Why? Everybody deserves to be protected in the sense of shielded from violence and exploitation, but nobody “deserves” to be celebrated. That’s a silly claim, or slogan – it’s a slogan rather than a claim but it’s in the form of a claim, which makes it both pernicious and ridiculous. We might as well run around saying [insert random set of people here] deserve immortality, or a car, or a lifetime ticket to Disneyland, or a slap-up meal at Taco Bell.
Sane progressive campaigns have sane goals. Feminist campaigns, labor campaigns, anti-racism campaigns all focused on genuine, specific rights and reasonable, achievable goals. They did not demand pampering and flattery and ass-kissing.
These campaigns sound more like Trump than like the SPLC or the Feminist Majority Foundation.
Speaking to reporters on Monday during an event that was supposed to have been about quantum computing, Mr. Trump said the enormous blooms of green algae and the peeling polyurethane had nothing to do with the rushed $16.4 million makeover he had ordered. Instead, he laid out in vague terms a series of events that he claimed were responsible for the highly embarrassing breakdown of a Washington landmark.
To hear Mr. Trump tell it, the renovation was going perfectly until vandals armed with knives and fertilizer set their sights on the century-old pool, which stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
I hope there will be a biopic. “Armed With Knives and Fertilizer” – with a title like that it can’t fail.
“They put, somebody said, fertilizer in the water,” Mr. Trump said. “If you put fertilizer in the water, you get algae. But somebody said they might have put fertilizer. They did something to create the algae.”
Good old somebody. Where would Trump be without Somebody? He needs his Somebody to explain all the Somethings that keep happening right where Trump is standing. Somebody did Something; news at 7.
Relentless, deadly heat is tightening its grip on Europe, with temperature records expected to not just fall but be obliterated this week. Scientists warn this extreme heat is a huge problem for Europe and a wake up call to a new reality.
Europe is the planet’s fastest-warming continent, heating at around two to three times the global average, yet it’s woefully underprepared. Its infrastructure was not built for extreme heat; when temperatures spike, rail tracks buckle, power cables break, homes turn into heat traps, and thousands die.
This week is yet another brutal reminder that European heat is becoming both more severe and more frequent. It marks the second record-breaking heat wave in two straight months, with the potential for national all-time temperature records to be broken before Europe even reaches July, typically its hottest month.
…
In the United Kingdom, temperatures are set to soar into the triple digits this week, with the UK Met Office issuing an very rare red warning for extreme heat, indicating a risk to life.
Hundreds of schools are closing or moving to half days, people have been told to avoid train journeys, and the Met Office has warned of severe impacts on energy and water. London is “cooking,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres, addressing an audience at London Climate week Tuesday.
…
The heat dome is not unusual for Europe in summer, “but the temperatures are,” said Richard Allan, a climate science professor at the University of Reading. These are being supercharged by climate change, driven by humans burning oil, coal and gas, which raises the background temperature, making every heat wave more intense.
And we can’t possibly stop burning all that oil, coal and gas, so we’re doomed. Oh well.
Scientists say that even without El Niño, climate change is the driving force of extreme heat. “There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” said Friederike Otto, a climate science professor at Imperial College London. “Yes it’s climate change, yes it’s us, no it’s not El Niño.”
It’s because we can’t possibly stop, you see.
They did tell us.
Is Europe heating up more rapidly than predicted?
In short, no — what’s happening now is what scientists have long warned. The increasing severity and extent of European heatwaves “is broadly consistent with what is expected from computer simulations and physical theory,” the University of Reading’s Allan said.
They told us, but we are helpless.
The temperatures Europe is enduring right now might not sound that extreme to some, but heat hits differently in countries where air conditioning is very rare — only found in around 20% of European homes.
Air conditioning itself contributes to warming, of course.
Europe’s May and June heat waves could just be the start of an extreme summer in Europe. “There is huge agreement that the next three months will be abnormally warm,” Thorne said.
Europe — in common with much of the rest of the world — has not reckoned with the fact the climate has shifted, he warned.
“Nowhere is truly prepared for what climate change will bring. We have developed everything — and I mean everything — to a stable climate we are rapidly waving goodbye to,” Thorne said. “We are definitively entering the find out phase here having done two centuries of mucking about by burning fossil fuels — and its not going to be pretty.”
If you get depressed about it, try going for a nice ride in the car.
The EU has invited Taliban officials to Brussels to discuss a migration deal — and today I am shaken and deeply disturbed by this.
This is the same Taliban that banned girls from secondary schools and forced them into marriage. The same Taliban that, earlier this month, arrested dozens of women in Herat for how they were dressed. The same Taliban that detains, beats and executes women who dare to speak out or break their rules.
Through its system of gender apartheid, the Taliban have erased women and girls from public life. Europe must not legitimise a regime responsible for one of the worst human rights crises in the world.
Any engagement with the Taliban must begin and end with the rights of Afghan women and girls.
In the old USSR, people could be arrested for photographing bridges, tunnels, etc. A repressive and paranoid regime assumed the photographers must be spies and saboteurs. Americans laughed at such petty tyranny. Nothing like that could happen in their free country! Until now. https://t.co/gbs3I8jD64
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement that “this administration values the judicial branch.”
“The American people have always valued President Trump’s ability to freely speak his mind and share his thoughts directly with them,” Jackson said. “It’s one of the many reasons why the President was resoundingly re-elected. He will unapologetically share his opinions about the Court’s rulings, as is his right.”
Is that true? Have we all always valued Trump’s rude ignorant trashy attacks on anyone and everyone who disagrees with him? Do we all love his noisy vulgarity and aggression?
The class-action lawsuit brought against the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) demanding to house all trans-identified male inmates in women’s prisons was brought by a pedophile, a rapist, and a domestic abuser who murdered his girlfriend, Reduxx can reveal. At the end of April, a federal judge ordered the ODOC to reassess its policies and house trans-identified males on the basis of their “gender identity” in a sweeping injunction.
How does a judge manage to think it’s fair to put violent men in women’s prisons so that the violent men will be safer and the women will be vastly more in danger? The violent men don’t want to be at the mercy of violent men, so hey, here’s the solution, put the subgroup of violent men with the women. Shift the danger to women! Problem solved!
For too many transgender Chicagoans, the sense of belonging they deserve in their city has been denied by exclusion and barriers to opportunity in spaces that should feel safe and welcoming. Since declaring a Transfemicide State of Emergency, our administration has strengthened… https://t.co/kJThl0CvHj
— Mayor Brandon Johnson (@ChicagosMayor) June 21, 2026
…Since declaring a Transfemicide State of Emergency, our administration has strengthened the City’s capacity to support LGBTQ+ Chicagoans. This framework builds on that work by centering the voices and lived experiences of trans Chicagoans to chart a path toward a safer, more connected city.
So what are the numbers? Please to quantify the transfemicide. Google AI obliges with:
Advocacy organizations and media investigations identified at least 15 transgender and gender non-conforming people—predominantly Black and Latinx trans women—violently killed in Chicago since 2015.
Oh. At least one per year.
Women?
In Chicago, approximately 50 to 80 women are killed per year. Women make up about 10% to 15% of the city’s overall homicide victims, with Black women disproportionately affected.
I wonder if Chicago has ever declared a femicide state of emergency.
If you type “chicago femicide state of emergency” into Google you get links to transfemicide. No links to femicide. None.
France has banned alcohol at some events at massive national music festival as a heatwave pushes temperatures towards record levels.
The annual Fête de la Musique celebrations draw millions to the streets but with the most serious heatwave warnings being issued for 35 of France’s departments, the government has banned alcohol consumption in public places under the red alerts.
Good plan. The hotter it is, the worse idea it is to gulp down the gin.
Temperatures have been forecast to peak on Monday, and authorities have warned they could match historic highs.
The government has called for limits on alcohol consumption “to preserve emergency and healthcare services and allow medical staff to focus on caring for the most vulnerable”.
The heatwave has been going for days and has disrupted the country, forcing the cancellation of dozens of trains and the suspension of classes.
Thank you, Tulsi, for documenting Dr. Fauci's central role in causing the COVID-19 pandemic — among the most consequential crimes in human history. https://t.co/Mni91nFi3Y
Trump has claimed that United States Park Police have made several arrests in connection with what he described as deliberate sabotage of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington D.C., which underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation earlier this year.
“The United States Park Police have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Saturday evening. “These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
In a second post on Saturday, Trump described the alleged damage in greater detail, saying more arrests had followed. He provided no evidence for any of his claims about the nature of the damage, and neither the Park Police nor any other law enforcement agency had publicly confirmed any arrests as of the time of publication.
On Friday, Maryland resident and former Olympian David Hearn was arrested and charged with destroying government property. Hearn says he merely reached into the pool to touch one of the already dislodged blue pieces, and denies the charge.
Only Trump could manage to have one (1) person arrested and have that person turn out to be a former Olympian.
Trump said that the pool would be drained and repaired quickly, and framed the alleged vandalism as an affront to American history. “We met with contractors today, will probably be forced to release and drain much of the water in order to do the necessary repairs,” he wrote. “What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly”.
Those are the two he’s heard of. Jefferson? Adams? Other Adams? Roosevelt? Other Roosevelt? Hoo R they?
Trump described what he said was physical destruction to the pool’s newly renovated lining. “They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete,” he wrote Saturday. “They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”
Yuh huh and they installed invisible witches and they stole all the diamonds and they made Trump look like a clown.
The president connected the alleged vandalism to the recent green color of the pool — again, without evidence. The pool turned green last week after being refilled following its renovation, in which its floor was repainted in a shade Trump calls “American flag blue.”
Aquatic ecologists and pool specialists told NPR the discoloration was caused by a natural bloom of algae from the genus Desmodesmus — a process scientists say is common in shallow, sun-exposed bodies of water, and one that may have been accelerated by the renovation disturbing the nutrient balance of the water.
Oh no no no that can’t possibly be right, it’s pure coincidence.
This has been one of the most succulent ironies I’ve seen in a long time. The administration that denies climate change has created a scale model of how it happens at their door because of their ignorant decisions and impositive orders.
They have a miniature anthropocene right there.
Disturbed by what he deemed a “filthy” aesthetic, Trump bypassed seasoned engineers and civil specialists, awarding a $14.2 million no-bid contract to a company that had previously coated a swimming pool at one of his private golf clubs.
The mandate was simple, superficial, and unburdened by expertise: paint the bottom of the historic, 2,000-foot-long basin a specific, patriotic hue dubbed “American flag blue”.
What followed is a masterclass in the unintended consequences of weaponized ignorance. By applying a dark, industrial epoxy coating across an expanse larger than six soccer fields, the builders unwittingly created a perfect, enclosed macro-experiment in anthropogenic climate change.
And I want to state the following: executive orders cannot override the basic laws of physics.
When solar radiation hits a body of water, the color of the basin’s floor dictates how that energy is managed:
The light, untreated stone bottom reflected a significant portion of solar energy back out of the shallow water, keeping temperatures relatively stable.
The dark “American flag blue” epoxy acted as a giant solar heat sink. Dark colors absorb a drastically higher percentage of the light spectrum, transferring that energy directly into the stagnant water as heat.
As a heatwave rolled through Washington D.C., the water temperature spiked. In biology, an increase in temperature accelerates metabolic rates. Combined with the untreated, nutrient-rich water pumped from the Tidal Basin, Trump’s dark blue floor transformed the national monument into a high-capacity biological incubator. Within days of completion, the pristine “azure expanse” underwent an ecological shift, blooming into a chartreuse, mossy green soup.
It’s no part of a woman prisoner’s punishment to be terrorized by having to share their space with male prisoners. The women are subjected to ogling, leering, threats, voyeurism, touching, groping, and, yes, rape, when men are housed with women in prison.
Why does your concern for prisoner safety only run one way? Grab the smelling salts and the fainting couch over the prospect that men might sexually assault male transgender prisoners, but you become blind and your head becomes empty when it comes to the risks to women prisoners of putting men into the women’s prison. Your solution is simply to transfer the risk to women prisoners because, what? Women? Pfffft! What are they?
Besides, your transperbole is false. Keeping male prisoners who claim to be transgender in the men’s prison does not inevitably subject them to violence. Male prisoners can be segregated from one another for safety. The men’s prison could create a segregated unit for transgender prisoners.
It’s interesting that, of all the retail chains in the world, it’s Lush that’s the most dogmatic about trans nonsense.
What is it about Lush specifically that aligns it so perfectly with gender woo?
I asked ChatGPT to “describe the brand and target audience of the retail chain Lush.”
Its reply began with, “Lush is basically ethical maximalism as retail theatre.” It went on to describe “natural-ish cosmetics, anti-corporate vibes, and sensory excess”, and a brand personality that is “sincere but also performative”. The bricks-and-mortar stores are “like a farmers’ market, candy shop, apothecary, activist booth, and theatre workshop mashed together.”
So it’s a giant international corporation that needs something to position itself as activist-y, countercultural, and individual. A bit Starbucks-y in that way. Starbucks, of course, is next on the list of giant international corporations that have gone kookoo for genderpuffs.
Trans, then, is corporate shorthand for “our brand is virtue”. It’s brand-positioning performance.
(No wonder the annual Toronto parade formerly known as Gay Pride is now nothing but flatbed trucks advertising Canada’s banks and media conglomerates, covered in pink, white, and baby blue.)
(It’s also no wonder that Lush was the primary sponsor of the girls-only kids’ music day camp that operated out of the venue I used to manage. That’s the one that had a strict locked-doors, no-males-anywhere-in-the-building-under-any-circumstance-because-there’s-young-girls-here policy, which it promptly discarded by hiring a hulking middle-aged crossdressing man to look after the girls alone.)
We’re gutting women’s rights and mutilating kids so corporations can sell us expensive bath bombs and pumpkin spice lattes while making us feel like we’re supporting our quirky little neighbourhood friends as we hand them our cash.
Imagine how those blue-haired, mastectomy-scarred they/thems are gonna feel in a few years when it dawns on them that their bodies were seen as nothing more than free advertising by corporate bigwigs.
Shoppers who believed only women could get pregnant were seen as “bigoted” by Lush staff, a former employee claims.
The sales assistant, who asked not to be named, told The Telegraph she saw a customer of the cosmetics retailer become upset, after she asked staff to help her choose a gift for a “pregnant woman” and was directed towards products for “pregnant people”.
In other words after staff rudely “corrected” her by telling her not to say the filthy word “woman”.
She said staff were encouraged to wear badges with preferred pronouns; described as “trans allies” by managers, and could ask customers to leave if they felt they were expressing transphobic views. Some seemed “genuinely excited” at the prospect of confronting people they saw as transphobic, she said.
Yeah no shit. Of course they did. Hey kids, it’s Righteous Denunciation time!
The former staff member contacted The Telegraph following public criticism of a window display at a Lush in Chelmsford, Essex. It showed a tiger with pink, blue and white stripes, and the words “proud of my stripes”. The tiger also bears markings suggestive of “top surgery” to remove breasts.
The display attracted criticism from survivors of breast cancer, who accused the cosmetics retailer of “glorifying the removal of healthy breasts”.
Bucky Ringsell, the artist was painted the mural, said in an Instagram post she had designed the tiger to support and represent people who had undergone top surgery, “myself included”.
But of course it’s not “top surgery”; it’s mutilation.
Staff were encouraged to hand campaign materials to customers, including parents and children, although she had concerns that some of the subjects were “too adult” for children.
This included a 24-page booklet produced by Lush and TransActual called The Dream vs Reality: Creating a World Where Trans People are Safe. It stated that being trans was not a mental illness, called for the ban on puberty blockers to be lifted and backed legal gender self-identification.
A judge has ruled that prison guidance which allows some transgender prisoners to be held in jails matching their gender identity, rather than their sex at birth, is unlawful.
Judge Lady Ross said sex segregation in prisons must be based on biological sex, based on a Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman in equality law in April last year.
Campaign group For Women Scotland challenged the Scottish government guidance through a judicial review, saying only those born biologically female should be held in the women’s estate.
Lawyers for the government had argued this would breach transgender prisoners’ human rights. The first minister said they will take time to consider the judgement.
Sneery voice: “Lawyers for the government had argued this would breach transgender prisoners’ human rights.” Well what about breaching female prisoners’ rights?! Why is it horrifying to [purportedly] breach transgender prisoners’ human rights but perfectly fine to violate women’s human rights? Why are so many people so happy to throw women to the wolves while the wolves get whatever they demand?
Lady Ross said the guidance was “in conflict with the requirement that prison accommodation be provided separately for men and women” and constituted “a mis-statement of the law”.
She said: “In all the circumstances, the prisons guidance is unlawful.”
But the Scottish government doesn’t care.
First Minister, John Swinney told BBC Scotland Lady Ross’s judgement was complex and the government will take time to consider its implications.
He said: “We will consider all of these details because there are complex issues that are involved, but at this early stage I acknowledge the outcome of the judgement from Lady Ross and the government will consider its findings.
“We will assess the implications the judgement has on carrying out policy in relation to the handling of prisoners.”
He seems to be saying his government will abide by the ruling if it feels like it but not if it doesn’t. He seems to be saying he gets to ignore the ruling.
