Now that’s more like it.

Scarborough’s New Year fireworks cancelled to protect walrus

Priorities. Which is more important, a walrus or fireworks? The walrus, obviously. Good job Scarborough.

A New Year’s Eve fireworks display had to be cancelled at the last minute to protect an Arctic walrus discovered in Scarborough.

The event was called off over fears it “could cause distress to the mammal”. Council leader Steve Siddons said he was disappointed but “the welfare of the walrus has to take precedence”.

The walrus, which has drawn huge crowds since arriving on Saturday, is believed to be the same one spotted on the Hampshire coast three weeks ago.

If it’s drawn huge crowds that would seem to indicate it’s … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on Where are the skeptics?

To go back to latsot’s analogy with other kinds of pseudomedicine, why is the skeptic community not going after the quack doctors peddling dangerous drugs and mutilating surgery to these genuinely distressed people?

I’ve been racking my brain for years trying to figure this out, and the best I can come up with is this:

“Gender medicine” is a treatment for a mental health disorder but people are terrified to make any kind of association between atypical gender expression and being mentally disordered. To which the obvious reply should be, “Then get rid of gender medicine, you idiots!” But instead, the reply from skeptics, progressives and everyone else is … Read the rest

Sigh. Rule number one, plus two through six or seven hundred: don’t be an asshole.

A controversial New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the billionaire owner of New York’s Empire State Building’s property outside Queenstown is understood to have caused a large scrub fire.

Why was the fireworks display controversial? Well, because of the risk of fire. Cool that the guy did it anyway.

Empire State Realty Trust chairman, president and chief executive Tony Malkin of New York had upset neighbours of his Dalefield property with plans for an extravagant 14-minute fireworks display to bring in 2023.

Because fireworks are a necessity of life?

Now, several neighbours who were watching the display closely with fears for their animals, believe

Everything that’s yours is belong to us.

An Australian transgender woman who says she was barred from using the female-only platform Giggle for Girls has sued the social media site for alleged discrimination.

Female people must not be allowed to have anything that’s only for them. Not one thing.

In a federal court lawsuit filed on 22 December, Roxanne Tickle claims she was unlawfully barred from using Giggle in September 2021 after the firm and its CEO, Sally “Sall” Grover, said she was a man.

The activist is seeking damages, a written apology and complete access to the platform.

Oh is that all.

After initially suing Giggle and Grover in the federal circuit and family court in July this

What do you know, sometimes Scientific American does remember that men are not women and vice versa.

Women have long surpassed men in the arena of environmental action; across age groups and countries, females tend to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Compared to men, women litter less, recycle more, and leave a smaller carbon footprint. Some researchers have suggested that personality differences, such as women’s prioritization of altruism, may help to explain this gender gap in green behavior.

Or to put it more crudely, lots of men are of the “you can’t tell me what to do” mindset even in contexts where yes of course someone can tell you what to do, while women are better at … Read the rest

Recognised:

A trans media activist who has been made an OBE said she was afraid of the backlash she might receive as a result.

It’s a funny sort of gig, being an “activist” for pretending to be the sex you’re not. “Come on, kids, let’s get some more of you pretending to be the other sex! You boys especially – put some effort into it!”

Helen Belcher, from Wiltshire, director of Transactual and trustee of Trans Media Watch, has been recognised in the King’s New Year’s Honours list.

Claim to fame? Pretending to be a woman.

The 59-year-old councillor said she was afraid of what the press reaction might be towards her.

“I would hope it would mean things

Originally a comment by latsot on Scary guy.

I know we’ve all made this point a thousand times but I never claimed not to be boring: where are the skeptics?

They (we) were right there front and centre when homoeopathy was a hot topic. You know what? In retrospect I think we probably exaggerated the harms, I don’t mind admitting it. Not the harms of believing nonsense, I don’t think those can be overstated, but the harms of fannying about with water for pretend ailments or ones that will eventually sort themselves out anyway*… there’s a case to be made that we might have had our thumbs on the scale when we raved about it as a scourge. Understand … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Cluecat on Scary guy.

Strange, isn’t it, that just a few years ago there was a massive issue raised by the Skeptic/Autism Advocate communities about Autistic youngsters (primarily male) being fed Lupron as a supposed “cure” for their Autism – that was totally caused by mercury poisoning (somehow that none of these practitioners ever really managed to satisfactorily explain).

There was a huge fuss about how chemical castration doesn’t cure a neurological developmental disorder, and that feeding these kids the same stuff that everyone decided was too harsh to give to literal sex offenders was correctly recognised as medical abuse (often driven by the kind of parent that won’t accept a “defective” child), and totally … Read the rest

The ACLU is promoting (on Facebook) a list it drew up last April of “10 Books Politicians Don’t Want You to Read.” Interesting. Something socialist no doubt, a communist item, an anarchist one, a Randesque libertarian one, maybe a Proud Boys tract, a sermon on gun rights…

No, not so much. What do we get?

Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”

“Heather Has Two Mommies” by Lesléa Newman

“All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Johnson

Ok I haven’t heard of that one, what is it? (And by the way it should be Not All Boys Are Blue, not All Boys Aren’t. Everybody gets that wrong these days; it’s irritating.)

In “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” LGBTQ+ activist George M. Johnson writes about

Commenter guest reminded us that Jack Turban has conflicts of interest. Let’s refresh our memories on those conflicts.

Uncommon ground in August 2020:

Jack Turban, insistent critic of Abigail Shrier’s book on transitioning of young girls, constantly claims puberty blockers are safe. He is paid by a firm that manufactures them.

And this isn’t, like, an acne cream or an over the counter cold remedy. It’s halting an adolescent’s puberty, with all the attendant consequences we’ve been learning about over the past several years. It’s a very drastic intervention, even if you believe everyone who claims to be trans really is trans and really does need medical intervention. If you believe that at least some people who claim … Read the rest

The Ginni Thomas transcript is finally out. She admits she was just bullshitting when she tried to help overturn the election.

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, admitted that she was not aware of any specific evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election at the time she personally lobbied senior White House officials to overturn the results.

She had no evidence but she lobbied anyway. To overturn an election. On behalf of an openly criminal thieving pussygrabbing sadistic bully and thug. Conservative values!

In the aftermath of that election, Ms Thomas personally lobbied White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to text messages obtained by the committee and leaked to journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“Help This

In Scientific American of all places. I know they have precedent, thanks to that crappy article the zealots used to point to, but there oughta be a limit. Jack Turban of all people – and the title Trans Girls Belong on Girls’ Sports Teams. Yeah sure: boys belong on girls’ sports teams, SciAm says so.

You may be wondering what this is doing in a science magazine, but the subtitle explains all:

There is no scientific case for excluding them

That’s sneaky, of course, because it’s not a purely scientific issue in the first place. It’s not science that says grown men shouldn’t punch babies in the face. There are some relevant facts though, which can be disputed or … Read the rest

News from the MidAmerica branch of Unitarian Universalistism:

UUMA/UUA Neurodiversity Skill Up Series: Rev. Leela Sinha

Rev. Leela Sinha (ze/zim/zir) is a brown, queer, genderqueer, entrepreneurial community minister with a theology of pleasure and a habit of transformative mischief. In zir work, ze offers leadership coaching, training, and keynotes, working with leaders and organizations to develop and delight in the power and intensity we have, and to use that power for good.

Wait a second. Who is this “we”? Did anyone ask what our pronouns are? And by “our” of course I mean “fm”.

Ze has been a UU all zir life, and lives and works in the Bay Area. Check out zir’s work with zir Sinha Intensive/Expansive Framework,

A euphemism too many:

Police Scotland has used the term “minor-attracted people” to describe paedophiles in a major report despite warnings it normalises child abuse.

It is a literal translation, but the overtones are very different, which is surely the point. Why would it be necessary or useful to come up with a less judgey label for sexual abuse of children? There’s no push to euphemise the words for other crimes is there? No calls to rename murder “premature involuntary termination”? Why euphemise sexual abuse of children?

The term MAP is contentious because child abusers are trying to escape the stigma attached to paedophilia and maintain they should be regarded as a niche group alongside the LGBT community.

The … Read the rest

Not just a social media influencer any more.

Social media influencer Andrew Tate has been arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group, prosecutors have confirmed.

Now that’s the big time.

The 36-year-old British-American and his brother Tristan were arrested on Thursday evening and are being detained for 24 hours alongside two Romanian suspects, prosecutors in the country said.

“The four suspects… appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost,” prosecutors said.

Imagine being a person who would do that – what can it be like? It … Read the rest

Elon Musk is saving Twitter from going broke by not paying the rent. That should work.

Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

Don’t pay the rent; don’t buy toilet paper. The future looks bright!

Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions

But

❤️❤️❤️

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 15, 2022

H/t GW… Read the rest

I should check out Greta Thunberg’s Twitter more often. She retweets urgent news items.

More than 120 people were killed Tuesday as the worst floods in years battered DRC's capital Kinshasa following an all-night downpour. Major roads in the city of some 15 million people, were submerged for hours, & a key supply route was cut off. #ClimateCrisis pic.twitter.com/fvPJ4MULLJ

— Fridays For Future Uganda (@Fridays4FutureU) December 14, 2022

Drought, one of the worst in last 50 years, in Peruvian Andes ravages alpaca flocks and potato crops, forcing government to declare state of emergency in more than 100 districts https://t.co/4f47v80szM

— TRT World (@trtworld) December 4, 2022

… Read the rest

David Folkenflik at NPR in September 2020:

Now comes the claim that you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson’s critics. It’s being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News’s own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.

Just read U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil’s opinion, leaning heavily on the arguments of Fox’s lawyers: The “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ “

And … Read the rest

Took his “anti-feminism” a little too far did he?

Anti-feminist social media personality Andrew Tate ‘arrested’ in Romania on human trafficking charges

The self-styled misogynist internet celebrity Andrew Tate has reportedly been arrested in Romania…British-American Tate, 36, has amassed a huge following of young men via Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Training young men to hate women more than they already do for fun and profit; it’s almost as good as charging women $5k and a fancy dinner for the privilege of being shamed.

Former Big Brother contestant Tate has almost 3.5 million Twitter followers. He recently got into a social media spat with climate activist Greta Thunberg. After [his] bragging about the carbon emissions of his supercars, Thunberg replied that