Speaking of Jack Monroe, Kathleen Stock is very funny on the subject:

…austerity guru Jack Monroe has a new book, Thrifty Kitchen, to cheer us all up.

Some of the suggested “home hacks” in this book have attracted particular mirth, seeming as they do to involve great effort and even high personal risk for exceptionally low reward. For instance, should you be desperate to get your hands on an egg ring — that is, a metal ring that helps you form perfectly round fried eggs — but unable to afford the £2.10 that would obtain you one from Amazon, Monroe suggests removing the lid and the bottom from a tuna tin, sanding the rough edges away, and washing

So much lying patronizing stupid bullshit in one little tweet.

A reminder from that ALL women have a right to be safe and live free from violence and discrimination – #trans women included! #StandUp4HumanRights #TransWomenAreWomen pic.twitter.com/fZ1vUWUeGV

— UN Free & Equal (@free_equal) January 2, 2023

ALL rabbits have a right to be safe and live free from violence and discrimination – #trans rabbits [aka wolves] included!

To itemize the lying patronizing stupid bullshit –

One: it’s not a “reminder”; it’s a stand-alone announcement that relies on a dishonest label.

Two: we know all too well what “ALL women” means: it means women including men who say they are women – in other words it means women and some deluded or … Read the rest

Welsh language: Non-binary speakers want gender-neutral help

That’s one of the more cryptic headlines I’ve seen today. People who speak non-binary want help with what? What is gender-neutral help? What does Welsh language have to do with it?

Non-binary Welsh speakers have said they feel unable to express their identities in the language due to its gendered nature.

Oh, that.

Here’s a helpful tip: nobody cares. Non-binary Welsh speakers don’t need to “express their identities,” because nobody cares. Nobody cares about other people’s identities. Don’t adults explain that to children any more? It’s the universal truth: nobody cares as much about you as you do. Nobody wants to hear about you as much as you want to talk about you.… Read the rest

Ah yes, the party of the workers.

60% of workers report living paycheck-to-paycheck

— GOP (@GOP) December 19, 2022

Republicans care deeply about those impoverished workers.

And yet y’all still voted against raising the minimum wage https://t.co/tFkTHf2OAO

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 19, 2022

… Read the rest

Discussion will be a crime.

The Scottish government is on a collision course with the courts again as it prepares legislation criminalising conversion therapy, according to a KC.

But what are they defining as conversion therapy? Oh, only almost everything.

Double silk Aidan O’Neill KC has warned that the proposals would be outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.

The SNP-Green alliance is considering plans to outlaw any activity – including parental chats, prayer and preaching – deemed to be an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.

Just for a start, they shouldn’t put sexuality and “gender identity” in the same law. The two are not comparable. Sexual orientation has nothing at all to do … Read the rest

“Anarchists” decree that feminist women must not be allowed to speak.

Rich, isn’t it – bring placards and noisemakers to drown them out, also watch out they are violent!!!… Read the rest

Climate.gov provides an interesting set of figures.

In State of the Climate in 2019, glacier expert Mauri Pelto reported that the pace of glacier loss has accelerated from -171 millimeters (6.7 inches) per year in the 1980s, to -460 millimeters (11 inches) per year in the 1990s, to -500 millimeters (1.6 feet) per year in the 2000s, to -889 millimeters (2.9 feet) per year for the 2000s.

That’s a huge increase in a short space of time. It’s kind of terrifying.

Over the same period of course the global population has increased hugely. Humans go up up up and the stored water they require for survival goes down down down. More humans depend on that stored water, and … Read the rest

Deutsche Welle last July on South Asia and the melting glaciers:

Heat waves are melting Himalayan glaciers on which hundreds of million people rely, flooding villages and leaving residents without drinking water. Climate change heats up Asia’s highlands faster than other regions.

…

The central Asian mountain region – also known as High-mountain Asia – includes the Himalayan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains. Stretching from China to Afghanistan, it is home to 55,000 glaciers that together store more fresh water than anywhere else on the planet outside the North and South Poles. The meltwater feeds the 10 biggest riverrs in Asia, in whose basins almost 2 billion people live. The Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra rivers alone are sources of

Speaking of Himalayan glaciers…CNBC reported a year ago:

Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting at an “exceptional” rate, according to new research that shows the massive ice sheets in the region have shrunk 10 times faster in the past four decades than during the previous seven centuries.

The research, published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports, found that mass ice loss from nearly 15,000 ice sheets in the Himalayas is especially rapid compared with other parts of the world.

The Himalayan mountains are also referred to as the third pole because they hold the world’s third-largest amount of glacier ice, following Antarctica and the Arctic. The ice melt threatens agriculture and water supply for millions of people

And speaking of violence and threats…

An example of the kind of emails you receive when you run a platform exclusively for women. pic.twitter.com/CLIS5lPrwd

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) January 4, 2023

… Read the rest

Let the bullets fly, eh?

The new Republican majority in Congress has decided to remove the metal detectors that outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed outside the House chamber after the Capitol riot on January 6, according to Rep Lauren Boebert.

“When I arrived in Congress two years ago, Nancy Pelosi put this hunk of garbage outside of the House chambers for members of Congress to go through,” Ms Boebert of Colorado said in a video in front of a metal detector being hauled down on Tuesday. “Today, they are being removed and we are turning Pelosi’s house back into the People’s House.”

When Boebert arrived in Congress two years ago it was attacked by a heavily armed mob which injured … Read the rest

Climate change means (among other things) running out of water. We’ve talked about Phoenix and water, the Sierras and water, the Colorado River and water…there are also the Alps and water.

Switzerland’s glaciers have lost more than half their volume in less than a hundred years, and the long hot summer this year has accelerated the thaw, a new study shows.

More than half gone and the melt is speeding up, so that’s not good. Since we’re not doing much of anything to stop it, it’s very bad.

The glaciers support ski resorts and attract climbers and hikers in summer, but are also essential to Europe’s water supply. Now, communities across the Alps are worrying about their future.

Just one thing about that…

A woman has become the first transgender inmate to be executed in the US, after stabbing her ex-girlfriend to death with a steak knife and dumping her body in a riverhttps://t.co/D9nuPHVytZ

— LBC (@LBC) January 4, 2023

NOT A WOMAN.… Read the rest

Deep rifts.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican congressman-elect who rose to prominence under former President Donald Trump’s wing, went rogue after the former president endorsed GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy of California for House speaker.

Gaetz told Fox News Digital that Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy for speaker has not changed the congressman’s view on the former president or GOP leader, nor has swayed his vote.

“Sad!” Gaetz said in a Wednesday statement. “This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.”

What happened to loyalty? What happened to payback? Where would Matt Gaetz be without Trump??

Gaetz wants the shirtsleeves molester guy.

Gaetz has led the House Freedom Caucus charge against the GOP leader’s speakership bid,

All the despised groups should have euphemisms, all of them. Murderers should be re-branded as population controllers and rapists should be called admirers of women. Jo Bartosch at spiked:

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Police Scotland were blasted for referring to those who abuse children as ‘minor-attracted people’, or ‘MAP’, in a report for a European Commission project.

As euphemisms go, that’s a pretty terrible one, because of course the issue isn’t attraction, it’s abuse. The issue with rapists isn’t attraction, it’s rape, and it works the same way with the rape or molestation of children.

After an online backlash, Police Scotland were quick to point out that the phrase ‘minor-attracted people’ was a quote from

Scandal in Wisconsin:

Early in 2020, an Indigenous artist urged the owners of a new music venue in [Madison] to change its name. 

It was called The Winnebago, after the street on which it stands. Many Indigenous people and allies let the owners know that wasn’t the best name for a white-owned music venue. One of them was nibiiwakamigkwe, also known as Kay LeClaire, a founding member and co-owner of the queer Indigenous artists’ collective giige, and budding leader of Madison’s Indigenous arts community.

I don’t think it’s all that clear that using indigenous names is bad if you’re not indigenous. You could be promoting awareness of indigenous culture, which could be not bad, it seems to me.

Anyway … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Holms on Marjorie.

For the last twenty years or so, there has been a strong push for movies, tv shows, theatrical productions (etc.) to have more widely representative characters and casts. Fewer male characters, more female; fewer white, more of every other ethnicity; fewer straight, more of other sexualities. It was emphasised that these characters were not to be reductive cliches. Further, this popular push emphasised that this was especially applicable to the lead role.

The reasoning was simple, and well understood by the left. People of demographic combinations other than ‘white male’ deserve to see themselves represented in movies, and not as insulting caricatures. Kids especially deserve to see their sex and/or skin colour … Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on Where are the skeptics?

Harald Hanche-Olsen@22ish

Your point reminds me of the characterisation of social media as Skinner Boxes, which I’ve written about here before. The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear and obviously designed to encourage people to take increasingly outspoken positions in the everlasting hunt for likes as returns diminish.

And of course once you’ve gone down one trouser leg of validation, it’s rather hard to come back. I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy is quite up to describing this effect because the increasing apparent conviction is based on diminishing returns for increasingly wild claims.

This is the only explanation I can come up with for the constant over-reaching of gender identity … Read the rest

Robert Reich points out that the Republican party veered into incoherence when it tried to combine libertarianism with cultural conservatism.

That kind of incoherence is inevitable though, when you have on the one hand two political parties and on the other hand more than two political philosophies or orientations or whatever you want to call them. It applies just as much to the Dems – they’re way too conservative on most issues for my liking, but they’re all there is.

The party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby created an opening for a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.

Or centering on whatever exactly it was that they saw in Trump. … Read the rest

Julie Bindel at Unherd:

In 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then rape their victims before pimping them to multiple men in exchange for alcohol, cigarettes and food.

…

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national