But…

But Joanne Harris is herself white middle-class. She’s also female, which I assume “vulnerable” is code for. She’s playing the Karen card, because……………I have no idea why she’s doing that.

Trump was trash-talking about Brian Kemp and Fani Willis just this morning.

Governor Kemp of Georgia is fighting hard against the Impeachment of the crooked, incompetent, & highly partisan D.A. of Fulton County, Fani Willis, who has allowed Murder and other Violent Crime to MASSIVELY ESCALATE. Crime in Atlanta is WORST IN NATION. She should be impeached for many reasons, not just the Witch Hunt (I did nothing wrong!). Willis should focus on out of control Murder, not “I will get TRUMP” over a Perfect Phone Call. Georgia does not deserve this GIANT MURDER WAVE!

He won’t stop just because he’s required to.

The BBC on Trump’s out on bailitude:

A judge in Georgia overseeing former US President Donald Trump’s election interference case has set a bail bond of $200,000 (£157,000).

Mr Trump and his 18 co-defendants have until midday Friday to surrender to a court in Atlanta.

The bail filing says Mr Trump can remain free pending trial so long as he does not attempt to threaten or intimidate witnesses.

But he will. He won’t be able to do otherwise. He doesn’t take orders from anyone.

Mr Trump is also banned from committing any crimes, and can only have contact with the other co-defendants in the case with lawyers present.

He’ll probably do both of those things too.

Out on bail.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s bail was set at $200,000 on Monday in a sprawling racketeering case charging Mr. Trump and 18 associates with election interference in Georgia.

The move came as it became clear that Mr. Trump and the other defendants will be required to pay cash upon being booked in Atlanta, unlike in the three other criminal cases involving the former president.

Under the conditions of his bond agreement, Mr. Trump cannot violate state or federal laws or communicate with any co-defendants in the case except through his lawyers. He was told not to intimidate witnesses or co-defendants, or “otherwise obstruct the administration of justice,” by threatening them or 30 unindicted co-conspirators in the case.

He will threaten them though. We know he will.

He was also directed to “make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against the community or to any property in the community” including “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media,” the bond sheet states.

He will though.

Mr. Trump in the past has made inflammatory and sometimes false personal attacks online against Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, who is leading the case.

…

The costs clearly worry some of the defendants in the Trump case; one of them, Cathy Latham, a former Republican Party official in Georgia who acted as a fake elector for Mr. Trump in 2020, has set up a legal-defense fund, describing herself as “a retired public-school teacher living on a teacher’s pension.” The $3,645 she has initially raised is well short of a $500,000 goal.

Gee, maybe it was a mistake to help Trump try to steal the election.

Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who played a central role in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost in 2020, expressed frustration a few days after her indictment in the case at the looming legal costs. “Why isn’t MAGA, Inc. funding everyone’s defense?” she asked last week on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Because Trump is Trump. Duh.

A person briefed on the matter said that Ms. Ellis had not asked for help from a legal-defense fund formed recently by Mr. Trump’s advisers but that she had sought help earlier and had been denied.

Mr. Trump has used a political action committee that is aligned with him, and that is replete with money he raised in small-dollar donations as he falsely claimed he was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election, to pay the legal bills of a number of allies, as well as his own.

But other defendants have been denied help with mounting legal bills long before they were charged. That includes Mr. Giuliani, who was also charged last week and whose lawyer and son have implored Mr. Trump to provide help with his mounting legal costs.

So they’ll all turn on him. Smart guy.

No. Get out.

Ecuadorians voted against drilling for oil in a protected area of the Amazon, an important decision that will require the state oil company to end its operations in a region that’s home to two uncontacted tribes and is a hotspot of biodiversity.

Yasuni National Park is inhabited by the Tagaeri and Taromenani, who live in self-isolation. In 1989, it was designated a world biosphere reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO. Encompassing a surface area of over 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres), it boasts 610 species of birds, 139 species of amphibians, and 121 species of reptiles. At least three species are endemic.

Rock on birds and amphibians and reptiles.

H/t Anna

Big weekend for cheating!

The NY Times reports:

A federal judge in Georgia has temporarily blocked part of a state law that prohibits hormone replacement therapy for transgender minors. 

But is “hormone replacement” actually therapy? Or is it medical malpractice? Or something in between?

Calling it therapy puts a big thumb on the scale in this contested issue. What if it’s quackery rather than therapy? What if it’s the new thalidomide, driven by trendy but magical ideas about people “born in the wrong body”?

Judge Geraghty, who was appointed by President Biden, said in her ruling that the ban “is substantially likely to violate the Equal Protection Clause.”

But maybe the equal protection needed is protection from quack medicine sparked by wack ideas about magic gender?

The Georgia law, Senate Bill 140, prohibits doctors in the state from providing gender transition surgery and hormone therapy for the treatment of gender dysphoria in people under the age of 18.

The law does allow minors who were already receiving hormone therapy to continue their treatment, and it allows doctors to prescribe puberty blocking medications to minors.

On June 29, the families of four transgender children filed an emergency request asking the federal court in Georgia to block the law from taking effect.

The plaintiffs said the ban violated the rights of parents to make medical decisions regarding their children; they also said it violated the “guarantees of equal protection by denying transgender youth essential, and often lifesaving, medical treatment based on their sex and on their transgender status.”

The only sense in which this “treatment” can be “lifesaving” is if it prevents kids who are convinced they’re trans from committing suicide. It’s not lifesaving in a medical sense at all. The whole thing is in the head: it’s about ideas, feelings, thoughts, concepts. Sometimes medical treatments do help with broken or distressing thoughts and moods. Depression can respond to medical treatment, for instance, and that’s a good thing. The situation with “gender dysphoria” is different, and the “treatment” is drastically different. Prozac is one thing and cross-sex hormones are another.

The legal challenge to the Georgia law will move forward. During the litigation, transgender young people in the state will still be able to receive hormone therapy, but not gender transition surgery.

“It is vital that, as a family, we have agency in our own medical decisions that are in the best interest of our child — that includes gender-affirming care,” said Anna Zoe, one of the plaintiffs, in a news release after the emergency request was filed.

But maybe “gender-affirming care” is not in fact in the best interests of her child. Some people who have had it have massive regret.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on From Joe Hill to Rich Men North of Richmond.

The Republicans of today are benefiting from the abortion and gay rights strategy of the Moral Majority. Before they embarked on that, most Catholics were Democrats due to the social justice aspect of being Catholic. It also picked up on many of the blue collar workers who didn’t want rampant gay sex and loose women getting welfare checks during the Reagan era. These are now Trump Republicans who sincerely believe that he is going to drain the swamp and end child trafficking.

Our Billy Bragg has written a responsorial to this song (I know, I know!) Rich Men North of Earning North of a Million. Tonatically it’s a bit dreary, but perhaps it’s so intended. I used to like Billy until I found out about his ears of stone.

I’d like someone to write a responsorial to Jason Aldean’s “Try That in A Small Town,” too. I have some thematic ideas of what it’s like to grow up in a small town and not fit in. Country music is no longer listenable for the most part, and is far from its roots in Scots-Irish backwoods and early African-American expression of angst in poverty and survival in coal mines. Now it’s a bunch of “All Hat – No Cattle” guys waving the flag around.

Hate to see folk music going the same way.

This fool should be a dictionary entry for narcissism. “So whenever someone looks at me, and they can’t tell what I was born as – [thumb up] – that’s perfect to me.”

Perfection to this fool is strangers looking at xir and not being able to tell what xir “was born as.” Not a fiery sunset, or a walk in the forest, or making a baby laugh, or helping someone, or learning something, or laughing xirself breathless – but causing a stranger to pay xir extra attention.

What a pathetic, witless, empty, futile, claustrophobic form of “perfection.”

Interesting. Innnnnnnteresting. It’s fine to have a Trans Pride event, but it is not permitted to have a lesbian/gay/bi event. No LGB without the T but definitely T without the LGB.

Why is that exactly?

I guess Maggie Chapman must be really quite thick? Not to have noticed? That she was promoting a trans event and in the same breath saying no lesbian gay bisexual without the trans?

Sigh. Yes it is. Of course it is. Men don’t need to shed the endometrium every month. Men don’t have any endometrium, because they don’t have any uterus.

Menstruation isn’t just a women’s issue, say Lib Dems

But it is, just as pregnancy is “just” a women’s issue. Women aren’t being selfish and mean by hogging all the menstruation – they’re stuck with it because of being women. It’s idiotic, insulting, frivolous, fatuous, rude, absurd, grotesque, for adult political parties to start whining that men get to bleed out their uterine linings every month too.

Sir Ed Davey’s party will vote on a policy proposal that insists period poverty is an issue that affects “some trans and non-binary people” in addition to biological women.

It’s not “in addition” to biological women, it’s just biological women. They can call themselves trans or non-binary but if they menstruate they’re women. Calling women trans or non-binary doesn’t create more women or new categories of people who used to be women. It just sticks a new and stupid label on existing women.

An agenda published by the Liberal Democrats for their annual gathering in Bournemouth includes a motion on period poverty which is to be debated on Sept 23.

The document states: “Conference notes that… menstruation is not just a women’s issue, and also affects some trans and non-binary people.

Why the need to insult women? Why the need to say women are mere? Why the apparent belief that if something is for women it’s not worth doing because meh, women don’t matter? Why the relentless insults??? I for one am beyond fucking tired of them.

Kenan Malik on a trumpy version of a folk song:

A jobbing country singer from Virginia, [Oliver] Anthony’s video of his song Rich Men North of Richmond has gone viral over the past week, clocking up more than 20m views on YouTube, rising to the top of the streaming charts and becoming an anthem for conservatives from Marjorie Taylor Green, the reactionary Republican congresswoman from Georgia, to the rightwing political commentator Matt Walsh, all viewing Anthony as a righteous figure, whose “rawness” and “authenticity” speak to real Americans.

The kind who just love them a criminal billionaire who wouldn’t give them a sandwich if they turned up starving at one of his golf resorts.

Kenan compares Anthony to John Handcox, an actual working-class folk singer during the Depression.

In some ways, Rich Men North of Richmond echoes the themes of Handcox’s song, giving voice to a sense of a world divided into rich and poor, and of ordinary people as menaced by those in power. It also shows the degree to which the working-class tradition that Handcox helped forge has decayed, politically and culturally.

Handcox was not simply a singer or songwriter. He was first and foremost a union activist, and it was out of his activism that his music flowed. He stood in a long line of working-class troubadours. From The Ballad of Joe Hill to This Land Is Your Land, much of what is now called the Great American Songbook emerged from grassroot struggles, songs created to organise, inspire and console…

All helped create a movement in which music became a central strand in the struggle for justice and betterment. It was a tradition that, long before the civil rights movement, was committed to interracial solidarity. Not only were African Americans, such as Robeson and Handcox, an inextricable part of the working-class folk scene, but there was much cross-fertilisation across blues, gospel and folk.

Handcox was an organiser for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), helping stage a major strike of cotton pickers demanding better pay in 1935. The strike was met with ferocious violence from planters, militias and the Ku Klux Klan. The union was crushed, and Handcox, blacklisted and threatened by lynch mobs, was forced to flee, joining the thousands who had formed a great exodus out of the dust bowl, the raw horrors of which were captured in Dorothea Lange’s photographs and in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

Handcox would have understood Anthony’s lament in Rich Men North of Richmond about the precariousness of working-class life. But where he was committed to collective action and unionisation, Rich Men North of Richmond expresses individualised resentment. It is a resentment not towards bosses or the capitalist class, as in the old songs but, as has become fashionable today, towards a nebulous political elite, defined as much by its cultural alienness as by its economic power.

It’s a fiendishly clever ploy, of course. Never mind the billionaires squeezing the workers and tenants for huge profits; go after the organizers, the protesters, the lefties. That’ll work!

Most of those who laud Rich Men North of Richmond as being, in Greene’s words, “the anthem of the forgotten Americans”, have also long campaigned to deny those forgotten Americans their dues. They oppose unionisation and Medicare and abortion rights, view tax cuts for the rich as more important than support for the poor, and despise welfare payments as “money stolen”. A century ago, they would have condemned Handcox and Wiggins, Robeson and Guthrie, as treacherous “reds”, cheered on the strike-breaking militias, and probably joined them, too.

And instead of Roosevelt in the White House there would have been Henry Ford, famous for strike-breaking.

A hunger strike.

A violent man who claims to be a woman and told a rally to “punch a terf in the face” is demanding to be moved to a female prison so that he can terrorize yet more women.

Colin Montgomerie is on Team Men in Women’s Spaces of course.

The full sentence is “You have a seemingly willful blind eye for statistics, Colin, don’t you?”

The ever-popular “but what do you mean by ‘trans rights’?” question.

For once we get an answer.

Ah, that “right.” Ok so now explain to us how that can be a right without demolishing the right to single sex spaces. Explain how it can be a right for men to force themselves on women in changing rooms and toilets and rape crisis centers and homeless shelters. Explain how “identifying as” the opposite of what a person in fact can be a basis for human rights.

We’ll wait.

British Columbia’s turn:

About 30,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia province, where nearly 400 wildfires are raging.

Two huge fires in the Shuswap region merged overnight, destroying blocks of houses and other buildings. To the south, travel to the waterside city of Kelowna has been restricted, and smoke from nearby fires hangs over Lake Okanagan. Fires have charred homes in West Kelowna, a nearby city of 36,000.

…

The province’s emergency management minister said officials “cannot stress strongly enough how critical it is to follow evacuation orders”. Bowinn Ma added: “They are a matter of life and death not only for the people in those properties, but also for the first responders who will often go back to try to implore people to leave.”

…

Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). Experts say climate change [aka global warming] increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.

I’m familiar with that just from Seattle summers: the grass gets visibly (and touchably) dryer and more brittle as the rainless months add up. By September it’s like straw.

Robin Ince promotes LGBT Youth Scotland, is reminded of the allegations of grooming and trafficking, boasts that he views the people reminding him as flat-earthers.

It’s a particularly odd comparison, because it wouldn’t be supernatural or an overturning of a huge chunk of science for LGBT Youth Scotland to have a history of grooming.

It’s also callous and smug.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on We can say it; he can’t.

We could say the same about the word “nerd”, which people tell me isn’t an insult anymore. They tell me that it’s cool to be a nerd now. They tell me to look at how nerd subculture is mainstream with comic book superheroes reigning at the box office.

Permit me to doubt. What I see is the cool kids saying, “I’m such a nerd,” in the same way and the same tone as they would say, “I’m such a bitch.” I see basic functionality locked behind menu options with labels like “stats for nerds”, implying that to understand or care about such things is abnormal. I see actual nerds seeking popularity through embracing Genderism, or else being shunned for lacking the social graces to shut off their hyperanalytical minds and go along with it.

The only person who can call me a nerd without being an asshole is me, and I’m an asshole anyway.

And “nerd” isn’t spat with anywhere near the venomous rancor as “terf”. It’s not in the same ballpark. It’s not even the same sport. There aren’t people making bank on shirts about nerds like the ones that say, “Kill TERFs”. Nor are there people telling crowds to attack nerds like the ones getting cheers for saying to punch any terfs they see right “in the fucking face.”

The gall of trying to claim it’s just an acronym with no connotations is simply stupendous.

India Willoughby spits venom at The Telegraph for saying “terf” is a slur. Such a lovely guy.

He says, echoing every racist who wants to say “nigger” because theyyyyyy dooooooooo so whyyyy cannnnnn’t weeeeeee? Thick as a plank and nastier than rancid fish.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on The situation evolved rapidly.

Terrible as this is it’s almost the best case scenario. The worst case scenario would be that the planet warms more or less uniformly with the tropics slowly becoming uninhabitable while the industrialised world looks on with much hand-wringing but precious little useful action. This way everyone is on notice that it’s their life or at least their property that is on the line.

Now, I’m not pretending that anyone is voluntarily going to give up their lives of consumption-for-the-sake-of-consumption. The sense of entitlement is too deeply engrained in the wealthy and the wannabee wealthy. But we have an opportunity to make the worst of the destructive behaviours along with opposition to necessary change socially shameful. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of climate activists are stuck in a mindset that has outlived its usefulness. What’s so shocking about dyeing the Trevi fountain black when the land is being burnt black? We know the problem. Stunts whose only effect are to publicise that there is a problem look, and are, self indulgent. And for that reason they backfire, badly.

I don’t want to do the “young people today” thing. It was people of my generation who created a world where performative narcissism is almost the only sane, or at least effective, strategy.But I suspect a little bit of genuinely subversive thought would go a long way. (I’m looking at you Penny, Maugham and Ince. The house of the self-regarding is getting crowded.) Of course, that requires actually thinking and who has time for that these days?

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on More threats.

It’s an easy, and lazy, argument to make that chess is played with the brain, not the genitals or the muscles therefore saying there is a need for a separate women’s category is demeaning to women. It relies on the trope of men’s brains and ladyeez brains and assumes women’s intellect is inferior to men’s.

Susan Polgar – Hall of Famer, the Winner of 4 Women’s World Chess Championships,12 Olympic Medals (5 Gold, 4 Silver, 3 Bronze), and the first woman in history to break the gender barrier in chess would like to disagree.

“Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s tournaments?”

This is probably one of the top 5 questions I have most often been asked over the past 15 years, since creating the Susan Polgar Foundation in 2002.

I would like to walk you through some history and then explain to you some challenges girls / women face in chess. But before we start down this journey, I want to make one thing abundantly clear. I have not changed my point of view. I do strongly believe that if given equal opportunities, women are just as capable in chess, and many other STEM fields, as are men. However, I still adamantly believe that there is a serious need for SOME “girls only” or “women only” events.

Polgar then goes on to address the 5 questions, pointing out how hard it is for girls to compete against aggressive males, that women’s achievements are belittled and diminished, how barriers are put in their way at every level.

When she qualified to enter the world championships, she was told she couldn’t enter because she wasn’t a man. Can’t have a girly brain showing up those muscular manly brains, can we?

The article concludes

Within 48 hours after I posted my article about “Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s Tournaments?”, between my website and various social media outlets, this article has reached well over 400,000 readers. Many made comments in the comment sections, in private messages, email, and tweets, etc. While the overwhelming majority were very supportive and understanding, some comments were eye openers. Here are just a few of the best ones:

– Why is it a problem if some girls are sexually harassed by male players at tournaments? It will make them stronger to deal with the real world.

– …shielding girls from the realities of the world isn’t the way to improve the conditions. What this does is subconsciously reinforce the notion that they are somehow inferior.

– If the girls didn’t provoke first, there would be no problem at all.

– If you have Girl or Women’s tournaments that exclude men, then shouldn’t you have Men’s tournaments that exclude women?

– Oooh, you’re so pretty. Are you married?

– If girls can’t deal with the reality of chess, maybe they could try something less challenging?

– Get a grip. Girls won’t ever be as good as boys.

– It’s good to have more girls in chess, especially the pretty ones.

– Chess is a men’s sport. You can’t change the fact.

– Girls are surely seeking attention when they go to chess tournaments. What do they expect?

– Why do you always wanna to rock the boat? Why can’t you accept it?

Now, why wouldn’t women want to be in a room with men like these?