Judge says the fired employees must be reinstated and Trump is an ignorant buffoon.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the jobs of probationary federal employees across multiple agencies, blasting the procedure behind their mass firings as a “sham.”

Ruling from the bench in a San Francisco courthouse, US District Judge William Alsup said the Office of Personnel Management — the federal government’s human resources department — had no basis for claiming the employees were fired for “performance” issues.

Alsup, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, said the explanation was a “gimmick” to circumvent legal requirements for laying off federal employees.

As was always obvious.

“It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said, according to Politico.

The firings were part of President Donald Trump’s initiative to shrink the federal workforce, led by the White House’s DOGE office.

Which is how we knew it was a lie. Trump and Musk were shouting about mass firings before they got in the door, so of course it wasn’t about “performance.”

His new ruling orders the departments of Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs to offer fired probationary employees their jobs back.

Now do the rest of them.

From The Atlantic: What ketamine does to the human brain

Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, “I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can’t really get work done,” then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Musk’s “associates” worried that ketamine, “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.”

But hey, that was 2023. He doesn’t make any chaotic impulsive statements and decisions these days, right?

Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance.

So that’s why Musk thinks humans can live on Mars?

Research has not yet established the side effects of long-term ketamine therapy, but older studies of recreational users offer some insight on heavy, extended dosing. Celia Morgan, now a psychopharmacology professor at the University of Exeter, in England, led a 2010 study that followed 120 recreational ketamine users for a year. Even infrequent users—those who used, on average, roughly three times a month—scored higher on a delusional-thought scale than ex–ketamine users, people who took other drugs, and people who didn’t use drugs at all. Those who averaged 20 uses a month scored even higher. People believed that they were the sole recipients of secret messages, or that society and people around them were especially attuned to them.

Does that sound like Musk?

H/t Jim Baerg

Texas is in a race to catch up to Afghanistan.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams in Afghanistan have reported a surge in measles patients at three MSF-supported hospitals since January. While measles is endemic in Afghanistan, such a high number of cases so early in the year is cause for alarm.

At least one child in Afghanistan has died from measles every day so far in 2025, according to data MSF staff have collected at the Mazar-i-Sharif Regional hospital, Herat Regional hospital, and Boost Provincial hospital in Helmand. This is almost three times as many deaths as were witnessed during the same period last year.

Is junior Robert Kennedy jealous of this record?

“These are preventable deaths,” says Mickael Le Paih, Country Representative with MSF. “Measles can be a deadly disease, particularly for children with underlying health conditions like malnutrition or congenital heart defects. It can also be prevented by a vaccine, but the immunisation coverage remains low in Afghanistan.”  

Junior Kennedy please note.

“These are preventable deaths,” says Mickael Le Paih, Country Representative with MSF. “Measles can be a deadly disease, particularly for children with underlying health conditions like malnutrition or congenital heart defects. It can also be prevented by a vaccine, but the immunisation coverage remains low in Afghanistan.”  

The children of Afghanistan don’t deserve this.

It’s odd that they can’t give up the nonsense even when all the walls are crashing down.

The buyouts are the latest efforts to scale back the workforce at HHS, a massive and highly consequential umbrella agency that employs more than 80,000 people.

Last week, eligible HHS employees were also offered early retirement buyouts under a separate program also managed by OPM, according to an email sent to staff. HHS also reportedly lost 5,200 probationary employees following the purge of those workers across the federal government. The agency has since reportedly rehired some. An unknown amount also resigned from HHS following the January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months of pay if they resign. It is not immediately clear how many workers at HHS had accepted the latest buyouts. But on Tuesday, HHS seemed to try to entice more workers to do so, by offering employees eight weeks of full pay and benefits in addition to the lump sum, according to a copy of an email to staff reviewed by Mother Jones.

HHS is not alone in trying to lead staff to the door. The Education Department and the Social Security Administration are among those that have also reportedly offered workers the same buyouts HHS workers were offered. And more layoffs will soon hit the entire government, given that Thursday is the deadline for agency heads to come up with “reorganization plans” to implement “large-scale reductions in force,” based on one of Trump’s executive orders, according to OPM.

…

A scientific review officer at NIH, who oversees grant applications and plans to take the buyout, recounted “realizing that things that you hold important are no longer valued and are actually demonized” when she was told to remove her pronouns from her email signature and that grant reviewers should ignore parts of applications focused on diversity to comply with the anti-DEI orders. “The things that brought me to public health years ago,” she told me, “are not the things that are being prioritized, if we’re not allowed to be looking at how we create an equitable environment for everybody.”

By having specialty luxury pronouns in one’s email signature? Really? You think that’s worth mentioning when Trump and Kennedy are taking an axe to Health and Human Services?

Mmmm not possible.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he feels “very badly” for the thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs in recent weeks but that “many of them don’t work at all.”

He means he feels very bad. “Feeling badly” is a pseudo-refinement resorted to by illiterate boobs like Trump who don’t know how adverbs work. “Feeling badly”=he does a bad job of feeling – which of course is true, but it’s not the lie he was trying to tell the press.

Asked by NBC News whether he feels responsible for so many people losing their jobs, Trump said: “Sure I do. I feel very badly … but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”

“When we cut, we want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren’t working or … not doing a good job,” he told reporters at an Oval Office meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin. “We’re keeping the best people.”

No they’re not. We know they’re not. How do we know they’re not? Because they’re dumping boatloads of people all at the same time, five minutes into this nightmare of a regime. They have no idea who is doing a good job and who isn’t; they haven’t paused for a single second to find out. It’s like taking a machete to a rose garden and then saying you were just plucking the wilted blooms.

Slash slash slash slash slash.

It’s almost Quaker in its simplicity.

President Donald Trump’s mass firings of permanent federal employees have already begun and are expected to accelerate over the next few weeks with tens of thousands more employees terminated. But the layoffs didn’t come out of nowhere.

This week, federal agencies face a deadline to provide Trump administration officials with plans for a reduction in force, a dramatic downsizing of the nation’s more than 2 million federal workers that will occur over the next few months. Along with layoffs, some agencies are expected to indefinitely extend their hiring freezes, eliminate currently vacant positions and consolidate offices as ways to reduce headcount.

To belabor the obvious, this isn’t a careful, planned, researched process of trimming the federal budget, it’s taking an axe to the infrastructure with zero regard to the consequences.

Guided by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department Of Government Efficiency aides, Trump has spent his first eight weeks in office focused on dismantling the federal government, including shutting down and laying off the staff of the United States Agency for International Development and taking steps to do the same to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Because consumers shouldn’t have financial protection. They should be cheated, and hope to do better next time.

The firings have affected all 50 states and include employees at agencies that Americans frequently interact with, including the National Park Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Internal Revenue Service, National Institutes of Health and many others.

We don’t need any of that. Eat, sleep, work; that’s all we need.

Ah. The woman who says “living as a woman” = being a woman is not just some random akkteeveest, she’s a big wheel.

Green MP for Bristol Central. Co-leader of @TheGreenParty. Engineer.

Too be completely honest, I would expect an MP and co-leader of the Green Party to be more intellectually serious than someone who blithers about “living as a woman” being the same thing as being a woman.

Yeah there is.

Of course there is “one way” of being a woman, just as there is one way of being a doe, a cow, a mare, a hen, a sow, a vixen, a ewe.

There’s not one way of living while being a woman, but there is one way of just basically being-a-woman-not-a-man.

Uh oh uh oh someone referred to a man as Mr.

A House subcommittee hearing abruptly ended on Tuesday after a Republican lawmaker was confronted over misgendering Rep. Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware and the first openly transgender member of Congress. 

In other words the first man playacting being a woman in Congress. Congress shouldn’t be a stage for playacting.

McBride, a transgender woman, had been the subject of attacks from Republicans since starting her term in January. She was previously misgendered by other members, including Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., and Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C.

There’s no such thing as “misgendering.” There is a misogynist thing where men taunt other men for being “pussies” and “cunts” and similar, but referring to a man as a man is not mis-anything. [Pedantic note: the “mis” in “misgender” is not the same word as the “mis” in “misogyny.”]

McBride later wrote on X that “No matter how I’m treated by some colleagues, nothing diminishes my awe and gratitude at getting to represent Delaware in Congress.”

“It is truly the honor and privilege of a lifetime. I simply want to serve and to try to make this world a better place,” she wrote. 

Not really. If that were true he wouldn’t be doing the narcissistic “pay close attention to my magic gender” thing. He wouldn’t because it’s a distraction, it’s a waste of time, it’s pointless, it does nothing to make the world a better place.

I somehow missed this yesterday. Ignorance was bliss. Trump did a car commercial on the White House lawn while Musk brandished his kid as a human shield.

President Donald Trump turned the South Lawn of the White House into a temporary Tesla showroom Tuesday in a conspicuous favor to his adviser Elon Musk, the car company’s billionaire CEO.

Tesla delivered five of its vehicles to the White House and parked them on a driveway for Trump to personally inspect, hours after he said on Truth Social that he planned to buy a Tesla to demonstrate his support for Musk and for the slumping company. 

Ok ideally he would do nothing but this from here on out, but nothing is ideal so in reality it’s so gross and embarrassing and deliberately insulting that there are no words.

Because of ethical restraints, it is extremely rare for a senior government official, let alone a sitting president, to endorse a consumer product so explicitly. In 2017, when then-Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway told Americans to buy from Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, she received a warning from a government ethics office and promised never to do it again. 

By reviewing the Teslas in public before cameras, Trump ensured that his purchase would get wide attention. Dan Scavino, a White House deputy chief of staff, livestreamed the event on X, the social media app owned by Musk. 

I’m guessing that government ethics office no longer exists?

You want horrendously bad journalism? I’ll give you horrendously bad journalism. The Northern Echo:

Tempers flared at an International Women’s Day event in Darlington after the council asked a group to leave over an “anti-trans” leaflet.

Concerns were raised over a Let Women Speak pamphlet that was being circulated at an event at Number Forty, on Skinnergate, on Saturday, March 8.

Darlington Council, which has run the site since 2022, said staff tried to intervene when some of the material at the event was found to be “inflammatory and anti-trans”.

Huh? Wut? Whose tempers flared? What group? Who asked them to leave? What does “over a leaflet” mean? What do the quotation marks on “anti-trans” mean? Concerns were raised by what people? What kind of concerns? How was the pamphlet being circulated? Who was circulating it? At what event? What staff tried to intervene? Some of the material was found to be unapproved by what people???

Even apart from the substance, this is such terrible journalism you have to wonder why they even bother.

Footage shared widely on social media shows the war of words between councillors and groups, with the authority saying they “behaved in a professional manner”.

What groups? What are you talking about you fucking idiots?

No crimes were believed to have been committed and therefore no police response was required. The event concluded with no further issues.

Not once in the entire piece does the “reporter” say what “the event” in question was.

Musk is having a sad because people don’t want to buy his cars, because they hate him.

Elon Musk — the world’s richest man, who for the past two months has been dismantling or threatening to dismantle government services that help the less fortunate — is having a bad week, and Donald Trump feels sorry for him.

The president’s trade wars have been tanking the stock market, and Musk’s signature company, Tesla, has been along for the ride. The EV behemoth’s shares fell 15 percent on Monday alone, and are down more than 50 percent since peaking in late December. Musk has been melting down as a result, alleging that rival automakers and anyone who prefers them are Nazis, while accusing liberal interests of fueling the Tesla downturn.

He destroys USAID with the result that many people will die of disease or be plunged into poverty or both, and then he whines because we don’t want to buy his expensive car. What a hero.

Musk and DOGE have been recklessly firing thousands upon thousands of government employees and cutting vital programs, all while rigging various agencies to benefit him personally.

The power couple have tried to support their actions by pushing a steady stream of misinformation about waste and fraud. There is of course no evidence that liberal agitators have anything to do with Tesla’s plunging share price, although there is a wealth of it pointing to the actions of Trump and Musk. Trump’s claim that a supposed “boycott” of Tesla is “illegal” is not only false, it is an affront to the First Amendment, toward which the president has grown increasingly hostile since taking office for the second time…

Will he do an Executive Order canceling it?

This is interesting, at least to me, because I think I do know what she means.

“What does it mean?” he asks, and she’s not able to answer, she can only repeat. He asks if it means wearing a dress, reading certain books, and adds that not every woman wears a dress.

I think what it can mean is just the thought in the head. Nothing more than that.

I think that because I did it myself as a child. I pretended to be various characters out of novels or tv shows, without necessarily actually doing anything. It was just “being.”

But that was just me. I never tried to impose it on anyone else, and in fact I think I kept it mostly secret. It was a form of daydreaming I suppose.

And, to be blunt, I was a child. I didn’t go on doing it forever.

Bad title.

In West Texas’ measles outbreak, families forgo conventional medicine along with vaccines

“Conventional” is not the right word there. It’s misleading at best; at worst it nudges people to avoid medicine that works.

They’re trying for the “conventional” journalistic neutrality, but it’s not neutral to apply a pejorative adjective to non-fake medicine. The issue here is doing what works to treat a dangerous disease versus doing what doesn’t work to treat a dangerous disease. It’s a life or death distinction in some cases, so major news outlets really shouldn’t blur it.

Sick families, mostly Mennonite, sit in a makeshift waiting room on the far left, and Dr. Ben Edwards is at a table on the far right.  One by one, families are called over to meet with the doctor.

Edwards asks about their diet and nutritional intake but does not do bloodwork to look at levels of specific vitamins or nutrients. Based on the conversations with the parents and the child, he decides whether the patient might benefit from cod liver oil, which is high in vitamins A and D. Bottles of the product — offered at no charge — line tables in the room.

If kids are having significant trouble breathing, Edwards recommends budesonide, an inhaled steroid typically used for asthma. He does not offer vaccines. 

Gaines County, where Seminole sits, has one of the state’s highest vaccine exemption rates, at nearly 18%, compared to 3% nationally. The embrace of unproven remedies shows that many members of the community are also eschewing conventional medical approaches.

The sad thing is that there is no treatment for measles – there is only prevention. If you get it, you’re stuck with it, and all you can do is try to alleviate symptoms and hope not to die.

“We need to help these kids out,” said Edwards, a family physician based an hour away in the city of Lubbock. Part of that help, he said, is by supplying kids and their families with cod liver oil and nutrition information, “like Bobby Kennedy is trying to do.”

Edwards is, of course, referring to newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s been vocal against proven medical practice. He’s encouraged vitamins and cod-liver oil over vaccination and isolation to control the outbreak.

Kennedy of course has no medical or scientific training of any kind

There’s no antiviral or cure for measles. Kids sick enough to be hospitalized are often given oxygen to help with their breathing. Studies done in other countries have suggested that vitamin A may be helpful in treating malnourished children with the disease. There’s no credible evidence to suggest cod liver oil is effective.

Though doctors here can administer vitamin A for measles, it’s typically used for severe cases in the hospital. Most people in the U.S. have normal levels of the vitamin and don’t need extra.

Too much can be toxic, said Dr. Ronald Cook, chief health officer at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock and health authority for the city. “Before I’d give mega doses of vitamin A, I would certainly get a vitamin A level” in the blood, he said. 

Any messaging suggesting that vitamin A, including cod liver oil, could be an alternative to vaccination is “misleading,” said Dr. David Higgins, a pediatrician and preventive medicine specialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “The goal is to prevent measles from ever occurring. Every single illness, hospitalization and death [from measles] is entirely preventable with vaccines.”

But noooooooo, that’s not interesting enough for a self-involved Kennedy, he has to do a pretend-doctor act on the world stage.

The makeshift clinic and unproven treatments in Texas echo a different deadly measles outbreak in which Kennedy was involved. In 2019, as measles raged in Samoa, Kennedy, then chairman of Children’s Health Defense, connected alternative medicine doctors in the U.S. with a local self-described “natural healer,” who administered their vitamin protocols to sick children and spread fear over the Pacific Island nation’s vaccination campaign. A total of 83 people, mostly children, died in the outbreak. Kennedy has repeatedly denied any involvement in the deaths and questions whether they were caused by measles at all. 

He’s a very bad man.

UN gives Saudi Arabia the women’s rights desk.

Joke? No. I wish it were, but it’s not.

Despite its abysmal record on women’s rights, Saudi Arabia is now chairing the UN’s top women’s rights body, presiding until March 21st at a gathering of global leaders that is supposed to address gender equality amid a reported backlash against women’s rights, at the 69th annual session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Saudi Arabia is systematically, explicitly, with malice aforethought opposed to women’s rights. Saudi Arabia despises women. The UN insults women.

The UN’s commission on the status of women meets every year and has a unique opportunity to hold country violators of women’s rights to account. Yet instead, it systematically ignores them.

For example:

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Saudi Arabia, which, notwithstanding recent limited reforms, subjugates women through its male guardianship system and jails and tortures women’s rights activists.

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Yemen, which ranks at the bottom of the gender equality index (153/153) and where child marriage is pervasive with more than two thirds of girls being married off before age 18.

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been dubbed the “rape capital of the world.”

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Pakistan, where violence against women is on the rise and conviction rates are low—between 2011 and 2017 over 51,000 cases of domestic violence were reported.

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Iran, where women suffer discrimination under the law in key areas such as marriage, family law, age of criminal responsibility, inheritance, and court testimony. The CSW gives a free pass to Iran for its misogynistic modesty laws, under which women are routinely arrested and sentenced to harsh punishments. If a Muslim woman is found in a relationship with a non-Muslim man, she may be sentenced to be whipped. Women have been sent to jail for speaking out in favor of equal rights for women.

I wonder how many trans women there are in Saudi Arabia.

He’s not even from here. He doesn’t even go to this school.

U.S. DOGE Service leader Elon Musk on Monday called Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) — a decorated Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut — a traitor in a post on X after the senator visited Ukraine and expressed his support for the country in its war with Russia.

Who’re you calling a traitor you filthy thieving bullying self-enriching toad of a man??? A traitor to what? You? You are not the boss of us and never will be.

Kelly, who flew dozens of combat missions in the Middle East as a Navy pilot and took four NASA missions to space, also told reporters at the Capitol later Monday that Musk is “not a serious guy” and that he “should go back to building rockets.”

“He’s slashed and burned the federal government to make room for a giant tax cut for billionaires like himself,” Kelly said, referring to Musk’s work leading the U.S. DOGE Service. “I’ve sworn an oath to this country, flown in combat, I served in the Navy for 25 years. It appears to me the oath that Elon Musk stands by is the oath of billionaires, to make their lives easier, not the American people, not veterans.”

The oath of white billionaires, the oath of male white billionaires.

Kelly also accused Musk of showing little respect for veterans as Musk has worked to cut government programs and agencies with DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency. DOGE has fired roughly 6,000 veterans from government jobs, and the Trump administration has announced plans to cut 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs, where military veterans make up about a quarter of the workforce.

I think by “little respect” they mean “brazen callous indifference.”

RTE News exclaims

A building is to be named after a woman for the first time in Trinity College Dublin’s 433-year history

The Women Exist Society retorts

Here’s the @tcddublin student union president sitting in his office with a sign saying ‘F*CK TERFs (women)’ How are the female students in Trinity meant to feel safe on campus when this level of misogyny is allowed

Yes, sure enough “Jenny” Maguire is a man. We’ve encountered him before. September 2023: there was a Let Women Speak rally so of course the pretend men turned up to Try to Make Women Shut Up.

The counter demo organised by Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin assembled outside the Dail on Kildare Street ahead of marching to Merrion Square.

Leading pro-trans activist Jenny Maguire told the crowd: “We as queer people are forced into a world that’s not meant for us.

“We do everything we can to force a world that accepts us and that can love us all unapologetically, and it is them that wants to reverse any progress we’ve made so far and pull us back into the Dark Ages.”

She added: “Trans people aren’t going anywhere.”

That guy, the one who tries to make women shut up, is now the TCD Student Union president. The Catholic Church in Ireland must be laughing itself sick.

Trinity News did a long fawning piece on him in February 2024 when he was running.

Jenny Maguire will undoubtedly be a familiar face to anyone involved with Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU), having previously served as both LGBT rights officer and gender equality officer. Now, the English Studies student wants to lend her experience to the role of president. 

It’s kind of a masterpiece of appropriation, isn’t it – he gets to be all the oppressed things when really he’s none of them. Oooh the lovely fella he’s gay and lesbian and a woman: he’s the top most oppressed person ever!

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Good relations between groups of staff.

…NHS Fife has a duty to foster good relations between groups of staff with different protected characteristics.

Yeah, but some groups are more equal than others.

Neither Upton nor Peggie should ever have been put in this position. It is the employer’s failing and NHS Fife has failed both.

I disagree. NHS Fife did not “put” Upton “in this position.” He put himself in that position all by himself. Upton chose to enter a female single sex space knowing he was male. NHS Fife permitted him to do so. That was not an accident. That was not a mistake. It was deliberate, on the part of both Upton and NHS. They are co-conspirators, or at least offender and enabler/apologist.

Sporting bodies which allow men to cheat against women are doing no disservice to the men who are cheating. Siding with cheating men, and persecuting women who complain is a violation of their duty of care to the women under their rules and regulations. Similarly, NHS Fife, by allowing Upton to enter women’s spaces, was not “failing” him, they were aiding and abetting him, because they took measures against Peggie. They were allowing his violation of boundaries, and he knew he was violating those boundaries, just as men in women’s sports know they’re cheating.

Just because the authorities let them cheat doesn’t let men off the hook for willingly taking advantage of the opportunity to cheat they’ve been handed. Their poor sportsmanship and taking of women’s places is still on them personally, however “inclusive” the sports federation might be. Would they feel that they’d been “failed” if they were allowed to compete against children, stealing all their awards and risking injury? Would they be absolved from their own opportunism in this case? No. Well the same goes for Upton. He knew what he was doing when he did it; he took advantage, in a predatory way, of a loophole opened to him by authorities who should have known better, who were failing to meet and uphold their legal and moral obligations to the women they betrayed, then punished.

How about another analogy. It is no defence of your actions if a misguided or corrupt police officer or police department tells you it’s okay to break into somebody’s house. It’s still wrong, supposed “official” “permission” or “inclusion” notwithstanding. He wasn’t yet eligible for even the flimsy, fictional, figleaf of a GRC, so however mistakenly supportive the current laws are, he did not even clear their offensively ridiculous low bar of acceptance.

Jane McClenachan in the Morning Star on the Sandie Peggie v NHS Fife tribunal:

This is a case that should never have happened and responsibility lies with the Scottish government, the NHS and the trade unions.

Their collective disregard for women’s rights has been made public. Inaccurate guidance issued by all of these organisations advises that individuals can choose which single-sex facilities they wish to use according to their gender identity. This mistaken position is set out in model trans equality policies produced by trade unions.

In point of fact, the Workplace (Health, Safety & Welfare) Regulation 1992 requires employers to provide separate changing rooms and toilets for male and female staff.

NHS Fife has failed to do so. Its workplace policy is not compliant, and it did not conduct an Equality Impact Assessment. The tribunal also heard that Upton began transitioning only 18 months ago, meaning he is ineligible for a gender recognition certificate. Legally he is male and as such must be treated like any other male employee.

Furthermore, under the Public Sector Equality Duty, NHS Fife has a duty to foster good relations between groups of staff with different protected characteristics. Neither Upton nor Peggie should ever have been put in this position. It is the employer’s failing and NHS Fife has failed both.

And why? Because trans ideology dictates that trans always gets to ignore other rights, especially women’s rights.

The NHS trade unions surely have questions to answer. They sign off employment policies at national and at local NHS board level. They are experts in employment and equalities law, employ legal officers and have access to specialist legal advice. Their role is to scrutinise employment policies and hold employers to account for their responsibilities. So, what happened here? Are their full-time and lay officers misinformed about the law? Or is this indicative of institutional capture?

The main health unions, Royal College of Nursing (RCN), Unison and Unite, claim to support the Equality Act including the protected characteristic of sex, while also having policies supporting self-ID of sex and the belief that “transwomen are women.” They deny that there is any conflict with women’s rights. Indeed, against the backdrop of the Peggie case, Unison’s women’s conference endorsed a motion stating exactly that.

Which is completely absurd. It’s like saying there’s no conflict between workers’ rights and bosses’ rights – which, come to think of it, is apt enough when you recall that Upton is of the boss class and Peggie is of the worker one. Whither intersectionality now eh?

Peggie’s trade union, the RCN refused to represent her. The Peggie case has placed trade unions in a highly unflattering spotlight before their majority female memberships. And this is not going away. A similar tribunal case involving a group of nurses in Darlington begins soon. It would be surprising if unions were not doing a pretty quick reassessment of their positions, as Labour has done — although more likely it might be a long wait. Both the Scottish TUC and Unite issued public statements condemning the Scottish Labour leadership for its about turn on the GRR (Scotland) Act.

The UK government blocked that Act, preventing self-ID becoming law in Scotland. The Peggie case illustrates what enforcement of the GRR Act would mean for women. For the political parties that voted the Act through at Holyrood in December 2023 and the trade unions that support it, the chickens are coming home to roost.

I look forward to the squawking.

Another Baltimore.

A major rescue operation was launched after a tanker laden with fuel and a cargo vessel collided in the North Sea off the East Yorkshire coast, with both vessels catching fire.

Great. Fabulous. Marine life and wildlife destroyed for miles around.

Maritime firm Crowley, which manages the tanker, said the vessel had suffered a ruptured cargo tank, adding crew had abandoned ship following “multiple explosions onboard”.

The vessels involved in the collision are the US-flagged Stena Immaculate tanker and the Solong, a Portuguese-flagged container ship, according to data from the ship-tracking website MarineTraffic.

No news on the crew of the Solong.

According to MarineTraffic, the Stena Immaculate had travelled from the Greek port of Agioi Theodoroi and was anchored by the Humber Estuary. The Solong had been sailing from the Scottish port of Grangemouth to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.

I had been hoping the people who run these ships knew how to avoid crashing into each other.