ANOTHER NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF EXPERTISM AND CREDENTIALISM: More broadly, the justices revealed their distrust of mental health authorities in this area of the law, reinforced the Trump administration’s suspicion of medical expertise and demonstrated how polarized gay and trans interests have become. ” Authorities. Yeah, right, but a delicious tell from CNN. Also, it’s not just SCOTUS who distrusts the whole mental illness establishment. Having said all that I’m suspicious of the whole notion of conversion therapy, even in the case of obvious mental illness (trans, nonbinary, etc).
EVERY DEAL WITH TERRORISTS IS A SURRENDER: Over at Front Page, Daniel Greenfield expresses due skepticism about the deal with Hamas, even assuming they hold up their end.
MSM DISCOVERS THAT CURRENT EVENTS INFLUENCE FASHION: And they don’t like it none too much. Trans and enby is out; traditional gender roles are in (see SugarFree’s lingerie link from yesterday afternoon).
THE IRONY, IT BURNS: Climate pollution from inhalers has the impact of half a million cars per year, study finds.
THE BULLSHIT, IT STINKS: The recent Salt Lake City ordinance that restricts alcohol consumption between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. indirectly targets marginalized communities that frequent late-night gatherings, including the LGBTQ+ community. Maybe you’re marginalized because you need to stay up all night drinking. JHTFC, you’re in Mormonistan, so you’re lucky to have it at all you is, lucky to has it.
AND SPEAKING OF BULLSHIT: The FBI has cut ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks extremist groups, after conservatives criticized the nonprofit for including slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s organization on its list of hate groups. No, they are not, and were never, a fucking civil rights organization. They were always about cancel culture, and giving government a flimsy excuse to go after people that the left doesn’t like. This is long overdue.
“FBI cuts ties with civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center”
Huzzah!
The SPLC, like the ACLU, is only for civil rights for right thinking people.
The Old West was — like the rest of the country — a racist, discriminatory place.
I tapped out here. I’m not sure how I made it that far.
When you was slaves, you used to sing like birds!
I get no kick from champagne
Mere alcohol, it doesn’t move me at all
…
I once had a 3 hours layover in Salt Lake City. Walked around the airport until I finally asked a security guy, “where’s a bar?”
He looked at me and said, “you’re in Salt Lake City, boy.”
It was a long 3 hours.
That’s why I go to Ogden on work trips.
signs you may be an alcoholic
Excellent set of links. Tonio. Thanks.
More broadly, the justices revealed their distrust of mental health authorities in this area of the law, reinforced the Trump administration’s suspicion of medical expertise and demonstrated how polarized gay and trans interests have become. ”
Scary.
Leave gays out of it. Most of us want nothing to do with that nonsense.
Sorry, dude, but they’ve yoked themselves to you. Which normally costs extra.
Yeah, not the same as downtown.
The thing about the mental health authorities is that what what they spew is largely based on various psychological theories that are as often as not unscientific horseshit based on conjecture, biased operational definitions, flawed applications of statistics, and studies that can’t be reproduced.
Being an expert in mental health isn’t quite the same thing as being an expert in the hard sciences.
At one point my middle kid declared herself “trans”. (Thankfully she grew out of it). But we talked to her therapist at the time, and it seems that mental health disorders can be added or dropped from the official list due to what society finds acceptable. Which makes sense, being gay was at one point considered a mental health disorder, right?
But are you really some kind of scientific expert if you’re just reporting that most people are ok with something they weren’t ok with in the past?
They received a new revelation from their god that only they can interpret.
Everything, both for and against, in the current trans era was done before in the gay rights era. It’s the farce phase of history now.
I’m suspicious of the whole notion of conversion therapy, even in the case of obvious mental illness (trans, nonbinary, etc).
Yeah, the devil is in there somewhere.
Half hour, yeah yeah yeah. I need to address this, since I’ve been out getting my fingers pressed against a piece of glass that refuses to see any whorls or grooves:
@Count Potato
Okay, so. I’m usually pretty good-natured about my romance-novel habits, writing and reading, but this sucking-off-of-a-minotaur “romance” is getting under my skin, and not the way BookTok likes it.
Do any of you actually READ me on Friday nights? Do you THINK *I* am going to write shit like that?
Far be it from me to yuck someone else’s yum, and I’ve dabbled in actual smut (didn’t get any traction; too smart, my first reader said), but commingling of homo sapiens lock and non-homo sapiens key is nowhere near romance. I even had a problem with Beauty and the Beast. Like, WE know the dude’s under a spell and he’s actually a human, but SHE doesn’t!
Anyway. Moving onto the rape fantasy, which, yes, is VERY common. Its purpose is to absolve the virtuous (on a sliding scale nowadays, not so much back then) ingenue (or, you know, horny-but-celibate-for-religious-reasons mature woman) (*koff*) of being considered a slut for wanting to fuck the hero. Yeah, it was 1983 back then, but it’s 2025 and still nobody likes a slut, or so my Tweeple announce.
That also serves for actual rape victims to cope with their trauma.
But the Golden Rule here is: Be attractive. Don’t be unattractive. Rape is still rape if she REALLY doesn’t want your dick in her (even if you ARE conventionally good looking). Yes. Romance blurs that line a bit. It’s called “forced seduction.”
And in closing, I will add that most women, regardless of their sexuality or philosophical preferences, no matter how much they protest, still want dudes who are manly and protective. Where the line is between manly and protective versus douchebag man-baby or simpering soyboy is what we’re always scanning for.
I ended up watching the whole thing (rare for me) and the bit about the downside of neuroplasticity was thought-provoking.
When you keep jilling yourself to the thought of minotaur cock, eventually _only_ minotaur cock is going to do it for you…
This is not exclusive to women.
I’m watching the video now.
I chuckled at “when the furries are calling you out for being freaks, you need to reflect because something has gone horribly wrong.”
Which always weirded me out when movies and pop culture depicted men thinking of grandma or baseball to prolong putting off an orgasm
OBE:
The Male Gaze (from SMBC).
This is not exclusive to women.
Oh, sure, I just had just thought about it in terms of watching weird shit; getting miswired just by reading weird shit (and getting yourself off on it) makes sense, just wasn’t something I thought about.
I go at least three minotaurs. Aging has not been without benefits.
So, you’re saying I should send back my Minotaur costume?
Yes. Yes, you should.
Wait, I need that for.. ah.. Halloween. Can you send it to me?
Here you go RJ:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1c/b3/19/1cb3197501cccc2d5690be20b2f2d2c3.jpg
🤮
” Can you send [the Minotaur costume] to me?”
Uh… you expect the Minister of Trash to thoroughly *cleanse* his soiled suit?
Fun Fact: My Walmart sells several OTC birth control meds. They reside right below ~8-10 varieties of dildos and butt plugs. I haven’t been told to pick one yet, for perhaps obvious reasons. (I check fruit out to make sure I select ones that satisfy me, were I shopping for myself. I don’t have the requisite knowledge to help the dildo-ing.
See also: Not having the Anniversary Card requested, and being asked to make a Substitution. Yeah, cupcake. That shit’s *way* over my pay grade, and I ain’t standin’ here and thinkin’ to make your (perhaps?) wife ‘happy’ on whatever anniversary it is that you’re having. That’s shit for *you* to buy. Not me.
‘NO CARD FOR YOU!’
~8-10 varieties of dildos and butt plugs. I haven’t been told to pick one yet, for perhaps obvious reasons. (I check fruit out to make sure I select ones that satisfy me, were I shopping for myself.
How, uh, do you ….. you know what, never mind. I don’t need to know how fruit satisfies you.
And yes, I recommend dry cleaning and perhaps a few days in a vacuum chamber before wearing the Minotaur suit.
Anything gets boring if you always have the same thing, and that goes for fantasies and porn as much as for diet. It’s probably a bad idea to indulge in porn or fantasy to the point where you have to seek out more and more extreme versions to feel a thrill because you are bored. It has to make actual sex dull eventually, and there’s a real shortage of wealthy, handsome Minotaurs out there (and a similar shortage of whatever extreme fantasy anyone might have instead), so maybe one should avoid becoming so jaded there is no real life joy possible.
The same medical consensus that was all in on forced sterilization and electroshock therapy?
Real cowboys weren’t universally beloved, either. In 1882 the Cheyenne Daily Leader described them as “foulmouthed, blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, and utterly corrupt. They are dreaded in towns, for then liquor has an ascendancy over them.”
That settles that.
Yes. All cowboys are alike.
Being an expert in mental health isn’t quite the same thing as being an expert in the hard sciences.
The anvil always falls downward in the physics lab. How pedestrian.
That inhaler story screams bullshit.
Looking up the main author of the study, he seems to be on a Quoxitic crusade for quite some time.
Thanks for doing the fact-check. My links were done in haste today and I just slapped them together from the links bucket.
I would ask all the participants in this argument to define “conversion therapy” and count how many different answers I got.
I wonder what percentage of people in therapy are going to get their thinking changed versus how many go to get their thinking reinforced.
I even had a problem with Beauty and the Beast.
Now do that bizarre Buffalo Wild Wings commercial
He’s right.
Reads biographies of Nelson Mandella, Bill Ayers, and Menachem Begin…
This checks out.
“The recent Salt Lake City ordinance that restricts alcohol consumption between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.” Recent? I wonder when it became legal to consume alcohol in Utah during those hours.
Still bullshit framing with the whole “its targeting me” but it is a bullshit ordinance.
Alcohol can’t be sold in San Francisco, and all of California for that matter, after 2 AM. I wonder how all the homos, er, queer folx, have survived such persecution this long.
This. Also, how many dry precincts are in big blue cities?
A quick internet search says it’s 10am to 1am in the entire state. 6 to 2 would be less restrictive than state law allows.
There were many events I went to here in CLE that were from 2200 – 0800. Alcohol sales stopped immediately at 0200, and had to be finished by 0230.
They knew vice cops were already there, and weren’t going to risk their liquor license over something that easy to get busted for. Surprisingly, people still stayed, and didn’t feel attacked.
I’m watching the video now.
I want to beat that woman with a sock filled with nickels aftert about 90 seconds. Can we ban fucking annoying vocal mannerisms?
Shoe is funny, tho.
“That is like throwing roast beef into a pit of wolves, or in this case, throwing a wolf into a pit of roast beef.”
That is fucking gold.
Any time I see the word “marginalized” I know a line of bullshit is coming.
…grow a nut and stop playing the victim. JFC what the hell is wrong with people…?
My victimhood is being mainstreamed! Yep, enjoy the shitty laws us normies have to deal with asshole
What do you know about being a…. Oh, never mind.
Victimhood is rewarded. It’s stunning and brave. I blame Oprah.
Puke.
The ur-queers from decades past are spinning in their graves seeing what shrinking violets today’s “activists” have become.
^^ Exactly this. If ya have a knee replacement (Dad’s 2nd now) or ya break a femur, ya. Ya got a complaint to stand on. Shit fuckin’ sucks. Word.
Now? For a few generations, kids are being actively trained to *know* that complaining is actively rewarded. Honestly, I think many/ most of us are on the same page: Shame’s extinction is a chief source of the bullshit we’re surrounded by. There used to be shit ya did, off-the -record shit, that ya simply didn’t ‘display’ for the world to see. And now, the constant performative aspect to ‘Throw all shit at all walls to see what sticks’ is pervasive.
People are fucking *weak.* Good men from hard times, Good Times to weak men. Predictable.
NY Attorney General Letitia James indicted by a grand jury on federal BANK FRAUD charges — Reuters
Today in you don’t hate the MSM enough:
The poor dear, targeted by OMB for no reason. He is so mean.
Insert the goose meme here. Why is she a target? Why is she a target, Reuters?
Articles are begging ATC to end the shutdown by encouraging them to do sick-outs.
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/08/shutdown-air-traffic-controllers-delays-sick-outs
I for one welcome the mass firing of the air traffic controllers.
Heinous
ave Sparks—also known as “Heavy D,” one half of the internet-famous Diesel Brothers—was arrested Tuesday morning in Utah. Bloomberg Law wrote late last week that a warrant had been issued for Sparks’ arrest, as a federal judge found him in contempt of multiple court orders following a Clean Air Act lawsuit. This includes paying $844,000 in fees. Now, Sparks has been booked in Salt Lake City Jail, as first reported by TMZ and confirmed by The Drive.
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby ruled in March 2020 that Sparks and three others must pay the substantial amount for tampering with diesel truck emissions systems. While Sparks and the other defendants uploaded videos of diesel pickups blowing black smoke to YouTube, racking up millions of views, those clips weren’t the only examples of tampering pointed out by the plaintiffs. Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment purchased a truck from Sparks Motors and had its exhaust emissions tested at a lab in Denver, Colorado. The results allegedly showed that the truck emitted 21 times more particulate matter than if it were equipped with an operational diesel particulate filter, or DPF.
Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment are true heroes. Without them we’d all be dead.
Rolling unnecessary coal is obnoxious.
Agreed. I have limited sympathy.
Especially to cyclists trying to do a charity ride.
The way those cyclists were dressed they were asking for it.
Defund whichever NGO or nonprofit funds them. The graft runs so wide and deep it feels like we’re emptying a beach with a fucking slotted spoon.
“The results allegedly showed that the truck emitted 21 times more particulate matter than if it were equipped with an operational diesel particulate filter, or DPF.” I wonder if that’s only while rolling coal, which is indeed obnoxious, or if that’s during normal use.
The Economist as usual. They sound authoritative until you know what they are writing about.
Meet Japan’s “Fireball”, Takaichi Sanae, its polarising new leader
It’s not completely unheard for men to take the wife’s name. Very common if they join a family business. So it’s an issue, but not necessarily an equality one.
Not sure about Japan, but in Korea, both men and women keep their family names, with children taking the father’s surname.
In Japan you join a register of the family. So you get to choose with the marriage it can be either one. But the idea is that’s the official marriage.
You are adopted the same way. You join the register of the family that is adopting you.
I don’t know how they handle divorce. I assume they revert you to the register of your parents.
Even the idea of the cowboy as distinctly American is inaccurate. Cowboys as a concept are almost entirely imported from cattle operations south of the US border.
America stops at the Rio Grande, and always has.
Also, from Webster’s:
“First Known Use
Noun
1623, in the meaning defined at sense 1”
1623?
From Oxford: “The earliest known use of the noun cowboy is in the early 1600s.
OED’s earliest evidence for cowboy is from 1623, in the writing of Henry Cockeram, lexicographer.”
Who is Cockeram. Must be some Spaniard.
Little is known about Cockeram beyond the fact that he authored this work.[3] From the various dedications in his works, it is apparent that he lived in Exeter, England, where contemporary records suggest that he could be the Henrye Cockram who married Elizabethe Strashley, on 2 February 1613.[2] The dedications and prefixes on the first edition show a friendship with John Webster, the playwright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cockeram
Speaking of pollution, I’m surprised the Biden EPA never sent a SWAT team to the Freedom Factory to arrest everybody in the burnout competitions. Possibly because they knew they’d never make it out alive.
Jalopnik boy weighs in
Most people understand we all have to breathe the same air, so if one person pollutes with impunity, we all suffer. Plus, it isn’t like we don’t have photos from pre-emissions-regulations Los Angeles to remind us of just how bad things can get without emissions controls. Thankfully, even though Republicans are doing their best to legalize polluting as much as possible and destroy the courts, there are still occasionally consequences for breaking the law and ignoring court orders, something Diesel Brother David “Heavy D” Sparks found out the hard way when he was arrested Tuesday morning, The Drive reports.
If you aren’t already familiar with Sparks’ legal issues, back in 2020, the co-host of Discovery’s “Diesel Brothers”, along with Joshua Stuart, Keaton Hoskins, and David “Diesel Dave” Kiley, was ordered to pay about $850,000 in fines for violating the Clean Air Act. In addition to the fines, the judge also ruled that Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, the plaintiffs in the case, were eligible to receive attorneys’ fees, rumored to have topped $1.2 million. It was a pretty open-and-shut case, too, since UPHE bought a modified diesel truck directly from Sparks, had its emissions tested and found its greenhouse gas emissions were 36 times the legal limit, while particulate emissions were 21 times the limit.
I just love this sort of prissy chest thumping.
Of course, Sparks would never have ended up in jail if he had simply complied with the court’s orders. And if he didn’t want to do that, he could have always followed the law and not sold a bunch of ridiculously dirty diesels. But no, he was too selfish to do that. He wanted to break the law, make life worse for little kids with asthma and other lung conditions, force his neighbors to breathe dirtier air and then dodge the consequences of his actions.
Howevermuch of an asshole Sparks might be, he’s not a disgusting little toady than that jalopnik dweeb.
^^ Highly accurate. Such nasty prose, purposefully with each word to show his ‘demonstrative’ harm to every stranger he’s never met.
I fucking hate these people. They manage to combine tedious nastiness, with every word, to cast as much bullshit shade they can. Pathetic. Visibly, pathetic. (That’s good! (In its own way!))
I’m certain that Sparks had a smile on his face every morning on the way to work just thinking about how badly he was going to fuck up some asthmatic kids. Just report on it and spare me the moral preening you scrunt.
So true. I can’t even click the link. Jalopnik got so bad I would rather have no car news ever than read that shit.
Ocean wave equal to five giraffes stacked on top of each other seen from space
American units rule.
JFC, i thought you were kidding.
Meh. How many stone do you weigh?
How many bananas is that?
Not sure why that is a story. 100 foot waves are not common but do exist. I think NASA? once said there is one somewhere nearly every day. I imagine most of them appear/disappear based on bathymetry.
Lurch is on TV now giving his ‘Peace in our time’ speech about Hamas. “Two state solution is the answer for lasting peace. ”
How many times do the Pali’s have to tell everyone – we dont want a state. We dont want peace. We want only one thing: to murder all jews everywhere on the planet.
I am keeping my fingers crossed but I have a bad feeling about this ‘deal’.
Tonio’s link is accurate. This will go to shit.
I do wish Trump success. I do. But this seems to have a 99% chance of failure.
They’re getting some dozens of terrorists back in exchange for every hostage, alive or dead.
It’s madness.
Re: “conversion therapy”
I think the only way any form of therapy can ever work is if the patient has a strong desire for it to work, has the willingness to confront the scary deep down parts of their mind, AND goes in with the desire to change, but not necessarily a predetermined idea of exactly what that change will look like at the end. If someone is miserable with their current sexual orientation, identity, expression or whatever else you want to label it, and the person meets the above requirements, they can possibly end up the process happier, and it is likely that there are people for whom that will involve a change in the label they give their sexual expression, or even the sex they end up most attracted to. I think going in with the predetermined idea of becoming straight, or becoming gay for that matter, is much less likely to work, but probably not impossible. As I have said before I think any therapy of whatever sort that is imposed on a patient by a court, or parents, or any other external pressure is doomed to failure at best and quite possibly will make the person less well.
Therapy here is limited to the talking and attitude/behavioral aspects, obviously drugs can ‘work’ even on patients forced into taking them if there is an actual chemical imbalance.
A good place to start is by not filling kids heads full of lunacy at impressionable developmental stages. Just spit ballin’ here.
“… AND goes in with the desire to change, but not necessarily a predetermined idea of exactly what that change will look like at the end. ”
Agreed, but I’ll simplify that with my favorite ink I’ve seen on another (I have none of my own): “Be Better.” On his hand, on the crook of his thumb and index finger. If ‘that’ is your goal, and ya truly desire to change to accomplish it, solid advice. None of it is easy. But good thought.
A food desert in the making in Marin County. Trump’s perfidy knows no bounds. https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/bay-area-town-stirred-amazon-closes-store-21091463.php
It sounds like the community needs to band together, buy the site, and operate a cooperative.
What? Private action not directed by the government? Are you some kind of fascist?
No doubt some regulation made it to where the whole building was now illegal and it would have to be razed to the ground if so much as one thing had to be fixed. I lived in California. I know how that goes. Fuck that government, all the way down to the city level.
Also there is no mention at all of profitability or crime issues. Deliberate?
Marin County so probably little to no crime.
Oh fuck! That tiny town has TWO whole foods and just closed this one location! Hahahaha!
https://www.marinij.com/2010/06/07/mill-valleys-second-whole-foods-store-to-open-wednesday/
Food desert my shiny green ass!
Of course they don’t tell you that Mill Valley is just one cog in a larger urban sprawl so this is hardly surprising.
My town is larger than Mill Valley proper but we don’t have no Whole Foods.
lol Perfect.
Probably she spent the last 30 years NIMBYing the fuck out of everyone else. She might have even voted for laws that made it impossible to turn a profit there. Standard California lib idiot.
Shoe0nHead’s front teeth bother me.
Thats is all.
Who the hell is that?
Lefty chick with a podcast who was doing Bill Maher’s anti-woke calling out the craziest left schtick before he was, and now has this odd niche with right leaning folks, despite being an avowed Bernie supporter. On social issues she is pretty solidly based, on econ… not so much