Uh oh. Salt water contaminating the drinking water in a highly populated area.

Drought-like conditions in the Midwest over the summer have created a growing water problem in the New Orleans area this fall.

Water levels of the Mississippi River have dropped low enough to make the river less resistant to a mass of saltwater flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico. This circumstance, known as saltwater intrusion, is endangering the drinking water systems in and around the city, as well as smaller municipalities to the south.

Is that scary enough yet?

Officials in Louisiana and with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say that a “saltwater wedge” could reach water treatment plants near New Orleans in October and

… Read the rest

This may be a contestant for the Most Passive-aggressive Subhead Ever prize:

A Harry Potter panel due to be held at London’s Comic Con event in October has been cancelled after conversations with an LGBTQ+ charity.

Who cancelled it? Who had the conversations? What is the connection between the cancelling and the conversations? What LGBXYZ charity?

Obviously a subhead can’t give all the relevant information, but that doesn’t mean it has to wrap itself in the passive voice repeatedly. It’s like the “activism” as a whole – all the creepy endless spying “something was said to someone by someone” hissing and pointing. Scandal-mongering without any scandal to work with. More succinctly: bad thinking leads to bad writing. That subhead is … Read the rest

It seems like only yesterday that no one would have said anything this stupid even for a hefty bribe.

The really unlikeable ARROGANCE of the TERF movement. In many ways, they remind me of Zionists trying to govern who is a "real" Jew or not. TERFs seem to think they have the right to govern who is a "real" woman or not.

It's none of their business. Who does Sandy think she is? https://t.co/q56ZMsS2yP

— Martin Philip Odoni (@HavetStorm) September 23, 2023

It’s nothing to do with “governing.” It’s knowing.

News flash: women need to know which people are men, partly for our own safety. We don’t think we have a “right” to “govern” and we don’t consider … Read the rest

I expect the next communniny we’ll be ordered to validate and lift up and ally ourselves with is the take pictures up women’s skirts communniny.

A Sydney teacher who was jailed for secretly filming up the skirts of students at his north shore school has had his sentence overturned on appeal, after a judge agreed his mental health conditions including a voyeuristic disorder could be better treated in the community.

I wonder how many men wandering loose in the community have “a voyeuristic disorder.” If we can hear what women tell us it has to be a pretty hefty number.

Eric Wong, 29, was jailed in July for at least six months after he took 90 videos and 300

… Read the rest

Good grief.

The Undergraduate Program Director at @YorkUniversity Faculty of Education @YorkUeducation denounces "Hateful Million Child March," and predicts that its apocalyptic psychic effects could make students "feel unsafe trying to complete program requirements" pic.twitter.com/D7LdwDnuRs

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) September 22, 2023

Yet again they honoo and stannd wif the “2SLGBTQIA+” memmers of our communinnee…while of course they don’t “stand with” those boring evil hags known as “women.” If only women could be done away with altogether! And they “stand against hate in all its forms” – except of course they don’t. This very statement reeks of hatred. They hate women who talk back, they hate women who are just women instead of trans women. They hate women who … Read the rest

Wait what? Who is demonizing whom?

https://twitter.com/MhairiHunter/status/1704741943966605532

It’s not “demonizing” anyone to say that men can’t be women, or to say that pretending men can be women is very bad for women’s rights.

Meanwhile…

https://twitter.com/MujerGuerrera78/status/1705135116899557835… Read the rest

The Telegraph has a long piece on what it calls Whitehall’s woke training regime.

Some of it is about what I would call anti-racism training and the rest is about gender bullshit.

Staff in Government departments are being taught about gender ideology, which affirms the idea that people can choose their gender, while those with legally protected gender critical beliefs, who believe that you cannot change your biological sex, say they are bullied into silence.

Instead of clearing backlogs from the pandemic, staff are spending work time on attending lectures on LGBT+ issues or watching videos telling them biological men can use women-only facilities if they self-identify as female.

In one department, staff shared a “30 days of Pride”

… Read the rest

Aw, Billy Bragg is sad that women are so stubborn about thinking their own thoughts instead of thinking his.

Your impressive performance at Left Field is the reason why I’m so dismayed to see you join the list of formerly progressive women who can now only find a platform in the Mail, Telegraph and Spectator.

— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) September 23, 2023

We haven’t stopped being progressive Billy. You on the other hand…… Read the rest

Geoff Mulgan on AI and bullshitters:

Since the arrival of ChatGPT there has been much debate about how AI can replace humans or work with them. Here I discuss a slightly different phenomenon which I increasingly notice, and probably wouldn’t have without the presence of generative AI: people who act rather like large language models. The phenomenon isn’t new. It’s just that we now have a new way of understanding it. As I show it’s quite malign, particularly in academia.

The strength and weakness of ChatGPT is that it can quickly assemble a plausible answer to a question, drawing on materials out in the world. It sucks them in, synthesises and mimics, sometimes quite convincingly, someone knowledgeable talking about

… Read the rest

There’s a lot of that about – a very very very large amount of it.

What is so troubling about about the attitude that Bragg displays here is its contemputous dismissal of concerns being voiced by women in favor of the mindless narrative that it's all just a matter of "having a go" at those who identify as trans. This is misogyny. https://t.co/yrodB3WOpp

— Prof. Gary Francione (@garylfrancione) September 23, 2023

It’s what makes the trans ideology and “activism” so extremely repellent.… Read the rest

But it’s their idenniny! You can’t say it’s not their idenniny! If they say they are Inuit they are Inuit!

Three women in Canada have been criminally charged after allegedly pretending to be Inuit to receive benefits from indigenous organisations.

According to police, two 25-year-old sisters committed fraud by posing as adopted Inuit children. Both sisters and their 59-year-old mother are facing two counts of fraud each. One Inuit group called the alleged deception “flabbergasting”. The defendants are due in court in the city of Iqaluit on 30 October.

In a statement, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said that the sisters – Amira and Nadya Gill – and their mother, Karima Manji, defrauded two local organisations of “funds that

… Read the rest

The Telegraph:

The Cabinet Secretary has been warned by senior civil servants of a “woke takeover of Whitehall” that risks “improperly” influencing Government policy. Simon Case was told in a letter signed by 42 staff from 16 departments that ideology on gender promoted by trans activists has become embedded in the Civil Service in a “significant breach of impartiality”.

They should call it a trans ideology takeover or similar. “Woke” is too generic and too vague.

It says the concept that “everyone has a gender identity which is more important than their sex” is “treated as undisputed fact”.

Staff who dare to air gender-critical views – meaning they believe there are two biological sexes that cannot be changed

… Read the rest

How dare Italy refuse to treat women like machines for the gestation of other people’s babies???

Italian authorities are bringing in new measures targeting LGBT families and making it harder for them to have children. Many same-sex parents feel that a new law, which would make it illegal to have surrogacy abroad, is a personal attack against them.

“We have two options: to stay in Italy and face prison, or to run away.”

Husbands Claudio and Davide (not their real names) have a baby on the way through surrogacy – a woman in another country is carrying their son for them.

They don’t “have” a baby on the way. What they have is an arrangement by which they pay a … Read the rest

Billy Bragg tells a woman how to feminism.

What?? Louise Distras hates trans people so much that she’s willing to dress in a style acceptable to Daily Mail readers in order to have a go at them. What does this have to do with feminism Louise? Or punk rock? pic.twitter.com/RO5kPuigQ3

— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) September 22, 2023

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by maddog1129 on TRANSlation.

I can’t dress in the “approved for women” way, either. With me, it starts with the shoes. I simply can’t wear the foot-binding torture devices that are assigned to women. I haven’t always had bilateral plantar fasciitis, but I’ve had the condition for several decades. In my 20’s, I could wear soft-soled oxfords; now I need all-black cushioned athletic shoes. Starting from that foundation, pants suit or pants and blazer are as close as I can get to appropriate business wear. Luckily, I didn’t have to actually go to court very often.

If I were somehow forced to put on the woman-appropriate glad rags it would feel profoundly uncomfortable…which is quite irrational.

… Read the rest

Such womany behavior:

A trans-identified male led a gang of activists to ransack the concession [stand] of a culturally significant cinematheque in Mexico last week in protest of his removal from the women’s washroom.

Sounds like fun. I think I’ll identify as Queen Elizabeth I and flip over all the library wastebaskets when they fail to believe me.

On September 12, a man calling himself “Laura Glover” took to social media to complain that he had been physically removed from the women’s washroom at the National Cinematheque in Mexico City, the nation’s most culturally significant film archive and theatre.

…

Glover was then recorded by his friend confronting security outside of the cinema, screaming at a male guard for

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Thomas the fundraising draw.

Like you, I don’t think there’s any quid pro quo going on here. Thomas is an ideologue and a true believer.

I think there’s three things going on here:

1) Conservatives want to keep justices like Thomas “in the fold.” There has long been a belief in the conservative legal and political world that Republican appointees like Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, and even Kennedy have gone “soft” and turned into moderates because they were co-opted into the Washington cocktail party circuit, or trying to curry favor with the liberal intelligentsia or whatever. (This used to be called the “Greenhouse Effect,” named for then-NYT legal reporter Linda Greenhouse — the … Read the rest

Oh so that’s how they get there – simple – just claim that “transvestite”=”transgender” and breeze right past all the differences.

New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People

The author is Laurie Marhoefer, a historian at the University of Washington.

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case.

It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians, including myself, before finding that the

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Mostly Cloudy at Miscellany Room.

The extremist trans activist Alejandra Caraballo is promoting an article in the Smithsonian Magazine that claims the Nazis persecuted transgender people:

The Nazis came for trans people, burned the first trans clinic, and murdered the first trans woman who ever got bottom surgery.

To deny this is to engage in holocaust denial.

I keep hearing this claim put about by many trans activists. The obvious purpose of this claim is to smear anyone who disagrees with puberty blockers, men in women’s prisons, men competing in women’s sports, etc. as being a similar type of murderous bigot that the Nazis were.

Has anyone researched this? I know Malcolm Clark has … Read the rest

Pro Publica has more on the ever-expanding “Clarence Thomas has multiple conflicts of interest” scandal.

On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Libertarian meaning extremely conservative and pro-rich people & anti-poor people.

One passenger on one private jet was Clarence Thomas.

During the summit, the justice went to a private dinner for the network’s donors. Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice

… Read the rest