Uh……….

Trump did not disclose $19.8m loan

Donald Trump failed to disclose a $19.8m loan from a company with historical ties to North Korea, while he was the US president, according to a new report.

Documents obtained by the New York attorney general, and reported by Forbes, on Sunday indicate a previously unreported loan owed by Trump to Daewoo, the South Korean conglomerate.

Daewoo was the only South Korean company allowed to operate a business in North Korea during the mid-1990s.

Forbes revealed that Trump’s relationship with Daewoo is at least 25 years old. At one point, Daewoo partnered with Trump on a development project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Trump World Tower.

And the filthy lying criminal toad kept all that secret.

Forbes reports that even though the loan was reported on the Trump Organization’s internal documents, it was not disclosed on the former president’s public financial disclosure reports. Under disclosure laws, Trump was required to submit the documents to federal officials during his presidential campaign and after he became president.

For obvious reasons. People or corporations or countries he owes money to could use the debt to extort favors. Big favors.

What an unfortunate juxtaposition, especially for the UN Human Rights chief.

Maya alerted us to the ridiculous pairing.

All is not well on the trans progressive front. Nobody is progressive enough or trans enough or safe enough. There are no safe spaces. There are no space safes. All the wheels have come off, even the ones that never touched the ground.

Mermaids is refusing to let staff see a report into ousted boss Susie Green’s leadership because there are not “safe spaces” in which to read it.

You can’t trust anyone – not Susie Green, not staff, not Mermaids – no one.

Last weekend, a whistleblower told The Telegraph how Ms Green faced a staff backlash over her “incapable” leadership, culminating in the “nail in the coffin” report, seen by trustees.

Trustees. You can’t trust them either. Where are you when you can’t trust the trustees?

But on Monday staff were told that the board of trustees felt “we can’t safely share the EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] report today as we had planned”.

You can’t even trust the EDI report!

Citing media reports and an “unacceptable risk” to the authors, Mat Maddocks, a Mermaids trustee, wrote in the email that “our first priority is the well-being of our staff and given these events it isn’t possible to create the safe spaces for processing the report that are vital”.

Can you keep track of all these different categories of people who need safe spaces and can’t find safe spaces and say that safe spaces are vital? Because I can’t. I picture a building full of distraught people all trying to prioritize the well-being of everyone else while at the same time preventing everyone else from reading anything written by everyone else.

Oh wait, there’s another set of people.

The audit by the Social Justice Collective (SJC), a diversity group, follows staff complaints about alleged racism, safeguarding after a trustee spoke at a conference sympathetic to paedophiles, and Ms Green “shoving her head in the sand” over scandals.

A diversity group! That’s a social justice collective! Added to the mix! How do they keep track of who is telling which set what to do and who is obeying?

Joanne Harris (Society of Authors important person) is still doing her Sneer At The Feminists thing.

Hur hur Hadley Freeman geddit – the fact that the Guardian wouldn’t let her write about gender ideology doesn’t mean she was canceled hur hur it just means she couldn’t write in the Guardian about an important trend harmful to women despite being a female, feminist columnist at the Guardian. That’s not being canceled hur hur.

It is too so funny hur hur!

Just the SOA hur hur!

Lucy Bannerman at The Times reported in 2018 that Natacha Kennedy was “behind a smear campaign aimed at academics.” (I wrote about it at the time.) Cool to see Sally Hines citing Kennedy as a valuable source a couple of days ago, and even cooler to see Open Democracy publishing an article by Kennedy – an article throwing muck at feminist women who don’t kiss the asses of men who claim to be women.

A transgender lecturer orchestrated a smear campaign against academics across the UK in which universities were described as dangerous and accused of “hate crime” if they refused to accept activists’ views that biological males can be women, it can be revealed.

Natacha Kennedy, a researcher at Goldsmiths University of London who is also understood to work there under the name Mark Hellen, faces accusations of a “ludicrous” assault on academic freedom after she invited thousands of members of a closed Facebook group to draw up and circulate a list shaming academics who disagreed with campaigners’ theories on gender.

And he’s still at it, and Open Democracy publishes him, and Sally Hines recommends what Open Democracy publishes by him.

Sally Hines chastises the BBC for not pampering trans people enough.

It’s embarrassing how seriously the BBC takes trans ideology, that’s what’s embarrassing.

I read the Open Democracy piece the other day and was underwhelmed but if Sally Hines thinks it’s timely n relevant who am I to continue to ignore it. It’s by Natacha Kennedy.

The recent backlash against Graham Norton’s entirely reasonable suggestion that the media talks to more trans people was more revealing than people think.

The media talks to more trans people than what? I think she meant “suggestion that the media should talk to more trans people” but is a bad writer. At any rate, seriously? The media don’t pay slavish enough attention to trans people already? The media never shut up about trans people, which is somewhat annoying to women given how easy they’ve always found it to ignore women.

He came dangerously close to exposing organised transphobia’s core campaign strategy, something they don’t want people talking about. In collaboration with mainstream media, its main strategy has been to liberally platform anti-trans narratives, hermetically exclude trans perspectives, and at the same time accuse trans people of ‘silencing’ transphobes.

Notice that “transphobia” has narratives while trans people have perspectives. Nudge nudge. To put it another way “transphobia” tells lies while trans people have wise reasonable thoughts. Also “transphobes” are not at all silenced, including by this habit of casually throwing buckets of mud at them on all occasions.

For example, a transphobic group holds a rally somewhere – maybe a couple of dozen transphobes in a draughty church hall. There’s a protest outside. A journalist, with confected faux-indignation, then claims trans people are ‘silencing’ them.

How dare they, those sneaky bitches. How dare they hold a rally or meet up in a building. Obviously they don’t do it for the reasons normal people hold rallies or meet up, they do it for obscure but sinister reasons of their own. “There’s a protest outside” – kind of the way there’s a rain storm or an earthquake. It’s not a matter of trans “activists” trying to stop women meeting and organizing, it’s just an impersonal event: A ProTest. Then this wholly innocent uncaused not at all political protest is reported by a journalist. Is that sinister or what?!

There is a name for this mechanism of power: ‘mirror propaganda’. Mirror propaganda means doing to your enemies what you are falsely accusing them of doing to you. 

But they are doing it. Nobody is falsely accusing them of doing it, because of the fact that they are doing it.

As, in fact, is Sally Hines. She’s treating us as illegitimate, and having no right to speak. She thinks an article that compares us to Nazis is good and worth promoting.

So the media creates the myth that trans people are silencing anti-trans activists, while the reality is that every major national media outlet in the UK, from The Guardian and The Times to the Mail and BBC, almost never includes any trans voices.

That’s the reality?

Not unless you change the meaning of “almost” and “never” and “includes.”

Kennedy goes on to compare “transphobes” and their dirty trick of being protested to the Rwandan genocide.

Kennedy is trans.

Joan Smith says goodbye Eddie Izzard:

Eddie Izzard likes pink. Pink coats, pink jackets — they’re all over the website promoting his failed bid to stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election. Labour’s colour is traditionally red but pink is for girls, and Izzard has been campaigning in what he coyly calls ‘girl mode’ for months now.

Triply insulting, isn’t it – the fetish for pink, the pretending to be a woman, the coyly calling it girl mode. Ugh. Imagine a grown woman doing that; now imagine a grown woman doing that in campaigning for public office. Making a game and a joke and an embarrassment of being a female person when you are in fact a man.

There was no pink in sight when Izzard posted a picture of himself with Abtisam Mohamed after she was selected as Labour’s candidate for Sheffield Central. For once Izzard was all in black but still in ‘girl mode’, judging by his high-heeled boots and the quilted bag slung over one shoulder. Other defeated hopefuls might have contented themselves with congratulating the winner but Izzard had to put himself front and centre. Towering over the diminutive Abtisam, he announced that he looked forward to “campaigning with her in the months and years to come”.

Well she’s not a slebrity, is she, and he is.

He towers over her, but to be fair, that’s a glorious photo of her, so props to him for that. He towers but it’s her face that grabs the attention.

It’s just possible that Labour members were put off by Izzard’s shameless self-promotion, which included a claim that he’s done more campaigning than anyone else in the Labour Party: ‘There isn’t a Labour activist who has done more,’ his campaign literature announced. More even than Margaret Beckett or Harriet Harman, who have been MPs for a total of almost 80 years between them? And they’ve done it without making performative gestures about being in ‘girl mode’. 

He identifies as having done more.

It may be that this craven response from the media misled Izzard into over-estimating his popularity. But while people are ready to applaud an actor and comedian who challenges gender stereotypes, they may not be so keen on a man making demands that defy the evidence of their senses. Izzard’s claim to be trans highlights the problem at the heart of self-identification, which is that it requires so little of the individual — but so much of everyone else. 

Let me repeat that, because it’s a gem: the problem at the heart of self-identification, which is that it requires so little of the individual — but so much of everyone else. 

I wish I’d thought of that.

Define “moderate.”

Republican moderate refuses to disown Trump over constitution threat

It doesn’t seem very “moderate” to me to give tacit support to a reckless self-serving criminal bully who says we should tear up the constitution and make him dictator.

“Whoever the Republicans end up picking, I’ll fall in behind” them, Dave Joyce of Ohio told ABC’s This Week, adding that he thought Americans did not want to look back to the 2020 election, the subject of Trump’s lies about electoral fraud and demand for extra-constitutional action.

We don’t want to “look back” at things that happened a few hours ago?

Joyce said: “I will support whoever the Republican nominee is. And I just don’t think that at this point [Trump] will be able to get there because I think there’s a lot of other good quality candidates out there.”

To the host, that was “a remarkable statement. You’d support a candidate who’s come out for suspending the constitution?”

Joyce said: “Well, you know, [Trump] says a lot of things. You have to take him in context. And right now I have to worry about making sure the Republican Governance Group and the Republican majority make things work for the American people. And I can’t be really chasing every one of these crazy statements that come out … from any of these candidates.”

Yes, Trump does say a lot of things, many of which are rock-solid reasons for never voting for him and for doing everything possible to consign him to oblivion. The fact that he does that is not a reason to shrug indifferently and continue to support him.

So that’s good news anyway.

Not Eddie Izzard.

No that’s not it.

It’s not “reducing” people to anything to know what definitions are. Nobody says female body parts are the sum total of women, are what women are about, are all there is to know about women. They’re just the basic equipment, that’s all.

Feminism has challenged the assumption among advertisers and sexist men that tits and ass are all there is to women, but that doesn’t entail saying women don’t have tits.

There’s that misogyny.

Uh huh, a flutter of the eyelashes, that’s us – we’re all Scarlett O’Hara. Just look at all those women fluttering their eyelashes and pleading for protection. The nerve of them.

Jo Bartosch on the elite feminism that can’t define women:

Even seasoned Westminster watchers could be forgiven for not having heard of the Women’s Equality Party (WEP). Co-founded by luvvie-extraordinaire Sandi Toksvig, the group works towards the laudable, if somewhat woolly, aim of making “equality a reality”. But their brand of insipid dinner party feminism is sinking into irrelevance; washed away by a wave of grassroots women’s rights activists who are tired of playing nice.

I love the combination of luvvie-extraordinaire and insipid dinner party feminism. I mean the verbal combination; the actual combination I don’t love at all.

To date, the most notable achievement of WEP’s leader Mandu Reid has been to stand next to a woman who was offended by the late queen’s lady-in-waiting. 

She hastened to write a Guardian piece about it.

Perhaps this is fair enough; wringing political points and publicity out of the news is part of her job. But it is worth noting that neither Reid, nor indeed any of the class of professional feminist, have found a media slot to defend the ordinary women who have been vilified for saying that biological sex matters.

Well, you see, it’s like this. Race is absolute and unmistakable, while sex is malleable and subtle and subjective.

If you say so, but then how does feminism work? What even is feminism?

Oh look, a squirrel.

This is because WEP reject the definition of “woman” as simply an “adult human female” in favour of the idea that any biological male who says he’s a woman should be treated as such. This was confirmed at last month’s conference, where delegates voted to support a system of gender self-identification; transforming the slogan “transwomen are women” into policy. This is about as logical as the Communist Party failing to define ‘worker’ lest it upset industrialists who identify as proletarians.

Or BLM cheerfully agreeing that if Donald Trump says he’s Black then he is.

Just a few days before Reid bore witness to “institutional racism” at the palace, a group of women of all backgrounds met at Hyde Park for a Standing for Women rally, a grassroots membership group. Uniting under the dictionary definition of “woman” as “adult human female”, they sought to raise awareness of the dangers of allowing men to identify as women. They were met by a baying mob of masked counter protesters, some of whom held a large banner reading “Arm Trans People”.

One threw liquid in the face of organiser Kellie-Jay Keen, and another was arrested after physically attacking a woman. There was no statement from WEP, Fawcett or Right to Equality to condemn this, and no round of media interviews

A palace greeter makes a clumsy mistake and there’s an uproar; men threaten and attack women and there’s a pointed gaze in the opposite direction.

It is now abundantly clear that organisations like WEP, Right to Equality and Fawcett do little more than provide jobs for the nice girls network. While they complain about funding and etiquette at the palace, they have been outstripped by a revitalised movement of righteously raging females; the ordinary women that professional feminists are too scared to even define.

Or they just call us Karens.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Seven lousy days.

My dad thought unions were just greedy arms of the mobs until he watched Reagan fire and basically destroy Patelco, the air traffic controllers union. Dad was a Republican government employee of the Customs and all of a sudden he understood at a visceral level what it means to not have the ability to use a strike as bargaining power. It’s amazing that this was all it took to turn a Republican into a Democrat who in his later years took any opportunity he could to lampoon whichever Bush happened to be in the White House.

But, the problem is that there were not enough union members who saw this, and instead were happy to buy into Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” narrative, and the Republicans were able to make inroads into a traditional Democratic base, as the unions were weakened by Reagan’s labor policies.

Me? I think that Congress and the President should have played this a bit differently to force some brinkmanship with the railroads and see if they were willing to blink closer to the Dec 9th deadline. The fear of the strike has been taken away from the rail unions.

I’ve got a combination of paid time off and sick days up to 36 days per year to allocate as I need to. I don’t have as physically demanding a job as railroad workers do.

7 lousy days.

It’s Joe Manchin’s fault. Again. Charles Pierce explains:

Seven paid sick days. That’s what the U.S. Senate couldn’t cough up for the people who work for the country’s railroads, at considerably more risk and for considerably less money than anyone in the U.S. Senate takes or earns. The Senate—especially Joe “Friend Of The Working Man” Manchin, who couldn’t cough up seven lousy sick days—hung the president out to dry on this one, not to mention all the actual rail workers. Marco Rubio voted for the seven sick days. So did Ted Cruz, for pity’s sake. But Joe Manchin couldn’t be bothered. He was too busy planning another TV interview about how the Democrats have lost touch with their blue-collar base, over whom he keeps a watchful eye by night from the aft deck of his yacht. (Please, Georgia, re-elect the reverend so this clown doesn’t have quite as much juice as he does.)

Isn’t it funny how “blue-collar base” means racism and sexism and xenophobia, as opposed to unions and paid sick days and similar luxurious benefits.

This situation is a result of the diminished power of organized labor, a reality that confronts the most labor-oriented president we’ve had in decades. It’s a long trail back to where that power once was, if it’s even possible to get there at all. The money-power has so locked itself in at this point that generations have grown up to believe that organized labor is somehow a detriment to the modern worker and not a benefit. The people doing the real work of organized labor these days are the people doing the hardest work for society in general: service workers, healthcare workers, and, yes, railroad workers.

And factory workers, and workers in meat-processing plants, which are some of the worst places to work in the country.

Now there’s a headline.

Trump’s call for ‘end’ of constitution condemned by Democrats

Only Democrats? Democrats only? So Republicans are fine with it? Let’s tear up the constitution because Trump says so?

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Mr Trump’s comments were “anathema to the soul of our nation”.

“You cannot only love America when you win,” Mr Bates said in a statement. He added that Mr Trump’s comments should be “universally condemned” – seemingly a pointed jab at senior Republicans who have so far avoided criticising the former president’s outburst.

What I’m saying. Trump is publicly saying he should be forcibly installed as dictator and Republicans are just nodding along.

Hadley Freeman in the Times:

What is now known as LGBT rights have firmly taken precedence over women’s rights. In 2021, Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood, an organisation originally established to provide women with contraception, wrote an apology in the New York Times, saying Planned Parenthood had focused “too narrowly on ‘women’s health’, we have excluded trans and non-binary people”. 

It makes me want to smash things. “Too narrowly.” Imagine BLM saying “We’ve focused too narrowly on Black people” – saying it and apologizing for it. Imagine trans people saying they’ve focused too narrowly on trans people…and apologizing for it. It’s only women who are expected to go hungry while the real people eat.

(“What we don’t want to be, as an organisation, is a Karen,” Johnson added, for good measure.) 

It makes me want to smash all the things and then set fire to them.

Planned Parenthood still at it.

Planned Parenthood will do whatever it takes except of course mentioning women.

Trump urges throwing out the Constitution.

Trump on Saturday morning raged on his anti-Twitter app Truth Social about non-existent “fraud and deception” in the November 8th midterm elections – and he proposed scrapping the United States Constitution as a means to reinstall himself into the presidency.

Did he ask nicely?

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump “truthed.”

Well he is an expert in constitutional law so…

Investigation ratchets up:

The Charity Commission has escalated its investigations into Mermaids, the regulatory body announced on Friday, responding to “newly identified issues” about the governance and management of the transgender children’s charity.

Which being interpreted means: “This is worse than we thought.”

The commission will investigate whether there is “serious systemic failing” in Mermaids’ governance and management. The trustees have cooperated fully, but the regulator said their response had “not provided the necessary reassurance or satisfied the commission at this stage”.

But their response identifies as the necessary reassurance.

Investigators will assess whether the charity’s governance is appropriate in relation to the activities it carries out, which involve vulnerable children and young people.

Which involve vulnerable children and young people set on a lifelong path of medical dependency at a minimum.

Mermaids said in a statement that it had separately commissioned an independent external report earlier this year “to carry out a frank and honest appraisal of our internal culture and how we measure up in terms of equity, diversity and inclusion”. 

But those aren’t the issue. There’s too much inclusion. Children are better off being excluded by Mermaids.

“We know we must do better and we are absolutely committed to doing so, and will be implementing the report’s recommendations as a priority. The charity has an unwavering commitment to safeguarding, which is, and always will be, our top priority.”

No it isn’t.

It’s all so maddeningly circular.

How can you be an activist to end violence against women and girls and at the same time insist that men who call themselves women are not men? How can you be an activist to end violence against women and girls if you don’t know which people are women and girls? How can you be an activist to end violence against women and girls if you think some men are women? How do you even know where to begin? Or who needs your activism?

Also I think that bullshit about women’s organizations fearing they’ll be sued by feminists is just that: bullshit.