Sadiq Khan has an interesting plan.

Adverts promoting negative body images will be banned across the Transport for London (TfL) network from next month.

As part of his mayoral election manifesto Sadiq Khan pledged to ban adverts promoting “unhealthy or unrealistic” body images.

The advertising watchdog received 378 complaints in 2015 about a weight-loss advert that asked customers if they were “beach body ready?”

Mr Khan has now asked TfL to set up its own advertising steering group.

The ASA rejected the complaints.

The Protein World “beach body ready” promotional posters were defaced in Tube stations and a petition was started calling for the adverts to be banned, however the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) watchdog later ruled the advert

Nick Little has a blistering post on hell and the slaughter in Orlando. Like me, he takes the idea of hell seriously as an evil harmful concept.

…like many people, what moved me away from religion (including a brief sojourn in Universalism) was the concept of hell as understood by the general believer, not by the academic or apologist. Hell was, I was taught, an unspeakably bad place. A place of torture, torment, and pain that would last for all eternity. And so I became unable to hold the existence of such a place, where people were actually sent, as consistent with the idea of a loving God.

Exactly. It’s not.

But it’s a mainstream belief – which is … Read the rest

Environment and Energy Daily reports:

One flier advertises an open hunting season on southeast Utah backpackers, with no harvest limits and all weapons permitted.

Another carries a fake news release from Interior Secretary Sally Jewell: The federal government plans to seize more than 4 million acres of the Navajo Nation’s land.

A third flier advertises a July 17 party in Blanding, Utah, to celebrate President Obama’s designation of a Bears Ears National Monument that would supposedly happen that day. But Utah Navajos aren’t invited, the flier states. They can kiss access to their sacred lands goodbye.

“Utah Navajos, stay away from our party,” it reads. “Everyone else come and celebrate with us.”

The postings discovered in the past month

Originally a comment by Ariel on They all stated without hesitation that it was wrong and forbidden.

Catholics, huh? Well, if you are interested in reactions of people in more distant and exotic parts of the world, here it goes.

Here in Poland we have a nationalist-Catholic organization called „All-Polish Youth”. Sweet people. Soon after the Orlando attack, on their Facebook site you could read the infamous quote from Leviticus (“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them”), attached to a photo of the Orlando club.

This provoked a lot of outrage and the Facebook post was … Read the rest

So if you’re a woman in Qatar and you get roofied, you’d better just shut up about it, because if you accuse the roofier of rape you’ll be charged with a crime yourself, and most likely convicted. The BBC reports:

A court in Qatar has convicted a Dutch woman of having sex outside marriage after she told police she was raped.

The 22-year-old was handed a suspended sentence and fined $824 (£580). She will also be deported.

Her lawyer said her drink had been spiked at a Doha hotel in March and she had woken up in a stranger’s flat, where she realised she had been raped.

The stranger was sentenced to 100 lashes for the “sex outside marriage,” … Read the rest

Adele Wilde on Facebook:

I taught a group of Algerian Muslim men here a couple of months ago. Without any provocation from my side, they asked me what I thought about gay people.

I had been warned by my boss (eager not to lose paying students) not to be pro-gay or say anything that might offend them (what like expressing views of a decent, tolerant human being?). He told me that a male teacher had said something to the class that showed he supported LGBT rights. They were deeply offended and told my boss to get another teacher for them, which he did.

So I turned the question on the men and asked them what they thought. They all

There are people who identify as victims of an organized group of stalkers, who are everywhere.

At first, Mr. Trespas wondered if it was all in his head. Then he encountered a large community of like-minded people on the internet who call themselves “targeted individuals,” or T.I.s, who described going through precisely the same thing.

The group was organized around the conviction that its members are victims of a sprawling conspiracy to harass thousands of everyday Americans with mind-control weapons and armies of so-called gang stalkers. The goal, as one gang-stalking website put it, is “to destroy every aspect of a targeted individual’s life.”

Mental health professionals say the narrative has taken hold among a group of people

And now, in Los Angeles…

Authorities in Santa Monica found possible explosives as well as weapons and ammunition Sunday in the car of a man who told them he was in town for the L.A. Pride festival in West Hollywood, a law enforcement source said.

Early Sunday,  Santa Monica police received a call of a suspected prowler near Olympic Boulevard and 11th Street. Patrol officers responded and encountered an individual who told officers he was waiting for a friend. That led officers to inspect the car and find several weapons and a lot of ammunition as well as tannerite, an ingredient that could be used to create a pipe bomb.

The car had Indiana plates. The man, was was

Everyday Sexism continues to flourish.

A casting call for a new project produced by Quentin Tarantino has caused controversy after a Facebook post invited “whores” to apply.

The post, which has since been deleted, appeared on a casting agency page and began: “Casting Whores for Quentin Tarantino project”. The post later requested that all applicants have “natural breasts” and should put the word “whore” in the subject line.

So the question becomes, do they mean actors who want to play prostitutes? Or do they mean women in general, whom they like to call whores? It’s impossible to tell.

The film doesn’t appear on Quentin Tarantino’s IMDb page. His last film The Hateful Eight drew controversy for its abusive treatment