This is an interesting point – by claiming executive privilege he’s confessed.

Lawyers are laughing at Trump’s filing.

It might be tempting to scrutinize the filing as if it were a serious legal document, submitted in a credible way. That would be a mistake. Orin Kerr, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley, noted overnight that many actual lawyers “are giggling at Trump’s motion, and how poorly it was done.”

Go on, just say it. Badly. The word is “badly.” There’s no need to soften it with “poorly.” Trump isn’t poor, he’s bad.

Among the many problems is the fact that it’s oddly late. The FBI executed its search warrant on Monday, Aug. 8. At that point, federal law enforcement officials reclaimed classified materials the former president brought to his glorified country club, taking stock of what he improperly took. Two weeks later, Trump’s lawyers went to court, apparently in the hopes that the FBI would stop reviewing the documents.

The FBI, with once voice: “Oops! Sorry! Our bad!”

The idea that the FBI’s search was “shockingly aggressive” is even more difficult to take seriously. The Justice Department tried a series of lesser means, including subpoenas and in-person meetings in the hope of avoiding this step. When Team Trump refused to cooperate, the FBI went to court, obtained a search warrant, and executed it in the least aggressive way possible: The bureau sent plain-clothed agents who coordinated in advance with the Secret Service.

I’m guessing that “shockingly aggressive” is trumpese for lèse-majesté. One doesn’t rifle the cupboards of the god-emperor.

The former president keeps calling it an illegal “break-in” and “raid,” hoping that the public will imagine swarms of agents in tactical gear, pointing assault weapons at scared Mar-a-Lago customers. That’s plainly absurd.

To adults it is. Trump aims everything toward people as childish in their thinking as he is. It turns out there are a hell of a lot of them.

Perhaps most entertaining was an accompanying written statement from Trump, which read in part, “This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given to them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.”

Would have given to them when? He’s only had a year and a half already. Also they’re not his to “give” to the National Archives, much less to grab back for his “library.”

That said, misguided court filings sometimes work, and in this instance, the case was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon — a Trump-appointed Federalist Society member, who was confirmed after Trump’s 2020 defeat, and who has a reputation as a far-right jurist.

Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum.

It never ceases to amaze me the way “inclusive” is for trans people but never ever for women. I still say I was never given the option to agree or disagree with the proposition “women are no longer an oppressed group in any way.”

See by giving customers a choice of male or female changing rooms they’re not being “an inclusive retailer,” because they’re excluding female people who don’t want to risk being spied on or assaulted while they try on a bra. It’s stupid and mindless to call it “inclusive” to give men carte blanche to do that.

What an interesting claim:

Regarding Julia Mason and Leor Sapir’s op-ed “The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Dubious Transgender Science” (Aug. 18): In its recommendations for caring for transgender and gender-diverse young people, the AAP advises pediatricians to offer developmentally appropriate care that is oriented toward understanding and appreciating the youth’s gender experience. This care is nonjudgmental, includes families and allows questions and concerns to be raised in a supportive environment. This is what it means to “affirm” a child or teen; it means destigmatizing gender variance and promoting a child’s self-worth. Gender-affirming care can be lifesaving. It doesn’t push medical treatments or surgery; for the vast majority of children, it recommends the opposite.

That’s what “gender-affirming care” means? It doesn’t mean cutting off breasts or penises, or constructing new “front holes” or penises from bits of colon or chunks of arm?

Huh. That’s not how Boston Children’s Hospital uses it. Someone should let them know.

Law-mavens are following the Maralago adventures with keen interest. [Updating to add: the bit about not having a lawyer turns out to be a mistake. H/t Screechy]

Typical Trump, too – always with the overkill. It’s like that hideous gilded apartment in Trump Tower.

The NY Times on Trump’s lavish archive of classified documents:

The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.

There are levels here. He wasn’t supposed to have any documents: they were never his to keep. Multiply that by a very big number for classified documents. Multiply again for the huge number of them.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

More than 300 separate crimes.

The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.

And all this is happening, let’s not forget, at a hotel. A place with hundreds of people wandering around at all times. Trump stole hundreds of classified documents and kept them at his hotel.

Mr. Trump’s allies insist that the president had a “standing order” to declassify material that left the Oval Office for the White House residence, and have claimed that the General Services Administration, not Mr. Trump’s staff, packed the boxes with the documents.

Why would that make it ok? Trump’s saying “declassify all this stuff, I’m taking it home” doesn’t change the nature of the stuff.

The Society of Authors has advice for us.

A lot of authors I follow are annoyed by the condescension of “play nicely.” I read some of the thing we were told to have a peep at, and was struck by a certain omission.

The Society of Authors is committed to promoting professional behaviour throughout all its activities, and to tackling and preventing bullying, harassment and racism in all their forms.

Why racism only? Why not sexism? (There are others, too – classism, xenophobia, etc – but women are half of everyone, so we’re a particularly big item to ignore.)

Bullying, harassment and racism have no place on our premises, in our communications, or in any other environment in which we operate.

But sexism does have a place there?

Our approach

We condemn any kind of racist, hate or unprofessional speech.

Again – why specify racism and leave all the other kinds of hate speech unspecified? In particular why leave the one that targets half the population unspecified?

I asked them but I don’t suppose they’ll answer.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Steve’s nails.

Does Steve think that the only way to rebel against gender stereotypes is to pretend that sex isn’t binary? Does Steve not understand that gender stereotypes aren’t the same as biological sexes? Does Steve think it’s impossible for him to wear nail polish if males and females are in any way different sexes? Does Steve think that by declaring himself neither male nor female he’s on the path to convincing us all that male and female literally don’t exist? Or is it not a matter of whether sex differences do or don’t exist, but whether they should or shoudn’t exist?

None of this makes any sense for more than a second or two. One goes from “ok, nonbinary is like gender bending” — fine so far I guess — but then one sees “oh, wait, they’re saying they’re neither male nor female because they’re gender bending” and after about two seconds of thought, the whole thing just turns into a self-contradictory jumble that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.

That this Travis person can write an entire book without putting so much as two seconds of thought into what he’s talking about is such an incredible level of narcissism, in the words of Ron Burgundy, I’m not even mad; that’s amazing.

Brendan on the narcissism of I don’t even have to say whose narcissism it is.

In his new book None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary, nonbinary writer Travis Alabanza cites this dilemma [to paint the nails or not to paint the nails] as proof of the ‘oppression [of] the gender binary’. He introduces us to Steve, a man who had ‘wanted to paint his nails for years’. But he didn’t because, like the rest of us cis squares, he’d been conditioned into ‘upholding the gender binary’ which says men don’t do that.

But then he saw Alabanza on stage and was EmPowered to paint those mofos.

Alabanza is moved by this brave strike against the forces of oppression. ‘My urge was to hug him’, he writes. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, free at last!

It’s almost too ridiculous for words. There’s page after page in this memoir-cum-nonbinary-treatise about Steve and his nails. Alabanza refers to the ‘trials’ of Steve, to Steve’s ‘oppression from the gender binary’. Turning the histrionics up to 11, he says he found himself ‘mourning Steve’s lost time’. Just to remind you: Steve wasn’t dead or in jail or under house arrest; he just didn’t paint his nails.

It is of course the case that we’re all limited in what we can do by a billion conventions, and that can be more or less sad, limiting, frustrating, and so on. But, as Brendan hints so subtly, there is a limit. It’s not all that sad, for the most part. The Steves of the world could surely wear nail polish for the weekend, for instance, and then remove it if they didn’t want to be giggled at on the job.

The story of Steve’s oppressed unpainted fingernails is only one mad example of gender-binary ‘oppression’ in Alabanza’s book. There’s also the tragic tale of Alabanza feeling he cannot go out in public dressed as a witch.

He can though, but people might laugh at him. Now if he did it in for instance Nigeria he could get himself killed, but Alabanza isn’t talking about Nigeria. He’s talking about getting laughed at.

Alabanza says in his book that the reason he couldn’t go into the ‘male changing rooms’ is because it would be an ‘unsafe place to change’. The men in there would pose a threat to him; he would be ‘at risk from harassment’. So the solution is to make all spaces ‘gender-neutral’ and allow those same men you fear to go anywhere they like, including into the girls’ changing room? The arrogance of this position, the narcissism of it, is astonishing.

But all too typical.

Idiots.

Notice anything missing? Of course: what’s always missing.

It’s not our bodily autonomy, i.e. everyone’s. It’s specifically women’s bodily autonomy. Women are not allowed to be entirely free because women have the responsibility of making the new humans. It is women who are dominated and pushed around by laws against abortion, and it’s yet another insult to women when political campaigns pretend it’s all of us.

The whole post by MoveOn which doesn’t mention women once:

The GOP thought they could strip away our bodily autonomy without facing any consequences. But the recent election in Kansas, one of the country’s most conservative states, proved them WRONG.

The anti-abortion measure on the ballot was defeated in every congressional district in the state. Even in the most conservative districts, people of all political stripes turned out to support abortion. And, crucially, the election’s turnout—which was expected to be relatively low—went through the roof.

Do you know what that means? We can turn the midterm elections this November into a referendum on abortion rights, and we can WIN.

MoveOn wants to get the message out for this fall that we’re going to Roe the Vote and make sure there’s a public, visible movement nationwide to ensure the fight over abortion access is front-and-center for voters.

We’ve just printed a big batch of these stickers and are giving them away for free, while supplies last. Click and order your sticker now while supplies last to proudly display your support for abortion rights and remind those in power that we, the people, hold the real power in this country—and we demand reproductive freedom.

We, the women, demand that you say “women” when you talk about abortion rights.

Let’s insult women some more.

“Hannah” Mouncey is an enormous man. The one woman on this panel is a friend of Mouncey’s.

Putin is aggrieved.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has sent his condolences to the family of Darya Dugina, describing the daughter of the ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin as a “patriot of Russia”.

In a statement published on the Kremlin website, the Russian leader described Dugina’s killing as a “despicable, cruel crime”.

No doubt it was, but what does Putin suppose it was when he launched a war? Was it not a despicable, cruel crime to kill all these Ukrainians?

Trump is insulting his own creatures again.

Donald Trump launched a new line of attack against Mitch McConnell over the weekend, calling the Republican Senate minority leader a “broken down hack politician” for what he believes is a lack of support for the GOP’s 2022 midterm candidates.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump also insulted McConnell’s wife, former Trump administration official Elaine Chao, calling her “crazy.”

So why did he lean so heavily on both of them for such a long time?

“Why do Republican Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard-working Republican candidates for the United States Senate?” Trump wrote on his social media platform Saturday. “This is such an affront to honor and to leadership. He should spend more time (and money!) helping them get elected, and less time helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China!”

An affront to honor – where’d he get that? And if Chao is crazy and corrupt why did Trump make her Secretary of Transportation?

I guess UNICEF is a terf.

Ensuring no child is excluded on the basis of gender is a priority identified in UNICEF’s new Education Strategy. To reach this goal, a commitment to strong intersectoral work is paramount. To understand what this means in practice, this blog outlines how Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) plays a significant role in girls’ access to education and could help unlock the future for millions of girls around the world.

WASH is fundamental for girls’ education

Every child – including every girl – has the right to a quality education, enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child 30 years ago…

For girls, appropriate WASH facilities are a particularly important part of ensuring their safe and healthy participation in school. WASH facilities have both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors for girls’ education. Girls can struggle to attend and stay in school if they do not have safe, single-sex and hygienic facilities, which are essential for menstrual hygiene management (MHM). Although there is still little evidence, reports have recognised that ‘the introduction of appropriate water and sanitation facilities has been associated with improved girls’ attendance.’ In addition, WaterAid notes that ‘girls are particularly at risk of sexual violence when using unsafe facilities at school.’ Indeed, girls in the Cox’s Bazaar refugee camp in Bangladesh have reported feeling fearful in accessing latrines, and UNHCR notes that ‘young girls/children and women who walk long distances to water points are at risk of sexual violence.’

…

In 2015, the world committed to achieving gender parity in education and to build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all with Sustainable Development Goal 4. Approaching this via WASH might seem like a circuitous route. But, in fact, supporting access to safe, hygienic WASH facilities in fragile states is an important step in the road to achieving education for all girls.

Huh. Girls. Who knew?

One of these again.

It really doesn’t take that much thought to see the problem. The authors of this harangue can’t have made any effort at all.

What about the privacy of the person – let’s say, just to pick one at random, the woman – who “feels like” the man she sees in the women’s toilet is in the wrong toilet? Why doesn’t her privacy matter at least as much as his? Why is he in the women’s toilet? Why can’t he use the men’s? Why is it her job to respect his privacy but not his job to respect hers? Why is it her job to protect him from harm when he could be there to do harm to her? Why does anyone have to respect anyone’s “identity” when that’s a matter of respecting a fantasy “identity” that differs from the obvious physical real-world one? And above all, she is using the facilities she feels safe in, and the man is taking that away from her by using them himself – so why is she the one admonished that the man is using the facilities he feels safe in?

I can’t believe this stupid poster hasn’t been laughed out of existence yet.

Misleading if not just plain dishonest.

Nobody is trying to “exclude LGBTQ+ students” from sports or healthcare or education. I’m sure there are way too many religious fanatics trying to convince lesbian and gay students to go straight, and they should stop, but mass exclusion is a different matter. People who aren’t delusional are trying to exclude male students from female sports, because including them is grossly unfair to the female athletes, and endorsement of cheating by the male students.

There are people who consider “gender-affirming” surgeries and hormones not health care but tragic mutilation at the behest of a fad. The NEA should not be supporting the mutilators.

Astrophysics n Mai Gender Idenninny:

It was by pure chance that I wandered into a bookstore and saw Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design on the front table. I cannot tell you what inspired me to pick up a book on cosmology. But I did, and in a few short minutes I had discovered a doorway into a new kind of physics—the kind of physics that doesn’t have all the answers, the kind of physics that disagrees with itself, the kind of physics that is messy and chaotic and, God forbid, fun. I changed my major to astrophysics the next week.

Over the following years, I learned about relativity, and how in the right circumstances time itself can slow. I learned about quantum mechanics, where anything can happen. Rules were no longer absolute. Things I had accepted as fact were really just approximations of unknowable truths.

In college, I would also hear the word “transgender” for the first time. I would meet queer folks in loving relationships. It was drastically different from my first brush with queerness—an encounter with a slur on a sign wielded by members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who came to my hometown to demonstrate when I was 13. At the end of college, I would realize that I myself am bisexual—attracted to my own gender as well as others, just as gravity draws every single thing in the universe to every other thing. It felt natural, like I had found a lower energy state of existence. Yet I still wasn’t in my ground state.

That finally happened halfway through graduate school, when I found the label “nonbinary” through friends on Twitter. With its fluidity and disavowal of the traditional two-gender system, nonbinary felt right.

Ah yes the “traditional” two-gender [aka two-sex] system, so quaint, like gentlemen tipping their hats to ladies on the steam train.

It felt like I had spent my whole life trying to solve a chaotic system only to realize there wasn’t one answer, but many. It was then I realized that I am a photon—possessing qualities inherent to either side of the binary, but ultimately belonging to neither.

…

Physics is always evolving, and gender is, too. When we understand that things are more complex than they appear, we learn. When scientists embrace the complexity of the universe, our science can only improve.

The Guardian interviews Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona house of representatives. He’s the one who refused to help Trump steal the election, and has now lost an election to a Trump attack-dog.

From the beginning, conservatism and the Republican party were interchangeable for Bowers. “Belief in God, that you should be held accountable for how you treat other people, those were very conservative thoughts and the bedrock of my politics.”

Wait. Being accountable for how you treat other people is a conservative value? I beg to differ. For one thing I think it’s a universal value, and for another thing it’s definitely a progressive or liberal or lefty value. Conservatism, at least in the US, endorses or defends or condones all kinds of harsh treatment of other people.

He identifies as “pro-life”, sees the US constitution as being inspired by God, and voted for Trump in the 2020 election. “I campaigned for Trump, I went to his rallies, I stood up on the stage with him,” he said.

See that’s a mismatch right there. Trump is and has always been absolutely notorious for not giving a shit what happens to other people, and for treating people badly himself. It’s the central thing about him. He’s mean and rude and greedy and crooked, and always has been, and he’s proud of it.

I asked Bowers whether, through all this, he had ever doubted his strength to stand up to the onslaught. Were his values tested?

“I never had the thought of giving up,” he said. “No way. I don’t like bullies. That’s one constant in my life: I. Do. Not. Like. Bullies.”

Good but then why was he for Trump until that point? When Trump is such a brazen obvious unmistakable bully?

Originally a comment by Me [that is, “Me” the commenter] on Gearing up.

Just some random observations: Maybe the “T” got blended with the “GLB” because some homosexual males became (for one reason or another) transwomen. The kind who would try to get picked up by straight guys, or who prostituted themselves to “straight” guys. And sometimes these straight or “straight” guys would become enraged with them and beat or kill them.

Since most women are attracted to men, and since sexual attraction isn’t a “lifestyle choice,” I know that I was perfectly able to entertain the possibility that there was a “gender” switch that these “AMAB” people had that made them at least nominally “female.” [I admit to not having given this all that much thought at the time.]

I think a lot of progressive men and women were willing to be compassionate to these transwomen. Perhaps women weren’t prepared to consider them genuinely part of their team but they bore them no ill will.

Then came the whole Gender Studies swill of incoherence and “trans” became this everything and nothing non-falsifiable virus that AGP fetishists (or “kinksters”) could claim as an actual identity. Then, even when they’re convicted rapists, their “trans” status somehow elevates them. In reality, these AGP transwomen are still men with the same statistical propensity to violence as other men (at least). But pointing that out is “bigotry.” And then these heterosexual males (who look like men in drag) claim they have human right to be considered as “lesbians” by actual lesbians.

But these unpalatable AGP types were accompanied by “trans-kids.” Boys and girls so crippled by “gender dysphoria” that they’ll kill themselves if they don’t get puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and masectomies and hysterectomies and other surgeries. And this poor little “trans-girl” who wants to play sports with the “other girls” but reactionary bigots are screaming in “her” face. And so a lot of people think they’re sticking up for “trans-kids.” And the growing numbers of “trans-kids” who detransition are deliberately denied. “So??? You just found out you were CIS after taking a few extra steps!”

And the evil “TERFs” who want to deny transwomen their human rights and deny transmen their status as “bleeders” and “birthing parents” are just as bad and evil as the transphobic conversion-therapy sadists.

And even though radical feminists are perfectly willing to publicly debate these issues and say they want trans people to live their best lives and to be able to love anyone who will have them, they are inundated with rape and death threats and legal harrassment and doxxings and threats to their employment, all in the name of human rights.

And it’s all a healthy part of PRIDE.

God is not optional.

Civil rights advocates are ringing alarm bells about officials distributing “In God We Trust” posters in Texas schools after a state law took effect requiring public campuses to display any donated items bearing that phrase.

“These posters demonstrate the more casual ways a state can impose religion on the public,” Sophie Ellman-Golan of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) told the Guardian. “Alone, they’re a basic violation of the separation of church and state. But in the broader context, it’s hard not to see them as part of the larger Christian nationalist project.”

Christian nationalist or just plain theocratic. Jews and Muslims also have a God.

While the phrase doesn’t explicitly mention any specific religion, many argue that “In God We Trust” has long been used as a tool to forward Christian nationalism.

No doubt it has, but any monotheistic religion can use it, for the obvious reason that the word “God” with the capital G is monotheistic. Same goes for Allah.

Christians were instrumental in putting the phrase on coins during the civil war, Kristina Lee of Colorado State University wrote last year, and ha[ve] since used the phrase as supposed evidence to prove the United States is a Christian nation.

I love “arguments” like that. Christians do a thing and then say the thing they did is evidence for the truthiness of the thing they did. It’s like trans activists waving “TERFS are evil” signs at protests and then pointing to their signs as evidence that terfs are evil. Round and round we go.

Texas state senator Bryan Hughes, who is Republican and said he is the author of the “In God We Trust Act,” celebrated on Twitter, saying that the motto “asserts our collective trust in a sovereign God”.

But it isn’t collective. It’s imposed, which is a different thing. You imposed this “say ingodwetrust everywhere” law on all of us, so you don’t get to claim we all agree with it.

Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights organization, welcomed the initiative and said this might allow for an opportunity for students to learn about other faiths.

Well they would, wouldn’t they. Monotheists join hands to impose their God on all of us, then later they return to killing each other over which God is the real God.

“The notion of trusting God is common across faiths,” CAIR spokesperson Corey Saylor told the Guardian. “Applied through that lens, the posters can foster discussions among Texas students about their various faiths and enhance understanding.”

And atheists can just be the oppressed minority.