Here’s the tweet:

Here’s CNN’s coverage:

President Donald Trump is continuing to wage battle against interpretations of history which he claims are un-American.

So the true-American or yes-American interpretation is that slavery was a benign arrangement that worked out very well for everyone, especially the slaves? In other words an enormous lie? That’s affirm-American?

In a Sunday morning tweet, the President said the US Department of Education would investigate whether California schools are using the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in [the] public school curriculum. The Pulitzer-Prize winning collection reframes American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America’s shores.

The message came after the President on Friday night banned federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training related to “white privilege” and “critical race theory.”

This is the guy who noisily insisted that Obama wasn’t born in the US, the guy who paid for a full page ad in the New York Times demanding the death penalty for 5 Black teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit, the guy who was sued by the federal government for refusing to rent his apartments to Black people. This is the guy who has been using his bully pulpit to incite racism for nearly four years now. This is scum.

The 1619 Project was launched by the New York Times Magazine last year. After the launch, the Pulitzer Center was named an education partner for the project and announced its education team would develop educational resources and curricula for teachers to use. The 1619 Project curriculum is available online for free through the center.

What’s the problem? It tells the unpleasant truth about the history of this country. Trump wants to bury that truth…or more to the point, he wants to whip his fans into a frothing rage about the telling of that truth.

The President and Attorney General William Barr have said that they don’t believe systemic racism exists in the United States.

I’m sure they’d say the same about systemic sexism. Easy for them, isn’t it.

I can see only the first two paragraphs but that’s plenty. Iain Gately in The Sunday Times:

It’s been nearly six months since we were first asked to work from home, and one of the early silver linings of lockdown was — I think we can all agree — not having to spend a large proportion of every morning and evening with our nose pressed into a stranger’s armpit on a packed train or bus.

But, with a half a year to reflect, did we wish our commutes away too readily? If you’re not back at your desk, isn’t a small piece of you missing that daily ride to and from the office? For many of us, the commute is part of who we are — and it serves a useful purpose.

Oh yes, I’m sure millions of people are missing the privilege of squandering a huge amount of money and an even huger amount of time to get from where they live to where they work. I’m sure they miss the expense and tedium and discomfort and waste. Who wouldn’t rather be sitting in a crowded train or a boring car going from X to Y than taking a walk or playing with the kids or slicing up some veggies from the garden?

From Pliny’s Far Corner Cafe:

Trump doesn’t want any more of that god damn anti-racism training around here, understood?

Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.

You know, racism is kind of divisive too.

To be fair, I’m not sure I trust the people who do mass trainings of this kind to do it well, having sat through some silly bullshit even just working for the Seattle Parks Department, but on the other hand I trust Donald Trump a whole lot less than that.

The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.

Because there is no white privilege? Come on now.

Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.

We definitely want Fox News telling us how to do things. That will work out very well.

“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added. 

No, he does not. Not even slightly. He has the opposite of that. He has a proven track record of stamping on those whose voices have long been ignored. He’s an evil malevolent psychopath, so shut up.

Jessica Krug won’t be teaching her classes this year.

In a statement released on Friday night, the University provost, Brian Blake, and dean, Paul Wahlbeck, wrote: “Dr Krug will not be teaching her classes this semester. We are working on developing a number of options for students in those classes, which will be communicated to affected students as soon as possible.”

…

Krug’s biography on the GW website lists imperialism and colonialism and African American history among her areas of expertise. Her writings center heavily on issues of African culture and diaspora.

In itself there’s nothing wrong with that. People should be interested in other cultures and histories. But she faked it, which is another matter.

In Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities, published before the revelations, she paid tribute to her apparently invented past in the acknowledgment section. She wrote: “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”

Back in my day being Jewish was good enough. Kids today want it all.

I jest, but I do find it pretty icky, battening onto other people’s history of oppression. That bit about her ancestors who bled life into a future (meaning, who produced her) is really ugh.

Krug’s public persona comes across in a video testimony to a New York city council hearing on gentrification from June. Referring to herself as Jess La Bombalera, Krug refers to “my Black and brown siblings” in the anti-gentrification movement and criticizes “all these white New Yorkers” who “did not yield their time to Black and brown indigenous New Yorkers”.

An exhibitionist, in short.

Is it a Sign?

A parade of boats in Texas celebrating their support for Donald Trump ended in disarray when multiple vessels got into trouble on apparently choppy waters leading to several sinking and a slew of distress calls being made to rescue officials.

Well, buddying up to Trump tends to end that way.

The event, called the Lake Travis Trump boat parade, had been organized on Facebook with images of Trump campaign slogans adorning a variety of boats.

Does Antifa have submarines?

Meanwhile Trump is playing golf.

Donald Trump visited one of his own golf courses on Saturday amid one of the worst recent scandals to his presidency in recent months and after expert warnings that up to 400,000 Americans could die of the coronavirus before the end of the year.

A guy’s got to relax you know. It’s hard work screaming nonsense into a microphone and telling lies to reporters.

CNN, which tallies Trump’s visits to golf courses, reported that this visit was the 295th trip to one of his own golf courses during his presidency.

A guy’s got to relax every three days, okay?

During his campaign for the White House in 2016, Trump was a harsh critic of the amount of golf Barack Obama played during his time in office. Yet once in the White House, Trump has played far more often than his predecessor.

Well, Obama didn’t have to spend all his time telling lies.

In a public post in a public Facebook group, a discussion of what to tell contact tracers.

Layperson looking for feedback. So I am in training to be a contact tracer, I have a trans family member so I escalated the way we were initially asking these questions. For epidemiological reasons we are required to ask for the following information:

Sex at birth

Gender identity

Sexual orientation

I have now been asked to create the verbatim myself that will go out to all the trainers for current and future training. The reason for this post is I am hoping to hear what would be prefered in terms of the verbiage for how a tracer would ask for that info.

Preferred meaning what? The goal here is getting accurate information. The goal is not flattering the feelings of people who think they have bespoke genders. This is a pandemic, people, not a meeting of the Self-obsessed Society.

But sure enough – the third reply proudly announces a policy of not telling the truth.

Speaking as a layperson, quite frankly regardless of the method used, if someone came to me asking me these questions, I’m going to give you answers to those that Will probably make those data points irrelevant. I would flat out refuse to answer any questions about my sexual orientation, and I’m going to match my sex at birth to my gender identity Because there’s no way I’m outing myself to you. It’s nothing personal to the contract [sic] tracer, but I don’t know them, and I don’t know what’s being done with this *public* data on the back end, and I don’t want anything to come around and bite me later with someone who might decide to misgender me in the current political climate. I despise the idea that some researcher somewhere will decide to use my sex and birth information to make decisions about what data set I belong in which may or may not be actually medically accurate depending which transition steps I may or may not have done. As a contract [sic] tracer, you’re not my doctor; I have no personal relationship with you. Thus, I have no vested interest in giving you accurate answers to these questions.

16 likes and loves; no dissents.

We’re doomed.

Who is that fascinating man?

Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US, has said Boris Johnson is fascinated and inspired by Donald Trump, and is intrigued by the US president’s patchy relationship “with the facts and the truth”.

Well, “patchy” – more like non-existent. Trump’s relationship with the facts and the truth is like Trump’s relationship with Tiffany: it doesn’t exist. Trump wouldn’t even recognize facts and the truth if they came up to him at a party and sat on his lap.

Darroch wrote that Johnson had been “fascinated” by Trump on his visits to Washington as foreign secretary before he became prime minister, with particular focus on the president’s use of language.

This includes “the limited vocabulary, the simplicity of the messaging, the disdain for political correctness, the sometimes incendiary imagery, and the at best intermittent relationship with facts and the truth”, the former diplomat wrote.

In other words Johnson was fascinated by the fact that Trump has the intellect of a very young and bad-tempered child and yet he is the head of state of an all-too-powerful country.

After Darroch left the diplomatic corps following a 42-year career, Trump fired back with a range of epithets, calling him “the wacky ambassador”, “pompous”, and “a very stupid guy”.

As I say – the intellect of a very young and bad-tempered child.

Aw, he mad.

The Guardian gives details:

The Atlantic magazine published a story that described how Trump said he cancelled a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers”. Other outlets confirmed the news and detailed more incidents of Trump’s insulting attitude to American soldiers.

Among those was the Fox News national security correspondent, Jennifer Griffin, who confirmed in a Twitter thread that Trump called soldiers “suckers”, had questioned why anyone would want to become a soldier, and had not wanted to honor war dead at the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France.

That’s gotta hurt. Et tu Vulpes?

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Greene’s post was so bad Facebook removed it.

Facebook said Friday it removed a Republican congressional candidate’s post [that depicted her holding a gun next to the images of three progressive congresswomen] for violating its policies against incitement of violence.

Brackets added for clarity.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a House candidate who has history of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic remarks and who has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory, on Thursday posted a picture of herself holding a rifle next to images of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — three of four members of the so-called liberal freshmen “squad.”

The terrible thing is, she will win that seat.

In the accompanying post, Greene railed against “leftists” who “want to take this country down,” adding, “American need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart.”

And by “go on the offense” she means kill with assault rifles.

Omar on Friday called on Facebook to remove the post, which she called a “violent provocation.” The Minnesota lawmaker said the post had already prompted new death threats towards the congresswomen online.

This is very Germany 1933.

Greene on Twitter told Omar to “Relax,” calling the post “just a meme.” In a statement to POLITICO in response to the post’s removal, Greene said, “Pelosi and the Socialist Squad are trying to cancel me out even before I’ve even taken the oath of office.”

It’s not “just a meme.” Guns are not just memes.

President Donald Trump has called Greene, the Republican candidate for Georgia’s 14th District, a “future Republican Star.” But other high-ranking Republican officials have called Greene’s racist rhetoric “appalling” and “disgusting,” as POLITICO reported.

They should have a word with Trump too while they’re at it.

H/t tigger

Oh no, a 19-year-old was not allowed to order alcohol in a pub because the photo on xir id didn’t resemble xir. Tears ensued.

A transgender woman has spoken of her upset after she was refused service in a pub because staff did not think she looked like the person on her ID.

Savanna Galloway, 19, said she left Wetherspoons on Tuesday in tears after being told she would not be served.

She showed her passport to prove her age, but was told by two members of staff her picture did not resemble her.

Wetherspoons has issued the required groveling apology but has also said it still requires “‘a valid ID which resembles the person presenting it’ to be provided when proof of age is needed.” Because they could get a very stiff fine if they served alcohol to a 17-year-old.

The barman who came to deliver the drinks challenged Ms Galloway’s age and asked to see her ID.

She showed him her passport, but Ms Galloway said he told her: “That’s not you”.

He said her ID could not be accepted and sent for a manager, who agreed the passport was not acceptable.

Ms Galloway said she explained she was transgender, and even offered to remove her wig to show them what was underneath – as in the passport picture she had short hair.

But it was no use, and the poor little mite left the pub in tears. In tears.

It remains unclear what Wetherspoons could or should have done differently.

Melania Trump today:

Melania Trump in 2011:

Not journalism but activism YOURSELF, you lying piece of crap.

Trump tells cities and the people in them we’re bad and stupid and he hates us.

President Donald Trump, on Wednesday, signed a memo threatening to withhold federal funding from Democrat-run cities the White House deems “anarchist jurisdictions” because of their handling of ongoing civil unrest that continues to ripple around the country. 

“Anarchist jurisdictions” – this from a greedy cynical asshole who has broken a thousand laws and gotten away with it because he’s filthy rich.

The five-page presidential memo, officially titled “Memorandum on Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities,” is more of a political document than a policy one. The real point of the memo is for Trump to sow division between his decidedly non-urban, white political base and the other two-thirds of the country. 

And for Trump to be an asshole.

Fox News confirms it. It will be interesting to see how he spins that. Fox has always hated him, it’s so unfair?

Another exciting one of whatever these are, where reporters ask questions and Trump just says whatever pops into his head for a minute or two.

Football! Medals! Central casting! Gerbil, ski pole, lima bean, choo choo train.

Russia…North Korea! China! Hillary! Football!

McCain! Disagree! Time! Extent!

Then he says John Kelly fell apart and couldn’t do his job.

A guy who writes for Forbes on “LGBT life, identities and being queer” wants us to know how wrong the Spectator is on trans issues.

Being transgender was declassified from the international classifications of diseases by the UN’s WHO body last year, and numerous trans activists have pointed out their lived experience is not a debate.

That doesn’t tell us much. Maybe the WHO was bullied into the “declassifying.” The second item is hand-waving bullshit. If someone’s purported “lived experience” relies on a belief system that defines women in a way that most women don’t want to be defined, then the belief system damn well is open to debate. Women get to say we’re not a feeling in a man’s head, and our “lived experience” is relevant too.

Stop Funding Hate, a U.K. based organisation that campaigns to brands and organisations to pull funding from media with hateful editorials have been focusing on the Spectator recently. They had posted celebrating the person who complained and “highlighted the magazine’s toxic track record of transphobic coverage.”

But is the coverage “transphobic” or analytical? I say it’s the latter. It’s not “phobic” to dispute fanciful truth claims.

“As a parent of a trans child, I’ve been aware of the trans-hostile reporting by the Spectator for quite some time.” Helen, who runs the trans advocacy Twitter account @mimmymum tells me.

Forbes is consulting mimmymum now. You couldn’t make it up.

Alan Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology, explains that race is real but not genetic.

Like a fish in water, we’ve all been engulfed by “the smog” of thinking that “race” is biologically real. Thus, it is easy to incorrectly conclude that “racial” differences in health, wealth, and all manner of other outcomes are the inescapable result of genetic differences.

The reality is that socially defined racial groups in the U.S. and most everywhere else do differ in outcomes. But that’s not due to genes. Rather, it is due to systemic differences in lived experience and institutional racism.

…

As a professor of biological anthropology, I teach and advise college undergraduates. While my students are aware of inequalities in the life experiences of different socially delineated racial groups, most of them also think that biological “races” are real things. Indeed, more than half of Americans still believe that their racial identity is “determined by information contained in their DNA.”

…

In the 1700s, Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy and someone not without ego, liked to imagine himself as organizing what God created. Linnaeus famously classified our own species into races based on reports from explorers and conquerors.

The race categories he created included Americanus, Africanus, and even Monstrosus (for wild and feral individuals and those with birth defects), and their essential defining traits included a biocultural mélange of color, personality, and modes of governance. Linnaeus described Europeaus as white, sanguine, and governed by law, and Asiaticus as yellow, melancholic, and ruled by opinion. These descriptions highlight just how much ideas of race are formulated by social ideas of the time.

Funny how all this time there was never any difficulty with pairs from different races producing viable offspring.

There have been lots of efforts since Charles Darwin’s time to fashion the typological and static concept of race into an evolutionary concept. For example, Carleton Coon, a former president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, argued in The Origin of Races (1962) that five races evolved separately and became modern humans at different times.

How odd that they’re able to interbreed then.

One nontrivial problem with Coon’s theory, and all attempts to make race into an evolutionary unit, is that there is no evidence. Rather, all the archaeological and genetic data point to abundant flows of individuals, ideas, and genes across continents, with modern humans evolving at the same time, together.

A few pundits such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute and science writers such as Nicholas Wade, formerly of The New York Times, still argue that even though humans don’t come in fixed, color-coded races, dividing us into races still does a decent job of describing human genetic variation. Their position is shockingly wrong. We’ve known for almost 50 years that race does not describe human genetic variation.

Read on.

Always great when the Attorney General of the whole country says things that aren’t true on national tv – especially when the untrue things convey that voter fraud is a much bigger problem than it is, weeks before an election which could see an evil corrupt monster re-elected.

In his latest warning about the dangers of mass mail-in voting, Attorney General William P. Barr pointed to a case in Texas that he said highlighted the risk of fraud.

“Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion,” Barr told CNN on Wednesday. “For example, we indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected, he — from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. Okay?”

Federal prosecutors brought no such indictment. And while a Justice Department spokeswoman said Barr was referring to a local prosecution involving suspected mail-in voting fraud in a city council election, the assistant district attorney on that case said Barr’s description doesn’t match the facts.

Not what happened at all, that ADA said.

“Unfortunately, it speaks volumes to the credibility of Attorney General Barr when he submits half-truths and alternative facts as clear evidence of voter fraud without having so much as even contacted me or the district attorney’s office for an understanding of the events that actually occurred,” he added later.

The genuine evidence is that voter fraud is tiny.

A Washington Post analysis earlier this year of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent. Local officials in those states pointed to what they called their sophisticated systems to detect and prevent fraud.

But William Barr desperately wants us to believe otherwise. He’s a very bad man.

All fine, completely normal, nothing to worry about.

Updating to add full image.

Trump denies it!!

Well of course he does. He denies everything. He also lies constantly. Who cares that he denies it?

According to The Atlantic magazine, Mr Trump cancelled a visit to a US cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he said it was “filled with losers”.

The allegations have since been corroborated by two senior military officials in a story by AP news agency.

But in a tweet, the president denounced the claims as “made up fake news”.

Oh, well, if it’s in a tweet, that changes everything.

People in the military world are stunned by the remarks that Mr Trump reportedly made about US soldiers killed in combat, the latest in a series of surprising comments from a commander-in-chief.

“What an ignorant, ignorant fool,” says Gary Solis, a former US Marines judge, adding: “I pity anyone who is so lacking in common understanding and appreciation for military service.”

The reaction of Mr Solis is shared by many of those who have served in the military and also by those who are currently in the US armed forces.

The question is why anyone in the military ever admired him. He’s a mouthy bloviating marshmallow, he’s all hat and no cattle, all talk and no guts or discipline or work or conscience. What’s to like?