Another lawsuit stamped NO:

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia.

The lawsuit was brought by former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell and relied on baseless conspiracy theories to argue Biden’s victory, which has been upheld by two recounts, was illegitimate.

“They want this court to substitute its judgment for the 2.5 million voters who voted for Biden,” US district judge Timothy Batten said of the lawsuit. “This I’m unwilling to do.”

Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said today that the state would move forward with recertifying Biden’s victory after another recount confirmed his win.

Trump is being completely grown-up and reasonable about it.

Michigan trumpers are armed and dangerous.

Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson said dozens of armed protesters gathered in a threatening manner outside her home on Saturday evening chanting “bogus” claims about electoral fraud.

Armed protesters. Outside her house. In support of a criminal trying to steal an election. We’re on a knife-edge here.

In a Twitter statement on Sunday, Benson said the protesters were trying to spread false information about the security and accuracy of the US election system. “The demands made outside my home were unambiguous, loud and threatening.”

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel, in a separate Twitter post, accused the pro-Trump demonstrators of “mob-like behavior (that) is an affront to basic morality and decency”.

“Anyone can air legitimate grievances to Secretary Benson’s office through civil and democratic means, but terrorizing children and families in their own homes is not activism.”

Knife-edge.

Mmmm.

No, chum, that’s not it. Spend your month off to learn being passed over for jobs and promotions, being ignored at meetings, being expected to make the coffee and keep the break room clean, being lectured and shouted at on social media, being a member of the sex seen as second, as an afterthought, as subordinate, as irrelevant, as stupid, as feeble, as scheming, as ball-breakers, as whores, as frigid bitches, as outsiders, as the enemy.

The Daily Mail again, sorry:

Two transgender women who viciously beat up and stamped on a teenager after he mocked them in central London have admitted they ‘overreacted,’ but have slammed Britain as ‘transphobic’.

Tamzin Lush and Tylah Bryan walked free from court last month after admitting violent disorder, alongside a third trans woman, Amarnih Lewis-Daniel, who has not since spoken out. 

They were filmed beating up and stamping on a 19-year-old who mocked them and told them: ‘You’re not a woman. You need a f**** to be a woman’.   

A fanny, that is, which here in the US is just very mild slang for butt/bum/ass/arse, so mild that it may have dropped out of use altogether, but in the UK is rude slang for The Lady Parts.

Anyway.

Now Lush, 29, and Bryan, 24, have spoken about the incident, admitting ‘we took it too far,’ as they said their actions were ‘entirely wrong’ after they reacted violently, spurred on by alcohol. 

…

The trans women said they faced abuse every day, but spoke about the attack, which was filmed outside Leicester Square tube station in 2018.

Bryan, from Barking, east London, said: ‘You get people that make passing comments and by the time they’ve said anything, they’re gone – they keep walking.

‘We were telling him to jog on and leave us alone. This guy was adamant to let us know his beliefs and it wasn’t just a passing comment.’

On the other hand it was just a comment, as opposed to slamming him to the platform and then kicking him.

So anyway Rudy has the Covid. Serves him right.

Giuliani was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital on Sunday, a source familiar confirmed to CNN.

Nice for some. Ordinary people can’t get admitted to anywhere unless they’re gasping, and not always even then, but Rudy just checks in the day he tests positive.

The former mayor of New York has been crisscrossing the country to battleground states, leading the President’s long-shot legal battle to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

In other words Giuliani has been doing lots of traveling as the pandemic gets ever worse and the medical experts and health care workers plead with us all not to travel, and he’s been doing this stupid reckless dangerous to others thing in an effort to help Trump steal the election. What a sewer.

Giuliani has repeatedly disregarded public health guidelines, appearing maskless in state capitols, hotel ballrooms and at indoor news conferences in recent weeks. At many of the events, most of the other people in the indoor settings were also not wearing masks.

At some of those events, Giuliani was spotted shaking hands, hugging and taking pictures with people while not wearing a mask.

It’s a wonder he didn’t actually spit into their mouths.

He traveled to Michigan on Wednesday for a state House committee hearing that lasted four and a half hours, during which he was maskless as he pushed misleading claims that the election was stolen from Trump.

…

Giuliani also eschewed US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine guidelines after his son, and close contact and campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn, tested positive in late November. The day Epshteyn announced he had tested positive, Giuliani traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he addressed a group of Republican state lawmakers in a crowded hotel ballroom.

These are not good people.

Georgia Democratic state senator Elena Parent, who attended the hearing at the Georgia Capitol on Thursday with Giuliani, told CNN that Giuliani and his team “willingly endangered all of us to pander to Trump.”

“It was reckless and irresponsible for the Georgia Senate Republicans to hold an in-person hearing without requiring masks and social distancing during a pandemic. Clearly the COVID risk from (Giuliani) and team, who have been attending hearings maskless all around the country, was high and they willingly endangered all of us to pander to Trump,” Parent said in a statement emailed to CNN Sunday.

She added, “Mayor Giuliani’s blatant disregard for public safety measures in this pandemic is irresponsible and puts Georgians in danger.”

That’s who he is.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Living azza.

I don’t know, maybe guys like Skye Morden are constantly saying to themselves (sotto voce) “I am a woman I am a woman I am a woman” ad infinitum. It sounds horribly distracting, but maybe it does the trick.

I believe the formula is most effective when repeated in ALL CAPS, like the preferred repetition of TWAW. I also am of the understanding that the minimum number of reps is five for best results.

Distraction is of no consequence, so long as one achieves confirmation and validation (or at least compliance/acquiescence), which is a much higher priority than actual policing. Perhaps PC Morden will be put onto limerick duty on twitter, to ensure Purity ond Orthodoxy in all publicly expressed thought.

Why do I fail to see it as healthy or normal for a police force to humour and encourage somebody’s delusion or paraphilia in this way? Would a police force recruit and accept an officer who’d come out as Otherkin, or Furry, and allow them to patrol the streets in fluffy tail and ears? What if they were to shoot Jolyon Maugham in self defence? Assignment to the K-9 unit might result in unintended struggles for dominance and territory. Mind you, it might also give new subject material for the BBC natural history unit, or be the basis for a truly unique police procedural programme.

More bullying of women who refuse to endorse the gender mythology:

(A side point, before we go on – I just want to make a note of the self-admiration in the first tweet of saying “feel free to wander off, I shan’t mind a bit” – as if Twitter were a living room and people were gathered around her listening to a speech. There’s no such thing as “wandering off” on Twitter because no one knows you’re there to begin with. She can’t see people “wandering off” so why assure them that it’s ok to do so? Much less say that she “won’t mind” when she won’t even know? It’s a tangent, sorry, but I really hate that kind of fake self-effacement that’s really self-aggrandizement. It gets on my NERVES.)

Of course, Transgender Trend isn’t “transphobic.” Telling children they can’t be “born in the wrong body” is not any kind of phobic. It’s not true that any normal person would challenge such useful advice.

Not sure I believe any of that.

Imagine what it’s like being a woman facing shouts of “TERF” every day.

Ahhh sneaky, pretending gender ideology is in any way related to BLM or any other form of resistance to racism. If you can sneak in under the raincoat of anti-racism you’re golden.

Bam, there it is, at the very end, the admission that it’s an attack on Rachel Rooney.

Unfortunately, Philip Pullman saw fit to back it up.

Hmm.

West Midlands PC Skye Morden is determined to blaze a trail for other transgender police officers. Skye knew that though she was assigned male at birth and had lived as a man for many years, she was, in fact, female.

What I’m wondering is, if you “live as a man” for many years (along with having a male body), how is it possible to “be, in fact, female”? Even if you believed in the whole magic internal gender-soul thing, once you’ve put in many years of “living as a man” while also having a male body…how would that work? Wouldn’t the two things working in combination end up over time making the magic internal gender-soul so attenuated as to be undetectable?

I don’t know, maybe guys like Skye Morden are constantly saying to themselves (sotto voce) “I am a woman I am a woman I am a woman” ad infinitum. It sounds horribly distracting, but maybe it does the trick.

This is ominous.

Over half of New York City firefighters said they will not get vaccinated for COVID-19 despite the second wave of cases in the city.

So they’ll spread it. They’re essential workers, obviously, so if they don’t get vaccinated they’ll spread it like crazy.

The results of the survey came nearly two weeks after the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) announced it won’t make the vaccine mandatory for its members, even as the city sees a surge of COVID-19 cases.

Yeeeeah that’s no good.

“It may become necessary to require that certain individuals or communities be vaccinated, such as health care workers and students, to protect the public’s health,” Mary Beth Morrissey, the chair of the New York State Bar Association’s COVID-19 task force, said in a statement on November 7.

Bad times ahead.

Trump was supposed to be in Georgia to help the Republican candidates in the run-offs for the Senate, but of course he talked exclusively about himself as he always does. He

has held his first political rally since losing the presidential election, delivering an incoherent speech laced with baseless conspiracies theories about election fraud and attacks on Republican state officials in Georgia who have refused to help him subvert the results.

In front of a crowd of thousands of mostly maskless, non-socially distanced supporters in south Georgia, Trump repeatedly claimed, falsely, that he had won the presidential election, and called for those in government with “courage and wisdom” to help him reverse the result.

So Georgia’s COVID numbers will rocket up in about ten days. That’s helpful.

The president read from a prepared list of nonsensical evidence that he said highlighted his victory. This included arguing that by winning the states of Ohio and Florida he had in fact won the entire election, and also that winning an uncontested Republican party primary earlier this year was proof he had won against Biden in November.

He had a prepared list of nonsensical evidence.

I laugh, but then, has he ever had anything else?

Trump vented fury at the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, a one-time political ally of the president, who has resisted calls to join Trump’s attempts to overturn the result in the state.

“Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” Trump told the crowd.

That is, “your governor could help me steal the election if he were as psychopathic as I am.”

It’s Trump’s one skill, knowing how to break the law.

He added: “For whatever reason your secretary of state and your governor are afraid of Stacey Abrams” – a reference to the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate, who is a staunch voting rights advocate and helped drive turnout in the election and secure the state for Biden.

And – pssst – is African-American and a woman. That was a very blatant double dog whistle.

Trump also made a number of bizarre and incoherent ad libs throughout his address, at one point professing: “I like cucumbers”.

At another point he boasted about non-existent “hydrosonic” missiles.

“Hypersonic missiles. We have hypersonic and hydrosonic. You know what hydrosonic is? Water,” he said.

Aaron Rupar remarked, “He’s talking about toothbrush missiles again.”

Eventually Trump gave the two Senate candidates he was supposed to be there to help a few minutes to speak. The crowd was “Meh.”

Another university tells another student to shut up about All That, but there’s a twist.

Alistair Bonnington, an ex-BBC legal adviser and former honorary law professor who taught Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during her student days, posted his views on an Open University forum during a discussion about the 18th Century French writer Voltaire – an advocate for freedom of speech.

But his comments, referring to Scotland’s Hate Crime Bill, which will allow men to self-identify as women, and the ‘woke’ backlash faced by Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling earlier this year over her trans views, were deleted.

He’s a law maven, and an adult, but the OU wouldn’t (and won’t) let him speak freely.

In his post, Mr Bonnington, 68, who is now an English Literature student at the OU, argued the SNP plans ‘would make it a crime for anybody to deny that a “trans” woman (ie a man) was a real woman’, adding: ‘It looks like feminists in Scotland can look forward to incarceration. Poor J.K. Rowling may need to become an exile like Voltaire!!!’

So the OU sent him a “warning letter” telling him he was violating forum rules.

Accusing the OU of ‘infantile and anti-intellectual behaviour’, Mr Bonnington last night said: ‘Bear in mind this was in a debate about free speech. For the university to do what it did is an absolute joke.

‘Universities should be places where free debate can be had between people who hold different views. If we’re not allowed to debate things in universities, then things have got into a bit of a mess.

‘That’s just Stalinism, basically, and I find it quite shocking for free speech to be treated as an expendable commodity by a university.’

Especially when what you’re saying is just a simple, basic, obvious truth. The OU might as well forbid its students to say dogs are not cats, or turnips are not raspberries, or the moon is not the sun.

Mr Bonnington added: ‘I’ve taught in universities for over 25 years, but it seemed to me extraordinary that a university would be basically enforcing a particular viewpoint. It’s an incredibly infantile approach and anti-intellectual.’

It makes it all the more extraordinary, and obnoxious and destructive, that the viewpoint the university is enforcing is so childishly fatuous and reality-denying. The public infrastructure is trying to force us to echo a lie, and it punishes us if we refuse.

Last night, an OU spokesman said: ‘We will not allow views to be presented in a way that is hostile or degrading to others. This does not infringe our statement on academic freedom, which supports opinions and arguments, including those that could cause offence to some people, to be openly and freely expressed.’

Ha that’s funny because yes it does. Of course it does. The second sentence flatly contradicts the first.

Ugghh. Trump is doing his loathsome Steal The Election rally.

Pink News flings its stones at the witch with its usual sloppy illiterate vacuous zeal.

The SNP’s new equalities convener is facing scrutiny for her support of anti-trans pressure group For Women Scotland and the author JK Rowling.

Scrutiny from this Pink News reporter at least. That’s so typical of this kind of shite – agent-free accusations of “scrutiny” – from whom? Besides you there at your laptop?

Elections for the party’s national executive committee on Monday (30 November) saw Lynne Anderson chosen by the party membership to serve as equalities convener, giving her a crucial say in SNP policy.

And Nick Duffy, the hack who wrote this, wants the party membership to un-give that crucial say. He has her under scrutiny, after all.

He tells us what she tweeted. Then he tells us what David Paisley tweeted about her. What more do we need to know? (I’m doing the same thing right now, but I’m not Pink News trying to take someone’s political appointment away.)

Then he shares a whole bunch of tweets from someone else, as if they were eyewitness testimony to a murder. Then –

Earlier this week, more than 700 people signed an open letter condemning a “crisis of inaction on transphobic abuse” in Scotland and demanding that Holyrood launch an independent inquiry into transphobia in political parties.

The signatories, who come from across Scotland’s political spectrum, came together to ask cisgender allies to “put pressure on all political parties to take internal complaints of transphobic abuse seriously”.

Therefore…Lynn Anderson should not be SNP equalities convenor? It’s less than convincing, yet this collection of irrelevant tweets was brandished in the Edinburgh LGBTI+ Facebook group as if it were a damning exposé, and then some feminist women were kicked out of the group for objecting, and all their comments were deleted.

It’s total obedience or nothing in this world.

There’s a public Facebook group called Edinburgh LGBTI+. Note the public part: anyone can read the posts. It shares details in a top of the page post:

Edinburgh LGBTI+ Community Group is intended as a safe space for all members of our community, regardless of race, religion, sex, gender, sexuality, trans identity, and ability/disability. We stand, to the best of our current knowledge and understanding, against both direct and indirect discrimination, striving to be anti-racist, anti-abilist, anti-ageist, anti-religious discrimination. We are anti-asexual erasure, anti-aromantic erasure, anti-intersex erasure, anti-bisexual erasure and anti-polyamory erasure. We are pro-trans rights, pro-nonbinary rights. Ultimately we are pro-human rights.

It’s oddly careful to say nothing about women or sexism or misogyny or feminism. It does say “regardless of sex” along with all the other categories, but that’s the closest it gets to mentioning women, i.e. not very close. (It also doesn’t mention class. There’s room to mention the aromantic, but not the working class.)

The admins just did a purge of people they call transphobic, and deleted all comments made by the women they call transphobic. The dispute was over a post calling someone…transphobic, of course. The evidence was an article at Pink News.

Our equalities chief is not fit for purpose and if she cannot represent the needs of all of us, then she should not be getting to serve any of us, please please please get in touch with your local mp and also to Nicola sturgeon as this should not be allowed to happen. Long story short, she is a transphobe and as such, is not fit for her job. I call on others to join me in sharing and encouraging others to also contact their mps in order to stop this being allowed to continue.

The Pink News headline is: New SNP equalities chief proudly supports JK Rowling and anti-trans pressure group For Women Scotland.

Same old same old same old. She’s a witch, throw your stones now.

There were dissenters, as I mentioned, but they’re gone and so is everything they said. It’s unanimous! New SNP equalities chief is definitely a witch, everyone says so!

Is it cruel to find this funny?

He’s not always so sweet and obliging.

That must have been an awkward phone conversation, maybe the most awkward since that “We need you to do us a favor though” one.

President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.

“Hi Brian, do me a solid and get the lej to throw out the votes for Biden, ok?”

Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Anything else? Invade Iran? Drop a few nukes on North Korea? Pave over the Amazon?

Kemp confirms.

Kemp, a one-time ally of Trump, has become a punching bag for the president who called him “hapless” for not doing more to help him wrest away Biden’s win.

That’s Trump for you. He has no friends, he has only people who do him favors. Once they refuse a demand, they’re the enemy aka one of his punching bags.

“Georgia law prohibits the governor from interfering in elections. The Secretary of State, who is an elected constitutional officer, has oversight over elections that cannot be overrriden by executive order,” Kemp’s spokesman said several days ago in response to Trump’s public demands.

Yes yes yes, blah blah, but he can just ignore that and do what he wants, because Trump told him to.

The fox-clubbing QC has riled people again. It’s about the Tavistock ruling of course.

Except that not giving children medication that stops puberty is not comparable to exterminating them.

Those rock paintings in the Amazon:

Thousands of rock art pictures depicting huge Ice Age creatures such as mastodons have been revealed by researchers in the Amazon rainforest.

The paintings were probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain’s University of Exeter.

The paintings are set over three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, home to 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs.

Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern-day Colombia, the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

Ok so I was reading a story about COVID measures in California and there’s a photo of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco seen between two rows of buildings, with the caption:

California Street, usually filled with iconic cable cars, is seen mostly empty in San Francisco, California on March 17, 2020.

And I was annoyed. Cable cars are not iconic! Neither are movie stars, or shoes, or apartment buildings, or the Space Needle, or the Grand Canyon. “Iconic” is not another word for famous or recognizable or familiar. That’s not what it means.

I know, I know, that is what it means now, because usage is what counts, but it isn’t, and I hate it.

I saw one yesterday that also set me off: it was on an ad for a flashy new apartment building in Seattle, of which some 5 million have been built over the last few years.

As the tallest residential building in Seattle, this iconic tower is home to a collection of ultra luxury apartment residences.

What’s iconic about it?! They don’t say. Here it doesn’t even mean “familiar”; it’s just a fancy word for expensive.

So I was ranting about it and a friend handed me this to keep me quiet for a few minutes:

Can we please give the word “iconic” a rest? These days, you can’t pick up a newspaper, click on some website, turn on a f*%$@* TV without reading about something or someone that is iconic. Once upon a time, the now infernal word (hey, let’s use “infernal” more) was relegated to the lexicon of overzealous art history professors who used words like “musculature” while they groped a Greek sculpture on display at the university art museum. Those were the days.

This is what I’m saying. It was an art history word. It had a particular, narrow meaning, and it didn’t come up more than a couple of times a year. People weren’t running around talking about their iconic new espresso machine or puffa jacket.

Type the word “iconic” into your favorite search engine and voila, nearly 200,000 articles about an “iconic gadget,” “iconic comedian,” “iconic art,” “Jamie Foxx’s iconic thriller,” “iconic summer,” “Madonna’s iconic pose,” “Miami’s iconic hotels,” “England’s iconic chimney stacks.”

How about England’s iconic toilet flusher pulls? Now those are iconic.

I’m kidding; they’re not.

Webster’s Dictionary defines iconic:

1. Relating to, resembling, or having the character of an icon or (Fine Arts & Visual Arts / Art Terms) (of memorial sculptures, esp those depicting athletes of ancient Greece) having a fixed conventional style

2. A conventional religious image typically painted on a small wooden panel and used in the devotions of Eastern Christians

To do with an actual, literal icon, in short.

I’m not alone in my revulsion toward “iconic,” either. Even the venerable British tabloid The Telegraph selected “iconic” among their list of “words that should be banned because they have lost their meaning and have become useless.” But that was nearly five years ago, and instead of retiring the word to the rafters, millions of unworthy icons or iconic people have appeared… like locusts. Just watch Inside Edition any day of the week and “follow Miss USA as she fulfills her life-long dream of recreating an iconic scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” followed quickly by Deborah Norville speaking with iconic film producer Harvey Weinstein.”

They don’t call Harvey Weinstein iconic any more, but that’s not because they’ve found out what the word means.

You were worrying that bankers wouldn’t be among the first to get the vaccine, weren’t you. Well worry no more!

Wall Street could get a shot in the arm in the coming months, while much of Main Street waits months for their COVID inoculations.

Lenders, bank tellers and traders could jump ahead of most Americans for vaccines, after such remedies receive emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, potentially putting financial industry workers ahead of those aged above 65, adults with medical issues and the rest of the U.S. population.

Bankers are important! How do we know? All that money they have. Stands to reason.

Essential workers are in the second group, after front-line health care workers and residents in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Bankers are essential!

[T]he DHS defines essential workers as those who conduct a range of operations and services that are typically essential to continue critical infrastructure operations, and normally have included firefighters, teachers and grocery workers.

And not so much bankers, which is a shocking and unreasonable oversight.