Links - 23rd March 2024 (2 - Trans Mania)

Meme - "DR. FOXFORD IS HERE!"
To MTF with big stomach: "AND YOUR TEST RESULTS ARE IN! HOPE YOU LIKE CHANGING DIAPERS CHUM! YOU HAVE COLON CANCER!"

Nick Pope - "My wife - Elizabeth Weiss - is a controversial and high-profile anthropology professor who's been the subject of various cancel culture attacks, e.g. for saying that skeletons are either male or female (now classified as "hate speech"!). She advocates for science, and speaks out against wokeism and political correctness in academia. Her book "On the Warpath: My Battles With Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors" will be out soon."
So many left wingers were claiming that this was fake and that she was cancelled for "grave robbing", when the American Anthropological Association literally cancelled her panel due to "transphobia" (maybe the cope will be that "transphobia" isn't "hate speech"; the hysterical claims from the AAA were hilarious, like comparing it to race science). Not to mention that the talk of "grave robbing" is nonsense anyway, given how non "indigenous" archaeology works

Meme - Godfrey Elfwick: "From the abject misery of living in the wrong body to the joy of being your true self. The beautiful journey of Elliot Page"
*happy Ellen Page* *upset Elliot Page*

Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport: Misleading at best, intellectually dishonest at worst | Macdonald-Laurier Institute - "The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) is an odd organization. On one hand, it is Canada’s National Anti-Doping Organization, funded by Sport Canada. Its task is to ensure fair sport. On the other hand, it behaves more like a think tank or academic centre, going way beyond regulation to argue for a conception of sport that ensures unfair sport for women. It does this is a way that is both militantly ideological, and also rather odd. Its latest publication, titled Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport: A Scientific Review (CCES 2022a), is an example of this second activity.  In a hotly contested field, the report has a good claim to be one of the worst published papers on trans-inclusion in female sport. I want first to highlight the oddness of the paper. It argues, simultaneously, for three inconsistent views. The first is that it is fair for transwomen to compete in female sport. The second is to concede that it is not fair for transwomen to compete in female sport. The third is that we don’t know whether it is fair for transwomen to compete in female sport. You don’t need to be a professor of logic to see that this is a mess... The CCES paper is divided into “biomedical” and “socio-cultural” approaches and the authors make a bold claim that this reflects two different “epistemologies” or “conceptualizations” (CCES 2022a, 13) in a “social hierarchy of knowledge” (Ibid., 6). This approach appears to appeal to a Foucauldian “structures of knowledge” idea, the view that knowledge is a social construction, in opposition to a view of truth and explanation as the correspondence between an independent reality and our understanding. Or perhaps it is supposed to resonate with a Wittgensteinian critique of “scientism” – the ideological presentation of science as having a master role in intellectual life. There is a lot of obfuscation along these lines in the paper that amounts to pseudo-profundity.   But what we get is a let-down. It is nothing more than the obvious point that socio-economic and other inequalities influence athletic performance. A “Key Sociocultural Finding” of the paper is that “Nutrition and time to train make a difference to athletic performance” (CCES 2022a, 6).  Well, gosh.  Whilst true, this has nothing to do with the inclusion of male-bodied athletes in female competition... the argument could be reconstructed in two ways: one is to say that the physiological effects of the social disadvantages faced by transwomen match, and therefore cancel out, their residual male advantages. Because of this, then, it turns out to be fair to include transwomen in female sport. This is the third view. Is it plausible?  Consider this consequence: in our paper published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), we point out that the different physiological advantages of males over females varied from sport to sport. So they were smaller in endurance sport – perhaps 11 percent in rowing, but bigger in explosive, upper body sport, such as 66 percent in powerlifting (Pike, Hilton and Howe 2021, 14). But, on the “cancelling out view,” the sociological disadvantages of transwomen would make it fair if they diminished performance by 11 percent for transwomen rowers but they would need to do so by 66 percent for transwomen power lifters. But this consequence is absurd. The other view is to say that, because of the sociocultural disadvantages faced by transwomen, sports authorities should accede to the demand that they are included in female sport. On this line of argument, inclusion of transwomen in female sport is not fair, but it is an act of solidarity with them. This justification, though, must attend to the opposite claim: it rests on the acceptance that inclusion is not fair, so it amounts to an act of hostility towards female athletes. Many female athletes face sociocultural disadvantages too. We know that inclusion of transwomen in female sport also excludes: it drives female athletes off podiums and out of competition (Devine 2021). We should ask, then, what do you have against female athletes? What have they done to merit being treated unfairly?... Transwomen tend to be taller, have bigger hands, bigger lungs, and higher fat free mass. This is because of the process of androgenisation, which happens to everyone who goes through male puberty. But, yes, if you control and adjust for these male advantages, then they start to fade away. This CCES move then has rather a dizzying effect: “If you control for all sex differences, then you find that sex differences are not significant” is a true, but meaningless, claim for this policy debate: “If wishes were fishes, we’d all swim in riches,” as the nursery rhyme – truthfully – goes.   At a more practical level, the authors pass over in silence evidence that males outperform body-size-matched females by up to 30 percent in many sports. However, the CCES acknowledge as one of their key findings that even with adjustment for height and weight, transgender women retain physiological advantages over females, and thus they must resort to the argument that these retained advantages are within range of female metrics, an argument that applies to many males regardless of gender identity and which has not been considered a rationale for permitting those males into female sporting categories... when this conceptual confusion, this wrong-end-of-the-stick grabbing and tomfoolery, is not enough to establish their pre-determined ideological conclusions, CCES simply misrepresents the literature. As if no-one can do the reading, they say that the evidence summarized in Harper et al. (2021b) “is highly suggestive that any potential performance advantage is negated through effective testosterone suppression” (CCES 2022a, 26, emphasis added). Compare this to what this source actually says: “the small decrease in strength in transwomen after 12–36 months of GAHT [gender-affirming hormone care] suggests that transwomen likely retain a strength advantage over cisgender women” (Harper et al. 2021b, 7, emphasis added).   It is necessary to speak plainly here. The CCES is sponsoring and publishing pseudo-science and intellectual dishonesty to the Canadian public, at the expense of the same Canadian public, up to and including misrepresentation of academic peer-reviewed research.  This report is frighteningly bad. There is so much more wrong with it than I have space to cover. In its gratuitous ad hominems, it fails to meet minimal standards of intellectual debate. The report’s authors do not understand what it would take for inclusion of male-bodied transwomen to be fair, and present mutually inconsistent accounts. It misreads and mischaracterizes the history of sport. The literature review is partial, shoddy, and dishonest. It is sometimes wrong, but often doesn’t rise to the threshold of even being wrong."
Since some black people earn more money than some white people, we can't say that black people earn less than white people, or that there's any discrimination against black people

Meme - "Trans people aren't valid"
"Nobody is denying your humanity. We're denying your delusion."

How trans ideology hijacked the gay-rights movement - "In the 1980s and 90s, there was no ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’ community. There were two very different groups, transvestites and transsexuals. The only thing they had in common was a need to be able to discreetly source ladies’ clothes in mens’ sizes. The only thing they had in common was a need to be able to discreetly source ladies’ clothes in mens’ sizes. Transvestites were overwhelmingly male and heterosexual, and liked to wear women’s clothes occasionally. They did not believe themselves to be women, nor did they want to physically transition. These transvestites outnumbered by 10 or 20 to one the far smaller group of transsexuals. Transsexuals at the time were mostly male, mostly homosexual and suffered gender dysphoria so severe that they willingly underwent the pain and risks of ‘sex change’ surgery. (There were only vanishingly small numbers of biological women identifying as either transvestites or transsexuals at that time.)... But at some point in the late 1990s, the transvestites and transsexuals merged into a new group: ‘transgender’ people. The public mostly thinks that transgender people are the same as the old ‘transsexuals’ – ie, gender dysphorics who have either already ‘changed sex’ or at least intend to. But more than 95 per cent of transgender people do not ‘change sex’. Most transwomen are biological males who still have full adult male genitalia and have no wish to change that. Many are still sexually attracted to biological females like the straight men they are and always were. This is how we arrived at ‘LGBT’. This is how a collective identity for homosexuals came to include lots of straight men who wanted to be seen as anything but straight men... Then, it was only a short wait before the Q was added. Q for queer. The n-word for homosexuals. Perhaps ‘trolling the homos’ wasn’t the reason the Q was added to LGBT, but it felt like it to some of us. Certainly, LGBTQ now included even more straights who didn’t want to be seen as straight – because that’s just too… dull? In any case, yet another bunch of straights had muscled into our acronym, literally queered our pitch, without bothering to ask the boring, old-fashioned LGB whether it wanted to be forceably teamed-up with yet more non-homosexuals. Most LGB people just kept their mouths shut. Others, afraid of being left behind, started calling themselves ‘nonbinary’. No one seemed to understand what it meant, apart perhaps from having a pink fringe and big glasses. Then came ‘I’ for ‘intersex’. Neither a sex, nor a gender, but a medical condition this time.  Then it was ‘A’. For ‘asexual’. Boy George famously once said he would prefer ‘a nice cup of tea and a sitdown’ to sex. Fair play! But that hardly warrants the launch of a human-rights campaign.  And so we arrived at LGBTQIA, which was then itself immediately overtaken by LGBTQIA+, with the plus sign signalling that there would be no limits to the expansion. If that’s a bit confusing, just remember, the LGB is the homosexual bit, the TQIA+ is the straight bit.   First our acronym was hijacked, and then our flag. In 2018, our beautiful, simple rainbow flag was binned and replaced with the ugly ‘Progress Pride Flag’, with added triangles signifying trans and nonbinary people, plus people of colour. Apparently a rainbow, the very definition of inclusion, is not inclusive enough for our queer new world.   Next up for a takeover was the jewel in our community’s crown, Stonewall. What was once a model lobby group has been hijacked and turned into, effectively, a consultancy firm for companies looking to put a tick in a ‘corporate social responsibility’ box. We should have seen this corporatisation coming years ago, when ‘Lesbian and Gay Pride’ was first de-gayed to just ‘Pride’.   But what can be done about all this? Is it time for a divorce? Well, according to the gaslighting narcissists of the TQIA+, we LGB people are nothing without them, and they’ll never let us leave them. Meanwhile, all those lovely progressive ‘allies’ keep telling us to ‘give the relationship a chance – you were meant to be together!’.  Unsurprisingly, some lesbians have come to the conclusion that they just need to ‘Get the L out’ of the LGBTQIA+ and organise separately as lesbians. Good luck with that. Every lesbian group and dating app is currently besieged by transwomen claiming to be lesbians and demanding to be considered as valid sexual partners. Other lesbians (from the Gay Liberation Front of the 1970s and the original Stonewall) have set up the LGB Alliance, a charity to focus once again on the needs of homosexuals. Shamefully, Stonewall and others have tried to prevent this organisation from even having charitable status.   All of this might sound to you like just one grumpy old man moaning about a TERF war between the different stripes of an ugly flag. But what began 25 years ago, with the erasure of the distinction between transvestites and transsexuals and the addition of a fourth letter to the LGB acronym, has delivered a whole catalogue of problems today, some with devastating consequences.  Of perhaps minor importance, but intensely annoying, is the Stalinist rewriting of LGB history to centre trans people, when in reality they were absent or only present on the margins.    More seriously, the progressive view that while biology is real, gender stereotypes are mere social constructs has been upended. LGBTQIA+ ideology reverses this, discounting the importance of sex and placing ‘gender identity’ on a pedestal. Dressing in the wrong colour or playing with the ‘wrong’ toy is now seen as diagnostic of a ‘trans’ identity – and anyone who dares question this identity is liable to be accused of ‘conversion therapy’.    The problems of transwomen’s unfair advantage in women’s sport and the potential dangers of their presence as biological males in women’s refuges, prisons, changing rooms and toilets are becoming glaringly apparent. The social contagion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria among teen girls and the ‘transing’ of effeminate boys and butch girls both deserve far more attention. They are a physical and mental-health timebomb ready to explode. Decades of progress in women’s rights, lesbian and gay rights, and even children’s rights are being rolled back or placed in jeopardy.  This is not the gay-rights movement of old. It is time for a divorce."

Meme - Barbie Movie: "It is literally impossible to be a woman."
Laverne Cox: "No it's not sis!"
Caitlyn Jenner: "All you need is long hair and a little makeup..."
Dylan Mulvaney: "A pretty dress and a giggle..."
Transwoman 4: "And knowing that what you feel is all that really matters"

Meme - "Normal People: living their lives, not bothering anyone
Trans People: *upset Denethor*"
TRAs post this with the positions swapped, which is amazing, because they're always trying to force the rest of the world to follow their agenda

Meme - "For the second year in a row, Mack Beggs, a transgender wrestler has won the Texas girls' Class 110 pound division. *man holding woman in choke hold*
Beavis and Butthead: "AH! HELP! HE'S GOT A BONER""

Meme - "But I have an untreated mental illness, made up some pronouns, and demanded that you call me a woman."
Bane: "And this gives you power over me?"

Meme - "Hill: The term 'Gender' has been used for more than five hundred years to reference a person's biological sexual characteristics. No amount of revisionism is going to change this fact.
Source: Oxford English Dictionary"
"Males or females viewed as a group; = sex Also: the property or fact of belonging to one of these groups. Originally extended from the grammatical use at sense 1 (sometimes humorously), as also in Anglo-Norman and Old French. In the 20th cent. as sex came increasingly to mean sexual intercourse (see sex), gender began to replace it (in early use euphemistically) as the usual word for the biological grouping of males and females. It is now often merged with or coloured by sense 3b."
1474. His heyres of the masculine gender of his body lawfully begoten. in C. L. Kingsford, Stonor Letters & Papers (1919) vol. I. 142 (Middle English Dictionary)
a1500 (a1460). Has thou oght writen there Of the femynyn gendere? Towneley Plays (1994) vol. I. xxx. 408
1580. For there is but one Lord..both of men and of Angels, which doth not onely exclude all other Lordes of the masculine gender, but much more all Ladyes. W. Fulke, Retentiue 92
1632. Here's a woman: The soule of Hercules has got into her. She has a spirit, is more masculine, Then the first gender. S. Marmion, Hollands Leaguer iii. iv. sig. g4v
1656. Strength..was a vertue attributed to the masculine gender. Earl of Monmouth, translation of T. Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnasso 135
1719. I think the Poets make her change her Sex, and turn He-Thing, as if she could not be as useful when of our Gender, as of yours.. J. Harris, Astronomical Dialogues 141
1723. Of the fair Sex..my only Consolation for being of that Gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being marry'd to any one amongst them. Lady M. W. Montagu, Letter 7 December (1966) vol. II. 33"
Proof that until about 10 years ago, everyone knew sex and gender were synonyms

Meme - "Good morning kids, welcome to Death Metal Story Hour, this next song is about killing child Molesters."
Of course, the left will be very upset about this

RATES OF PSYCHIATRIC EMERGENCIES BEFORE AND AFTER GENDER AFFIRMING SURGERY
Benjamin Ryan on X - "Study finds that the attempted-suicide rate among transgender women who received a vaginoplasty in California was twice as high during the period after the surgery compared with the period before the surgery.  The investigaotrs analyzed data on all 868 people who received a vaginoplasty and 357 people who received a phalloplasty in California from 2012-2018. There were an average of 2 years of data before and after surgery.   A total of 22% of the vaginoplasty group and 21% of the phalloplasty group had at least one ER or in-patient psych encounter during the study period, whether before or after surgery.   If there was a psych encounter prior to surgery, 34% of the vaginoplasty group and 27% of the phalloplasty group had a psych encounter after surgery.   Among those receiving a vaginoplasty, the rate of suicide attempts was twice as high after the surgery, at 3.3%, compared with before, at 1.5%.   The phalloplasty suicide-attempt rate was similar to the general population, while the vaginoplasty group's rate was more than twice as high as the general population.  "Patients undergoing [gender-affirming surgery] with a history of prior psychiatric emergences or feminizing transition are at higher risk and should be counseled appropriately," the study authors concluded."
Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "This is big! A new study out of California completely destroys the narrative that kids will kill themselves if not allowed to transition.  Attempted suicides of trans-identified males more than doubled after sex-reassignment surgery.   Looking at the two years before and two years after surgery, the attempted suicide rate went from 1.5% - 3.3%.  Suicidality stayed the same for females."
The TRAs will pretend this study doesn't exist, block anyone who mentions it under the excuse of "transphobia" and carry on as if the claim that surgery reduces suicide hasn't already been debunked elsewhere
As we get newer studies which include more and more victims of trans mania, the "life saving" interventions are going to look worse and worse, since screening is now "gatekeeping" and everyone is being given these interventions, even if there's no reason to think they will benefit

Benjamin Ryan on X - "The era of pediatric gender-transition treatment for early adolescents is over in England, as the National Health Service announces it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers to minors. This puts the U.S. further and further away from Europe. @WPATH is doubling down."
Clearly Europe is filled with far right transphobic bigots and extremists

Leaked Files Spark Furor Over Kids' Gender Transition Treatments - "The publication of a trove of leaked internal communications from the nation’s predominant transgender medicine and advocacy organization – in which leading doctors in the gender-care field acknowledge children’s inability to consent to gender-transition treatment and espouse few limits for prescribing hormones to gender-distressed adults with severe mental illness – has roiled the already fraught debate over gender-related medical care for children and adolescents.   The leaked documents could also imperil liberal legal groups’ efforts to undo bans on such medical treatment in the courts. And they could aid the growing number of plaintiffs suing what they claim are unscrupulous medical providers who provided them with gender-transition treatment when, the plaintiffs argue, they should have focused on their myriad other mental health needs instead.   The documents could also inspire new malpractice suits against health care providers– including members of the organization – and even fraud lawsuits against the organization itself.  The group in question is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. On March 4, the think tank Environmental Progress published a sprawling and scathing report based on leaked internal documents from the organization. The report portrays WPATH members as engaging in what it characterizes as reckless and non-evidence-based medical practices to treat gender-related distress while often being indifferent to serious risks. Called The WPATH Files, the report asserts that health and mental health providers within WPATH leadership have been knowingly providing or endorsing gender-transition treatment to people with at best a poor capacity to provide informed consent for such care. This includes gender-distressed minors (children and teens distressed over their biological sex) and their parents consenting on their behalf. WPATH is also accused of fostering a culture of heedless prescribing of gender transition treatments to “vulnerable” adults, in particular those with numerous severe psychiatric conditions...   “Courts across the nation have relied on WPATH as the subject matter expert to stop the enforcement of state laws protecting children from sex-modification procedures,” said Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, referring to judges who have blocked some of the 23 state bans of pediatric gender-transition treatment. “The WPATH Files confirm that such reliance is misplaced.” Seven current and former WPATH members spoke critically about the organization with The Sun. Many said that the public-relations crisis engulfing WPATH was of its own making, at least in part. And they criticized the organization’s leaders for presenting such a confident, united front to the public regarding the safety and efficacy of pediatric gender-transition treatment.  They said that WPATH leadership instead should have favored greater transparency regarding the organization’s ongoing appraisal of pediatric gender-medicine research. WPATH, they said, should have made clear to the public two things: that according to an increasing number of systematic literature reviews conducted in Europe, the associated scientific literature regarding medical gender transitions for minors remains wanting and inconclusive; and that a swath of European nations have accordingly moved to reclassify such treatment as experimental and to sharply restrict minors’ access to it.   However, current and former WPATH members also said they recognized that the politicization of pediatric gender medicine in North America has put the organization in a bind... Jordan Campbell, a partner at Campbell Miller Payne, a legal firm established to represent in medical-malpractice cases so-called detransitioners—those who received transition treatment as minors or young adults and later regretted it and reverted to identifying as their birth sex—said that that potential legal impact of The WPATH Files “cannot be understated.” WPATH’s only response to a request for comment was a blanket claim from WPATH president Dr. Marci Bowers that she was being misrepresented in the detailed content from the draft of this article that, in advance of publication, The Sun shared with her and WPATH leadership. She did not respond to a request to be more specific.  The day following the publication of the report, WPATH emailed its membership to request that they remain publicly silent on the matter.   This email, obtained by the Sun, included a statement from Dr. Bowers, which the organization asserted at the time would remain its only response to The WPATH Files.  “We are the professionals who best know the medical needs of trans and gender diverse individuals, Dr." Bowers said... Dr. Berg says she remained “a little stumped” over how to communicate the risk of future infertility to children nine to 11 years old who want to start taking puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones... “You talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall,” says Dr. Metzger. He recounts stories of young adults who had started such treatment as minors coming to regret their inability to have biological children.  “But what really disturbs me,” Dr. Berg says, “is when the parents can’t tell me what they need to know about a medical intervention that apparently they signed off for.”... According to Dr. Gregory Dolin, a medical doctor who teaches tort law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, when a medical institution such as WPATH is “saying one thing publicly and another thing privately, that might make them a juicy target for any malpractice suit.” In public, WPATH has remained resolute that pediatric gender-transition treatment is safe and effective and that, in the words of a prominent member, University of California, San Francisco, psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, “children know who they are” and can be trusted to guide their own gender-transition trajectory. In a March 2023 release, WPATH touted the SoC 8 as the “foremost evidence based guideline” in the gender-medicine field...   “Where WPATH is vulnerable is having ignored the systematic evidence reviews in Europe” that contradict such sweeping claims, said Erica Anderson, a Minnesota psychologist and former head of WPATH’s US branch, USPATH. “That is going to really bite them. I’ve tried to steer them. I gave up.”... They said it was understandable that neither Dr. Berg nor Dr. Metzger had publicly addressed these concerns, given the tense political climate and the fierce blowback sustained by those within WPATH who lend the public cause to doubt the organization.
Basically not talking about your concerns publicly for political reasons is good because it's a noble lie. Too bad for all the victims sacrificed to the left wing agenda

Former co-chair of transgender organisation arrested and sent to prison on sexual assault charges : japannews
トランスジェンダー団体元共同代表　強制わいせつ容疑で逮捕・送検｜青森放送NEWS NNN
Damn transphobic myths!

Forced head shave for transgender inmate a human rights violation: Osaka lawyers - "A group of lawyers has submitted a recommendation asking the Japanese government to stop imposing haircuts on prisoners after a transgender woman in her 50s was forced to have her head shaved as an inmate...   The justice ministry has guidelines for inmates' hair length, establishing either 2 millimeters or 1.6 centimeters for males and stating that females' hair should be neat and clean without being flamboyant.  The recommendation points out that, "Allowing male inmates the same degree of freedom of hairstyle as women is not deemed to interfere with the maintenance of discipline and order in penal institutions."  It asks for a revision of the guidelines, affirming that hairstyles are one of the rights of self-determination guaranteed by the Japanese Constitution and that forcing a male hairstyle on the inmate in question caused a large amount of psychological pain and humiliation. However, the recommendation has no legal binding power."
Forced head shave for transgender inmate a human rights violation: Osaka lawyers - The Mainichi : japannews - "Why do men have to have their head shaved in the first place? Having one rule for everyone would be a simple solution, it’s not like they are on holidays there"

Germany: so much for the ‘grown-up country’

Germany: so much for the ‘grown-up country’

"Germany has long occupied a special place in the liberal-elite imagination. Over the past few decades, and especially since the world was upended by the votes for Brexit and Trump, Germany has been held up by the great and good as a model nation. As the rest of the West lost their minds, or so the story goes, Germany remained a paragon of economic efficiency, political maturity and environmental stewardship. The last bulwark of the liberal order in an age of rising populism.

This elite Germanophilia is best embodied in John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes From a Grown-Up Country. First published in August 2020, it became an unlikely bestseller in the UK. It received rave reviews and was declared ‘book of the year’ by the Guardian, the New Statesman and The Economist. Its central claim is that Germany has forged ‘a new paradigm in stability’ that the rest of the world ought to follow. It is hard to think of any book that has aged quite so badly, quite so quickly.

Indeed, the news coming out of Germany lately paints a wholly different picture: one of economic collapse and interminable political strife.

Even though 2024 is just a few weeks old, Germany has already been rocked by huge farmers’ protests, with thousands of tractors blocking cities and motorway junctions this past week alone. It has been crippled by transport workers’ and doctors’ strikes. Factories in its much-vaunted manufacturing sector are shutting down and shipping production elsewhere. The federal government is struggling to reckon with a budget crisis and is ushering in a new age of austerity. Data released this week showed that Germany had the worst economic performance last year of any major economy. In the year ahead, it is predicted to have the slowest growth in the G20, apart from Argentina...

Germany’s problems have far deeper roots than just one unpopular government and its hapless leader. They are structural. In fact, so much of the current crisis can be traced back to precisely the aspects of Germany that are so often admired by liberal-elite observers like Kampfner – most of all, its embrace of green ideology and its democracy-dodging elites.

Germany’s green movement is one of the oldest and most influential in the world. Its Green Party was the first in the West to be in government – initially between 1998 and 2001, and now since 2021. Other mainstream parties were also early adopters of green ideology. Angela Merkel, one of the longest-serving chancellors of the postwar era, wanted the world to know her as the Klimakanzlerin, the ‘climate chancellor’.

It has taken the global energy crisis, prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to truly kill off Germany’s industrial strength. But the death sentence was surely handed down in 2010, when Merkel’s government initiated the Energiewende – the ‘energy transition’ to renewables.

The Energiewende amounted to the world’s largest single investment in wind and solar power. The trouble with this plan was that, unlike fossil fuels, which can be tapped on demand, renewable-energy sources are ‘intermittent’ – they cannot produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the Sun doesn’t shine. And so they need a constant supply of back-up sources, usually fossil fuels like coal or gas, to keep the grid running. This is why, despite Germany’s green reputation, the energy transition has had little effect on CO2 emissions. It is also part of the reason why Germany developed its now infamous dependence on imports of Russian gas.

Madder still was the Atomausstieg, the plan to rid Germany of all its nuclear plants. Despite nuclear power providing plentiful, reliable, cheap and even carbon-neutral electricity, every major political party in Germany is opposed to it, following decades of hysterical, fact-free campaigns by environmentalists. In 2000, the SDP-Green government announced a nuclear phaseout, with the first plants due to be dismantled in 2007. Then, in 2011, following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Merkel doubled down on the policy. In April last year, the Ampel closed Germany’s last three nuclear plants. It did so even in the grip of the energy crisis, as the government struggled to source alternative energy supplies to Russian gas, such is its devotion to green ideology.

The results of the Energiewende have been stark. Electricity prices rose by 50 per cent between 2006 and 2017, giving Germany the most expensive electricity in Europe. The energy shock of the war in Ukraine then sent prices into the stratosphere. In 2022, the government was forced to spend some €440 billion – or €1.5 billion per day – bailing out energy firms, sourcing new energy supplies and subsidising bills. And still cutbacks had to be made to energy use, as supplies dwindled. Town councils dimmed or turned off street lights and even traffic lights. Large landlords and housing associations turned down the heating on their residents and rationed their hot water. 

In one of his rare complaints about Germany in Why the Germans Do it Better, Kampfner laments Germany’s failure to live up to its lofty environmental ambitions. Ordinary Germans are as fixated on their petrol cars as Americans are on their guns, he complains. This is one reason why emissions from transport are at the same level they were in the 1990s. They are also too hung up on preserving ‘real jobs for real men’, in coal mines and other polluting industries, apparently. Perhaps Kampfner will be pleased to learn that since his book was published in 2020, Germany’s CO2 emissions have fallen to their lowest levels since the 1950s. But, as even Green Party economy minister Robert Habeck was forced to concede earlier this month, this has had little to do with gains in energy efficiency. It was overwhelmingly due to a sharp slowdown in industrial activity, caused by exorbitant energy costs. Major firms like BASF – a chemical giant that is older than the German state itself – are now closing their factories and offshoring production. Even ‘green’ industries cannot cope. This week, Germany’s largest solar-panel producer, Meyer Burger, threatened to shut down its factory in Saxony and relocate to the US.

It’s not as if Germany’s energy woes were unforeseeable. After all, electricity prices were already rising to unsustainable levels before the Ukraine crisis. But the German political class and the system that sustains it are remarkably impervious to criticism and dissent.

Kampfner poses this in positive terms. Germany is a ‘grown-up country’ because its political process is consensual, he argues. The two major parties, the centre-right CDU and centre-left SPD, regularly form ‘grand coalitions’ to govern from the centre. Politicians, he writes, care ‘passionately about process. About getting it right. Not playing fast and loose.’ He contrasts the ability of ostensible opponents to get along with the increasingly ‘adversarial’ politics of the UK and the US. Britain in the post-Brexit era, he says, is ‘infantile’ and ‘improvised’. Where Britain’s leaders are cast as demagogues, rapt by ‘pseudo-Churchillian self-delusion’, Germany’s are supposedly competent technocrats, quietly getting on with the job. They reach consensus through considered deliberation and skilled negotiation, Kampfner says.

But ‘consensus’ in parliament, among the mainstream political parties or even in the media, is not the same as consensus among the public at large. This illusion of consensus ought to have been shattered after the federal elections in 2017, when the AfD became the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. It has been clear for some time now that the way Germany is run is alienating a growing segment of the population. Some have been so angry with the status quo that they have been willing to put their trust in the AfD, a party that is routinely labelled as extremist by the mainstream.

Back in 2017, when the AfD made its first big mark on politics, it was the only party in the Bundestag to question Merkel’s immigration policy. Back in 2015, she decided to open Germany’s borders to around a million Syrian refugees – without consulting parliament or allowing for any political debate. Today, the AfD is playing a similar role in questioning green ideology and the abandonment of nuclear power (although the CDU is belatedly calling for the revival of nuclear, too).

It would have been possible for the political class to denounce the AfD’s more hardline elements while acknowledging the public’s anger and addressing some of their concerns. But instead of trying to win back the voters they have been shedding, the mainstream parties have tried to draw up a cordon sanitaire between themselves and the populist upstarts. Mainstream parties refuse to work with the AfD, even at the local level. Worse still, they have engaged in legal shenanigans to try to delegitimise and undermine it. In 2021, the AfD was placed under surveillance by the German secret service. This was a blatant act of anti-democratic authoritarianism. But Kampfner lauds it as a stirring example of ‘the liberal-democratic state fighting back’. Now, there is even growing clamour from the liberal mainstream to outlaw the AfD outright. It seems if you can’t beat them, ban them.

The result of this suppression of dissent, this aversion to democracy and this enforcement of groupthink is that problems go unaddressed and are allowed to fester and grow.

This has allowed Germany’s elites to become complacent. Merkel, in particular, presided over a notable decline in the public realm, from infrastructure to public services. Today, Germany is no longer a country where the trains run on time... Germany’s internet, where its broadband speed has been among the slowest in the Western world, and its 4G coverage the worst in Europe. Curiously, some 80 per cent of German businesses still use fax machines for office tasks, as do a fifth of doctors’ surgeries. Fax machines are due to be phased out in the offices of the Bundestag by June 2024 ‘at the latest’. German efficiency, at least where tech is concerned, is a myth.

Physical infrastructure is often slow to build and over budget, too. Most notoriously, Berlin’s newest airport, Berlin Brandenburg, took nine years longer to build than planned, and missed seven of its slated opening dates. Clearly, those in charge cannot be trusted to govern smoothly. The technocrats are not as competent as they claim.

The space for political debate in Germany is also limited by the extraordinary power of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the constitutional court in Karlsruhe, which interprets Germany’s basic law. Kampfner marvels at this set-up – not least at the way it insulates elite decision-making from the influence of the demos. ‘The judges are figures of considerable respect’, Kampfner swoons. ‘They are not pressurised or denounced as “enemies of the people” as their equivalents have been in the UK.’...

The court decided that some of the government’s green-energy investments must be paid for out of day-to-day spending, rather than from a separate ‘climate transformation fund’, lest the 2024 budget exceed the debt brake.

In response to this missive from the constitutional judges, the elected government has been forced to hastily draw up a new budget. Naturally, for a government so wedded to green ideology, it has been reticent to simply scrap its expensive climate measures. Instead, much of the shortfall will be made up by unexpected spending cuts and tax rises. A new round of austerity is now in the offing. 

Most controversial has been the threat to abolish tax breaks on agricultural diesel and to introduce new taxes on farm vehicles – a move that would cost already struggling farmers roughly €4,000 per year. This has been one of the key drivers of Europe’s latest populist revolt. It has brought farmers and their tractors out on to the streets in their thousands. Indeed, this was the final straw for a sector that had already endured a decade of green-inspired rules, regulations and cutbacks.

In this sense, the farmers’ uprising last week strikes at the heart of modern Germany’s malaise. It challenges the elites’ devotion to greenism at all costs. It is confronting a political system that tries to insulate itself from democratic pressure – that tries to hide from the devastating consequences its agenda is having on voters and on the economy. For far too long, German elites were given free rein to undermine their nation’s prosperity – to impose their fantasy of a carbon-free society on industries and people that they do not understand, and do not care to. Previously, anyone who challenged this was ignored or demonised. But as the current winter of discontent shows, the political class will not get away with this for much longer.

Rather than being valorised as a model nation, perhaps Germany ought to be seen as a cautionary tale – of how a cosy elite consensus, untroubled by democracy, can take even a powerful, successful country to the brink."

Clearly, the problem is that Germans didn't embrace renewable energy fast or completely enough

Links - 23rd March 2024 (1 - Indigenous Peoples)

Dougie Hampson wrote to relative admitting fear of going to hospitals, inquest hears - "An Indigenous man misdiagnosed at a Central West New South Wales hospital who later died once wrote to a relative saying he was "really scared" to visit them in hospital, an inquest has heard... Dr McBride was a first-year emergency medicine registrar and was responsible for all patients in the emergency department the night Mr Hampson was being treated.  On Thursday Dr McBride, who is Indigenous, told the inquest he was not made aware that Mr Hampson was Aboriginal but said that information was vital given the complexities related to First Nations people seeking healthcare."
Indigenous culture 'completely misunderstood', inquest hears, as late dad's fear of hospital revealed : ABCaus - "An Indigenous doctor misdiagnosing an indigenous patient is somehow a result of white racism. Makes sense."
"I would never guess he was indigenous based on the photo. Maybe the Dr didn't know either."

Many Indigenous patients won't tell hospitals they're Indigenous for fear of poorer care - "In general, most hospital data in Australia is of a very high standard. Hospitals collect information about patient care, waiting times, disease and other factors. These data are sent to the national hospital information reporting system run by the Australian Institute of Welfare (AIHW). By and large, this data set is comprehensive, coordinated and consistent.   Indigenous status has been a mandatory data item since 1996 for all hospitals in Australia. But as the most recent report from the AIHW on hospital data notes, the “true” number of separations (meaning hospital admissions) should be about 9% higher than reported for Indigenous Australians.   Studies measuring identification of Indigenous patients in hospitals, GP clinics and other health services have found rates of accurate identification could be as low as 34%. My study of 784 cardiac patients (70% Indigenous and 30% non-Indigenous) found only 60% of the Indigenous patients were accurately recorded as Indigenous at hospital."
Weird how indigenous patients face racism when they're not even correctly identified as indigenous
Grievance mongering has very real harms

BC told to stop saying 'British Columbians' because it's offensive now - "The Province of British Columbia is now instructing its residents not to refer to themselves as “British Columbians” as the term is offensive. The guideline — first publicized by True North — is contained within an official guide for B.C. government workers drafting “Indigenous content.”  Writers are told that the term British Columbian “excludes Indigenous Peoples who may not identify with it.” In referring to First Nations, bureaucrats are told to avoid any moniker associated with B.C. or Canada, a “nation that has actively worked to assimilate (Indigenous) people.”  “’British Columbians’ also excludes other groups such as newcomers and refugees,” it adds.  The correct term, according to the guide, is “people living in B.C.”  It’s a turn of phrase similar to prior government-sponsored revamps of the words “homeless people” or “drug addicts.” The new government-approved terms — in B.C. and other provinces — are now “people experiencing homelessness” and “people who use drugs.” Awkwardly, the memo on “British Columbians” now being an offensive term has not yet made its way to the provincial government itself.  The official website of the ruling BC NDP contains nearly 900 usages of the term “British Columbians,” including many press statements issued in just the last few weeks... The “Terminology in Indigenous content” guide also includes a list of outdated terms that bureaucrats are instructed to avoid.  This includes “Aboriginal groups,” “Aboriginal interest” and the word “traditional.” “Traditional knowledge, traditional territories, makes it seem like it is only applicable to the past and not the present,” it reads.  B.C. also happens to be the same province that is engaged in a years-long effort to purge absolutely every piece of provincial legislation of gendered terms.  The program is premised on the notion that non-binary people would not “recognize themselves in the law.” As such, the province has a dedicated team combing through all 154 years of provincial legislation and codes to remove pronouns as well as mentions of any terms that imply the existence of gender such as “father” “aunt” or “herself.”  According to the government’s own style guidelines, the official name for this gender neutrality project is now itself offensive. It is overseen through a regulatory process known as Better Regulations for British Columbians."
We're still told that liberals don't hate their countries
Left wingers still claim that the BC NDP is really conservative (because they can't ever take responsibility)

Meme - Anime girl conquistador: "Oh gosh, did I just go and conquer a native empire that was enslaving its neighbors, practicing human sacrifice and cannibalism, teach them to read and write, convert them to Christianity and give them modern ideas of sanitation? Did I just do that? I'M SORRY!"

Meme - ">be conquistador
>cross ocean to find mystic lands
>arrive there and find a death cult worshipping a serpent God
>parlay with them, walk by rows of skulls by torchlight with priests torturing babies at temple zeniths
>realize everything in your Bible is absolutely true"

Meme - Abraham Ash @Historycourses: "Deposit of remains from the Crow Creek Massacre, in present day South Dakota. Dated to about 1350, this deposit of at least 486 victims - men, women, and children - represents the largest pre-Columbian massacre with an archaeological record. Virtually all the victims were scalped"
Jonathan Kay @jonkay: "There must be some kind of mistake. This sort of stuff just never happened on Turtle Island until Europeans arrived."

Meme - "Who's going to tell him who the "Mexicans" got it from? Now do Anatolia and Constantinople!"
Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson: "The fact that the Southwest is occupied Mexican territory makes the militarized border especially morally heinous. By what right does the US keep people from entering stolen territory? The passage of time compounds a crime it doesn't erase it.
Chomsky on why Arizona should be called "occupied Mexico": "To use an analogy, I gave a talk in Arizona recently and I simply referred to it as occupied Mexico, which it is. It should be referred to that way. It's occupied Mexico. We conquered it in a violent brutal war of aggression. We should do something about it. That's why they have names like San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and so on. Recognize it, recognize what we did."

Barbara Kay on X - "Very excited to announce launch of a new website published by the "Indian Residential Schools Research Group" where I am a board member "at large". This site deals with all evidence in the round - including the bad stuff; this isn't about laundering known deficits - but not narratives, myths and unverified "knowings.""

Jonathan Kay: The cancellation of Michelle Latimer has become (another) disgrace to the CBC - "It’s been almost a quarter century since the Supreme Court of Canada told us that Indigenous oral traditions must be considered “on an equal footing” with other types of historical evidence. Alas, as the attack on famed Canadian filmmaker Michelle Latimer shows, the CBC still hasn’t gotten that memo... the “family and oral traditions that have shaped [her] Algonquin Métis identity are consistent with the documented history, culture, and struggles of a larger non-status and Métis diaspora located in the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys.” This will come as an embarrassment to the CBC, which recently tasked a pair of reporters with a two-month investigation into Latimer’s roots. Having determined that part of her family history was incorrect, these journalists published a lengthy December 17, 2020 report suggesting that Latimer’s whole back story was a tissue of lies. (“It’s an insult and it’s an exploitation and an appropriation of our culture, identity, community,” went one outrage quote.)  Angela Sterritt, another CBC reporter, followed up with an article promoting the idea that “pretendians” should be treated as criminals. Latimer’s name appears nine times on that CBC News story page. The CBC didn’t just want to disgrace Latimer. They seemed open to putting her behind bars.  Thanks to this week’s Globe and Mail report, however, this hysterical campaign against Latimer has been discredited... Progressive witch hunts have become a problem everywhere in the English-speaking world. But the phenomenon is especially acute in this country, since we are still inhabiting the post-Canada-150 era — a period during which we have all been encouraged to treat Indigenous cultural expression as a form of sacred scripture. And as with every ethno-religious movement, the high priests of this one have gotten carried away with their inquisitions... The real audience for the CBC hit job on Latimer wasn’t you and me. Rather, it was the media executives, funders, arts grandees, academics, activists, and fellow journalists who collectively crowdsource the task of canceling anyone deemed to have incorrect viewpoints (or, in this case, incorrect DNA)... NOW contributor Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers even claimed (and I am not making this up) that Latimer’s perfidy shows “how Canadian institutions uphold white supremacy.”...  shortly before the magazine’s tragicomic implosion amidst a vast toxic cloud of white race guilt, Canadian Art even tried to take down blockbuster Cree artist Kent Monkman. Specifically, author Regan de Loggans claimed that “Monkman’s paintings do little to question art-historical inequalities between settlers and Indigenous peoples, and pander to the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty through the narrative of a shared history between settlers and colonizers as though their experiences are commensurate.” I’ll let readers parse that gibberish on their own time. But they don’t really need to, since Monkman’s actual crime was that he’d just landed two of his works in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. To a certain kind of government-subsidized Canadian mediocrity, this kind of world-class success represents a sin almost as horrifying as deadnaming Elliot Page... Again, these are the same culture clannists who’ve been droning on for years about how we all need to “believe women,” trust people’s “lived experience,” and celebrate “Indigenous storytelling.” And so it’s worth asking how they explain going after a woman with Indigenous ancestry who trusted in her family’s own orally conveyed stories and collective memories."

The Myth of Harmonious Indigenous Conservationism - "The overall theme is that Indigenous peoples traditionally lived their lives in harmony with the land and its creatures, and so their land-use demands transcend the realm of politics, and represent quasi-oracular revealed truths. As has been pointed out by others, this mythology now has a severe, and likely negative, distorting effect on public policy, one that hurts Indigenous peoples themselves. In recent years, Indigenous groups have finally gotten a fair cut of the proceeds of industrial-development and commodity-extraction revenues originating on their lands. And increasingly, they are telling white policy makers to stop listening to those activists who seek to portray them as perpetual children of the forest. It is for their benefit, as much as anyone else’s, to explore the truth about the myth of harmonious Indigenous conservationism. When the ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples entered the New World some 16,000 years ago via Siberia, they hunted many of the mammals, reptiles, and birds, from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego. Mammoths, mastodons, and enormous ground-dwelling sloths, as well as giant bears, giant tortoises, and enormous teratorn birds with 16-foot wingspans—animals that had never had a chance to evolve in the presence of humans—were among the many species that disappeared from the Americas. Some medium-sized animals—such as horse, peccary, and antelope species—were also wiped out. But others survived: Bison and deer species, tree sloths, tapirs, jaguars, bear species, alligators, and big birds such as rheas and condors are, at least for the time being, still with us. The existence of these survivors, along with the relatively unspoiled forests, grasslands, and rivers seen by the first Europeans to enter the Americas, served to support the illusion that America’s first peoples had been maintaining what popular environmentalist David Suzuki calls a “sacred balance” with the natural world. Throughout history, however, humans killed animals that were tasty, numerous, and huntable. For kin-groups, staying alive meant making life-and-death cost-benefit calculations about where to send your berry-pickers and hunters. “Sacredness” had nothing to do with it... In every known case where humans entered continents formerly uninhabited by our species, the bigger animals tended to disappear, since they provided the most sustenance per kill. The first humans to enter Australia some 70,000 years ago wiped out giant kangaroo species, rhino-sized marsupial herbivores, jaguar-sized marsupial carnivores, big flightless birds, and many other megafauna. The same thing would happen in Europe: After sapiens completed its occupation of that sub-continent some 30,000 years ago, the mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant deer, and lions they recorded in their cave paintings and carvings also disappeared. After our species completed its settlement of Australia, Eurasia, and the Americas, further human-caused extinctions took place as we discovered and settled islands in the world’s seas and oceans. The last big die-off started as recently as the 13th century AD, when Polynesian seafarers started settling one of the Earth’s most isolated land masses, New Zealand. Within little more than a century of their arrival, over 60 bird species, including 500-pound, 12-foot-tall, flightless moas, and the world’s largest eagle, had disappeared. Little of this is controversial among mainstream scientists. Yet it is now considered taboo to discuss it, and fashionable to replace these historical facts with what are, in effect, modern fairy tales. A common meme, which now has found its way into newspaper articles, is that “worldwide, there is no evidence of Indigenous peoples systematically hunting nor over-killing megafauna.” The Australian Museum’s website informs us that “for social, spiritual and economic reasons, First Nations peoples harvested game in a sustainable manner.” Wade Davis, a professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, presents the killing of animals by Indigenous peoples as a gentle, almost consensual act: The Indigenous bushmen of Africa “do not simply kill game. They engage in a dance with the prey, a ritual exchange that ends with the creature literally making of itself an offering, a sacrifice.”... In many cases, the above-described mythology has become a subset of a larger anti-capitalist discourse that presents Indigenous lands as a secular Eden, and greed as a form of original sin. This worldview, in turn, leads to false hopes that we may return our lands and society to some fictional state of grace... Because Africa’s megafauna had co-evolved with the human family, it had been able to evolve behavioral and other defences against the relatively slow emergence of human inventive power. (The South Asian megafauna, which still includes elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers, was also partially protected from the end-Pleistocene extinction wave by early exposure to our family.)... It is nice to think that humans always lived in “harmony” with the natural world. But had our ancestors all taken on a “harmonious” approach, hominids would have died out long ago, devoured on the savanna as they attempted to preach their pacifistic creed to some bemused predator in the instant before it pounced."

Black-only swim times, Black-only lounges: The rise of race segregation on Canadian universities : canada - "Land Act Amendments - govTogetherBC... here in B.C. it will literally mean that circa 5-6% of the population will have enormously greater decision-making power over public land than the other 94-95%.  It is even more alarming - because it seems - albeit subjectively - that well over 90% of people have no idea these two laws have been proposed - or what their impact will be.  I am researching the following question; But you seem to know a great deal more than I do; so:  Is it possible to hire a civil rights lawyer to file an injunction against a proposed law if it contravenes 15(1)?  What other ways can we stop these above two proposed laws?  Thank you for any ideas in advance.  I'm going for it; I'm literally going to spend hard-earned savings on this if I can figure out how to make a difference.  I'm an immigrant. My partner is mixed background Canadian. I don't want my children's home province to be a place where 5% of people have governmentally enshrined rights and power - where my children and the other 95% of people do not."
"I have worked for lawyers for the past 7 years as support staff. My nonlegal non-lawyer advice, do not do it. You will lose, and waste your money, the courts are too chucked and hate you too much to interpret the law this way.  BC has totally bought into the noble savage idea and will not adjust course. Best advice, figure out how to leave Canada, it is a failed state."

Opinion: Plan to co-manage public land with First Nations will close B.C. for business - "In a move that surprised both British Columbians and Canadians across the country, B.C.’s NDP government intends to change the province’s Land Act and essentially establish a co-management partnership with more than 200 First Nations, who will become joint landlords of more than 90 per cent of B.C. and own veto power over any land-use decisions. The NDP, which holds 56 of 87 seats in the provincial legislature, plans to table the proposal in the spring. If passed, the revised act will represent a massive barrier to infrastructure projects in the province and a death knell for investment. That is the last thing the province needs. Between 2010 and 2019, the decade preceding COVID, B.C. attracted less private investment per worker than the national average and far less than Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. B.C. did fare slightly better in 2021, the latest year for which data are available, but the province’s per-worker investment remains only 62 per cent of the level in the United States. As expected, the lack of business investment has produced lower incomes. A recent report compared the median employment income of 59 large metropolitan areas in the west, 11 in Canada and the rest in the United States. Of the bottom 10 cities by earned income, five were in B.C., with Vancouver, the province’s commercial hub, ranking only 47th at C$37,300, barely half what’s earned in top-ranked Silicon Valley’s C$73,895. What’s behind B.C.’s poor investment climate? Mainly poor government policy. Consider the province’s business tax system, which includes the highest total tax rate on businesses in Canada. In 2020, B.C.’s total business tax rate , including federal business taxes, was 25.6 per cent, almost two-thirds higher than the national average (15.6 per cent) and more than double the rate in neighbouring Alberta (12.1 per cent). On the regulatory front, a 2022 survey of mining companies ranked B.C. 27th of 62 jurisdictions around the world  for mining investment attractiveness. A 2023 survey of petroleum companies ranked B.C. 15th among 17 jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S. in terms of its investment attractiveness. Survey respondents repeatedly cited the same three deterrents to investment: land claims, protected areas and environmental regulations. According to the B.C. government’s own economic estimates , its regulations reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), known as CleanBC , will cost the province $28 billion in lost economic activity by 2030, which means that by the end of the decade British Columbians will be $4,600 poorer per person than they would be without these regulations."
Who needs private investment? Just get the government to spend even more money!

Indigenous Australians are Earth's oldest civilization: DNA study
Civilisation doesn't mean what it used to

Chanel Pfahl 🇨🇦 on X - "By grade 1, most kids can:
- count to ten;
- put on their own clothes;
- recognize the letters of the alphabet;
- write their names;
and - (believe it or not) discuss the ongoing impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples and lands!! 🙂
Last week at Davisville Junior Public School, Toronto (TDSB)."
Indoctrination in schools is good if it's left wing indoctrination

CBC News on X - "Since May 2021, at least 33 Canadian churches have burned to the ground. Only two fires were ruled accidental by police. Investigators say many were deliberately set while others were deemed suspicious."
Jonathan Kay on X - "Gee, I wonder why that happened…Oh. Right. Now I remember. It’s because your colleagues boosted false claims that hundreds of child corpses had been discovered in “unmarked graves”…instead of, yknow, just GPR data that, 2.5 years later, hasn’t yielded a single known grave."
Of course, if they were mosques...

Nearly ONE HUNDRED churches across Canada have been torched or damaged after activists lied that 200 indigenous children were buried under Catholic schools - "As the incidents pile up, outrage has been growing among those who feel the government's reaction was far stronger to the hoax 'mass graves' than recent attacks on Christianity... The fury at Canada's history has only escalated, however, with one of the earliest reported arson attacks coming on July 21, 2021, when 100-year-old St Gregory's Church in British Columbia, just over the US-Canada border, was razed to the ground... 'How was the precise number of the remains of 215 children arrived at with the specified technology, and will a thorough investigation be done to help determine the cause of death of those who were forgotten beneath the soil?'"

No human remains found 2 years after claims of 'mass graves' in Canada - "Some academics and politicians say it’s further evidence that the stories are unproven.  Minegoziibe Anishinabe, a group of indigenous people also known as Pine Creek First Nation, excavated 14 sites in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba during four weeks this summer.  The so-called “anomalies” were first detected using ground-penetrating radar, but on Aug. 18, Chief Derek Nepinak of remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve said no remains were found... “I don’t like to use the word hoax because it’s too strong but there are also too many falsehoods circulating about this issue with no evidence,” Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post Wednesday. Nonetheless, he welcomes more excavations because of the enormous adverse publicity and stain left on Canada after the first reports of the alleged mass graves.  “This has all been very dark for Canada. We need more excavations so we can know the truth,” Rouillard said. “Too much was said and decided upon before there was any proof.”   In May 2021, the leaders of the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced the discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Indigenous children detected via ground-penetrating radar at a residential school in British Columbia. The radar found “anomalies” in the soil but no proof of actual human remains... until last week, there hadn’t been any excavations in the alleged burial spots. There still have been no excavations at Kamloops nor any dates set for any such work to commence.   That didn’t stop many in Canada from painting a demonic picture of the residential schools and those who staffed them... A number of writers, academics and politicians like Rouillard have come out cautioning against the claim that hundreds or thousands of children are buried at the school, but they have been labeled “genocide deniers” — even though many of the skeptics do not dispute that conditions at the schools were often harsh.  “The evidence does not support the overall gruesome narrative put forward around the world for several years, a narrative for which verifiable evidence has been scarce, or non-existent,” James C. McCrae, a former attorney general for Manitoba, wrote in an essay published last year.  McCrae resigned from his position on a government panel in May after his views on residential schools outraged Indigenous groups and other activists and politicians. Tom Flanagan, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, told The Post Wednesday that he sees the issue as a “moral panic” similar to the hysteria over repressed memories and alleged Satanic cults in schools in the US in the 1980s and ’90s.  “People believe things that are not true or improbable and they continue to believe it even when no evidence turns up,” Flanagan said. “People seem to double down on their conviction that something happened.”  Eldon Yellowhorn, a professor and founding chair of the Indigenous studies department at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, told The Post last year that he too was cautious about the veracity of some of the more highly charged claims.  Yellowhorn, a member of the Blackfoot Nation, had been hired by Canada’s powerful Truth and Reconciliation Commission to search for and identify gravesites of Indigenous children at the residential schools. But he said then that many of the graves he found were from actual cemeteries and it wasn’t clear how they died."

Alleged mass grave of indigenous children at Catholic schools across Canada contains NO BODIES, excavation shows - as experts suggest it's proof the stories were fabricated - "'This was a crime against humanity, an assault on First Nations,' said Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations in Saskatchewan.  'We will not stop until we find all the bodies,' he added... no bodies were recovered from the sites, and Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation admitted the figures may be exaggerated."
Weird how they stopped looking

Residential school denialists tried to dig up suspected unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C., report finds - "Residential school deniers tried to dig up suspected unmarked grave sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, not believing a May 2021 announcement from the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc that as many as 215 Indigenous children had been buried there, according to a new report.  "Denialists entered the site without permission. Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to 'see for themselves' if children are buried there," said a Friday report from Kimberly Murray, the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.  She did not say who the denialists were or when they came to the site.  But the unauthorized visits to the site are the work of a "core group" of Canadians who continue to deny, defend or minimize the physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse inflicted on Indigenous children in the Indian Residential School System "despite the indisputable evidence of survivors and their families," Murray said... Citing international experts, Murray called denialism "the last step in genocide."  "Denialism is violence. Denialism is calculated. Denialism is harmful. Denialism is hate," Murray said."
Looking for evidence when (almost) no one has done or is doing that means you're a "denialist", because allegations must be taken on faith. If you question the government narrative, you need to be jailed because you are hateful and causing harm through your violence

McMaster University apologizes for 'grave oversight' of noting Sir John A. Macdonald Day - "John A. Macdonald Day, which occurs annually on Jan. 11, has been phased out by many institutions due to the first prime minister’s controversial history. But, it remains a day designated by the federal government, often used “as an opportunity to teach young people about our first prime minister and the founding of our country,” says the federal government’s description... Yet, even as there have been attacks on some Canadian historical figures, others have stepped up to defend them. In the case of Macdonald, a statement by over 200 experts in 2021 expressed concern over the way people were viewing Canadian history. “We urge governments, historians, teachers, media and other engaged Canadians to ensure everyone has access to a balanced view of our common past and the people who made us,” the statement said . “Looking at our history with a dispassionate eye will give us a much clearer vision of the future. Let’s start with Sir John A. Macdonald.”"
Weird. I thought liberals were all about teaching accurate history. Turns out they mean pushing the left wing agenda by demonising white countries

Links - 22nd March 2024 (2 - Trump)

Elon Musk and Donald Trump Cases Imperil the Rule of Law - WSJ - "The U.S. is the business capital of the world in large part because of its robust constitutional system and impartial judiciary. But two unprecedented legal decisions, against Donald Trump in New York and Elon Musk in Delaware, call that into question. In both cases, judges have ordered massive punitive judgments on behalf of dubious or nonexistent “victims.” Every American has a right to be critical of Mr. Trump’s politics—one of us ran against him in 2016—or Mr. Musk’s public persona. But equality before the law is precious, and these rulings represent a crisis not only for the soundness of our courts, but for the business environment that has allowed the U.S. to prosper. If these rulings stand, the damage could cascade through the economy, creating fear of arbitrary enforcement against entrepreneurs who seek public office or raise their voices as citizens in a way that politicians dislike. In Delaware, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Court of Chancery ordered the unwinding of five years of Mr. Musk’s incentive-based compensation at Tesla , which had been approved by 80% of the company’s shareholders. The plaintiff, Richard Tornetta, held nine shares in 2018—worth about $200 then and $2,000 today, after the execution of the compensation plan that supposedly injured him.  Mr. Musk’s compensation plan awarded him stock bonuses tied to earnings and stock-value benchmarks, which many critics thought he could never meet. When he did, he received $56 billion, enriching shareholders like Mr. Tornetta along the way... Mr. Musk’s performance at Tesla enriched all shareholders, but Judge McCormick’s ruling may primarily enrich Delaware trial lawyers.  In New York, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Mr. Trump to pay more than $350 million in a civil fraud judgment for inflating the value of his real-estate holdings. That case was brought by Attorney General Letitia James, who ran for office in 2018 on a promise to target the man she called “an illegitimate president.”  The unusual New York law Ms. James used to investigate and sue Mr. Trump didn’t require her to prove that he had intended to defraud anyone, or even that anyone lost money. The Associated Press found that of the 12 cases brought under that law since its adoption in 1956 in which significant penalties were imposed, the case against Mr. Trump was the only instance without an alleged victim or financial loss. Bankers from Deutsche Bank , which lent money to Mr. Trump, testified that they were satisfied with having done so, given they were paid back on time and with interest. They also testified that they were uncertain whether the alleged exaggerations would have affected the terms of the loans to Mr. Trump—a key part of Ms. James’s case. Since there were no victims, the state will collect the damages. New York and Delaware have played an outsize role in business in the U.S. Many major companies are incorporated in Delaware owing to the state’s body of corporate legal precedents; and a significant number of banks operate in New York, the world financial capital. The appellate courts in those states now have a chance to review these dangerous judicial rulings and try to stop further damage to the reputations of their respective judiciaries.  If they don’t, blue-state politicians may have the satisfaction of “sticking it” to Messrs. Trump and Musk, but the loss to those states will be significant. The damage to the legal fabric of the country will be even worse. A dispassionate justice system is at the heart of American exceptionalism, and the country will be poorer if we lose it."

Dem elites shouldn't be laughing at Trump's civil trial outcome -- they just made him a political martyr - "Was there ever a more predictable outcome than that of Donald Trump’s civil trial?  Attorney General Letitia James came into office vowing to punish him and ignore all other crimes.  Judge Arthur Engoron found him guilty before anyone even set foot in a courtroom.  It was all over but the punishment: a $355 million fine and a three-year ban from running a business in New York.   Guess they were out of tar and feathers.  This was a politically motivated trial from the start, one that had the progressive James “protecting” big banks she would otherwise demean.Congratulations, you’ve won a trial without victims and proved that Donald Trump likes to exaggerate. See if that gets you elected governor.  Democrats have again shot themselves in the foot, proving to an increasing number of voters that the justice system is stacked against the ex-president. This trial and the upcoming “hush-money” nothingness trivializes the more serious Jan. 6 case.  And how many will dismiss the classified documents trial because elderly Joe skated?"

Donald Trump Georgia fraud case: Live updates from DA Fani Willis' misconduct hearing - "Trump special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney seemed to admit in a text message read aloud in an Atlanta court Friday that Wade and District Attorney Fani Willis were in a relationship before 2022 — contradicting the timeline the former lovers gave in their respective testimonies a day earlier... There is a chance the two prosecutors could be disqualified from the case if evidence is produced that shows “an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said.  Willis and Wade — whom the DA appointed as a special prosecutor in the Georgia election fraud case — had both been seeking to get out of testifying at this week’s hearing, where a Trump co-defendant is seeking to have the case dropped against him over the prosecutors’ alleged misconduct."

Why Trump’s withdrawal from Syria is bad for Israel — and good for Iran
From 2019. Of course, the shitshow under Biden is Trump's fault
Comment: "I like how the left is so far gone that they will simultaneously complain we should be the world police and we should not be the world police based on who they want to shit on these days"

Google's push to lecture us on diversity goes beyond AI - "Watching the treatment of Donald Trump in the last week, I’m reminded of a scene from the great film “A Man for All Seasons.”...   Trump’s prosecutors certainly treat him like the devil. But have they really thought this latest move through?  What do they think this town will be like for other property developers now that this precedent has been set?  Is it unheard of for developers to exaggerate property values in this city? What about the seizure and effective confiscation of assets? On a bigger scale, who do people think will run for high office in this country now that total financial destruction is the latest weapon in the prosecutor’s armory?  Sometimes the cost of getting your devil is far too high. And comes back at you."

Keith Olbermann Melts Down Over Trump's SCOTUS Victory - "Former ESPN and MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann did not take the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to put Donald Trump back on the ballot in stride on Monday.  In a per curiam decision, the Court ruled that the Colorado Supreme Court erred in disqualifying Trump from the state’s presidential contest because states aren’t empowered to enforce the insurrectionist clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.  On X (formerly Twitter), Olbermann reacted with fury, laying into all of the justices, including Democratic appointees Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. “The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the “court” has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate,” he wrote. “It must be dissolved.” “The Supreme Court is full of shit,” Olbermann insisted in another post.  But that was merely a prelude to his masterpiece, which came in his response to a reply from a right-wing influencer who urged him to “Cry more” and then pointed out that the decision to reinstate Trump was unanimous.  “Those aren’t tears, Fascist,” retorted Olbermann. “They’re urine. I’m sure you enjoy being bathed in it.”

Meme - Keith Olbermann: "Those aren't tears, Fascist. They're urine. I'm sure you enjoy being bathed in it"
Aelfred The Great: "But you're in big trouble. I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast."
"You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?"
"No."

How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t - The Atlantic - "Without clear guidance from the Court, House Democrats suggest that they might not certify a Trump win on January 6."
Ironic. Election denial and obstruction is only bad if it hurts the left

Meme - Harry Sisson @harryjsisson: "Insurrection sympathizer Clarence Thomas ruled that insurrectionist Donald Trump can remain on the ballot in 2024. That should be the headline."
#ThePersistence @ScottPresler: "The ruling was 9-0 & you attack the black man. Figures."

Meme - "AM I SO OUT OF TOUCH? NO, IT IS ALL 9 SUPREME COURT JUSTICES WHO ARE WRONG"

Meme - "They didn believe Paula Jones
They didn't believe Tara Reade
But they believe E. Jean Carroll"

Donald Trump’s populism is turning off corporate donors - "Republican fundraisers are in for a tough year"
So the US is an oligarchy?
Liberals like to complain that policies popular with most Americans aren't enacted, and call this oligarchy and say they don't live in a democracy. But of course they hate "populism"

Meme 2016: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"
2017: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"
2018: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"
2019: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"
2020: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"
2021: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"
2022: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"
2023: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON" *you are here*
2024: Rachel Maddow - "TRUMP'S GOING TO PRISON"

A liberal spends a year with devout Trump voters, and discovers he's been wrong - "If I thought I was going to meet only modern John Lithgows, I was to be sadly disappointed. Instead, I met young evangelicals interested in social justice and refugee issues (how to help them, not how to keep them out). I met families who had committed their entire lives to helping the poor and those who live in the shadows. I met a pastor who had forged a major social service partnership with his city’s openly gay mayor to demonstrate how evangelicals could be known by what they were for, not just what they were against... Plenty of people who I talked to were struggling with rapid changes to society and seemed to lack the vocabulary to deal with some of the challenges of modernity. But for most, those social issues were entirely secondary. They wanted to talk about the role of the church in forming community, the responsibility to help others and the belief that private voluntary organizations could be the central convening place of a better society. I found myself nodding in agreement when Sam Adams, Portland’s first openly gay mayor, told me, “We can agree to disagree on gay marriage and disagree on abortion, but we probably agree on eight out of 10 things that are important to society … So we can act together genuinely in our communities on those eight out of 10 and break out of the trap that has been built around us.” Many have been puzzled by the fact that so many religious people (83 percent of white evangelicals) voted for Trump and have dismissed this support as proof of evangelical hypocrisy. But it is not so difficult to understand. I did meet a few impassioned Trump supporters, but mostly I found people who viewed their support for Trump as a compromised choice between two not particularly attractive options... Support for people like Trump and Roy Moore grows when you think you need hardcore, uncompromising street fighters to protect you from the other side. Democrats forget this at their peril.  Over the course of the year, I often found myself in agreement with the evangelicals on the importance of community organizations, of feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and even on the importance of the two-parent family in combating poverty (though not on what counts as a two-parent family). I didn’t agree with everything I heard or with everyone I met, but that was OK.   Many of us on the left talk about diversity and respecting differences in life, but that is often for the differences in race, sexuality and lifestyle that we find agreeable, not the differences in political persuasion, geography, and moral and religious vision that we find somewhat less appealing. When you don’t know the other side, it is easy to obsess about the two out of 10, and forget that the other eight are the basis for democracy and for the bonds of affection, as Lincoln once said, that unite us as Americans.
Ken Stern is the president of Palisades Media Ventures and the former CEO of National Public Radio. He is the author of the new book “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.”"
This doesn't stop left wingers from mocking Christians, even though Christians do more of the things that the left claim they don't do than non-religious people do

The Davos Consensus: Donald Trump Will Win Re-Election - The New York Times - "Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase also got a lot of attention for his comments. In an interview with Andrew on CNBC, he didn’t predict that Trump would win, but suggested that dismissing the former president and his supporters would be a mistake.  “Just take a step back and be honest,” Dimon said, listing the things that he thought Trump got at least partially right: NATO, immigration, the economy, China and more. “He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues, and that’s why they’re voting for him,” he said.  “I think this negative talk about MAGA will hurt [President] Biden’s campaign,” he added... A little history: The Davos consensus was that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump in 2016. And in 2020, the prevailing view was that there were few risks to the economy … as the pandemic began to explode."

SHAPIRO: Trump on the road to achieving a political miracle - "Why does Trump retain such a grip on the Republican imagination after losing the 2020 election, contributing heavily to the loss of two Republican Senate seats in Georgia in 2021 and contributing heavily to the loss of the Senate in 2022 with his spate of bizarre primary picks? Why should Trump, who spends much of every day fulminating about his upcoming legal cases, have the upper hand against Republicans without such baggage? Why does Trump, who is certainly no conservative ideologue, live so large in the imagination of conservatives? There are several reasons. Primarily, Trump is lucky in his enemies. To be more precise, Trump’s very presence on the political stage — and his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 — drove his enemies out of their minds. Those enemies determined that any and all means were appropriate for undermining his presidency and his 2020 re-election bid. From Russian collusion nonsense to multiple impeachments, from nodding at historically damaging riots to blaming him for a pandemic, from changing the voting rules to lying about and then shutting down the dissemination of the Hunter Biden laptop story, anything was on the table. So when Trump claimed in the post-2020 election landscape that he had been robbed of victory, that contention rang true, even if his contentions about outright voter fraud remained unproven. Trump has been the title character of “Trump: The Series” since 2015. In the end, the chances that Americans would allow a recasting before his re-election effort were always low. But those chances shrank to zero the moment Trump’s enemies weaponized the legal system against him. When Trump’s enemies, in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s election win, continued to come after Trump using the legal system, Trump argued that he was a stand-in for conservatives everywhere who feel that they are targeted for destruction by America’s most powerful institutions. That argument had major purchase — by polling data, Trump’s bump to the top of the Republican 2024 heap came not with his re-election announcement, but with the announcement in March 2023 that he would be indicted in Manhattan on specious charges of campaign finance violation. The drumbeat of new legal charges against him, dropped everywhere from Florida to Washington, D.C. to Georgia, simply added fuel to the fire. Perhaps even that legal news could have been turned against Trump in a primary race. But there was one more factor Trump needed — he needed Joe Biden to be so terrible at his job, so outright awful, that Trump would suddenly look competitive. The electability argument — the argument that Trump’s losing record since 2016 would continue into 2024 — collapsed for Trump’s Republican opponents as Biden’s approval rating sank into the 30s. Republicans’ hearts were with Trump; now their heads could be with him, too... 2024 could easily be a referendum on Biden’s presidency. And if that happens, Trump will have capped the most remarkable political comeback since Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968"

Glenn Greenwald on X - "The massive and historic size of Trump's victory should lead to some self-reflection about what caused the complete collapse of faith in the legitimacy of US institutions of authority and justice, whereby voters so easily disregard 4 felony cases as irrelevant if not an asset... It's always tempting to say those who see the world differently are drowning in cult-like delusions. Conservatives often say that about Biden voters, too and, before that, Obama voters.  But there are millions of Obama-to-Trump voters, whose appeal is anti-establishment vitriol."

Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives on X - "🔥🚨DEVELOPING: Da Fani Willis spoke after allegations of paying lover to prosecute Trump:  “You cannot expect black women to be perfect. We need to be allowed to stumble. We need grace. We are all sinners”  She really trying to act like she represent Black women and she chose to do it when she got caught for being a hoe.   We don’t need everyone to represent us, just the right people."

MAGA Celebrates Donald Trump Being 'Exonerated' in Epstein Docs - ""In October, a judge ruled Alex Jones must pay $1.1 BILLION for 'repeated lies,'" Loudon posted. "Now that Rightful President Trump has been EXONERATED of visiting Epstein island, is the media going to retract their bogus articles?""
Of course, all the Trump haters who were unwilling and/or unable to read claimed this release showed the opposite

The Associated Press on X - "A pro-peace Russian presidential hopeful is blocked by the election commission"
Glenn Greenwald on X - "What kind of monstrous dictatorship bans a candidate who wants to seek office from appearing on the ballot? I shudder to think what it must be like to be a citizen of such a country."

Simon Ateba on X - "FLASHBACK: The Democrats blasting "dictator" Trump in 2019 for using the Department of Justice to investigate a political rival thereby turning the U.S. into a "banana republic." Not making this up. WATCH"

Collin Rugg on X - "JUST IN: Former FBI official Charles McGonigal, who helped investigate Trump for 'colluding' with Russia, has been sentenced to four years in prison for colluding with Russia.  Read that again.  McGonigal accepted over $17,000 from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska who he supplied information to.  Deripaska is a close associate of Vladimir Putin and has a net worth of about $3 billion.  "Charles McGonigal violated the trust his country placed in him by using his high-level position at the FBI to prepare for his future in business," said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.  "Once he left public service, he jeopardized our national security by providing services to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian tycoon who acts as Vladimir Putin’s agent."  They always accuse you of what they are doing..."

George on X - "BREAKING: The bank Trump allegedly defrauded just gave a testimony saying Trump did nothing wrong in their dealings with him.  “It’s not unusual or atypical for any client’s provide financial statements to be adjusted to this level to this extent.” Bank Exec David Williams  Williams also said he personally went to Trump Tower in December 2011 to review bank and brokerage statements to verify there was $51.8 million in marketable securities $178 million cash balances.  So exactly who did Trump defraud here? And what laws were broken?"

Actually, Trump Was NOT Wearing His Pants Backward At A Weekend Rally - "Former President Donald Trump transfixed a sizable part of the nation over the weekend — not through his words, as he has often done, but because of his pants. Or more specifically, because of unusual wrinkles in Trump's pants that people struggled to explain."
From 2021

Meme - Nick Adams @NickAdamsin...: "NASCAR is reviewing Brandon Brown's new "Let's Go Brandon" paint scheme on his race car.  I stand with Brandon Brown's right to free speech!" Miss Bella - NO DMS! @MissBella5735: "Freedom of speech does not include hate speech."
Miss Bella - NO DMS! @MissBella5735: "FUCK TRUMP! I have despised him for decades. #TeamBiden! If you need to know more about me, read pinned tweet. @#VoteBlue"

Charlie Kirk on X - "Donald Trump says he's open to Tucker Carlson as a 2024 running mate. At first, it sounds a little loopy. But upon further thought...  Besides Trump himself, nobody enjoys the base's trust the way Tucker Carlson does. Nobody else intuitively understands their values, their priorities, or their worries the way they do.  No other VP contender is as battle-tested as Tucker. Like Trump, he thrives under attack and under pressure. He's been targeted and smeared endlessly for seven years, but he's never cracked, never had a breakdown. He's only become more popular. Despite years of digging, his personal life is spotless.  Tucker is the only Republican who can even begin to imitate Trump's rhetorical style. They're the only two men who can keep an audience transfixed speaking for an hour without a single note.  The Democrat plan is to keep Donald Trump stuck in court or even in jail so he can't campaign. Is anybody a more viable Trump campaign surrogate than Tucker Carlson?  And as we know, the vice president is just a heartbeat away from the presidency. If something were to happen to President Trump, God forbid, is there anyone we'd trust more than Tucker Carlson to carry the conservative mantle into the future?  This isn't some flight of fancy. Trump/Tucker is a great idea."

Sundae_Gurl on X - "Can someone please remind me why we're not supposed to compare the present Republican Party and Trump in America with the 20th Century Nazi Party and Hitler in Germany?"
Only liberals get to make Nazi comparisons

Meme - Jo @JoJoFromJerz: "PRO-TIP: If you're still chanting "Lock her up" in 2022, you don't get to whine when we call your asses out for being fascists."
Jo @JoJoFromJerz: "LOCK HIM THE FUCK UP!!"

ACLU sides with Trump on limited gag order in Jan. 6 case - "The American Civil Liberties Union sued former President Donald Trump or his administration more than 400 times during his tenure in the White House.  But now the ACLU is siding with Trump in the criminal case that charges he conspired to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power — telling a judge that a gag order she's imposed sweeps too broadly in restraining Trump's speech"

Did Democrats Hurt the Anti-Trump Effort by Bashing Mitt Romney and George W. Bush? - The Atlantic - "some conservatives feel that Democrats and liberal pundits have cried wolf, describing past Republicans with such elevated levels of alarm that warnings about Trump don’t elicit the same urgency. Dangerously ignorant about policy and incurious about the world? That was the line on George W. Bush 16 years ago. Radical, unacceptable views about women? Said of any number of Republicans. Overrated business career? Just ask Mitt Romney about that one. (Not only was Romney’s success credited to his father’s connection, The New York Times reported,“Mr. Romney, though, never ran a corner store or a traditional business. Instead, he excelled as a deal maker,” which sounds eerily familiar.) A temperament unsuited for the Oval Office? Some said the same thing about John McCain. Fascism? Two videos uploaded by users to a MoveOn contest likened Bush to Adolph Hitler in 2004.* Extreme positions? “He’s the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater,” top Obama aide David Plouffe said of Romney in 2012. Once you’ve already used all of these insults once before, they start to lose their sting. That’s the point of Godwin’s Law, the theory that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1,” and of critiques of likening various politicians to the Nazi leader. Once you’ve compared someone to Hitler, you have both used up your one chance to compare her to history’s greatest monster—and you’ve risked downplaying the significance of Hitler by diluting the insult... Some of the same publications that were critical of Romney’s presidential run lavishly lauded him for speaking out against Trump... The prevalence of wolf-crying, rather than being the fault of any particular party or even specific politicians or pundits, is a symptom of a particularly toxic, polarized moment in American politics. Hyperbole is just about the only way to live in such a moment, and who better to exemplify it than a man who once justified his lies as “truthful hyperbole” (whatever that means)?"
Every Republican Presidential Candidate Is Hitler

Spooks Spooking Themselves - "With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.    It’s looking more and more massive.  The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key government officials.  Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration.  Although the corporate press accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block “Siberian candidate” Trump.    The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove, Halper’s friend and business partner.  Sitting in winged chairs in London’s venerable Garrick Club, according toThe Washington Post, Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous “golden showers” opposition research dossier, that Trump “reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin.”  Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down.  When that didn’t work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light.  A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal...   A few things stand out about this august group.  One is its in-bred quality... Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else.  But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence...   The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public manipulation – and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election... the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive – just $46,000 worth of Facebook ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with no particular slant at all – that Mueller probably wouldn’t even have bothered if he hadn’t been under intense pressure to come up with anything at all.  "
From 2018
Clearly, the Deep State is a myth