Somebody with a high-up job at the State Department got the job by telling a bunch of whoppers.

A senior Trump administration official has embellished her résumé with misleading claims about her professional background — even creating a fake Time magazine cover with her face on it — raising questions about her qualifications to hold a top position at the State Department.

An NBC News investigation found that Mina Chang, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations, has inflated her educational achievements and exaggerated the scope of her nonprofit’s work.

…

Chang, who assumed her post in April, also invented a role on a U.N. panel, claimed she had addressed both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and implied she had testified before Congress.

She was being considered for an even bigger government job, one with a budget of more than $1 billion, until Congress started asking questions about her résumé.

…

In her State Department post, Chang, 35, from Dallas, helps oversee efforts to prevent conflicts from erupting in politically unstable countries. She earns a six-figure salary in a bureau with a $6 million budget. A deputy assistant secretary usually has a top secret security clearance. It’s not clear if Chang has such a clearance.

But it is clear that she’s never been on the cover of Time.

For Chang’s current job, her most relevant experience would appear to be her time as CEO of a nonprofit called Linking the World. Chang has touted her small nonprofit online and in speeches as operating in dozens of countries, building schools and “impacting” thousands of people. But tax filings for her organization offer no concrete information about overseas projects and show a budget of less than $300,000 with a handful of staff.

She sounds like Princess Ivanka. Princess Ivanka tells us she’s doing all this empowery stuff for women but really she’s just empowering herself. No doubt both of them “identify as” important thought leaders who are making things happen all over everywhere, but identifying as ain’t magic.

In a 2017 video posted on her nonprofit’s website, Chang can be heard describing her work while a Time magazine cover with her face on it scrolls past.

“Here you are on Time magazine, congratulations! Tell me about this cover and how it came to be?” asks the interviewer, who hosts a YouTube show.

“Well, we started using drone technology in disaster response and so that was when the whole talk of how is technology being used to save lives in disaster response scenarios, I suppose I brought some attention to that,” Chang said.

Behold the fake cover:

NOT A REAL TIME COVER

Chang’s biography says she was part of a panel on drones in humanitarian relief efforts convened by the U.N. But there’s no record backing up her claim and a source with knowledge of the matter said she was not part of the “panel,” which was a single public roundtable.

Chang says in her official biography that she is as an “alumna” of Harvard Business School. According to the university, Chang attended a seven-week course in 2016, and does not hold a degree from the institution.

But wait, there’s more!

Her biography on the State Department website says she is a “graduate” of a program at the Army War College. But the program she attended was a four-day seminar on national security, according to the college.

Chang does not cite any undergraduate degree in her biography, but her LinkedIn account mentions the University of the Nations, an unaccredited Christian school with volunteer teachers that says it has 600 locations “on all continents.”

She says she “addressed” both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 2016, but videos and documents show she instead spoke at separate events held in Philadelphia and Cleveland during the same time periods.

Whatever. It’s only the State Department.

Trump still thinks working in his administration=working for him.

President Trump has discussed dismissing the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, because Mr. Atkinson reported a whistle-blower’s complaint about Mr. Trump’s interactions with Ukraine to Congress after concluding it was credible, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

He’s been whining about the subject for weeks.

The president has said he does not understand why Mr. Atkinson shared the complaint, which outlined how Mr. Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals at the same time he was withholding military aid from the country. He has said he believes Mr. Atkinson, whom he appointed in 2017, has been disloyal, one of the people said.

In other words the president is mentally a child. It’s surely been explained to him a million times, but he can’t grasp that the people who work in his – and any – administration are supposed to be “loyal” to the country, the people, the Constitution, not to the crook who sits in the fancy chair. The more of a crook the crook is the more urgent that norm becomes. The IG isn’t supposed to be loyal to Trump despite Trump’s wildly abnormal and destructive and wrong actions, he’s supposed to do something about them.

Mr. Trump’s private complaints about Mr. Atkinson have come as he has publicly questioned his integrity and accused him of working with the Democrats to sabotage his presidency.

It is unclear how far Mr. Trump’s discussions about removing Mr. Atkinson have progressed. Two people familiar with what took place said they thought that Mr. Trump was just venting, and insisted that Mr. Atkinson’s dismissal was never under serious consideration.

But the mixture of public attacks and private discussions about a possible dismissal is a familiar way Mr. Trump has undermined investigators who have examined his conduct or that of people close to him. The president publicly criticized James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, before he dismissed them for perceived disloyalty.

There is no “just venting” with Trump. He always means it, whether he gets around to acting on it or not.

T-Mobile has big news for us – not an object or plan we might to give them money for, but an employee relations story.

Another Way to #BeYou: T-Mobile Brings Gender Pronouns to Retail Stores

At T-Mobile, #BeYou has become an employee mantra — so much so that it’s displayed on magenta-painted walls in company hallways around the country.

Really? How awful. Seriously. How gorge-risingly eye-rollingly horrible. Work is work, it’s not a therapy session and it’s not a theater for narcissism. Be You on your own time; at work pay attention to Not-You.

But it’s more than just a catchphrase. It’s representative of the company’s longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion that is truly part of its DNA. With this in mind, senior leaders are always open to new ways to support employees who want to better express who they are. That’s why, starting November 6, T-Mobile is launching new optional name badges for all retail employees that can include employees’ personal pronouns. Employees at T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile retail stores can choose to add any of the following options:

• He/him/his
• She/her/hers
• They/them/theirs
• Ask me my pronouns

This is for all retail employees, they say – so I guess that means that people in their stores can wear them if they choose? Which means that customers will be confronted with people ordering them to “ask my pronouns”? In a situation in which the customer has zero, repeat, zero need to know the employee’s pronouns because they are talking directly to the employee and anything other than “you” will simply create confusion? Why? Why invite employees to tell customers to “Ask me my pronouns” when it makes no sense and will strike the customer as repellently narcissistic? 

Do people not get that narcissism and self-obsession are not good things?

Another move – finally!! – to give men a little attention for a change.

For the first time in its four-decade history, Dunedin’s Rape Crisis centre will work with sexual abuse victims of all genders.

The shift is part of a major overhaul of the organisation, which also includes changing its name to the Otepoti Collective Against Sexual Abuse (OCASA).

The move has been met with cautious optimism by the head of a New Zealand male survivors group, who said the more support organisations could work together, the better.

OCASA development co-ordinator Angelo Libeau said the historically women-only organisation had changed its constitution to work with people of all genders.

Good, because why should everything be about women all the time? For centuries, millennia, everything has always been all about women. At last we are starting to redress the balance!

“We said `if we’re going to make these changes, can we still maintain our feminist philosophies’, and we talked about it for a really long time, and then we went `absolutely you can – it’s about how you manage the space to keep everybody safe’.”

He described the change as “quite huge”.

Yes, it is.

Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust chairman Phillip Chapman said Otago was leading the way in terms of communicating with the organisation.

…

But he acknowledged it would require some changes.

“If you’re only working with female victims, you don’t get the most pleasant view of men.

“So to start working with them, it’s a whole switch in ideology.”

Yes, it is.

In We already knew this but more so news, the SPLC has a new report on just how racist Stephen Miller is.

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Miller also railed against those wishing to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public display in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, restrictionist immigration policies.

There’s this trove of emails, see.

The SPLC story is based largely on emails provided by a former Breitbart writer, Katie McHugh. McHugh was fired by Breitbart over a series of anti-Muslim tweets and has since renounced the far right, telling the SPLC that the movement is “evil”.

However, throughout 2015 and 2016, as the Trump campaign progressed and she became an increasingly influential voice at Breitbart, McHugh told the SPLC that Miller urged her in a steady drumbeat of emails and phone calls to promote arguments from sources popular with far-right and white nationalist movements.

It’s his field, his specialty, his leitmotif.

Outsports, self-described as “the leader in LGBTQ sports news & commentary for athletes, coaches & fans,” tweets:

For decades, women’s sports have existed to create opportunities for cis women and non-binary athletes. It’s finally time to include trans women in the growth and prosperity of women’s sports. Let’s have that conversation.

For decades, women’s sports have existed to create opportunities for women – but not all that many decades, and it took a fierce struggle, and the struggle for funding and coverage and fairness continues. Yes, women’s and girls’ sports exist to create opportunities for women and girls to play sports , and why shouldn’t they? That was the whole point, remember? Girls didn’t get that much opportunity, and neither did women, so quite a few women and girls thought it would be good to fix that problem. The situation has improved but certainly not as much as it could have. Why the hell should women’s sports now include men who claim to be women? Men already have sports, they don’t need to take over women’s too.

The sheer entitled gall of it is just disgusting.

Illustrating it with DOCTOR McKinnon doesn’t help, either.

Updating to add: there’s also an earlier tweet (with the same wording) that has 200+ replies. Hostile replies.

A wisdom tweet:

I think the sentence “cis people shouldn’t be in charge of trans people’s healthcare” is just as true as “men shouldn’t be in charge of women’s healthcare”. If you understand why one is true, take some time to realise that it’s the same reasons that make the other true.

Well let’s slow down. Is the one true? Is it a general truth that “men shouldn’t be in charge of women’s healthcare”? In what sense of “in charge”? Setting policy, or administering policy that is already in place? Is it true that no men should be part of an administration that includes women’s health? My answer would be no. I think women should be involved, certainly, but I don’t think that has to mean no men should be involved. So I don’t think the one is true, let alone understand why it is. It’s too sloppy and general to be true, which is often a problem with Twitter – people hawk up clever-sounding aphorisms like this that turn out to be silly if you look at them for more than a second.

But even if I did “understand why” that one is true, that wouldn’t make the first one true. If a trans person gets the flu, is it bad or risky or unjust for a “cis” doctor to provide treatment? If so, why, exactly? Can the principle be extended to everything? If you’re a person who climbs mountains, does that mean you need a doctor who climbs mountains? Or a hospital administration that does?

If it became a principle that only trans people can be in charge of trans people’s health, where will they come from? Are there enough medically trained trans people for this to work?

I think further consideration is needed before we take this bold step.

Grifter Princess Ivanka has the gall to say her crime family is not profiting from Donnie’s presidency.

Ivanka Trump brushed off criticism that her family has profited off the presidency and said Friday a big difference between her family and Democrat Joe Biden’s is that President Donald Trump amassed his fortune before he entered politics while Biden’s wealth is “derivative” of his time in office…

Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser, pushed back against nearly three years of ethics complaints and lawsuits accusing the Trumps of trying to turn the presidency to their financial advantage.

His hotel a short walk from the White House? The one where Barr throws expensive parties? And foreign governments book stays? His golf course in western Ireland where Pence stayed when he had meetings in Dublin? Trump shouting on Twitter that everyone should read Junior’s book? That kind of turning the presidency to their financial advantage?

Government watchdogs have criticized Trump for unethically mixing official business with promotion of his own interests.

Trump is the first president in modern history who has not walled himself off from his business holdings. He makes frequent trips to his for-profit golf clubs, collects dues at his members-only properties and hosts fundraisers and foreign delegations at hotels that bear his family’s name.

I guess the princess means aside from all that.

The NY Times reports:

Not long before the Ukrainian president was inaugurated in May, an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s journeyed to Kiev to deliver a warning to the country’s new leadership, a lawyer for the associate said.

The associate, Lev Parnas, told a representative of the incoming government that it had to announce an investigation into Mr. Trump’s political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and his son, or else Vice President Mike Pence would not attend the swearing-in of the new president, and the United States would freeze aid, the lawyer said.

The claim by Mr. Parnas, who is preparing to share his account with impeachment investigators, challenges the narrative of events from Mr. Trump and Ukrainian officials that is at the core of the congressional inquiry. It also directly links Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to threats of repercussions made to the Ukrainians, something he has strenuously denied.

But Mr. Parnas’s account, while potentially significant, is being contradicted on several fronts. None of the people involved dispute that the meeting occurred, but Mr. Parnas stands alone in saying the intention was to present an ultimatum to the Ukrainian leadership.

This is all so bizarre. Rudy Giuliani is not a government employee, he’s not part of Trump’s administration, which means among other things he’s not subject to any of the oversight and vetting such an employee faces – but it also means he has absolutely no business running around the world trying to extort favors from foreign heads of state, and the same goes for his “associates.” What is some random private citizen doing threatening the president of Ukraine?? It’s nuts.

It seems Don Junior was booed out of his own book event because he’s…not right-wing enough? Jeez, conservatives are so easily triggered. Pass me a hanky.

Donald Trump Jr. apparently failed to grasp the hypocrisy in refusing to answer questions for an event to promote his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, which is dedicated to mocking liberals and their so-called political correctness.

But the president’s eldest son’s missteps were not lost on the audience at UCLA on Sunday, where his own supporters, frustrated with the lack of a Q&A opportunity, filled the event with incessant booing.

So then his girlfriend, a former Fox “News” performer, taunted them with not being able to get a date.

The Guardian has more:

At first, Trump and Guilfoyle tried to ignore the discontent, which originated with a fringe group of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration has been taken captive by a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.

What about the white mice? Don’t they get a credit?

When the shouting would not subside, Trump Jr tried – and failed – to argue that taking questions from the floor risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would abuse and distort. Nobody was buying that.

In minutes, the entire argument put forward by the president’s son – that he was willing to engage in dialogue but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech – crumbled.

“I’m willing to listen…” Trump began.

“Q and A! Q and A!” the audience yelled back.

“We’ll go into the lion’s den and talk …” Trump tried again.

“Then open the Q and A!” came the immediate response.

Guilfoyle, forced to shout to make herself heard, told students in the crowd: “You’re not making your parents proud by being rude and disruptive.”

Then they left. So the question is…were they triggered?

Julie Bindel wrote about Sophie Wilson and Spearmint Rhino a week ago, starting from the humiliation of Labour under Corbyn:

Sophie Wilson, a 23-year-old Sheffield councillor who was last week selected as Jeremy Corbyn’s candidate for Rother Valley, has campaigned against feminists trying to close a notorious club, and for the “right” of women to “choose” to work there.

Last year, Wilson was carpeted by Sheffield City Council after a complaint about her online conduct was partially upheld. She had tweeted that the women protesting the existence of lap dancing clubs in the city — many of whom are survivors of sexual exploitation — were “trashy SWERFS”. Another tweet read: “SWERFS and TERFS are usually one in (sic) the same, aren’t they?”

So this is a (very young and thus inexperienced) woman calling feminist women “trashy” because they oppose treating women as receptacles for men, selected as a Labour candidate. They couldn’t find someone who doesn’t call feminist women trashy? Really?

Wilson joined a protest earlier this year to save the Spearmint Rhino club when its licence was under threat. Feminists campaigning for its closure had released film footage, obtained covertly, which allegedly showed dancers “sexually touching customers”. The club, according to the campaigners, breached more than 200 regulations.

I have seen similar things at lap dancing clubs with my own eyes. In 2004 I visited a number of them, posing as the PA of a businessman who was persuaded to join him for a few drinks. I found that many of the clubs were fronts for prostitution, and that the women were routinely sexually harassed.

Being sexually harassed is empowering! If you’re paid for it. I guess.

Unfortunately for Sophie Wilson, she has a formidable opponent in Sammy Woodhouse, who, if Wilson is elected, would be her constituent. Woodhouse has in the past courageously spoken about the abuse she suffered at the hands of grooming gangs in her home town, and has published a book about her experiences, called Just a Child.

Woodhouse was failed by the authorities, but nevertheless put heart and soul into helping police and prosecutors nail the perpetrators of the biggest sex scandal of modern times: the Jay Report uncovered the abuse of 1,400 children in Rotherham.

Woodhouse doesn’t see sexual abuse as empowering.

“Fun feminists” have long supported the pro-prostitution lobby, buying the lies that prostitution can be “sexually liberating” for women, and this group somehow lends its voice to other campaigns against patriarchal control of our bodies. But prostitution, of which stripping is a part, is about the right of men to access women’s bodies, and to view and treat us as commodities.

Sammy Woodhouse in fact worked at Spearmint Rhino after she escaped the grooming gang, and she doesn’t see it the way Sophie Wilson does.

Lap dancing, she says, is anything but feminist: “Rotherham is known all over the world for its exploitation, and we have a woman standing who is in favour of exploitation,” she said. “That lot say it’s empowering. But let me tell you, there is nothing empowering in sitting on some sweaty man’s lap grinding into his dick.”

What Wilson is defending is unconscionable, for as Woodhouse put it: “If you put a bloke on a street corner selling girls, we call him a pimp. Put him in a suit and stick him in a licensed lap dance club and we call him a businessman. He’s just a pimp in a suit.”

I suppose Wilson would say that’s trashy talk.

Even Parents Magazine? What next, The Mainstream Herald? The Churchy Gazette? Middleground Digest?

Headline:

Mom’s Viral Post Celebrates That ‘Some Women, Some Non-Binary People, & Some Men’ Get Their Periods

Yunh hunh, and some bats make webs, some spiders echolocate, some tigers knit, some orcas play Bach cello suites, some houses are made of cotton candy, some cars can climb trees, some hats can fill out tax forms – let’s see some viral posts celebrating that.

Last month, Always announced that the Venus symbol would be removed from their sanitary products’ packaging to be more inclusive of transgender and non-binary people. “For over 35 years Always has championed girls and women, and we will continue to do so,” Always’ parent company, Procter & Gamble said in a statement, according to NBC. “We’re also committed to diversity & inclusion and are on a continual journey to understand the needs of all of our consumers.” Now, a mom from Hull, England named Milly Bhaskara is furthering the conversation, showing parents how easy it is to introduce your L.O. to the concept that women aren’t the only people who menstruate.

Her L.O. is four. Of course you can introduce your L.O. age four to the concept that [your choice of bullshit here], because children age four believe what adults tell them. They don’t have anything to compare it to, they don’t have other information, and they don’t yet have brains mature enough to do skepticism.

Bhaskara—who boasts 173K followers and is known for her posts on mental health awareness and body acceptance—posted a super-cute photo of her 4-year-old son Eli holding a pin board sign that reads, “Some men have periods too. If I can get it, so can you.”

Super cute! Also not true! In fact complete and utter bullshit!

There are some women who call themselves trans men, and they can have periods (unless the blockers have prevented them), but that doesn’t mean men can. Men can’t.

The proud mom’s caption: “Some men have periods. Some non-binary people have periods. Some women have periods. Eli has been told about periods since he saw blood on my pants a couple of years ago. I didn’t use the language of women have periods because it’s not entirely inclusive.”

Bhaskara continued, “I told him that SOME women, SOME non-binary people and SOME men have periods. It was easy for him to accept as he hadn’t had to unlearn the engrained societal norm, but if a 4-year-old can grasp it, I’m sure most of us can have a crack at unlearning transphobic/misinformed norms and open our minds… ya think?”

That poor kid.

Janice Turner in The Times:

A friend told me his student daughter had become a feminist activist. Check out her Facebook page, he said. So I did, expecting posts on the gender pay gap or #MeToo. Instead I discovered the campaign to which she and her mates devoted their energy was to save the Sheffield branch of Spearmint Rhino.

Seriously? A lap-dancing club? Indeed, a multinational lap-dancing corporation, where men from London to Las Vegas can pay near-naked women to grind on their crotches in private booths. Spearmint Rhino, whose posters of strippers dressed in sexy uniforms for “naughty schoolgirl” parties were banned by the advertising watchdog, and which exists to flatter and feed the sexual entitlement of men, according to its founder John Gray.

Not just any old Spearmint Rhino either but Sheffield’s, where the council recorded 74 breaches of the licence and 145 of the club’s own code of conduct, including sexual touching and masturbation. Yet outside the club with placards, demanding the council ignore such violations, were women students.

I suppose all those breaches of the licence and the code of conduct were recorded by wicked SWERFs, right? Who else doesn’t want women exploited and put in danger? The Spearmint Rhino feminists told Sheffield council that stripping “plays a huge role in empowering women.” Hell yeah. Don’t go into law or engineering or politics, be a stripper. That’s where the real power is.

Among the club’s most vocal supporters was Sophie Wilson, 23, a Sheffield councillor and now the prospective Labour candidate for Rother Valley.

Given this constituency includes part of Rotherham, you’d expect Ms Wilson to be mindful of the town’s recent sexual abuse scandal, aware that 20 men were jailed for grooming, rape and trafficking, that her voters include some of the 1,500 female victims. These grotesque crimes, the ensuing cover-up and recriminations, have left a festering wound. No surprise that residents voted for a zero-tolerance policy on sexual entertainment venues: from next year Rotherham council won’t renew any strip club licences.

Yet instead of reaching out to victim groups, Ms Wilson has gone to war against one of Rotherham’s bravest survivors. Sammy Woodhouse described being raped and impregnated as a 14-year-old by Arshid Hussain, now jailed, in her memoir Just A Child.

…

Sammy Woodhouse is aghast that middle-class students believe lap-dancing clubs are empowering. Or that Sophie Wilson responded to Spearmint Rhino’s offer of a free night out as reward for saving their licence with an excited: “I’m up for it.” In response, Ms Wilson called Woodhouse — a Rother Valley voter — “SWERF trash”. It is hard to believe such an immature, insensitive person could be selected for a seat beset with complex problems. But the Rother Valley long-list compiled by Labour’s NEC excluded most local candidates. Ms Wilson was a Momentum choice.

That is blood-chillingly horrible.

Yet sadder than this betrayal of South Yorkshire voters by the party they have always trusted with power is the mindset of Spearmint Rhino feminists. Has the first generation raised on internet porn come to believe that sexual objectification is normal, even desirable? They call themselves “sex positive”, implying that women who oppose lap-dancing clubs ain’t getting any. (As if the sex trade has any respect for female pleasure.) They say lap dancers just need unionisation and for men to tip them well.

This, remember, is the #MeToo generation that calls a hand on a knee sexual assault and railed against entitled businessmen ogling hostesses at the Presidents Club charity ball last year. Yet it does not see that the narrative that gave Harvey Weinstein impunity to grab any passing starlet is played out in every £30 private dance. Wrapped up in their own narcissism and “identity” they are blind to the bigger picture. They are Spearmint Rhino’s useful feminist idiots. Ladies, you’ve been had.

A tale of the German Democratic Republic (aka the GDR aka East Germany) and doping:

40 years of the official GDR were done, the Berlin Wall was about to be dismantled to the sound of the scuttling feet of Stasi (secret police) operatives dashing for the archive and the shredder.

Thankfully, there was just too much to shred, too much to hide, too many notes to wipe from the slate of history. They included scribblings of the precise dosages of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs – some of them clinically trialled on human guinea pigs – that fuelled the GDR sports medals and records factory.

…

The Stasi kept files on about 5.6 million people. The archive of what survived runs to 111 km (69 miles) of files in total, about half of that kept at the Stasi Records Agency’s headquarters in Berlin, the rest at its 12 regional offices. It includes written documentation, photos, slides, film and sound recordings and stretches to samples of the sweat and body odour collected from the subjects of interrogation.

The archive includes vast tomes of information on State Research Plan 14:25, the systematic doping program that had its roots in the 1960s and was bolstered by the establishment of the ‘uM’ – unterstützende Mittel’ or supportive means – working group in 1974 in response to the 1972 advance of techniques to detect doping and their adoption by the International Olympic Committee at the dawn of realisation that cheating would be cancer to the Games.

The dawn? Of realization? The IOC didn’t think all along that cheating would be doubleplus ungood to the Games?

Men were doped too but the virilisation effect of Oral Turinabol and other steroid compounds that effectively turned girls and women into boys in sporting-performance terms (and, with further intervention, literally in some cases) meant that it was in women’s sport that we saw the most dramatic dominance of swimming ever witnessed in the history of the sport.

That history resonates today in various forms, including the addition of transgender male-to-female athletes excelling in women’s sport because of the physical advantages accrued from growing up as boys.

In other words, cheating. Cheating cheating cheating.

On 26 August 1993, after the former GDR had disbanded itself to accede to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, records were opened and State Plan 14:25 confirmed: the Stasi, the GDR state secret police, supervised systematic doping of East German athletes from 1971 until reunification in 1990. Doping existed in other countries but the GDR was officially unique in so far as having a state plan designed to win in international sport as a way of saying ‘look how great our democratic republic and socialist/communist state is’.

The body and bulk of what was discovered is now held in places public and private in several countries, safe from the long arm of any single authority that may ver wish to suppress the truth. Some of that evidence was used in legal cases against coaches, doctors and others in the German doping trials of the late 1990s and subsequent compensation claims by athletes who suffered a spectrum of woes, from personal health, physical and psychological problems to the horrors of inheritance in the form of children born with club feet and a variety of other disabilities.

Yet now there’s a supposedly “progressive” movement that demands doping on demand for people who decide their “gender identity” has been mislabeled.

Oral Turinabol was just part of the poisonous cocktail of substances administered not only to medal-winning ‘ambassadors in tracksuits’ but to many who were never destined to make it beyond the Berlin Wall. Like the bulk of good but not world-class swimmers in the world, they were club swimmers – but with a dark difference; they served as human guinea pigs to test the effectiveness of substances that had never been clinically trailed in labs before b[e]ing administered to the athletes.

Now it’s trans people, especially children and adolescents, who are the guinea pigs.

More moles:

Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley alleges that two of President Trump’s senior advisers tried to recruit her to secretly undermine the administration from the inside.

That’s Business Insider’s way of wording it.

In her explosive new memoir, Haley claims former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly attempted to bring her in to subvert the president, according to The Washington Post which obtained the book prior to its release.

Haley refused their attempts to convince her to “save the country,” noting Tillerson and Kelly were suspicious of and threatened by her relationship with the president. During her time in the administration, Haley demonstrated an “obligation to carry out [Trump’s] wishes since he was the one elected by voters,” wrote Washington Post reporter Anne Gearan.

See these are all different things. Undermining the administration is not the same as subverting the president is not the same as saving the country.

Also, it’s not true that Trump is the one elected by voters. He’s the one elected by the (grotesquely lopsided) Electoral College. The voters elected Clinton by more than three million. It’s accurate to say he was elected, it’s not accurate to say he was elected by voters.

“Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country,” Haley wrote in “With All Due Respect.”

Kelly and Tillerson are not great themselves, in fact Kelly is downright rotten, but they’re not the headlong disaster that Trump is.

Ray Blanchard interviwed at Quillette:

I published my early writings on autogynephilia in specialty journals with very small circulations. I intended them for a tiny readership of clinicians who specialized in the assessment and management of gender-dysphoric patients. However, this work attracted the attention of two individuals who decided to promote it more broadly, one online (Anne A. Lawrence) and one in a book (J. Michael Bailey). These efforts, especially the book, enraged three influential trans women—two of them senior academics—who attempted to get Bailey fired from his teaching position at Northwestern University for writing it. This campaign has been documented in detail by Alice D. Dreger, a medical historian. Paradoxically, the efforts of trans activists, then and today, to completely suppress any mention of autogynephilia in public discourse has resulted in an increased public awareness of it. I think the self-defeating behavior of trans activists has persisted because the idea of autogynephilia cuts too close to the bone. If the idea had no resonance with them, they would simply have ignored it, and the idea of autogynephilia would just be one of many forgotten hypotheses of gender identity disorder.

Subsequently other strange and unexpected (to me) events befell my notion of autogynephilia. Modern trans activists reframed transsexualism/transgenderism as a political problem rather than a clinical problem. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, trans activism become a sub-department of the Social Justice Movement, and the Social Justice Movement became a primary combatant in the ongoing, pervasive Culture Wars.

And that is the hell we are now living in. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, along with the flat assertion that trans women are women, and the accompanying dictat that failure to accept and echo that assertion is evil, the most evil evil possible, and deserving of ostracism and violence.

And that’s fucked up. No other branch of political activism is like that, because it’s nonsensical and thus tyrannical. To be an Approved Person you have to affirm falsehoods, and you have to keep on affirming them many times every day, and you have to bully and harass anyone who refuses to Affirm the Falsehoods, and you have to insist that trans women are the most marginalized vulnerable group in the universe. You have to “center” your politics, including your feminism, on men who fetishize themselves as women. How’s that working? Badly.

Jonathan Freedland on Labour and antisemitism.

For most progressive-minded, remain-leaning folk, is it even a dilemma? I’m not sure. To them the logic must seem simple and straightforward: they want to eject a cruel and useless government and stop Brexit, and that means denying Boris Johnson a majority and replacing him with Jeremy Corbyn, who will end austerity and hold a second referendum. Job done.

But it’s not that simple for him, much as he would like it to be.

The thought of it prompts in me, and the overwhelming majority of the community I grew up in, a fear that we have not known before.

I’m referring to Britain’s Jews who, for the first time in their history, have concluded that someone hostile to them is on the brink of taking democratic power. Yes, of course, not every single British Jew holds that view. But the most recent poll found that 87% regard Corbyn as an antisemite, meaning an anti-Jewish racist.

He lists some cringe-making examples of Corbyn’s antisemitism. (That sounds as if a “but” is imminent. It’s not. The examples make me cringe; no buts.) Labour has dismally failed to do enough about it.

We’re meant to cheer that Chris Williamson has been barred from standing again as an MP. But Jews remember that, even when Williamson’s penchant for egregious Jew-baiting was well known, Corbyn was still praising him. Just a few months ago, in fact, Corbyn called him “a very good, very effective Labour MP. He’s a very strong anti-racist campaigner. He is not antisemitic in any way.”

…

Plenty advise Jews to shelve their angst in return for a government that will stop Brexit (Jews are overwhelmingly pro-remain). In effect, Jews and their would-be allies are being told that some racism is, if not quite acceptable, then a price worth paying. That seems to have been the bargain struck with those Labour “moderates” who were once so admirably vocal in their denunciation of the leadership on this issue and who are now – minus Tom Watson – knocking on doors to put Corbyn in No 10: you’ve got your second referendum, now shut up about the Jews. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, to be part of a small community that can be so quickly cast aside for the supposed greater good.

I’m guessing it’s quite like being part of a large community that can be so quickly cast aside for the supposed greater good, by which I mean women. The smallness v largeness should make a difference, because surely they make a massive difference to the level of vulnerability, and yet…it doesn’t seem to be working that way.

But that’s a side note…except that it’s also a confirmation of “wtf lefty comrades, what are you doing??”

Many, Jews included, ask themselves how bad would it really be. What’s the worst that could happen? Of course this isn’t the 1930s and, despite the Sunday Telegraph’s front page, most Jews would not leave the country. But that the question is even in the air, that someone who sees Jews as not quite “us” – “they don’t understand English irony” – is deemed eligible to be prime minister, makes our presence here feel conditional and shaky. And, whether Corbyn makes it to Downing Street or not, to realise that the historic party of social justice in this country finds a little bit of racism acceptable for the sake of the larger cause, and that many millions of voters agree – well, that realisation contains its own heartbreak. It means that what we thought about this country wasn’t quite true.

I understand that to many, all this will sound overwrought. I’m afraid that Jewish history has made us that way, prone to imagining the worst. We look at our usually sparse family trees and we can pick out the pessimists, those who panicked and got out. It was they who left their mark on us. You see, the optimists, those who assumed things would work out for the best, they never made it out in time.

I have nothing optimistic to add.

Some dastardly fiend stabbed the Alabama Trump Baby balloon.

A towering Baby Trump protest balloon was knifed and deflated by someone unhappy with its appearance during Donald Trump’s Saturday trip to Alabama, organisers said.

The incident occurred during the president’s visit to watch a University of Alabama football game. The balloon, which is more than 6.1 metres (20 feet) tall, was set up in a nearby park.

Jim Girvan, the organiser of a group that “adopts” out Baby Trump balloons for protests, said a man charged the balloon with a knife and cut a 2.4-metre (8-foot) gash in the back. Girvan said the unidentified man was taken into custody.

Good! Throw the book at him!

Robert Kennedy, a volunteer “baby sitter” who brought the balloon to Tuscaloosa, said the balloon immediately began to sag after it was cut.

The day had been going mostly smoothly, Kennedy said. Some people yelled “Trump 2020” as they passed while others posed for selfies with the balloon. But then Kennedy said a man sidled up on the back of the balloon and attacked it with a knife. He ran away but was caught by police officers, Kennedy said.

In memoriam: