Another Sokal hoax. Has to be. Right? Right?

Wait there’s more.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on A uniquely favorable jurist.

This NYT article reports on the clerk’s explanation for how Cannon was assigned to this case. In a nutshell:

Judge Cannon’s handling of the prior case was irrelevant. The “low number” rule Rob reports Ken White mentioning was not in play here.

Her assignment was “random” in the sense that judicial assignments usually are — that is, strictly speaking, although there were 10 judges who were eligible to receive the case, it was not a 1 in 10 chance, because that’s weighted by how full each judge’s caseload is, and 3 of those 10 judges are senior judges (semi-retired) who have smaller dockets and are at or close to their limit.

There is nobody, in the clerk’s office or otherwise, who sits down and says “hmm, who do I think should get this case?”

Short of trying to file in a different division, or a different district entirely, there wasn’t anything DOJ could have done to avoid the assignment — and filing somewhere else might have led to venue challenges, motions to transfer, etc.

Trump was able to get Cannon assigned to his civil case because he filed it in the division where she was one of only two judges. Even then it was not a sure thing, as another civil case he filed (against Clinton et al) got assigned to Judge Middlebrooks instead. It’s not like that division in Texas where the abortion pill case got filed because there’s exactly one judge and it was a virtual guarantee they’d get their anti-choice hack assigned.

Moral monster Willoughby

Immediately followed by ridiculous fake dressup Willoughby

Festive interlude.

Excuse me?

The two halves of the tweet disagree with each other. The first two curt bossy sentences just issue an order, without of course any authority to do so. The rest of the tweet pretends to give reasons for the curt order.

First of all, it’s just gibberish. Bits of vocabulary aren’t “required.” What are they gonna do, arrest us? Give us an F? Sue us? Carve us up? They’re not in a position to tell us what words to use or else.

Second, pronouns, like verbs and nouns and prepositions and the like, are neither preferred nor required, they’re just part of language. Use them correctly if you want to be understood, use them creatively if you don’t care about being understood. Next question?

But the intent behind the absurd claim is less trivial. The intent is to bully us into submitting to a new and stupid ideology that says men can become women by saying they are women.

No.

The Johns Hopkins definition of lesbian is doing the rounds.

I really think Johns Hopkins ought to explain, as well as delete and start over. I really think anyone in a position to promulgate the claim that women are non-men while men get to go on being men ought to explain the reasons for spreading such a blatant shameless in your face insult to women.

Humanists UK are going with “men are women if they say they are.” Women are going with “Goodbye Humanists UK.”

Sex Matters explains.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate takes a very grim view of the Judge Cannon situation.

Cannon’s total lack of principle, combined with her evident incapacity to experience shame, renders her a uniquely favorable jurist for the former president. Indeed, if she maintains her grasp on this case, it is nearly impossible to envision Smith securing a conviction in her courtroom.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, gained notoriety while presiding over Trump’s attempt to halt the classified documents investigation in 2022. Following the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lawyers filed a complaint alleging that the search was illegitimate and unconstitutional; they demanded the appointment of a special master and, in the meantime, a freeze on prosecutors’ review of seized materials. In a calculated act of judge shopping, the case was assigned to Cannon…

Assigned by whom? Who was doing the shopping?

Trump’s lawsuit amounted to pure gibberish, a glorified Truth Social post that alleged a Democratic conspiracy. So Cannon promptly encouraged his lawyers to rewrite the suit so it sounded marginally less asinine. She then issued an order prohibiting the government from “further review and use of any of the materials” seized from Mar-a-Lago “for criminal investigative purposes.”

In other words she acted like a consigliere for Trump.

This command marked the first time in the history of the republic that a federal judge had claimed the power to stop a pre-indictment criminal investigation into a suspect. Cannon’s overreach provoked genuine shock in legal circles and fear in the intelligence community, as it effectively blocked officials from assessing the seized documents for national security risks. (Her order reflected a profound misunderstanding of national security damage assessments.) A right-leaning panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit—which included two Trump appointees—soon stayed this portion of her decision, highlighting its “chilling” effect on fundamental “national-security duties.”

You’d think that all by itself would be more than enough to make her the last person on the planet who should be the judge on Trump’s indictment and yet here we are. I still don’t understand why. Do they write names on bits of paper and put them in a hat and ask a passing intern to pull one out and that’s the judge? Which works because all the names on all the bits of paper are Cannon? I don’t understand why this is being allowed to happen. It’s like waking up on a bus racing down a mountain road with no guard rails and finding the driver is asleep.

But Cannon wasn’t finished. She agreed to Trump’s request for a special master and appointed Raymond Dearie, a well-respected federal judge. After Dearie tried to bring some discipline to the case, though, Cannon immediately ran interference for Trump. She overruled an order that would’ve required the former president to either disavow or stand by previous claims that FBI agents planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago. She spared him the burden of lodging specific objections to the review of individual documents, which would have revealed the bogus nature of his claim to executive privilege. And she extended deadlines to help Trump drag out the special master’s review for as long as possible.

She might as well be Ivanka.

The madness finally ended when a panel of the 11^th Circuit—made up of two Trump appointees and the ultraconservative William Pryor—ruled that Cannon had no authority to hear Trump’s lawsuit in the first place, rendering every one of her orders null and void. It was one of the most humiliating appellate smackdowns in recent history, a total demolition of literally every action that Cannon had taken from the outset of the case. The 11^th Circuit accused Cannon of attempting “a radical reordering of our caselaw” that violated “bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.” And it directed her to relinquish control over the case.

So why why why is she on this case? When she’s literally the worst possible person on the planet for the job?

Smith, for his part, has the option of requesting a different judge; 11^th Circuit precedent allows reassignment when the presiding judge appears unable to put “previous views and findings aside.” (This is a nice way of saying that they’re in the tank for the defendant.) Trump would surely fight such a request, and it’s impossible to say where the 11^th Circuit would come down.

Oh well it’s only a parking ticket.

But don’t worry, climate change is just a lefty plot to make people get rid of their SUVs, it’s not a real thing. Not real not real not real.

Tens of thousands of fish washed ashore along the gulf coast of Texas starting on Friday after being starved of oxygen in warm water, officials said.

Park officials for Brazoria County said that a cleanup effort was underway but thousands more fish were expected to wash ashore.

That’s ok. We can just print new fish.

Katie St. Clair, the sea life facility manager at Texas A&M University at Galveston, said that the warming of gulf coast waters through climate change could have contributed to the fish kill.

“As we see increased water temperatures, certainly this could lead to more of these events occurring,” Ms. St. Clair said, “especially in our shallow, near-shore or inshore environments.”

No no no, that can’t be right. Warming is a myth.

A United Nations report concluded in 2019 that warming ocean water had increased incidences of hypoxia — or low oxygen levels — in coastal waters, threatening fish populations. One of the authors of the report said at the time that oxygen loss and other effects of global warming would “create enormous pressure” on the Gulf Coast region in the future.

In addition to localized cases of hypoxia, a large “dead zone” of water spanning thousands of square miles is known to form in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.

It’s not dead, it’s resting.

Just try harder grrrlzzzz

No no no no no you stupid goons, you still don’t get it – we’re happy for you to play all-trans sports. Delighted. Go for it! It’s the playing “one man in the women’s sport” that we object to.

Pink News headline:

Historic all-trans rugby match sends a ‘big f*** you’ to transphobes

No, Pinky, it really doesn’t. Quite the opposite. All-trans sport is perfectly fine and doesn’t trouble us in the least. It’s the stealing women’s sports we object to. I think we’ve been very clear on this point.

Ken White on the unwinnable case scenario:

Yesterday, on our Emergent Situation Episode of Serious Trouble, Josh and I sparred a bit over the moral and political philosophy of Jack Smith’s decision to prosecute. I pointed out that the somewhat predictable assignment of the case to Judge Aileen Cannon — who proved herself to be an arguably lawless Trump partisan when she entertained his attempts to derail his own investigation — will make it extraordinarily difficult to convict him. If Judge Cannon presides over the case she can derail the prosecution in myriad ways, some of them unreviewable, if she wants to. Moreover, there’s reason to doubt that a Florida jury will convict Trump. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, striking Trump down with a federal indictment may make him more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

So that’s cheery.

But it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be prosecuted.

So the Principles of Federal Prosecution suggest that if Jack Smith thinks that if Trump’s prosecution serves an important federal interest (it does) and the evidence is objectively factually and legally sufficient (it is), then he’s bound to bring the case even if Trump’s popularity makes a unanimous verdict difficult, risks a partisan judge, and threatens political upheaval. As Josh suggests, Jack Smith can and should make strategic decisions about what approach is soundest and most likely to lead to conviction. But the indictment in this case is overwhelmingly strong – one of the most devastating on its face that I’ve seen in my career. If Jack Smith can prove those facts, that is far more than enough to convict Trump. The only arguments against it are political.

The arguments for it are better.

Third, it’s corrosive and unjust to say that we won’t hold people to account because they are popular and powerful. The system doesn’t need more of that, thank you, we’re all stocked up. It’s already a fact, we don’t need to make it a policy as well. Strongmen already fare indescribably better than normal citizens when facing the justice system. Going full-on junta and making it an official principle of prosecution not to prosecute the powerful means abandoning even an aspiration of equality before the law.

Fourth, yielding to people who say “if you punish me or my friends for breaking the law I’ll hurt you” is a terrible way to run a society. It’s governance by thugs. If someone says “if you apply the rule of law to hold me accountable for my conduct, I will later abuse the rule of law to punish you,” you know that person is a dishonest, dishonorable partisan. There is no rational basis to believe that a dishonest, dishonorable partisan will ever behave well.

Once more unto the breach.

H/t Rob

Hmmm.

A lawyer speaks:

“And when they finally have the genitalia they want?” is an interesting sentence. I remember when genitalia were just part of the package deal and no substitutions were offered.

She’s welcome to be abundantly clear but I still don’t believe her.

Trump isn’t the only one.

Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the SNP. Police confirmed a 52-year-old woman was taken into custody as a suspect and is being questioned by detectives.

It follows the arrest and release of her husband, ex-SNP chief executive Peter Murrell in April. A spokesman for Ms Sturgeon confirmed she was cooperating with the investigation.

She probably won’t have to spend time in a cell, but if she does, I wonder if she’ll urge the screws to put her in with a trans laydee.

Sonia Sodha writes:

Patients are supposed to be at the heart of everything the NHS does. This is considered such an important principle that, a decade ago, the fledgling NHS constitution was rewritten after the mid-Staffs scandal, in which so many patients died, to make clear it should frame every aspect of NHS work.

You’d think that would be self-evident. What else would be at the heart of health care?

Yet, last week, the NHS Confederation, the membership body for NHS providers, published guidance that appears to cut this ethos adrift. [Its stated objectives are incredibly important: supporting trans staff by helping healthcare leaders to understand their needs and address any workplace discrimination they may face.] But it also includes guidance on how to handle requests for same-sex care that gets the law badly wrong and could lead NHS trusts to unlawfully discriminate against female patients.

Brackets mine. I’m not sure I agree with the (no doubt obligatory) stipulations in the brackets. I’m not sure I think the NHS should even be hiring trans people for work involving patients, given the state of the ideology around “trans” and the peremptory bullying demands that issue from that ideology. That of course would be “discrimination” and probably illegal…but the reality is that trans people are encouraged to be nuisances and time-wasters and attention-hogs at best and persecutors of women at worst.

The NHS Confederation cannot override the law and is not a statutory body like the CQC. Yet its guidance directly contradicts it. It claims it would be “discriminatory” for a patient to refuse to be treated by a trans healthcare professional of the opposite sex unless “evidenced clinical harm may result”. This is legal gibberish – individuals are not directly bound by equalities law in their conduct as patients – and the law does not say providers should only accept requests if there would otherwise be clinical harm.

Its guidance wrongly claims it would probably be discriminatory for a provider to honour a request for same-sex care by excluding trans staff of the opposite sex if the request has “no clinical merit”, opines without basis that there will be “extremely few circumstances” where this request is lawful and says “patients expressing any such view should be informed of the discriminatory nature of their request [and] that such behaviour is unacceptable”. It does not even mention the law on consent.

Again, this is the result of years of drip drip drip indoctrination. Of course women shouldn’t be forced to have a man inspecting her genitals because he claims to be a woman. It’s obvious yet people have been relentlessly trained to think (or at least say) it’s twanzphobic. Drip drip drip indoctrination will do that to you.

Grey Slavery is back in the news gossip.

He adds several hundred tweets, which are too boring to read, let alone share. He’s enjoying the attention a lot.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

The Times says Aileen Cannon won’t be recused.

The news of Judge Cannon’s assignment raised eyebrows because of her role in an earlier lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump challenging the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago. In issuing a series of rulings favorable to him, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, effectively disrupted the investigation until a conservative appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.

In other words she’s the last person who should be filling this slot.

There are all kinds of reasons other judges couldn’t be assigned to the case. It’s almost as if there are too many reasons. Assigning a judge who has already tried to protect Trump from the consequences of his crimes, and been caught doing it and replaced and made to look like a corrupt fool – a judge who was appointed by Trump, to the shock-horror of all observers on account of how underqualified she is – is not a very wise or judicious thing to do.

The clerk clarified another matter: whether Judge Cannon would continue to handle the case. Since news of Judge Cannon’s assignment emerged early Friday, observers have speculated that it could only be an initial assignment before being handed to another judge.

But Ms. Noble confirmed that no court practice would return the case to be assigned to another judge. In short, Judge Cannon’s assignment is permanent unless she were to step aside.

In short the fix is in already. He’s going to get away with it, isn’t he. Get away with it, get elected, get to destroy whatever shards and fragments are left.

Trump is displaying his usual taste and wit.

Donald Trump vowed Saturday to continue running for president even if he were to be convicted as part of the 37-count federal felony indictment that was issued against him this week.

“I’ll never leave,” Trump said in an interview aboard his plane. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016. That was a rough one. In theory that was not doable.”

Translation: He’ll continue to barge ahead because he’s a deranged narcissist.

While Trump said campaign fundraising had skyrocketed since the indictment was issued, he conceded it was an unwelcome development.

“Nobody wants to be indicted,” said Trump. “I don’t care that my poll numbers went up by a lot. I don’t want to be indicted. I’ve never been indicted. I went through my whole life, now I get indicted every two months. It’s been political.”

Sure it’s been political: he decided to run for a political office that presented him with all sorts of new opportunities to commit crimes. He got elected and duly committed many crimes. Some of them (though not enough) are now catching up with him.

The BBC reminds us that Trump is charged not just with taking all those documents he had no right to take, but also with lying and obstruction in order to hang on to them.

Mr Trump has been charged with 37 counts of unauthorised possession of classified material, obstruction of justice, concealing documents, and making false statements to law enforcement.

…

Republicans, including some of Mr Trump’s presidential rivals, rushed to his defence on Thursday as news of the indictment first broke.

While they may still take issue with what they view as a politically motivated prosecution, they may find it more difficult to explain why Mr Trump held onto such sensitive national security after leaving the White House.

Where does political motivation end and enforcement of the law begin? Republicans are usually big fans of enforcing the law.

The alleged mishandling of classified documents is only one part of the case against Mr Trump. The others involve charges of obstruction of the investigation and lying to and misleading investigators.

Those last two weren’t allowed even when he was president. [See: Nixon, passim.]

“The biggest obstacle in cases of this kind is proving intent,” says David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University.

“But the indictment provides an enormous volume of very specific information showing Mr Trump’s personal awareness and involvement, including his proposing that various statements be made to investigators that he knew were false.”

Meanwhile he’s campaigning to be put back in the office so that he can steal more classified documents.

The Guardian is still resorting to the gender uncritical framing.

Oxford University’s new professor of LGBTQ+ history has accused the government of “fanning a culture war” over freedom of speech, insisting it is alive and well in higher education.

Is there such a thing as LGBTQ+ history? I suppose you can lump two or more unrelated things together and then do history of both of them, but is that a genre of history or just a random list?

Matt Cook, who was this week named as the first Jonathan Cooper chair of the history of sexualities, a newly created post at Mansfield College, was speaking only days after the appointment of the government’s first “free speech tsar” for higher education.

Oh him. He’s the guy who went on the radio and made such an exhibition of himself by being unable to stop repeating “kind of” and “you know” multiple times in every sentence.

Cook, a renowned cultural historian who has written extensively on queer urban life, the Aids crisis and queer domesticity, denied that free speech was under threat in higher education.

“Of course there’s protests about certain people speaking and there has been historically, about figures as diverse as David Icke and Enoch Powell, and that’s right,” he said.

“But these people still spoke in university contexts, despite the protests and despite the calls for people not to speak in university forums. It’s only a tiny fraction of cases where people actually don’t speak.

“So my sense is that it’s not a huge problem. I think the issue has been blown out of proportion. I also think there’s some political expediency in this. It’s a way of fanning a culture war. I don’t think we need additional protections for free speech in the university. Free speech is pretty alive and well.”

I wonder if that’s really what he said. I wonder if the Guardian cleaned it up for him.