Photographic confirmation – Trump grinning and poking his thumb up at Arlington National Cemetery.

Oh COME on.

Really? Really? Because Islam famously stands for women’s rights and women’s visibility and women’s non-erasure?

On what PLANET you woman-hating goon?

Is it goodbye Don at last?

Democrat Kamala Harris has surged ahead of Republican Donald Trump, 48%-43%, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found.

The findings reflect an eight-point turnaround in the presidential race from late June, when Trump had led President Joe Biden in the survey by nearly four points.

…

“I think people are cautiously optimistic that they’re going to have a lot better chance with Harris than they would have had with Biden going head-to-head with Trump,” said Amy Hendrix, 46, of Fort Worth. An independent who usually votes Democratic, she was among those called in the poll. “I’m very excited to vote for a woman, and that’s just the truth.”

I’m excited to smack Trump in the face again.

The Army slaps Trump upside the head.

The US Army issued a stark rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over the incident on Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, saying in a statement on Thursday that participants in the ceremony “were made aware of federal laws” regarding political activity at the cemetery, and “abruptly pushed aside” an employee of the cemetery.

“Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,” the Army spokesperson said in the statement on Thursday.

“This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve,” the statement said.

So there, Bonespurs.

The obligatory insult:

Aw, gee, look how enlightened and sensitive and generous the man is when he explains why husbands have to beat their wives. It’s interesting, though, that he doesn’t also explain why wives have to beat their husbands, or even say they do have to beat their husbands. Apparently it’s just men who get to do the beating and women who get to be beaten.

The purpose of the beating, he says earnestly, is to warn the wife that the family is in danger. He doesn’t explain why that can’t be done just by saying it, or how he knows the family is in danger, or in danger from what. Also that the marital relations are in danger, he goes on. It’s odd that he thinks beating her will remove the danger. We secular weirdos think that marital relations should be based on affection, not beating. Beating doesn’t promote affection.

The beating is to tell her to be cautious.

Well, yes, the way fire burning is to tell you to be cautious. The beating might tell her to get the hell out of there if she can.

The beating should be symbolic, he says.

Symbolic of what, dude? The fact that you are always right and she is always wrong? What if that’s not the case? Eh? What if she’s right and you’re wrong? What if you have irreconcilable differences and there is no right or wrong, there’s only disagreement? Where do you get off assuming you’re always right and she’s always wrong?

We know where, of course. The Prophet Station.

Any port in a storm:

Today, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”

No, really. But bear with me; the headline wasn’t quite accurate.

Trump could beat Kamala Harris, Lowry wrote, not by running on his character but by attacking hers. According to Lowry, you see, one of Trump’s “talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.”

That’s not a talent though. It may work, but that doesn’t make it a talent. There’s no skill to it. More the opposite – sheer repetition is what you do when you have nothing else, and Trump always has nothing else.

Thus, he argued, Trump could hammer Harris into the ground if he called her “weak” enough times—50 times a day ought to do it, according to Lowry—and especially if he gave her a funny nickname, like the ones he managed to stick on “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Little Marco” Rubio.

That might be true, but if it is it’s because people are stupid or greedy or both, not because Trump’s 3 tricks endlessly repeated equal talent.

Lowry and others in that group never became full-fledged MAGA warriors. Many of them hated Trump, as Tucker Carlson, now a born-again Trump booster, admitted in 2021; they just hated Democrats more. But they also hated being reminded of the spirit-crushing bargain they’d made with a tacky outer-borough real-estate developer they wouldn’t have spoken with a year earlier. As Charlie Sykes wrote in 2017, they adopted a new fetish: “Loathing those who loathe the president. Rabid anti-anti-Trumpism.”

Which is tricky, because reasons not to loathe Trump are shatteringly difficult to find. He’s not one of the lovable bad guy types – he’s too boring for that, too dumb, too trashy, too clumsy (those damn hands!), too dim, too painful to listen to.

Stepping outside of years of partisan tribal affiliations comes with professional and social costs (and for politicians, electoral consequences). But principles are sometimes burdensome things; that’s part of what makes them principles. The behavior of the anti-anti-Trumpers continues to be an inexcusable betrayal of the values they once claimed to hold. Many of them spoke, even passionately, against Trump—and then they shuffled into line. And for what? One more federal judge? A few billion more dollars in the account of a donor?

Winning. Winning for the sake of winning. That’s my guess.

It’s like kindergarten. As long as someone, somewhere, said ok, that’s all the permission you need. “Sally said I could!” “Sally, like you, is 5 years old.”

In a post on Truth Social, Trump shared a statement from family members of the fallen soldiers honoured at the event, expressing their approval.

“We had given our approval for President Trump’s official videographer and photographer to attend the event, ensuring these sacred moments of remembrance were respectfully captured and so we can cherish these memories forever,” the families said in Trump’s Truth Social post.

But that doesn’t matter. It’s not their cemetery and they don’t make the rules. Their approval doesn’t override federal law.

But that goes against federal policy, an Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson told the BBC.

Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities on the grounds of military cemeteries, including photographers, content creators or anyone directly supporting a partisan political candidate’s campaign, the cemetery spokesperson said.

Never mind, if Trump wins he’ll make it a Trump property run according to Trump rules.

Trump and his enablers tried to stage a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery – in disregard of the fact that Arlington National Cemetery doesn’t allow such events.

I think the reasons for not allowing it are pretty obvious. That’s not what the cemetery is there for. It’s a military cemetery, and it doesn’t want to be used as advertising. It’s very typical of Trump and his underlings not to understand what that even means.

Two members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony, NPR has learned.

A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.

When the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering Section 60, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside, according to the source.

How…patriotic?

In a statement to NPR, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, strongly rejected the notion of a physical altercation, adding: “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.

“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Cheung said in the statement.

The photographer was permitted on the cemetery premises; it doesn’t follow that the photographer was permitted to take photos of the campaign event in Section 60. It turns out there was no such permission.

In a statement to NPR, Arlington National Cemetery said it “can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” according to the statement. “Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants.”

But Trump and his goons tried to go ahead anyway.

Why does he not get some time in a cell?

A man berated three women [as] “prostitutes” for not wearing traditional Asian dress and [for] putting on make-up, then violently attacked them, a court heard.

Muhammad Hassan, 26, assaulted the victims after spotting them at a petrol station in Bradford.

In a 51-second attack captured on CCTV, Hassan grabbed the driver and slammed her head on to the dashboard of her vehicle. He then grabbed another woman’s hair and punched her in the head before hitting the third woman.

By “traditional Asian dress” the inept reporter means Muslim or Islamic but of course it’s taboo to spell out that this is male religious bullying in action. The religious belief here is that women are all whores and must wear bags in public to conceal their whorish bodies. That’s the “tradition.”

Hassan, from Bradford, was sentenced to six months in prison, suspended for two years.

Why suspended? Was the violent attack not violent enough? It seems plenty violent enough to me.

I’m amazed.

The Guardian has a great big long piece on childbirth and it uses the taboo word “women” throughout. I could hardly believe what I was reading. Not one single mention of “people who identify as” or “and non-binary people” or just plain “people” where it should be “women.” There are mentions of parents but only where it makes sense, not where it glaringly obviously doesn’t.

“It’s lovely to know other mums hitting the same hurdles as you, so you don’t feel alone,” says Sinead Knights, 38, a travel industry manager from Manchester who did NCT classes in October 2023. She describes them as “a space to share ideas and ask questions and not feel judged” and says she meets up with the mothers from her group weekly. “Hopefully, our babies will be friends for a long time, as the mums will as well,” Knights says.

That’s in the GUARDIAN. Can you believe it? Other mums, mothers, mums.

Childbirth, said Dick-Read, is not inherently painful. It hurt when women – usually educated women in western countries – felt fear, through what he called the “fear‑tension-pain syndrome”. If women relaxed and stopped worrying about childbirth, they could have painless, unmedicated births. Dick-Read became the NCT’s first president and his teachings were enthusiastically promoted by middle-class women, who met at antenatal groups in each other’s homes.

See what I mean? Openly discussing childbirth as something that women do. No pause to include our enby siblings, just women women women.

And it’s all like that, paragraph after paragraph. The word “women” appears 44 times.

Something has shifted.

I see. Threats are ok, but calling a man a man requires investigation.

A city councillor in Hobart, Australia, is under investigation for a social media post describing a trans-identified male as a “man.” Louise Elliot, who was previously the subject of a tribunal inquiry for saying “trans women are men,” was previously the victim of threats from the very individual who reported her for “misgendering” him.

The one who is a man. The kind of man who threatens women. How dare women call men who threaten us “men”?

On July 24, Elliot announced via her X account that she was being subjected to yet another investigation, this time for labeling a trans-identified male who threatened to assault her as a “man.” The incident had occurred the day before while Elliot was campaigning at a shopping center. The man, who cannot yet be named, reportedly walked by Elliot and told her “I’m going to rip you to shreds.”

And she’s not allowed to call him a man? But he is allowed to tell her he’s going to rip her to shreds?

Why is it bad for her to call him a man (which he is) but not bad for him to say he’s going to rip her to shreds? I’d love an explanation of that.

On X, Elliot says she says the individual was overtly male in appearance and behavior.

“I described them as a man as that’s what I saw; an obvious male person with heavy male build, male jawline, male gait, male voice, and definitely male aggression,” Elliot wrote. “This person threatened me, and now I’m the one being investigated for ‘misgendering.’ There was no visible name badge, no ‘transwoman’ tattooed on forehead. I have lawyered up to fight this, again.”

We’re supposed to know that men who claim to be women are men who claim to be women on sight with no visible clues or other ways of discerning that they are men who claim to be women? How does that make sense? How are we supposed to know?

Although details of the allegations are limited while the investigation is underway, Reduxx has seen documentation confirming that Elliot is accused of “possible incitement to hatred, serious contempt, or severe ridicule on the basis of gender identity” by “misgendering and insulting transgender women” and “referring to their ‘abuse.’”

However, in a 17-page document outlining Elliot’s alleged offenses, it is claimed that her language may “go further… and may have the effect of inciting hatred towards transgender women and transgender people more generally.”

And yet his yelling at her that he’s going to rip her to shreds gets zero page documentation of his offenses? Why? Why is she being investigated for saying he is what he is while he is not being investigated for loud public physical threats?

I don’t understand the people in charge of this crap. I never will.

What a fucking insult.

Hateful conduct is it.

I replied to a tweet of Rob’s.

Too many all-caps?

Amnesty finally fixed it…in the dead of night, in a closet three stories underground.

“Just for being women and girls” replaces “for the ‘crime’ of identifying as a girl.”

Is it censorship to delete lies? Are lies free speech? Should lies be protected as free speech?

Mark Zuckerberg apparently thinks so.

[META] CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration had pressured the company to “censor” COVID-19 content during the pandemic, apparently referring to White House requests to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.

Medical misinformation isn’t mere “content” – it’s misinformation.

In a letter dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg told the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee that he regretted not speaking up about this pressure earlier, as well as other decisions he had made as the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp around removing certain content.

I have to wonder why he wishes that. Does he wish more people had received bad information about Covid?

In the letter to the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Monday, Zuckerberg said his company was “pressured” into “censoring” content and that the company would push back if it faced such demands again.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was posted by the Judiciary Committee on its Facebook page.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Zuckerberg regrets not allowing more lies about Covid on Facebook.

Zuckerberg has recently tried to appeal to conservative users, by complimenting Republican nominee Donald Trump’s response to an assassination attempt as “badass” and going on right-wing podcasts. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jim Jordan, is a longtime Trump ally.

In its Facebook post, the Judiciary Committee called the letter a “big win for free speech” and said that Zuckerberg had admitted that “Facebook censored Americans”.

So we shouldn’t distinguish between bad medical advice and the other kind – social media should just be a free-for-all, and if thousands die as a result that’s Free Speech.

It turns out medical organizations lose members if they make decisions based on politics rather than medical science.

Doctors are leaving the British Medical Association in revolt at its opposition to the Cass review, amid claims that the union has been taken over by an ideologically driven “vocal minority”.

See, “ideologically driven” is pretty much the last thing you want a medical association to be. Ideology is not going to cure your illness or mend your broken leg.

Hundreds of members, including NHS clinical leaders and former presidents of medical royal colleges, have gone public with their “dismay” at BMA leaders for voting to reject the Cass review into the care of transgender children and reverse a ban on puberty blockers.

Is the BMA run by teenagers?

Some have resigned from the union after up to 50 years as members, and others said that the BMA’s “abysmal” leadership was “increasingly bonkers” and “ideologically captured”.

We’re sort of used to that with universities and arts organizations, but not so much with the more technical professions. Or is that just me?

Turns out it’s a bit of a coup.

The union’s council, an elected policy-forming body of 69 members, was asked to vote on a motion rejecting the Cass review at a meeting described by critics as “secretive and opaque”. The motion passed, making it formal BMA policy, although the breakdown of votes has not been made available and the BMA’s membership base of 195,000 doctors was not consulted.

The motion was tabled at the BMA council by Tom Dolphin, a consultant anaesthetist in London, and Vassili Crispi, a junior doctor in Birmingham who has said that “rejecting the Cass review is one of many steps we need to take”.

It was backed by Emma Runswick, deputy chair of the BMA council, who is the ringleader of a left-wing and pro-strike coalition of junior doctors elected to the leadership body in 2022. Runswick has described the ban on puberty blockers as a “terrible decision” and repeated a debunked claim that it is linked to more suicides.

Splitters!

Some other senior members of the BMA council were perplexed that they were being asked to vote on the issue at all and said that it did not reflect the views of the wider membership.

Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist and member of the BMA council who opposed the motion, said: “The BMA council contains a vocal minority who have an anti-Cass agenda. They are driving policy in a direction that the membership have not been consulted on and do not agree with.

A direction that is anti-reality and pro-fantasy. Not ideal for a medical organization.

“This minority has voted to block the implementation of Cass, an evidence-based review which took four years to put together. They have no evidence for their opposition. The Cass review is not a matter for a trade union. It is not our business as a union to be doing a critique of the Cass review. It is a waste of time and resources.”

Evidence shmevidence. They don’t like it! They know they’re not supposed to like it because all their friends say so! Trans rights are human rights!! Doctors are terfs!!!!

More than 1,400 doctors, 900 of whom are BMA members, have signed an open letter calling for the BMA to drop its opposition to Cass. The letter criticises the union’s leaders for “going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and against ethical practice”. The letter has been signed by high-profile figures, including nearly 70 professors and 23 former or current presidents of medical royal colleges.

Comments left by signatories include dozens saying that they are resigning or considering resigning their membership. Many doctors criticised members of the council, with one calling for a “vote of no confidence in BMA leadership”, another saying that it was “an abysmal failure of leadership” and another commenting that “activists appear to have been allowed to take over”.

And not just any activists but activists in service of a warped new ideology that says men are women if their passports say so.

Back to Rotherham:

The journalist who uncovered the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal has said that even he massively underestimated the scale of the abuse.

…

Mr Norfolk had been putting pressure on Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police to answer questions about child sexual exploitation by predominantly Asian men since he started receiving tip-offs in 2011.

There it is again, that meaningless “Asian” euphemism. What Asian? Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malayan, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Indian, Sri Lankan, what?

But this time the BBC does in fact admit the truth, albeit briefly.

He admitted that he had had to balance his instinct to reveal the abuse with concerns that the story’s publication would both stoke the reaction of the far-right and lead to accusations of racism.

“If you’d asked me the day before that press conference how many young teenage girls had been groomed and exploited in Rotherham over the time period the report covered, I would have guessed 150,” he said. He was “staggered” to hear Prof Jay reveal how 1,400 girls had been abused, trafficked to other cities, or had petrol poured on them. “They were treated like sub-human species for the pleasure of these men,” he added.

Mr Norfolk had first identified a “pattern” of Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs exploiting white girls in the north of England and the Midlands in 2010, but came up against a “conspiracy of silence” when he tried to elicit responses from police forces and councils.

He said that hearing Prof Jay explicitly refer to the perpetrators’ ethnic backgrounds was an “extraordinary” moment. “It was so hard-hitting, she didn’t mince her words. The response was seismic across the world.”

The BBC is still carefully avoiding the issue, of course. What does “Pakistani-heritage” imply? Islam. What about Islam? It’s obvious enough when the Beeb and others report on Afghanistan but not when they report on people of “Pakistani heritage.” They don’t want to stir up the Tommy Robinson fans, and they’re right not to want to do that, but drawing a tactful veil or rather burqa over the fact that Islam is intensely hostile to women has its drawbacks.

The Times had been called racist and Islamophobic for pursuing the investigation.

“It was a very difficult story to cover because it was a story about white British girls, aged typically between 12 to 15, being groomed and abused by men who, as the pattern seemed to become more clear, were overwhelmingly of Pakistani and Muslim heritage,” he said. “It’s not fun being regarded as somebody with abhorrent views, when in your heart, you know the opposite is the case.”

There were also fears about how far-right groups would react to the story, which did eventually lead to protests and marches descending on Rotherham. “It was a dream story for the far-right,” he said.

And a nightmare for the girls.

Mother Jones reports:

I had traveled to the Silicon Valley headquarters of a startup called Qvin, pronounced “kwin,” derived from the Danish word meaning “woman.” Since receiving clearance from the FDA in January, Qvin has begun selling a new menstrual pad that it says will help people tap into the “power in your period.” Rather than undergo a blood draw, a woman (and anyone who menstruates, but for this story, I will sometimes refer to women because they dominate the group that does)…

No, women don’t dominate the group that menstruates; women are the group that menstruates. Men don’t menstruate; the end. For this story a sane journalist should always refer to women as opposed to “sometimes.”

The uterus is an incredible organ for many reasons, chief among them is that it repairs itself—without scarring—after shedding its tissue every month or so during a person’s reproductive years.

Ding ding! A woman’s reproductive years. Men don’t have the incredible organ called the uterus.

Even so, scientists studying menstrual blood say they have been met with a reluctance rooted in cultural taboos about menstruation. The queasiness continues to hamper research, obscuring discoveries that—considering every single day, hundreds of millions of people worldwide are menstruating—may be hiding in plain sight.

Women. Not people in general; women. It’s not a dirty word. You’re not (or at least you shouldn’t be) the Taliban.

She goes on to talk about the disgust and taboos around menstruation, which is ironic, given her own taboos.

H/t Mike B

Apart from anything else, it’s so futile.

The Graun:

New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.

The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.

In other words to avoid leading men into thinking about sex. But guess what: they’ll think about it anyway. You might as well lock up all the food so that people won’t think about eating. Sex isn’t just in the head, it isn’t just what you see in the street. It’s the testosterone, stupid.

But of course that won’t do, because then there’s no one to hate.

“The Taliban government does not have any sort of legitimacy and these new edicts designed to further erase and suppress woman are an indication of their hatred towards women,” says Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan human rights activist who was the first woman vice-president of the Afghan parliament.

Yeah. That’s the grim reality. They like the hatred, they nurture it, they want it to grow and grow. They’re like Hitler and Jews, they’re like Justice Taney and black people, they’re like Trump and almost everyone. The hatred is the point. It’s a motivator.