The word “lesbian” used to be considered ooky because lesbians were considered ooky. Then there was Stonewall, and activism, and increased visibility, and Alison Bechdel, and Ellen, and Maddow. And then the word somehow became ooky again, apparently because it was somehow not “inclusive” enough. So when York Civic Trust put up a plaque to honor Ann Lister it carefully avoided That Word. It said “Gender-nonconforming entrepreneur. Celebrated marital commitment, without legal recognition, to Ann Walker in this church. Easter, 1834.”

And there was a stink, and a petition, and it worked.

A draft of the new wording will be proposed and opened for public comment in the coming weeks.

An online petition calling on York Civic Trust to

James Kirkup on Greens and Challenors and Terfblockers:

Aimee Challenor was a prominent Green activist. She was the party’s spokesperson on equalities issues and a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership. Aimee Challenor was a Green candidate in the 2017 general election and the 2018 local government elections. In both elections, her election agent was her father, David “Baloo” Challenor.

David Challenor was last month convicted of torturing and raping a ten-year old girl in the attic of the family home. He was charged with those crimes in 2016. So Aimee Challenor was nominated for public office for the Green Party by a man awaiting trial for the most serious sexual offences against a child. (Read more about this 

Now David Remnick has changed his mind and canceled the Bannon gig.

There are many ways for a publication like ours to do its job: investigative reporting; pointed, well-argued opinion pieces; Profiles; reporting from all over the country and around the world; radio and video interviews; even live interviews. At the same time, many of our readers, including some colleagues, have said that the Festival is different, a different kind of forum. It’s also true that we pay an honorarium, that we pay for travel and lodging. (Which does not happen, of course, when we interview someone for an article or for the radio.) I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns.

Hmmm this seems pretty nuts: Steve Bannon Headlines New Yorker Festival.

Readers of The New Yorker prize the magazine for its wide-ranging collection of perspectives. From Oct. 5 to 7, The New Yorker Festival, now in its 19th year, will bring some of these voices to venues around New York City.

Political figures feature prominently in this year’s lineup, which includes Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, who will be interviewed by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, a frequent critic of the administration.

“I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Mr. Remnick said in a phone interview.

And of giving even more publicity and platform space … Read the rest

Commenter Kalyani alerted us to another massacre in Burma, this time by the Rohingya rather than to them. There’s nothing surprising in that, of course – no magic law makes the victims of massacres, let alone members of the category of people targeted for massacres, perfect.

Amnesty International reported last May 22:

A Rohingya armed group brandishing guns and swords is responsible for at least one, and potentially a second, massacre of up to 99 Hindu women, men, and children as well as additional unlawful killings and abductions of Hindu villagers in August 2017, Amnesty International revealed today after carrying out a detailed investigation inside Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

Based on dozens of interviews conducted there and across the border

Reuters has a detailed story on the framing of the two Reuters reporters in Burma.

Time and again, Myanmar’s government appeared at risk of blowing its prosecution of two young journalists who had exposed a massacre of 10 Muslim men and implicated security forces in the killings.

On April 20, a prosecution witness revealed in pre-trial hearings that police planted military documents on Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo in order to frame them for violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. That admission drew gasps from the courtroom.

A police officer told the court that he burned notes he made at the time of the reporters’ arrest, but didn’t explain why. Several prosecution witnesses contradicted the police account

Robert Reich points out the well known fact that most people are not doing well in this economy and that there’s a huge gap between the rich and everyone else. Then he points out the not quite so well known consequence.

Last year, about 40 percent of American families struggled to meet at least one basic need – food, health care, housing or utilities, according to an Urban Institute survey. 

All of which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had in 2008, and possibly as bad as 1929.

Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and

The Des Moines Register has a guest column by Rob Tibbetts, father of Molly Tibbetts, the University of Iowa student who was murdered and hidden in a corn field last month.

Ten days ago, we learned that Mollie would not be coming home. Shattered, my family set out tocelebrate Mollie’s extraordinary life and chose to share our sorrow in private. At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas. We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.

Sadly, others have ignored our request. They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration;

This helpfully isolates one point of contention.

https://twitter.com/ILoveUTigerLily/status/1036185866018811906

No. Really not. Everyone has a sex, a complicated one in the case of trans-sexual people. “Gender identity” is a neologism and what it names is just an idea about the self. It’s a particular, local, time-specific, constructed, contentious, culture-bound idea about the self, and one which not everyone signs up to, to put it mildly.

You might as well say everyone has a height identity or a species identity or an age identity. You might as well but you wouldn’t, because “activists” have not yet declared that that is 1. a thing and 2. mandatory for all. But they have declared that about “gender identity,” and that’s a pity, … Read the rest

About those racist robo-calls in Florida…

If nothing else, the minute-long audio clip is a clear sign of how quickly racism — subtle in some cases, overt in others — has entered the contest to determine who will lead Florida.

“Well hello there,” the call begins as the sounds of drums and monkeys can be heard in the background, according to the New York Times. “I is Andrew Gillum.”

“We Negroes . . . done made mud huts while white folk waste a bunch of time making their home out of wood an stone.”

…

A disclaimer at the end of the robo-call says it was produced by the Road to Power, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group

Look, her tit was right there, what was he supposed to do, not grab it? But he said he was sorry anyway, just in case.

The bishop who led Aretha Franklin’s funeral has apologised to Ariana Grande after being accused of groping her on stage.

Or, in fact, after groping her on stage.

The preacher said he hugged all artists, male or female, during the ceremony commemorating the Queen of Soul.

But viewers began posting images from the service when Ariana got up to sing Aretha’s song (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

https://twitter.com/ArianaToday/status/1035659644319014912

I don’t care what you think about Ariana Grande, her music or her dress. This is wrong. That bishop’s hand should not be

Bloomberg on the drought:

The sweltering summer turned lush fields brown and led to shortages of fodder for the country’s millions of cows. Months of drought and heat have also caused problems across the European Union, the top milk exporter. Farmers from Ireland to Germany have had to cull herds or stop milking months early.

For the EU’s $12 billion dairy industry, parched fields have raised animal-feed costs, squeezing farmers’ profits. Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority expects dairy farms to earn half as much as last year. The feed situation could become critical and milk production may drop in the coming months, according to Arla Foods, the Nordic region’s biggest dairy company.

“In July, we brought in

Tiggerthewing has been telling us about the drought in Ireland, so let’s read more:

Ireland has been listed as one of the countries “most significantly” impacted by drought conditions over the summer months, according to a newly-published European Drought Observatory (EDO) report.

Comparing results for August to a previous assessment at the end of June, the report – carried out by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) – found that the overall situation “worsened” over Scandinavia, and substantially over Ireland and the UK.

…

Concerning agriculture, the report highlights that in the drought-affected zones, some national governments are discussing aid to farmers amid damage claims.

In addition, the livestock sector in many member states is also

Oh not this again.

Thousands of Islamists have set off on a protest march in Pakistan to demand Imran Khan’s new government sever diplomatic ties with the Netherlands over a “blasphemous” cartoon competition.

The march, organised by Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), a political party dedicated to the punishment of blasphemy, presents the first major test of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration. Last year, a similar protest by the TLP shut down the capital, Islamabad, for almost a month.

In June, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam MP who leads the Netherlands’ second largest party and has been found guilty of inciting hatred, invited submissions of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, which Islam forbids. The $10,000 (£7,700) competition is due to open in

Oh and about that warming Arctic Ocean?

The Arctic is in hot water, literally, following the discovery that heat has been accumulating rapidly in a salty layer of the Arctic Ocean 50 metres down. Currently, it’s being held at that depth by a less dense layer of freshwater overhead, but if the two layers start to mix it could melt all seasonal sea ice, accelerating the already-rapid loss of polar ice cover.

Researchers discovered the heat time-bomb after analysing publicly available data on ice cover, and at different depths on sea temperature, heat content and saltiness over the past three decades. The data was gathered around the Canadian Basin, a major basin of the Arctic Ocean fed by waters