I wish they would notice the contradiction. They never notice the contradiction.

Illinois public school administrators tried to force a 13-year-old girl to change clothes in front of a biological male, in accordance with the district’s “inclusive” bathroom policy that allows transgender students to use whichever locker room corresponds with their chosen gender, the mother of the girl said at a Deerfield School District 109 School Board meeting on Thursday evening.

When Nicole Georgas’s 13-year-old daughter came home from Shepard Middle School on February 5, she was frightened and upset: A boy had been in the girl’s bathroom.

Georgas’s daughter was told by Deerfield administrators that because the male student identified as a female, he could use the girl’s locker room and bathroom, Georgas said. Although Georgas expressed to the school that the district was “in clear violation” of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order that restricts males from participating in female sports and using female changing rooms, her daughter’s teachers and principal reiterated that under direction from the district’s legal counsel, the male student could use whichever bathroom corresponded to his chosen gender.

The contradiction is obvious, right? By letting a boy use the girl’s locker room and bathroom, the administrators are preventing all the girls from using whichever bathroom corresponds to their chosen gender. They no longer have a girls’ bathroom so they can’t use the one that fits their gender. Why does what the boy wants matter more than what the girls need? Why is his correspondy bathroom so important while theirs doesn’t matter at all? One boy gets what he wants at the expense of who knows how many girls who lose what they need. They’re not even following their own damn rule.

Deerfield is “committed to inclusive practices that ensure equitable outcomes across educational environments for all students,” the district says on its website, and places priority on “identity development and equity best practices,” and ensuring “inclusion of diverse populations and perspectives.”

But it isn’t. It isn’t. It isn’t at all committed to inclusive practices that ensure equitable outcomes for all students. It’s committed to special luxury practices that ensure lopsided unfair outcomes for all students except that one kid who says he’s a girl. If it really gave a shit about all students, as opposed to giving a shit about looking on trend and superior, it would come up with a solution such as for instance building a couple of new locker rooms for pretend girls and pretend boys. Forcing tens or hundreds of female students to give up the right to stay clothed in the presence of boy students is not the progressive outcome the goonies think it is.

Willoughby plunges to a new disgusting low.

We can ignore him, but I think it’s worth noting and keeping track of how low some lifeforms will plunge.

Roberts says no that’s not how this works.

In an extraordinary display of conflict between the executive and judiciary branches, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rejected calls for impeaching federal judges shortly after President Donald Trump demanded the removal of a judge who ruled against his deportation plans.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a rare statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

But of course Trump has no truck with “normal.” Trump despises normal unless it’s his own very particular brand of normal. Trump considers himself the arbiter of what’s normal and what’s an outrage against Trump and thus the enemy of normal.

In a Tuesday morning social media post, Trump described U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg as an unelected “troublemaker and agitator.” Boasberg recently issued an order blocking deportation flights under wartime authorities from an 18th century law that Trump invoked to carry out his plans.

Well now we could have a long and strenuous conversation about exactly who is the real troublemaker and agitator in this dispute.

Wait what?

NY Times subhead:

In an echo of the Yalta Conference in 1945, the American and Russian leaders will talk on Tuesday about who gets what in the process of ending the war in Ukraine.

How is that an echo of the Yalta Conference???

At the Yalta Conference, the three heads of state were allies, however uncomfortably. At Yalta, the other team was the aggressor.

Here’s a shocker: Russia is not a US ally. I know Trump doesn’t get that, but the Times certainly should. Here’s another shocker: Russia is the aggressor in this war.

Trump handing Ukraine bound and gagged over to Putin does not resemble the Yalta Conference.

But talking to reporters on Air Force One while returning from Florida on Sunday night, Mr. Trump made clear that his scheduled phone conversation with Mr. Putin on Tuesday would be focused on what lands and assets Russia would retain in any cease-fire with Ukraine.

He will, in essence, be negotiating over how large a reward Russia will receive for its 11 years of open aggression against Ukraine, starting with its seizure of Crimea in 2014 and extending through the full-scale war Mr. Putin started three years ago. White House aides have made clear that Russia will certainly retain Crimea — in one of those odd twists of history, the location of the weeklong Yalta Conference in February 1945 — and strongly suggested it would get almost all of the territory it holds.

…

Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC over the weekend that he expected the talks with Russia to be pragmatic, and he deflected any discussion of whether Russia was being rewarded for its aggression. (As a member of Congress, Mr. Waltz was a vocal defender of Ukraine and its sovereignty. As the head of Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, he has avoided stating the obvious, that Russia began the war.)

I hope he has trouble sleeping.

The ominous conclusion:

In an interview, Professor Toft said that land expansion “is what Putin wants, and it’s obviously what Trump wants — just look at Greenland and Panama and Canada.”

She continued: “This is what these leaders think they need to do to make their countries great again.”

“The big question mark is China,” she added. The outcome of the negotiations — and particularly the question of whether Mr. Putin is rewarded for what has been a brutally expensive war, “may indicate what will happen if Xi Jinping decides he wants to take Taiwan.”

That Trump will say “Go right ahead.”

Ah well we may not like what Trump is doing, but Chinese state media think he’s fabulous.

Chinese state media has welcomed Donald Trump’s move to cut public funding for news outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which have long reported on authoritarian regimes.

The decison affects thousands of employees – some 1,300 staff have been put on paid leave at Voice Of America (VOA) alone since Friday’s executive order.

Critics have called the move a setback for democracy but Beijing’s state newspaper Global Times denounced VOA for its “appalling track record” in reporting on China and said it has “now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag”.

That settles it then. “Nothing about us without us” – so when China’s state newspaper says so, we outsiders are required to nod in agreement.

Trump’s cuts target the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is supported by Congress and funds the affected news outlets, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.

They have won acclaim and international recognition for their reporting in places where press freedom is severely curtailed or non-existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.

Ssssshhhh – those are our dear allies now. They don’t like press freedom, so shut up.

RFA has often reported on the crackdown on human rights in Cambodia, whose former authoritarian ruler Hun Sen has hailed the cuts as a “big contribution to eliminating fake news”.

It was also among the first news outlets to report on China’s network of detention centres in Xinjiang, where the authorities are accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims without trial. Beijing denies the claims, saying people willingly attend “re-education camps” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”. VOA’s reporting on North Korean defectors and the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged cover-up of Covid fatalities has won awards.

We’ll be having re-education camps here soon, at the rate we’re going. I do hope the food is good.

The National Press Club, a leading representative group for US journalists, said the order “undermines America’s long-standing commitment to a free and independent press”.

Founded during World War Two in part to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches some 360 million people a week in nearly 50 languages. Over the years it has broadcast in China, North Korea, communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. It’s also been a helpful tool for many Chinese people to learn English.

VOA’s director Michael Abramowitz said Trump’s order has hobbled VOA while “America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”.

They might as well save their billions. We’re doing a brilliant job of discrediting ourselves.

This Alex Staniforth fella really wants to punish women.

More from Team Women May Not Have Anything Just For Women:

Councillors in Edinburgh are considering whether to remove funding from a service that does not support trans women.

What kind of service, you evasive schmucks?

Alex Staniforth, a Scottish Greens councillor, has lodged a motion calling for a review of how the local authority allocates funds to domestic abuse services.

Oh that kind. Well guess what: sometimes women-only services are necessary for women who have experienced domestic abuse. Sometimes that need matters more than the frivolous desire to play Let’s Pretend on the part of selfish demanding entitled doods.

The move is a reaction to an announcement from Edinburgh Women’s Aid (EWA), one of Scotland’s largest domestic abuse charities, that it will not allow trans women or non-binary males to use its 24-hour refuges or group counselling services.

It’s women’s aid. It says so on the tin. It’s for women, so it’s not for men, so men don’t get to use the service, which is for women. Women are allowed to have that; women are allowed to provide that. Men have no right to bounce up and demand services that have never been intended for them. Build your own you pathetic bullies.

Staniforth expressed the concern that if trans women are not welcome to use single-sex services they have no alternative provision. “If there is a blanket ban on trans people accessing the service that is not acceptable,” the councillor said.

The ban is on men. That is entirely acceptable. Men are not a shunned neglected oppressed exploited class.

“It would be completely inappropriate for [a trans woman] to try to access men’s services. We wouldn’t allow any other minority women to be just cast aside completely like that.”

Men are not “minority women.” Men are men.

Lisa Mackenzie, of the policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, said councillors from other parties should unite to reject Staniforth’s motion.

Mackenzie said: “This is a moment for all the mainstream parties to back the courage of the leadership at EWA in standing up for the needs of women they serve, and pushing back against the pressure to adopt self-ID polices, based on poor legal advice.

“We hope that parties on the council that really listen to women will take the chance to distance themselves from this motion.”

Men who playact being women should not have a veto on women’s need for women’s services. Ever.

Ralph Nader on the steadily worsening horror:

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Hm. Debatable. Surely some people elected him to do all that and worse.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

In short why isn’t the Resistance forming? Why aren’t people who have the power to form it, forming it?

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

Allons enfants.

National Review reports [because The Nation won’t]:

Illinois public school administrators tried to force a 13-year-old girl to change clothes in front of a biological male, in accordance with the district’s “inclusive” bathroom policy that allows transgender students to use whichever locker room corresponds with their chosen gender, the mother of the girl said at a Deerfield School District 109 School Board meeting on Thursday evening.

When Nicole Georgas’s 13-year-old daughter came home from Shepard Middle School on February 5, she was frightened and upset: A boy had been in the girl’s bathroom.

Georgas’s daughter was told by Deerfield administrators that because the male student identified as a female, he could use the girl’s locker room and bathroom, Georgas said. 

Yes and this tiger here identifies as a cocker spaniel so the tiger gets to use your living room.

“A few days later, the male student was present in the girls locker room. Feeling violated, the girls made the choice to not change into their PE clothes with the biological male student present,” Georgas said at the meeting.

Administrators then supervised the locker room to ensure that all girls were changing into their physical education clothes without protest, Georgas claimed. District 109 Assistant Superintendent for Student Services Joanna Ford, Assistant Principal Cathy Van Treese, and Director for Student Services Ginger Logemann tried to force the girls to change in front of the male student, Georgas said.

Seriously? They all went in there and tried to force the girls to take their clothes off in front of the boy? If that’s true it’s a whole new level.

Charlie Friedman, a transgender person and parent of a transgender middle schooler, lauded the Illinois gender-inclusive bathroom policy that “protects trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students from the type of bullying that this parent represents,” Charlie said, pointing to Georgas. 

And fails to protect all the other students from the kind of bullying that Charlie Friedman represents. “You MUST take your clothes off in front of a member of the opposite sex no matter how much you don’t want to” versus “I refuse to take my clothes off in front of a member of the opposite sex” – which is the real bullying?

“The discomfort or privacy concerns of other students, teachers, or parents are not valid reasons to deny or limit the full and equal use of those facilities based on a student’s gender related identity,” Charlie added.

Yes they are. Yes they are you Stalinist shithead.

Charlie, the director of operations for Trans Up Front, a non-profit advocacy organization, promised to “dig in to contact our coalition” to pressure the school board to enforce the bathroom policy.

Charlie promised to step up the bullying of the girls who don’t want to take their clothes off in front of a boy.

There’s this one thing that doesn’t get as much attention as it should, no doubt because there’s so much else to pay attention to. Trump repeats everything. He comes up with what he considers a zinger and he repeats it and repeats it, because he thinks it’s so brilliant. It’s a trivial point, and yet…why has no one told him? Why have none of his offspring said “Dad we got it the first time, the more you repeat it the less funny it is, just say it ONCE ffs.”

It’s such a tell of out of control vanity, to repeat your own eloquence all the time.

Danger danger.

The White House has denied an accusation from rights groups that it flouted due process by defying a judge’s order while carrying out deportations at the weekend.

A group of 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members, plus 23 alleged members of the international MS-13 gang, were sent from the US to a prison in El Salvador. Some were removed from the country under a law not used since World War Two.

The move came despite a temporary block issued by a judge. The White House said the judge’s order itself was not lawful and was issued after the group was deported.

Neither the US government nor El Salvador has identified the detainees, or provided details of their alleged criminality or gang membership.

The White House doesn’t get to decide whether a judge’s order is lawful. The presidency is not intended to be a dictatorship.

Announcing the move on Saturday, Trump accused Tren de Aragua (TdA) of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States”.

He invoked the Alien Enemies Act – a piece of legislation that dates to 1798, which was designed to allow non-citizens to be deported in times of war or invasion. Campaigners have questioned Trump’s justification.

The US is not at war, and the only invasion happening is the one by Trump and his gang members.

The order to halt the deportations came from US District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday evening, who demanded a 14-day pause pending further legal arguments.

After lawyers told him that planes with deportees had already taken off, the judge reportedly gave a verbal order for the flights to turn back, although that directive did not form part of his written ruling.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the court ruling had been broken. “The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” she said. “The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from US territory.”

The justice department echoed Leavitt, saying the deportees had already left before the judge’s ruling – which it has appealed against. The case raises constitutional questions since, under the US system of checks and balances, government agencies are expected to comply with a federal judge’s ruling.

In other words compliance is not optional.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questioned Trump’s use of a sweeping wartime authority which allows fast-track deportations. “I think we’re in very dangerous territory here in the United States with the invocation of this law,” said Lee Gelernt from the organisation.

The Alien Enemies Act only allowed deportations when the US was in a declared war with that foreign government, or was being invaded, Mr Gelernt said. “A gang is not invading,” he told BBC News.

The act was last used during World War Two to intern Japanese-American civilians.

But not, for some reason, German-American civilians. I wonder what the difference could possibly be.

If German-American civilians had been interned, Trump’s daddy would have been among them.

Anyway. Trump is ignoring the judicial branch; the coup is real.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on No YOU decolonize.

My tuppence-worth on the “whitness” of Shakespeare:

Let’s allow, for the sake of the argument, that there is racism in his plays. Well, OK; but that’s not enough. We need to know more about whether that putative racism maps on to today’s definition of racism; and I don’t think it does. And I take Othello as my case-in-point.

Here’s a trivial starting-point: Othello is a tragedy. This means that, in Shakespeare’s handling of the form, the titular character is brought down by a flaw in his own character. For Macbeth it’s ambition; for Hamlet it’s over-thinking; for Othello it’s jealousy. But the titular characters of a tragedy are all high-status people: people you’d want to be, in effect. Were they just plebs like you or me, their ignominy would not be tragic, because they’d’ve been ignominious from the beginning.

What else do we know about Othello? He’s black. So he’s an admirable black man. More than that: he’s not just a visiting prince from Egypt, and so a passing curiosity or noble savage character; he holds high military office in a European state. This means he must command respect both from his peers and from the men he commands, skin-tone notwithstanding.

And this must have made sense to Shakespeare’s audience. This stands spelling out. It must have been perfectly straightforward to a 17th-century costermonger that a black guy could have been in charge of a European army, and been worthy of respect, and married a nobleman’s daughter, because if any of that were not true, the tragedy simply wouldn’t have worked. One might as well have written a play about Caliban or a dog holding a place among the Venetian nobility. In that case, his being brought low would not be a tragedy, but the restoraton of order. Othello would be a kind of comedy; it would never have succeeded as a tragedy. But it isn’t, and it did.

Now imagine another world, in which Shakespeare lived in (say) the nineteenth century. Could he have written Othello then? That’s not nearly as clear, because racism – as we see it – was by that point A Thing. There would have been something faintly obscene about the premise of the play.

And so I think it’s fair to deduce that even if you want to say that Shakespeare was racist, you can’t just help yourself to it. You’ve got to be able to say precisely how, and you’ve got to be alive to the possibility that you’re being deeply anachronistic.

The threats to Canada seemed to be too absurd to be real, but it turns out that plenty of people think it’s all too real.

After President Trump imposed tariffs on Canada on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an extraordinary statement that was largely lost in the fray of the moment.

“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Mr. Trudeau told the news media in Ottawa. “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he added.

This is the story of how Mr. Trudeau went from thinking Mr. Trump was joking when he referred to him as “governor” and Canada as “the 51st state” in early December to publicly stating that Canada’s closest ally and neighbor was implementing a strategy of crushing the country in order to take it over.

Could we just not? Could we go back to being a deeply flawed but still serious grown-up country that doesn’t attack its own allies?

Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau spoke twice on Feb. 3, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, as part of discussions to stave off tariffs on Canadian exports.

But those early February calls were not just about tariffs.

On those calls, President Trump laid out a long list of grievances he had with the trade relationship between the two countries, including Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Mr. Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.

He also brought up something much more fundamental.

He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.

Yeah see announcing you want to revise the boundary is like saying “I want your house and everything that’s in it.” Trump could mean he wants to push the boundary 500 miles north…where it’s 99% ice.

Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”

Trump hates Canada and loves Russia.

We’re doomed.

That’s not hyperbole any more. It looks horribly likely that we really are doomed – stuck with a crazed megalomaniac who will destroy everything, like a reincarnation of Hitler.

Met Police hate women, love men who playact being women.

A Met Police training officer called anti-transgender women a “bunch of lesbians”, a tribunal has heard.

Sgt Karl Eccott, an LGBT+ training officer, allegedly made the comments in a session with trainee Melanie Newman, who is now bringing harassment and direct discrimination claims against the Met.

Ms Newman claimed in her witness statement to the tribunal, held in Croydon, south London, that the Met Police was a “hostile environment” for anyone with gender-critical opinions.

In other words the police=a hostile environment who know that men are not women.

How is that a tenable situation?

Ms Newman is now a detective constable with the Met, based in the child abuse investigation team in Croydon, the tribunal heard.

She listed several “symptoms” of what she called an anti-gender-critical narrative at the Met, including the invitation of trans activists to speak who she said were “extremely hostile” to gender-critical people.

Eva Echo, a transgender activist, told a 2023 Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) seminar that trans people needed to be “saved” from gender-critical people, who had “warped, twisted views”, Ms Newman claimed.

The police host “seminars” where men announce that people who know that men are not women have warped, twisted views. That certainly seems healthy and sane.

Ms Newman – who describes herself as gender-critical, having a belief in only two sexes – claimed speakers at the event delivered a one-sided “invective” and she “couldn’t believe” what she was hearing.

For the billionth time, it’s not a belief that there are only two sexes, it’s just a dull basic obvious fact. It’s not like belief in Baby Jesus, it’s like belief in gravity – which if you don’t have it you will die very young.

Det Chief Insp Charlotte Cadden, who is a lesbian, agreed the event was “discriminatory”.

She said: “The homophobic terminology used by two of the speakers is classed as offensive by many gay people and felt specifically oppressive to me as a lesbian officer.”

Aileen McColgan KC, acting on behalf of the Met, told Ms Cadden the purpose of the TDOV event was to “celebrate trans identity”.

Why? Why have events to celebrate trans idenniny? Especially why do the police have such events? Why? Trans idenniny is a stupid destructive fiction; why celebrate it??

Originally a comment by YNnB on Not far from how it started in Donetsk.

This is a sign of madness and a policy objective at the same time. The repeated utterance of the “51st State” bullshit by yet another official is an indication that this is something Trump is serious about. This is 25th Ammendment level insanity. It amazes me that this is a cabinet-level official behaving like this. It is as clear an indication as any that Trump has surrounded himself with empty-headed sycophants whose only talent is fellating his ego. America is now threatened by its own government. Not only by the erosion of its democratic institutions, and Trump’s accelerating authoritarianism, but also by the installation of idiots in key positions. Mass firings of experienced civil servants is lobotomizing the country’s institutional memory. Getting rid of people who know how things work is a great way to get the things to stop working, and since Trump (and Musk) haven’t bothered to learn how the systems they’re destroying work, they are going to find out the hard way. They actually need some of the people they’re getting rid of, but those who are still around (or who are hurriedly being rehired once the need for their talents is accidentally discovered) are now working for a very different government, a very different country, from the one which originally hired them. How much of the original America will they be able to preserve and protect in the face of Trump’s MAGAmerica? Can they work for America without working for Trump? Working for Trump is working against America. It is clear that you cannot be loyal to both. This is the dilemma that many of those fired are going to be facing.

America’s enemies can see as plainly as the rest of us, that Trump is weakening America. Filling posts with people whose only qualifications are personal loyalty to him, rather than any experience or talent for the jobs they’ve been handed, means the United States is being run by people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, who don’t know that they don’t know what fuck they’re doing. His all-consuming narcissism keeps him from seeing beyond his own ego-gratification, and his government reflects and is directed by his petty grievances, and his pathological need to “win.” How can you see where you’re going if all you’re paying attention to is your own reflection in the rear view mirror?

It’s all play-acting from the top down. Trump is the stupid person’s idea of a tough guy. He thinks he’s a tough guy. (I rest my case.) He’s a parody of himself, a living, breathing cartoon character, armed with nuclear weapons. He thinks he only has to issue orders for things to happen, that his words have the power to shape reality. He can certainly shape reality, but not in the way he thinks he can, not even in the way he would like. His botching of the pandemic left hundreds of thousands more dead than should have died. The raking of forests, the “watering” of Califiornia to stop wildfires, his delusions about “developing” Mar-a-Gaza, are all symptoms of his detachment from reality, and his grandiose belief in his ability to control it. Trump thinks he can change the world with an Executive Order and a Sharpie. Canute would like to have a word with him; he knew he did not have the power to stop the rising tide.

It’s strange; even though as a Canadian, I feel threatened by Trump’s insanity in a way that I have never felt threatened before (not even during the mid 80’s with Reagan’s rhetoric, tens of thousands more nuclear weapons, etc*), and I have no idea what’s going to happen, I have come to realize that Americans have it worse. We might live next door to him, but Trump lives in your house. He’s your monster, and he’s not alone. Tens of millions of Americans voted for him, and are cheering him on.

Canadians are uniting and rallying around our shared rejection of Trump’s unasked-for “offer” to make us part of the United States. America is dangerously divided, with Trump well on the way to criminalizing dissent and oppostion to his regime, both of which are unacceptable obstacles to the MAGA project. Trump and his “movement” represent the greatest threat to the United States since the Civil War, because he is a domestic enemy with frighteningly widespread support. A homegrown dictatorship like his is a greater danger to America than overseas dictatorships ever could be. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan could never have been the kind of existential threat that Trump is; yes, the USSR threatened nuclear annihilation, but none of these foreign totalitarian regimes was ever going to invade, take over, and destroy the country. America could only ever do that to itself. And now it has. With any luck, Trump’s greed, narcissism, and stupidity can be turned against him by Americans themselves, that they might save their country from its descent into tyranny. Like I said, America has it worse.

Trump is so easily fooled and so easily led. He has no long game; he has no grasp of subtlety or nuance, no sense of public service, sacrifice, duty, or honour. He is not a genius, he is not a good or decent human being. He is not good for America. His personal corruption goes far beyond Nixon’s, his continuing crimes are more widespread, and corrosive to the very fabric and foundations of America itself. And those who work for him are as corrupt and shallow as he is, otherwise they wouldn’t be working for him. It is naive to think that America’s enemies will not encourage and take advantage of the spreading brain-rot and ineptitude in the American government. Trump and his cronies won’t see it coming, because they’ll all be too busy looking at him.

*My mom, who experienced the Depression as a child, and saw her dad march off to war overseas in WWII, once told me that the only time she was ever really scared was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m not “there” yet, but I can feel things edging closer.

Now from the other main branch of looney tunes – the people running the Shakespeare Trust announce that Shakespeare wasn’t all that and besides he was white so let’s all stop paying any attention to his stupid old plays and poetry.

William Shakespeare’s birthplace is being “decolonised” following concerns about the playwright being used to promote “white supremacy”.

Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust owns buildings linked to the Bard in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust also owns archival material including parish records of the playwright’s birth and baptism.

It is now “decolonising” its vast collection to “create a more inclusive museum experience”.

Hang on. Wait just a second. I have a better idea. How about the people doing this get different jobs so that people who actually see the point of Mr S can take over. Wouldn’t that be both simpler and less destructive?

The trust has stated that some items in its collections and archives may contain “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”.

Well yes. Things have changed over the past four centuries, so naturally Shakespeare’s thoughts won’t be identical to our much purer thoughts…and yet, if you actually pay attention to the plays, you eventually notice that he wrote a lot of very meaty roles for the cross-dressed boys to play. You eventually notice that he created a lot of highly intelligent, witty, brave, mouthy female characters. If you read his contemporaries at all you’re struck by the contrast. There aren’t a whole hell of a lot of Rosalinds or Violas or Cordelias in Webster or Jonson.

The process of “decolonising”, which typically means moving away from Western perspectives, comes after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s genius was used to advance ideas about “white supremacy”.

The claims were made in a 2022 collaborative research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham.

The research took issue with the trust’s quaint Stratford attractions, comprising the supposed childhood homes and shared family home of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, his wife, because the Bard was presented as a “universal” genius.

This idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy”, it was claimed.

The best thing about this is how strikingly original it is.

No Voice of America for you.

All full-time staffers at the Voice of America and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and Television Martí, were affected — more than 1,000 employees. The move followed a late Friday night edict from President Trump that its parent agency, called the U.S. Agency for Global Media, must eliminate all activities that are not required by law.

In addition, under the leadership of Trump appointees, the agency has severed all contracts for the privately incorporated international broadcasters it funds, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

Gosh it seems like only yesterday that Republicans were enthusiastic about broadcasting pro-US content all around the planet.

The termination notices for grants for the funded networks, two of which were reviewed by NPR, carried the signature of Trump’s senior adviser Kari Lake, whom he placed at USAGM, not the agency’s acting chief executive. Lake does not appear in her current job to have the statutory authority to carry out that termination.

Pfffff. Statutory shmatutory, who cares. She works for the Big Boss and what the Big Boss says=law.

“The cancellation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s grant agreement would be a massive gift to America’s enemies,” Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said in a statement today shared with NPR. “The Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years. Handing our adversaries a win would make them stronger and America weaker. We’ve benefitted from strong bipartisan support throughout RFE/RL’s storied history. Without us, the nearly 50 million people in closed societies who depend on us for accurate news and information each week won’t have access to the truth about America and the world.”

Sorry, we’re now on team Ayatollahs and Autocrats.

Taken together, the federally-funded broadcasters and their sister networks covering the Middle East and Cuba reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week, according to the agency. They are fully funded by federal dollars.

The networks’ mission is to deliver news coverage and cultural programming to places where a free press is threatened or doesn’t exist. They are also designed as a form of soft diplomacy, modeling independent journalism that incorporates dissent from government policy.

Or you could call it propaganda, or capitalist propaganda, or imperialist propaganda. We are daily being instructed in how much worse angry self-dealing plutocratic propaganda is.

The Voice of America sparked Trump’s ire in his first term in office over reporting on Covid-19. His appointee as chief executive for U.S. Agency for Global Media embarked on a series of suspensions, visa revocations and investigations that were found, in some instances, to violate the law and federal policy.

This time, Trump’s budget-slashing adviser, Elon Musk, and other administration officials have called for Voice of America and some of the sister networks to be shut down. The scope and legality of these acts are not yet in full focus, but they appear to be designed to gut them and place whatever coverage survives under tighter control of politically appointed officials.

Aka TrumpMusk stooges.

The broadcasters’ reporting has angered some powerful figures abroad, including those who have close links to Trump.

The reporting of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, for example, has vexed autocratic-minded leaders in Russia and Hungary, as well as their allies. The network’s journalists have been imprisoned or detained in Russian-controlled Crimea, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Russia itself.

Trump has struck warm relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Premier Viktor Orbán.

Autocrats gotta stick together – except when distributing the spoils of course.

Radio Free Asia’s reports on the oppression of Uighur Muslims by Chinese authorities helped to bring their plight to international attention. In 2020, North Korean officials executed the owner of a fishing fleet for secretly listening to broadcasts by Radio Free Asia while at sea, the network reported. Authorities brought in 100 of his peers to watch the execution as a warning of the dangers of tuning in.

How long before Trump is doing the same thing?

I missed Kristi Noem’s stunt last week.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently toured a library that straddled the United States-Canada border, and one remark she made repeatedly is angering both Americans and Canadians.

The Boston Globe reported that Noem made the remark during an appearance at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Stanstead, Quebec and Derby Line, Vermont. The library has both American and Canadian flags and a line of black electrical tape on the floor that marks the international border for visitors.

During her visit, the Globe reported that Noem stood on the American side of the library and said “USA number one,” before stepping to the Canadian side and saying: “The 51st state.” 

What is she, six? Does she know how to tie her shoes yet?

Noem’s comments garnered outrage on social media. University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris called it “insulting, shameful and professional. But most of all… childish.” Reason editor-at-large Matt Welch lamented: “We are governed by four year-olds.” Former Obama administration appointee Bart Acocella characterized it as “utterly deranged behavior.” And Doug Saunders, who is an international affairs columnist for the Canadian publication Globe and Mail, grimly made a comparison to the Ukraine war, tweeting: “This is not too far from how it started in Donetsk.”

Well that would explain it. Trump wants to make war on a neighbor just like his buddy Vlad the Impaler.

So so so so so so sorry.

A BBC radio presenter apologised for “misgendering” Eddie Izzard on air – despite the comedian not caring about pronouns and gender labels.

Anita Anand said she was “very very sorry” after referring to Izzard as “the man” while presenting Radio 4’s PM programme on Friday.

Yet Izzard, 63, who identifies as gender fluid and uses she/her pronouns, has previously confessed an indifference to such labels, telling The Telegraph last year: “He, she – it doesn’t matter.”

In any case it doesn’t matter what pronouns he “uses”; accuracy trumps faddish luxuries. Izzard is a man, so BBC Radio 4 shouldn’t pretend he isn’t. It’s not the BBC’s job to lie to us.

Izzard appeared on the afternoon news and current affairs programme to promote a new production of Hamlet, which is set to tour the UK with all 23 roles played by the comedian.

During the pre-recorded interview, Mrs Anand had asked Izzard to perform a snippet of the play for listeners…

Wait wait wait. What’s this “Mrs Anand” crap? Why is Izzard Izzard while Anand is “Mrs”?

Last February, the BBC upheld a complaint against Justin Webb, the Today presenter, after he called trans women “males” on the BBC Radio 4 programme in 2023.

A listener complained that the comment amounted to Mr Webb giving his personal view on a controversial matter in breach of the BBC’s requirements on impartiality. The BBC’s editorial complaints unit agreed, saying it “gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area”.

Oh get a grip. It’s controversial only because a bunch of pests have systematically and tiresomely made it controversial.

Another consignment of ugly:

Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website, part of a broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its online presence.

Well…all references that the Trump people at the Defense Department consider “references to diversity, equity and inclusion.” There are other ways of naming information about women and non-white people.

A cemetery spokesperson confirmed Friday that it removed internal links directing users to webpages listing the dozens of “Notable Graves” of Black, Hispanic and female veterans and their spouses.

On these pages, users could read short biographies about the people buried in the cemetery, including Gen. Colin L. Powell, the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Hector Santa Anna, a World War II B-17 bomber pilot, Berlin Airlift pilot and career military leader; members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country’s first Black military airmen whose accomplishments include completing more than 1,800 missions during World War II; and members of the6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black, all-female Women’s Army Corps unit to serve overseas during World War II.

Users could also read about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black person to sit on the high court, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is buried alongside her husband, Martin Ginsburg, an Army veteran.

Ugly ugly ugly.