Who ya gonna believe, Trump or pretty much anyone else?

Donald Trump has angrily denied claims by the director of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York that he bullied his way into a now famous cameo. The former president made a brief appearance in the 1992 film in a scene filmed at the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time.

Director Chris Columbus said Mr Trump insisted on appearing in the film if they used the hotel as a location. But Mr Trump said the filmmakers were “begging” him to appear.

“I was very busy, and didn’t want to do it. They were very nice, but above all, persistent,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.

Tsss. Of course he wanted to do it. He’s always loved attention. A spot in a movie? A movie that was a sequel to a huge success? Of course he wasn’t too busy to do it.

The initial comments from Mr Columbus were made in a 2020 interview with Business Insider, although they received renewed attention on social media over Christmas. The director said Mr Trump sought a cameo appearance in addition to the customary fee to film in the hotel.

“We paid the fee, but he also said ‘the only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie’,” Mr Columbus said. “So we agreed to put him in the movie.”

Trump has been a publicity hound his whole adult life.

Let the mutilations continue.

Ohio’s Republican governor has vetoed legislation that would have barred transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming care, he said Friday. Signing the bill would “be saying that the state, the government” knows what’s better for youth than their parents, Gov. Mike DeWine said.

So there should be no laws against beating children, or torturing them, or locking them up in a dark cold basement room, or putting them to work in factories at age 5. Parents always know better, so there should be no child protection laws or institutions at all.

Also, it makes a difference what you call it. “Gender-affirming” makes it sound wholesome and nice. Non-medical genital mutilation and mastectomy don’t sound quite so nice.

The legislation would have prohibited gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary youth, including hormone blockers, hormone replacement therapy, medical or surgical procedures and some mental health services.

That’s because hormone blockers, hormone replacement therapy, medical and surgical procedures are very drastic things to do to children and teenagers, and they’re done in service to a comparatively new and fanciful ideology that claims physical sex is changeable.

The bill also sought to prohibit transgender [male] athletes from taking part in female sports.

Because it’s not fair to females. Apparently the governor of Ohio doesn’t care about that.

How not to do an exhibition on women in revolt:

I wouldn’t say the circled bit makes clear that trans women are centered, but that it makes clear they’re included, which of course they shouldn’t be. Men shouldn’t be included in exhibitions about women, because men are not women. You can’t include men in an exhibition that purports to be about women even slightly without diluting it. It’s just really stupid, frankly, to claim you’re doing a thing about women rebelling and at the same time shove in a sentence about men pretending to be women as if they belonged there. It’s insulting. It can’t not be insulting. It can’t ever be anything but reminding women that we never get to have anything about women and women only, ever again.

Men wanting to be women, claiming to be women, dressing up as women, insisting they are women, are a separate issue from women demanding equal rights. Even if you think such men are an important issue, it’s still a separate issue, and frankly it’s a pretty trivial issue compared to the rights and freedoms of half of humanity.

Today I learned that it’s “insidious” to be not attracted to someone.

When the Mail gets it and “progressives” don’t:

The BBC has been heavily criticised for describing playwright Noel Coward as ‘queer’ amid concerns that the term, ‘reclaimed’ by some in the gay community, is still offensive to many.

A social media post by the BBC Arts account promoting the BBC2 Boxing Day documentary about the actor, singer and composer’s life described him as being ‘queer’ in a ‘very straight world’. The same wording is used on the show’s description on the BBC’s iPlayer.

Critics accused the corporation of using ‘homophobic slurs’ saying Coward was a ‘gay man’, while another said the term ‘queer’ was an ‘insult for most gay men and women’. 

And it’s not for the BBC to err on the side of insulting most gay women and men. The BBC, pillar of the establishment including the royals, is not the institution you want babbling about queer this and queer that one minute and kissing an archbishop’s bum the next.

BBC News’ own style guide says the term should not be applied to an individual or group ‘unless they have already adopted it’. 

It adds: ‘Originally a pejorative term… “queer” has been reclaimed by some in the LGBTQ+ community. However, it is not universally accepted and has the potential to cause offence.’

Yeah kind of like the way the word “nigga” does when used by white people. Duh.

In response to the BBC post, Dennis Noel Kavanagh, director at the Gay Men’s Network, said: ‘You know damned well a good portion of gay men find this term offensive, but it’s plainly more important to you to offend us and show how much you love Stonewall rather than behave like an independent broadcaster.’

The BBC has been accused of being too close to campaigning gay charity Stonewall, an organisation that has sparked controversy for its views on issues such as trans rights.

Gay rights activist Fred Sargeant said Coward ‘would never have embraced a slur used against his generation of gay men’.

Two of my favorite gay rights activists.

Pathetic that the Mail gets this and the Beeb doesn’t.

What is The Birth of a Nation?

D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic 1915 film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern carpetbaggers and freed Black people.

Similar to Gone With the Wind but without spoken dialogue.

History is usually written by the winners. But that wasn’t the case when The Birth of a Nation was released on February 8, 1915. In just over three hours, D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern carpetbaggers and immoral freed Black people. The film was an instant blockbuster. And with innovative cinematography and a Confederate-skewed point of view, The Birth of a Nation also helped rekindle the KKK.

Until the movie’s debut, the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1865 by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, was a regional organization in the South that was all but obliterated due to government suppression. But The Birth of a Nation’s racially charged Jim Crow narrative, coupled with America’s heightened anti-immigrant climate, led the Klan to align itself with the movie’s success and use it as a recruiting tool.

A heightened anti-immigrant climate eh? That sounds oddly familiar.

Adapted from the book The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr., who was a classmate and friend of President Woodrow Wilson, The Birth of a Nation portrayed Reconstruction as catastrophic. It showed Radical Republicans encouraging equality for Black people, who in the film are represented as uncouth, intellectually inferior and predators of white women. And this racist narrative was widely accepted as historical fact.

That is, Black men are represented as predators of white women.

Anyway. That one movie has a lot to answer for.

Two more down.

A Confederate monument was taken down in Jacksonville, Fla., on Wednesday, after an order by the city’s mayor ended years of debate, as officials around the United States reckon with memorials on public property that commemorate the Confederacy.

Donna Deegan, the Democratic mayor of Jacksonville, ordered the removal of two statues that were part of the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” monument in Springfield Park.

Does Jacksonville need large heavy three-dimensional tributes to the women of the slave-owning Confedracy?

Ms. Deegan said in a statement on Wednesday that the monument had been erected as part of a campaign to promote discriminatory Jim Crow laws and intimidate Black people.

A campaign that lasted a century and more.

The memorial was commissioned by the Florida division of the United Confederate Veterans, a national organization that promoted the “lost cause” myth that the Civil War was a noble fight for states’ rights.

The statues were erected in 1915, a year after the United Confederate Veterans held an annual reunion in Jacksonville that was attended by about 8,000 former soldiers. Five months after the reunion, the city renamed the park Confederate Park. It was renamed Springfield Park in 2020.

1915. Why 1915? The premiere of The Birth of a Nation was on February 8 that year. Coincidence? Probably not.

Since 2020, hundreds of Confederate memorials have been renamed or removed from federal, state and municipal land. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for the removal of a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

The removal of the Jacksonville memorial has attracted criticism from conservatives, including Dean Black, a Florida State representative, who filed legislation to block cities in the state from removing Confederate and other historical memorials.

I wonder why Germany isn’t full of memorials to the Third Reich. Italy has thousands of statues of Mussolini, right?

Don’t mention the slavery.

Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina who for years has wrestled with how to approach issues of race, slavery and the Confederacy, found herself again confronted with those subjects at a town hall event on Wednesday in New Hampshire, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Her answer to a simple yet loaded question by an audience member in the city of Berlin — “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” — showed just how much she continues to struggle with such topics.

“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she said eventually, arguing that government should not tell people how to live their lives or “what you can and can’t do.”

Interesting. So the government should not tell people they can’t murder everyone they dislike or steal cars or violently overturn an election.

Notably missing from her answer was slavery, which most mainstream historians agree was at the root of the United States’ bloodiest conflict — specifically the economics and political control behind slavery. Democrats were quick to jump on her answer, with President Biden’s re-election campaign team and others spreading video of the exchange on social media.

After a quick back and forth with the questioner, she said, “What do you want me to say about slavery? Next question.”

Hm. How about: that it made a difference?

Her latest remarks were in keeping with the way she and most of her Republican rivals have toed the line on race and racism on the 2024 presidential trail, downplaying the nation’s sordid racial history and portraying structural racism and prejudice as challenges of the past. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that simple?

I watched this scene again yesterday evening (not the whole movie; I came in late) and it struck me how like Trump Colonel Jessup is. Not as flabby and laughable, of course, but every bit as enraged and murderous.

Cheater wins.

The Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) has been forced to drop their new regulations on men who want to participate in women’s competitions after being sued by a trans-identified male player. The lawsuit was launched earlier this year by Natalie Ryan, who had been dominating women’s competitions prior to the PDGA attempting to rein in male competitors.

Natalie Ryan is of course a man.

Ryan first filed a suit against the PDGA in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California this past February. In his complaint, he argued that a recently-adopted PDGA policy prohibiting trans-identified males from competing with women if they had undergone a “male puberty” violated his civil rights and California laws against discrimination.

And he won so now he gets to violate the civil rights of all the women he competes against.

“The policy adopted by the PDGA and [Disc Golf Pro Tour] is arbitrary and capricious and in violation of Plaintiff’s right to be free from discrimination based on her gender,” the suit said, arguing that policies restricting widespread male participation in women’s sport “denied [Ryan] and other transgender women, who in the eyes of California law are women, full and equal access to the accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, and/or services of [PDGA] organizations.”

Well the eyes of California are closed or crossed or made of glass, because transgender women are by definition men, and men of course are not women.

Yesterday, a settlement between Ryan and PDGA was announced. While the full terms are not available for public consumption, part of the agreement included PDGA dropping the policy which banned males from competing with women unless they had begun transitioning prior to puberty. This change means that all males who had undergone at least two years of hormone therapy are able to compete with women once again.

Sucks to be wimz!

PDGA gave in because it doesn’t have the money to keep fighting.

Bullies win another round.

Geeta Pandey of BBC New Delhi reports:

It was sometime after 1am on 11 December when more than a dozen people barged into Sasikala’s [not her real name] house. The 42-year-old was dragged out, stripped and paraded naked around the village, tied to an electricity pole and beaten for hours.

A resident of Hosa Vantamuri village in Belagavi district in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, she was being punished because her 24-year-old son had eloped with his 18-year-old girlfriend.

The young woman had been betrothed by her family to another man and was to get married the next day. Her furious family wanted to know where the couple were.

So this isn’t about injustice to one woman, it’s about injustice to two women. The younger one was promised to a man by her family, clearly without her consent, let alone joy. The older woman was humiliated and beaten up because everything is women’s fault.

The police reached the village around 4am after they received a tip-off and rescued Sasikala and took her to hospital. She’s reported to be suffering from severe trauma. Her husband later told a visiting state minister that “my wife and I didn’t even know about the relationship”.

More than a dozen people have been arrested and a local police officer has been suspended for “dereliction of duty”. The incident made national headlines and authorities took notice. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah called it an “inhuman act” and promised justice to her.

But no real justice is possible. There’s no way to undo the events of that night.

…the incident in Belagavi is not really rare and several similar incidents have made headlines in India in recent years.

One such story that sparked global outrage came from the north-eastern state of Manipur in July. A viral video showed two women being dragged and groped by a mob of men before one of them was allegedly gang-raped.

If something goes wrong, strip a woman naked and then beat her up. Makes everything better.

Tommy Dorfman, the lovely fella who tried to make an airline worker’s life worse, isn’t a narcissistic self-obsessed dweeb at all, no indeed. Here he is “coming out” in 2021. I had to hit stop at 54 seconds because enough already, so if you manage more and it turns out he’s really not a narcissistic self-obsessed dweeb, let us know.

Morgane Oger declares himself “thrilled” to ruin yet another women’s organization. Shutting down Vancouver Rape Relief wasn’t enough for him.

Oh joy an opportunity for self-promotion!

Fame at last – Newsweek!!

A video by transgender actress Tommy Dorfman, in which she accuses Delta Air Lines Employees of “intentionally” misgendering her, quickly went viral and sparked a fiery debate on social media.

He’s an obvious guy. People who work for airlines have to deal with a lot of people, most of them stressed, all day every day. They don’t have time or mental space to remember to use the wrong third-person pronouns for this one narcissistic guy who is holding up the line to pitch a fit at them.

Dorfman, who played Ryan Shaver in the Netflix drama series 13 Reasons Why, came out as a transgender woman in 2021. The 31-year-old actress shared a roughly 30-second clip to her TikTok over the weekend, showing part of the altercation. In the video, Dorfman said while ;he was] at LaGuardia Airport in New York City several Delta employees, including one she identified as “Tristan,” intentionally misgendered her “multiple” times.

Nobody cares. It doesn’t matter. Shut up. Get on the plane, put your bag in the overhead compartment, sit down, and shut up.

I didn’t realize it was Adam Kinzinger who set off the “Trump smells” alarm. I take that to mean it’s actually true.

I’ll do better than wearing a mask; I’ll never go near him ever.

A point of no return passed?

The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return.

And no doubt other scientists worry that events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is slowly but not all that slowly approaching a point of no return. In short, droughts in the Amazon rainforest are a very bad sign as well as a very bad thing.

Bom Jesus de Igapo Grande is a community of 40 families in the middle of the forest and has been badly affected by the worst drought recorded in the region.

There was no water to shower. Bananas, cassava, chestnuts and acai crops spoiled because they can’t get to the city fast enough.

In the rain forest. Imagine what it’s like elsewhere.

As well as being home to a stunning array of biodiversity, the Amazon is estimated to store around 150bn tonnes of carbon. Many scientists fear the forest is racing towards a theoretical tipping point – a point where it dries, breaks apart and becomes a savannah.

As it stands, the Amazon creates a weather system of its own. In the vast rainforest, water evaporates from the trees to form rain clouds which travel over the tree canopy, recycling this moisture five or six times. This keeps the forest cool and hydrated, feeding it the water it needs to sustain life.

But if swathes of the forest die, that mechanism could be broken. And once this happens there may be no going back.

Aka a tipping point.

The BBC taking care to annoy gay men by using a familiar slur for “gay men.”

Replies are fierce.

You will repeat the lie or you will be punished.

Queen’s University orders every single person on campus to comply with transgender names and pronouns or face punishment

Queen’s University Belfast has toughened up its code of conduct so that refusing to recognise someone’s self-declared gender is now a “zero tolerance” disciplinary matter. Specifically, the university’s new code demands that both staff and students use whatever name and pronouns an individual demands. Failure to do so is now treated as bullying and / or harassment.

It also applies to anyone who makes “derogatory” jokes about transgenderism.

All jokes are derogatory. There shall be no joking.

This new code covers not just staff and students but anybody who sets foot on campus, including outside contractors like cleaners, caterers, and suppliers, and anyone hired by them. This means if a building firm was hired to do repairs at Queen’s, and then hired a subcontractor to supply scaffolding, that subcontractor would be bound by the code of conduct too.

If, for example, this hypothetical scaffolder were then to encounter a 7ft tall, balding, bearded student who demanded to be referred to as a female, they would be under an obligation to accept that person’s declared gender identity without question, despite not even having signed a contract with Queen’s.

Well, except what could Queen’s do to them? Surely nothing? It can do things to students and employees, but not to outsiders.

But who knows, maybe they’ll just start flogging people. It will be nostalgic.

What is a “life coach”?

I’ve suddenly noticed that there are people who go around calling themselves “life coaches,” which seems like quite a presumptuous thing to call oneself. So I consulted Google to confirm what I suspected: it’s a way to charge people for advice without having to get any professional qualifications. Anybody can put up a shingle saying “Life Coach” and charge whatever fees they like.

Some sources consider this an exciting advantage – for the life coaches, that is.

Modern lifestyles are fast paced, highly competitive and come with the added pressure of meeting (often unrealistic) expectations. Many people find it difficult to juggle personal & professional responsibilities and do justice to both. Against this backdrop, a lot of individuals are turning to professionals who can help them navigate life situations and meet their goals, making life coaching the second fastest growing industry, worldwide!  

But it is also one of the most unregulated sectors with no formal guidelines or requirements for specific qualifications, certification or licensing. As things stand, anyone who wants to become a life coach can become one!  

Wait wait wait back up a second. You said “professionals.” You said “Against this backdrop, a lot of individuals are turning to professionals” – but if there are no formal requirements for qualifications then how can the coaches be “professionals”? The reason the professions have high status and are paid well is because they require higher education. Life coaches aren’t professionals then, they’re just randos who call themselves life coaches.

Trump’s Xmas message: