On Thursday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a far-right federal judge in the Northern District of Texas with a record of aligning with the GOP’s most extreme legal positions — issued a ruling declaring that Title VII no longer protects LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination. The decision directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 ruling inBostock v. Clayton County, which held that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is, by definition, sex discrimination. Kacsmaryk’s ruling marks one of the most alarming judicial rollbacks of LGBTQ+ rights in recent memory — and sets up a direct legal challenge to one of the foundational civil rights protections for queer and trans people in the United States.
The case was brought against the EEOC by the state of Texas alongside the Heritage Foundation, a central force behindProject 2025 — an aggressive right-wing policy blueprint that explicitly calls for rolling back LGBTQ+ protections in federal law. In siding with the plaintiffs, Judge Kacsmaryk pointed to the Texas Department of Agriculture’s current employee policy, which requires “employees to comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological gender,” specifying that “men may wear pants” and “women may wear dresses, skirts, or pants.” The ruling also upheld the department’s policy banning transgender employees from using restrooms that align with their gender identity.
The judge reached a verdict that Title VII only protects “firing someone simply for being homosexual or transgender,” but that it does not protect transgender or gay people from “harassment”:
Judge Kacsmaryk ruling that gay and trans people can be harassed without repercussion under Title VII.
“In sum, Title VII does not bar workplace employment policies that protect the inherent differences between men and women,” Kacsmaryk writes in his ruling.
Judge Kacsmaryk further argued that disparate treatment of transgender employees does not constitute unequal treatment, reasoning that “a male employee must use male facilities like other males” — a statement that erases transgender identity altogether. He extended that logic to dress codes and pronouns, claiming that requiring employees to adhere to clothing standards and pronoun use based on their assigned sex at birth is not discriminatory because it applies “equally” to everyone. The argument mirrors the discredited legal reasoning once used to uphold bans on same-sex marriage — that such laws didn’t discriminate against gay people because they, like straight people, were allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex. It’s a circular logic designed to mask exclusion as neutrality. It also flies in the face of the fact that Texas allows people assigned female at birth to wear gender “pants, skirts, and dresses” but denies that same right to people assigned male at birth.
Kacsmaryk, a former lawyer for an anti-LGBTQ hate group, was exposed in 2023 for failing to disclose millions in stock holdings.
Kacsmaryk was previously exposed for failing to disclose viciously anti-LGBTQ interviews and acting to hide his authorship of an anti-abortion article ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing.
Republican and Christian groups regularly filed their lawsuits in his district because they know they’ll get a friendly ear.
How does Trump sleep? Probably with a lot of fartin’ and snorin’. Read on Substack
Donald Trump loves asskissers because he is an asskisser. That explains why his lips are constantly puckered.
That’s just disturbing
During his speech in Saudi Arabia at the Investment Forum, he spent a good portion of it waxing non-eloquently about the awesomeness of Mohammed Bin Salman, the Crown Prince.
Trump said, “Riyadh is becoming not just a seat of government but a major business, cultural, and high-tech capital of the entire world.”
MBS was sitting in the audience directly across from Trump, and Trump asked rhetorically, “Mohammed, do you sleep at night? How do you sleep? Critics doubted that it was possible, what you’ve done, but over the past eight years, Saudi Arabia has proved the critics totally wrong.”
“He’s your greatest representative, greatest representative. And if I didn’t like him, I’d get out of here so fast. You know that, don’t you? He knows me well. I do — I like him a lot. I like him too much.”
The crowd applauded and giggled as Trump flirted with the man who directed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist living in the United States for his safety. The crowd was made up of the world’s most powerful CEOs, like Jensen Huang, Larry Fink, and Sir Shit-for-Brains Elon Musk. So naturally, this audience lacked morals and integrity. What’s a little murder when it comes to making billions of dollars? These people, like Trump and MBS, aren’t the biggest fans of journalists.
I shouldn’t have to refresh your memory, but just in case, in 2018, Jamal Khashoggi was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, murdered and hacked up with bone saws by Saudi agents on the orders of Trump’s buddy, Mohammed Bin Salman.
After the murder, Trump said it was a “bad event,” and went on to defend MBS. He said, “Nobody has directly pointed a finger.” That’s a lie. Our intelligence agencies have “directly pointed a finger at him.” The United Nations has “directly pointed a finger at him.”
Trump also said that MBS is “innocent until proven guilty.” But MBS will never be proven guilty because they don’t have fair trials in Saudi Arabia. The nation doesn’t have due process, freedom of speech, human rights, or elections. Those are things Trump hates, which is probably why he spent another portion of his speech whining and lying about our elections. He lied that he won the 2020 election to people who don’t hold elections.
There will never be an investigation into Khashoggi’s death in Saudi Arabia. MBS will never stand trial. This man didn’t just order the murder, but that Khashoggi be cut into pieces with bone saws. Mohammed Bin Salman is a sick murderous fuck.
When Jared Kushner, who worked directly with MBS as a White House adviser, was asked about the murder last year, he said, “Are we really still doing this?” Jared said he hadn’t seen the US Intelligence report that concluded MBS ordered the murder of Khashoggi, finding fault with it because it was made during the Biden administration.
Of course, not reading the report made it a lot easier for Jared to accept $2 billion from MBS. Jared acts like being made to feel uncomfortable about accepting a $2 billion gift from a murderer is worse punishment than being sliced apart by a bone saw.
Under the Trump regime, our nation feels it’s more important to secure arms deals with Saudi Arabia than to stand up for our American principles. Plus, those arms deals deliver a quid pro quo as the Saudi Government will conduct golf tournaments at Trump golf courses, and invest in new Trump resorts in their nation.
Just remember that all the money Trump and Jared take from MBS is blood money.
How does Donald Trump sleep at night? Probably in a bed full of KFC and Big Mac crumbs.
Did I do that? ToonAmerica, the site using AI to steal my cartoons, is down.
Why is it down? Because of this.
The thieves can’t fight my reports or those from my colleagues, so they remove the videos, avoiding copyright strikes and saving their channel from deletion. They saved the channel, but now there’s no content because all their content was stolen copyright. That’s all they had.
I’m not declaring victory yet because I don’t know if the ToonAmerica YouTube channel will start over, create a new channel, find another scam to fuck people over with, or give up. But for now, they can’t monetize the cartoons they stole, at least not on YouTube.
But TikTok is something else.
Now I have to take them down on TikTok.
AmeriSatire, the other one stealing cartoons with AI, is still up, but they’re next on my target. Thanks to my friend and colleague, Pedro Molina, I now know that they’ve stolen one of my cartoons.
That means I can file a report on them. And why did AI make Flynn a donkey?
Creative note: I almost did my bone saw cartoon yesterday, but went for the Pete Rose one instead. I think this cartoon is better and more important.
May 16, 1918 The U.S. Congress passed the Sedition Act, legislation designed to protect America’s participation in World War I. Along with the Espionage Act of the previous year, the Sedition Act was orchestrated largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson. The Espionage Act, passed shortly after the U.S. entrance into the war in early April 1917, made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces’ prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country’s enemies. Aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists, the Sedition Act imposed harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, conscription, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. The Sedition Act of 1918
May 16, 1943 The Nazis crushed the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto after a month of bloody fighting. 56,000 died in the struggle. Read more
May 16, 1967 Nhat Chi Mai immolated herself in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to protest the war. “I offer my body as a torch / to dissipate the dark / to waken love among men / to give peace to Vietnam.” The flower known as Nhat Chi Mai. Read more
May 16, 1998 Tens of thousands of Britons supporting Jubilee 2000 formed a human chain around the meeting place of the G7 Summit (an annual meeting of the leaders of the largest industrial countries) in Birmingham, England. Jubilee 2000 urged the major international lending countries to relieve terms of and forgive the massive indebtedness of poor countries around the world. Jubilee 2000 by Noam Chomsky
After being banned from Major League Baseball for life, gambler Pete Rose and others like Shoeless Joe Jackson are now eligible to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Rose was banned in 1989 and spent the rest of his life crying about it instead of offering repentance. He didn’t even stop gambling. He never helped his case, even when it seemed Baseball wanted to bring him back.
Commissioner Rob Manfred made the ruling and said, “In my view, once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served. Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve.”
If Rose hadn’t bet on baseball, or if he hadn’t been caught, he would have been voted into the HoF as soon as he was eligible, which is five years after retirement. His 4,256 hits, 3,562 games played, and 15,890 plate appearances are still unbroken records. Across 24 seasons, Rose made 17 All-Star teams, won three batting titles, won the 1973 NL MVP, and won three World Series trophies. Rose earned the nickname “Charlie Hustle” for his aggressive style of play. Rose always seemed to find himself on base, and then the next, and then the next, until he was across home plate. He is a baseball legend. Even his gambling addiction couldn’t take away his legend.
I was excited when I heard this, not because I am a baseball fan and am in Rose’s corner. I’ve always had mixed views about Rose’s ban, and Shoeless Joe Jackson’s, for that matter. I was excited because I thought that here’s a chance I can do a cartoon that’s not about Donald Trump. And then I read how this ban was lifted.
Chilean flamingo. Credit: Victor Ortega Jiménez, UC Berkeley
Flamingos are known for posing serenely on one leg in extreme wetlands, placidly bobbing their heads into the shallow water to feed. But a new study has revealed there’s more going on beneath the surface than meets the eye.
It seems flamingos create controlled underwater chaos to actively trap their prey, according to the research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
They use a repertoire of behaviours, including stomping feet, jerking heads, and chattering beaks, to create swirling “underwater tornadoes” that concentrate and funnel prey into their mouths.
“Flamingos are actually predators, they are actively looking for animals that are moving in the water,” says lead author of the paper Victor Ortega Jiménez, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California Berkeley in the US.
“The problem they face is how to concentrate these animals, to pull them together and feed. Flamingos are using vortices to trap animals, like brine shrimp.
“It’s not just the head, but the neck, their legs, their feet and all the behaviours they use to effectively capture these tiny and agile organisms.”
Ortega Jiménez and his collaborators trained Chilean flamingos at the Nashville Zoo to feed from a shallow aquarium.
They used high speed cameras and laser light to view the gas bubbles created in the water to visualise the animals’ feeding behaviour. They then confirmed their observations using fluid dynamics computer simulations and experiments using 3D printed models of flamingo beaks and feet.
They found that flamingos stomp their floppy webbed feet to churn up the sediment beneath them, propelling it forward in whorls.
The birds then draw these vortexes towards the water’s surface by jerking their heads upward at speeds of about 40cm/s, creating mini tornadoes that concentrate particles of food.
These small vortices are strong enough to trap even agile invertebrates, such as brine shrimp and microscopic crustaceans called copepods.
The flamingos’ heads remain upside down within this watery vortex, with their unique beaks angled so that the flat front end stays parallel to the bottom. They then “chatter”, clapping the lower beak open and shut about 12 times every second, to create smaller vortices that direct sediment and food into their mouths.
Experiments with 3D replicas of flamingo beaks revealed that chattering increases the number of brine shrimp captured by the beak seven-fold.
They found that flamingos also use a technique called “skimming”, which involves pushing the head forward while chattering to create sheet-like vortices – called von Kármán vortices.
“We observed when we put a 3D printed model in a flume to mimic what we call skimming, [it produces] symmetrical vortices on the sides of the beak that recirculate the particles in the water, so they actually get into the beak,” Ortega Jiménez says.
“It’s this trick of fluid dynamics.”
The team believes that their findings could be used to design better systems for concentrating and sucking up particles, such as microplastics, from water.
Next, Ortega Jiménez aims to determine the role of the flamingo’s piston-like tongue and how the comb-like edges of the beak filter prey out of the water.
May 15, 1870 Julia Ward Howe Julia Ward Howe, suffragist, abolitionist and author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” proposed Mother’s Day as a peace holiday. She had seen firsthand some of the worst effects of war during the American Civil War—the death and disease which killed and maimed, and the widows and orphans left behind on both sides and realized that the effects of the war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. Mother’s Day did not become a national holiday until declared by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. “… Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe our dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel.”
May 15, 1935 The National Labor Relations Act was passed, recognizing workers’ rights to organize unions and bargain collectively with their employers. Read more
May 15, 1957 Britain tested its first hydrogen bomb over Christmas Island in the South Pacific, after just two years of development. Mushroom cloud over Christmas Island
May 15, 1965 A National teach-in to oppose the Vietnam War was held in Washington, D.C.
May 15, 1966 The American Friends Service Committee, SANE (The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), and Women March for Peace, along with four other organizations, sponsored a 10,000+ person anti-war picket at the White House and a 60,000+ rally at the Washington Monument to oppose the Vietnam War. . . . elsewhere the same day . . . Buddhist altars were placed in streets to impede troops arresting dissidents in South Vietnam.
May 15, 1969 Governor Ronald Reagan sent in the National Guard to reclaim People’s Park from 6,000 protesters in Berkeley, California, who had occupied the space and created the park. Police gunfire killed a bystander, James Rector, blinded another, and injured dozens. People’s Park March, Friday May 30, 1969, at the intersection of Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley
May 15, 1970 In response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia (an expansion of the Vietnam War) and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, several million U.S. students held campus strikes to oppose the Vietnam War.
May 15, 1970 The Native American Rights Fund filed suit on behalf of the Hopi tribe to prevent strip-mining on sacred Black Mesa in Arizona.
May 15 (since the 1980’s) International Conscientious Objectors Day, established to honor those who leave or refuse to enter their country’s armed forces for reasons of principle. Conscientious Objector Day history
Philadelphia is turning up the volume during Pride Weekend, starting with its iconic Pride flag, which is back and bigger than ever.
The massive flag — now stretching to 600 feet — will debut on Friday, May 30 during ride Around the City, a powerful display of LGBTQ+ visibility and unity.
You can catch the flag traveling to iconic locations across the city starting at the Art Museum and ending in the Gayborhood.
The flag will then lead the 2025 Philadelphia Pride March on Sunday, June 1, 2025. This popular march will form at 6th and Walnut at 10:30 a.m. and end in the Gayborhood as well.
All LGBTQ communities and allies are welcome to join the march, with no registration required.
When the march reaches the Gayborhood, organizers said the festival will begin, running from noon to 7 p.m., on Walnut to Pine streets, and Quince to Juniper streets, with other select roads closed around the festival footprint.
This year’s festival will feature more than 200 small businesses and organizations, performers, entertainers, artists, vendors, local bars, food trucks, community organizations, stages and much more.
Philadelphia Pride March and Festival is open to all to attend with no admission, and all food and drink are pay-as-you-go.
Also don’t forget to check out Pride Promenade, a night of music, performances, and community connections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on Saturday, May 31.
Zolnierek / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Scottie's Playtime 