Webbon posted a video under the title “I’ll Take Fascism Over Democracy.” In it, he and others discuss their preference for more authoritarian or hierarchical forms of government over liberal democracy, which they view as decadent and failing. China Uncensored replied by calling this “the right wing version of a useful idiot,” arguing that fascism is a form of socialism and that people who advocate for such systems rarely imagine they themselves will end up among its victims.

The phrase “useful idiot” has a long history. It was popularized during the Cold War by Yuri Bezmenov (a KGB defector turned journalist, seen in the picture above) to describe Western intellectuals and sympathizers who excused or actively supported Soviet communism while remaining blind (or willfully naive) about its repressions, purges, and body count. The term implies someone who advances a cause that will ultimately consume them, usually because they believe the violence will only be directed at their enemies.

China Uncensored’s point, which the song takes up, is that the same pattern can appear on the right. Some people who correctly identify the failures and excesses of contemporary liberal democracy conclude that the solution is a strongman, a more coercive state, or an explicitly authoritarian system. The song treats this as a recurring error rather than a uniquely left-wing one: the belief that concentrated power will reliably serve “our side” and stop once the other side has been dealt with.

The lyrics walk through that logic step by step. They describe the attraction of order, uniforms, and decisive action; the tendency to downplay historical parallels; and the assumption that temporary emergency powers will remain temporary. The chorus turns on the irony that the same mechanisms used against political opponents have historically been turned on their original supporters once those supporters were no longer useful. The bridge notes that the pattern is old enough to be predictable, regardless of which team is currently advocating it.

In short, the song is not a defense of the status quo. It is a warning, drawn from the China Uncensored post, about the recurring temptation to trade liberal constraints for concentrated power in the belief that this time the power will be used only against the right people. The historical record, the lyrics suggest, has rarely cooperated with that belief.

This song came out of a multi-day conversation that started out normal and then revealed itself as a soft sales pitch. After several days of back-and-forth, I got the sense an OnlyFans link was coming. I asked directly whether she had one. She confirmed by dropping the link. I told her I wasn’t interested, called the move what it looked like to me, and blocked her.

The lyrics are a blunt rejection of that specific pattern: long chats that feel personal until the moment a paid-content link appears. The title and chorus state the boundary without ambiguity—no subscription, no content, no monthly fee, no conversion of the conversation into a transaction. The verses describe the sequence many people have run into: extended messaging, photos, compliments, and the gradual sense that the interaction is being kept alive until the pitch feels timed right.

It is written in a 6/8 feel because that meter has a rolling, almost conversational rhythm that fits the “days of talking” setup before the hard stop. The structure is straightforward—verses laying out the setup, chorus stating the refusal, bridge rejecting the pretense that the long chat was something other than a funnel.

The point is not a broad attack on anyone who has an OnlyFans. It is a refusal to treat personal attention as free marketing for paid content, especially after the conversation has already been framed as ordinary interest. Once the link drops, the interaction stops being a conversation and becomes a sales attempt. The song simply records the decision not to continue it.

That is the full context. The lyrics are the short version of saying no.

“Tiddy Skittles” is the nickname the song gives the pills themselves—colorful little tablets that, when taken by a biological male, can cause breast tissue to develop. Estrogen is the primary female sex hormone. In males it suppresses testosterone, redistributes body fat, softens skin, and, with enough time and dose, often produces gynecomastia (male breast growth). The “tiddy” part is just slang for that physical change; the “Skittles” part is a reference to the rainbow assortment of pills some people take.

The lyrics stay light on purpose. They’re not a medical guide or a political manifesto. They’re a cartoonish retelling of one specific experience: a guy decides to take the hormones, notices the physical shifts, and treats the whole thing like a low-stakes personal project. Lines about shirts fitting differently or friends doing a double-take are exaggerated for rhythm and comedy, not clinical accuracy.

Biologically, the song is describing a real and well-documented effect. Cross-sex hormones do change secondary sex characteristics. Whether someone finds that desirable, irrelevant, or concerning is outside the scope of a three-minute joke song. The track simply takes the premise at face value and runs with the visual gag.

If you’re reading this, you can treat the song however you like — meme, cautionary tale, curiosity, or none of the above. The only claim I’m making is that the nickname “Tiddy Skittles” is catchy and that estrogen can grow breasts in males. Everything else is just the song having fun with those two facts.

h/t for putting the idea in my head.

In a recent video circulating on X, India Willoughby—once known as Jonathan Willoughby, a regional newsreader who transitioned in the mid-2010s—stood in front of a brick wall and urged viewers to ignore the changing rules around single-sex spaces. “Just keep using female facilities anyway,” the clip advised, framing resistance as men not getting their way and urging people to carry on even if challenged. On-screen text referenced Labour’s “retrograde step” and recommended writing letters or simply persisting.

Gender-critical accounts quickly framed it as a man telling other men to keep using women’s spaces. One reply captured the mood with a single line: “Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white dude.” The line stuck because it cut through the usual arguments. It wasn’t about complex theory or medical literature. It was about the visible self-assurance of someone born male, with a public career built under a male name, instructing others to treat female facilities as optional.

That confidence is the product. Willoughby has spent years arguing that restrictions on sex-based spaces are unenforceable, humiliating, and motivated by prejudice rather than privacy or safety. After the UK Supreme Court clarified that “woman” in equality law means biological sex, and as public and private providers adjusted policies, the response from some activists has been to treat the law as optional. The video fits that pattern: acknowledge the pushback, then recommend continuing as before.

The resulting sarcasm writes itself. The same person who once presented the news as Jonathan now presents advice on navigating women’s toilets as India, with the casual authority of someone who has already decided the outcome. Critics note the gap between that presentation and the underlying sex. Supporters call any reference to the prior name or male puberty “hate.” The middle ground—recording the public record without either celebration or ritual apology—has largely collapsed.

A song even emerged from the moment, set to an eighth-note shuffle:

“Lord, grant me the confidence / Of a mediocre white dude / Who never asks permission / And never gets reviewed.”

The lyrics lean into the joke without inventing new facts. They simply restate the advice in the video and the reaction it produced. Whether the track gets recorded or stays a meme is secondary. The phrase already did the work of naming the mismatch between the certainty on display and the contested ground underneath it.

Willoughby’s position is consistent with a broader activist view that self-identification and persistence should override sex-based boundaries. Opponents argue that those boundaries exist for reasons that predate the current debate and cannot be waved away by confidence or volume. The video and the reply sit squarely in that disagreement. One side hears a woman defending access. The other hears a man telling men the rules no longer apply.

Johnny Willyboy is on his bullshit again. The confidence remains undiminished.

Someone in a thread was treating an obvious fact as if noticing it were a kind of cruelty. My reply was: And Martin here thinks we don’t have these things in our heads called “eyes.”

That’s the whole argument. Sex is not a mood, a wardrobe, or a story you tell the room. In ordinary life people clock male and female the way they clock height or age: by looking. You can change clothes, name, and pronouns. You cannot change what other people are seeing.

The song is not a policy paper. It is that point put in four-line boxes so it can be sung.

If a claim requires you to distrust your own sight, the problem is the claim, not your eyes.

Also, In Memoriam:

Peter James Byrne, the English singer and songwriter best known as the voice of Naked Eyes, died in Los Angeles on 14 September 2026 after a brief illness. He was 74.

Born in Islington on 9 June 1952 and raised in Bath, Byrne came up through short-lived groups including Studio and Neon, the latter with Rob Fisher and future Tears for Fears members Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. In 1982 he and Fisher formed Naked Eyes and signed to EMI. Their synth-pop cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Always Something There to Remind Me” reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Promises, Promises,” “When the Lights Go Out,” and “(What) In the Name of Love” followed as U.S. Top 40 hits.

He is survived by his children Merlin, Dylan and Chloe; his siblings Eileen, Sandy, Carol and Steve; and his former wife, Elena.

I always thought Pete Byrne was brilliant because he made craft look easy. He could take a Bacharach melody, drop it onto synths, and still sound human. That voice cut through the chrome of early-1980s pop without shouting. “Always Something There to Remind Me” and “Promises, Promises” taught me that a hook is not a gimmick if the line is true.

He influenced how I write. Keep the lyric plain. Let the chorus do the work. Do not hide behind production. If people can sing it after one listen, you did the job. Naked Eyes also showed that a small unit can last: two writers, a handful of songs, then years of carrying the catalogue after Rob Fisher was gone. That persistence mattered as much as the hits.

When I sit down with a guitar and try to make a four-line box that will stand on its own, I am still chasing that clarity. Byrne made pop that you could hear. That is the standard.

We have heard the line so many times it has become liturgy. AI music has no soul. It is sterile. It is an insult to real art. The people who say this often say it with the confidence of someone who has already won an argument they never entered.

So enter it.

If machines are only producing lifeless product, a musician with lived experience, a physical instrument, and a voice should be able to take one of those songs, learn it, and outperform the recording in public. That is not a thought experiment. It is a performance problem. Performance problems get solved on a stage, not in a comments section.

The ones who refuse this test while issuing sweeping moral verdicts are not protecting music. They are protecting a posture. Calling the output garbage and then declining to pick up an instrument is not principled. It is evasive. If the track is hollow, exposing that hollowness should be straightforward. If it is not straightforward, the slogan was doing more work than the ear.

This has already started to happen, which makes the refusal even thinner. Human players have taken AI songs and put flesh on them. Jazz Is Dead arranged and performed a human version of the AI soul track “Through My Soul.” Sons of Legion covered Velvet Sundown’s “Dust on the Wind” and put both versions in front of strangers. Other musicians formed a tribute project specifically to re-record Velvet Sundown songs with real players. These people did the obvious thing: they treated the material as material. Some of it improved. Some of it revealed the original’s limits. That is what musicians do with songs.

“Soul,” in this argument, is usually a magic word meant to end discussion. It is not a measurement. Live performance is. A human version can win on breath, risk, timing that leans, a room that answers back, an arrangement the model did not invent. It can also lose on hook, finish, and the frictionless catchiness generators now produce on demand. Either result is more honest than another essay about authenticity from someone who will not sing the chorus.

Here is the challenge:

Pick a specific AI-generated song that already exists and has listeners. Name it. Link it. Learn it. Arrange it faithfully or tear it open. Perform it live, or record it in a single take that does not hide the fact a person is playing. Publish your version next to the original. Say what winning means for you: more force, better singing, a smarter arrangement, a crowd that stays. Then let other people listen.

That is the whole test. Not a petition. Not a thread about training data. A song, a body, a room.

If you believe AI cannot make art, this should be easy work. If you will not do the work, stop pretending the refusal is courage. Courage, in music, has always looked like walking out and playing the thing.

Post the original. Post yours. And let the room decide.

This song grew out of a very specific, very public moment: a heavily filtered video of someone insisting their presentation should have been enough, only to discover that it wasn’t. The clip that sparked it featured the now-famous line about the tits being out, followed by the inevitable recognition that something still didn’t add up.

“You’ve Been Clocked” is a short, sharp send-up of that gap between effort and result. It isn’t interested in feelings or identity claims. It is interested in what actually happens when people look and listen: the voice that doesn’t match the costume, the hands, the frame, the way the room quietly clocks what the filter tried to hide.

The song treats the whole performance as theater that didn’t quite land. No lectures, no manifesto — just the observation that some things are harder to rewrite than a good filter and a pair of implants. That’s the joke, and that’s the point.

PS I inadvertently hit the modulation wheel on the keyboard, but it was such an interesting mistake I kept it in.

I wrote I Miss Drugs because it has been one of those days. You know the ones. The days where your brain files a formal complaint that consciousness is too high-resolution. The lighting is too honest. The clock is doing performance art. Someone says “how are you?” and your soul tries to open a Help Desk ticket.

This is not a how-to. This is not a glow-up. This is not me standing on a mountain in linen whispering that healing is a journey. Healing is a journey, yes, but sometimes the journey is just you standing in the kitchen, staring at a mug, thinking: I used to have a faster off-switch than this.

The song is about that specific, inconvenient honesty: you can be proud you didn’t vanish, and still miss the vanishing. You can keep an empty hand and still remember how nice it was when the world briefly went out of focus. You can do the dishes like a functional citizen and hate every wet plate for being evidence that you stayed.

If you are in recovery, almost-recovery, “I don’t do that anymore except in my head” recovery, or simply a person who has ever wanted the volume knob on existence to go down one illegal notch: this one’s for you. Sit with it. Laugh at it. Send it to the group chat with no context. Then drink water like a Victorian ghost trying to live.

Morning light still shows up. Rude of it, honestly. But it does.

There are finales that reward you. There are finales that explain you. And then there is the kind that walks into the room, sits down, and dares you to keep breathing normally.

Silo’s Season 3 closer is that last kind.

If you've been present for this show since the beginning of cleaning, you know its tried and true recipe: deny all knowledge, deny all knowledge, two degrees tilt camera, what is this room again? This season, so much of its energy was occupied existing simultaneously within two different clocks: one ticking in the silo we thought we had a handle on, one ticking in the world that created the necessity for the silo. And though, by the opening of the finale, you're primed to receive answers, you're probably not primed by how the answers are delivered.

The first stretch of the episode is the tell. No throat-clearing. No gentle recap card. It drops you into a version of this story that has been running, quietly, the entire time you were looking elsewhere. The tone is clinical. The faces are familiar in a way that feels wrong. And the show does not blink.

That is the cruelty of good dystopia. It doesn’t need monsters in rubber suits. It needs competent people with procedures, a voice that stays even, and a reason that sounds, for half a second, almost administrative. Silo has always been about systems that outlive the people who built them. This hour makes you feel the weight of that idea in your chest instead of in a monologue.

I won’t tell you what happens. I will tell you what it does.

It reframes every conversation about “outside.”

It makes earlier acts of control look small.

It turns a character you thought you were still getting to know into a question you now have to live with.

And it ends not with a bow, but with a direction: the story is no longer about surviving one silo. It’s about what you do once you understand who has been holding the map.

Apple has been playing a long game with this adaptation. Wool gave the trap. Shift gave the architecture. Dust is the bill coming due. Season 3’s finale is the sound of that bill hitting the table.

Watch it when you can sit still. Don’t put your phone on the arm of the couch. The first twenty-five minutes are not an opening. They are a statement of terms.

After that, Season 4 isn’t a continuation. It’s a confrontation.

I wrote two notes the other day. One said: I am a man and I am not confused about what is swinging between my legs. The other: Men must be held accountable for what men do; I am not blaming women for what trans-identified males do and I am tired of being told that a normal attraction to women is something shameful - the only conceivable motive must be that I simply want to get my dick out.

Someone wanted me to turn it into a song.

This I did. The verses are essentially the notes – not even disguised much. I know what sex I am. I am not at all interested in the new language that is seeking to abolish it.

When men commit crimes against women they should be held accountable – do not launder his conduct under the pretense of identifying as female, then feign surprise when the female half of the human race is up in arms.

The chorus is the part that lots of people consistently omit on purpose. Accountability and attraction are not mutually entailing. Most men are attracted to women.

This is not a statement of intent or of crime. Labeling everyday heterosexual lust as predators and simultaneously demanding that males be accepted as females in female spaces is an especially neat piece of work. It is an excellent method of pathologizing the majority while protecting the exception.

The bridge is a refusal.

I am not seeking approval to be identified as male in my daily life. I am not going to apologize for noticing women. If the current zeitgeist expects such apology, so much the worse for the current zeitgeist. That is the song.

It is not subtle because the notes are not subtle.

Biology is not a concept or a mood. Personal accountability for males is not a matter of preference but of requirement. I am attracted to women; there are many more of us on the planet than there are men who predate on women.

And if there is any ambiguity on the subject: no, I still am not confused about what is swinging between my legs.

What can you say?

Hey friends,

The neuropathy has been steadily, voraciously eating away at my life, in both the gentle whispers of my toes and the insistent shouts to my fingers. Even my signature – no longer mine – has come to resemble a determined toddler scribbling a ransom note. My career as a session musician is in serious doubt, and my prospects for being a bass hero evaporated the moment my fine motor skills punched out their notice to quit on life.

So, of course, I wrote a song about it.

This isn’t a weepy lament. This isn’t a sterile health and wellness PSA. This is a swinging little number for a group playing at an 8th note swing: you know the feel, the relaxed, slightly drunken stumble that approximates the actual feeling of my nerves trying, then giving up, on keeping time.

This, my friends, is “The Neuropathy Blues”

It’s dark humor as an act of self-preservation. The concept is pretty simple:neuropathy trounced in like some cannibal chef, proclaimed it was gonna eat my whole darn life, and then got straight to work, picking us apart limb by limb, starting with our extremities and working inward. The lyric is all about dropped spoons, lost string “accuracy”, and signing my name like some “drunken doctor” while still manage to “swing on and hang in there.”

You can hear the vicious intent of this little number.

The bottom line is, if we’re gonna lose the ability to play a single note of “Hey Jude” or be unable to coherently write down a list of what’s needed at Whole Foods, we can at least chuckle at the ruins.

Cheers! 🍻

In a federal court over the summer, there was a significant event - a momentous event that as of yet, has been under the radar in many circles of the broader culture who don't closely follow developments in gender medicine.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has essentially admitted that their acclaimed “Standards of Care, Version 8” (SOC-8) is not the definitive standard of care that it is conventionally treated as in its motion to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s lawsuit - co-sponsored by a group of states - dated July 28, 2022. In WPATH’s own words, they have merely been presenting SOC-8 as their free-speech opinion: a source to reference in a field which they now characterize as “medical and scientific uncertainty.”

Clinicians and systems who adhere to it - and treat it as the status quo - will “assume independent responsibility,” claims the filing.

It’s a big step back.

For many years, WPATH had its Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC-8) the 2022 report that served as the de facto gospel and consensus opinion document outlining care for gender dysphoric minors and adults for the major medical institutions, hospitals, and clinics of the US. Express any doubts and you risked your career. In contrast, European systematic reviews – most importantly the Cass Review in the UK - concluded that the evidence base for the blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgeries in minors was woefully inadequate.

Those reviews were a driving force for restriction in several nations while the United States has remained deeply divided on the question.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), joined by Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas, has filed suit against WPATH in June 2026, citing that it provided the apparatus for health care providers to peddle misinformation and falsehoods about safety and efficacy, necessity of the procedure and scientific consensus to the patients and parents.

According to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine’s detailed reading of the motion (the document is publicly available):

• WPATH now acknowledges two sides to the scientific debate over care for gender-dysphoric youth: the gender-affirming model it promotes, and the Cass Review / Cass-aligned approaches that restrict or ban puberty blockers and hormones for minors.

• It describes pediatric transgender medicine as marked by medical and scientific uncertainty.

• It frames SOC-8 recommendations as an expression of WPATH’s free speech rather than an established standard of care.

But, most telling of all, WPATH argues that physicians and organizations relying on SOC-8 as the standard take on all the liabilities and responsibility for that reliance.

Essentially: buyer beware. The document marketed for many years as a gold-standard treatment has, by WPATH's current legal interpretation, devolved more into an act of First Amendment advocacy.

WPATH’s arguments are based on the latest Supreme Court cases (United States v. Skrmetti, which approved state bans on the practice for young people, and Chiles v. Salazar, which protected specific kinds of talk therapy), which their earlier rhetoric could hardly have dreamed of ever making. Back then, the organization often referred to any similar policies as "conversion therapy" or "harmful limitations."

This is not the first time a high-ranking WPATH official has thrown the organization and their legal standing under the bus by themselves: In a 2026 malpractice lawsuit against Dr. Einhorn and WPATH for detransition from a double-mastectomy he did to a 16-year-old girl (which she won $2,000,000 as a result), then WPATH President-Elect Dr. Loren Schechter claimed under oath, that “the standards of care are NOT interpreted by the courts.” as being “the” standard of care - but rather that the standard is what a reasonably skilled and competent physician would do in the circumstances.

If SOC-8 is only one opinion in an unsettled scientific debate, then hospitals, clinics, and professional societies that adopted it wholesale as “the” standard of care may need to revisit that decision.

Informed-consent processes that rested on claims of strong consensus and medical necessity look very weak (as if we didn't already know that).

For many families and patients the message they’ve heard was that the science was settled. WPATH takes this position in court now and argues those families are merely hearing one side of a debate.

Where the orthodoxy once had an appointed sheriff at its back door, under legal siege, the group is now calling its own handiwork contentious marketing. Those shifts do not undo the years of clinical care under SOC-8; however, they would irrevocably reshape the legal-ethical environment going forward.

The evidentiary rigor of the literature from WPATH has long been scrutinized in systematic reviews over the past several years. But the gap between those reviews and the often-certain tones that were attached to SOC-8 were where the real problem lay. With WPATH’s latest submission, that gap has been brought before the courts in a formal document.

Whether courts accept the First Amendment defense remains to be seen. The factual admission that the “Standards of Care” are opinion rather than settled science is already on the record.

SOC-8 was not proposed or accepted as tentative clinical opinion for years. It appeared in protocols, hospital policies, coverage criteria, Medical Board recommendations, expert reports and briefs, and activism, as the standard of care, as a matter of fact. To dispute its recommendations, or challenge the evidence behind its claims, had immediate professional, social (and thus economic) consequences. Most clinicians were, correctly, advised that adherence to WPATH was a clear path of action from both a clinical and legal risk standpoint, even more so in a climate of accusations that disagreement equates to harm or transphobia.

WPATH and proponents have spent years bolstering this belief. The language used in WPATH’s publications and the marketing around SOC-8 underscored expert opinion, science-backed medical advice, and medical necessity. Facing pressure from FTC deception complaints, WPATH is shifting to the other side. These are opinions in an uncertain area of expertise which medical experts need to discern on their own.

Now the question remains as to what this means for the doctors who have relied on SOC-8.

For future (and pending) cases involving detransitioning or medical negligence, plaintiffs can now cite this recent filing to argue that doctors did not use their own judgment and that WPATH is to blame. "I was following WPATH" is no longer a credible defense when WPATH claims the guidance is opinion and that doctors should be assessing the evidence on their own. WPATH President-Elect Dr. Loren Schechter's recent testimony in the Varian case (wherein he asserted the Standards of Care is "not considered" legal standard of care) already foreshadowed this development, but this document makes it explicit.

And if the guidance was actually considered in-house as just one side in an ongoing argument, then claims to patients and parents that the science was decided, and the treatments the only option become harder to sustain, and the wording of the brief challenging the earlier “certainty” impossible to dismiss.

The issue applies to the hospitals, health systems, and associations that took a large bite of the SOC-8 apple and made it their standard of care. Their best practices were based on a publication the source itself is saying in court is a controversial opinion, not a universally accepted standard.

As a nonprofit guidelines and advocacy group, WPATH is sheltering under the umbrella of the First Amendment - that you can’t shut down scientific debate in the name of fighting consumer fraud. Doctors and private clinics don’t have that cushion. They have patients and juries and licensing boards and insurance companies.

This is a total retreat from WPATH’s point of view. If SOC-8 actually provided the “means and instrumentalities” to make deceptions to patients, WPATH is arguing that the paper was an opinion piece targeted towards people who could understand and critique it, thus creating a break in the causal chain, like those offered in Skrmetti and Chiles v Salazar.

This is the price of that strategy: the public loss of faith in the very authority which gave SOC-8 weight. After expending so many years preaching orthodox observance of those guidelines, the legal instruments of the organizations, which once wrote those guidelines, now admits that no one truly knows what it takes, there’s no scientific consensus here, there are people trying good-faith answers (Cass’s group of approaches is a direct mention).

But the physicians are stuck carrying all the liability.

This is the go-to script when an activist body providing guidance has its guidance publicly challenged and is held to account: The org preserves its claim of having protected, opinion-based speech and ensures institutional continuity by reiterating the nonbinding, subjective nature of its statements. The burden of those consequences falls on the clinicians and the institutions implementing its guidance. It is almost irrelevant whether the courts see its arguments under the First Amendment as successful or not, just that it uttered distancing statements.

The doctors who built and based their clinics and treatment on those procedures and signed documents, relying on SOC-8 as protocol and established fact, now find themselves in an astonishingly untenable situation. The exact same people who have spent years touting the SOC-8 guidelines as the final word have now appeared in federal court and publicly stated these same guidelines do not bind them, that they serve as mere opinion on unsettled scientific questions, while throwing the “independent responsibility” squarely into the laps of the physicians themselves - physicians who treated their patient based on the consensus offered by WPATH.

Indeed, it becomes a direct roadmap.

The plaintiffs’ bar can read directly from the official document.

Now hospitals that adopted the guidelines in whole; the insurers who accepted those standards for payment, and the medical boards all stand on equally shaky ground. The internal professional fear that kept dissenting doctors isolated now serves only to highlight the enormity of WPATH’s abdication of that risk. Those that follow the established - no, only now recognized by WPATH as debatable guidelines will be left holding the chart notes, the patient, the treatment history and a potentially ruinous legal battle.

Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s an TRA who spent years screaming “Trans women are women!” at anyone with eyes on the back of their head who caught their attention, now looking at an Enes Kanter Freedom declaration like, “Okay but HE’S not a woman.”

I kid you not, the low-key comedy is something else.

Yesterday, the 6-foot-10-inches-tall former (that’s “actual NBA”) center broke the internet with a video in which she declared she would be eligible for the 2027 WNBA Draft.

Her logic was irrefutable in its brilliance: the only thing needed to meet a criteria is that of saying the words to meet it, a criterion that she has achieved in meeting. She has “meditated carefully upon WNBA’s rules on self-identification and gender-affirming guidelines and policies.”

She swears she’s not making fun of you; She wishes only to live her life equally here at the top of society: welcome to WNBA training camp!

But the WNBA collectively bargaining agreement itself states “only players who are women are eligible. It does not state what “women” are. Nor does it say how the league handles the 250lb male athletic who after ten years the NBA just decided in week seven that the vibes were indeed female. Usually this ambiguity was fine when it served the preferred narrative and was pushed aside by outrage; today, the sky is falling down.

Witness the mental contortions. These are the same individuals who told us, for years, that self-identification is sacrosanct, that “lived experience” is the gold standard, and that anybody who objected to a single part of this entire proposition was a bigot, now doing backflips of olympic caliber on why this particular self-identified woman does not meet the criteria. "he's just doing it for the attention." " he's not trans." "this is different because ... Reasons."

The reasons often come down to this inconvenient fact that Kanter is really tall, really strong, and can actually out-dunk quite a lot of guys she used to compete against.

We were offered a very tidy, all-or-nothing logic – that if someone simply self-identified as a woman, they are a woman. Period. And it really did not matter whether sports, locker rooms, academic achievement, accolades or medaling were involved – just that she was a woman and received our acknowledgement. Then this year a young phenom, who claimed she is still capable of “60 and 30” in the WNBA, calls the ethic into question, and we can hardly hear our own mouths recalling what it was.

That’s how the whole house of cards falls. It only ever relies on the right kind of people performing “identity”-people who are, ideally, unlikely to provide a glaring physical incongruity, or who hold the correct positions anyway. A 6’10” Turkish-American activist who has publicly criticized China, Turkey, and basic biology?

Bam.

Sex binary resurrected. Biology validated. Fairness established. Women’s sports saved.

Boom.

She didn’t come up with the loop hole, all she did was literally stroll right into one waving a welcome mat which stated ‘self ID or GTFO’. Royce White saw there was a gap in the market shortly after this, saying she was a trans woman and wanting the same access to the draft.

Floodgates Joke, of course, writes itself.

Naturally, the pearl-clutching has begun over the “hate” and the “use of the WNBA for political pawn.” The players’ association came out with a statemement about not stirring up hate and division. Fair enough.

But the fear and division was not first conjured by a retired center in a hoodie noting that the emperor lacks clothes and has significant hops.

It all began when institutions started believing that male athleticism advantage in the sports arena was a social construction that could be dismissed with sufficient pronouns.

Next June, once the Supreme Court finally acts with more obvious force in the way most people surely already have decided it should about this specific brand of sportive reality-denial, quite a few of the freshly energized proponents of “well he’s not a woman,” etc., will have discreetly shifted their allegiance once more, probably either arguing that they always stood for fairness, or that the Kanter gambit simply wasn’t so much gambit at all, or even that the actual menace was those observers who noticed it!

In the meantime,enjoy the spectacle. Enes Kanter Freedom has provided us with the ultimate test of the ideology: take the idea to the logical conclusion of existence, and watch the faithful contrive on the fly the exceptions that justify the entire premise: trans women are women.

Unless they are six-ten and a former NBA center, and also doing it for irony.

Then of course, and coincidentally, common sense reasserts itself.

I’ll see you at training camp, ladies. And try to be on your best game; pack some athletic tape for your ankles, perhaps?

Factors Driving the Reality on the Ground

Historically, homosexuality has been illegal in the Gaza Strip under the British Mandate and Egyptian administration. It continues to be an illegal act under the Hamas authority.

In the West Bank, even though there isn’t a precise and contemporary PA penal code establishing capital punishment for homosexuality, the relationships are still quite criminalized as remaining Jordanian law requires that same-sex practices be punishing and as a result of serious social policing measures enforced in the context of PA rule.

There is no anti-discrimination legislation, same-sex relationships are not acknowledged legally, and there are no mechanisms to protect LGBTQ people from state-sanctioned violence or violence at the hands of other individuals.

Within ultraconservative patristarchal societies it might not come as a surprise family honor takes precedence over all of one’s individual rights. For many of these societies homosexuality is not seen solely as a social taboo; indeed it presents an assault on existing norms. As an LGBTQ person born and raised into such environs, the process of simply coming out may be equivalent to facing instant and public exclusion, the violence of your own family members (“honor violence”), and the danger of your being targeted by the local paramilitary and state elements.

But the deep absurdity of the paradox is that all these people parading through Western cities to call for attention to the Palestinian cause would almost certainly, by simply living openly under the authority of Hamas or in the general framework of the territories’ customs, be put to death, imprisoned or tortured.

Authentic solidarity needs intellectual honesty, though. When activism in the West sacrifices the life experience of the people that it purports to support – abandoning universal human rights in favor of targeted ideological affinity – it’s not crafting freedom; it’s committing a carefully orchestrated offense against awareness.

When a movement demands silence from you, or glories in an order that would have your being locked in prison or worse, inquire, whose freedom?

Popped my last metformin required this morning.

No ritual, no celebration however with no toast with champagne merely one little white pill… same dimensions and design in structure with most just like these earlier and after one gulp… finished. The container’s finished and also the prescription’s finished and something which sounded akin to alleviation washed within the after quiet.

For so long metformin was a daily nod that I was on my way to destroying myself through my own body - and the numbers this medication held at bay. Taken with breakfast. Or taken with dinner.

Monitored.

Adjusted. Rinse and repeat. That reminder is done today. My numbers are “good” in my doc’s estimation - and perhaps I’ve stuck to “making better choices -” it’s a non-necessary to my medication box.

Officially.

Victory.

Unofficially, I can’t write my name anymore.

Three years with neuropathy has made me graceless and untrustworthy. I can barely sign my name. That graceful signature that used to come with as much attention to spelling than tying my shoes looks now like it’s being forged by a five-year-old who has only finger-painted before this year’s artwork.

It’s worse now: the bass guitar has spent these three years sitting in it’s case.

Those days when I’d pick it up, and it would fit into my hands like a warm coat with extensions for arms, well those have ended now. It’s just pieces of wood and string that don’t, won’t, reliably behave according to intention any longer. I lost those callouses years ago. The muscle memory is still lodged securely in my brain, yet the physical execution remains-or becomes-confused; the nervous connection between intending and producing has been cut in some places, or amplified into static in others.

I used to think the hard part would be getting off the metformin. It turns out the hard part is living with what the years of high blood sugar already took. The pill is gone. The damage is not.

Just not ungrateful, is all. Better diabetes management does at least promise the neuropathy won’t inevitably continue to ravage my nerves until my fingers lose all dexterity in their ability to feel my guitar playing it’s very own lament - there’s even treatment to explore there, doctors still available to tap, adaptive implements to test. My iPhone can convert my babblings into language. I can buy thicker ink pen for when I make to scribbling at an album’s worth of lyrical inspiration will hit, I can buy, well eventually I hope, to once again be playing bass or to give it away to someone who will appreciate its particular set of charms as much as I always did.

But today is not about solutions. Today is about marking the line.

I took the last metformin I will ever need.

I can barely write my name.
I can’t play bass anymore.

Both of those things are true at the same time. The body keeps its own score, and the score isn’t finished just because one prescription ended.

Still, an empty bottle is an empty bottle. I’ll take the win where I can find it.

A few days ago I posted something that’s been rattling around in my head for a while:

I have come to the conclusion that males and females experience transition differently… for males it’s ‘look at me.’ For females it’s ‘don’t look at me.’

The reactions (and non-reactions) were interesting, so I turned the thought into a song.

This one isn’t a banger or a ballad — it’s more of a quiet mirror held up to the whole phenomenon. One side chasing the spotlight, the other side trying to disappear from it. Same procedure, radically different motivations. Same knife, different wounds.

I’m not saying every single case fits this perfectly. People are complicated. But the pattern is hard to ignore once you see it: one group running toward visibility and validation, the other group trying to escape the female reality they’ve known. Different psychological drivers, different outcomes, same ideology demanding we pretend it’s all the same.

What do you think? Does this track with what you’ve observed? Drop your thoughts below — especially if you think I got it wrong. I’m always open to better lyrics or sharper verses.

JK Rowling has once again became the focal point of the gender culture war — this time through two overlapping controversies that exposed the bad faith, selective outrage, and fetishistic undercurrents driving much of trans activism.

Amnesty International’s Self-Own

First, Amnesty International UK released a report that branded Rowling’s women-only rape and sexual assault centre, Beira’s Place, as “anti-rights.” The organization lumped a service dedicated to female victims of sexual violence in with dozens of gender-critical groups supposedly threatening human rights. Rowling, who once worked at Amnesty researching genuine atrocities, fired back hard. The charity quickly removed the report for “internal review” amid widespread criticism, but the damage was done: a legacy human rights group had positioned a women’s rape crisis centre as the villain.

The Fred Wallace Episode

Almost immediately afterward, Rowling clashed with trans activist Fred Wallace (known online as Freda Wallace). Wallace criticized her publicly, blocking her on X, and triggered another classic Rowling thread. She invited open debate. When Wallace refused, Rowling escalated by sharing a revealing photograph from a previous public, filmed debate Wallace had participated in.

The “Upskirting” Claim Is Fraud

In the image above, Wallace — a biological male — sits in a short skirt with the camera angle clearly showing underwear and genital area. Rowling’s caption was pointed: Wallace was “free to wear whatever he wanted” in that setting, and “many trans-identified men delight in wearing their paraphilia in public.” Predictably, Wallace’s defenders erupted, accusing Rowling of upskirting — a serious sexual offense. This charge is not just wrong. It is a deliberate, cynical inversion of reality.

Let’s be brutally clear:

• Real upskirting is covert, non-consensual filming under a person’s clothes without their knowledge. It is predatory.

• This was a public event. Wallace chose the outfit. Wallace chose how to sit. Wallace participated knowing it was being filmed for distribution. The image is a still from open, consensual footage.

Calling Rowling’s sharing of this photo “upskirting” is journalistic malpractice and moral fraud. It attempts to equate political commentary on public behaviour with sexual assault.

Fred Gets Off On This

What makes the outrage particularly hollow is that Fred Wallace appears to derive gratification from exactly this kind of attention and boundary-pushing. Rowling’s reference to “paraphilia” was not random. Many observers, including gender-critical feminists and detransitioners, have long argued that a subset of trans-identified males are driven by autogynephilia or exhibitionistic fetish — the erotic thrill of being perceived as female, especially in provocative or transgressive ways. Wallace’s choice of clothing in a public debate, combined with the subsequent pearl-clutching outrage when the image circulates, fits this pattern perfectly.

Wallace doesn’t appear to be a victim here — but an active participant who benefits from the cycle: provoke with revealing attire in mixed company → generate controversy → play the persecuted trans woman → gain sympathy, attention, and validation.

The “upskirting” cries are not about protecting dignity. They are about enforcing a taboo against noticing the obvious male body and the possible sexual motivations behind it.

This is why Rowling’s response resonates with so many women. When a male activist chooses to flash underwear in public settings and then weaponises victimhood the moment anyone comments, it stops being about “trans rights” and starts looking like fetishistic exhibitionism dressed up as civil rights. And large parts of the institutional left, including Amnesty in its report, have decided to treat that fetish as sacrosanct while labelling women’s safety concerns as bigotry.

The Pattern Is Clear

The Amnesty report and the Wallace photo incident are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, the defense of material, sex-based reality — women’s shelters for female victims, public acknowledgment of male bodies and male patterns of behavior — is treated as illegitimate. Meanwhile, any pushback is met with inflated accusations of harm.

Rowling keeps refusing to pretend. She won’t ignore the bodies, the patterns, or the paraphilic elements that critics desperately want to keep off-limits. For that, she is relentlessly smeared.

The “upskirting” hysteria didn’t damage Rowling — it exposed the weakness and bad faith of her critics. When your ideology requires you to defend public exhibitionism while attacking women who notice it, you’ve already lost the argument with anyone still tethered to reality.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has brought the world to our doorstep—co-hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico—and something beautiful, unexpected, and deeply moving has happened. Thousands of international fans arrived with whatever preconceptions they carried from global media, social feeds, or old stereotypes. What many of them are discovering is the real America: the one with giant portions, relentless friendliness, air-conditioned wonderlands, and everyday abundance that we sometimes forget to see and often take for granted.

Their reactions? Pure gold.

From Culture Shock to Heartfelt Praise

Videos and posts have flooded social media. Europeans, Japanese fans, South Americans, and others are going viral for their wide-eyed delight at things we take for granted. Buc-ee’s? It’s not just a gas station—it’s a cathedral of snacks, clean bathrooms, and sheer scale that leaves grown men speechless. Waffle House runs at odd hours, free refills on fountain drinks (with actual ice), massive supermarkets, friendly customer service, and those enormous pickup trucks all get the star treatment.

One German fan documented his road trip through the South, raving about everything from college stadiums and Southern hospitality to ranch dressing and Waffle House. His genuine enthusiasm went mega-viral. Scottish and British visitors have marveled at the landscapes, the portions (“This could feed my whole family back home!”), and the spontaneous kindness. Japanese fans in Texas have been sharing amazed posts about everyday American life that read like love letters.

Reddit threads from World Cup tourists are refreshingly positive: Americans are “genuinely friendly and welcoming,” the scale of everything is mind-blowing, and the food culture is “wild” in the best way. Sure, there are notes on expense or urban sprawl, but the positives dominate. Many say it’s nothing like what the news back home portrayed.

Even more touching are the stories of unexpected kindness. A German supporter, fearing the worst based on stereotypes, choked up in an interview after a stranger gave him a ride home after a match. He declared his love for America and said leaving would hurt more than his team’s exit.

Videos capture visitors receiving free meals, being invited to parties, or just experiencing that classic American “How y’all doing today?” from total strangers. Many admit they came expecting one version of the country and are leaving with a completely different opinion.

Why This Hits Different

These reactions aren’t scripted tourism board campaigns. They’re authentic, unfiltered moments from people experiencing roadside diners, grocery store variety, spacious living, and a culture that—flaws and all—often shows up with warmth and abundance. It’s a reminder that the “unexported America” (the one beyond the headlines) is weirder, warmer, and more human than many outsiders imagined.

As an American watching all this unfold, I’ll be honest: it made me cry. Not the performative, social media kind of tears, but the quiet, grateful kind. Seeing people from around the world discover the kindness, the ingenuity, the sheer possibility baked into everyday life here reminds me why I love this country. In a time when it’s fashionable in some circles to tear America down, these visitors are holding up a mirror that shows our best self—the one that still surprises and delights.

It’s easy for us natives to get cynical or numb to what we have. Free ice everywhere. 24-hour options. People striking up conversations. Gigantic helpings of food and optimism.

These World Cup guests are giving us the gift of fresh eyes.

Come for the Soccer, Stay for the Revelation

If you’re one of those foreign visitors reading this: thank you. Thank you for showing up, for exploring beyond the stadiums, for sharing your honest reactions, and for reminding us what’s special about our country. We’re glad you’re here. Eat the barbecue, try the ranch, chat with the locals, and drive those wide-open roads.

The World Cup will end, but I hope these impressions linger—for you and for us. America isn’t perfect, but it’s generous, vibrant, and full of heart. Your videos and stories have been a much-needed shot of perspective.

And yeah… I might still be a little teary. 😭

Welcome to America, friends. 🇺🇸⚽

And I think I just did that.

Like the other old songs, this one features my first attempt at singing country music.

”White guilt” isn’t just a harmless cultural quirk — it’s become a full-blown secular religion. It demands perpetual confession, inherited sin, ritual humiliation, and cash transfers from the living to atone for the dead.

Konstantin Kisin

Henry Nowak: How Anti-Racism Gave You Racism

Cast your mind back exactly 6 years. It is the summer of 2020 and Britain is undergoing what its commentariat breathlessly described as a “reckoning.” The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sent hundreds of thousands of British people into the streets. Statues were toppled. Corporations issued grovelling statements. Police officers …

Read more

5 months ago · 1451 likes · 31 comments · Konstantin Kisin

And worst of all, it insists that one specific group of people must remain in a permanent state of moral probation based solely on their ancestry.

This song is the rejection of that script.

White Guilt (I Don’t Give A Shit) is deliberately savage, unapologetic, and politically incorrect. It calls out the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the self-destructive masochism at the heart of modern racial politics. No flowery language. No polite disclaimers. Just raw, rhythmic pushback.

Why this matters

White guilt isn’t progress — it’s paralysis. It teaches people to apologize for their civilization’s achievements while ignoring everyone else’s sins. It flattens complex history into a cartoon where one group is eternally guilty and everyone else is eternally innocent. It punishes competence in the name of equity and turns resentment into righteousness.

The song isn’t about hating other races. It’s about refusing to hate yourself. It’s about rejecting the idea that your skin color comes with a lifelong moral debt. It’s about saying “enough” to the endless emotional shakedown.

In a healthier culture, this wouldn’t be controversial. It would be obvious. But right now, stating the obvious requires saying it loud, crude, and without apology.

So here it is.

I don’t give a shit.

And if you’re reading this, maybe it’s time you stopped giving one too.