It drives me crazy how normalized dangerous driving is.

Road safety campaigners have accused the UK home secretary of trying to downplay the dangers of speeding after she reportedly requested a private speed awareness course after being caught driving over the speed limit.

Bad writing. You have to read the whole piece to understand that she requested a private course instead of a group one. She didn’t ask for a speed awareness course because she wanted to improve her awareness, she asked for a private one instead of a group one because she wanted to be sneaky.

Within the last year, two of Braverman’s ministers at the Home Office were banned from driving for six months. The immigration minister,

Never mind about the health of the baby, if the man wants to “participate” in breastfeeding the baby by taking a cocktail of drugs and hormones here’s the list. Women, meanwhile, must not drink so much as a glass of wine.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals has a maternity document that advises men to breastfeed their babies if they say they identify as women. It links to a blog that advises men to take birth control pills, estrogen and domperidone to build milk ducts https://t.co/pHu8meXdvF pic.twitter.com/3twx97r2Qz

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) May 20, 2023

… Read the rest

What a stupid thing to lose a job over – curated pronouns ffs.

A New York Christian university terminated two employees for putting pronouns in their respective email signatures, these former workers allege, according to reports.

Where are all the secular universities here? The idea that pronouns are magic is more theocratic than secular; the secular universities absolutely need to resist that idea too.

Raegan Zelaya and Shua Wilmot, who were residence hall directors at Houghton University, said that administrators told them to take the words “she/her” and “he/him” off of their email signatures.

Apart from anything else, customized pronouns in email are utterly stupid because nobody is going to be using their pronouns in email in the first place. … Read the rest

Another girl loses another opportunity to a boy in a girls’ sport.

A boy took 2nd in the Girls 1600m at a CA State qualifier meet on Saturday. The top 3 finishers advance to State. He smiled while 4th place senior, Adeline Johnson lost her chance to advance to State by 1 spot.@SF_TERF_CENTRAL @XxtraEstroGenny @icons_women #SaveWomensSports pic.twitter.com/LXC6uRtPbP

— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) May 21, 2023

It’s the girls 1600m so the boy shouldn’t have been there at all. It’s not fair. It’s obviously not fair.

This damn fool doesn’t understand “fair.”

One women found our “Protect Female Sports” banner disgusting and offensive. Note the secretive thank you’s and a high-five by a female athlete at the end. @SF_TERF_CENTRAL @XxtraEstroGenny @icons_women #SaveWomensSports

The kids today, you know? How does anybody think anybody wants to watch a clip of “Watch me squirming to music in the front seat of a car”?

Well let’s face it, wims, your bodies just are ugly. We know it, you know it, the whole world knows it. We try to be polite about it but when we want to show off our fabulous new swimsuits it would be stupid to get lumpy bulgy clumsy women to do it. It takes a man to model a women’s swimsuit.

Adidas has come under fire for advertising a female-style swimming costume using a model with a penis.

That’s the small polite kind of bulge. Not like those sloppy bobbly breast things, let alone those giant buttocks.

See how beautiful???? Who would dream of replacing that with a woman?

The move has prompted criticism from campaigners for women’s equality

Interesting. This cop tells Billboard Chris that if his sign says something “offensive” to anyone that’s “where you fall short.” He says it’s the law, and he says it more than once. Chris reasonably points out that that would mean anything at all could fit that description and the cop agrees that it could. But the cop is wrong.

The bit where the cop says it:

The bit where he’s wrong:

It is not a crime if someone is offended. For it to be an offence under Section 7 of The Public Order Act, the sign must be "threatening, abusive, insulting or obscene".
However, if our proposed hate speech law is enacted, it likely will be a crime to

He said to them, quite honestly, no.

A trans-identified male is suing England's Rugby Football Union over a ruling prohibiting men from playing on women's teams.

Julie-Anne Curtiss, who has a history of stealing women's underwear, compared sex categories in sport to racial apartheid.

READ: https://t.co/DYliCdPpDN pic.twitter.com/d1L8cvI6WX

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) May 18, 2023

They told him he could do coaching or reffing, but no, he said, if he did that it would mean he was accepting “that trans women can’t play this sport.”

No it wouldn’t. That’s a lie. The usual lie. It would mean he was accepting that men (including men who identify as trans) can’t play women’s rugby. Not the whole sport, just the women’s sport. So, he’s … Read the rest

Oliver Brown at the Telegraph talked to cyclist Hannah Arensman about being forced to compete against a man. Her passion for cycling

was a passion she channelled with distinction, wearing the colours of her country, winning national medals, even nurturing a dream of representing the United States at next summer’s Paris Olympics. And yet last December, at the age of 24, she simply walked away. The immediate trigger for that decision was not injury or dwindling form, but the fact that in her final race, at the US cyclocross championships in Connecticut, she lost out on a podium place to a biological male. “There are,” she says, “a million different levels where it hurts.”

Arensman was fourth on that Hartford

The climate emergency in progress:

The province of Alberta, Canada, home to more than four million people, is under a state of emergency, as nearly 100 wildfires burn, dozens of them out of control. Since the first local state of emergency was declared on 4 May, over 782,000 hectares of land – 1.9 million American football fields or more than 3,000 square miles – have burned, local officials said.

Thousands of firefighters and support staff from across Canada and the US have descended upon the area to fight the ceaseless flames. Still, there are 93 active wildfires in Alberta as of 12:00 EST (17:00 BST) on Friday, and experts say the end is nowhere in sight.

Wild fires are … Read the rest

Nobody disinvites the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

LA Pride has pulled out of an annual Pride Night hosted by the Dodgers after the team disinvited a non-profit drag group from the event.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Dodgers rescinded an invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a well-known San Francisco order of queer and trans ‘nuns’ that has existed since the 1970s, amid opposition from conservative Catholics. The group, which does does charitable and protest work in addition to its street drag show performances, was set to receive an award during a ceremony before a 16 June game against the San Francisco Giants.

Conservative Catholics can go soak their heads. The Catholic church is an evil institution … Read the rest

Willoughby. Such a nice guy.

But this is the best example, and it wasn't on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/jA9j5Kqm2q

— Stuart Macintosh (@stueymaco) May 12, 2023

… Read the rest

The Guardian on Jankowicz v Fox part 2:

Her aim she said was partly to show that individuals could also confront the powerful, not just businesses like Dominion and Smartmatic. “These companies have venture capital firms behind them, they can afford fancy lawyers and years-long trials to hold Fox to account. For individuals like me, it’s much harder – and I don’t believe that is something that our system can sustain.”

By bringing the lawsuit, she runs the risk of potentially opening herself up to a renewed wave of criticism that she is attempting to limit free speech protected under the first amendment. The Guardian asked her whether suing for defamation was the best way to counter Fox’s alleged

Oddly familiar.

Nina Jankowicz sued Fox News and its parent company Fox Corporation for allegedly damaging her reputation as a specialist in conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. The lawsuit was lodged in a Delaware state court exactly a year after she resigned as executive director of a new Department of Homeland Security unit combatting online disinformation.

The Disinformation Governance Board was abruptly shut down in the wake of a storm of virulent rightwing criticism, allegedly fueled by Fox News. Jankowicz and the new DHS division she led were attacked as being part of a conspiracy to censor rightwing comment spearheaded by Joe Biden.

Shutting down disinformation is translated to stifling politically incorrect opinion. We’ve been seeing that translation around … Read the rest

Is that steam?

Temperatures in the world’s oceans have broken fresh records, testing new highs for more than a month in an “unprecedented” run that has led to scientists stating the Earth has reached “uncharted territory” in the climate crisis.

The rapid acceleration of ocean temperatures in the last month is an anomaly that scientists have yet to explain. Data collated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), known as the Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) series, gathered by satellites and buoys, has shown temperatures higher than in any previous year, in a series stretching back to 1981, continuously over the past 42 days.

…

Prof Mike Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey said: “This has

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on All the rivers.

Quite honestly, the most frightening aspect is that the heating is affecting access to resources, especially water. Flooding does have its benefits when it’s part of a natural cycle, as in the Red River Valley of the North, or the Nile Delta, where the floods leave behind nutrients on agricultural land that would otherwise be overused and end up not being arable. But the floods, such as in Italy, in Pakistan last year, and in England before that, do not do much to restore the natural water table as the water rushes down towards the sea. And the water that’s flooding there is not falling in places that also … Read the rest

More inclusive inclusiony huggy kissy embracey inclusion (but not for you though):

Kinetic has made its commitment to diversity and inclusion spectacularly clear with one of its iconic SkyBus red double decker buses transformed with a rainbow-coloured design.

Ooooooh has it??? It painted a bus in colors??????? That’s the most diverse and inclusiony thing I’ve ever heard of!! I can hardly breathe from the diversity and inclusion.

The ‘Pride Bus’ will adorn freeways and arterial roads connecting SkyBus passengers between the city centre and Melbourne’s two major airports at Tullamarine and Avalon. 

It will adorn them? So it won’t go to and fro carrying passengers in the usual way of buses, but instead it will adorn freeways and arterial roads? … Read the rest

Different moves, different grooves. Stands to reason, don’t it.

Here, @laurahelmuth, the editor-in-chief of @sciam is claiming that different behaviours (aggressive v nurturing) equals different sexes.

Seriously. She’s arguing that an aggressive male sparrow is a different sex to a nurturing male sparrow. https://t.co/hPnXrtGf8S

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) May 17, 2023

White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways
P.S. Nature is amazing
P.P.S. Sex is not binary https://t.co/NJhQI6uC0q via @audubonsociety

— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth) May 17, 2023

Once again, ideology distorts science: the editor-in-chief of Scientific American flubs big time, wrongly asserting that sparrows have four sexes. https://t.co/J3HddoJFjA

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) May 18, 2023

… Read the rest

Planned Parenthood tells women to be quiet.

Climate crisis in Italy:

More than 20 rivers have burst their banks in Italy, leaving 13 people dead and forcing thousands from their homes after six months’ rainfall fell in a day and a half.

More bodies were found on Thursday after almost every river flooded between Bologna and the north-east coast 115km (70 miles) away. Some 280 landslides have taken place.

…

Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely. Already, the world has warmed about 1.1C since the industrial era began, and temperatures will continue to rise unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.

Which they’re not going to do.… Read the rest