Ron DeSantis is making every effort to kill as many Floridians as he can.

The Office of Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the Florida Board of Education could withhold the salaries of superintendents and school board members who defy the governor’s executive order prohibiting mask mandates.

Now…why would school officials impose mask mandates?

To try to reduce the body count among students, teachers and staff. That’s it, that’s the reason. It’s not a personal insult to DeSantis, it’s an attempt to keep casualties down.

It’s extremely odd and unpleasant to see an elected official planning to punish other officials for doing that. Some people are choosing to see it as a political shouting match, but the reality is … Read the rest

Apologies for reposting this from Facebook (thus boring anyone who’s already seen it) but I discovered it’s not unique so I wanted to share.

I took the bus to a park on another bit of Puget Sound, because today is the nicest the weather is going to be until the other side of the approaching heat wave. It was indeed a perfect day for it – bright, warm but not hot, a cool breeze, interesting clouds.

Across the aisle of the bus from me was a teenage girl or young woman wearing a binder as if it were an item of clothing, like a tube top – but it was a binder. It’s quite a disconcerting sight, especially if you’ve … Read the rest

The CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis has said "Sexual violence happens to bigoted people too. But if you bring beliefs that are discriminatory, expect to be challenged on your prejudice. Reframe your trauma"

Apparently, survivors are to be "educated" in this service. https://t.co/K1Or2MhBcG

— For Women Scotland (@ForWomenScot) August 9, 2021

The CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis, you may recall, is a man. From the Glinner Update May 5:

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre has just appointed its new CEO. He’s a man.

But “she” is a man.

Mridul Wadhwa is a trans-identified male. He has no gender recognition certificate so, not only is he biologically male, he’s also legally male.

He was formerly the manager of Forth Valley

Lionel Shriver on the incendiary tuber:

When conceiving Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce anticipated a rough ride. Sure enough, an initially interested literary agent who considered her proposal “well-argued”, “persuasive” and “timely” eventually demurred that Joyce would need an advocate to “weather the storm that publishing this book will create. I am sorry to say that I am not that person.”

One sceptical British editor wrote, “Debate over trans issues is incredibly polarised and siloed, and if we are going to torch our own credentials as woke members in good standing we would prefer to do it for a book that has some chance of selling.”

Oops. The book is selling like crazy. It’s doing so … Read the rest

The blessings of religion:

An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective police custody in east Pakistan after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in the country.

Not a record Pakistan should be trying to set.

The boy’s family is in hiding and many of the Hindu community in the conservative district of Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab, have fled their homes after a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail last week. Troops were deployed to the area to quell any further unrest.

Muslims and Hindus duke it out again! Nostalgia for Partition or the Babri Masjid riots or both?

The boy is accused of intentionally urinating on

Nowhere to hide:

The repeatedly ignored warnings of scientists over past decades have now become reality. Humanity, through its actions, or lack of action, has unequivocally overheated the planet. Nowhere on Earth is escaping rising temperatures, worse floods, hotter wildfires or more searing droughts.

…

The key aspect of the IPCC report is that the 42-page summary is agreed, line by line, by every government on the planet, with the scientists vetoing any politically convenient but unscientific proposal.

As a result, governments that continue to fail to take action have nowhere left to hide – the crystal-clear report has bust all of their alibis. “Too many ‘net-zero’ climate plans have been used to greenwash pollution and business as usual,”

Originally a comment by Holms on Misinformation circulated.

…I was expected to agree that scientific facts such as sex are to be sidelined. This position has never been debated and agreed by Conference but appears to be an implicit consequence of the Party’s stance on trans rights.

An ‘implicit consequence’ is exactly right. Rejection of the very existence of sex is not a stance that any of them would have held ordinarily, it is a stance that they were forced to hold – or pretend to hold – as part of the support structure of beliefs build around TWAW/TMAM. This central belief is in need of such support specifically because it is untrue: when it clashes with some other … Read the rest

Remember Andy Wightman? Resigned from the Scottish Green Party last December over the tension between women’s rights and (purported) trans rights. Now he’s been bullied into explaining his reasons.

I never intended to write further about my resignation from the Scottish Green Party. When I resigned, I agreed with the Party not to say anything further.

However, I am now aware that there has been some significant misinformation circulated by members and officials of the Party alleging to explain why I resigned.

I have seen emails, Slack channel communications, information from protected Twitter accounts and the Party’s Q&A following my resignation They make wild allegations about my motivations and character. Some of the claims being made are now being

Another last minute tune-changer:

An anti-vaccine right-wing radio host in West Palm Beach, Florida died Wednesday from COVID-19 complications.

Dick Farrel, 65, used his local talk show and social media to rail against Dr. Anthony Fauci, who he called a “power tripping lying freak,” and say that no one should get the coronavirus vaccine. When COVID-19 sent him to the hospital for three weeks, though, he changed his tune, urging friends to get vaccinated, friends told local station WPTV.

Of the two, which is more of a power-tripping lying freak? The medical expert with decades of experience with lethal viruses and how to prevent and treat them? Or the bloviating radio host who took it all back once … Read the rest

Speaking of no it’s not a matter of if, it’s already happening, Mendocino is running out of water.

For the past century, misty, forested Mendocino – despite being nestled along a number of major rivers, creeks and springs – has relied on shallow wells for water. But amid a historic drought dessicating the US west, the aquifers beneath the town’s damp fog layer have rapidly declined, threatening to sink the region’s tourism industry and the residents who rely on it.

Café Beaujolais, which normally draws all its water for cooking and cleaning from two small wells on its property, has already been shelling out thousands of dollars to have water trucked in from nearby towns and cities.

Restaurants … Read the rest

When marketing discovers trans rhetoric and cannot believe its luck.

Bobbie, a milk formula company, wants to 'evolve the conversation' surrounding breastfeeding, and that entirely means removing the word 'breast'. Because 'those who can not are made to feel second best.. Let's start by supporting every kind of feeding journey' pic.twitter.com/RCJe1tBDBn

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) August 5, 2021

If you were marketing baby formula wouldn’t you be hugging yourself with glee? You get to talk about “putting breastfeeding on a pedestal”!! Without shame! In fact with a glow of righteous fervor, because you’re on the side of the downtrodden! Those selfish arrogant bitches, I mean cows, who can nurse their babies have lorded it over the men who identify as women … Read the rest

A new report on climate change will say (no surprise ahead) that the trend is not good. Not good at all.

The planet is odds-on to hit 1.5C of global warming within 20 years, the world’s leading climate scientists will warn in a milestone report tomorrow.

…

A 1.5C rise in average global temperatures on pre-industrial levels is widely considered to be the point beyond which climate change will become increasingly dangerous. 

Eh? It’s already becoming increasingly dangerous – it’s been doing that for decades, or ever since we started burning coal and oil at steadily escalating rates.

The cabinet minister Alok Sharma, president of Cop26, said countries must work harder to reduce emissions and ensure the threshold is not

Nick Cohen on Tucker Carlson:

Carlson is the dependable voice of the dominant force on the right that will destroy democracy in the name of “the people”.

Last week, Carlson’s Fox News beamed an admiring show from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, even though there is every indication that Orbán will make it Europe’s first rightwing dictatorship since the fall of Franco’s Spain in 1975.

Or rather because Orban is the next Franco. Fox News doesn’t have any scruples about such things.

Like the unforgivably overrated Roger Scruton, Trump’s mentor Steve Bannon, that part-time defender of free speech Jordan Peterson, and until recently the leaders of Europe’s nominally anti-dictatorial Christian Democrat parties, Carlson was comfortable with

So the UK has its own Tucker Carlson, in the shape of Toby Young. Last January he got caught telling a whopper about the virus.

The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over a “significantly misleading” column written by Toby Young, press regulator Ipso has ruled.

The July 2020 article claimed the common cold could provide “natural immunity” to Covid-19 and London was “probably approaching herd immunity”.

But on Thursday Ipso found the paper had “failed to take care not to publish inaccurate and misleading information”.

About a pandemic that kills.

I still find it hard to believe that people happily spout off on medical issues in ways that encourage people to catch a lethal virus, for the … Read the rest

In our next episode of The War on Feminist Women, we have Index on Censorship publishing an article by a Gender-Special person saying that oh yes Maya Forstater is too so twanzphobic.

In @IndexCensorship 's magazine P Andrews writes that they think I am guilty of the public order offence of Threatening Behaviour.

This is a crime that attracts up to 6 months in prison
https://t.co/dfRKHvXXKz pic.twitter.com/jpb4h0w5No

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) August 7, 2021

It feels like some kind of self- flagellation by @IndexCensorship, doing atonement for supporting my case by publish this flaccid, nonsensical, tripe.

But of course its not their reputation they are (directly) beating up on, its mine.

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) August 7, 2021

I

Owen Jones wrote a long “I never did!!” post in response to Douglas Murray in The Spectator. He took pains to accuse Suzanne Moore of lying.

Suzanne Moore wasn’t targeted or bullied, and nobody tried to get her fired – yet she’s been able to pose as a free speech martyr silenced by the misogynist mob.

This entirely fictitious episode is a classic example of a “debate” in which truth is banished. https://t.co/krPWSLDGW3

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) August 7, 2021

Hadley Freeman was in the room and she says it did happen, as Suzanne says it did.

I don’t know why people are still talking about this, but unlike a lot of people talking about this, I was at the

Rebecca Solnit addresses this constant puzzle of the politicization of death-avoidance in a pandemic:

Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.

It’s true and I … Read the rest

Marjorie Taylor Greene urges her fans to murder more federal workers.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., suggested at a recent Republican fundraiser in Alabama that Southerners could threaten President Joe Biden’s “police state friends” with guns if they show up at their homes asking about their coronavirus vaccination status.

The late-July event in Dothan was closed to the media, but a video clip of some of her comments leaked, according to the Alabama Political Reporter.

What’s the world coming to when a pro-fascist member of the House can’t foment insurrection in private?

“You lucky people here in Alabama might get a knock on your door, because I hear Alabama might be one of the most unvaccinated states,” Greene

The guy dressed as a baby at the “trans rights” protest is very indignant that people noticed he was dressed as a baby.

This photo was posted online by an extreme far right bigot.

But joke is on them, it's a great photo.#TransRightsProtest pic.twitter.com/oPkc2Nm7SB

— Felix F Fern – Writing 'Steel & Embers' (@Felix_F_Fern) August 6, 2021

Is it?

I don’t know; maybe. For a day at the beach or a pool party it may be. For other purposes? I would think not. Mostly, adults don’t want to be seen as pretending to be children, or dressing up to look like children, for a whole host of reasons. Maybe that’s unfair, maybe we should be more relaxed about the … Read the rest

Oops.