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Up to the Hill, Hampstead:

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Flying Flamingos © Hua Shang

The Red Sails © Albert Dros

Water Park Slides, Houston © Tommy Tenzo

Paragraph-module__paragraph–block ContentPageBodyParagraph-module__paragraph–size-medium–spacing-normal” style=”padding-left: 40px”>It is customary for those who doubt the legality or constitutional propriety of the government’s acts to start with a hand-wringing declaration that they do so with a heavy heart, not doubting for a moment the need for the measures taken. I shall not follow that tradition. I do not doubt the seriousness of the epidemic, but I believe that history will look back on the measures taken to contain it as a monument of collective hysteria and governmental folly….

Marion Post Wolcott – September 1941. "Houses in old mining town of Leadville, Colorado."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]

asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451ebab69e2026bdea16795200c img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/mt_imported_image_1758338630.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Lost-summer7″ />

[Photos © Alys Tomlinson]

A self-published book, Lost Summers, is now available for pre-orders.

void-offending-transgender-people%2F”>tweeted about "the birthing parent". They were forced to apologise after the backlash they received from outraged mothers.

Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust referred to women as “people with a cervix”. It was pointed out that many women are unaware of what a cervix is, so they were being unhelpful as well as offensive. 

Femcare, based in Canada, describes itself as “a global leader in menstrual policy entrepreneurship”. In a recent tweet, it referred to pregnant women as “menstruators” – a particularly baffling piece of offensive obscurantism, given that pregnant women don't menstruate.

Rewire News Group, an American “nonprofit media organization dedicated to reshaping the national dialogue on all things sex”, that “center(s) BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities” and “seek(s) out inclusive points of view”, tweeted about “people who are born with a uterus”. 

Of course the phrase "people who menstruate" was what set off the whole JK Rowling affair – "‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?"

It's unstoppable. In the latest efforts, Open Clinic NHS, refers to "people with vaginas". And Forbes Science has "pregnant people". Anything to avoid those awful trans-exclusionary words "women" and "mothers".

You'd think it would work both ways, to avoid offending trans men as well as trans women – neither of whom have the requisite biological equipment. But talk of "people with testicles", or "sperm-providers", doesn't seem to feature much. It's all about the misogyny.

med insurgents rather than Syrian troops”.

In Daraya, however, no one was aware of this “prisoner swap”. And even his own interviewees didn’t support his conclusions. Most gave evasive answers. And the only interviewee he cites as supporting his theory casts further doubt on it: “Although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard,” writes Fisk, “he believed that most were related to the government army”.

The record was quickly set straight by the American journalist Janine di Giovanni who sneaked into Daraya disguised as a local and interviewed survivors without the intimidating presence of regime forces. (The Free Syrian Army had left two weeks earlier.) Di Giovanni revealed in precise detail how the offensive began, what weapons were used, and how the slaughter was carried out. Human Rights Watch corroborated her report.

Fisk was undeterred. A few months later he visited “one of Syria’s most feared military prisons”. But even though two of the four prisoners he interviewed “gave unmistakable hints of brutal treatment”, even though their testimonies sounded like “stories that the Syrian authorities obviously wanted us to hear”, Fisk tried to convince readers that they were telling the truth because they “were clearly anxious to talk to us”, because the prison guards left at his insistence, and because Fisk “refused later requests by the Syrian authorities for access to our tapes”.

That all the prisoners confessed to being motivated by religious extremism or sectarian hatred, that one pronounced himself “happy to be arrested” by the Mukhabarat, and that one admitted to receiving “very good treatment” from his interrogators did nothing to raise Fisk’s suspicions. Indeed, Fisk’s usual cynicisms is absent when these doomed men—likely awaiting the grim fate suffered by at least 11,000 others—tell him that the FSA are just “thieves, killers and rapists” and condemn “the Emir of Qatar for stirring revolution in Syria”.

The list goes on…

A once revered journalist, who ended his reporting career as an Assad apologist.

A giant mural by artist Vitaly Tsarenkov, who works under the moniker SY, as part of the Urban Morphogenesis festival in Chelyabinsk, Russia:

[Photos © Vitaly Tsarenkov]

It's called “Love of Nature”, and is supposedly "a vertical rendering of the human impact on nature, with color-blocked trucks, road cones, and towering buildings near the top and a fire, flowers, and tufts of grass occupying space at the bottom". Though you'd be forgiven for not quite grasping the ecological message.

A couple of weeks back I had a post on reactions from throughout the Muslim world to the beheading of the French teacher, as covered by MEMRI TV. Well, there've been a few more since…

• Pakistani politician and Islamic scholar Allama Khadim Hussain Rizvi urges the Pakistani government to declare jihad against “those who slander the Prophet Muhammad" by dropping the atom bomb, to let "everyone die".

• In a lesson from the Al-Aqsa mosque, Sheikh Issam Amira declares that the beheading of French teacher Paty is a great honour for all Muslims.

• According to Canadian imam Younus Kathrada, Samuel Paty was a "cursed, evil-spirited, filthy excuse for a human-being".

• And finally, here's the happy scene at a school playground in Islamabad:

A teacher at Islamabad's Jamia Hafsa Madrassa beheads what was described as an effigy of French President Macron with a sword in front of her students, accompanied by a little song:

"This is the punishment of the Prophet's slanderer. The head chopped off from the body. This is the punishment of the Prophet's slanderer. The head chopped from the body. The makers of the cartoons. We shall crush them to dust. The makers of the cartoons. We shall crush them to dust."

two subscriptions, one for its staff in England and one for staff in Wales. A separate FOI request to the Scottish government shows that it paid £9,144 to the charity in 2019, including £7,200 for membership, the newspaper reported.

Organisations learn about inclusion from the programme and are encouraged to allow trans people to choose which lavatories and changing rooms to use.

Simon Fanshawe, one of the charity’s founders, left the organisation last year, claiming its transgender policy risked undermining “women’s sex-based rights and protections”, and a teenage girl, supported by the Safe Schools Alliance UK, has applied for a judicial review of the CPS’s membership of the scheme.

A letter sent last year to The Sunday Times, co-signed by Mr Fanshawe, said: “Last October a group of LGB rights supporters asked Stonewall to ‘commit to fostering an atmosphere of respectful debate rather than demonising as transphobic those who wish to discuss, or dissent from, Stonewall’s transgender policies’. Since then, Stonewall has refused repeated requests to enter into any such dialogue.

“The government continues to treat Stonewall as if it represented the views of progressive thinking in general, and specifically LGB opinion. It does not.

“We believe it has made mistakes in its approach that undermine women’s sex-based rights and protections. The most worrying aspect of this is that all primary-school children are now challenged to review their ‘gender identity’ and decide that they may be the opposite sex if they do not embrace outdated gender stereotypes.”

Many organisations mention that they are Stonewall diversity champions but not that they have paid a subscription fee for the title.

Once the UK's leading campaigning organisation for gay rights, Stonewall has transformed itself into an organisation consumed by trans ideology. And we're paying for it, apparently, to spread its regressive misogynist message.

And why is a statutory body like the CPS giving financial support to an organisation campaigning for the law to enter the realms of fantasy by allowing men to become women simply by saying so?