Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Life-changing opportunities are missed.

Wallwork says it’s the IOC’s doing, and that’s true, and they suck, but it’s Hubbard’s doing too, and I think we absolutely can keep saying so. He’s blatantly cheating, and he knows it, and it’s simply revolting

Yeah, he didn’t end up on that podium accidentally, nor was a gun held to his head. “Validation” trumps fairness.

Also, would the New Zealand Olympic team be as silent if other nations fielded male ringers, if their own women’s team was made up solely of, you know,women? Or what if other countries had bigger, burlier, stronger TIMs on their “women’” weightlifting rosters? Are they good with cheating as long as they’re the only ones doing it? And as long as they’re winning? An “advantage” in the rules like this one disappears as soon as others start to join in.

Just imagine an athletic arms race in which women are wholly supplanted by TIMs in certain sports. If it’s permitted, it will be done. Pretty soon everyone is building battleships, and pushing as much through the loopholes as is possible. “It would never happen,” has already turned out to be a lie in plenty of other instances (see for example: prisons). How likely is it to remain an improbable, scaremongering fiction if money and fame are on offer?

This has been very much a story of “top down” change, with institutional capture being inecessary for the success that trans activism and gender ideology has so far attained. How far can this be imposed on the rest of the general public? Perhaps appealing to the sports viewing audience might be of some use. I think many people are completely oblivious to all the furor and controversy that blows up on twitter and in academia. Their first exposure to the issue could very well be the intrusion of boys and men into female athletics, maybe watching Hubbard in Olympic competition. How many members of the average public will actually understand that they are seeing cheating men invading women’s sports? (Though it is not likely they will learn this from captured broadcasters and media outlets.) Will they see this as fair or just? Will the average member of the public stand for this? Do they really want to watch men cheat? Not “transgender” or “transwomen” athletes. MEN. This is why the fight for clear language is important.

Perhaps we have seen the high water mark of genderism, and that the apparently sudden, and growing, institutional concern over legal risk exposure at having been misled by Stonewall, marks a changing of the tide. I’m hoping there’s a potentially huge load of peak transing just about to happen…

An item from the (very conservative) Federalist a week ago:

An exclusive New York City high school hired an educator to teach students about pornography, and it did not go over well with parents.

Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an institution with a price tag of about $47,000 for the highest grade offered, held a sexuality workshop for all students in the junior class. Parents were not made aware of the training, and students were misinformed about the explicit content.

It seems to me there is a place in high schools for a certain kind of teaching about porn, though it would probably be futile. Porn-critical teaching could elucidate the ways porn endangers women, for instance by normalizing “choking” i.e. strangling, which keeps leading to news items about women who, surprisingly to all concerned, turn up dead as a result of “rough sex.” Remember that guy who lured a teenage girl to the top of Calton Hill in Edinburgh on a freezing January night, poured vodka down her, bit and strangled her, and then toddled off home leaving her to die of hypothermia? That’s porn, right there.

But, teenagers being what they are, the result of such education would probably be eye-rolling and a renewed determination to be kink-friendly. At any rate it’s not at all clear that that’s what this “sexuality workshop” was teaching.

One student told the New York Post he thought it was “just going to be about condoms or birth control.” On the contrary, the training was called “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn.” It was taught by Justine Ang Fonte, the director of health and wellness at The Dalton School nearby.

Oh well thank god the focus is intersectional. Is it also inclusive? A worried nation wants to know.

The Federalist alas doesn’t make clear how the image is connected to the presentation. I haven’t been able to find out what exactly Justine Ang Fonte talked about.

The students were just irritated by it. They know about porn, duh.

After the Post published its report on Columbia Prep, head of the school William M. Donohue apologized to parents in an email, saying the “content and tone of the presentation did not represent our philosophy, which is to educate our students in ways that promote their personal development and overall health, as well as to express respect for them as individuals.”

Well what did they think it was going to be? Why are they bringing in external speakers when they don’t know what the content will be?

Fonte has a page of her “presentations” but it too is just titles and images but no real information. One title looks like the kind of thing I suggested – be safe type advice.

Get (Lit)erate on Porn

Sexual Assault & Consent Summit

But a more recent title sounds less…adult.

Are You a Porn Genre or Are You Privileged?

It’s not apparent who she is or what her expertise is or what it is about her that convinces administrators she should show up at their schools to tell the students things.

Making history.

A Scot has made history by becoming the first transgender woman golfer to win a professional tournament in the US.

That’s not making history, it’s cheating. Different thing.

Ayrshire-born Hailey Davidson claimed victory in a mini-tour event at Providence Golf Club in Polk County, Florida.

Hailey, 28, was finally given the green light to compete in National Women’s Golf Association events after the United States Golf Association and the Ladies Professional Golf Association changed eligibility rules to make it easier for trans athletes to compete.

That is, after the United States Golf Association and the Ladies Professional Golf Association changed eligibility rules to make it easier for men to cheat by competing against women.

Hailey said she “finally feels whole” after undergoing gender reassignment surgery in January after being on hormone therapy since September 24, 2015 – a date that is tattooed on her right forearm.

She said: “Opposition to transgender women playing in female sport irritates me due to most being based on societal stereotypes and not actual facts and real athlete experiences.”

Men playing in female sport irritates me because it’s grossly unfair to the women.

Stonewall is melting, melllltiiiinnnggg…

Liz Truss, the equalities minister, is pushing for all government departments to withdraw from Stonewall’s employment scheme following a row over transgender rights.

…

The Times understands that responsibility for co-ordinating participation in the scheme rests with the Cabinet Office. The scheme counts 250 government departments and public bodies among its 850 members, which pay for guidance on issues such as pronouns and gender-neutral spaces.

Why pay for that? There are a million sources on it that don’t charge anything, besides which, it’s all nonsense anyway. Nobody needs “guidance” on pronouns.

Stonewall says the scheme is “the leading employers’ programme for ensuring all LGBT staff are accepted without exception in the workplace”. 

Oh yes? What if a member of staff is incompetent or a bully or a misogynist abuser or all those? Does that member of staff have to be accepted?

That aside, why is Stonewall “the leading programme”? Who says it is? Leading in what sense? Is it any good at what it does? Is the “leading” thing just one of those self-perpetuating monopoly type deals? Those other people have Stonewall so we’d better have them too? Conformity in other words? Name recognition? Not actually anything to do with quality or expertise or skill?

Essex University, another member of the diversity champion scheme, apologised this month for dropping two speakers after they were accused of transphobia. The university published an independent report that concluded that Stonewall had provided officials with misleading and potentially illegal advice. The report expressed concern that Stonewall had misrepresented the provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to suggest that the legislation included “gender identity”. Academics have claimed that the alleged misrepresentation has resulted in speakers being prevented from debating trans rights.

No kidding; we’ve been watching it happen for the past several years.

Seriously bad joke.

A Belgian weightlifter says dealing with transgender issues in sport is “impossible” but the presence of Laurel Hubbard in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games is “like a bad joke” to women athletes.

The women athletes have been keeping quiet, though, for all the reasons we know about.

Anna Vanbellinghen of Belgium has broken the athletes’ silence with a considered statement on Hubbard’s achievement.

Vanbellinghen has a chance of qualifying in the same weight category, the over-87-kilogram super-heavyweights, and is therefore directly affected by the presence of Hubbard, who transitioned to female at the age of 35.

Others have voiced outrage at Hubbard’s presence in women’s sport, most often on social media, but Vanbellinghen is not making a personal criticism.

“First off, I would like to stress that I fully support the transgender community, and that what I’m about to say doesn’t come from a place of rejection of this athlete’s identity,” Vanbellinghen said.

Why would she “like to” stress that? Because of the relentless bullying that greets any complaints about male athletes stealing women’s prizes.

This athlete’s identity can be a dandelion or a wheelbarrow or the moons of Venus, it doesn’t matter, the point is what he is in fact, which is a person with a male body, aka a man.

“However, anyone that has trained weightlifting at a high level knows this to be true in their bones: this particular situation is unfair to the sport and to the athletes.”

Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.

“So why is it still a question whether two decades, from puberty to the age of 35, with the hormonal system of a man also would give an advantage [in competing against women]?

“I understand that for sports authorities nothing is as simple as following your common sense, and that there are a lot of impracticalities when studying such a rare phenomenon, but for athletes the whole thing feels like a bad joke.

“Life-changing opportunities are missed for some athletes – medals and Olympic qualifications – and we are powerless.”

Well, that’s being a woman. Life’s tough.

A similar point was made by Jerry Wallwork, President of the Samoan Weightlifting Federation, which has had athletes competing against Hubbard since she transitioned in 2017.

“I was one of the people who opposed it [having Hubbard in Olympic qualifying] greatly back in 2018,” Wallwork said.

But I do feel that we cannot keep throwing mud at Laurel and blaming her, even though our female athletes are in direct competition with her and could miss out on competing at the Olympic Games.”

No, I disagree. Wallwork says it’s the IOC’s doing, and that’s true, and they suck, but it’s Hubbard’s doing too, and I think we absolutely can keep saying so. He’s blatantly cheating, and he knows it, and it’s simply revolting.

The people who get elected to Congress these days…

At about midnight four years ago, restauranteur Lauren Boebert, in her words, “turned too sharp,” and rolled her truck into a ditch near her home in Rifle, Colorado. She faced a careless driving and unsafe vehicle charges, and a court date was set for three months later.

Not an uncommon slip-up on rural roads at night. But Boebert, who’s now a Republican candidate for Congress, never showed up for her court hearing on October 5, 2016, according to records obtained by the Colorado Times Recorder from Colorado’s 9th Judicial District.

Now, nine months after the article appeared, she’s in Congress.

So there was a warrant for her arrest. The court sent her a nice letter explaining it all and telling her how to fix it by mail – she didn’t even have to show up physically! But she blew that off too.

After apparently ignoring the court’s letter, Boebert was arrested four months later, on Feb. 13, 2017, fingerprinted, photographed, and fined $100. The following month, she appeared in court, as ordered, and the matter was settled in a plea bargain, dropping the careless driving charge.

There was another arrest.

When arrested in 2015 for disorderly conduct, Boebert warned deputies at the time that she had “friends at Fox News.”

One deputy wrote that Boebert was “trying to get subjects to leave the custody of law enforcement,” according to the police report. Some of these “subjects” were detained for underage drinking. (Find the police report, with the deputy’s full description of Boebert’s behavior, here.)

Isn’t she just a character?

Newsline pointed out that Boebert recently criticized protesters for not respecting the law. “Civil order, rule of law, respect, and decency need to be restored!!!” Boebert tweeted June 23, as quoted by Newsline.

And today she’s been…criticizing.

It’s not in the future, it’s not 20 or 10 years from now, it’s now. The Himalayas are losing their ice.

When Padma Thinles was 11 years old, he lived in a city called Leh, in the northern Indian territory of Ladakh, on the Western side of the Himalayas. Then, it was a small village with streams brimming with freshwater. Now, “forget the streams,” said Thinles, who is now 21 and still lives in the region.

“There’s no water left in the sewers, either,” he said.

Despite the location of Leh in the upper Indus River Valley, which is usually flushed with water, global warming has caused an immense water shortage that has led to the shutdown of many agricultural operations critical to the region.

“In Ladakh, we used to get 5 to 6 feet of snow every year, but in 2017, it didn’t snow an inch,” said Akshit Seth, 27, who runs a school for underprivileged children in Himachal Pradesh.

And that’s not “just” a local problem – it’s a problem for everything downhill. What’s downhill is India.

As many as 2 billion people from South Asia to China are highly dependent for survival on the mountain range’s glaciers, which make up one of the world’s largest supplies of freshwater. And the world is set to lose about a third of that supply by 2100 because of global warming, a critical 2019 study found — even with the strictest possible climate crisis measures in place.

Are those measures in place? Hardly.

Glacial meltwater is an essential part of the region’s hydrology. The Himalayas are the source for a number of the world’s biggest rivers, which provide water for agriculture, drinking, and personal use: the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Indus and the Mekong. But the glaciers have lost about a third of their freshwater supply since 1975, a June 2019 study published in Science Advances found. And, more worryingly, in the 21^stcentury, the rate of loss has been twice what it was in the last quarter of the 20^th, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature.

What does that mean? It means literally billions of people affected by crop failures as well as lack of water. It’s as grim as it could get short of the planet sprouting thousands of live volcanoes all at the same time.

Also, there is a high interdependence between the glaciers located in the Himalayas and the energy security of India. Almost 33 percent of the country’s thermal electricity and 52 percent of its hydropower is dependent on the water from rivers originating in the Himalayas.

So add that. Water shortage, food shortage, power shortage.

The Tulsa massacre almost got buried. One future historian got curious.

The white schoolboy Scott Ellsworth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left to wonder what the city’s darkest secret could be.

“As a 10- and 11-year-old, I would occasionally hear older adults, neighbours, talking about what we then called ‘the riot’ and they would always lower their voices or change the subject,” recalls Ellsworth, now 67. “I started to catch wind of these stories about bodies floating down the Arkansas River, machine guns on the roofs of town, but you couldn’t really find out anything about it.”

All that changed one day in 1966 when the local library installed a microfilm reader and Ellsworth and friends fed in daily newspapers from 1921. “We were just gobsmacked: hundreds die, martial law declared,” says the author and historian. “We weren’t sophisticated enough to put it all together but I knew at that point that the skeleton in the closet was true.”

The truth that could no longer be denied was that, on 31 May and 1 June 1921, a white mob had attacked Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people and wounding 800 more while robbing and burning businesses, homes and churches. Planes dropped explosives on the area, razing it to the ground. It remains one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history.

Ellsworth got the academic credentials and then he interviewed survivors.

“They had never been interviewed before. They didn’t talk about the massacre in their own family. I ended up being their witness. It didn’t have to be me. It could have been you or somebody else. It just happened to be me. That was one of the highest professional moments of my life.”

Conversely, Ellsworth found it almost impossible to get any white person to admit they had been involved in the carnage (none faced criminal charges). On one occasion he visited a white police officer who was happy to talk about his career but became taciturn when the subject came up.

Naturally not. The Nazis moved to Argentina; the Tulsa genociders just sat tight and became taciturn.

When Ellsworth’s Death in a Promised Land – the first comprehensive history of the massacre – was published in 1982, the survivors threw a launch party but the book was mostly ignored by the local white media. However, the author notes: “For a number of years it was the most stolen book out of the Tulsa City county library system. They’d even steal the branch copies. So once a year, I just sent them a box of books.”

Tulsa’s secret was out and could not be forgotten again. The massacre’s 75th anniversary in 1996 received national media attention. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed a year later to carry out a long overdue investigation and make the case for reparations.

A lot of our history is long overdue.

International embarrassment.

A hat shop in Nashville, Tennessee, has drawn condemnation and protests after it advertised an anti-vaccine yellow star like those forced on Jews by Nazi Germany.

The shop, Hatwrks, said in a now-deleted Instagram post that it was selling the patches for $5 (£3.50).

The shop was criticised online and targeted by protesters, who held a sign saying “no Nazis in Nashville”.

A local rabbi said the star was an insult to Jews killed under the Nazis.

Being urged to get a vaccination against a lethal pandemic is not very comparable to being murdered by a fascist antisemitic state.

In a later Instagram post, the shop apologised “for any insensitivity”. It said it did not “intend to trivialise the Star of David or disrespect what happened to millions of people”.

Don’t be schewpid. Of course you did. You can’t flaunt a picture of a giggling person wearing a yellow star with “vaccination” on it without intending to trivialize the real yellow star.

During the pandemic some conspiracy theorists have been denounced for making extreme comparisons between Covid-19 measures and the fascist policies of Nazi Germany.

This week Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was criticised for equating Covid mask mandates with Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars.

You have to watch out for the rabbit-hole beliefs because you just don’t know where they’ll take you. You don’t want to end up believing masks are like yellow stars or men are women if they say they are.

Inspirational?

Many women ask what’s inspirational about him.

Burns thinks rapists are more polite than feminist women.

Inspirational for rapists maybe.

About those anti-vax yellow stars…

1. (Howard Forman [↩]

More passengers are disembarking.

A string of high-profile public sector employers are cutting ties with the LGBT charity Stonewall amid mounting disquiet over its diversity training on transgender rights.

Campaigners have warned of a “flood” of departures from the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme, after the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the equalities watchdog, did not renew its membership over “value for money” concerns.

The Telegraph says it knows of at least five more leavers.

The scheme counts 250 Government departments and public bodies among its members. They pay thousands for guidance on gender neutral spaces, pronouns and trans inclusion and are ranked on the charity’s Workplace Equality Index.

Imagine paying thousands for “guidance on pronouns” – i.e. on using the wrong ones. It’s all so cultish as well as wrong.

As scrutiny of the programme grows, last week its list of 850 members disappeared from public view on the Stonewall website.

But several major names on the list confirmed to this newspaper that they have left, though this was not related to the EHRC’s decision and they all stressed their commitment to inclusion and equality.

The House of Commons said it did not renew its membership for 2020. The Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) said it exited in December, while Acas, the employment dispute service, said it had withdrawn “for cost reasons” last June.

Tired of paying thousands for guidance on pronouns, no doubt. Who wouldn’t be?

See also: Dorset Police and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. The Crown Prosecution Service is having a think.

Last night Stonewall’s chief executive, Nancy Kelley, prompted a furious backlash on Twitter by likening so-called “gender critical” beliefs to anti-Semitism. ‘Gender-critical’ academics and researchers argue that male-born trans women are not women, a view the EHRC has said is protected by equality law.

That is, we “argue” that men are not women, which is not so much a “view” as reality. The fantasy that men can identify out of being men is the “view,” not the awareness that they can’t.

Stonewall boss is fine with comparing gender-skeptical women to antisemites.

The new EHRC chair, Lady Falkner, has said women have the right to question transgender identity without being abused, stigmatised or risking losing their job.

Or threatened. All those “kill a terf” shirts and signs and posters – those are threats.

Ms Kelley said while Stonewall believed in freedom of speech, it was “not without limit”.

“With all beliefs including controversial beliefs there is a right to express those beliefs publicly and where they’re harmful or damaging – whether it’s anti-Semitic beliefs, gender critical beliefs, beliefs about disability – we have legal systems that are put in place for people who are harmed by that.”

That’s nice.

Challenged as to whether it might be considered offensive to compare anti-Semitic beliefs to gender-critical views, she insisted it was appropriate.

“We’re talking about protected groups. We’re talking about people that are protected on the basis of their sexuality, people that are protected on the basis of gender identity, people who are protected on the basis of race and that’s why I think the analogy is apt.”

Are we talking about people who are protected on the basis of sex?

What is this idea of “protected” anyway? Protected how? By having the police arrest women who say a man is a man?

If people are protected on the basis of gender identity but not on the basis of sex – in other words if men who say they are women are protected but women are not protected – what exactly is the reason for that? What’s the reasoning behind it? What’s the thinking? The brute reality is that women need protection from men more than men need protection from women. It’s a perverse world that says that changes the instant a man says he is a woman.

Stonewall’s been criticised for using the term “gender identity” when referring to the Equality Act’s protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”.

But Ms Kelley described that as “the difference between natural language and statutory language”.

Uh, no. “Gender identity” is a much bigger, looser, easier to step in and out of bag than “gender reassignment.” Anybody can “identify as” anything, including a man who has just been arrested for assault.

Sport builds character.

On 17 May, 2021, it was announced that Valentina Petrillo is set to create a world record as the first, and so far only, male to participate in a female sports competition with male documents.

The software programmer and divorced father, who identifies as a woman and has not undergone cosmetic ‘gender’ surgery, is among the athletes chosen to compete in the European Paralympic Athletics Championship in Poland from June 1 to June 5. Seven athletes, including Petrillo, will compete on the Italian Team for Bydgoszcz 2021 in the women’s category, and 16 in the men’s.

The 47-year-old’s goal is to qualify for the Tokyo 2021 Paralympics.

Petrillo, who has a degenerative eye condition, skyrocketed to international fame in 2020 when the runner was recognized as the first male to compete in the women’s Paralympics, a series of international multi-sport events for athletes with a range of disabilities.

Before declaring a female identity in 2019, Petrillo competed with other men as Fabrizio, the name that still appears on the athlete’s legal documents. Petrillo won 11 national men’s titles between 2016 and 2018.

Seems legit.

Seen on Twitter:

For people in urban, liberal cities, the mask and associated rituals are articles of faith. It is literally a yarmulke or a prayer shawl. Not hard to understand if we see it as motivated by signaling “I’m part of the good tribe.”

No it isn’t. If the mask were literally a yarmulke or a prayer shawl then it would be literally a yarmulke or a prayer shawl. It isn’t, it’s a mask. You can tell it’s a mask because of the loops for the ears, and the size and shape. It doesn’t look like a yarmulke or a prayer shawl.

But more to the point, there’s no need to attach some weird political idenniny to it. I don’t know, maybe some people get a little “right-on!!” thrill from it, but it has to be very little, because…what’s political about it? There’s no political thrill to putting ice on a bruise, or washing a cut carefully, or taking aspirin for a headache. There’s little if any political thrill to trying to cover your cough when you’re around people (I read somewhere a few years ago that the best way is to cough into your elbow – and definitely is not coughing into your hand, which will just spread it). It’s just ordinary medical advice and basic (seriously, so basic) consideration for other people. I guess you can decide that’s “political” if you want to say that all Republicans are malicious boors who want to make other people sick, but otherwise it makes pretty much no sense.

I get what the idea is supposed to be, I think. Politics is groupthink, lefties are very susceptible to groupthink, this is just more of that. Wearing masks during a pandemic is groupthink, and it gives lefties a little righteous glow of being better than those rebellious independent thinkers over there in their MAGA caps.

But it’s just dumb. It wouldn’t be a right-left controversy in the first place if Trump hadn’t decided to make it one, and why would we take our ideas of what’s political and what isn’t from him?

We wear the damn masks (or did) because that was the medical advice, and it’s stupid to go all do-it-yourself on medical issues of all things, especially during a pandemic. There’s no thrill in it, it’s just the inconvenient thing we have to do (or did) to try to avoid spreading the Covid. That’s all, no psychoanalysis necessary.

Updating to add (h/t Mike @ 2)

Oh so this is who Christian Jessen is.

Maybe he never had any critical thinking to begin with.

Via Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany 6 – The Toronto Star reports:

KAMLOOPS, B.C. – The remains of 215 children have been found buried on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation said in a news release Thursday that the remains were confirmed last weekend with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist.

Casimir called the discovery an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

She said it’s believed the deaths are undocumented, although a local museum archivist is working with the Royal British Columbia Museum to see if any records of the deaths can be found.

Meaning, I take it, the school neither reported nor recorded the deaths, which means…I guess that the school (the officials, the government bodies in charge of the officials and the schools) saw the children as…vermin?

Some of them were 3 years old.

The school was once the largest in Canada’s residential school system.

As Auschwitz was one of the largest in Germany’s extermination/forced labor system.

The school operated between 1890 and 1969. The federal government took over the operation from the Catholic Church to operate as a day school until it closed in 1978.

Which seems to indicate that the school was initially run by the Catholic church, just as similar hellholes were run in Ireland.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final report on residential schools more than five years ago. The nearly 4,000-page account details the harsh mistreatment inflicted on Indigenous children at the institutions, where at least 3,200 children died amid abuse and neglect.

While Mister God watched approvingly.

The existential threat:

On Friday Republicans in the Senate torpedoed an effort to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January, deploying the procedural move known as the filibuster to stop it even being debated.

The filibuster is bad and stupid and needs to go away.

Tellingly Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who previously condemned Trump’s role in the riot, reportedly asked senators to nix the commission as a “personal favour”. It was a sign that the rot now goes deeper than a cult of personality into the foundations of the Grand Old Party (GOP).

A personal favor ffs. This isn’t his living room we’re talking about, it’s the federal government. He has no business making it “personal.”

It is a party that still has room for Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman under investigation over sex trafficking allegations, who this week appeared to incite supporters to take up arms. “We have a second amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it,” he said.

You can’t “use” the second amendment as if it were a flashlight or a trowel. It governs law-making; “we” as in the people at large have no opportunity to “use” it. But of course it’s code for saying he thinks Republicans should start shooting their perceived enemies.

One of America’s two major parties now falls outside the democratic mainstream – think “far right” in European terms. But are Democrats taking the existential threat sufficiently seriously or sleepwalking towards disaster in the next election cycle?

The second, from what I can see.

Fred Wellman, a military veteran who is executive director of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, tweeted: “We need to fight for our Republic. I don’t understand at all what the Democratic leadership is thinking. Stop fucking around. Stop letting McConnell walk all over you. For God’s sake act like you are the majority. We are all out here fighting. Where are you?”

Letting McConnell walk all over them.

It’s called “Woman’s Hour” for a reason.

Ah yes the old space to discuss everything approach. We used to understand that woman’s meant woman’s, and that for women meant for women. Now instead we “understand” that woman’s means everyone’s, and for women means for everyone.

Next up on Woman’s Hour: beards, erectile dysfunction, urinals, neckties, jock straps, paternity suits.

Once in every billion tweets or so, a man will go so much too far that it bites him in the ass.

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster has been awarded £125,000 in damages after a defamatory tweet by TV presenter Dr Christian Jessen. Dr Jessen tweeted an unfounded claim that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader had been having an extra-marital affair on 23 December 2019. The post remained online until Dr Jessen deleted it on 7 January 2020.

A judge at the High Court in Belfast said it was an “outrageous libel” which was “grossly defamatory”.

…

He ordered Dr Jessen, who is best known for presenting Channel Four programme Embarrassing Bodies, to pay damages of £125,000 and Mrs Foster’s legal costs.

The judge also addressed the fact that Dr Jessen failed to respond to warnings from Mrs Foster’s lawyer – which became the subject of mainstream media coverage. “The offending tweet remained on the defendant’s Twitter account for two weeks, a Twitter account with 311,000 followers,” he said.

“The tweet was liked approximately 3,500 times and it was retweeted 517 times. “This outrageously bad libel cut [Mrs Foster] to the core, causing her considerable upset, distress, humiliation, embarrassment and hurt.”

So what’s the nice doctor up to?