The Justice Department says cops in Phoenix are doing it wrong.

The Phoenix Police Department routinely uses excessive force and discriminates against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, part of a broader pattern of unconstitutional policing in one of America’s largest cities, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday.

Will there be any such reports if Trump returns? Obviously not.

In a 126-page report, the Justice Department said a federal civil rights investigation found that police in Phoenix use unnecessarily dangerous force, making situations more volatile; fail to provide proper oversight when force is used; and enforce the law based on race. Investigators also found that the department violates the rights of people who are homeless, improperly arresting them and destroying their property.

While other jurisdictions have recently responded to similar investigations by pledging to cooperate with federal oversight, Phoenix officials had publicly questioned the Justice Department probe, raising the possibility that they could refuse to accept its findings. If so, that could lead to a legal battle in which the Justice Department goes to court to pursue an order forcing the local agency under federal supervision, opening a contentious new front in the public debate over police reform and accountability.

…

The Justice Department report released Thursday noted that the Phoenix police shoot and kill people at one of the country’s highest rates. Phoenix police officers have fatally shot at least 119 people since the beginning of 2015, according to a Washington Post database tracking deadly shootings by police. This number outpaces fatal shootings by police in other cities with larger populations, including Chicago, New York and Houston.

In the report, federal investigators said they found that Phoenix police “use unreasonable force to rapidly dominate encounters, often within the first few moments of an encounter.” Officers shoot at people who present no threat or who are no longer a threat, the report says, sometimes using force against people who are already unconscious due to police gunfire. Police also use force rapidly, the report said, sometimes before even speaking to the person involved.

Nobody’s perfect.

Ooooh yay, decor tips for trans women. I’m sure I could learn a lot – my decor isn’t all that womany. I’m not sure it’s even decor.

Creating a feminine home is a journey of self-expression and empowerment. This article offers practical decor tips and DIY projects for trans women to transform their living spaces. From selecting a soothing color palette and elegant furniture to adding soft textiles and ambient lighting, these suggestions help create a sanctuary that reflects personal style. 

That’s why we have to tell you how to do it: it’s so personal that only complete strangers can give you lessons in it.

No crude stereotypes there, no indeed.

Labour continues to ignore women.

Labour has pledged to ban conversion therapy despite fears it could stop children who are questioning their gender from getting help. The party unveiled a “fully trans-inclusive ban” in their plans on Thursday, which would come into force should they succeed in the polls.

…

The Labour Party’s manifesto included a section describing legislation around conversion practices as “a very complex issue”. The document stated: “So-called conversion therapy is abuse – there is no other word for it – so Labour will finally deliver a full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices, while protecting the freedom for people to explore their sexual orientation and gender identity.”

If “conversion therapy” is “so-called” then how is Labour so certain that it’s “abuse”?

The trick of course is to pretend that therapy for gender-confused children is the same as homophobic pseudo-therapy with the goal of talking kids out of being gay.

Following the Conservatives’ rejection earlier this week, Helen Joyce, director of advocacy for Sex Matters, said the Tories had heeded “growing evidence” that the ban would be “harmful”.

“The Conservatives’ decision not to pursue a ban on so-called ‘conversion therapy’ reflects growing evidence that such measures are unnecessary and even harmful,” she said. “Abuse perpetrated under the guise of healthcare or therapy is already illegal.” Ms Joyce added: “It is by now well established that most children feeling gender distress or convinced of an opposite-sex identity will grow out of this during puberty. It is hard to see how a conversion therapy ban could be framed so as to avoid outlawing the supportive, open-ended approach recommended in the recent Cass Review.”

…

Kate Barker, Chief Executive, LGB Alliance said: “This is a dark day for young LGB people. As the Cass Review noted, 89 per cent of girls and 81 per cent of boys experiencing gender distress are same-sex attracted. Therapists should not be criminalised for exploring the reasons someone feels uncomfortable in their body, including internalised homophobia and autism. If this manifesto promise becomes law, it will exert a chilling effect on professionals and drive more young people to undertake medical procedures with profound, irreversible and lifelong consequences.”

On the upside, we’ll see more women with hairy armpits on the covers of fashion mags.

Hahahahahahahaha classic – she’s nonbinereeeee yet somehow she still ends up on the cover of Harpers Bazaar in her underwear looking passive and vacant. Unshaved armpits=exciting thrilling unusual original rebelliousish gender theater.

Convicted felons are not allowed to have guns.

Weeks after he was convicted of 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial, Donald Trump confessed to having a gun—which would be illegal with his felony conviction.

New York City Department of Probation officials questioned the convicted felon and Republican presidential nominee Tuesday in a presentencing interview, and part of the discussion concerned a gun registered to him in the state. Under federal law, convicted felons are not allowed to have guns or ammunition.

…

Trump turned over two of his three licensed guns to the New York Police Department on March 31, 2023, before he was arrested for paying hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. The third gun was supposed to be “lawfully moved to Florida.” Palm Beach police told CNN that they weren’t aware of any gun Trump owned and that he hadn’t submitted one to them since his felony conviction.

Laws are for other people to obey.

Hahahaha no. Creepy Jeffrey would love that but no.

“Could” if water turned into wine and dogs taught philosophy at Cambridge.

William “Lia” Thomas lost.

Lia Thomas, the swimmer who became the first transgender winner of an American collegiate title, has had her case against new World Aquatics rules dismissed by the Court Of Arbitration of Sport.

World Aquatics banned transgender swimmers from the elite female category if they had undergone any part of male puberty following Thomas’s NCAA win in 2022, an intervention which ended Thomas’s hopes of ever competing in women’s swimming events at the Olympics.

As is only right.

Thomas responded by lodging a legal challenge with Cas in September of last year, arguing that the rules were “invalid and unlawful” because they were discriminatory and contrary to the Olympic Charter and European Convention of Human Rights. Cas, however, has dismissed the case after concluding that the rules applied only to World Aquatics elite events or world records, and otherwise had “no impact” on athletes.

Let’s hope this is the last we ever hear from that horrible man.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on There’s a sucker born every minute.

I’ve never in my life heard of anyone paying for a life coach’s services, and that’s puzzled me more and more; I seem to come across a self-declared life coach online at least once a week. Who the hell are they coaching?

Now I have my answer: like Amway salesmen, life coaches are their own target demographic. The only people gullible enough to buy it are the people gullible enough to get roped into selling it.

It feels like everything is a pyramid scheme these days. In the information-overload/hypertechnology age, we’re all feeling lost at sea and searching for safe harbour. In this environment, people everywhere are throwing themselves behind dubious “life changing” schemes. When you look at it that way, getting into “life coaching” isn’t all that different from getting into gender ideology.

I would say the same about Bitcoin, or NFTs. They’re pyramid schemes that sell the promise of life improvement through investment in junk products.

I happen to believe Canada’s entire economy has become swept up in one such pyramid scheme, a craze that promises to change everyone’s lives but which is centred around junk products: the real estate speculation bubble. Countless Canadians have redirected their savings into investing in the condo craze. Many people have even quit their jobs to become full-time real estate speculators. Prices have ballooned far above anything remotely rational, and now the entire country is deep in debt, trying (and failing) to keep up with their preposterous mortgage payments. Millions of Canadians now depend on food banks; there’s a national boycott of our chief grocer (resentment at sky-high grocery prices is a side-effect of people finding they don’t have enough money to eat after the rent/mortgage bill comes out); there’s a catastrophic spike in homelessness; international students and recent immigrants are turning around and leaving; storefronts are shuttering. No one can afford any discretionary spending, leading to mass layoffs in the service sector, leading to a cascade of job losses throughout the economy. All because of the get-rich-quick condo investment pyramid scheme. The true believers are adamant that the problem is simply a temporary increase in interest rates, but the true problem is the principal on these home loans, not the interest: everybody’s real estate valuations need to be cut in half, coast to coast, to make life liveable again in this country. There is in fact more for-rent housing and more for-sale housing on the market right now than there has been in decades, so the problem is certainly not supply. The problem is that the prices are too high for anyone to afford, and the normal machinations of supply and demand haven’t yet succeeded in bringing the prices back down to earth, because everyone — including policymakers in the federal government — is desperate to put off the inevitable reckoning with reality.

It feels like I’m living in a bizarre dream where everyone around me has succumbed to some cult or other. It’s Invasion of the Critical-Thinking Snatchers, and the few of us un-snatched remainers are laying low, just trying to hold on until something comes along to save us all.

How is “life coaching” even a thing?

With early roots in the late-20th-century pull toward self-improvement, life coaching broadly encompasses a program of goal-setting and talk-therapy-style sessions aimed at improving an individual’s circumstances and well-being.

They may be “talk-therapy-style” but that doesn’t mean they are talk therapy. There’s no body of knowledge behind “life coaching”; it’s just people giving advice, with no training or education required. I don’t understand why people pay other people to do that when they could just do it themselves.

Business is booming. The International Coaching Federation, the world’s largest nonprofit coaching association, estimated that the industry was worth $4.6 billion in 2022 and that the number of coaches increased 54 percent between 2019 and 2022. Because the industry lacks standardized accreditation, it’s most likely larger — one of the dangers of life coaching is that anyone can claim the title of life coach.

And, clearly, lots and lots of people believe that the title of life coach means something.

“Coaching is a self-regulated industry, which means that anyone can establish a coaching practice regardless of their training or professional background,” said Carrie Abner, the vice president of credentials and standards at the International Coaching Federation, in a statement. She said that clients should make sure they were working with trained and experienced coaches who had credentials.

Trained how, by whom, where?

Ms. Abner said that coaches with credentials from the International Coaching Federation agreed to abide by a code of ethics. “If a client feels a coach has acted in a way that is out of alignment with professional or ethical standards, the client has a formal process available to them to hold the coach accountable,” she said.

Well that’s good but what is the substance of the training? What is the body of knowledge that trainees are taught?

Spoiler: you can read to the end of the article but you still won’t find any answers to that question.

Oh SHUT up.

Matt Smith has been praised by fans for correcting Sue Perkins on his House of the Dragon co-star’s pro-nouns during an interview.

The word is “pronouns”; not “pro-nouns”. Illiterate hacks.

The former Doctor Who and The Crown star was chatting to the TV presenter about season two of the prequel to the Game of Thrones franchise when Sue mislabelled actor Emma D’Arcy as a ‘she’. Emma identifies as non-binary and goes by the pronouns they/them – something Matt was quick to effortlessly point out as the interview with former The Great British Bake Off host Sue continued.

Blah blah blah. There’s no such thing as “non-binary.” Nobody has time or energy or inclination to memorize all the luxury pronouns out there, and nobody needs to be corrected for referring to an Emma with a “she.” Just shut up.

Emma, 31, recently opened up on how clothes play a part in their non-binary identity during an interview with HighSnobiety magazine and said: “Clothing, for most people, is central to who they are and how they express themselves. But for gender-fluid or trans people, clothes play an even more fundamental role.”

Oh dear god just stop talking.

Can’t a guy call people faggots in the privacy of his own [checks notes] Vatican?

Pope Francis has again been accused of using a highly offensive term to describe gay men in a closed-door meeting, two weeks after the Vatican apologized over his use of the same slur.

The Italian news agency ANSA, citing unnamed sources, reported that Francis used the Italian word in a meeting on Tuesday afternoon in which he suggested gay men should be welcome in the Church but not in seminaries. The Pope is alleged to have used the term in a non-public meeting with Roman priests at the Salesian Pontifical University.

Ok not his own Vatican but his own Pontifical University. Much the same thing. Pontifical, you see.

And ok not literally “faggots” because that’s English and he won’t have been speaking English. He used the Italian word for “faggots.”

Anyway, can’t a Catholic homophobe have some privacy around here?

Two sources in the room told NBC News last month that the Pope used the phrase in another closed-door meeting with bishops on May 20. The Vatican was moved to issue a rare apology “to those who were offended.”

Ah yes, the old “I’m tho thorry you were ofFENded ya big whiny faggot” apology. Good job, Frank.

Southern institutions are going all-in on the nasty prejudices and persecutions these days.

Southern Baptists say women are inferior.

Even as they prepare to vote on a formal ban on churches with women pastors, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to boot one such church from its ranks.

Messengers, as voting representatives are known, voted 6,759 to 563 to oust First Baptist Church of Alexandria, a historic Virginia congregation that affirms women can serve in any pastoral role, including as senior pastor.

What’s wrong with saying women can be senior pastors?

Tut, don’t be silly, it’s obvious. Women are inferior. End of story.

“We find no joy in making this recommendation, but have formed the opinion that the church’s egalitarian beliefs regarding the office of pastor do not closely identify with the convention’s adopted statement of faith,” said Jonathan Sams, chair of the credentials committee.

Egalitarianism is bad. Hierarchy is good. Inferior people must understand and agree that they’re inferior.

Early Tuesday, a small group of women stood outside the Indiana Convention Center in a low-key demonstration in support of women in ministry. “I hope that people know women have equal value and can be pastors,” said the Rev. Meredith Stone, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry. The organization originated among Southern Baptists in the 1980s, but it now works with women in a variety of Baptist denominations.

Joining them was Christa Brown, who has long advocated for fellow survivors of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches and criticized the denomination’s resistance to reforms, an effort she has chronicled in a new memoir, “Baptistland.” The Southern Baptists ongoing struggles with sexual abuse reforms is also on this year’s calendar. She said there’s a direct connection between issues of abuse and the equality of women in ministry. “When you squash some people, it sets up a lot more people to be squashed,” she said.

Indeed.

How spiteful.

The Virginia NAACP sued a county school board Tuesday over its reinstatement of Confederate military names to two schools, accusing it of embracing segregationist values and subjecting Black students to a racially discriminatory educational environment.

The school board in Shenandoah County voted 5-1 last month to revert the name of Mountain View High School back to Stonewall Jackson High School, and that of Honey Run Elementary to Ashby Lee Elementary. The vote reversed a 2020 decision to remove the original names against a backdrop of nationwide protests over racial injustice.

Who is Ashby Lee? I had to google. Ashby and Lee are two people; Turner Ashby was a Confederate cavalry commander. Two for the price of one!

So here we have a school board voting to restore the names of three military officers who fought to maintain the enslavement of human beings. How very ugly.

The NAACP wrote that students will be “required against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement.”

The school board members in Shenandoah County who had voted in May to restore the Confederate names said they were honoring popular community sentiment. They said the previous board members who had removed the names in 2020 had ignored constituents and due process on the matter.

Ahhh shaddup. The hell with popular communniny senniment. When communniny senniment is pro-enslavement of Other Races it doesn’t deserve to be honored.

Women have no rights that the manly men must accept.

TikTok has briefly suspended the account of Hey Jane, a prominent telemedicine abortion service, four times without explanation. Instagram has suspended Mayday Health, a nonprofit that provides information about abortion pill access, without explanation as well. And the search engine Bing has erroneously flagged the website for Aid Access, a major seller of abortion pills online, as unsafe.

The [abortion] groups and women’s health advocates say these examples, all from recent months, show why they are increasingly confused and frustrated by how major technology platforms moderate posts about abortion services.

Is that the job of technology platforms? No it is not.

They say the companies’ policies on abortion-related content, including advertisements, have long been opaque. But they say the platforms seem to have been more aggressive about removing or suppressing posts that share information about how to obtain safe and legal procedures since the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. And when the platforms do restrict the accounts, the companies can be difficult to contact to learn why.

When in doubt, bully women. Rights are for men; forced pregnancy is for women.

From the Department of Easy For Him to Say:

Keir Starmer has pledged to end the Tory culture wars if he becomes prime minister. In an exclusive interview, the Labour leader told HuffPost UK that people are “exhausted” by the political battles over issues such as trans rights. And he said he wanted to focus on “bringing people together” rather than creating further division.

Man blows off women’s rights as “culture war” and thinks that will “bring people together.” Is it 1968 again? Are men of the left really still sneering at pesky women and our pesky insistence on our pesky rights?

Starmer has been criticised in the past for shifting his own position on transgender rights. However, the Labour leader said his government would look to bring an end to those controversies on day one.

He said: “I think people are exhausted by culture wars. My clear view is that the vast majority of the public in general in the UK are reasonable, tolerant people. Live and let live is a very British thing, and what culture wars do is force people into taking sides that they’re not instinctively inclined to do. And it’s exhausting because you’re constantly having a battle about this and a battle about that.”

Defending women’s rights is not unreasonable, nor is it intolerant. We are allowed to have rights, and we are allowed to defend them. Keir Starmer does not get to throw them away while telling us to give up. We didn’t ask for this “battle” but we’re not going to submit just because Starmer says “live and let live.” Easy for him; his rights are not being stomped into the mud.

He adds:

“That’s why I’ve said that politics needs to tread more lightly on people’s lives.”

Well. Some people’s lives, he means. Not women’s, of course. Go right ahead and tread on those, as hard as you can. Thanks, maaaaaate.

Another dude dismisses women’s concerns while claiming the women don’t know what they’re talking about.

Martina is not impressed.

Neither is JKR.

Well you know how it is, it’s only women, and women just don’t matter.

Nothing but mashed potatoes between those ears.

Keir Starmer promises to continue ignoring women.

Keir Starmer has pledged to end the Tory culture wars if he becomes prime minister. In an exclusive interview, the Labour leader told HuffPost UK that people are “exhausted” by the political battles over issues such as trans rights.

So he’ll just continue to ignore women’s concerns. Thanks Mister Sir!

Starmer has been criticised in the past for shifting his own position on transgender rights. However, the Labour leader said his government would look to bring an end to those controversies on day one. He said: “I think people are exhausted by culture wars. My clear view is that the vast majority of the public in general in the UK are reasonable, tolerant people.”

Unlike those stupid noisy bitches who won’t shut up, right? So exhausting.

Well, maybe, but a question arises. How, exactly, are you defining “transphobia”? How are the people reporting it defining it?

The full caption says “Map shows hotspots for sexual orientation and transgender hate crimes” but the tweet twice says the issue is reports of such “hate crimes.” The two are not the same thing, to put it mildly. Trans “activists” see “hate crimes” everywhere. Of course the stats have shot up when there is so much hyperbolic shouting about dangerous women who refuse to pretend that men are women.

Meanwhile actual violence against women goes underreported and underprosecuted.

You what?

There are tentative signs of high pressure building from the west but cool, wet weather is likely to continue across the UK, forecasters say. After a cool and windy weekend, Monday and Tuesday will remain cool for the time of year, the Met Office said, although will feel warmer in sheltered sunshine.

Heavier showers on Monday should ease up by Tuesday, and overnight temperatures will be in the single figures with a chance of grass frost in rural areas. Ellie Glaisyer, a Met Office meteorologist, said the temperatures were “disappointing for June”. 

Oh dear oh dear if only it were hotter.