere where many people feel frightened even to speak up about their concerns.

And all for the sake of men who want to trample women. Funny how that works – we don’t see the newspapers and political figures and entertainers lining up to cheer on white people who want to trample brown people, or rich people who want to trample poor people, or bosses who want to trample workers, but somehow when it’s about women the power imbalance no longer matters. Step on those bitches, guys, they deserve it.

The FA has been under significant pressure to change its stance since last December, when it received a letter from more than 70 MPs and members of the House of Lords – including Lord Triesman – demanding urgent action to protect women from the injury risks of playing against biological males. After Telegraph Sport’s revelation that at least four women’s teams in the Sheffield and Hallamshire League were refusing to play against Francesca Needham, a trans-identifying male accused of causing a season-ending injury to an opponent, MPs ordered the FA to “show leadership” and to abandon its position of allowing those born male to register to play in their “affirmed gender”.

As if “affirmed gender” means anything. We don’t have our own “affirmed species” so why should we have an affirmed “gender” aka sex?

The FA said that it was happy to discuss its policy with Lord Triesman. It has consistently defended its position, saying in a statement earlier this year: “Our current transgender policy has been in place for 10 years, and it has helped to enable a very small population of transgender women to enjoy playing football safely in the grass-roots game. This is a complex and constantly evolving area, and our review remains ongoing as we monitor and support the practical application of our policy.”

Oh fuck off. It’s not complex. Men are not women. Calling it a “very small population” doesn’t make it ok, and adding dishonest blather about “enjoying playing safely” also doesn’t make it ok. Men can’t play safely against women, and the fact that they enjoy endangering women is not a reason to let them do it.

A press release from Gov.UK:

Poor governance at Mermaids amounted to mismanagement, inquiry reveals

By “poor” they of course mean bad, not financially lacking. The word “bad” must always be euphemized, lest it frighten the horses.

In September 2022, the Commission opened a regulatory compliance case into the charity after complaints were made by the public, and highlighted in the media. Concerns were raised around chest-binding services and online support offered to young people, and alleged ties between the charity’s now former CEO and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. 

There follows a torrent of bureaucratic bafflegab that doesn’t tell us anything. This is the most informative bit:

The inquiry also found the purpose of the information about puberty blockers published on the charity’s website was unclear. Charities are by law required to ensure that information provided on an education basis is accurate, evidence-based and balanced. The inquiry provided statutory advice on this matter, which the trustees have since acted on. 

The inquiry found that the charity had a detailed policy relating to its chest binder service and demonstrated compliance with this policy, though in a small number of cases could have been more transparent with service users when declining requests. Mermaids terminated the service in October 2023. However, the Commission has issued statutory advice to the charity requiring that, should it ever resume this service, its future policy and controls should reflect the recent Cass Review, or any future NHS guidelines on parental involvement. 

Chest binding is not a “service” at all.

JKR provides some useful commentary:

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Draw your weapons.

It’s the “two kinds of experts” problem: science-minded people, polite and overcautious to a fault with their criticism, try to rationalize puberty blockers like they’re antidepressants — they only discuss them in terms of potential mood improvement.

That’s because it’s not scientifically possible to evaluate the religious belief that our sexed bodies are profane while our “gender identities” are sacred.

The cultists who’ve taken over the gender clinics don’t even care if puberty blockers have a negative impact on the children’s mood. They don’t see puberty blockers as antidepressants, they see them the way they see all “gender medicine”: as a mandatory rite of passage to bond new recruits into the group.

The media has to stop playing games and being coy about the facts: they need to report that sex is real and binary and that “transgender identity” is a non-natural kind — a social construct that emerged from within a religious subcultural group. Journalists need to ask every single “expert” they consult about “gender” whether they believe in the facts of biology or not, in order to separate out the gender cultists from the fact-based experts in this field, who have so far been far too reticent to call out the pseudoscientific metaphysical beliefs that plague the trans movement.

Ah yes…if you don’t like the findings, bury them.

Oyyy.

Uh, yeah, because that’s the whole point.

“Prominent torturer Fiendy Painmaker has refused to publish data from a study of torture, fearing that the results will be weaponized by critics of torture.”

Listen up, Johanna Olsen-Kennedy: the whole point of medical studies (as of course you know perfectly well) is to determine whether they are beneficial or the other thing. If a study finds out that X is the other thing, aka harmful, it’s not your job to hide the data on the grounds that critics of X will cite it in order to prevent further harm. You’re not supposed to want to keep perpetrating harm.

Rather late in the day, we’re having the “Trump is a genuine fascist” conversation.

(Well of course he is. It’s not as if there’s some high bar to being one. It doesn’t require erudition or physical fitness. He’s every inch a fascist, and it’s all right there on the surface where we can see it.)

John Kelly, a former four-star Marine general and former chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, hammered his old boss in a stunningly public fashion on Tuesday — just two weeks before Election Day.

Kelly, who had previously refrained from discussing his time in the White House so openly, said in expansive interviews with The New York Times that Trump’s discussion of using the military against the “enemy within” — who, in Trump’s words, included Democratic foes — pushed him to come forward. His comments come after several other prominent former administration officials, including those with military experience, expressed concern about Trump’s fitness for office.

“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Kelly said.

The former general held nothing back, arguing that Trump could fit the bill of a “fascist.”

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he told The Times.

Quite. What’s in there that doesn’t fit Trump?

Mark Milley, a retired Army general and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is a “fascist to the core.”

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” he said.

And of course not just this one. If he gets in again he’ll be a danger to many other countries. Ukraine is obviously high on the list.

Another brave courageous indomitable fierce proud man invades women’s sport.

Hundreds of female golfers have complained about the participation of Scottish-born transgender player Hailey Davidson in the penultimate stage of the LPGA Tour’s qualifying competition.

Gets it wrong the way they always do. If even the Telegraph refuses to get it right what hope is there?

The issue is not that Davidson is “transgender”; the issue is that he’s a MAN.

Davidson, a 31-year-old professional originally from Ayrshire but now based in Florida, has said that the intention is “to make Scotland proud” by earning a card on the women’s premier circuit.

Second para and still doing it. “the intention” ffs – HIS intention.

Newspapers and tv and radio news need to make it clear from the very first words that the subject is a man shoving his way into a women’s sport. They need to do the opposite of carefully hiding that fact until late in the story.

But after progressing through August’s first stage of Q-School , the former player on a US male college team was accused of acting “unfairly”…

Yet again. “the former player on a US male college team” – talk about circumlocution!

He’s a male. News outlets should be saying that up front.

…with Amy Olson, a two-time major runner-up, railing against Davidson being allowed to compete. “These women have worked too hard and too long to have to stand by and watch a man compete for and take their spot,” she said.

Finally the Telegraph allows it to be said, by someone else. It does however compensate by sneering at the woman with “railing.”

It has now emerged that this view was held by many in the field, with the International Women’s Forum revealing that 275 signed a letter sent to the LPGA, the US Golf Association and the International Golf Federation, urging Davidson’s removal from the tournament.

But the Telegraph is too chickenshit to say it up front.

“We all know there can be no equal athletic opportunity for women without a separate female golf category,” the letter, as reported by sports website OutKick, read. “Yet, the Ladies Professional Golf Association continues to propagate a policy that allows male athletes to qualify, compete and win in women’s golf, even as several national and international governing bodies of sport and state legislatures increasingly reject these unjust and inequitable policies that harm female athletes.

“LPGA policy does not explicitly state eligibility based on sex. It is essential for the integrity and fairness of women’s golf to have a clear and consistent participation policy in place based on a player’s immutable sex. There are differences between the sexes – female and male – that specifically affect our sport of golf.”

The letter goes into detail on the differences. Davidson responds with sympathy and understanding.

Joke.

Davidson, who almost qualified for the US Women’s Open in June, has remained unapologetic and instead lashed out at the detractors. “I will never understand athletes who blame a transgender competitor on their own athletic failures,” Davidson wrote on Instagram. “If you don’t take accountability for your failures then you will never actually be good enough to make it.”

How absolutely fucking breathtaking is that?

Pride versus Pride With Mission Creep.

But there is no “LGBTIQ+ community.” There’s only forced teaming of the LGB with the TIQ+.

So much lying in one little article…

Weightlifter Laurel Hubbard’s dogged fight to keep her name out of the media

His. His name. He’s a man.

Olympic weightlifting hopeful Laurel Hubbard has failed in a nine-month battle to keep her name secret over a driving charge.

Hubbard, 41, a transgender athlete who is trying to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, was charged with careless driving causing injury after her vehicle fishtailed on a sharp bend near Queenstown on October 24, 2018.

Her car hit a vehicle carrying an Australian couple in their 60s. The male driver spent nearly two weeks in Dunedin Hospital and needed major spinal surgery on returning to Australia.

His. His name, his vehicle, his car. He was driving his car too fast so he crashed into another car, causing a painful serious injury to another person.

Hubbard, who is the daughter of cereal magnate Dick Hubbard, pleaded guilty in January this year and offered to pay the couple about $13,000 including $1000 for emotional harm. 

A trifling amount.

The case could not be reported because Hubbard, represented by lawyer Fiona Guy Kidd QC, successfully applied for suppression orders at each of the five stages of the court process.

Why should he be able to do that?

The High Court in Invercargill this week overturned the suppression orders after an appeal by Stuff.

At sentencing on February 4, Judge Bernadette Farnan discharged Hubbard without conviction noting she was a first offender, the low level nature of the accident, Hubbard’s remorse and the reparation payment. She disqualified her from driving for a month (the normal disqualification is six months) and ordered her to pay about $13,000 to the Australian couple. 

What “low level nature”??? Major spinal surgery, two weeks in the hospital? How is that low level? Dangerous driving isn’t a joke.

Are some more equal than others?

You might as well unpack your suitcase for that trip to Mars.

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

OK, so you still want to talk about Mars. Fine. Let’s imagine that Mars’s lack of a magnetic field somehow is not an issue. Would you like to try to simulate what life on Mars would be like? Step one is to clear out your freezer. Step two is to lock yourself inside of it. (You can bring your phone, if you like!) When you get desperately hungry, your loved ones on the outside may deliver some food to you no sooner than nine months after you ask for it. This nine-month wait will also apply when you start banging on the inside of the freezer, begging to be let out.

Congratulations: You have now simulated—you have now died, horribly, within a day or two, while simulating—what life on Mars might be like, once you solve the problem of it not having even one gasp worth of breathable air, anywhere on the entire planet. We will never live on Mars.

But surely we can pack enough breathable air in that suitcase? Can’t we?

Some people have the idea that making Mars’s atmosphere breathable is as simple as introducing some green plants to it: They will eat up sunlight and produce oxygen, and then people can breathe it. That is uhhhhh the circle of life (?) or whatever. They call this idea “terraforming.”

At this point in our discussion I must acquaint you with two dear friends of mine. Their names are The South Pole, and The Summit Of Mount Everest.

The South Pole is around 2,800 meters above sea level, and like everywhere else on Earth around 44 million miles closer to the sun than any point on Mars. It sits deep down inside the nutritious atmosphere of a planet teeming with native life. Compared to the very most hospitable place on Mars it is an unimaginably fertile Eden. Here is a list of the plant-life that grows there: Nothing. Here is a list of all the animals that reproduce there: None.

Well…maybe they just haven’t tried hard enough. The people who go to Mars will try harder.

Musk is bribing voters.

A group of 11 former Republican officials have become the latest public figures to raise questions over the legality of cash incentives being offered by tech billionaire Elon Musk to voters before the US election on 5 November.

Mr Musk’s campaign group America PAC, which was set up to support Donald Trump in the presidential contest, calls on registered voters in seven swing states to sign a petition. Each day until the election, one signatory is selected at random and awarded a million-dollar prize.

But legal experts and several Democrats have suggested the giveaway may break American law by offering money for an act that requires someone to be signed up as a voter.

And besides Musk doesn’t even go to this school.

The deck, of course, is stacked.

With former President Donald Trump on the precipice of possibly becoming president again, let’s recall that he’s on the 2024 ballot thanks partly to the Supreme Court. 

I’m not talking about the ruling granting him broad criminal immunity. Though the Roberts Court’s handling of that appeal helped Trump push off a trial in the federal election interference case — possibly forever, if he wins the election and deploys his reacquired presidential power to crush it.

I’m talking about another Jan. 6-related appeal from the last Supreme Court term, one that more directly positioned the Republican to take office again: Trump v. Anderson.

It was there that the justices reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to keep the former president from the ballot. The case was technically about one state during the primary process, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling effectively scrapped nationwide efforts to enforce the constitutional provision barring oath-breaking insurrectionists from office.

Which, I have to say, I’ve never been able to understand and probably never will. He broke his oath and he urged the volunteer insurrectionists to insurrect on his behalf. You’d think that would be enough.

As a reminder, here’s what that post-Civil War provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, says: 

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Aid and comfort. He gave lots of aid and comfort. He urged them on. The only reason he didn’t rush over there to join them is because the Secret Service wouldn’t let him.