Trump ordered to pay Carroll $83 million

The jury in the trial took only about two hours to come back with a verdict that said that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has to pay her $83 million. It consists of $7.3m in compensatory damages, $11m to repair her reputation, and $65m in punitive damages. He has, of course, said that he will appeal.

The punitive damages are to make SSAT shut up.

Even on Fox News, a rightwing network generally supportive of the former president, John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, saw nothing but bad news.

“The whole point of these unprecedented damages is to tell Donald Trump to shut up,” Yoo said.“You could think of it this way: every time Donald Trump wants to insult [E] Jean Carroll, he’s gonna have to write a $40m check for each sentence. That’s how bad this is.

“I can’t believe his lawyers haven’t succeeded in just telling him, ‘Campaign for president, run for president, make your accusations about a two-tiered justice system. But leave this alone.’”

It looks like the antics of SSAT inside and outside the courtroom that so irritated the judge did not endear him to the jury either. Neither did the obnoxious behavior of his lawyer Alina Habba who seemed to think that her audience was the MAGA cult instead of the nine people in the jury box.

In a recent interview with some MAGA-friendly person, Habba was asked whether she would like to be pretty or smart. She instantly replied that she would like to be pretty because you can fake being smart. Well, maybe some people can fake being smart, but she is clearly not one of them. For example, on Monday, she told the judge that she was feeling unwell and had been exposed to people with Covid and asked that the proceedings for the next day be canceled. It was duly done. But then on Tuesday evening, she was seen at a victory party in New Hampshire following the primary election. Judges do not like lawyers lying to them and she is lucky that he did not reprimand her for that.

Observers were astounded at the level of her incompetence, down to basic knowledge of courtroom proceedings.

After the verdict, Habba sounded off to the media. She is mad because the judge did not allow her to re-litigate the issue of assault that the first jury had already decided.

Bye, bye Ron

I can’t say that I was surprised that Ron DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential race. Even before he ran, I wrote that he would be foolish to challenge serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and that he would be better served by sitting this one out and campaigning hard for SSAT this time because, whether SSAT won or lost, 2028 would be an open race. He could then reap the rewards of MAGA cult loyalty in that race, rather than alienating them this year.

But my prediction that he would fail was based on strategic reasoning. What I had not anticipated was that he would be such a lousy campaigner, so wooden and anti-charismatic on the stump, and have nothing really to offer. His easy re-election victory for governor of Florida seemed to make him think that being ‘anti-woke’ (whatever the hell that means) was his path to victory on the national stage. While that may have been of a somewhat catchy slogan, in terms of policies, it only translates into some culture war issues, such as banning books and fighting over bathroom access for transgender students that he carried to extremes, that may have excited some people but really did not have relevance to most people. Furthermore, carrying his anti-woke crusade into a fight with the Disney corporation, the state’s biggest employer, tended to alienate the business community.
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More evidence that SSAT is losing it

There has been considerable speculation that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT)’s repeated verbal flubs are not just because he is casual with the truth, saying wrong things if it serves to advance his narrative, but that he actually is losing his grip on reality. As evidence of this, here is a clip of him during a rambling speech he gave at a rally in New Hampshire which holds it primary election on Tuesday and where Nikki Haley is challenging him.

He is clearly confusing Haley with Nancy Pelosi who was speaker on January 6th, 2021. He is not making an off-the-cuff aside where verbal slips can happen. This was clearly part of a planned attack on Haley and yet he spoke as if he did not know that she has never been in Congress.

Also, why would he offer whoever 10,000 troops to quell the riot if, as he keeps saying, there was no riot at all and those people were merely patriotic citizens who were just peacefully demonstrating and visiting the Capitol building? Furthermore, there is no evidence that he ever made such an offer of troops and his own secretary of defense, who should know, directly refuted it when testifying under oath..

Ardent MAGAnauts may not care about the mounting evidence of SSAT’s cognitive decline but I suspect that these kinds of things will continue to be a steady drip, drip that will take a toll on those who are now supporting him but have some misgivings. Even Nikki Haley has used this to start musing about SSAT’s mental competence.

“They’re saying he got confused, that he was talking about something else, he’s talking about Nancy Pelosi,” she continued. “He mentioned me multiple times in that scenario. The concern I have is — I’m not saying anything derogatory — but when you’re dealing with the pressures of the presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this. We can’t.”

Let’s see if any other Republicans start talking about SSAT’s mental state.

I wish we could say, “Bye, bye, Vivek”

The Iowa caucuses were held yesterday and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) won easily as expected, getting roughly half the votes (51%) and half the delegates (20). Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley split the remaining votes (21% and 19%) and delegates (9 and 8) respectively. After the results were announced , Vivek Ramaswamy (who got 7.7% and 3 delegates) and Asa Hutchinson announced that they were suspending their candidacies.

I wish we could say that we have seen the last of Ramaswamy whose personality is even more grating than DeSantis, and that is saying something. But I think he is going to be around for a long while. He will likely be a fixture on right wing media as an all-purpose provocateur, a role that he would clearly relish since he seems to love being in the media spotlight

He has also endorsed SSAT, no doubt hoping that if SSAT wins in November, he will be awarded some post by him. That alone should be enough to vote against SSAT.
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The horror in Gaza and the media bubble in which Israelis live

Following the attacks by Hamas on October 7th that killed 1,200 Israelis and the massive retaliation by Israel that seeks to level Gaza and make it into a moonscape, currently over 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70% of whom are women and children. Furthermore, pretty much all of the entire two million population is now displaced and homeless due to the widespread and incessant bombing, and famine is imminent because Israel refuses to allow in adequate levels of humanitarian aid. The sheer scale of the indiscriminate assault and attacks on refugee camps makes laughable the claims by the Israeli government and military that they are targeting only militants. They are clearly seeking to terrorize the entire population of Gaza, destroy the infrastructure, and make life a living hell for the people there.
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Burying the Evidence, Accidentally or Otherwise

One way to mis-handle a problem is to just keep on trucking. Another is to actively bury it. That might seem impossible in the internet age, but not only is the internet gradually losing information, it’s opened up whole new ways to bury things.

Speaking of denying you, if you go to check any of [Rachel] Oates’ videos or live streams referenced throughout any of our exposés, only to discover that they’re no longer available, this is because Oates has taken to deleting and privating said evidence. Now, we’d originally prepared for this possibility by mirroring key pieces, unpublished, linking said mirror below the link to her original. Sadly, Rachel Oates saw this as an opportunity to abuse YouTube’s copyright system to try and have the channel taken down. The string of DMCA claims Oates filed put the channel a single strike away from the three required to be deleted, permanently, putting the future of the channel and my sole source of income as a trans person in jeopardy. We naturally won our appeals over the coming weeks, leading YouTube to reinstate said videos. Yet we decided that it was best to remove them to prevent Rachl[sic] Oates filing further DMCA takedowns from different channels, continuing to legally harass us or even potentially spreading out said claims so that she got the necessary three strikes.

This was my inspiration for circling back to old controversies: Rachel Oates has been trying to hide the evidence of past misbehaviour, and in a rather clever way. Don’t want people to see something? Delete it. Someone else mirrors or clips from the deleted content? Not only can you abuse the copyright system to have those mirrors taken down, do it often enough and you can financially harm the person trying to hold you accountable!
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Jerry Coyne: as dumb as a creationist

Orac called out Jerry Coyne on Threads!

Jerry Coyne is unhappy with Science Based Medicine!

Coyne was mad because SBM didn’t endorse his favorite flavors of transphobia — they rejected the hateful nonsense of people like Katherine Stock and Abigail Schreier. How dare they! SBM quoted an article that criticized Helen Joyce’s bad biology, which, unfortunately, Coyne is committed to supporting. This is embarrassing.*

The prohibition of trans women in female sports is to assure fair competition for women, not “mental and physical health”.

Joyce is no scientist. Joyce’s Twitter bio includes the line “show me the 3rd gamete & we can talk.” Joyce considers the term “TERF” a slur. It is evident throughout the painstaking reading of her online footprint and book that she labors under confusion, ignorance, and lack of scientific knowledge. And, of course, Joyce believes that trans activists are suppressing research.

I like the third gamete quote because it is indeed the presence of only two types of gametes that is the definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones. And yes, “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is indeed a slur by gender activists against “gender-critical feminists” like Joyce. Here’s the very first result I got when I googled TERF. DEROGATORY!

Oh, he likes “the third gamete quote”. He thinks he can shut down all those people arguing for trans rights by shouting Show me the third gamete! which is so incredibly stupid. No one is arguing that there is a “third gamete”. This claim is directly comparable to a creationist saying Show me a dog giving birth to a cat!, something no evolutionary biologist thinks is possible, that isn’t a conclusion from evolutionary theory, that reveals such a deep misunderstanding of the concept they’re trying to criticize that they ought to be just cast into the depths and ignored forever more.

There isn’t a third gamete, but no one is talking about gametes, except for the likes of Jerry Coyne and other TERFs. We are talking about the rights of full grown adult human beings, who are far more than a puddle of ejaculated goo or a sloughed off membrane. People are far more complex than a single-celled component of their bodies, and I would hope Coyne would realize that there are many more than two kinds of humans, and understand that what he’s trying to do is reify a category.

It really comes down to his narrow definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones. Nope. No one defines their sex by the kind of gametes they produce — sex is complex and diverse and idiosyncratic for everyone, and we all use varied criteria for identifying the sex of others and ourselves. Coyne has arbitrarily decided to be extremely reductive and key everything on one cell, because that supports his claim that there should be only two sexes, contrary to everything we can see.

As for his whine that the word TERF is DEROGATORY, yes it is. It’s a terrible thing to be, no matter what words you use: gender critical or regressive dickhead or anti-trans, I don’t care. The derogatory nature of the term comes from the inherent substance of the person, not the dictionary. You could call them “sweet baboos” and they’d still stink, and the name would still be derogatory, because it is attached to an unpleasant and hateful person.

  • Sorry, not linking. You can look it up if you must — the bit I’ve included is a direct copy & paste, you’re not going to find that I’ve misquoted him. He really said that.

Trump reveals new discovery about magnets

In their 2010 song Miracles, the Insane Clown Posse had the lyric “Fucking magnets, how do they work?”. That line has since become an internet meme. They also sang that they did not want to talk to any scientist because scientists lie.

In a speech in Iowa on Friday, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) reveals his knowledge of magnets, that pouring water over them destroys them.


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Adventures in cringe

Join me in getting a glimpse of the demented, broken minds of the people who idolize right-wing autocrats.

Here’s Neil Strauss, formerly best known for writing about pick-up artists, and then landed a job writing cover stories for Rolling Stone. I don’t know why. He wrote the November 2017 cover story on Elon Musk, the Architect of Tomorrow.

If we don’t send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dream’s inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

And then the article just goes on and on in this vein. I couldn’t get far before cramping up with all the cringing.

Matt Binder tells us about Kevin Sorbo’s January 6th Twitter epistles. It’s a classic, here they are in chronological order:

Beautiful descent. I remember watching Hercules with the kids years and years ago…if I knew then what we know now…

Prudes on parade

See the nice couple? They have a busy career making videos and writing books. They seem to be enjoying their life.

Geri and Jay Hart are the pen names of a married woman and man who serve in executive positions at two well-known organizations in the U.S. They frequently participate in civic and charitable events and appear in their local media. Although their careers keep Geri and Jay well occupied individually, their top priority is being together. During shared times they enjoy exercising, traveling, eating healthy food, and—of course—exploring and savoring their sexuality. See select videos and follow them on OnlyFans, X (formerly Twitter), and PornHub @SexyHappyCouple.

“Geri and Jay Hart” are pseudonyms — they do a lot of sex stuff, and want their privacy. Somebody leaked their actual names, and…uh-oh, Jay Hart’s real name is Joe Gow, and he was the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. You can imagine how that went down.

Former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow said Thursday that the school’s governing board fired him because members were uncomfortable with him and his wife producing and appearing in pornographic videos.

The Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents, which oversees UW-Madison, UW-La Crosse and 11 other regional campuses, voted unanimously during a hastily convened closed meeting Wednesday evening to fire Gow.

After the vote, Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and regents President Karen Walsh issued statements saying the regents had learned of specific conduct by Gow that subjected the university to “significant reputational harm.” Rothman called Gow’s actions “abhorrent” and Walsh said she was “disgusted.” But neither of them offered any details of the allegations.

No details. I glanced through their stuff (blushing all the way), and it’s all very explicit, but the focus is on consent and mutual pleasure. I didn’t see anything abhorrent or disgusting…well, maybe a tightly-puckered sphincter of a prude would dislike them. They fired him because he had a happy, cheerful sex life, something none of the regents would ever have.

They’re also planning to have his tenure revoked.

Unless there is evidence of non-consensual behavior, none of this should happen. Unless we’re going to fire everyone for the ‘crime’ of being sexual, there are no grounds for dismissal here.

There’s an interesting counterpoint in the case of Bridget Ziegler, the far-right co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who was discovered to have an interesting sex life — she was involved in a three-way sexual relationship. Again, as long as it’s consensual, no big deal; her husband, on the other hand, was accused of raping their partner, which is a big deal. Ziegler was not fired for her sexual activities, and I have no problem with that, although she should have been fired for extraordinary hypocrisy, since she rode into her position by condemning others for their sex acts. At least some people realize that. This student zeroed in on the real problem.

Calls for Ziegler to resign her position on the Sarasota School Board continue to this day, and a public hearing was recently held, with parents and students demanding she step down. One Sarasota parent, Sally Sells, explained the issue wasn’t what the Zieglers do in the bedroom. “Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” Sells said. Former Sarasota student Zander Moricz drove home that point. “Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman,” Moricz said.

The kids are all right.