One of these is not like the other, one of these doesn’t belong.

Can YOU see it?

The BBC is reporting on it.

The RSPCA is looking into claims made by a prominent lawyer that he killed a fox with a baseball bat.

Jolyon Maugham posted on Twitter on Thursday morning: “Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?”

The animal welfare charity tweeted that the claim was “distressing”.

Which is so sad because he meant it to be funny. Jokes are such a personal thing.

Government guidelines state you can use cage traps and snares to catch foxes and you must “humanely kill any fox you catch while it’s in the trap or snare”.

Humanely doesn’t mean “with a baseball bat.”

Jolyon Maugham QC’s fox-smashing exploit has garnered him considerable attention, and not the good kind. Maybe being a preening sadist isn’t such a great marketing ploy after all?

So I smashed it with a club.

Odd thing to brag about.

A great many people have pointed out that the RSPCA has a 24-hour hotline for exactly this purpose. The RSPCA have pointed out that what Maugham claims to have done is not lawful.

In case you’ve forgotten, that was Maugham’s tweeted advice to women who pointed out the potential for male people to harass or abuse women in “inclusive” changing rooms.

The Guardian even did a story on it.

In further news of holiday cheer, Walmart doesn’t pay overtime for those very same holidays.

Walmart is one of several big-box retailers who are open on Thanksgiving Day and will start its Black Friday sale at 6pm.

Walmart is also one of the few big companies that does not offer employees increased hourly wages for working shifts on a holiday. At Target and Amazon, workers are paid time and a half for each hour worked.

“Walmart doesn’t offer holiday pay. They have a discount you have to work certain days to receive and one discount only lasts two days,” said a Walmart worker in Idaho who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. They are re scheduled to work full-time shifts on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday this year.

Walmart sent ever such a nice note to explain exactly how many minutes you have to use the discount and exactly what you can’t buy with it, although the “etc” at the end could mean…well, everything else, so not so much exact as a trap. What nice trillionaires they must be.

God almighty. These people.

Republican of Arizona.

It matters.

Rudy Giuliani talked to a reporter for New York magazine the other day.

As we sped uptown, he spoke in monologue about the scandal he co-created, weaving one made-up talking point into another and another. He said former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom he calls Santa Maria Yovanovitch, is “controlled” by George Soros. “He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents.” I told him he sounded crazy, but he insisted he wasn’t.

The sarcasm is interesting. She did her job, and she answered questions before Congress, therefore Giuliani mocks her. She’s not a criminal or a traitor, so let’s sneer at her as a saint.

“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” he said. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.”

But “Jew” doesn’t mean just “someone who goes to synagogue.” If it did there would have been fewer Jews killed in the genocide.

In the grand tradition of Soros conspiracy theorists, Giuliani believes the media is doing the billionaire’s bidding by printing lies about him, yet he often bungles his own attempts to discredit the media’s reporting. While attempting to argue that, despite what has been written, “I have no business interests in Ukraine,” he told me about his business interests in Ukraine.

“I’ve done two business deals in Ukraine. I’ve sought four or five others,” he said. Since he’s been representing the president, he said, he has been approached with two opportunities in Ukraine, both of which he turned down to avoid accusations of impropriety.

“The one that I really wanted to do,” Giuliani said, was a lawsuit on behalf of the Ukrainian government against a large financial institution he claims laundered $7 billion for Viktor Yanukovych, the former president. “It would’ve had nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with Burisma, nothing to do with Biden,” he said. He then explained that the reason why he “really wanted” to take on the case was to learn about Ukrainian money laundering, “so I could figure out they utilize the same money-laundering system for Hunter Biden.”

That’s especially interesting because he’s a lawyer, a lawyer and a former prosecutor. You’d think a prosecutor would be well alert to the importance of keeping his stories consistent.

And then there’s the Southern District of New York, the biggest betrayal of all. That was supposed to be his world, full of his guys; he ran the office for most of the ’80s. It was unrecognizable now. “If they’re investigating me, they’re assholes. They’re absolutely assholes if they’re investigating me,” he said.

…

“If they are, they’re idiots,” he went on. “Then they really are a Trump-deranged bunch of silly New York liberals.”

Again…for the millionth time…I don’t get this. It’s not about being liberal, it’s about Trump’s many crimes and brutalities. It’s not just “liberals” who object to crimes and brutalities. Apparently I have more respect for conservatives than Trumpy conservatives do.

Of course he did.

Stephen Miller pushed to embed agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a refugee agency in a bid to target the parents of unaccompanied migrant children for deportation, a new report has revealed.

Pro tip: that’s not what refugee agencies are for.

The Washington Post reported that according to six current and former Trump administration officials, the White House sought to plant ICE agents at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which cares for migrant children who cross the border without a parent as part of the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Program.

Stephen Miller is another Mengele, minus the medical skills.

According to the Post, Miller has long claimed that the ORR is being exploited by parents who hire smugglers to bring their children into the U.S. illegally. Three officials familiar with Miller’s plan said it was part of his wider effort to dismantle the barriers between ICE and the refugee program.

Yes, and let’s place a lot of cops in food banks, and disguise FBI agents as caretakers in public housing, and replace public school teachers with prison guards.

Happy Festivus from Pettson and Findus, via Sven Nordqvist.

Best known for his series about the old farmer Pettson and his talented cat Findus, Sven Otto Rickard Nordqvist originally wanted to be an illustrator but was rejected by several art schools. Instead he studied architecture at Lund Institute of Technology, and worked for a time there as a lecturer in architecture. At the same time he continued to look for work as an illustrator working on advertisements, posters and picture books. In 1983 he won first prize in a children’s book competition and since then has worked exclusively as an author and illustrator of children’s books.

H/t Jeffrey

Common Dreams says it’s very bad in Australia.

The fires in Australia’s southeastern state of New South Wales (NSW) were at the “catastrophic” level on Saturday, according to the BBC. 

“These fires are likely to continue to spread well past Christmas,” said NSW Rural Fire Services Inspector Ben Shepherd.

Photos shared on social media showed hazy skies around the country. 

“Everything is burning,” said one Twitter user. 

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, Australia just endured a heat wave that broke records for temperature in consecutive days. 

“I think this is the single loudest alarm bell I’ve ever heard on global heating,” said Kees van der Leun, a director at the American consultancy firm Navigant.

The view from above:

And guess what: escape routes are closing.

The fires are out of control and will be stopped only by rain. The forecast is no rain for the next couple of months.

Gee, who knew Bill Cosby even still had a publicist? One wonders what the point is. Is he expecting to revive his acting career?

I guess Cosby “used comedy to humanize all genders” in his spare time from assaulting women.

There’s another thing Jolyon Maugham said a couple of days ago…

That’s not it (I’m getting to it), but I’ll just say I haven’t seen anything like that from the gender critical side. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but on the other hand, I think if it did exist we would be buried in screen shots of it. I doubt that it does exist. I think Maugham is equating skepticism about Magic Gender with calling women ugly hearted cunts. I think they are very different.

But that wasn’t it; this is it.

It’s the assertion that “deliberate misgendering” will “contribute to deaths and self-harm” and that that’s a very real wrong done by all of us who don’t believe in Magic Gender, including Maya. It’s the assertion that Maya’s non-compliance with orders to pretend that men are women will cause trans people to die.

He’s a QC. He has some fame and clout. He shouldn’t say things like that.

Oh hey, Jolyon Maugham has finally grasped the point.

Hahaha nah just kidding, he’s talking about something else. New Truth about this subject bad, New Truth about that other subject good.