If you type “The Vivienne” into the BBC News search box you get eight hits. Not one, not two, but eight.

The Vivienne was an ‘authentic all-round perfomer’

The Vivienne was true talent, says pride organiser

The Vivienne was truly loved, says Drag Race star

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK star The Vivienne dies aged 32

How The Vivienne became a breakout star of British drag

RuPaul says heart ‘broken’ after The Vivienne’s death

The Vivienne’s family tell vigil ‘we’re so proud’

Theatre pays tribute to ‘formidable’ drag race star

Eight separate stories about one drag queen.

Why?… Read the rest

Bahahaha Trump is getting tired of clingy Musk. Of course he is.

According to an eminent New York Times journalist named Maggie Haberman, US President- elect Donald Trump is privately growing weary of Tesla CEO Elon Musk‘s constant presence at Mar-a-Lago residence in spite of publicly welcoming his mega donor and ‘First Buddy’.

Daily Beast reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been renting the Banyan Cottage near US President- elect Donald Trump’s residence for approximately $2,000 per night while attending personnel meetings and dinners with other significant tech billionaires.

While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has invested over $260 million in US President-elect Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and currently seems to be on the winning side of the 

Nick Cohen on Elon Musk’s move to overthrow the UK government:

A billionaire American with extreme right-wing politics and a distant relationship to the truth wants to impose his will on us, and has found many eager collaborators here in the UK to help him do it.

The Financial Times reported three days ago: “Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election.”

His “allies”? What are they? France, Germany, Sweden? Russia, China, North Korea? Does he think he’s a country?

And who might those allies be? The Mail reports this morning that the government believes Dominic Cummings, who orchestrated the “leave” victory in the 2016

The International Cricket Council is happy.

I guess that’s all that matters, yeah?

Family life:

A woman alleged to have strangled and battered her mother in a row over table salt has been acquitted. Ami Avanti (46) was charged with non-fatal strangulation and assault occasioning actual bodily harm following an incident at her mother’s home on August 11 last year.

The alleged victim told police at the time her daughter had punched, kicked and choked her after the lid of a salt cellar had come loose when Avanti was trying to season her food. However, during a contest at Laganside Magistrates Court in Belfast this month she was acquitted of both charges due to issues around the evidence.

The court heard no statement of complaint was made by the defendant’s mother, but

An oldy, but I happened to see it and it made me wonder, how does one address this kind of thing?

Philosophers, following Hume, talk of the is/ought gap. Short summary: they’re not the same thing, but humans like to mash them together.

What people, or asparagus, think about what we are is not the same thing as what we are.

I think working scientists in general are pretty aware of that. Gender patriotism seems to tug them, or at least one of them, in the other direction.

Here’s the skinny: men are men; women are women. How any of them feel about being either is another issue entirely. Disliking being a man does not make a man a … Read the rest

A very important question, one I fret about often.

Isaac de Tormes asked:

Question for British followers. Are there people in British media that are invited on shows to give an opinion on everything under the sun without having any particular background or experience in the topic? In Spanish, we call them “todólogos” or “everythingists”.

Here in the US we have just one for that job: David Brooks. I’ve been trying to figure out how he got the job for years, but I still have no clue.

It’s not that there’s anything in particular wrong with him, that I know of, it’s just that it’s so random. Why have random people pronouncing on everything? Why not find people who … Read the rest

Janice Turner on the fun new way to exploit and harm women:

At a trade fair called the Modern Family Show in a luxury London hotel I paid £32 to hear a PowerPoint presentation on how to buy a baby abroad. If you have $150,000 for a full “concierge service”, I was told, you send your embryos to be incubated by a stranger in America. But for a better “price point”, the hot new surrogacy destination, where UK agencies now have shiny clinics, is Mexico.

Oh dear god. Can you imagine it? For a luxury rent-a-woman go to the US, for a cheaper one go south of the border. Ugly enough yet?

Mexico has replaced India, which banned foreign

Joan Smith on The Usual Backlash:

For too long, a motley collection of trans activists and green zealots have only needed to threaten to withdraw from literary events, and the organisers have taken fright. Now the Oxford Literary Festival has discovered a backbone, inviting the gender-critical author Helen Joyce and the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel to take part in this year’s programme. Cue the predictable outrage.

There have been calls for authors to withdraw, on the dubious (some would say bonkers) premise that the invitation puts other writers at risk. Harry R. McCarthy, a lecturer in early modern literature, grandly announced that he had withdrawn from his scheduled session on “Shakespeare for the modern age” because Joyce and

A new Pliny:

Mike Davis: “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” from 30-odd years ago:

Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand

Leave Title IX alone, Joe.

A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.

It’s not “sex discrimination” to decline to call a boy “she.” It’s more the other way around. Boys demanding to be called “she” are undercutting girls’ and women’s rights.

The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q. and pregnant students, among others, through Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. 

Arwa Mahdawi on the fires and women and Musk:

On Wednesday, for example, Musk took some time out from obsessively tweeting about whether the US should “liberate” Britain to proclaim that the Los Angeles fire department (LAFD) “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes”. He has continued to post spurious claims about diversity initiatives (for example, “DEI means people DIE”) for days now, along with posts insinuating that if LAFD’s fire chief weren’t a woman, then things would be very different.

If only no one were a woman. You know? Wouldn’t that be great? Male competence replacing female incompetence everywhere? Imagine the efficiency, the inspiration, the superhuman strength.

There are, to be clear, various nuanced issues

This is truly staggering.

When I asked my 46th District legislators about the lawsuit from the former female prisoner forced to share a cell with a 6’4” male who sexually assaulted her, their response was … interesting. What do you think? pic.twitter.com/NuaBFUoATi

— Beth Daranciang (@bethsd) January 11, 2025

Updating to add transcript, thanks to NightCrow.

Question: Hi. Washington State is being sued by a woman who was forced to share a jail cell with a six foot four male who sexually harassed and assaulted her over many days and weeks. And she was told by the prison the Washington State Prison to not report it because she might get retaliated against. She had to suffer that for a long

Another conversation with Humanists UK:

Gender identity is an absurd dualist claim that relies on the proposition that boy gender souls end up in girl bodies and vice versa. There is no scientific test for a gender identity and it cannot be falsified. You are practicing cult level religion.

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) January 10, 2025

You are rather avoiding my point.

You appear to be saying the criminal law of the United Kingdom should concern itself with gender souls where it would not with the equivalent religious concept.

Do I have your position correct?

A yes or no please

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) January 10, 2025

With the greatest of respect, the term we were discussing was

Forced teaming creates yet another mess.

This is the mentality that permitted the chemical castration of Alan Turing and thousands of other gay and bi men

This is the mindset of the abusers in church robes who subject people to ‘conversion therapy’ torture for their innate sexual orientation

Shocking policy from Meta https://t.co/fiGrdClA8R

— Humanists UK (@Humanists_UK) January 10, 2025

There are no “LGBTQ+” people. It’s an impossibility. No one can be lesbian and gay male and bisexual and trans and “queer” and +. (And what does “+” mean anyway?)

Humanists UK can’t explain.

We don't believe in 'innate gendered souls' and we aren't 'mandating' anything. This is a post about Meta equivocating re the false belief that being LGBT

Hm. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say don’t do this.

The pink hair ribs-deficient person is male.

From a physiology standpoint, this individual has just turned his T10-T12 vertebra into L zero, L minus 1, and L minus 2. What? The human body has 5 lumbar vertebrae, which are enough to let us pivot at the waist, but our own natural lumbar vertebrae get SO MUCH stress T11 and…

— Jonathan Clemens, PA-C (@jpclemens) January 10, 2025

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Coel on Brought to you by.

Since climate change matters and since the science of climate change is important:

Whenever there is a cold snap or a snow storm some will inevitably quip “so much for global warming” and use one weather event as an excuse to ignore the settled opinion about climate change. They are very wrong to do so.

It is equally wrong to point to a drought event, a drought-caused fire, or indeed a hurricane, and suggest that it is due to climate change, or even to suggest that climate change has made those events much more likely. We don’t know enough to know that. After all, California is a semi-desert and … Read the rest

I was reading someone burbling about trans women menstruating and blah blah blah and a thought suddenly occurred to me (weirdly late, I think) – we’ve heard a lot about gender dysphoria, and especially a lot about men who have it, but what about other kinds of dysphoria? Specifically what about gay men who have to tell people they’re gay? You know what I mean? Gay men who appear straight – not necessarily football playerish, not necessarily muscular or domineering or anything else in particular, but just not clockable as gay.

(I don’t think it works the same way with lesbians. Lots are not clockable. Let me know if I’m wrong.)

I wonder if that can cause a form of … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Making everything worse.

The climate catastrophe deniers have long given up on any attempt to argue a case. They tried that long and hard but there’s only so many times you can use sleight of hand* as an argumentative technique. The Trump technique of more or less random abuse of anyone perceived to be less than 100% supportive of your grift is just so much more effective so everyone is doing it now.

*Favourite sleight of hand techniques that I have personally encountered, in most cases multiple times:

1. cite a scientific paper as demonstrating your point when the paper does no such thing. Indeed in many cases the paper is only … Read the rest