Allons-y!
===
2026-04-22
[YouTuber Jesse Dollemore cited polls showing majorities in favor of impeachment/removal of TOO but kept wondering about the undecided.]
To answer Jesse’s question about “Who are these people,” the 8% unsure about impeachment, I’d suggest that some of them are those who might favor impeachment/removal but think success is so unlikely that it’s a waste of energy and political capital to make it a focus.
Consider: There are now 45 Dem Senators plus 2 Independents who caucus with the party, for a total of 47. There are 22 GOPpers up for reelection to the Senate this fall. If the Dems hold every one of their seats and flip fully half of those GOPper seats, that total rises to 58. Even then if in a Senate trial every one of that 58 (including such as John Fetterman) voted to convict, it would still take the votes of 9 GOPers to reach a 2/3 majority.
Not an impossible task but if you don’t find those numbers daunting, you’re not paying attention.
===
2026-04-23
[From Erin in the Morning: The FCC is seeking comment
on whether the TV Parental Guidelines rating system needs to be changed
to penalize shows for transgender or nonbinary content.]
It’s worth noting that if TV programs should be expected should have some sort of indication that themes relating to gender are involved, then every single program with people, real or animated (and maybe some without), should have such a notice because the failure to include characters who are some flavor of LGBTQ+ is every bit as much a statement of “gender ideology” as is having any who are.
-
2026-04-23
[Comment:
The rating system I support: parents review the content and decide if
it’s appropriate for their child, no one else’s.]
Just be aware that you will get the response “How can I review a TV show before it’s broadcast? Isn’t that what the ratings system is for? So shouldn’t it be expanded?”
Of course that argument becomes self-defeating because you’d either have to have ratings for every single topic that anyone at all might find offensive or concerning - which is a practical impossibility - or say it’ll be up to the government to decide what topics “need parental review” and which don’t and how many potentially concerned parents/guardians are necessary for the government to provide the government-determined appropriate warning.
In other words, chaos or censorship.
The problem is, most people won’t get past mentally adding “to include MY concerns” to the end of my opening quote.
===
2026-04-23
[Texas Tech bans LGBTQ+ topics, including in theses and dissertations]
As bans are being applied even to graduate level research, does anyone remember when the whole thing was about THE CHILDREN!!! OMG SAVE THE CHILDREN!!!
I seem to remember that....
===
2026-04-26
What we now have in hand [thanks to Chris Geidner]
is proof of what we thought and expected (and any among us who didn’t
should have): This SCOTUS is making it up as it goes along, inventing
and ignoring procedures and legal principles as needed to obtain
pre-decided, ideologically desired, results.
Bear in mind that the power - really the only power - of any court is the acceptance of its authority and legitimacy. Even violent enforcement of its rulings requires that acceptance among the enforcers. And the loss of respect and legitimacy of this court has gone so far that I can’t help but both wonder and fear there may soon come a time when people in some position of power start saying “I don’t care what the Supreme Court says, I’m doing it anyway.”
===
2026-04-26
The
death penalty is a relic of barbarism that has no place in a society
that even claims to be civilized. That it’s being pushed by an
administration that prides itself on being “tough” and “manly” and
“lethal” headed by a man-child so doubtful of his own merit that he has
to plaster his name on anything available in the (no doubt vain) hope
that he will be remembered by history as someone powerful and worthy of
that notice should come as no surprise.
We are a shameful outlier. We are the only UN member state in the Americas to have executed anyone since 2008. We are virtually alone among - I almost used the passé term “our allies” - NATO nations in maintaining this badge of brutality, this symbol of savagery, which despite the lack of any evidence that it reduces the murder rate, despite the demonstrated racist bias in its imposition, despite the execution of innocent people, despite the murder rate continuing to gradually decline, despite dropping support, it itself refuses to die.
Twenty-three US states, Washington, DC, and four US territories have banned capital punishment. Of the 27 states and one territory that allow it, seven have a moratorium on it and five more have had no executions for over 10 years, leaving 16 states and the feds with active death penalties.
That’s 16 too many.
===
2026-04-28
[The
DOI - Department of Injustice - filed a motion to lift the injunction
blocking The Orange Overlord’s ballroom; the motion “more closely resembled a Truth social
post than a legal filing.” One comment defended the filing, saying “It
reads like advocacy. So what? Where is the sanctionable conduct?”]
The “what” is that while it can be generously described as advocacy, it is advocacy not addressed to the court but to The Orange Overlord in an on-going effort to maintain favor in his sight by stringing together a list of his fantasies punctuated with effusive praise of his “ability, foresight, [and] talent” - even as the facts related to the ballroom have not shifted and “public safety” is “central” only as a means to advance a selfish ego-driven project undertaken without lawful authority.
So the sanctionable conduct is in filing such a patently frivolous motion.
===
2026-04-30
[An image showed ‘70s homophobia and ‘20s transphobia using the same language.]
Exactly. Not just the same clams, the same damn words.
Oh, but you missed one, the perpetual “THE CHILDREN! OMG SAVE THE CHILDREN!”
-
2026-04-30
[I do fight to protect our trans kids.]
Okay…. but that reads like you think I was disagreeing with you somehow. I wasn’t. I’ve been struck before how it’s not only the same claims being made in each case, it is frequently in the exact same words. (Although for me, the “then” case stretches back to the ‘50s, when again, it was the same claims in the same words.
Which was why my last remark, more a case of bitter humor than actually suggesting it be included (it really is too long) because “save the children” always seems to be at the heart of this sort of fear-driven social panic - especially this one, which unlike most social panics did not arise organically but was deliberately designed and created (and is being maintained) for selfish ideological reasons of social and political dominance.
===
2026-04-30
[Idaho passed an extreme bathroom ban,
covering all public facilities, government and private, including
single-stall ones. One trans person spoke about the difficulties that
presented.]
“do I avoid going out altogether?”
Yes. That is exactly the point, to make trans folks disappear from society.
===
2026-05-01
[On
April 9, responding to a post about a methodologically-flawed study
saying puberty blockers are dangerous, someone asked what kind of review
the study received. I answered by describing the general impression of
the publication’s standards. On May 1, a reply to that said they think
the publication has an anti-trans bias based on earlier having published
an equally-flawed survey of related studies. Got all that? Okay.]
Thank you for this. I hadn’t known about the Baxendale study you examined, but I did note that it pursued the same logic that anti-trans studies of the literature often do: Studies producing what I’ll call pro-trans results (defined as “not producing results useful to anti-trans ideologues”) are dismissed for not having RCTs and/or for having a small sample while neither of those standards are required for those that produce anti-trans results.
I hope it was clear that in my original comment I wasn’t defending the study in question; someone asked about what standards for publication the study had met, so I described the publication.
Without being more familiar with the journal, I don’t know if Acta Paediatrica has a bias on the topic but if it has a bias, I rather suspect it lies in the “moderately picky about what it accepts” and “cited relatively rarely” parts. “Sure, we’ll take it. Got pages to fill.”
===
2026-05-01
[Pete “Manly Man” Hegseth claimed that the first message from the pilot downed in Iran was “Good is good.” A TikTok video said that was a a lie because the transponder couldn’t send custom messages.]
Recalling first that a lie can be reasonably defined as “a statement intended to deceive” and second the saying that “a lie is most effective when wrapped around a kernel of truth,” I can but wonder if the lie here is not one of falsification but of misleading.
That is, yes, that was the message - and it was a pre-programmed one as code for, I dunno, something like “I’m alive and capable of getting into a helicopter without assistance.”
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