Speaking of Trump and criminality and how he totally had no idea it’s not legal to steal an election, Mark Pomerantz was on Fresh Air a couple of days ago.

Our guest today, Mark Pomerantz, has written an insider’s account of the year he and others at the Manhattan district attorney’s office spent on a criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s finances and business practices. Pomerantz was a retired prosecutor and lawyer in December 2020 when he was invited to join then DA Cyrus Vance’s team looking into Trump. In his book, Pomerantz calls the investigation the legal equivalent of a plane crash where the principal cause was pilot error.

At the end of 2021, as District Attorney Vance approached retirement, Pomerantz felt the team had sufficient evidence to file felony charges against Trump. But the newly elected district attorney, Alvin Bragg, wasn’t ready to proceed with charges. So Pomerantz and another senior attorney resigned. Their departures made news. And Pomerantz wrote in his resignation letter that not bringing a case against Trump was a grave failure of justice.

To put it mildly.

The thing about Pomerantz is that he spent a lot of time – many many hours – looking at the [deeply boring] details of the financial fiddling, work that normally an underling would do.

DAVIES: You know, you would say at the end of the book that when others were reluctant to proceed with charges against Trump, they hadn’t gone through this process. They didn’t see, you know, what was really at work here. It took time to get into it and grasp the import of it. Let’s take an example or two of these statements and what they told us about Trump’s practices. Do you want to pick one?

POMERANTZ: Yeah. One pretty straightforward example has to do with the triplex penthouse apartment that Trump had on the top of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. In the years 2015 and 2016, the value he assigned to that apartment for financial statement purposes was $327 million. And he reached that, among other things, by saying, well, this apartment contains 30,000 square feet. And let’s put aside for the moment the price per square foot that was used, although that was inflated as well. But the notion that the apartment should be valued on the basis that it contains 30,000 square feet fell apart when it became clear the apartment doesn’t have 30,000 square feet, it has 11,000 square feet.

That’s smaller. 11 is smaller than 30.

So for financial statement purposes, the value of the apartment was tripled by simply saying it had 30,000 square feet when it didn’t. The value of the apartment was vastly overstated. Now, did Trump know that the apartment had only 11,000 square feet and not 30,000 square feet? Was he responsible for telling people that the apartment had 30,000 square feet? Well, we spoke to witnesses who heard him say, in fact, right at this time, that the apartment has 33,000 square feet, even more than the square footage that was used in the financial statements. And if the question is, does Donald Trump know the difference between a 30,000 square foot apartment and an 11,000 square foot apartment, consider the facts that it was his business to buy and sell apartments. He built the building that contained this apartment. He looked after the renovation of this apartment. He has proclaimed himself a real estate guru, and he lived in the apartment. So the notion that it was an innocent mistaken overstatement is just not one that I think people should accept.

It’s ludicrous. Real estate hustlers live and breathe square footage. Of course they don’t make “mistakes” of that kind.

And $327 million is a lotttttttttttttttttttt of money.

POMERANTZ: Well, $327 million is not only a value that exceeds the price that has been ever paid for any apartment in New York City to this date, it’s a number that is larger than the price that has ever been paid for a private residence in the history of the United States, ever. In fact, $327 million for a single residence would put it on the list of the highest prices ever paid or ever valued for a private residence, including such properties as the Taj Mahal and Buckingham Palace. So, you know, it’s a nice apartment, but $327 million? I don’t think so. Our experts looked at the apartment and valued it in the neighborhood of $55- to $60 million, being charitable with respect to its possible value.

I just looked up Balmoral for further comparison. The estimate is $140 million – and it’s enormous, probably genuinely 300 30,000 square feet or something, plus all that land, plus the cachet of royal royality. Trump’s vulgar gilt apartment with the nice view of the park not quite the same.

Any more inflated stats of that kind?

POMERANTZ: Well, another easy example is his golf course in Jupiter, which he bought at the end of 2013, I believe, for $5 million. It was valued as of June 30, 2014 – so that’s about seven months later – it was valued in connection with his financial statements at over $60 million. He had bought the golf course only a few months earlier and had paid $5 million in cash. So how do you get from $5 million to $62 million when no substantial changes or building or redesign or anything much had happened to the golf course in the several months between when he bought it and when it was valued on his financial statements? When we looked at the accounting backup in detail, we saw that Trump had – when he bought the property, he had also inherited some liabilities to members. There were circumstances in which he would potentially have to pay back their membership deposits, and there was about $41 million worth of potential refund obligations. And so he added that to the $5 million.

But the problem was, he had also said in the financial statements that for liability purposes, those liabilities were unlikely to be repaid. There’d always be new members, so they would be valued at zero. Well, he valued them at zero on the liability side, but he valued them at $41 million on the asset side. You can’t do that. And on top of that, he added another 30% for the so-called brand value of the fact that his name was now on the golf course. Again, whether or not that’s appropriate in some circumstances is beside the point because the financial statement said we’re not including brand value in the values that are reflected on this statement. So again, that value was misleading.

Zero on the liability side, $41 million on the asset side. It’s so Trump.

Why did he do all this wild inflation of his monetary worth? To get banks to lend him vast sums of money. That’s a crime.

POMERANTZ: What we learned – and when I say we, I should include the staff of the New York attorney general, which had been conducting a parallel civil investigation and which discovered many of the same facts and indeed discovered many of these facts before the DA’s office learned them. And they were extremely helpful in allowing our criminal investigation to go forward. But what emerged from the investigation was that the financial statements were used in a variety of contexts. But the one context in which they were used that most directly led to criminal liability was the fact that the statements were given to banks in connection with applications for loans, in connection with a loan that The Trump Organization got to purchase the Doral Golf Resort near Miami, in connection with the creation of a luxury hotel at the old post office property in Washington, D.C., and a refinancing of Trump’s property in Chicago.

In each case, The Trump Organization asked for financing in the amount of millions – hundreds of millions of dollars. And in each case, the bank required that Donald Trump personally guarantee the loans. And Trump was willing to guarantee the loans, but the bank insisted in connection with those guarantees. And this is standard practice in the industry and certainly for this portion of the bank’s operations. The bank insisted on not only a guarantee but the submission of a personal financial statement. The bank required as a condition of making the loan and accepting the guarantee that Donald Trump verify that the financial statements he supplied to the bank were true and accurate in all material respects and that they accurately reflected his financial condition. And they didn’t. They overstated his net worth. They overstated the value of his assets by literally billions of dollars. For each year that he submitted personal financial statements to the bank – and the bank required them to be updated annually – the financial statements were massively inflated. And that’s a crime.

He would have just blamed it on his accountants, right? The prosecutors knew that, right?

POMERANTZ: We did. And if a charge had been brought or if a charge should be brought, and certainly in the context of the pending civil case, Donald Trump will certainly say, I relied on accountants; I relied on the people around me. And to be sure, we looked for and got evidence reflecting his personal involvement and responsibility for the financial statements. We developed evidence that he had been involved in providing the values for particular assets to the people in the Trump Organization whose job it was to compile these numbers.

They were, of course, assets that he spent his lifetime building and acquiring. He cared deeply about his net worth. And we had evidence that he had a history of exaggerating and indeed lying and misleading people about his net worth and the value of his assets. And bear in mind, each financial statement indicated that he, Donald Trump, was responsible for the preparation of the financial statements, responsible for the numbers that they contained. They’re his assets. The financial statements were used for his benefit. They were prepared by people who worked for him and who followed his directions. And so we thought the circumstances made out a pretty compelling case that he was indeed personally responsible for the misstatements.

One would hope that’s the way it works – that the big bosses don’t get to say “Oh it was all the underlings’ fault” and walk away humming a cheerful tune.

And on top of all the paper and the circumstances and the facts surrounding the valuation of particular properties, Michael Cohen also told us, as he had told Congress some years earlier, that he had been in the room with Donald Trump and with the CFO, Allen Weisselberg, when the financial statements were prepared. And he knew that the process included Trump saying, in effect, this is what I need to be worth. Now go out, and come back with values of the properties that add up to what I need to be worth. And so the valuations that were put on individual properties were, in effect, reverse engineered to meet the target that Trump had set forth for his net worth. And so that had all the trappings of criminal conduct.

Yet Trump remains at liberty.

Pence has had the heavy arm of the law descend on his shoulder.

Former Vice President Mike Pence received a subpoena from the special counsel investigating key aspects of the sprawling probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, according to a person familiar with the matter.

It’s about January 6th, the Post tells us.

It is unclear whether Pence will comply with the subpoena. His advisers had previously said he was not interested in appearing before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Yyyyyeeeeeah it’s not really about whether he’s “interested” or not.

Pence has publicly suggested Trump got bad legal advice and downplayed the idea that he saw criminal conduct.

“Well, I don’t know if it is criminal to listen to bad advice from lawyers,” Pence told NBC last year.

Oh come on. We’re not talking about some naïve random citizen here, we’re talking about a “president,” the chief law officer blah blah blah. Trump didn’t just bumble into trying to cancel an election because he didn’t know any better, Trump capped a long long career of criminality with an attempted coup. He didn’t just listen to bad advice!

“Presidents, just like all of us that have served in public life, you have to rely on your team, you have to rely on the credibility of the people around you. So, as time goes on, I hope we can move beyond this, beyond that prospect. And this is really a time when our country ought to be healing.”

Not on the basics you don’t. The fine points of national security, sure, but whether or not it’s ok to steal an election, no. Trump is a lifelong criminal, and Pence knows it.

This is why we can’t do anything about global warming.

China seeks ‘bold’ steps to lift birth rate

So that more people will have to deal with the horrors in the future. Never mind what’s good for people already born, and the climate they depend on, and the resources they need – just keep doing more and more until everyone is gone.

News outta Scotland:

The Scottish Green Party has suspended Beth Douglas from the role of Rainbow Greens co-convener, after a series of “violent” tweets.

Douglas has been accused of using derogatory language on social media, supporting controversial protests against women, inflaming debate by calling feminists ‘fascists’ and posing with weapons for Twitter pictures that threaten “cis” people.

Oh is that all.

Douglas, who still has the job title in her Twitter bio, has been in the “public facing” representative role for LGBT+ members of the Scottish Greens and attended Holyrood equality committee evidence sessions.

The use of the offensive word Terf -Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist- used to describe women who criticise gender ideology, features heavily on Douglas’s social media, along with unfounded allegations that they are “fascists”.

There are also images of Douglas holding an axe and a knife circulating social media. Holding up a knife in a threatening way, one of the captions for the images says “I heard yall hate trans women, knives and axes”.

Oh you mean this one?

The date on it is October 22, 2020. It’s more than two years old. Wouldn’t you think the Scottish Green Party could have acted a little more quickly? Wouldn’t you think they would ask themselves why they wanted that guy in that kind of job?

I hopped on a bus to Carkeek Park this afternoon. It’s basically a chunk of forest with streams, and it ends up at the beach, which is accessible only via a pedestrian overpass. I stood on the overpass to take in the scene for ten minutes or so. There was a great blue heron standing in the water, and a bald eagle flew up to perch in a tall cedar. Then, the cherry on the cake, I heard a train approaching from the south, so I got to watch it chug around the curve at the far end of Golden Gardens and then come thundering along and under the overpass. It gave a little blast on the horn as it approached, either for safety reasons or to say hello.

The heron left the scene though.

This one is traveling north to south; the one I saw was going south to north. A two-engine freight train though, not the commuter train.

Dale He/Him has spoken.

Stupid liars. Maya didn’t break any of those rules. They’re such liars.

The Independent tells us:

Vulnerable female patients have been sexually “exposed” on a mixed gender ward deemed not “fit for purpose”, the NHS watchdog has warned.

The Care Quality Commission found that sexual incidents had occured at Hill Crest, a 25-bed mixed gender mental health unit in Redditch, as male and female were being put at risk.

It found male patients are able to walk into female bathrooms and bedrooms, leading to risks of sexual assault and relationships. It found that sexual incidents had taken on the unit because of the risks.

Duh. Are people really having to re-learn what they’ve known since puberty? Or are they just pretending?

The rate of assaults on mixed sex wards is significantly higher than on single-sex wards, data has shown.

You don’t say! What a surprise.

Vicki Nash, head of Policy, Campaigns and Public Affairs for charity Mind said: “The fact that sexual incidents occurred on a mental health ward is abhorrent. Mental health hospitals are a place where people have the right to feel safe, and should never be put at risk of any harm, including traumatising sexual assault. We expect Worcestershire Health and Care Foundation Trust to take immediate action to address these risks and ensure people are kept safe.

“Mixed-sex NHS accommodation has been expected to be eliminated, except where it is in the best interests of the patient, for over a decade.”

Which patient? Some male patients might consider it in their best interests, but it’s hard to see how women would.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The lack of formal protocols.

I’ve recently started trying to come up with a scenario where Genderism and the belief in medicalizing “trans kids” was originally produced, promoted, and popularized not by the Progressive Left, but by the Conservative Right. Can it be done?

It’s hard because there are so many contributing elements — such as critical theory in academics and unsupervised teenagers on Tumblr — which don’t fit easily into the conservative mindset. But there are I think other elements that either do or could have done.

Consider a hypothetical revisionist history where, back in the early 2000s or so:

1.) A few respected and prominent conservative pundits start floating the idea that homosexuality is not so much a sin as a sign that the essential natures of women and men were born into the wrong bodies. A gay man is really a straight woman; a lesbian is really a straight man. A simple explanation, with a simple solution.

2.) Transexuals and people with gender dysphoria are used as examples supporting this — and the conservative community begins to support them . They argue for more and better health care that helps align the true inner soul to the body. They invite them to speak, join, their communities, and love bomb some of them into doing so, seeing the trans-identified as proof that “our souls are real, men and women have different natures, and it matters.”

3.) The heartfelt emphasis on “believe the children” popular during the Satanic Panic is continued, with the pure and honest declarations of childhood you can depend on now having to do with an inner gender needing acknowledgment instead of nursery school teachers sacrificing goats.

4.) The vulnerable, marginalized status of trans people is emphasized by people intent on showing God’s infinite love towards them, and the stories of Born Again as the Correct Gender join and sometimes turn into the stories of Born Again in Christ.

5.) Pushback from the scientific, skeptical, rational community involves ridiculing the homophobia, gendered souls, and Save the Children “roots” of the belief in transgenderism.

7.) The religious demonize those secular liberalswho scoff at the existence of Gender Identity and/or try to prevent trans kids from expressing their God-Given nature. Eventually, they also “demonize” them metaphorically.

6.) The media begins to frame the issue as Conservative vs Liberal, and then starts to report it as Republican vs Democrat.

7.) Both sides get caught up in rationalizing why the Other Side is wrong.

Might it have gone that way? I don’t know. I don’t think it would have achieved anywhere near the popularity it has. But I can conceive of this scenario. Conservatives who insist the excesses of trans doctrine are the natural consequence of uniquely Progressive thinking are mistaken. It could have been them.

Continuing the Gender Apostate’s Tale:

Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 

Note the “allowing a child to be who he or she is” part – which is hardly a medical description. It’s more a bit of religious terminology from the Temple of Gender Idenniny.

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 

She provides the example of a patient who was put on Bicalutamide and developed liver toxicity.

He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.

Maybe the family should have sued though.

How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.

We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.

Worth it to “be who he or she is”?

Reed got out of that job and tried to put it all behind her, but then…

Then I came across comments from Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who is a high official at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The article read: “Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, said that clinics are proceeding carefully and that no American children are receiving drugs or hormones for gender dysphoria who shouldn’t.”

I felt stunned and sickened. It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience. 

I wonder if Levine knew it was a lie. The nature of Gender Theology can mess with people’s critical thinking skills to the point where they believe absurd reckless claims like that.

There is a clear path for us to follow. Just last year England shut down the Tavistock Centre, the only youth gender clinic in the country, after an investigation revealed shoddy practices and poor patient treatment. Sweden and Finland, too, have investigated pediatric transition and greatly curbed the practice, finding there is insufficient evidence of help, and danger of great harm. 

Some critics describe the kind of treatment offered at places like the Transgender Center where I worked as a kind of national experiment. But that’s wrong. 

Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: “We are building the plane while we are flying it.” No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft.

No one should be a pilot or flight attendant on it either.

At The Free Press (founded by Bari Weiss) we get a long piece by a gender apostate on why she has transitioned to apostasy.

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor. 

So, not just your average social media “activist” but someone who does the gritty hard work. For several years she worked with HIV-positive teenagers and young adults.

Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a trans man, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 

So, not a “terf” even if you think that word names something real.

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 

That might make sense if “treat kids” meant something less drastic than what it has come to mean. Tragically for such kids, it doesn’t.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

So she’s talking about it, despite knowing how radioactive it all is.

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

Which is odd and disturbing, because being trans isn’t medical.

During Jamie Reed’s time there, the proportion of girls showing up with transness skyrocketed.

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t). 

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

How did the doctors know that? How could they know that?

To be continued.

Last week I shared a Slate piece that involved a reckless gun enthusiast who liked to use his gun as well as carry it, and a court ruling that said it is his RIGHT.

To refresh our memories:

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a gun while under a restraining order for domestic violence, the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday in a decision with alarming implications for gun violence in America.

Although mass shootings and intimate partner murders are heavily linked to domestic violence, the 5^th Circuit held that the government cannot disarm alleged abusers solely because they are subject to a civil protective order. The court vacated the conviction of a man, Zackey Rahimi, who possessed a gun after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, and invalidated the federal law that prevents alleged abusers from bearing arms.

Today What a Maroon alerted us to Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post with further details on Zackey Rahimi:

Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Texas. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.

But the 5th Circuit smiles approvingly on his possession of these guns that he fires so casually and recklessly.

Wait though.

Scary Jeffrey says “I coach a lot of people one on one who want to go no contact with their parents and cannot bring themselves to admit it.”

If they can’t bring themselves to admit it then how does he know they want to?

It has to be a kind of gnosis, right? A superior mystical inward Knowledge that special people like Jeffrey Marsh have and others lack?

Which is how the whole ideology works, isn’t it. People have superior mystical inward gnosis that they are the Other sex despite what their bodies look like on the outside. The special enlightened awakened people who Know this are the ones deputized to inform the rest of us of this magical new Enlightenment.

So what Jeffrey March means by “coach people” is that he pushes them to make enemies of their parents even though they have told him they don’t want to.

They feel guilty, they feel awful, they know it’s the right thing they wanna do and they can’t admit it.

They know it’s the right thing they wanna do even though they say it isn’t, and Jeffrey Marsh is the magical gnostic seer who Knows what they want despite what they tell him they want.

The guy is a horror show all by himself.

[Updating to point out that the tweet is wrong about teens; Marsh doesn’t specify age.]

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest…

The World Health Organization (WHO) has placed a senior scientist on administrative leave following a series of complaints of a sexual nature, including an allegation he removed his trousers in the presence of a female colleague.

Aw come on, where’s ya sensa yuma?

The Telegraph has learnt that Dr Maurizio Barbeschi, who led the agency’s Health Security Interface Unit and was a senior advisor to WHO executive director Dr Mike Ryan, was put on leave in late 2021 after a series of complaints were made against him – some stretching back 20 years.

Cool. The complaints go back 20 years, and they suspended him more than a year ago, but nothing more has been done.

An internal investigation is ongoing, but several of those who officially reported Dr Barbeschi in January 2020 are angry the UN agency has not moved to resolve the matter more quickly. 

More quickly than three years.

Former colleagues and WHO consultants described the culture within Dr Barbeschi’s team as a “misogynistic pissing circle” and it’s claimed his inappropriate behaviour had been an open secret for years. 

Misogyny never goes away, it just moves its pieces around the board now and then.

Women need male permission to continue to live.

“You are only as safe as your male partner allows you to be”, the head of a group of leading girls’ schools has said in the wake of the suspected murder of Emma Pattison, the headmistress of Epsom College.

The danger of male violence against women from all backgrounds has been highlighted by Cheryl Giovannini, chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST) following the death of Emma Pattison. 

Meanwhile we’re not allowed to tell the truth about who is male and which people are women.

“It doesn’t matter how successful or accomplished or brilliant you are as a woman, you are only as safe as your male partner allows you to be,” she told the BBC.

Or as the male cop who “arrests” you for “violating Covid isolation rules” and then abducts and rapes and murders you allows you to be, which is zero safe.

[Emma] Pattison, 45, was a widely-respected school leader who was found dead in the early hours of Sunday morning alongside her seven-year-old daughter, Lettie, and husband, George, 39. She had only started as head of Epsom in September, after six years as head teacher of Croydon High School, a girls’ school in South London. 

George had a licensed gun. A gun was found at the scene.

A moment of comedy as George Santos photobombs the bigwigs and Mitt Romney says oh no you don’t.

Senator Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican known for his party-bucking stands and emphasis on moral rectitude, could be seen scolding Representative George Santos, the New York freshman who faces multiple investigations after fabricating much of his résumé.

Mr. Romney admonished Mr. Santos for positioning himself in a prime camera-ready spot in the chamber, saying he didn’t belong there, and had no shame.

“I didn’t expect that he’d be standing there trying to shake hands with every senator and the president of the United States,” Mr. Romney said afterward to reporters who asked about the incident, which was captured on camera and erupted on social media.

He’s a newbie! He’s only been there five minutes! It’s like a 9th grader trying to sit at a table full of seniors and a nerd trying to sit at the cool kids’ table. It’s just Not Done.

Plus…

He added: “Given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room.”

So it’s like a 9th grader who pretended to be a football star from the best school in town trying to sit at the cool kids’ table.

It’s only women.

In President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union since Roe was overturned and half of the country lost their right to be seen as full human beings, abortion barely merited a mention. In a speech where ‘junk fees’ got nineteen sentences, reproductive rights got just four:

“Congress must restore the right the Supreme Court took away last year and codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman’s constitutional right to choose. The Vice President and I are doing everything we can to protect access to reproductive health care and safeguard patient privacy. But already, more than a dozen states are enforcing extreme abortion bans. Make no mistake; if Congress passes a national abortion ban, I will veto it.”

Oh, gee, thanks – IF the situation gets even worse, he’ll say no. Big woop. The situation is bad NOW.

In all, Biden spoke on abortion for about thirty seconds. And while the president found emotion and energy when talking about other issues facing the nation, he seemed to almost shrug out the perfunctory few sentences on abortion.

Well, he’s Joe Biden. He’s never been a feminist. He’s a “devout” Catholic. He threw Anita Hill to the wolves. He’s never been a feminist.

We didn’t even get a full minute of his time.

If President Biden gave American women any message tonight, it’s this: We’re on our own.

It’s only women. He’s not much interested.

Katha Pollitt on “blasphemy” complaints in higher education:

Have we really reached the stage where accusations of blasphemy can get a professor fired? Seriously, blasphemy? In a secular college? In the United States? What century is this? When it comes to being offended on religious grounds, anyone can play the game. A Catholic student can accuse his history professor of bigotry for speaking with insufficient respect for the doctrine of papal infallibility. A fundamentalist Protestant can insist that a biology professor accept an exam answer claiming that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. A Jewish foreign-relations student can insist on an A for a paper claiming that God gave Jews the land of Israel. Left meets right; deference to religion meets the cult of My Feelings.

And, of course, a man who claims to be a woman can accuse his history professor of “transphobia” for any number of ludicrous reasons.

Speaking of critical thinking, can we stop applying the word “Islamophobia” indiscriminately? “Phobia” is a psychological term that means irrational fear. If you think a Muslim family moving into your neighborhood means tomorrow you’ll be living under sharia law, that’s Islamophobia. Back in 2015, a Texas high school had 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed arrested as a bomb maker after he proudly showed his teacher a clock he’d made out of a pencil case. That was Islamophobia. It is not Islamophobic to publicly doubt that Muhammad flew to heaven and back on a magical horselike creature or to conclude that the Quran is the work of human beings, not the direct word of God. The same thought process applies to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Greek myth. Islam is a religion like other religions, and as such should be open to critique and dispute. It’s hardly racist or bigoted to believe we have the right not to live according to religious beliefs we don’t share.

Indeed, and, again, also applies to the religion of Magic Gender Identity.

Originally a comment by latsot on The women of Scotland would bring it.

A couple of videos from the day.

This one is… well, basically it’s a bunch of interviews with men. At an event called Let Women Speak. It has me in it, though :) (just in the crowd, nobody was stupid enough to try to interview me)

But this one is amazing:

And it has Spookie in it! And Lorna! And Dr Em! And Jean from Aberdeen! And the extra benefit of not having me in it!

Seriously, goosebumps with that one. These are ordinary women being absolutely brilliant. Say what you like about Kellie-Jay, nobody else could have made this happen. Nobody.

Do you see how good it was, now?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Appetite is outpacing.

…We’re not going to stop flying…until we reach the point where we can’t fly any longer, whether it is economical, climate induced, or just the total collapse of systems (from environmental damage, much of which is not climate change, and most of which is being ignored right now. How many people are paying attention to the decline of flying insects, for instance? That is crucial…but people ONLY want to talk about climate change).

And we’re lucky if people are even willing to talk about that. Climate change is but a small part of the complex of interlinked, cascading disasters we’ve initiated and continue to fuel. These are themselves the result of a series of stepwise historical developments and processes that have combined to increase our numbers and our impact. Not all of them are immediately material; some are philosophical and conceptual shifts that gave licence to pathways that other mental frameworks may have prohibited. Any of them on their own would have been a major change, but their concatenation has produced a potent force for destruction. In roughly chronological order, some of the big ones are:

The development of settled agriculture: This was an assertion of, and commitment to the imposition of human monopoly over the productive capacity of a landscape, replacing a pre-existing, dynamic habitat with a limited , impoverished one intended solely for human use and benefit. This shift in attitude presages and underlines much of what followed.

The development of colonial empires: Us and Them on a large scale, where hinterlands are conquered for the benefit of the centre or homeland of the conquerors. Control is imposed and resources are extracted.

The “discovery” of the “New World”: This came in two phases, separated by tens of thousands of years. The first humans to arrive in North and South America from Eurasia most likely triggered (or at least assured) the extinction of the Ice Age megafauna, who were, unfortunately, lethally naive when it came to the new, human predators. The second wave, from the Vikings onward, resulted in the devastation of the indigenous societies that had evolved in the preceding millennia. The disease caused human catastrophe was probably inevitable, given the introduction of diseases to which North and South American peoples had no immunity. Even if Europeans had been completely benign and altruistic in their intentions, any contact at all would have still been devastating. The rapacious greed and territorial ambitions of the colonial powers made things that much worse, actively destroying many of the societies already weakened by rampant disease and its attendant disorder and chaos.

The rest of the big turning points I’ll list more quickly.

The exploitation of fossil fuels and the development industrial production methods.

Medicine, public health and the reduction of childhood mortality.

For the last five hundred years the synergistic acceleration of our technology has allowed us to exploit and appropriate more and more of the living and non-living Earth for our exclusive use. Even if we “cure” global warming, we’ll still be an out of control global society pushing beyond the natural limits that the planet had established over billions of years. We’re like some sort of collective Wile E. Coyote, just after he’s careened off the edge of the cliff, obliviously sailing along until he happens to look down. Some of us have been looking down for some time. Soon to come, the inevitable cloud of dust as we hit the canyon floor.

The BBC “apologises” for soliciting yet more abuse of JK Rowling.

The BBC has apologised for its “poor effort” to resist “baseless accusations” of transphobia against JK Rowling on BBC Radio 4. Stacey Henley, a trans woman and editor-in-chief at The Gamer, said the Harry Potter creator was pushing “transphobia” and a “campaign against trans people”. She made the comments while discussing a new Harry Potter video game called Hogwarts Legacy.

Effort shmeffort. Why seek out men who call themselves women to talk about JKR at all? The BBC doesn’t seek out white people who call themselves Black to talk about race and issues around race, does it? Who cares what some guy who runs a gamer mag thinks about JK Rowling? Why ask him? What’s his expertise or relevance? Why does the BBC go looking for people it knows are going to rant about terfs and transphobia to discuss feminist women? Fuck their “apology.” They got what they were looking for: more abuse of Rowling and thus more bullying of feminist women and women in general.