Hello#RFKjr also a Jeffrey Epstein client
newrepublic.com/post/198416/rf…
RFK Jr. Captured in Old Photos Partying With Jeffrey Epstein
It’s not just Donald Trump. Those in his inner circle were in the same orbit as Epstein too.The New Republic
“My parents very clearly do not love me”: Children of Bayswater Speak Out
"In July last year, we exposed Bayswater Support Group’s private Discord for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, revealing evidence of child abuse and political lobbying. Bayswater describes itself as offering “parents whose children have a transgender identity somewhere to talk, share and be understood”. But posts from their private Discord forum revealed that parents exchanged conversion therapy tips, and fostered relationships with MPs to push anti-trans policies."
transsafety.network/posts/my-p…
#Transgender #LGBTQ #ConversionTherapy #TransYouth #TransKids #Transphobia #Transphobes #TransChildren #GenderCritical #Terfs
Study Ordered by Utah Republicans Finds Gender-Affirming Care Benefits Trans Youth
them.us/story/utah-gender-affi…
"Rate of regret after Gender-affirming surgery is approximately 1%. Other life decisions, such as having children and getting a tattoo have regret rates of 7% and 16.2%, respectively."
americanjournalofsurgery.com/a…
Trans women and fairness in sports
Transgender Athletes Could Be At A Physical Disadvantage, Research Shows
forbes.com/sites/lindseyedarvi…
Specific claims of unfairness are self debunking if the source is at all honest about the situation.
For example trans marathon runner Glenique Frank finished 6,159th in the female category but you would get an entirely different impression if you didn't read past the headlines in the daily mail: archive.ph/udkN7
Similarly, Riley Gaines's fairness grievance was literally a tie for fifth place.
Nobody's placement changes if Lia Thomas didn't compete and again, the complaint was that a trans women dared to perform equally to a cis women athlete.
Then there's the chess controversy which is so ridiculous and misogynist that I don't need to dignify it with a debunking. It's just sexism dressed up as concern for cis women.
Miscellaneous
Critically appraising the cass report: methodological flaws and unsupported claims
doi.org/10.1186/s12874-025-025…
Further citations to research on the subject of transgender healthcare thanks to this archived reddit comment by tgjer web.archive.org/web/2019082319…
#transgender #transRights #TransAthletes #LGBTQ #GenderAffirmingCare #GenderAffirmingSurgery #trans #TransWomen
Critically appraising the cass report: methodological flaws and unsupported claims - BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background The Cass Review aimed to provide recommendations for the delivery of services for gender diverse children and young people in England.BioMed Central
Fuzzy Leapfrog (@fuzzyleapfrog@chaos.social)
Stumbling over a Stolperstein while showing your German city to friends from the US, and explaining its meaning, then watching the horror on their faces grow as they continue to stumble over Stolperstein after Stolperstein in the streets we walk together. 🧵
like this
Mark Wollschlager reshared this.
Doctor who with a better take on morality than any Christian on debate forums:
"Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis."
season 10 episode 6
On a public “grooming standards” webpage aimed at prospective Customs and Border Protection agents, the agency advises that any tattoos and brandings must be concealed if they are “obscene or gang-related.” In other words, agents are allowed to have the very markings for which Caraballo and others were disappeared into a Salvadoran gulag — as long as they keep them out of sight.
“It’s like saying ‘our gangsters are okay,’” Rosenow said. “But a young man fleeing persecution from his home country, a father of two little girls who likes to have ink on his body to commemorate his daughters, he is going to be subjected to this kind of horrifying shit?”
theintercept.com/2025/07/16/cb…
#CBPGangs #CBPTattoos #ICEThugs
See #GraeberOnGangs in Athens...
Neither Victims nor Torturers/Executioners --- Albert Camus
Hateful Monger Miller should be put in a nice little sandbox not put into policy positions..
... I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely We’re not a barbaric people. We respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is the celebration of life and human dignity. Ha, ha...It's from a video that was posted on social media yesterday by Breakthrough News
https://x.com/BTnewsroom/status/1945531629037850656
#JeffreyStClair on #StephenMiller #HateMonger #NeitherVictimsNorExecutioners #AlbertCamus
facebook.com/share/1B1eZbrQYh/
I'd like to use my pinned post to shoot the bird to transphobes
Study Ordered by Utah Republicans Finds Gender-Affirming Care Benefits Trans Youth
them.us/story/utah-gender-affi…
Transgender Athletes Could Be At A Physical Disadvantage, New Research Shows
forbes.com/sites/lindseyedarvi…
#transgender #transgenderAthletes #GenderAffirmingCare #TransYouth #IoC #Utah #LGBTQ
Oops! Study Ordered by Utah Republicans Finds Gender-Affirming Care Benefits Trans Youth
Some state Republicans are already dismissing the findings.Abby Monteil (Them.)
Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It’s important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the “war on terror,” and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it.
...
Note that extraordinary rendition is illegal, both under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, where it is identified by the term “refoulement,” and under the U.S. Foreign Affairs Act of 1998, which states: “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” That last clause relates to a practice known as “chain refoulement,” in which someone is first sent to a third country where the risk of torture is less, only to be sent on to the original prohibited destination.
- tomdispatch.com/everything-old…
#RebeccaGordon at #TomDispatch on #AbregoGarcia #KilmarAbregoGarcia #ICEThugs kidnappings as #ExtraordinaryRendition illegal under #InternationalLaw #USALaw #USATorture
Everything Old Is New Again - TomDispatch.com
I didn't want to write this article. In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence.Andy Kroll (TomDispatch)
You could call these jokes, if you think killing people is funny. Or you could call them thought experiments. Liddle suggested as much in his column: “I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.” This “humour” permits obscene ideas to seep into the range of the possible.
Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the thresholds of hate speech as a form of “strategic mainstreaming”. Far-right influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience and normalise extremism.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Since the 90s Chomsky was mentioning how the USA turn toward the sort of economy it urged onto "our backyard" (Latin American) "client states" was making a situation where the only jobs were security guards....
' “The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.” "
theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
#ICEThugs #USACrime #USALawEnforcement #USAImmigration #MoralInjury
Nothing is inevitable. Everything is resistible.... the American "we" is different. In both racial demographics and political norms, this is not the country it was fifty or sixty years ago. But under authoritarianism, it's often not that people normalize atrocities, but that they're afraid to speak up, which is why strong early action matters.
Arendt argued as early as 1951 that the concentration camps in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) served as a model for the Third Reich’s bureaucratic organisation of forced labour and systematic murder: to suppress an anticolonial rebellion, the Germans had killed a hundred thousand Ovaherero and ten thousand Nama. Both Arendt and Aimé Césaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism was published a year before The Origins of Totalitarianism, used the metaphor of the boomerang to describe the way violence that was once reserved for colonial subjects was turned on Europeans. For Mbembe, too, this history shows the West’s need for some racialised other – ‘a Negro, a Jew, an Arab, a foreigner’ – to make sense
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/ke…
#HannahArendt #Arendt #ArendtOnColonialism #ArendtOnImperialism
/HT #RebeccaSolnit FB
> 幸福な人たちの最も一般的かつ明瞭な特徴と思われるもの,すなわち'熱意'（zest）を扱おうと思う。> I propose to deal with what seems to me the most universal and distinctive mark of happy men, namely zest.
...
> 人は,関心を寄せるものが多ければ多いほど,よりいっそう幸福になる機会が多くなり,また,ますます運命に左右されることが少なくなる。その理由は,何か一つを失っても,別のものを頼る（←別のものに撤退する）ことができるからである。> The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.
Though the Trump administration often refers to the AEA removals as deportations, they do not resemble the codified judicial process of deportation.Rather than deporting the men removed under the AEA back to their country of origin, the Trump administration sent them to a country foreign to them to serve out an indefinite sentence without ever convicting them of a crime or giving them an opportunity to challenge their removal or continued confinement.
...
Multiple investigations have found that a majority of those removed by the Trump administration do not have criminal records in the U.S., Venezuela or El Salvador and never violated U.S. immigration laws.
...
... the U.S. has paid El Salvador around $6 million to imprison the men for at least a year.
...
El Salvador said that the U.S. had exclusive responsibility over the men.“In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters,” it said.
democracydocket.com/news-alert…
#ICEVenezuelans #ICEThugs #USAImmigrations #CECOT #DemocracyDocket #ImmigrationLaw #InternationalLaw
El Salvador Contradicts Trump, Says It Has No Authority Over Migrants Held in Megaprison - Democracy Docket
El Salvador told the United Nations that it has no legal authority over hundreds of Venezuelan men that President Donald Trump sent to a Salvadoran megaprison earlier this year.Democracy Docket
Hard to imagine gangs coming to rescue vulnerable immigrants like a cheap novel or SalamiAI illustration.. Would be nice though....
... to understand the often surprising affinity between criminals, criminal gangs, right-wing political movements, and the armed representative state. Ultimately, they speak the same language. They create their own rules on the basis of force. As a result, they typically share the same broad political sensibilities. Mussolini might have wiped out the mafia, but Italian Mafiosi still idolize Mussolini.... > In Athens, nowadays, there’s active collaboration between the crime bosses in poor immigrant neighborhoods, fascist gangs, and the police. In fact, in this case it was clearly a political strategy: faced with the prospect of popular uprisings against a right-wing government, the police first withdrew protection from neighborhoods near the immigrant gangs, then started giving tacit support to the fascists. For the far-right, then, it is in that space where different violent forces operating outside of the legal order interact that new forms of power, and hence of order, can emerge.
thenewinquiry.com/super-positi…
#GraeberOnGangs #GraeberOnAthens #GraeberOnSuperHeros #DavidGraeber
The ICE Thug stuff is worse than the Golf Course Goobers, where's the _Falling Down_ guy snapping in the right way at first and then getting caught before doing evil? I wonder if the _Training Day_ guys are saying anything about this??
> “Minutes before, there were more than 20 kids playing — then, the MILITARY comes through,” she wrote. “The SECOND I heard about this, I went to the park to speak to the person in charge to tell them it needed to end NOW. Absolutely outrageous.”
...
> One of the officials in the raid told the Associated Press that the raid was “going to be more overt and larger than we usually participate in,” though the news organization added that raid ended abruptly with no explanation.
> Bass, City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson later decried the raids at a press conference on Monday afternoon.
ktvu.com/news/ice-operation-ma…
#ICEThugs #LAMayor #LAMayorBass #MayorBass
ICE in LA: Mayor Bass confronts federal agents in MacArthur Park, demands withdrawal
Federal agents conducted a federal immigration sweep at MacArthur Park in LA's Westlake District late Monday morning.Kelli Johnson (KTVU FOX 2)
望ましい４つの特質
合わさって人間の理想的な性格の基礎を形作ると思われる４つの特質を取り上げてみよう。即ち,活力（Vitality）,勇気（Courage）,感受性（Sensitiveness）,知性（Intelligence)の４つである（右図参照）。このリストは完全であると私は言うつもりはない。しかし,この４つの特質がそなわれば,我々は良い方向に進むことができると,私は考えている。さらに,若い人たちの肉体や感情や知性を適切に取り扱えば（世話をすれば）,これらの特質はいずれもごくありふれたものにできる,と私は固く信じている。順に考察してみよう
...
I will take four characteristics which seem to me jointly to form the basis of an ideal character; vitality, courage, sensitiveness and intelligence. I do not suggest that this list is complete, but I think it carries us a good way. Moreover, I firmly believe that, by proper physical, emotional and intellectual care of the young, these qualities could all be made very common. I shall consider each in turn.
... Eunisses Hernandez, a 35-year-old city councilmember who represents a quarter-million people in a majority-Latino district in northern Los Angeles.Many Angelenos who did not attend protests against the new Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids are doing other kinds of work, Hernandez said, like providing “know your rights” information to small businesses about interacting with law enforcement officials, or figuring out how to deliver food to immigrant families too afraid to leave home even to buy groceries.
Mutual aid networks created to help people affected by the January’s wildfires have been “reinvigorated” to respond to the Trump administration’s raids, Hernandez said.
“In this moment, while we’re seeing the worst of our federal administration, we are seeing the best here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said.
...
“Even with documents, people are afraid to go out. Even citizens are afraid to go out. People are afraid to encounter an Ice agent regardless of their status, because of the level of violence they have seen on social media or on TV,” she said.
Multiple US citizens in the Los Angeles area have reportedly been detained as part of immigration raids this month.
theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j…
#EunissesHernandez #SolidarityInLA #LASolidarity #ICEThugs #USAImmigration
‘We’re seeing the best of LA’: as Ice raids haunt the city, Angelenos show up for each other
With the largest undocumented population of any US city, much of LA locks in with fundraisers, mutual aid networks and grocery deliveriesLois Beckett (The Guardian)
New research from a recent PRRI survey of more than 5,000 adults shows that 61% of Americans oppose the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya, without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court, including 36% who strongly oppose.[1] At the same time, majorities of some specific groups — Republicans, white evangelical Protestants, and white Catholics, as well as Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers — support these actions.Republicans (78%) are nearly eight times as likely as Democrats (10%) to favor the deportation of undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process. Roughly one-third of independents (35%) support these immigration actions by the Trump administration.
prri.org/spotlight/new-prri-po…
... sexual harrassment in the workplace is not about out of control lust but about control itself, as an abuse of power and an exercise of it, meant to demonstrate the abuser can do whatever he wants, and the abused have no rights and what they want doesn't matter. Because we're a somewhat less hierarchical society than we once were, those abuses of power are (sometimes) less tolerated, and victims are (sometimes) more likely to have avenues in which to push back against violations of their rights. In other words, the line has been redrawn so that rights are more widely distributed, and while Cuomo surely knew this, he had also created a workplace in which he could get away with enforcing his own rules and overriding the law and the rights of others.
Iran could for example have directed its fury at Israel, which Iran views as responsible for its current predicament, or withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which unlike Israel Iran has ratified. It could additionally have chosen to prevent shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20-30 per cent of global energy exports pass, and coordinate efforts with AnsarAllah to similarly block Bab al-Mandab, shutting off the Suez Canal through which 10-15 per cent of global trade reaches its destination. While this would reduce Iranian oil exports to zero, and severely affect China (which imports most of its oil from the Persian Gulf), it would send prices at the pump in the US through the stratosphere at the height of the summer driving season. That won’t go down very well with the MAGA base which voted for Trump in significant part on account of his proclaimed opposition to costly and needless forever wars in the Middle East. ..
Iran is in a very unenviable position. Significantly weakened and still isolated, with strategic allies in Russia and China that are far less dependable than is the US for Israel, Tehran is damned if it acts, and damned – arguably more so – if it does nothing. At the same time Iran has spent many years preparing for precisely the scenario it is confronted with today, and it is most unlikely to prioritize self-preservation if the price is capitulation. Expanding the conflict to the region, and inflicting losses directly and indirectly on the US, appears to be its most likely course of action. In a calculated rather than impulsive fashion. ...
Serious questions must be asked as to the longer-term strategy here. While Israeli officials have articulated a need for strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear weapons capability, Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (although it has threatened recently to quit) and key officials have regularly declared that nuclear weapons have no place in Iran’s strategic portfolio. ..Israel is not a signatory to the treaty. In fact, it is thought to possess between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads. It’s hard to tell, as the country has maintained a steadfast policy of nuclear opacity, never actually admitting the extent of its nuclear capability...
The contours of global politics are changing before our eyes. Gone are the norms that have served as the bedrock of the so-called liberal international order. The risk is that while this period has itself featured tragedy and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, tearing up the rule book will be far worse.
juancole.com/2025/06/israel-us…
#SimonMabon #GlobalOrder
#NPT #IsraelNukes #IranNuclearProgram #JuanCole #JuanColeSite
Iran’s military budget in recent years has expanded from $10 billion a year around $15 billion annually, making it 25th in the world for such expenditures and putting it in the same range as Singapore and Uruguay. Algeria and Turkiye spend more, and Israel spends twice as much. Even if the war causes Iran to double its spending, it would still only match the United Arab Emirates and Israel, and would not reach the level of Saudi Arabia. Moreover, Iran is a country of 92 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to some of these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population.
juancole.com/2025/06/things-st…
JuanCole #WarOnIran #IranMilitary
USA, more and more like Chile and other States under military dictatorship...
Locals praised the Dodgers when the team announced on social media that it had realized who actually buys their expensive tickets and sent Trump’s attack dogs on their way.
ICE and DHS, in contrast, have been snippy and defensive since they were shown the door and initially, and laughably, just posted tersely, “False. We were never there.” Then they admitted that Customs and Border Patrol were there as photos and videos flooded social media. Emily Phillips of an Echo Park Rapid Response network reported that the Feds said that they needed the stadium to process detainees since doing so out in the open at Home Depot would be “too dangerous.” It should frighten as well as offend everyone that such a cowardly, frightened group gets to be masked and armed and arrest people without warrant.
...
It would be a mistake to think that the Dodgers, whose ownership and (some) players visited the White House several months back and kissed the ring, are born again. This was done because of all the people who bravely stood up to the LAPD, the National Guard, the Marines, and whatever motley group of agencies have been diverted to California—a state that, like Greenland in the springtime, Trump clearly wants to seize. And yet the actions by the Feds here is also an escalation. They expect to be able to use a stadium to “process” those suspected of being undocumented—or even worse, that they can pull people out of the crowd at a ballgame and throw them into the backs of white vans. Given the history of stadiums being used across the globe as mass holding cells, with all kinds of small rooms perfect for “enhanced interrogations,” it would be particularly traumatizing for those connected to countries where sports arenas double as torture chambers.
thenation.com/article/society/…
#DavidZirin #LADodgers #DodgersStadium #ICEThugs
CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Professor Shocks Students Speaking Gen Alpha Slang youtube.com/shorts/oj4wYbiP6V8…Great one
#languageProfessor Shocks Students Speaking Gen Alpha Slang
I was invited by Westtown School to give a speech—as a language expert—about the importance of learning languages, in front of a full auditorium of high scho...YouTube
Tana Petruzzelli, a volunteer with Detention Resistance, a human rights group who regularly accompany migrants and refugees to their court hearings, said she noticed a difference in how the court and law enforcement acted when the religious delegation was in the building.
“They bailed as soon as they showed up,” Petruzzelli said, referring to ICE officers. In a video shot by Petruzzelli and shown to Courthouse News, six or so ICE agents, all completely masked with black face coverings, can be seen gathering toward an elevator.
> “What is the sense of all of the hatchery work and habitat restoration that we are doing as a Nation if 50 years from now the water temperature may be so high that none of the salmon will survive anyway?” I didn’t receive an answer from anyone that day...
> “Mr. Chairman you had asked us all a question about the relevance of hatchery & habitat work in spite of a future where the water temperature may be so high that nothing will survive. I apologize for not having an answer for you that day. I had to think long and hard about your question. The truth is the future of the salmon is so dark that we refuse to discuss it and we refuse to acknowledge it.”...
> Dam removal is the only option that exists in properly addressing the water temperature question.
counterpunch.org/2025/06/20/ro…
#SalmonFisheries #Dams #DamRemoval #ダムはムダ #JoDeGoudy #YakamaNation #ColumbiaRiver #ColumbiaRiverBasin #JeffreyStClair #RoamingCharges
Roaming Charges: Neo-Conned Again! - CounterPunch.org
Using Israel's logic for attacking Iran (to protect itself from (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons), every country in the Middle East (and beyond) would be justified in attacking Israel and destroying its (still undeclared) arsenal of 90 nuclear …Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch.org)
> + Last Saturday, the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers told the singer Nezza to “do the national anthem in English tonight.” Instead, Nezza put on a Dominican Republic t-shirt and sang the anthem in Spanish. (Nezza was born in the US and is an American citizen.) Word of the Dodgers’ attempt to suppress Nezza ignited outrage among many in the LA Hispanic community. This is, after all, the team that evicted a predominantly Mexican community of 300 families from their homes in Chavez Ravine (without compensation) to build Dodger Stadium. Nezza’s defiant act and the local response to it almost certainly prompted the Dodgers to take this action on Thursday…
counterpunch.org/2025/06/20/ro…
#Nezza #LaDodgers #DodgersStadium #DodgersStadiumICE #JeffreyStClair
Darth Tiktaalik
in reply to Darth Tiktaalik • •Transgender people over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime
williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu…