FBI confirms the “investigation” of Brett Kavanaugh was a sham.

Nearly three years after Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s tumultuous confirmation to the Supreme Court, the F.B.I. has disclosed more details about its efforts to review the justice’s background, leading a group of Senate Democrats to question the thoroughness of the vetting and conclude that it was shaped largely by the Trump White House.

Ya think?

In a letter dated June 30 to two Democratic senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Chris Coons of Delaware, an F.B.I. assistant director, Jill C. Tyson, said that the most “relevant” of the 4,500 tips the agency received during an investigation into Mr. Kavanaugh’s past were referred to White House lawyers in the Trump administration, whose handling of them remains unclear.

It was a background check not a criminal investigation, so the rules are different, she pointed out.

Ms. Tyson’s letter was a response to a 2019 letter from Mr. Whitehouse and Mr. Coons to the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, posing questions about how the F.B.I.’s review of Mr. Kavanaugh was handled.

Oh, so it took the FBI only two years to respond. How impressive.

In an interview, Mr. Whitehouse said the F.B.I.’s response showed that the F.B.I.’s handling of the accusations into misconduct by Mr. Kavanaugh was a sham. Ms. Tyson’s letter, Mr. Whitehouse said, suggested that the F.B.I. ran a “fake tip line that never got properly reviewed, that was presumably not even conducted in good faith.”

And they didn’t tell the senators it was a sham at the time.

Originally a comment by latsot on The chemistry teacher’s question.

A brilliant, moving article. Lesbian and Gay News gets better and better. Any comparison with the off-red comic would be such a glaring category error that it would blind us all from space.

I have much sympathy with the author. I was bullied in much the same way, relentlessly, by kids and teachers alike. Every single day, from around the age of four to when I left school at 15. While I had a few friends, I don’t remember a single day that wasn’t hell. At first, my family didn’t seem to notice. After I had an enormous, violent explosion one night, they most certainly knew about it, but did absolutely nothing. For that, I can never forgive them.

I was constantly called a girl by kids, teachers and family and while I never thought for a moment to actually question my sex, I knew I was a broken kind of boy, not a boy like any of the others.

I was so vulnerable in other words, to grooming of virtually any kind. Thank goodness, that didn’t happen. After a period of homelessness, I went back into education and achieved the towering success I enjoy today. But as I’ve said here before, I could so easily have been seduced by a cult – any cult – that told me there was nothing wrong with me. I don’t think I’d ever have believed I was a girl, but I’m damn sure I would have gone along with it anyway, for a while at least, if I thought it might have given me some respite.

I think mine is a fairly extreme case. I was a very strange kid, have a remarkably uncaring family and it was a very rough school. But then, transing was not an option back then and acceptance of any kind of gender or behavioural nonconformity was unthinkable. Now that new genders are available off the peg it is no wonder that children – and especially girls – want to wear them like a costume. Or a suit of armour.

If only it could remain a costume, I’d be delighted. But groomers like Mermaids, institutionalised by organisations like Stonewall, are grinding children to pieces with their zealotry and we haven’t even begun to see the carnage, yet.

It has to stop.

Another thing that’s funny (but infuriating) about that “Duhhhhhh wut’s GC?” is –

He knows all about it, unlike us, but he doesn’t know what GC is.

And it gets worse.

Yes you find things out by asking but you just told us you already know all about the subject and that WE DON’T.

So there’s that.

Uhhhh…that unlike most of the people who criticise you over this, you HAVE got your head round both sides.

It was two days ago. Click on Tweets & replies. It’s right there.

More pathetic by the day.

“Evidence? Don’t come pestering me with your evidence – I’m SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE.”

What is he on? Some kind of tribalism train is my guess. All the doors are locked, it blasts through all the stations, all it does is speed ahead until it runs out of track.

What’s Tucker Carlson’s complaint?

In a March interview with The Washington Post, Dunn said he was called the n-word more than a dozen times that day in January. Black police officers, he said, “were fighting a different fight” as a throng of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol grounds and building — some violently attacking police officers standing in their way.

Dunn will be one of the first witnesses to testify next week before a special committee tasked with investigating the insurrection. But Fox News host Tucker Carlson, during his Wednesday night broadcast, cast doubt on the officer’s ability to testify objectively.

Ah yes, and by the same token an assault victim can’t testify objectively, a victim of rape can’t testify objectively, a victim of burglary can’t testify objectively, and so on.

“Dunn will pretend to speak for the country’s law enforcement community, but it turns out Dunn has very little in common with your average cop,” Carlson said. “Dunn is an angry left-wing political activist.”

So what Tucker Carlson is saying here is that your average cop, your normal cop, is a racist. Your average cop apparently has no objection to violent armed insurrectionists shouting “nigger” as they try to overturn an election. I’m not sure your average cop is going to be as thrilled with that picture of them as Carlson thinks.

Here’s an interview Officer Dunn did on ABC News in February. We can see why Tucker Carlson wouldn’t like him…

I really despise Tucker Carlson. I would be happy to see him get the virus and become deathly ill.

Harry Dunn:

Macron has put his foot down.

More than 100,000 people took to the streets across France over the weekend to protest against President Emmanuel Macron’s tough new vaccination strategy, which will restrict access to restaurants, cafes, movie theaters, long-distance trains and more for the unvaccinated.

More than a hundred thousand people took to the streets to protest measures to prevent the spread of a virus that kills.

Why are people so stupid?

Demonstrators in Paris and elsewhere vented against what some called Mr. Macron’s “dictatorship” after he announced that a “health pass” — official proof of vaccination, a recent negative test, or recent Covid-19 recovery — would be required for many to attend or enter most public events and venues.

That’s just stupid. It’s not dictatorship, it’s emergency measures in an emergency. Remember when the Nazis occupied Paris? Now that was dictatorship. This is not.

Lots of people are rushing to get the vax though. Allons enfants.

Some protesters caused particular outrage after drawing parallels between their situation and that of the Jews during the Holocaust. Some wore a yellow star that said “nonvaccinated,” others carried signs or shouted slogans that compared the health pass to a Nazi-era measure.

“This comparison is abhorrent,” said Joseph Szwarc, 94, a Holocaust survivor who was speaking on Sunday as France commemorated the victims of racist or anti-Semitic acts by the Vichy government.

“I wore the star, I know what it is, I still have it in my flesh,” said Mr. Szwarc said at a ceremony in Paris.

Justement.

At Lesbian and Gay News:

“Why are you wearing a boy’s uniform?” That question has stayed with me since it was first asked by my chemistry teacher in front of a packed class when I was just 13 years old. The year was 1989, Thatcher was in power and had passed Section 28 the year before and it was the year that Stonewall was founded…

I often look back on that moment, in that class in front of my classmates, and wonder why it has stayed with me more than everything else about that dreadful time at that dreadful school. Over the years I’ve battled with my mental health, most of it due to trauma of living through the homophobic abuse I got day in day out when I was just a young boy struggling to come to terms with his sexuality and who was mercilessly picked on by his peers because he wasn’t boisterous or violent, because he preferred the company of girls, because he wasn’t into football, because he did crazy things to his hair, and because he liked Doctor Who.  

The much more overt and disgusting stuff his classmates did to him has not haunted him in the same way.

Up until that point my 13-year-old brain was able to rationalise, as best it could, that my classmates were just common bullies, and that what they were saying and what they were doing was borne out of a childish need to hurt people. It was a distraction from their own insecurities, an acting out of what they had seen elsewhere, or just something that they did because it made them feel a little more in control of their own lives. When my chemistry teacher asked that question, and the entire class all laughed, it hit hard because it was coming from a different place, and I perceived that it had a truth that only a position of genuine power and authority could give it.

It triggered in me a period of intense dysphoria where I struggled with what I thought was the truth. A truth that spoke directly to my insecurities. The truth that I was damaged and broken, and that there was this terrible mistake and I had been born in the wrong body. The terror of that perceived truth stayed with me until I fully came to terms with my sexual orientation.

But the truth for me after that teacher’s question was for a time, what if I really was a girl? Was that why I was getting crushes on boys? Is that what my peers knew but that I up until that point was not aware of? The actual reality was that the question was spiteful, red hot and dripping with homophobia, but to 13-year-old me it was confirmation of my worst fears, why was I wearing a boy’s uniform?

But now, somehow, it has become the enlightened and “kind” thing to do – to assure people that they really are the other sex since they’re so clearly not comfortable with the conventions of their “assigned” sex.

I share this story to give context to why I am so deeply angry with the way Stonewall has betrayed its founding principles as it chases money and a reason to continue to exist. When Stonewall was formed the message that we as gay men are not broken, and there was nothing wrong with us, eventually filtered down to me. It was a light that I could cling to, being shone by adults who understood what I was going through because they had been through it themselves.

Stonewall ultimately helped me overcome my dysphoric feelings while I did the work I needed to do to come to terms with who I am.

Stonewall said that I was not a freak, or broken, or born in the wrong body, they said that I had every right to wear a boy’s uniform as the next boy in my class, or even wear a girl’s uniform, it didn’t matter as I was still a boy – I didn’t need fixing, as I was perfect just as I was.

But now Stonewall says the opposite.

The way that gender ideology has metastasised into every area of public life means that things for children today struggling with sexuality has gotten worse in recent years. It’s Stonewall now asking: “Why are you wearing a boy’s uniform?” I wonder if Stonewall would congratulate my chemistry teacher for being progressive and inclusive? It is Stonewall after all who now seem to look down on homosexuality as something to be ashamed of, something to be belittled, to be redefined, to be brushed under the carpet as an inconvenience to their gender identity homophobic pseudoscience.  

It’s horribly sad and destructive.

Science-based. SCIENCE-BASED I tell you! Is is is is IS.

It’s a SCIENCE-BASED block.

On the one hand women are terfs, on the other hand women are those bitches who won’t have sex with every man who asks. (Women who do have sex with every man who asks are of course sluts.)

An Ohio man who was part of an online community of “incels,” or misogynists who blame women for denying them what they believe is their right to sexual intercourse, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with plotting to shoot students in sororities, federal prosecutors said.

Not trans women, please note, just women. We’re constantly told about how vulnerable trans women are, but they’re not the targets of incels. I go on thinking trans women are not as vulnerable as women.

From July 2019 to March 2020, according to a federal indictment, Mr. Genco was active on a website for “incels,” short for involuntary celibates, a label that members of the community claim for themselves.

And a label that assumes men are somehow owed sex with women, which in turn assumes that women have no right to refuse to have sex with a man.

On Aug. 3, 2019, Mr. Genco wrote a manifesto titled “A Hideous Symphony,” by “Tres Genco, the socially exiled Incel,” in which he stated that he would “slaughter” women out of “hatred, jealousy and revenge,” prosecutors said. That same day, Mr. Genco searched online for sororities and a university in Ohio, which was not named in a federal indictment.

On Jan. 11, 2020, prosecutors said, Mr. Genco wrote another document entitled “isolated,” in which he said: “If you’re reading this, I’ve done something horrible. Somehow you’ve come across the writings of the deluded and homicidal,” prosecutors said. He signed the document, “Your hopeful friend and murderer.”

All because he can’t get sex with a woman on demand.

It’s weird to feel that entitled.

Again we are reminded that the US is trembling on the brink.

The House speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, announced on Wednesday that she would veto the two top Republicans appointed by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to the new select committee investigating the Capitol attack, saying the Trump-allied congressmen could threaten the integrity of the investigation.

That’s one of the reasons we’re trembling on the brink – the fact that some Republicans approved of the attack aka insurrection, and some helped it.

But the move triggered McCarthy to pull all five of the Republicans he had chosen off the committee if Pelosi wouldn’t seat the whole cohort – and threaten to set up their own investigation into the 6 January Capitol attack.

The move didn’t trigger anything; McCarthy decided to try to use it to push the US over the brink into being an authoritarian state.

The Republican House minority leader’s actions also spurred Liz Cheney, the lone Republican appointed to the committee by Pelosi and therefore not one of the five effectively withdrawn by McCarthy, to stand on the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon and decry his actions as “despicable and disgraceful”.

Cheney also accused McCarthy of trying to “prevent” Americans from knowing the truth of how the Capitol attack occurred.

“The American people deserve to know what happened. The people who did this must be held accountable, it must be an investigation that is sober and gets to the facts,” she said, adding that, however “at every turn the minority leader has tried to get the people not to know what happened”.

Well it doesn’t look good.

Pelosi said in a statement that she was rejecting Republicans Jim Banks and Jim Jordan from the panel because of their remarks disparaging the inquiry and their ties to Donald Trump, who will be the subject of the select committee’s investigation.

Jim Jordan ffs – that guy is the worst.

McCarthy had included Banks and Jordan – both outspoken Trump allies who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election victory – among his picks on Monday, foreshadowing a bitter partisan fight over the direction of the inquiry.

Yes see that’s no good – voting against certifying Biden’s election is an anti-democratic move, an authoritarian move, a let’s be a failed state now move. It’s an attempt to overturn a legitimate election in order to re-install an evil corrupt authoritarian. It’s not acceptable.

House Democrats were outraged with Banks’s appointment in part because of a statement released on Monday night in which he inexplicably blamed the Biden administration for its response to the 6 January attack, which took place during the Trump administration, the source said.

During and as a result of the incitement of the Trump administration. It didn’t just happen on his watch, it happened immediately after he told them to go do it.

Banks also drew the ire of Pelosi and House Democrats after he arranged a trip for House Republicans to join Trump at a recent event at the southern border alongside an individual who participated in the Capitol attack itself.

That’s nice. That’s a nice touch.

What it does to people.

No they don’t. He must have been looking at the biblical arguments instead. Gender critical arguments don’t involve ew ick or god.

Aw yeah old lady feminism, how gross is that. Feminism is for women who can wear bikini bottoms to play volleyball, not crones and witches.

It takes zero contortion to accuse Gorski of both.

There’s no such thing as “trans misogyny” any more than there’s such a thing as “trans racism.”

It’s not “the truth” that “trans and non-binary people have been here forever.” It may be, and probably is, the truth that people who have felt discomfort with their own sex and/or curiosity about being the other sex have been here forever, but “trans” has been expanded and expanded and expanded to mean far more than that, and the far more is mostly batshit crazy. There’s no reason to assume that that particular brand of crazy – so shaped by Twitter and other modern forms of media – has always existed.

It’s not “the fact” that JK Rowling is using her platform to spread violence against trans people all the time. It’s not even close to a fact, aka true, in fact it looks kind of libelous to me. Saying that men are not women is not “spreading violence” against those men. It’s not true that JKR is transphobic or that she “continues to create hate” or has created hate in the first place. (Meanwhile Mr Van Ness should take a harder look to the way some trans activists talk about and to women.)

It’s not true that trans women are women.

Truth matters. It matters what’s true and what isn’t.

Life expectancy in the US has fallen.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data showed the average US lifespan dropped from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.3 years in 2020. Researchers said the pandemic was mostly to blame for the decline, with record-high drug deaths also noted as a contributing factor.

The data comes amid a resurgence of Covid-19 cases across the country. Hospital rates are also on the rise with daily deaths now almost 50% higher than last week, according to officials.

More than 600,000 Americans have died so far during the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s not what they mean – they mean from or because of the pandemic. I know this because that’s the number. I think they’re avoiding asserting causality, for some reason, but the result is just confusion. Many more than 600k of us have died during the pandemic.

The report, released on Tuesday, also noted that racial and ethnic disparities in life expectancy had grown during the pandemic.

Hispanic men saw the sharpest decline – with 3.7 years knocked off their average life expectancy within the year alone. Black American men also saw a 3.3-year drop, down to an average of just 68 years. Black and Hispanic women also saw sharper declines than both white men and white women. 

“It is impossible to look at these findings and not see a reflection of the systemic racism in the US,” Lesley Curtis, chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, told NPR.

Cue the complaints about critical race theory.

He really is quite something.

I’ll have to try that more often. “Unlike most people who disagree with me, I DO understand everything.”

That Georgia Rep has been telling lies about Covid on Twitter.

Twitter temporarily suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for violating its covid-19 misinformation policy after she falsely claimed the coronavirus was “not dangerous” for some people.

…

Greene tweeted Monday that the novel coronavirus was “not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65.” More than 600,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19.

And not all of them were over 65 or obese or both.

Why would MGT endanger people by lying that way? I know the obvious reasons (politics, attention, stupidity, ignorance), but they never really seem like enough. It’s like seeing a fire engulfing an apartment block full of people, and running around putting obstacles in the way of the firefighters. Why kill people just for the hell of it?

She also made claims about vaccine-related deaths and side effects, calling the coronavirus vaccines “controversial.”

In another tweet, Greene falsely claimed “defeating obesity” would protect people from covid-19 complications and death.

Why not err on the side of caution? Why not just keep her trap shut?

Greene said in a statement that the suspension was “a Communist-style attack on free speech.”

No it isn’t. Free speech doesn’t cover practicing medicine without a license.

President Biden said last week that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing misinformation about the novel coronavirus and vaccines to spread on their platforms.

…

Biden’s comments came shortly after Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory about health misinformation online, which he said had caused some Americans to avoid vaccines or masks, leading to “avoidable illnesses and death.” He called on tech companies to invest in addressing misinformation on their platforms.

This is what I’m saying. Playing this game kills people. The payoff doesn’t seem worth it.

Philip Pullman really is very entitled.

I guess “change our tone” in the sense of saying he’s got it all right instead of wrong? But he has got it all wrong. Despite being perfect and a sage and a magus and so on, he has got it all wrong. I know that’s hard to believe, when it’s women saying so, but there it is.

Anti-vaxxer dies of COVID:

On Tuesday, the Cape Cod Times reported that Linda Zuern, a former member of the Bourne, Massachusetts Board of Selectmen and a Trump-supporting figure in the local Republican Party, had died of COVID-19.

Zuern died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston of severe complications caused by COVID-19, according to the report. She was 70 years old and had not been vaccinated.

“She was a strong woman who believed in speaking the truth and defending our freedoms in America,” Republican State Committeewoman Deborah Dugan told the Cape Cod Times. Dugan was at Zuern’s bedside when she died. “I would describe her to people as a little woman but a mighty warrior.”

What freedoms? Freedom from public health measures? That’s not one of our freedoms – it’s not one of anyone’s freedoms. It’s not a genuine freedom, it’s just anarchic refusal to consider the needs of others. It’s not one of our freedoms to drive down a shopping street at 80 miles an hour, and it’s not one of our freedoms to spread a lethal pandemic.

For months, Zuern, a member of the pro-Trump group the United Cape Patriots, had promoted conspiracy theories about the pandemic on Facebook. She has shared articles accusing the World Health Organization of a coverup of the “Wuhan Virus” and claiming COVID-19 is cover for “globalists” to usher in “U.N. Agenda 2030” — a sustainable development initiative right-wing conspiracy theorists assert is a plot to create a one world government.

Then she found out that COVID-19 is a real illness that destroys the lungs.

nutmeg sums up the point neatly.