Trump cancels himself.

Note that that’s all one sentence – one long, tangled, inelegant, confusing, direction-changing, clumsy sentence. Man woman person camera tv.

Investigating:

Officials in the US state of Georgia are investigating online threats made against members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump on Monday. Personal information, including the addresses and photos of the jurors, were shared on right-wing platforms. Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said it was aware of the threats, and was trying to track down those behind them.

The names of the jurors were published in the indictment, a routine practice in Georgia. But after their identities emerged in that document, supporters of former President Trump seemingly compiled further information available online and posted photographs and addresses to forums, including the social media site Telegram…

Officials said that along with jurors’ personal information, threats against them were also shared. Police say the threats could amount to jury intimidation.

Ya think?

More on the Yellowknife evacuations:

This is Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 265 in the Northwest Territories. Experts say climate change has exacerbated the wildfire problem.

Drought has been a contributing factor to the number and intensity of this year’s fires, officials say, with high temperatures exacerbating the situation. Much of Canada has seen abnormally dry conditions.

Shane Thompson, the territorial environment minister, said the evacuation order had been issued late Wednesday to give people time to get out before the weather turned bad.

“The urgency is, fire changes drastically … the conditions are in our favor right now, but that will change on Saturday,” he told the CBC.

In total, about 65% of the Territories population of 46,000 people would be evacuated, he said.

There’s only one two-lane road out of Yellowknife to Alberta.

So far about 134,000 square km (52,000 square miles) of land in Canada have been scorched, more than six times a 10-year average. Nearly 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate at some point this season.

“The territories have never seen anything like this before in terms of wildfire … it’s an unimaginable situation for so many,” Mike Westwick, the territories’ fire information officer, told the CBC.

See…we were thinking this would happen to future people, who don’t matter, because they don’t exist [yet].

Oh shut up bro.

There’s no such thing as “cis” female pals, much less feminist ones. Women are in no need of a prefix or adjective to indicate that we are women, because the word “women” already does that. “Cis” is superfluous. It’s there to trick us into thinking there are two kinds of women, the female kind and the male kind. There aren’t. There is only the one.

It’s perfectly possible to “support trans people” without insisting that men can be women.

If empathy is a good thing why not have some for women? There are a hell of a lot more women than there are men who call themselves women, so why all the exaggerated concern for a few confused men at the expense of billions of women?

Farking hell.

The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC isn’t naming the website for obvious reasons.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. District Attorney Fani Willis faced racist threats ahead of the return of the indictment, and additional security measures were put in place, with some employees being allowed to work from home.

The grand jurors’ purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It’s becoming all too commonplace to see everyday citizens performing necessary functions for our democracy being targeted with violent threats by Trump-supporting extremists,” Jones said. “The lack of political leadership on the right to denounce these threats — which serve to inspire real-world political violence — is shameful.”

Not to mention the lack of Trump saying don’t do that…coupled with the abundance of Trump encouraging threats and naming and all the rest of the poisonous brew.

“These jurors have signed their death warrant by falsely indicting President Trump,” a post on a pro-Trump forum read in response to a post including the names of jurors, which was viewed by NBC News.

Welcome to the Mafia.

There are norms, and there are laws. Trump likes to smash both.

The Trump presidency generated an enormous amount of discussion about “norms”—the unwritten rules of American political life that everyone tacitly agrees to and that keep democracy functioning. Many of these norms had been somewhat invisible until Trump began shattering them, by doing things like profiting from his business during his time in office or demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political enemies.

But what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious means by which to punish him, legally speaking, or hold him back. Much of the public learned for the first time that many things they believed had been required by law—such as the expectation that presidential candidates release their tax returns—were essentially just gentlemen’s agreements. Trump’s actions raised this question so frequently that The Washington Post launched a podcast titled, simply, Can He Do That? Often, the Post’s reporters discovered, the answer was “yes.”

I’m definitely part of that public who kept thinking he was breaking at least rules, if not laws, and finding out otherwise.

Among the many norms that have long held up American democracy is the shared belief that political candidates should accept the outcome of a free and fair election. And if, after the 2020 election, Trump had confined his discontent to grousing on Twitter about supposed fraud, that would have violated this norm but, in all likelihood, not have been illegal. Yet according to both Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump’s actions moved from destructively poor sportsmanship to outright illegality when he began actively scheming to hold on to power. “The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” the Smith indictment states.

He may have had a legal right to lie about the election, but I still say he had no moral right to do that.

But Trump “also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”

Sometimes, then, the answer to the question Can he do that? is actually “no,” at least not legally. Consider, for example, Smith’s decision to charge Trump under Title 18, Section 241, of the U.S. Code, a civil-rights statute first passed during Reconstruction to empower the federal government to combat white-supremacist attacks on Black Americans. Courts have since interpreted the law as prohibiting efforts to interfere with both the process of voting and the accurate counting of the vote.

I bet Trump has no idea what Reconstruction was.

State law adds to this landscape, too. Repeatedly throughout his presidency, Trump arguably violated his own oath of office and encouraged others to violate theirs. At the federal level, the oath isn’t judicially enforceable; the president’s adherence to it can’t be investigated by a prosecutor or charged by a grand jury. It is, once again, a reflection of a normative commitment to carrying out the duties of the office in the public interest. Georgia, though, criminalizes the violation of an oath by a “public officer” in the state. And the Fulton County indictment charges Trump with soliciting Georgia officials—whom he pressured to overturn the state’s election results—to violate their oaths.

That Trump has been charged with these crimes doesn’t mean he’ll be convicted. And securing accountability for his wrongdoing is a much larger project than criminal law, whether at the state or federal level, can carry out on its own. After all, Trump will be busy campaigning for the presidency at the same time as prosecutors are hoping to bring these cases to trial—and even following a conviction, voters could still decide to grant him a second term. But the indictments are a signal that the foundation of American democracy rests on more than norms alone. These prosecutors aren’t criminalizing politics. They’re criminalizing, well, actual crimes—ones that Trump and his allies are alleged to have committed.

A bold move.

His what?

Former President Donald Trump’s promised press conference to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton County DA’s Office is now very much in doubt, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

He wants to blather about the indictment in a press conference? Is there any limit to his stupidity?

Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisors have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.

Trump announced the planned press conference with a social media post shortly after he and 18 co-defendants were indicted late Monday in Georgia. He said he would present, “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia.”

Georgia’s Republican governor responded to that with his own social media post declaring, “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law.”

Yes but he won’t be under oath so he’s free to tell any lies he wants and he’s stupid enough to do it. In public.

How we live now:

Yellowknife residents have been ordered to begin evacuating the city immediately as wildfires approach, N.W.T. officials said Wednesday evening.

While the city is not in immediate danger, Environment Minister Shane Thompson said a “phased approach” to evacuating will allow citizens to get out safely by car or by plane.

People most at risk go now, the rest have until noon tomorrow.

“The fire now represents a real threat to the city,” Thompson said at a news conference Wednesday evening, adding it could reach the outskirts of the city by the weekend. The fire was about 17 kilometres from the city on Wednesday, he said.

…

Thompson said Wednesday that the highway from Yellowknife to Alberta is safe to drive. People are being urged to fill up their vehicles before leaving Yellowknife, but he said the Department of Infrastructure will have a tanker full of gas along the route, and tow trucks will also be out in force.

“At Big River [Service Centre], they have informed us they have a lot of gas available and they will have other gas brought in Friday,” said Thompson. Pilot vehicles will also be on the highway to escort evacuees through smoky areas in the fire zone.

“The window of opportunity right now is going to allow us to evacuate everybody safely,” Thompson said, adding, “we need you to do it now,” because the fire threatens both air and road access.

Does that sound terrifying enough yet?

People who cannot leave by road, and residents who are immunocompromised or have other conditions that put them at higher risk, are asked to register for evacuation flights. Air evacuations are scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Thursday. 

Air evacuees are being advised to go to Sir John Franklin High School in Yellowknife, with standard carry-on baggage only, after 10 a.m. Thursday. Pets will be allowed on commercial carriers, but must be crated. On military aircraft, pets should be crated if possible. 

I’m not sure we all fully understood that global warming would be quite this literal.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on WHO snake oil.

A small logical, and ethical, point: The claim that most Western countries are ‘the least racist countries there has (sic) ever been, anywhere’, whether it is true or not (I happen to think it largely true), does not entail that no racism occurs in them, nor that instances of racism should be ignored. And we might remember that the existence of these ‘least racist’ societies has depended upon people struggling to achieve fairness & justice. I wonder on which side certain commentators would have been on fifty, a hundred, or 150 years ago? I wonder also why, say, the Windrush business in the UK, or Republican efforts to suppress the Black vote in many parts of the USA do not interest them. We do not live in a fantasy world, a perfected present where the ill consequences of slavery have somehow been magically expunged. There is a complacency, a refusal to face realities, in the view that we do live in such a fantasy present.

I also think that certain commentators should broaden their acquaintance, not necessarily personally, but at least with what animates the American & British extreme right as well as the self-righteous & Chomskyian left. The complacency and hypocrisy of certain British acquaintances of mine, who suppose that once the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire were ended, that was that and we should congratulate ourselves on our humanity, whereas those dreadful Americans – just look at them! They forget that their slaves were on islands thousands of miles away (out of sight and happily out of mind – so long as the money kept coming in) and did not form a large population within their own shores. They consider it bad taste to be presented with the facts of slavery, what it did for the British economy, and its continuing effects.

I find this debate, if you can call it that, infantile and ridiculous. It consists in reducing things to sentimental ‘woke’ lefties on one side, and complacent fools, virulent racists and the type of people who would no doubt be happy to be on the faculty of Prager University, if it existed, on the other. When a debate is reduced to this level, it becomes a face scowling at itself in a mirror. Why is it so difficult to recognise what happened in history, a history that does not magically stop at some (never specified) point and works in our changing present? Moral cowardice? Complacency? A desire not to be upset in any way?

One may certainly dislike Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ (I do), though its title certainly points to something (a craven distaste for recognising realities), but there are other books that certainly do put their fingers on realities:

Isabel Wilkerson: ‘Caste’

Eric Williamson: Capitalism & Slavery

Sathhnam Sanghara: Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

Vincent Brown: Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Padraic X. Scanlan: How Slavery Built Modern Britain

I recommend them all to those who want to get away from the sterilities of the present debate.

How disgusting.

An Israeli journalist reported being pressured to change seats on an international flight on Tuesday, complaining that she was told by airline staff that any flight delays caused by ultra-Orthodox men attempting to enforce gender segregation would be her fault.

In a tweet, Neria Kraus, a U.S.-based correspondent for Channel 13 News, wrote that she had been asked to move by ultra-Orthodox men and alleged that she received no assistance after she turned to the Delta Air Lines flight crew for help.

Burying the lede. Why wasn’t the important bit in the first paragraph? Male religious fanatics tried to force a woman out of her seat because they think women are too filthy and whorey to sit next to.

In recent years, male ultra-Orthodox passengers on flights to and from Israel have increasingly refused to sit next to women, with travelers reporting clusters of ultra-Orthodox men approaching female passengers prior to take-off and requesting to switch seats.

Because god hates women. Men like that should be banned by the airlines.

There is no problem sitting next to a woman on public transportation according to Jewish law, asserted Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, co-founder of the Orthodox feminist group Chochmat Nashim, complaining that “we in the religious community have allowed this by erasing women. When we erase women’s images, we get used to the idea that women aren’t there, and then we expect women not to be there in person.”

And that women are sinister, and dangerous, and filthy, and harlots, and all the rest of it. If sitting next to a woman is too difficult for men then they should stay home.

Elements of the ultra-Orthodox community have long tried to erase images of women from the public sphere through vandalism and by blurring their faces in news coverage.

Don’t call it a “community.” That’s a hooray word. Call it something not-hooray – sect, cult, gang, mafia.

The latest incident involving Kraus happened only a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “Israel is a free country in which no one will restrict who can use public transportation, and no one will dictate where she or he will sit.”

He was responded to a series of incidents where women were asked to move to the back seats on buses or avoid using public transportation.

The back of the bus – or just get off the bus altogether. Unfuckingbelievable.

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Here is a thought experiment about academia.  Let us imagine that, about 40 years ago, a few academic operators had invented a newish subject called “Critical Chemical Studies”.   The focus of this subject would not be actual chemicals, but rather the language used in writing or talking about  Chemistry:  catalogues of the frequency of words like element, molecule, valence,  bond,  reaction, intermediate, rate, etc. etc.; and then endless gabble about the philosophical implications of the words’ spelling,  font type, sound, pronunciation, association, and usage.

    Before long, journals would be established to publish disquisitions in this vein.  The scholars of Critical Chemical Studies would not need laboratories, beakers, or spectrophotometers, for they would not do experiments; they would not produce things like nanosensors or new kinds of batteries or drug tests.   Instead, they would produce a steady stream of publications about chemical words in their parochial journals, and these publications would refer to each other, thus mimicking in a formal way a behavior of their academic colleagues who did actual Chemistry with chemicals.   Some of the scholars would then extend their logomachy to general propositions; for example the thesis that the lengths of terms like “coordination complex” and “dissociation constant” defined the general structure of the university, of human society, and of the universe.  Conjectures of this kind would be routinely referred to as “Theory”, thus imitating a status like that of the atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gases.   As a result of this mimicry and these “Theory” exercises, scholars of Critical Chem Studies would rise through the ranks into committees which made decisions about employment, departments, and curriculum in academe;  and in time they would also ascend into administration.    

   They might next get it into their heads that the University should endorse specific political doctrines, particularly ones focussed on certain favorite words— such as “Dilution”, “Equilibrium”, and “Ionization“.    These magic words and their acronym, repeated in innumerable notices, memoranda, statements, and edicts, would establish a new, conventional monoculture in the groves of academe.   A  new bureaucracy would be set up to make sure that everyone in the groves demonstrated fealty to the three magic words in all their teaching, research, writing, correspondence, reading, recreation, thoughts, and dreams—or at least said they did. 

Talk about an own goal.

FGM he says? FGM??????? GM is what trans ideology DOES to its believers. Trans ideology does “espouse” gender mutilation, along with breast removal and puberty blocking and related horrors. Of all things to choose to illustrate “You wouldn’t talk that way about _____” he chose genital mutilation. Think, man, think.

Interesting. Prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers in an opinion piece at CNN:

RICO also carries sentencing benefits. A conviction under Georgia’s RICO law would carry a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years, and most of the other 40 charges in the indictment likewise involve mandatory minimum sentences of one year.

None of the other charged cases include a mandatory minimum, upping the stakes for a Georgia conviction not only for Trump, but his co-conspirators, who will be deciding in the coming weeks and months whether they want to take a plea deal that might help them avoid this consequence by allowing them to plead to a count without mandatory minimum penalties.

Here’s hoping they all abandon him, every last one of them.

In another part of the Fringe…

So there! Nyah!

BBC insults women with a headline:

Celebrity MasterChef: Cheryl Hole on why LGBTQ+ representation is important

So the BBC is cool with calling women “holes”?

Drag artist Cheryl Hole said LGBTQ+ representation on shows like Celebrity MasterChef is important with “the community under attack”.

She appears in the penultimate week of heats of the celebrity cooking show.

Is “Hole” a drag artist or a she? He can’t be both, now can he – only males can do female drag, because that’s what drag means.

Why on earth does the WHO do this?

[Ignore the first tweet.]

That crap isn’t a “first stop for health and well-being,” it’s just woo.

Joan Smith asks what Humza Yousaf thinks he’s doing talking about toxic masculinity.

“Men cannot be passive bystanders when it is our actions that are causing such pain, suffering and misery,” he declares.

The pain of being punched in the face for supporting women’s rights, for instance? The suffering that comes from being locked up in a women’s prison with a convicted rapist? Or the misery of being forced to refer to the man who attacked you as “she” in court because he “identifies” as a woman?

Noooo. Women who don’t comply with the orders issued by men who claim to be women don’t count as women or as having pain.

Of course not. Giving a woman a black eye results in nothing worse than a caution in Scotland, it seems, if the woman in question happens to be a “terf”. And Scottish prisons policy allowed even violent male offenders to demand transfers to the female estate until January this year, when a disbelieving public was confronted with photographs of “Isla Bryson” arriving at court in a blond wig.

…

“As men, we must listen,” Yousaf says in the Guardian, but there is no evidence that he (or indeed the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar) is listening to women who offer a compelling critique of the reckless Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The most minimal safeguards were voted down during the Bill’s passage at Holyrood, with supporters flatly denying that predators would ever take advantage of the legislation to get access to vulnerable women. Or “identify” as women in order to serve their sentence in a less scary environment. 

…

Politicians don’t get to pick and choose which types of misogyny, and which aspects of male violence, are beyond the pale. Trans activism has created a tidal wave of woman-hating — and the targets are the very campaigners for women’s safety that Yousaf should be listening to.

Should be but never will be.

A shocking headline:

Seven police interviewed, station raided over ‘false’ non-binary claims

Victoria Police officers have searched the force’s Frankston station and interviewed several officers accused of claiming to be non-binary to fraudulently claim more money for civilian clothing allowances.

You mean claiming to be non-binary when they’re not actually non-binary?

So…how can they tell? What’s the difference? What were they searching for when they searched the station? Binary fingerprints? Binary clothes, binary badges, binary socks? What? What exactly is there to search for? What is the difference between real non-binary and fake non-binary? What happened to “people are who they say they are”?

Chief Commissioner Shane Patton announced a probe into the issue in July, after reports that some male officers had been rorting a discrepancy in the force’s clothing allowance by identifying as non-binary.

But if they identify as non-binary they are non-binary. Does the Chief Commissioner not know that? It’s the rule, and it’s absolute.

Under the scheme, female officers are entitled to claim about $1300 more than male colleagues.

I suppose that’s because clothing manufacturers systematically price women’s clothing higher than men’s even when the clothing in question is identical.

Professional Standards Command detectives arrested a member of the Frankston crime investigation unit on Monday, according to a police source not authorised to speak publicly.

But people are who they say they are!!!

Patton announced the investigation after the force noted a sharp increase in the number of officers identifying as gender-neutral over the previous year.

The claims were first raised by the @discernibleofficial Instagram page in June, which posted: “We have unconfirmed ­reports from inside Victoria Police that management is pulling their hair out after a majority of a CIU (crime investigation unit) in southern region changed their profile in the HR system to be ‘gender neutral’.”

Because they are gender neutral. Who is this “management” who dares to question it?

Patton then told all members in a statement that “conduct of this sort, if validated, is not acceptable and falls far short of the standards I expect from Victoria Police members and standards of behaviour outlined in our code of conduct and Victoria Police values”.

He said the option to self-describe had been introduced about three years ago as an act of good faith to support gender diverse employees.

What does “gender diverse” mean? How, exactly, does anyone know which is real and which is fake?

“This behaviour has had a significant impact on our gender diverse employees and our reputation among the Victorian LGBTIQ+ community. 

Oh no!! Oh no oh no oh no!!!!!!!

How’s their reputation doing among the Victorian women community? Have they ever sought to find out?

Officers wanting to claim the allowance, which is paid fortnightly, must now make a sworn statement if intending to self-describe as non-binary.

And the brass will know when they’re lying about it by……………………….?

The Herald on Leith Arches and its smug abrupt rude cancellation of a scheduled event because Leith Arches doesn’t like its “views.”

An Edinburgh Fringe venue has axed a show involving Father Ted creator Graham Linehan following a number of complaints.

“You can’t have a show involving Graham Linehan, he knows which people are women!!!”

The writer was the “surprise famous cancelled comedian” at the night being promoted by Comedy Unleashed at the Leith Arches.

He was due to appear in the show alongside Bruce Devlin, Mary Bourke, Dominic Frisby and Alistair Williams on Thursday night.

Today is Tuesday. How charming of Leith Arches to do this with all of two days’ notice. What exquisite manners.

Taking to X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr Linehan pointed to the legal difficulty the Stand Comedy found itself in after cancelling an in-conversation event with SNP MP Joanna Cherry.

Earlier this year, the club said a number of “key operational staff, including venue management and box office personnel” were unwilling to work on the event because of “concerns about Ms Cherry’s views.”

However, after the politician obtained legal opinion from leading human rights advocate, Aidan O’Neill KC, The Stand backed down and admitted that the cancellation constituted “unlawful discrimination”.

And did the same thing all over again to someone else. Clever.