Some said motte and bailey, I said bait and switch, others said it’s just plain lying.

What is this rhetorical strategy, where you omit the relevantly-controversial part of a debate (competing rights) to fool your audience that all the fuss is focussed on the uncontroversial part (live how you want)?

It must have a name? https://t.co/7oUPsAVGlE

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) August 30, 2022

Anyway. What Chris Bryant said. Caller asks: “What does it actually mean to transition?”

Chris Bryant replies:

I think I’ve answered your question and [shaking head in sorrow] I’ll tell you – something that really frightens me at the moment – is politicians who want to use this issue to stir division – because for me –

Why does Trump think it helps him to claim that he “declassified” all the documents? That would make it worse, not better. The issue isn’t one of nomenclature, or cataloging.

Donald Trump is repeating his assertion, debunked in the justice department’s legal filing, that he “declassified” the top secret documents seized by the FBI in their raid on his Florida home.

He “declassified” them so that he could do whatever he wanted with them. Yeah that’s not exculpatory. This isn’t some empty ritual; the point is that the documents are secret and meant to remain secret.

Among a series of posts by the former president on his favored Truth Social platform on Wednesday, he also accused federal agents of

Great god almighty.

Dr. Scott Mosser admits they have "secret missions" to normalize child sex change surgery at the Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco, no minimum age "at all" to get sex change surgery and he has done sex change surgeries on 13 year olds. This is what pure evil looks like. pic.twitter.com/uL5EXn3ncH

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 31, 2022

He’s “always been drawn to things that are deeply impactful” – like mutilating children’s genitals.

“We try to live with our values thirty to forty years in the future,” he says. “So and that puts us in a mindset of extreme affirmation cuz affirmation at that time is a foregone conclusion.”

Does he then explain how he knows … Read the rest

That Times piece on the perjury and treason of Trump and his lawyers is too dense for one post.

Investigators developed evidence that “government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago after the Justice Department sent Mr. Trump’s office a subpoena for any remaining documents with classified markings. That led prosecutors to conclude that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the government filing said.

The DoJ said give us the documents. Trump and his people hid two thirds of the documents, and his people told the FBI “That’s all of it.” Under oath.

You have to wonder what his people were thinking. Maybe Trump had convinced them that he still had such … Read the rest

New information about Trump’s systematic lying and concealment:

The Justice Department sought a search warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida after obtaining evidence that highly classified documents were likely concealed and that Mr. Trump’s representatives had falsely claimed all sensitive material had been returned, according to a court filing by the department on Tuesday.

In other words Trump’s people lied to the feds about highly classified documents.

The filing came in response to Mr. Trump’s request for an independent review of materials seized from his home, Mar-a-Lago. But it went far beyond that, painting the clearest picture yet of the department’s efforts to retrieve the documents before taking the extraordinary step of searching a former

Well Jackson, Mississippi is only the state capital and the largest city.

Some 180,000 residents in Jackson, Mississippi have “indefinitely” lost access to reliable running water after excessive rainfall and flooding.

That happened to New Orleans after Katrina, too. Remember? People desperately begging reporters for water to drink. Many people died because there was no drinking water.

Rising floodwaters over the weekend breached the city’s main water treatment facility, bringing it to the brink of collapse.

…Both the city and state are distributing bottled drinking water to residents as well as non-potable water via tanker truck.

I hope they’re distributing the drinking water in mass quantities and very fast. Death from dehydration is swift.

The southern state’s capital is more

Even if we turned it around right this second the sea levels would still rise. Also: we’re not turning it around right this second. We’re not even slowing it.

Research based on satellite measurements of ice losses from Greenland and the shape of the ice cap from 2000-19 has allowed scientists to calculate how the climate crisis has pushed the ice sheet from an equilibrium where snowfall matches the ice lost.

They found that a minimum 10.6in sea-level rise is inevitable regardless of action to limit carbon emissions after 110tn tonnes of the Greenland ice cap melted. A multi-metre sea-level rise also appears likely as the trajectory of environmental damage continues.

“The minimum of 27cm is the sea-level rise

Also the floods in Pakistan aren’t just “floods” – that is, not just expanses of water or torrents of water. They’re torrents of ROCK. Take a look.

Hard to comprehend the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan, the 5th most populated nation in the world.

Nearly 1400 dead, 1 million houses damaged or destroyed, and 50,000,000 people displaced.

1/3 of the country is underwater.pic.twitter.com/NFd15q3g7I

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) August 30, 2022

… Read the rest

Much of Pakistan is under water.

Heavy rains over two months have caused the worst flooding in more than a decade and damaged more than 1m homes.

[UN secretary general António] Guterres said on Tuesday that south Asia was a hotspot for the climate crisis and that the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan that has left tens of millions needing help was a warning to every nation of the destruction wreaked by human-caused global heating.

…

Flash floods fuelled by the climate crisis have affected more than 33 million people, officials have said. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDA) said on Monday the death toll from the monsoon rains and floods in Pakistan had reached 1,136 – with 75 killed

The absolute minimum sea level rise that’s already inevitable, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels right this second, is bad enough. We are, of course, not stopping the burning right this second, or tomorrow, or in ten years.

Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight.

…

“It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Prof Jason Box from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus), who led the research. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

…

Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and the Alps

All these years I thought, or assumed without thinking about it much, that “custard powder/instant custard” was actually custard in powder form. Today I learned otherwise. I saw this –

Those two packets above the porridge oats are custard powder. Even though we were told to ignore the custard, I became curious about how much protein was actually in the custard powder, figuring it was not much. (There’s been some chat about Monroe’s food advice over the past couple of days, and she does seem to me to have some odd ideas, or at least say odd things, like that oats and mushrooms are good sources of protein.) SO I looked it up, and was mildly shocked to find … Read the rest

Also in Trump today: demanding an immediate re-do of the election.

Philip Bump asks innocently what is the difference between warnings and threats.

…there is an important difference between understanding the existing threat and leveraging it.

In an interview on Fox News on Sunday evening, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rationalized why Trump supporters would be furious at an indictment.

“There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump,” Graham told host Trey Gowdy.

As we’ve already noted, of course there isn’t. Hillary Clinton didn’t take boxes of White House documents home with her in January 2001 or 2016, much less spread them around a large golf club and brag about them on social media. Hillary Clinton didn’t steal top secret documents and refuse to give them back when asked politely … Read the rest

A whopping catch-22:

A judge ruled this morning that Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp must testify before a special grand jury that’s investigating possible illegal attempts by then-president Donald Trump and others to influence the 2020 election in the state – but not until after the November midterm election, the Associated Press reports.

See, this is a problem. It’s clear enough why it’s not desirable to have criminal investigations of political candidates happening close to an election, but, and this is a huge “but,” it’s also not desirable to remain in ignorance of the criminality or complicity in criminality of political candidates until it’s too late. You see what I mean? We get why Kemp doesn’t want to be … Read the rest

The move now is to threaten violence if the criminal Trump is treated like the criminal he is.

Amid growing fears about political violence in the US, a senior Republican senator predicted “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is prosecuted for mishandling classified information.

For “mishandling” top secret classified information by stealing it and keeping it in his hotel, including leaving it lying around in the open while fake Rothschilds wandered around the place.

Graham said: “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him. There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump.”

Really. What other ex-president has stolen whole boxes of top secret documents and … Read the rest

In snooker news –

Jamie Hunter has won her first ranking title with victory in the US Women’s Snooker Open on Sunday in Seattle.

The Englishwoman secured the biggest triumph of her career so far with a 4-1 defeat of pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna in the final.

Hunter comfortably advanced from the initial round-robin phase with four successive 2-0 wins to earn a spot in the quarter-finals.

There’s just one tiny detail not mentioned in the article – Hunter is not a woman. The Daily Star is more forthcoming, aka more honest.

WPBSA chairman Jason Ferguson has congratulated Jamie Hunter after she became the first transgender player to win a ranking event.

Hunter, who came out as transgender in

Representation:

I’m always hungry for historical queer representation,” says Charlie Josephine, the non-binary playwright of I, Joan, a sweaty, heady, joyously queer new drama about the patron saint of France. “Because our history has been erased – particularly transgender people’s – there is very limited documentation of us throughout history, even though we have existed since the beginning of time.”

Whose history? “Queer” people’s? So the fix is to erase the history of women?

To Josephine, Joan being written as non-binary felt both obvious and natural. “I could have written this play as a cis woman who is feminist and passionate about expressing themselves in this way,” says Josephine, shrugging the idea away. “But the more I read

Originally a comment by Rob on Watch out: too girly!

I’m not at all convinced that the style of learning has a big impact on whether boys or girls do better. As a purely anecdotal point, I always did much better with internal assessment and assignments, because my technique and discipline for a single end of year exams swot absolutely sucked.

I suspect the biggest factor in declining male academic success is simply that over recent decades male heroes and role models are no longer scientists, engineers, academics, poets or ‘elites’ generally. They’re anti-heroes, the fighters, drinkers, womanisers, sneerers. In fact, engineers, scientists, or educated males in popular culture are more likely to be cast in either the role of … Read the rest

Climate crisis/rising energy cost solved – just do everything at the office.

This is apparently meant as serious advice:

Office workers could be better off at their desks than working from home from October because of the money they will save on heating, making coffee and charging devices.

Becoming an energy freeloader who outsources the bulk of their consumption to their office, local café or gym over the next few months could save you about £28 a week, roughly £120 a month, from October.

This assumes you worked in the office five days a week and charged a phone, laptop and smart watch while you were there, made two cups of tea or coffee and reheated your lunch, and

The BBC craps on lesbians from a very great height. Headline:

No place for hate, says Pride Cymru after Cardiff protest

So it was a homophobic protest?

Pride Cymru has said there is “no place for hate” after protesters interrupted an LGBTQ+ march in Cardiff.

A video emerged on social media showing police asking a group to leave for safety reasons on Saturday.

South Wales Police said no arrests were made after a “small protest group” had “assembled themselves on the route to block the procession”.

Bigots, right? A small group of fundamentalists perhaps?

Protest organisers Get The L Out were carrying banners, including one which read “transactivism erases lesbians”.

Ohhhhh…not god-botherers, not the God Hates Fags crew, but … Read the rest