Grim:

Canada is warming on average at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the world, a new scientific report indicates.

The federal government climate report also warns that changes are already evident in many parts of the country and are projected to intensify.

Canada’s Arctic has seen the deepest impact and will continue to warm at more than double the global rate.

The report suggests that many of the effects already seen are probably irreversible.

…

Hotter temperatures could mean more heat waves and a higher risk of wildfires and droughts in some parts of the country.

Oceans are expected to become more acidic and less oxygenated, which could harm marine life.

Parts of Canada’s Arctic

Trump’s America:

An employee at a South San Jose, Calif., gas station was fired after ranting against a customer who was speaking Spanish in the store and demanding the customer prove she was a U.S. citizen.

According to ABC 7, San Jose resident Grecya Moran was speaking Spanish with an employee who, she said, had greeted her initially in Spanish. The two carried on a conversation in Spanish until another employee demanded that the two speak English, the outlet reported Tuesday.

In the video, Moran can be heard telling the employee, who is white, that she is allowed to speak Spanish before the employee asks for proof that Moran is a U.S. citizen.

It’s not the job … Read the rest

Meanwhile Trump is spraying racist venom at Puerto Rico and Carmen Yulín Cruz.

Trump, who has reportedly said in private that he doesn’t want “another single dollar” going to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, again complained about funding for the island and called San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, a frequent critic, “crazed and incompetent.”

“The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any ‘place’ in history,” Trump tweeted around 11 p.m.

What’s with “place”? What are we supposed to think? That places are only for … Read the rest

The Trump administration has decided it wants less information about domestic terrorism, because hey, who needs to know anything about a trivial thing like that?

Pittsburgh, Charleston, Santa Barbara – no big deal, right?

The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism, The Daily Beast has learned. Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism—including white supremacist terrorism—is growing.

In the wake of this move, officials said the number of analytic reports produced by DHS about domestic terrorism, including the threat from white supremacists, has dropped significantly. People in and close to the department said this has generated significant concern

Rachel ratchets.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1112793015934910468

Again: nobody says trans people shouldn’t compete or denies their right to compete. The issue is people with male bodies competing against women. Funny how McKinnon consistently avoids mentioning that in these slogans and T shirt logos.

So what is the merch like?

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1112876621210509312

There’s a second one, I guess for emphasis.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1112878194686873600

“I’m not touching her, Mom!”

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1113012119392477186

Metaphorically hahahaha not really.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1113013200310734849

Throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick!

Metaphorically, of course.

Imagine someone tweeted the same thing repeatedly / compulsively with Black Lives Matter substituted for transphobia. What would we think? We would think what we were meant to think: that … Read the rest

Via quixote in a comment, Alessandra Asteriti on the very material reasons women need legal protections:

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111710344836194306

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111711025898967040

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111711750330540033

Let’s pause there. An estimated 830 women a day die in childbirth. Is that cis privilege?

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111712389710430209

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111713135600246784

Meanwhile “activists” like Rachel McKinnon concentrate all their venom and rage on women, as if their discomfort with being male were our fault. When are trans women going to be told to be more intersectional?… Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on Thanks I guess?

If there is no right way to be a woman – or to be a man – then how in the world can anyone know that they “feel like a woman”? That is the main question we are asking. We are not the ones assuming there is a “right” way to be something, and therefore the idea that one who doesn’t “feel” right needs to be the other…CAN THEY NOT EVEN SEE THE ILLOGIC? (sorry, I know the answer to that).

Who counts as a woman black? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood blackness, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman black person will

Soooo this is horrifying:

A whistle-blower working inside the White House has told a House committee that senior Trump administration officials granted security clearances to at least 25 individuals whose applications had been denied by career employees, the committee’s Democratic staff said Monday.

The whistle-blower, Tricia Newbold, a manager in the White House’s Personnel Security Office, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in a private interview last month that the 25 individuals included two current senior White House officials, in addition to contractors and other employees working for the office of the president, the staff said in a memo it released publicly.

…

Ms. Newbold told the committee’s staff members that the clearance applications had been denied

If you look at it as a test of faith / proud defiance of reason in favor of faith, it all fits.

Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans rights are human rights. This is not up for debate. #TransDayOfVisibility pic.twitter.com/CaYu0iprpt

— National NOW (@NationalNOW) March 31, 2019

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/1112672398892036096

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/1112673326357532673… Read the rest

A day late for #transdayofvisibility, here's some TERF-bashing I just published in the @nytimes. https://t.co/RRIENvwr9E

— Carol Hay (@DrCarolHay) April 1, 2019

Oh. Ok. Always fun to read more about bashing feminist women.

Who counts as a woman? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?

That’s the wrong question. It’s a leading question, set up to bash “TERFs” for claims they don’t make. The point isn’t about adventures and exploits, and it isn’t about who “counts” as a woman – it’s not a contest or an exam, it’s just a brute material fact.

It’s … Read the rest

Isn’t there some norm about how appropriation is a bad thing? I could have sworn there was.

Designed this poster yesterday to help Our Community Bikes in #Vancouver celebrate #TransDayOfVisibility . pic.twitter.com/8WnzL54YMQ

— Bria (@LifeofBria) March 31, 2019

… Read the rest

Temporary fill-in substitute interim pretend White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is out there trying to convert the Mueller report into a reason to forget all about Trump’s obstruction of justice.

“The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,’” Barr wrote to lawmakers, adding that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that Mueller’s investigative findings are “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

“That is not what these documents do,” Mulvaney said, referring to Mueller not reaching a verdict on obstruction.

“When you do an investigation like this, there’s typically two outcomes — either criminal indictments come down

Fox News today:

… Read the rest

Lionel Shriver is a crap writer. Witness:

For it’s more the case that the EU is a bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered timeservers inventing gratuitous regulations to justify their sinecures.

The first sentence of the second paragraph of a piece in Harper’s. That’s a crap sentence. “more the case that” – why use a clunker like that? “bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered” – have you no ear?? Then that long string of lifeless stale words. It’s just a terrible sentence, and there’s something wrong with a writer who doesn’t notice.

And that kind of thing makes a difference, because it makes the reader suspect she’s not really thinking about what she’s saying, but just rolling out a punditty reaction. … Read the rest

Trump decides the way to make people stay home is to make their lives at home even worse.

US opposition politicians and aid agencies have questioned a decision by President Donald Trump to cut off aid to three Central American states.

Mr Trump ordered the suspension of aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to push their governments to stop migration into the US.

To stop it how? A Berlin Wall type of thing? Just tell them they can’t leave, end of story? We tend to see that as tyrannical and unjust, those of us in the “no you’re not supposed to bully and torment people” community.

In 2017, Guatemala received over $248m while Honduras received $175m and El

It would be funny/tragic if it turned out that cheating at golf is what did him in.

Shortly after he became president, Trump played with Tiger Woods, the current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson and the veteran PGA Tour pro Brad Faxon. Given the quality and profile of his companions, you might have thought Trump would have been on his best behavior. Not so.

On one hole, Trump dunked a shot into the lake, but as his opponents weren’t looking he simply dropped another ball — and then hit that into the water, too.

“So he drives up and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green,” recalls Faxon.

Apparently someone was looking.… Read the rest

One judge says No.

Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed bans on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic, a judge said in a ruling that restored the Obama-era restrictions.

In a decision late on Friday, US district court judge Sharon Gleason threw out Trump’s executive order that overturned the bans that comprised a key part of Obama’s environmental legacy.

Presidents have the power under a federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, Gleason said.

“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,”

Whoa.

Paleontologists have found a fossil site in North Dakota that contains animals and plants killed and buried within an hour of the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. This is the richest K-T boundary site ever found, incorporating insects, fish, mammals, dinosaurs and plants living at the end of the Cretaceous, mixed with tektites and rock created and scattered by the impact. The find shows that dinosaurs survived until the impact.

The beginning of the end started with violent shaking that raised giant waves in the waters of an inland sea in what is now North Dakota.

Then, tiny glass beads began to fall like birdshot from the heavens. The rain of glass was

Down we continue to go.

Trump’s presidential campaign has started selling $28 “Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff” T-shirts that feature a drawing of Rep. Adam Schiff with a pencil for a neck and a clown nose.

It really has.

Little Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff

He spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking. He should be forced to resign from Congress!

Everyone should buy a Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff shirt today!

BUY Now: https://t.co/5SMsrJC8nU pic.twitter.com/v3Vvmma0e6

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) March 29, 2019

While we’re here, let’s pay a visit to Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign.

By promoting values such as healthy living, encouragement, kindness, and respect, parents, teachers, and other adults can help prepare children for their