Governor Gavin Newsom has made history, signing a first-in-the-nation measure that forces some of America's oldest and biggest companies to dig through their own pasts and swear to what they find.

Assembly Bill 2599, dubbed the Truth in Disclosure Act, targets corporations with more than $100 million in total revenue that were founded on or before December 31, 1964.

Under the law, each company must file an affidavit, signed under penalty of perjury, certifying that it has combed through every record connected to slavery from 1849 to the present day to ensure the company has had no involvement with slavery.

The clock is ticking: Businesses have until January 15, 2029, to file the sworn statement with the California Civil Rights Department.

The filing must lay bare any links to slavery, including people bought or sold, people used as collateral, and loans made to finance the purchase of enslaved people. It must also reveal any insurance written on those transactions or on the enslaved themselves, and any other services that helped make such deals possible.​

While AB2599 doesn't go as far as paying reparations, Nimmers is hopeful that will be addressed in the future. "When we're thinking about what repair looks like," she said, "it's important that we're tying it back to what the origin of it was so we can address those core issues."

It leaves me a little dizzy, too. I take it as a giant positive for our country and interests, but I'm interested in how this plays out in the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

And I wonder where this leaves western Europe.

Consider the source (Axios), but the headline is hardly surprising, Trump announces major diesel deal with Putin, infuriating Ukraine (Barak Ravid, Axios)There's a lot of gobbledygook in this report, but I get the feeling Trump is bitch-slapping the Europeans and giving Zelenskyy a kick in the pants for good measure.

Trump has asked Zelenskyy to avoid damaging Russia's diesel refineries (an oil infrastructure generally) and with the midterms virtually tomorrow wasted no time punishing Ukraine for ignoring him.

As for Europe, if they want to heat their homes with windmills, go right ahead.

I haven't followed this closely, so my comments are general.

1. Voluntary intoxication is specifically and statutorily not a defense to a criminal charge.

2. Any kind of intoxication may, at law, render a person incapable of valid consent.

Thus, if a voluntarily intoxicated person (A) has sex with a person too intoxicated to give valid consent (B), A has committed rape. That's the law, whether it feels "fair" or not. Of course, if A also provided the intoxicant to B, that is a more culpable degree of rape. And if B is a minor and A is a legal adult, it's a horse of a whole different color.

Let's make it real and personal. When I started college, the age of majority in Maryland was still 21. The school, by law, operated in loco parentis. Many incoming freshmen, of course, were not yet even 18. During the summer before my first year, U of MD had freshman orientation, which was a week of living in one of the dorms, attending orientation sessions, and social events. It was not my first time away from home, but it was for a lot of kids. At the parties in the dorm where I stayed there was plenty of beer and wine, despite that being nominally forbidden. The upper classmen and grad students who were "chaperoning" the orientation dorms may not have supplied the alcohol, but they certainly didn't make any effort to prevent its consumption.

The orientation RA for my dorm was a grad student, so he was at least 4 years older than I was. He attended the party the first night and drank beer, as did I. I have no idea whether he was impaired or not, and legally it doesn't matter. I was sufficiently tipsy that I would not have driven, but not passing-out drunk by any measure (but how impaired, of course, he had no way to accurately measure). He conducted a heavy-duty pressure campaign to get me to go to his room for the night. The usual young male BS for the time (and perhaps all time): don't be uptight, what's your hang-up, etc., etc. And pushing me to have another beer and "loosen up, ferchrissakes."

I shut him down and ended up threatening to report him, which finally got him to back off. If I hadn't, would that really have been consent? What if, instead of me, it had been your daughter?

Well, well, well. The infamous Cornell 7 case just took yet another massive hit, and more of the trouble is coming straight from Jane Doe’s own mouth… or fingertips, thanks to another round of damning text messages.

These newly revealed text messages between Jane Doe and one of the men involved in the so-called “rape” should be enough to ask Ms. Doe why she filed a false police report.

Yes, they’re that revealing.

We’re talking about a young woman whose allegations have become the center of a highly publicized “rape” lawsuit involving seven young men. It’s the kind of accusation that can destroy reputations, derail careers, and follow somebody around for the rest of their life, regardless of how the case turns out.

But now we’re getting a look at what Jane Doe was actually saying right after that infamous night, before the lawyers and media got involved and the story became a national controversy.

And her own words paint a very different picture from the one that’s made headlines.

TMZ got their hands on text messages between Jane Doe and Jonathan Newell, one of the men involved, on October 21, 2024.

Newell reaches out to apologize for how things went down that night and the fallout. He also acknowledges the rumors circulating about what happened and tells Jane Doe they’ve been trying to shut down the gossip.

His message offers an interesting look at how the people involved were communicating after that night.

But it’s Jane’s response that really changes the game.

Here’s a screenshot of the text exchange:

In her response, Jane freely discusses the encounter, acknowledges that everyone was extremely intoxicated, and says her own memories were cloudy, too.

But she also makes some pretty remarkable statements about what went down.

She tells Newell that she genuinely enjoyed being with him and another man named Matt and describes the encounter using the term “gangbang,” and says she didn’t believe any of the sexual activity was illegal.

That’s quite a thing to put in writing shortly after an encounter that would later become the subject of a major “rape” lawsuit.

So how do these comments jive with the rape allegations she made later?

TMZ says the conversation between Doe and Newell didn’t end there.

The two continued talking in the days that followed, discussing campus rumors and even some personal belongings Doe left in his room.

She also seemed way more concerned with defending her “personal choices” about that night than expressing shame over anything that happened.
In the same text exchange, Jane Doe seemed to defend what she called “the gangbang,” saying, “i don’t think we should feel any shame for the part. our body our choice asf.”

Jane and Jonathan text back and forth in the coming days about some rumors going around campus about the night … and some earrings she says she lost in his room during the encounter.


She’s defending her right to make her own sexual choices, openly discussing the encounter with one of the men involved, and seemingly pushing back against the campus gossip surrounding the whole thing.

Clearly, what happened afterward was driven by embarrassment, regret, and the social humiliation of having an extremely private sexual encounter become public gossip. But that’s not rape.
[. . . .]

Rolling Stone magazine on Sunday night apologized and officially retracted its discredited article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, and an independent review said the article may cast doubt on future rape accusations.

A New York education group is planning a trans middle school—and wants its approach to reach classrooms far beyond New York.

Trans Formative Schools spells out its ambition:
Its plans extend to teachers already working in other schools. The organization proposes national educator training and free classroom materials combining conventional academic subjects with sex education and activism.

It already operates a free afterschool program welcoming students ages nine to fifteen. Its advertised activities include “Activism/Transing School.” And this September, a philanthropic fund backed by MacKenzie Scott named the organization among its latest grant recipients.
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I always wanted a gay son. I did. I love that relationship between gay sons and their mothers. I want to be the picket sign-holding mom who would beat the s**t out of somebody for her kid. I mean, let's just admit it: Gay sons are the best, right? Right!?

I have photographs of my son in high heels, in full drag. He knows every word to every musical ever written. His fairy godfather, Aaron Walton, is here with us tonight. I mean, truly, I thought I had this f***ing thing locked up.

But no, nooooooo. He's the only straight guy in his entire musical theater company.

So, when Marcia called me about 10 years ago from her closet — I kid you not, she was in her closet — to tell me that her son had come out to her as gay, all I said was, 'Oh my God. You are so f***ing lucky.'

About a week later, I was at Marcia's house for dinner when an Amazon package was delivered for her son. And inside, I'm not kidding you, was a pair of thigh-high red patent leather boots — like kinky boots. And I thought, oh come on, now she is just showing off, right?

The writer behind the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter to poor Big Apple schools as a “sacrifice” to try to boost the education system — and no one is angrier than the kid.

The teen is now “boiling” mad — badly behind her peers after finally being allowed to enroll in a more rigorous high school, her mother revealed in a bombshell bizarre essay.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her only child in two struggling Brooklyn public schools beginning in 2015 — as part of a battle to change what she characterized as systemic racism, despite having the “connections and time and status” to get the girl into the city’s best schools, she wrote in the Times Magazine on Sunday.

That “status” included top-notch education of her own and financial security — she and her husband bought a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2018.

But she said she still decided to offer up her daughter’s education for the cause of bettering the experience of black students in city schools.

​

By her own account, Hannah-Jones’ daughter Najya knows she was cheated by her parents.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” the girl yelled in one fight, according to the essay. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Hannah-Jones wrote of her decision, “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there.
“We believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

“I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage,” the mom said.

But after years of her daughter at the schools — PS 307 and Urban Assembly Unison, a specialty middle school — Hannah-Jones discovered her sharp-witted child lacked the basic skills to keep up in high school.

And the girl was furious her own family put the community’s needs before hers.
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” Hannah-Jones’ now-16-year-old daughter, Najya, said during a confrontation over the summer.

“I never really got the education I wanted.”

And Hannah-Jones had to agree, telling her daughter, “I feel like you got cheated” and admitting in the essay she may have “failed” her daughter.

“Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “The honest answer is, I don’t know.

“When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”

[. . . .]
​

In one shocking revelation involving Najya in 4th grade, Hannah-Jones discovered the girl’s teachers hadn’t been grading her schoolwork — and that her supposed proficiency was complete nonsense.

“Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work,” the distraught mother wrote. “Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.

“I sat there silently for several minutes, conjuring the image of my little girl thinking she was soaring in class when she was failing, and my devastation morphed into hot rage,” she said.

Despite that fury, Hannah-Jones kept her daughter enrolled in local public schools once she reached the sixth grade. Even though Najya was sent to a middle school with an admired and sympathetic principal, the girl was soon complaining that studious kids were neglected while misbehavior would get attention.

Najya’s complaints came to a head as she neared high school and found her school’s struggling scores online — sparking an explosive fight between mother and daughter.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya said, before her mother explained her reasoning.

It wasn’t long before Najya insisted she be allowed to choose her own high school, and Hannah-Jones finally agreed — only for Najya to get there and her teachers to discover she was woefully behind in fundamental skills, requiring close personal tutoring for her to catch up and finally thrive.
​

"Everybody in the state, when you have a baby, you're going to have a home visit within days, weeks and that will be an opportunity for a healthcare provider to make an assessment to see if you need some additional support and resources," Healey said during an interview last week on Boston Public Radio.

Much has been written about 9/11 on the 25th anniversary of this attack on our soil. To my mind, the most prescient was by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Tablet Magazine. [LINK]

Before I get to it (and I hope you will take time to read more than I can summarize here), we need to review failures that led to the attack and failures that followed.

In this regard, we are aided by this week’s CIA declassification of 71 Presidential Daily Briefs from 1998 through December 2001.

[crediting Ayaan Hirsi Ali] Moslem culture is incompatible with ours. It is not an “Abrahamic faith” like Judaism or Christianity. It does not accept a separation between church and state, nor the notion of individual freedoms and rights, including most specifically freedom of religion. "In the frame in which both ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed political spokesmen see the world, America and the wider West are not just geopolitical rivals. They are civilizational obstacles… which Islamists seek to overcome.” It is a culture which today seeks control “through institutions. Mosques, schools, centers, charities, advocacy groups, and cultural bodies can serve as the primary sites where Muslims encounter religious authority and are socialized into a comprehensive civilizational understanding of Islam.” They strategize settling in, embedding, and using Western freedoms “to advance Islamic rule and weaken Western civilization from within.” Migration and fertility are tools to transform Western society. Worse yet, Russia and China rely on migration-related destabilization, inter alia, as more useful than conventional military confrontation alone. This left-Islamist union is a very great threat. Looking at cities like Dearborn and New York, she observes, “the union of Islamists and the left opens a fertile channel for foreign propagandists who aim to widen the fractures in American society for their own gain.”

Her conclusion is, I think, hard to argue against: If we can’t redesign our protections to shelter citizens “rather than adversaries,” “resist civilization subversion without abandoning liberty itself,” and wall out these people, it doesn’t matter how effective we are on the battlefields.

The lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case was also the only Black person on the jury, one of the panelists revealed in a new interview.

Paula Devlin, one of the outspoken jurors who was part of the 11-person majority in favor of finding Clancy not criminally responsible for strangling her three young children, explained that the lone holdout was a Black man and the only person of color on the jury in an interview with "CBS Mornings" Friday.

"Everybody else was White," she said.

"I have to sit with that for just a second," said host Gayle King, who was conducting the interview.
​

According to a study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research by Columbia University in New York and Charles University in Prague, parents of sons experience cognitive decline at a much faster rate compared to parents of daughters. So, if you have a son, you can probably expect some concentration and memory difficulties, and maybe even dementia, to hit you a little bit faster than if you just had a daughter.

The real lesson here is that it couldn’t hurt to raise your sons to be a little bit more caring and empathetic, not just for the world but for selfish reasons, just in case you make it to a ripe old age and need your progeny to take care of you the way you took care of them when they were children. If you raise a snotty little brat boy who doesn’t give a shit about you, all of a sudden that little shithead is going be the one you’re begging to take care of you in your twilight years.

On the other hand, parents of sons are less likely to divorce, and being married has been linked to better cognitive functioning in later life.