Author: Mick Hartley

grim reminder of the state of the publishing world….

sive Women’s Night” — that is open to all females, including trans women….

But activists were quick to accuse the spa owners of enacting anti-trans and exclusionary policies — with some vowing to still try and attend the night set aside for those who may adhere to religious or cultural rules.

Well of course. Women can't ever be allowed to have a night for themselves.

ht: An Intimate History of Revolution.

She taught me about the Polish aphorism ‘knocking from below’ – just when you think things can’t get any worse, you hear knocking from below.

“That was precisely the phrase that came into my mind when I was watching,” Shore said. “I thought, there is no bottom. You think you are prepared for everything, and then there is still more depravity to come.”…

Dr. Marci Shore: Let me start perhaps with the broken hearts. There are a couple of pieces to that question. The only positive thing I saw about what happened yesterday was that it was such a decisive moment of the end of the affair. I felt like Europeans in particular, perhaps finally, belatedly, and this, of course, started with Munich, were shaken into realizing they absolutely cannot trust Washington.

This idea of America – despite all our problems and our hypocrisy and our racism and our violence – that it was still somehow the world's deepest liberal democracy and the land of the free and the home of the brave, and everything that Soviet communism was not – will, in the end, be the rescuer and guarantor of freedom. I feel like the last vestiges of that are finally dissolving….

Now it's also very possible that in representing himself and doing what is in his best interest, that Trump belongs to Putin in some way. I don't think we know the background reasons for that. We can speculate, but in some sense, it doesn't matter. They clearly were not representing American interests in a broader sense, in terms of the American people. We are now going to be isolated from the rest of the world. They're representing their own interests. And [last Friday], they were representing Russia's interest. It looks very clearly like it was all some kind of a setup….

I have a kind of psychological fascination with the different ways in which people go over to the dark side. Trump is clearly a pathological narcissist, perhaps that and a psychopath. That's his own category. Let's call that a marginal demographic. But what about people like Lindsey Graham, who say that Trump gave us a master class in representing the interest of America.

No. Trump gave us a master class in moral nihilism, and Lindsey Graham gave us a master class in selling one’s soul to the devil….

Worth reading in full. 

I don't think it's of very much use to speculate what hold Putin may or may not have on Trump. It's more that, at bottom, they share the same understanding of the world, where people – little people – don't matter, and the powerful and strong get to decide, just because they're powerful and strong.

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“The parents are experiencing severe distress watching their children subjected to forced labor. Local residents were stunned to learn that young boys could be forced into unpaid labor.

“The teenagers themselves suffered the greatest shock. Having always believed their powerful parents in military security would protect them, they were terrified and astonished that this could happen to them,” the source added.

from institutions that were once beacons of intellectual excellence and honest inquiry to people who couldn’t find Israel on a map.

Our esteemed halls of learning have become, in the words of Professor James Orr “ivory asylums” that seem to care more about the diversity of immutable characteristics than diversity of opinion and genuine intellectual debate, let alone the truth of empirical evidence, historic fact and contemporary data.

And so, Black Lives Matter, except in Africa where black Christians are being decapitated and young girls kidnapped as sex slaves.

LGBTQ+ rights matter, except in Islamic countries that execute homosexuals (in Yemen you can be crucified for being gay).

And women should always be believed, unless they’re Jewish, in which case even videos of grotesque sexual torture, videos made by their torturers themselves and posted by them live on social media, must be Israeli propaganda.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

George Orwell, 1984

ont-size: 11pt”>Times lead:

President Trump said he found it “easier” to deal with Russia than Ukraine as he claimed that President Putin was “doing what anybody else would do” by intensifying his bombing of the war-torn country.

The US president, who has been widely criticised for his willingness to trust Putin and see the conflict from Russia’s perspective, added that the Kremlin leader “wants to end the war … and I think he’s going to be more generous than he has to be”

The Kremlin's most useful idiot.

in the context in which it had been used was belittling or demeaning to the complainant, nor insulting in a manner that it considered pejorative or prejudicial,” it added.

The verdict marks a significant watershed. It can seem sometimes in this debate as if we have passed through the looking glass, with years of pandering to self-ID lobbyists threatening a situation where athletes had to be accepted as whatever sex they purported to be. Somehow, this fallacy reached the highest levels of global sport, with the International Olympic Committee’s former medical director Dr Richard Budgett infamously declaring in 2021: “Everybody accepts that trans women are women.”

Au contraire, Dr Budgett. In 2025, the conclusion of the UK press regulator flies in the face of that ludicrous pronouncement, supporting a report that trans women are in fact biological males – and establishing that it is legitimate for journalists to remind their readers of this essential, indisputable fact.

It's astonishing that we've reached this stage – that it needs to be confirmed that the importance of sex in sport is actually of profound significance – but yes, good news.

The IPSO ruling places the immutable laws of human biology above emotive personal testimony. Hamilton, who in addition to being a goalkeeper in a women’s team is an academic specialising in the impact of gender-affirmative care on the athletic performance of transgender athletes, had appealed for a definition of womanhood “beyond mere anatomy”, rejecting any reference to being biologically male on the grounds that this “inaccurately reflected an outdated understanding that did not account for the complexity of gender”. Except anatomy is not some frivolous detail here. It is the centrepiece of the entire discussion: that men and women are different, and that the delineation of sports by sex serves as a crucial protection for fairness and safety.

For too long, there has been a form of coerced speech on this subject, where pronouns mattered more than practicalities, where affirmation was prized above accuracy. It is still enraging to recall Thomas Bach, the outgoing IOC president, declaring at the height of last summer’s boxing scandal at the Paris Olympics that womanhood could somehow be validated by an “F” in an athlete’s passport.

People don't fall for this bullshit any more.

Now journalists should no longer feel cowed into toeing the activists’ line. It is critical that all reporters seeking to report the science are not intimidated into falsifying reality or into fooling their readership. I hope, too, that this IPSO decision has repercussions beyond the industry. I know of academics who have been furiously rebuked within their profession for going down the “biological male” route, even when they are guilty of nothing more than the faithful recording of facts. So, let us throw out the reflexive accusations of transphobia once and for all. This, ultimately, is about honest and transparent reporting of an issue at the heart of fair play. “Transphobic dog whistle”? How about just settling for the truth?

And abandoning this new Lysekoism once and for all.

s comments.

"We woke up profoundly sickened and frustrated by these remarks," a statement from California's LGBT legislative caucus read….

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called Newsom's remarks about trans athletes "disgusting".

Pramila Jayapal, a left-wing Democrat representing a district in the north-western state of Washington, told Politico that her party should not "take the bait and give into their anti-trans people rhetoric".

Newsom makes a strange champion of sex realism, mind:

Newsom made the state the first sanctuary for transgender youth and protected school curriculums that included LGBT history.

Last year he signed legislation that made California the first state to bar school districts from requiring staff to notify parents if their child changed gender identity.

Making an early bid for leader of the Dems? Well, at least he's now woken up and smelled the coffee, however cynical his move may be. And there doesn't seem to be anyone else. Kamala Harris has disappeared off the face of the earth. Tim Walz was stumped yesterday when CNN asks him who leads the Democratic party….

but it has particular salience for lesbians. Lesbianism is the only sexual orientation that does not include men. Yet — and one does not have to think too hard about why this is — heterosexual men have always shown a particular interest in it. Many lesbians have heard variations on the “all you need is a good man” theme. This is not only tiresome but, often, threatening. Research shows that lesbians are at higher risk of rape, sexual assault and sexual victimisation than other groups, including heterosexual women and gay men.

How could anyone not have foreseen this? If men can self-identify as women of course it's going to happen: men in bad wigs and fake breasts, often enough not even bothering to shave their beards off, dominating lesbian dating sites. Along with death and taxes, the third certainty in life is men taking every opportunity to exploit women.

In For Women Scotland, the Supreme Court considered written submissions from a group of lesbian organisations with the glorious collective title of the Lesbian Interveners, which spoke powerfully of the existential threat posed to lesbian social life by the unnavigable state of the law. A possible outcome of the case is that the judges will decide that a GRC does make a male into a woman under the Equality Act, but will also suggest that parliament considers amending the legislation to sort out the problems this causes.

Perhaps the Equality Act needs a complete rewrite. But Labour have shown no interest. As I wrote last year…
The Equality Act was formulated at at time before gender became the new cause celebre so the wording is ambiguous on the difference between sex and gender identity, which wasn't a thing then (and isn't a thing now, either, but here we are), allowing for the kind of manipulation that lets men get into women-only spaces, women's sport, women's jails, rape centres, and so on. Clarification was required – yes, the Tories should have got round it a lot sooner – but the current ambiguity suits the gender activists. It seems to suit our new Labour government too.

t any partition plan, partial as it was. They can also learn from the Zionist leader Yigal Allon, who maintained that this is our land, but that this does not mean that it cannot be shared or divided, out of humane concerns.

There is an urgent need for this decision. At this very moment, before the war is renewed in full force, will the Palestinians have the strength to make such a decision? Apparently not. The Jews accepted it only after the Jewish leadership – Ben Gurion, Allon – did so because the Jewish people had already experienced 2,000 years of suffering and persecution culminating in the Holocaust, choosing survival and humanity. For Hamas and the Palestinians, as for most of the Arabs, their political culture is one of victory, and Islam is a religion of empowerment and triumph. Survival and humanity are not built into their political and religious culture, as they are for the Jews. 

Two weeks after the war began, on October 23, 2023, I published an article titled About the Future. In it, I wrote that the war would continue for about another decade. When asked why I was so pessimistic, I said, "Pessimistic? I am realistic. It could take a lot longer."

As the renowned Moroccan liberal intellectual Tahar ben Jelloun, idol of the left in Europe, put it sorrowfully but truthfully: "The Palestinian cause died on October 7, 2023, murdered by fanatic elements mired in an Islamist ideology of the worst kind."