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adapt it to a technocratic era, it will require a similarly sceptical form of science journalism, based on the recognition that appeals to Science have become the basic idiom for the exercise of authority.

The man who works the soft machine….

The Soft Machine? A nod to William Burroughs there?

It's about the same period as the Stones' Beggar's Banquet (1968) and Let It Bleed (1969). Performance was made in 1968 but not released till 1970. The same dark feel as songs like Sympathy for the Devil and Midnight Rambler. I wonder which influenced which? Or maybe it was all a kind of dystopian nod to Burroughs.

The other great song from the Performance soundtrack is Gone Dead Train, the Jack Nitzsche/Russ Titelman song with Randy Newman on vocals.

tt says that “the world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today,” he is being disingenuous. It only means that one of Hamas’ useful idiots in the American press was exposed.

zi in the Commons on Monday. 

Debbie Hayton in the Spectator:

Now that Brennan has been jailed, there is another unanswered question here: where will Brennan be spending the next 22 years? Current policy requires that, following sentence, the individual must initially be transferred to the part of the prison estate consistent with their legal gender. For anyone holding a Gender Recognition Certificate, that is their preferred gender, not their biological sex. Cases like Brennan’s show why checks and balances are necessary in the Gender Recognition Act, and why self-identification of legal gender is a dreadful idea.

We would not allow an adult male to self-identify as 17 years old so that they could be transferred to a young offender institute. So why should we consider allowing such a person to identify as a woman and be transferred to the female estate? The Westminster government seems to have understood the problem and pulled back from the edge. But, worryingly, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government still seems intent on inflicting self-identification on Scotland….

So what should happen to convicted abusers like Brennan? The reality is that if such a person says they are transgender, we must assume they are. After all, there is no qualifying exam to join our club. But because of this, it is vital that we do not allow transgender women (i.e., biological males) to then claim all the specific rights granted to women. For Brennan, this must mean that his jail sentence is served in a male prison.

Perhaps he'll end up in that special transgender unit at Downview women's prison that we heard about the other day, where the women prisoners can have the pleasure of his company. In a men's prison….well, as a paedophile rapist his reception from the other prisoners wouldn't be particularly welcoming. Which point may of course have had some bearing on his decision to transition – though, as Hayton charitably notes, "if such a person says they are transgender, we must assume they are". Hmm, I suppose.

Sunset on the West Texas plains, from photographer Laura Rowe:

[Photo © Laura Rowe]

: 40px”>The discussion, held on 10 May, on “Israel’s brutal aggression” covered the roles and responsibilities of other Muslim majority states.

The cleric, who preaches in mosques in Birmingham, said: “Personally I believe the only solution is jihad, and a call for jihad – an announcement for jihad by Muslim majority states that we have. Even surgical strikes or wallpaper strikes, the type that Saddam Hussein did in the early Nineties, I believe, 39 rockets he fired into Tel Aviv, and every Jew was running into his shelter. Those with a European passport would be running back to Europe.

“You see the way they react to Katyusha missiles or Kasam missiles that do not even kill anyone, they run into their shelters so the Jews are known as… a cowardly nation.”

In comments now removed from the site, the cleric added that while neither Pakistan or Turkey would be expected to carry out a ground invasion, Afghanistan alone could invade as the Taliban had “recently defeated the mighty America”.

“So America has been defeated by tribesmen from Afghanistan,” he said. “Do not think anyone is invincible.”

r />"We ask those rulers [of Pakistan], who claim to be the rulers of the Islamic nation… We ask those armed forces, we ask the military of our Pakistan… You number 700,000-800,000 and your motto is jihad in the path of Allah… Why aren't you declaring jihad against Israel today? Today, we ask the Pakistani government: We have developed missiles. We have missiles with a range of 4,000 km at our disposal, we have F-17 [fighter jets] we have atom bombs, we are the seventh most powerful country. […]

"Mr. Chairman, when will this atomic power be useful? Will we use these missiles as toys? To show our kids? Or will we keep these missiles and this atom bomb in some museum, so that we will able to say [in the future] that at a certain era we had managed to acquire nuclear power? This is very sad. Mr. Speaker, if you want to liberate Kashmir, if you want to help the Kashmiris, if you want to liberate Palestine, if you want to help the Palestinians, then you have only one path, and that is the path of 'fight for the sake of Allah.' The path of Allah is the path of jihad. Jihad is the only way. We have no way other than fighting and confronting them. […]

"I demand of you, I demand of the government of Pakistan, I demand of the Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa: For Allah's sake, if we cannot save our First Qibla, then there is no need for our military, no need for the atomic power, and no need for our missiles."

Not just a preacher stirring up the faithful: this is a politician, speaking in parliament.

The "First Qibla" refers to Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Qibla means direction, and Jerusalem was the direction to which Muslims turned to pray in the early years, before Muhammad changed it to Mecca – hence the "First Qibla".

here):

[Photos © Natalie Christensen]

e: 11pt”>Recently, trans activism has given the world the fairly revolting image of the “cotton ceiling”: riffing on the idea of a glass ceiling for those women in the workplace unsuccessfully seeking promotion, but replacing glass with knickers to represent the “ceiling” that female-attracted trans women often cannot get “past.” Along similar lines, in 2016, a trans activist tweeted, in reference to sexual relations with trans women, that sometimes “the cis [i.e., non-trans] lesbian gets over her genital hang-ups and realises that she can cope just fine.”…

The implication of all this is that the main reason for a lesbian refusing to sleep with trans women, or a gay man with trans men, could only be bigotry and disgust for trans people. Yet this ignores a much more obvious explanation: it’s the sexual orientation, stupid. With such statements coming from what seem like authoritative liberal and left-leaning voices, we get a sense of what must be the moral pressure exerted at a more local level upon younger people ill-equipped to deal with it, and especially young lesbians. A former attendee of a trans youth group recalls that “one day, there were three MTFs [trans women, or male-to-female people] over 40 who were hitting on the teen FTMs, very explicitly. It was obviously making us uncomfortable, but almost no one ever said anything, only changed the topic or tried to engage them in a conversation away from us.”

If only those young FTMs—that is, trans men, or “Female To Male” people—had felt socially permitted, within queer culture, confidently to insist upon the fact of their same-sex attraction. Yet largely thanks to the LGBT organisations supposed to protect them, they weren’t. And many still aren’t.

In other words these LGBT organisations like Stonewall, while adopting a supposedly progressive and liberal approach, have in fact dropped the LGB and gone all out for the T – at the expense in particular of young lesbians.

at its treatment of the professors infringed on their freedom of speech.

So how did the university end up in such a mess? The answer clearly lies in the stranglehold that the campaigning organisation Stonewall has over 850 public and private institutions in the UK, via its much criticised ‘Diversity Champions’ programme, which has led to the silencing of feminist voices and a creeping McCarthyite culture in universities and workplaces over the issue of so-called ‘trans rights’.

The report makes it clear that the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme is in tension with academic freedom. Stonewall’s programme requires university members to ‘instigate specialist trans policies, in addition to general equality policies, which outlaw “transphobic” teaching and research material but offer no clear definition of what would count as such,’ points out the report.

‘If the university considers it appropriate to continue its relationship with Stonewall,’ the report concludes, it should devise a strategy for countering the drawbacks and potential illegalities’ of the programme.  […]

Despite Stonewall’s refusal to acknowledge the tension between trans and women’s rights, discussion about these conflicts is legitimate. Gender identity is not a protected characteristic and by presenting it as such in harassment and bullying policies, universities are contributing to the so-called chilling effect on gender critical views.

Stonewall lists 121 universities as members of its ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme. Similar stories of academics and students being investigated for expressing ‘gender critical’ beliefs are surfacing across the UK. It is about time that Stonewall is forced to lose its hold over so many of our public institutions.