Home life with David Carrick according to an ex:

“He used to say: ‘Who do you belong to? You belong to me.’ He said many, many times: ‘You have to obey me. You’re here to serve me.’” The woman described Carrick as a sex addict and alcoholic who started drinking at 7am after returning home from night shifts guarding Westminster VIPs.

She said his three-bedroom terrace house in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, was full of pornography and he became obsessed with emulating violent sexual acts. She said he would often text her pornographic videos while on duty, and if she said she was not interested he would send her “sad face” selfies.

The easy instant availability of porn has been such a wonderful thing for women yeah?

“Sex became really violent,” the woman said. “He wanted me to be the same as a prostitute but I didn’t want to do this kind of stuff. It was weird, crazy stuff and I didn’t accept it and that’s when the fights started.”

But don’t let anyone tell you that prostitution is not a fabulous career choice for women! Sex work is work!

She alleges that Carrick would become violent if she refused, kicking her out of bed and strangling her. She recalled a harrowing experience on holiday in which he tried to force her to drink his urine. “We had a really bad fight because he wanted me to do that,” she said. Fighting back tears, she added: “One time he made me do it. We were having a shower together. You say no and he forces you. He forces you. You want to get away from that situation but you can’t. It’s awful.”

She accused Carrick of raping her on more than one occasion, saying: “I would say no and then wake up with him on top of me … He’s not a normal person – but he used to call me frigid.”

Carrick also restrained her using his police-issue handcuffs, sometimes lashing her wrist to her ankle and leaving her immobile. She recalled once being handcuffed at his home for hours after he claimed to have lost the key. “I started crying, saying I was going to call my family and he said he had to go to his base in central London to get the key.”

Don’t worry, it’s just kink, it’s fine.

The woman said she ended the relationship a year later after Carrick handcuffed her before throwing her outside naked in the middle of the night. Carrick then blackmailed the woman in an attempt to make her stay with him, she claimed. “He told me: ‘I’ll put drugs in your car and call the police. Who are they going to believe?’” But she told Carrick she was going to report him to the police and he eventually stopped harassing her.

He stopped; it’s in the past; what’s the big deal?

Why Andrew Tate moved to Romania:

In one of his social media videos, Andrew Tate explains why he moved to Romania in 2017.

“One of [my reasons] is the #MeToo era,” he says. “People say: ‘Oh you are a rapist’. No, I am not a rapist, but I like the idea of being able to do what I want, I like being free.”

“If she goes to the [Romanian] police and says: ‘He raped me yesterday’, they’ll say ok, do you have evidence? Is there CCTV proof?”

Yes quite. Rape is such a fun crime for the perp, because all you have to do is turn the CCTV off and you’re golden. Everybody knows women are all lying Karens, so it’s generally quite safe to rape them.

Originally a comment by Piglet on Holy dread.

I can’t get over how pathetic it is. There are so many fantasy novels out there that they could read, including ones by trans authors and with trans characters, yet they’re hung up on this one. It would be so easy to move on and read a different book. I used to love the music of the Smiths, but Morrissey turned out to be such a prick that I haven’t been able to listen to them anymore. That’s OK, plenty of other bands out there. Conversely, I know Jewish opera fans who enjoy Wagner, feminists who love James Brown, CSA survivors who still listen to Michael Jackson. They accept that you can enjoy the music without signing off on everything the artist did and believed in.

But this “I can’t move on and let go of these books so I’m going to steal the credit for writing them” routine is bullshit. As long as they keep reading those books, they’ll know that JKR wrote them and got the royalties for them, and it will torment them because you can never completely lie to yourself. You can’t half-ass a damnatio memoriae, so move on from reading Harry Potter. Hell, JKR herself has moved on from writing Harry Potter – her other projects are selling very nicely thank you very much, because she is a genuinely creative person, while all they can do is plagiarise and imitate and rebrand and steal. Pathetic.

High up London cop turns out to be a serial rapist. What a surprise.

A Metropolitan police officer has been revealed as a serial rapist who committed more than 71 serious sexual offences, despite the force being told of repeated allegations over two decades that he was a threat to women.

Well twenty years isn’t that long, and you don’t want to rush these things. It’s better to wait and see how it all plays out.

PC David Carrick, an armed officer in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, admitted on Monday to 49 counts – some detailing multiple offences, against 12 women.

Police and prosecutors say he exploited his position as a Met officer to lure women, then terrorise them into staying silent about his sexual attacks and degradation of them.

The scale of offending by Carrick, 48, spanning 17 years, makes him one of the worst sexual offenders in modern criminal history.

He pleaded guilty to the final offences against him on Monday at Southwark crown court, allowing reporting restrictions to be lifted.

He’s one of the worst sexual offenders in modern criminal history (that we know of) and he’s a cop. Brilliant.

After more than a year of pre-trial hearings covered by tight reporting restrictions, Carrick pleaded guilty to the final six charges on Monday, having pleaded guilty in December to 43 charges.

In all Carrick admitted 49 charges, some of which detailed multiple instances of offending.

In total the Met officer entrusted with a gun and guarding some of the country’s most sensitive sites pleaded guilty to 24 counts of rape, nine counts of sexual assault, five counts of assault by penetration, three counts of coercive and controlling behaviour, three counts of false imprisonment, two counts of attempted rape, one count of attempted sexual assault by penetration, one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and one count of indecent assault.

…

Police suspect Carrick had other victims who have yet to come forward, or who told detectives of the Met officer’s attacks on them but could not face the ordeal of a trial, which is notoriously gruelling for victims of sexual violence.

And not likely to succeed anyway.

Harriet Wistrich, of the Centre for Women’s Justice, said: “All these revelations in the context of the wider picture that has been revealed of misogyny within the Met is seriously undermining of women’s confidence in the police …

“[Carrick’s] crimes, along with a significant number of other Met police officers, reveals the a deeply rotten misogynistic culture that has been allowed to exist within the Met.”

These are hate crimes more than they are sex crimes.

Now the reporting restrictions have been lifted, the Guardian can reveal part of the until now secret reason Cressida Dick was ousted as Met commissioner in February 2022 by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, was the Carrick scandal, as details emerged of his offending and possible Met errors.

Oh that’s interesting.

In a statement Khan, who is also the police and crime commissioner for London, said: “Londoners will be rightly shocked that this man was able to work for the Met for so long and serious questions must be answered about how he was able to abuse his position as an officer in this horrendous manner.

“The work to reform the culture and standards of the Met has already started … But more can and must be done, including acting on the findings of the forthcoming Angiolini inquiry, and I will continue to hold the Met to account as they work to implement the reforms needed.”

Fine, but he needs to unsack Joan Smith. She’s been reporting on this subject for decades.

Don’t utter the name!!

A Canadian trans artist is taking JK Rowling’s name off Harry Potter books and reselling them without it following the debate about the writer’s views on trans issues.

Is a trans artist someone who claims to be an artist but isn’t actually a literal artist?

More to the point, what a childish and spiteful little hobby. Some observers are saying it’s a violation of copyright, but we can say for sure it’s childish and spiteful.

Artist Laur Flom is now removing her name from books about the boy wizard, before giving the books new covers and selling them for £140.

It has been reported that some of the proceeds are then donated to transgender charities.

Some. That’s still quite a hefty profit.

The faculty of the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota issued a statement of its own, a far better one.

The tenure-stream faculty of the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota writes to address the recent non-renewal of adjunct instructor, Dr. Erika López Prater, from her term appointment at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As has been widely reported, and especially well documented in a New York Times article of January 8, 2023, Dr. López Prater showed a 14th-century manuscript painting depicting the Prophet Mohammad in her art history survey course, prompting student complaint and the subsequent cancellation of Dr. López Prater’s spring semester course. This happened without the due process of formal investigation, without an opportunity for Dr. López Prater to respond to the administration’s ill-informed and unfounded accusations, and without good-faith institutional investment in open dialogue or the restorative practices of communication and relational repair. The blame for the mishandling falls entirely to Hamline’s administration.

One, two, three. No due process, no chance to respond, without institutional investment in open dialogue and relational repair.

In response, we offer this unanimous statement from our position as tenure-stream faculty at the only PhD-granting institution in art history in the state of Minnesota and as faculty in a department that has long been proud to be a leader in the field of Islamic art. These distinctions overlap. We are uniquely positioned to serve and learn from Minnesota’s rich and diverse Islamic communities, which include students who we know regularly negotiate an educational landscape often pitched against them.

That’s how it’s done. They’re passionate about Islamic art and they’re passionate about students from rich and diverse Islamic communities who feel beleaguered. I bet they’re a lot more passionate about those actual students than the goons who fired Dr. López Prater are. I bet the goons are just afraid of them.

It is in view of all of this that we offer our strong support of Dr. López Prater, an alumna of our graduate program who achieved her PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota in 2019. We view her course at Hamline to uphold the standards and norms of our discipline and its changing, global canon. We also admire Dr. López Prater’s thoughtful approach to teaching, as demonstrated by, among other things, her clear and sophisticated understanding that historical knowledge always intersects with contemporary circumstances and experiences. 

As art historians, we believe that images and objects are unique sources of cultural information. Our job is to study them in their original and ongoing historical contexts — contexts that we understand to be widely varied, overlapping, and dynamic. As art historians, we believe in the unique power of images and objects in social life. Our discipline treats that power with responsibility and respect. As educators, we are challenged to make past worlds alive and relevant to contemporary viewers, which we do through the conveyance of artworks, even when it means presenting cultural realities that are distinct from or even anathema to our own. Indeed, we study artworks from the past precisely because they were understood in their own time very unlike how viewers might apprehend them now. This is what makes them indispensable records of individual, cultural, and historical difference. 

There. They make me want to study art history. They also make me want to cheer and applaud and fling roses.

Dr. López Prater’s course included a discussion of a medieval Persian painting, commissioned by the Il Khanid Prime Minister, Rashid al-Din for an illustrated manuscript known as Jami al-Tawarikh: Compendium of Histories. The Compendium itself is widely considered to be the first truly global written history, covering all time periods and religions of the known world. Illustrated copies were made in both Arabic and Persian, the main languages of the Muslim world at the time, and distributed widely to libraries. Rashid al-Din established a trust so that at least one copy would be made every year to ensure its longevity and spread. In other words, the book’s paintings had a wide audience in the 14th century, achieving something akin to what we might now call public domain. Illustrations from the Compendium, including the image at the center of the Hamline controversy, are considered masterpieces in Islamic art history, commonly taught in college and university courses, and reproduced in Yale University Press’s textbook, The Art and Architecture of Islam, by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, as well as in many other specialist publications. 

And it’s a beautiful image. As I mentioned when I first posted about this, it’s not literally an image of Mohammed, because it was hundreds of years after he lived, and they didn’t have photos. It’s an image of their idea of him, and a very humane image it is. It’s sad as well as bad that it’s taboo.

Including the Jami al-Tawarikh illustration in a classroom lecture and displaying it at length allowed Dr. López Prater to analyze its considerable formal merits, to explain the artistic and theological diversity of Islamic visual histories, to demonstrate their change over time and across cultural geographies, and indeed to present Islamic artistic and scholarly traditions as having always been central, not peripheral, to a global, cosmopolitan world. For all these reasons, we agree with the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s statement of January 9, 2023, which affirmed Dr. López Prater’s lecture as useful to the effort “to combat narrow understandings of Islam” and so also “to combat Islamophobia” writ large. Such a perspective does not delegitimize student experience or obviate the need for sustained conversation when classroom harm and cultural offense occurs. It is this experience of active discussion, response, disagreement, and curiosity about alternative perspectives that we as art historians and college educators often enjoy most about our classrooms.

But Hamline just said get out.

In its removal of Dr. López Prater from its teaching roster, Hamline’s administration took an explicit stand against higher education’s longstanding tradition of instructional prerogative, compromising the freedom of college-level instructors to make individual selections and decisions in presenting expert knowledge of all stripes (factual, theoretical, interpretive, editorial). This prerogative goes by the term “academic freedom” and it is an extraordinary privilege. As faculty, we cherish this privilege as necessary to our scholarly enterprise and earned through our pursuit of scholarly inquiry, knowledge, and insight. We take the responsibility that comes with this privilege seriously, practicing it within the social contract of the university classroom and the responsive learning communities we seek to forge there. Academic freedom, too, is a privilege we fear is currently under threat, a precarity made worse specifically by the casualization of academic labor via the underpaid adjunct gig economy and the disposability of expertise in pursuit of rising revenues. 

Isn’t it nice to read people who know how to write? And think?

Big thanks to Sackbut for alerting us to the letter.

The Times reports on that firing of an academic who showed an image of Mohammed in an art history class we talked about last month.

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

Let me just interrupt here to say it’s an art history class and students shouldn’t be able to impose their religious taboos on all the students in the class. Their deeply held religious beliefs should be their problem, not everyone else’s. If they can’t tolerate images of Mo then they shouldn’t take an art history class.

In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.

In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.

Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.

She’s an adjunct. Adjuncts don’t have the protections that academics with tenure have. It’s easy to fire them.

Officials at Hamline, a small, private university in St. Paul, Minn., with about 1,800 undergraduates, had tried to douse what they feared would become a runaway fire. Instead they ended up with what they had tried to avoid: a national controversy, which pitted advocates of academic liberty and free speech against Muslims who believe that showing the image of Prophet Muhammad is always sacrilegious.

But again, whether they believe it’s always sacrilegious or not, they don’t get to impose their beliefs on everyone else. If Christians don’t want to engage in a discussion of the historical Jesus and whether he existed or not, then they shouldn’t take a class in the subject. Same goes for snapshots of Mo.

A senior in the class went whining to the administration. Other students, not in the class, added their whines. The university lay on the floor while the whiners walked up and down on it.

Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.

Minnesota has a sizable population of immigrants from Somalia. Minnesota should by all means welcome them, but it shouldn’t impose their religion on anyone (including the immigrants themselves).

Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.

“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”

But lots of things are against lots of faiths. If people go out into the wider world instead of staying inside a religious enclave, they give up the power to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else.

And it’s actually not important that students – any students – feel safe, supported and respected in the sense of shielded from material that violates their tedious religious taboos. It’s actually important that students not feel sheltered in that way, because otherwise they won’t learn much.

Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.

“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”

And then used as a weapon against hapless art history professors who don’t have tenure.

Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.

Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.

Oh for fuck’s sake. No it’s not.

“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.

Zing.

The good news is she doesn’t particularly want to stay, and has job offers.

But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

The administration, after meeting with the school’s Muslim Student Association, would host an open forum “on the subject of Islamophobia,” he wrote.

Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.”

I bet David Everett loves to call women terfs, too.

At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.

…

Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.

The main speaker was Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group.

Ah yes CAIR – not so much a Muslim civil rights group as a theocratic Islamist rights group.

The instructor’s actions, he said, hurt Muslim students and students of color and had “absolutely no benefit.”

“If this institution wants to value those students,” he added, “it cannot have incidents like this happen. If somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.”

What an ugly and stupid thing to say. Hamline is a university, not a madrasa (and not a monastery either). Universities teach “controversial stuff” all the time – it’s an important part of the job.

Mark Berkson, a religion professor at Hamline, raised his hand.

“When you say ‘trust Muslims on Islamophobia,’” Dr. Berkson asked, “what does one do when the Islamic community itself is divided on an issue? Because there are many Muslim scholars and experts and art historians who do not believe that this was Islamophobic.”

Mr. Hussein responded that there were marginal and extremist voices on any issue. “You can teach a whole class about why Hitler was good,” Mr. Hussein said.

Again – that’s a stupid thing to say. Showing an image of Mohammed – from an Islamic tradition – is not remotely comparable to saying Hitler was good.

During the exchange, Ms. Baker, the department head, and Dr. Everett, the administrator, separately walked up to the religion professor, put their hands on his shoulders and said this was not the time to raise these concerns, Dr. Berkson said in an interview.

How horrible. How disgusting. Get your hands off me and yes it is the time, it’s exactly the time.

But Dr. Berkson, who said he strongly supported campus diversity, said that he felt compelled to speak up.

“We were being asked to accept, without questioning, that what our colleague did — teaching an Islamic art masterpiece in a class on art history after having given multiple warnings — was somehow equivalent to mosque vandalism and violence against Muslims and hate speech,” Dr. Berkson said. “That is what I could not stand.”

Seriously. Bringing in the CAIR guy just made it more like that.

A higher up CAIR guy has a much better take.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the deputy executive director of the national chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that he did not have enough information to comment on the Hamline dispute. But while his group discourages visual depictions of the prophet, he said that there was a difference between an act that was un-Islamic and one that was Islamophobic.

“If you drink a beer in front of me, you’re doing something that is un-Islamic, but it’s not Islamophobic,” he said. “If you drink a beer in front of me because you’re deliberately trying to offend me, well then, maybe that has an intent factor.”

“Intent and circumstances matter,” he said, “especially in a university setting, where academic freedom is critical and professors often address sensitive and controversial topics.”

He should have a word with Mr. Hussein.

Allons enfants:

Parisians will be invited to vote on whether to allow electric scooter rental services to continue operating in the French capital as authorities weigh banning the controversial for-hire vehicles, the city’s mayor has said.

Do it. Those things are a nightmare. People zoom silently down the sidewalk [pavement] on them, risking the lives of all pedestrians.

The issue is “extremely divisive”, Anne Hidalgo told the weekend edition of Le Parisien newspaper, with critics saying riders show only cursory respect for the rules of the road.

Cursory meaning zero.

They often defy bans on riding on pavements, or park without consideration, while some abandon the scooters in parks or even toss them into the Seine river.

…

David Belliard, Hidalgo’s deputy in charge of urban transport, still said a cost-benefit analysis did not favour the rental schemes. “They are in the way and they are dangerous,” he said, saying he favoured a ban to “pacify our streets and pavements”.

There was “too much negative feedback” from citizens about the scooters, he said.

Get rid of them. Set an example.

Let Women Speak part one:

Apparently the audio cuts out a lot, so be warned.

Part 2 is refusing to embed so here is Part 2.

H/t latsot

Interesting. It seems that if you’re in the military, reporting rape=having a “personality disorder” and getting discharged.

Hundreds of female members of the Armed Forces who accused their colleagues of rape were “misdiagnosed” with having a personality disorder, The Telegraph can reveal.

You can kind of see the logic, I guess. No one but a personality disordered person would accuse a colleague of rape. It’s such a…disordered thing to do.

The victims claimed that after they sought help for sexual assault from the military’s departments of community mental health (DCMH), they were “written off” with emotionally unstable personality disorder and subsequently medically discharged.

Very community mental health. I’m sure it did wonders for them.

Paula Edwards, the chief executive of Salute Her UK, a charity for female military personnel who have experienced sexual assault and rape, said that victims were being “overdiagnosed and misdiagnosed” so that the military can “get rid of the problem”.

By throwing out the victims and keeping the perps. It’s a very good idea to keep the military well stocked with rapists.

Ms Edwards told The Telegraph that it became a “common theme” for young women to have the diagnosis on their medical records when accessing support from her charity.

“It is a worrying pattern,” she said. “A woman is raped so she goes to DCMH. She’s understandably all over the place. She might be suicidal. But instead of the medical practitioner seeing it as post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD], they diagnose her with a personality disorder. 

“You can’t serve in the military with this diagnosis, which enables the military to get rid of the problem.”

It’s not at all personality disordered to rape, but it’s very personality disordered to report rape. That’s the long version of bitches be lyin’.

Read the whole thing. It’s infuriating.

Originally a comment by latsot in Miscellany Room.

I’m going to the Standing For Women event in Newcastle today. There are expected to be ‘counter-protesters’ there (by which I mean crybabies in masks) so there might be interesting things to report.

If you want to follow what’s happening on Twitter, the official account is @SFWnortheast and the most relevant tags are #LetWomenSpeak, #LetWomenSpeakNewcastle, #WomenTalking.

I expect footage of the talks (if they are allowed to take place) will be on KJK’s various spaces at some point. I’ll be filming what I can, but I won’t be able to get decent footage of the talks. I need my hands to get around so I’ll be using a chest-mounted camera and I’ll be in a crowd. And The mic isn’t great.

If you don’t know what these events are about, here’s KJK talking about the Newcastle one:

Oh yes about that guy with his dick out:

Victoria Centre statement over pictures of person exposing themselves in House of Fraser

Not themselves, just himself. He’s a guy.

A statement has been issued after photos of a person appearing to indecently expose themselves in a Nottingham designer shop caused rage on social media. The censored pictures have been widely shared on social media, depicting a person seemingly exposing their private parts in public.

What an abominable piece of writing. The photos were of a man apparently flashing in a Nottingham shop.

Users have identified the shop where the pictures were taken, which was in various locations across House of Fraser, in Nottingham’s Victoria Centre. The person seems to pull up their skirt slightly, revealing stockings, while posing at the camera smiling.

The man. His skirt. Also that was only one of the photos; the others were more…er…direct, although I’ve only seen them with an emoji over the actual naughty bits.

pause to rummage through Twitter

Ah yes, this is the one.

Police seize Andrew Tate’s supplementary penises:

Several luxury cars have been seized from British-American influencer Andrew Tate’s property in Bucharest.

British-American for-profit misogynist, they mean.

After the arrests on 29 December, police said they had identified six people who were allegedly “sexually exploited” by what it called an “organised criminal group”.

Six people? Not six women? Were some of them men?

Police alleged the victims were “recruited” by the British citizens, who they said misrepresented their intention to enter into a relationship with the victims – which they called “the loverboy method”.

They were later forced to perform in pornographic content under threat of violence, a statement alleged.

That certainly sounds as if all six were women. Why not say “women” then?

Trans people in the bible! Jesus lifts up gender-queer people as model disciples!!

Also how fast can we talk let’s try to set a record

Is the long arm of the law finally reaching out to grab Trump by the shoulder?

Even as Donald Trump prepares to dial up his campaign to take back the White House, the former US president’s political and personal fate may already have been decided by the secret workings of a grand jury in Georgia.

The 23-member panel, convened to consider whether Trump and others committed crimes in trying to overturn his defeat in Georgia when it appeared the state might decide the outcome of the entire 2020 presidential election, was dissolved on Monday after submitting its conclusions and asking that they be made public.

…

In November, the day before Trump announced he was again running for the White House, the Brookings Institution in Washington published a report that concluded he is “at substantial risk of prosecution” in Georgia including for improperly influencing government officials, forgery and criminal solicitation. The report said Trump may even be vulnerable to charges under anti-racketeering laws written to combat the mafia.

May be, but on the other hand, our apparently infinite capacity for finding reasons not to do anything about Trump may protect him yet again.

Norman Eisen, the lead author of the Brookings report and former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, said he thinks charges against Trump are “highly likely”.

“The evidence is powerful and the law is very favourable to the prosecutors in Georgia,” he said. “I believe the [special grand jury] report very likely calls for the prosecution of Trump and his co-conspirators.”

Here’s hoping – and not just because it’s Trump, either, but also because we shouldn’t have an unwritten but still binding rule that guys like Trump (and Trump himself) can do whatever they want all the time with no consequences just because they are rich or famous or ex-presidents.

Willis launched her investigation into “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results” just weeks after the former president left office. The investigation initially focused on a tape recording of Trump pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to conjure nearly 12,000 votes out of thin air in order to overturn Joe Biden’s win.

Willis expanded the investigation as more evidence emerged of Trump and his allies attempting to manipulate the results, including the appointment of a sham slate of 16 electors to replace the state’s legitimate members of the electoral college. The fake electors included the chair of the Georgia Republican party, David Shafer, and Republican members of the state legislature who have been warned that they are at risk of prosecution.

No biggy, just a known crook doing everything he can think of to steal an election.

Special grand juries are rare in Georgia. Unlike the regular kind, they cannot indict. But they can sit for much longer and have wider powers to subpoena. Willis recognised that if she was to build a case against such a divisive political figure as Trump, and convince a jury in a criminal trial, the evidence would have to be rock solid, and that would take time and depth.

Willis used the grand jury’s powers to good effect. She called a parade of witness, including many of Trump’s closest allies and lawyers. Some fought their subpoenas including Senator Lindsey Graham who went all the way to the US supreme court in a failed attempt to avoid giving evidence.

Raffensperger was the star witness. Trump told him to find the votes; he told Trump the votes weren’t there to find.

Trump tried to claim that the vote had been rigged by alleging that ballot boxes were stuffed and other irregularities. Then the president said: “All of this stuff is very dangerous stuff when you talk about no criminality. I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.”

Raffensperger saw that for what it was.

“I felt then – and still believe today – that this was a threat,” he wrote. “Others obviously thought so, too, because some of Trump’s more radical followers have responded as if it was their duty to carry out this threat.”

Raffensperger said he and his wife were subject to death threats.

Trump remains at liberty, free to threaten others.

Giuliani is likely to have been asked about false testimony he gave to Georgia legislators the month after the presidential election, including claims that voting machines were rigged and that thousands of teenagers below the voting age had cast ballots. A New York court suspended his licence to practice law last year over his “demonstrably false and misleading statements regarding the Georgia presidential election results”.

But he too is still at liberty, free to bribe and threaten and lie.

Those who have worked with Willis say she is unlikely to shy from prosecuting Trump if she deems it appropriate. She is known to be a fan of anti-racketeering laws, having used them to prosecute public school teachers who were part of a cheating scandal.

It’s seen as in some sense extreme to prosecute Trump, because he’s a former president, but the fact that he’s a former president is a compelling reason to prosecute him. His crimes are against all of us, on the planet as well as in this one country.

It’s like Nazi Germany. Just like. No difference.

No he doesn’t.

There is no resemblance. None. Pretending there is is a disgusting form of narcissism.

That’s…………..what we’re saying.

That’s the whole point. Gender-neutral awards=women being forgotten. That’s why there have to be awards specifically for women. If the Oscars didn’t have a Best Actress category women would have vastly fewer awards, because most movies have few women and those few women have few lines.

But

I do not care. If people like Emma Corrin and Sam Smith are so determined to present themselves as Special, they can do it at their own expense, not everyone else’s.

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

An NHS Trust taking over care of trans children from the Tavistock clinic is being trained by controversial charity Mermaids, The Telegraph can reveal.

Why go to all the trouble of removing care of trans children from the Tavistock only to get training from Mermaids? Why not find people who aren’t captive to a deranged ideology?

The charity, which is at the centre of a number of safeguarding rows and is currently under investigation by the regulator, will provide sessions for staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) starting this month.

It’s under investigation, but in the meantime – “Keep doing what you’ve been doing!”

Mermaids’ influence on the Tavistock was cited by some whistle-blowers as one of the reasons why it lost its way, with claims that activists put pressure on clinicians to affirm children’s belief that they were trans and to prescribe potentially life-altering drugs.

Ya think?

Medics who blew the whistle on Tavistock said that the trans charity’s involvement with SLaM is a cause for “concern” and that previous training has been “inaccurate and misleading”. They called for a “completely different approach” at the new NHS service.

But but but we don’t want to. We want to go on doing what we were doing.

Sue Evans, a Tavistock nurse who first raised concerns in 2005, told The Telegraph: “My experience was that groups like Mermaids exerted pressure on the clinical service which was not always helpful in terms of thinking about patients holistically.”

Mermaids doesn’t do holistic. Mermaids knows one thing and one thing only.

Mermaids say that its Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training is “tailored to the needs of your organisation, exploring: gender diversity, barriers faced by trans people, transitioning and treatment pathways, and ways to improve your diversity policies and procedures.”

If you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.

Consultant psychotherapist Dr Marcus Evans, who resigned from the Trust over their treatment of whistle-blowers, told The Telegraph “There are a lot of parents who are already worried after Tavistock said it would be involved in advising the new service providers, and now Mermaids is offering training as well.

“The old service system is discredited. We need a completely different approach that avoids preoccupation with gender to the exclusion of all other facets of the family, child and young person’s personality and development.”

But without preoccupation with gender, life has no meaning.

A SLaM spokesman said: “This training is not related to the development of an early adopter service for children and young people experiencing gender incongruence and gender dysphoria.

“We commission as well as directly provide high-quality professional training courses from a wide range of providers as part of our training offer for our staff to further support the provision of personalised, safe and therapeutic care for young people and adults using mental health services.”

But Mermaids isn’t high-quality. It can’t provide high-quality training courses because it’s not high-quality itself. It’s myopic and obsessive; its quality is low.

A genius comments on Joan Smith’s The Brits go gender-neutral and women disappear:

This is the real paradox of late stage feminism, by insisting that women can be equal to men in everything and anything they have forced women to compete in spaces and venues where Nature has given men genetic advantages – hence women are pushed down the hierarchy.

Yes indeed, women are genetically inferior to men in the writing novels departments, which is why we’ve never heard of Jane Austen or Emily Bronte or George Eliot or Charlotte Bronte or Edith Wharton or Willa Cather or Mary McCarthy or Margaret Drabble or Margaret Atwood.

Let’s drop the sex categories for the awards, they said! Let’s make the awards gender-neutral, they said! It will be awesome, they said!

Who could possibly have predicted that would happen? The top category in a major music award goes ‘gender-neutral’ — and this year’s nominees are all men. The Brit Awards scrapped the best male and best female categories last year, ignoring warnings that the decision would lead to the exclusion of women. Five male artists, including Stormzy and Harry Styles, are in the running in 2023, with not a woman — or a gender-neutral person — in sight.

Welllllllllll but then obviously that’s because women aren’t as good, isn’t it? Not at all because women just get overlooked and forgotten and discouraged from trying in the first place.

Separate male and female categories are one of the few mechanisms that exist to protect women artists, actors and authors from male-dominated prize lists. The then Orange prize for fiction was created in the 1990s to challenge the absence of widely-admired female authors, such as Angela Carter, from Booker prize shortlists.

Sorry, women just aren’t designed for writing good novels. Their shoulders are too narrow and their hips are too wide.

This is another example of what happens when an organisation decides to address a problem that doesn’t exist; sex is binary and few people genuinely believe that artists who ‘identify’ as gender-neutral are neither male nor female. The comically self-obsessed singer Sam Smith comes to mind — he was excluded from nomination in the best male artist category at the Brit Awards in 2021 after adopting ‘they/them’ pronouns — but it’s hard to see why up-and-coming female musicians should pay the price for his delusions.

It’s because they’re all Karens, every last one of them. All suburban, all white, all Karen.