Are we there yet? I think we are.

Catastrophic hurricane approaches popular low-lying state

Hurricane Milton tore towards Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, leaving residents with one final day to evacuate or hunker down before the “catastrophic” Category 5 storm is predicted to hit, triggering a life-threatening storm surge.

With more than 1 million people in coastal areas under evacuation orders, those fleeing for higher ground clogged highways on Tuesday and gas stations ran out of fuel, in a region still recovering from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago.

…

Milton is on a rare west-to-east path through the Gulf of Mexico and is likely to bring a deadly storm surge of 10 feet (3 meters) or more of flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Officials from Biden to Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned people in evacuation zones to get out or risk death.

But of course we’re talking about millions of people here. Getting out won’t be a walk in the park. When gas stations run out of fuel, well, that’s game over.

Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic, growing from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours.

“These extremely warm sea surface temperatures provide the fuel necessary for the rapid intensification that we saw taking place to occur,” said climate scientist Daniel Gilford of Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. “We know that as human beings increase the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels, we are increasing that temperature all around the planet.”

So it’s not even that people should have left sooner, because they didn’t know they had to leave until it was too late to leave.

More than a dozen coastal counties issued mandatory evacuation orders, including Tampa’s Hillsborough County. Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, ordered the evacuation of more than 500,000 people. Lee County said 416,000 people lived in its mandatory evacuation zones.

Evacuation is mandatory and impossible. We’re going to be seeing headlines about thousands of people trapped in their cars as the hurricane takes everything out.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa on Tuesday, when about 17% of Florida’s nearly 8,000 gas stations had run out of fuel, according to fuel markets tracker GasBuddy.

What’s the % now? What will it be 12 hours from now?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Trump’s decompensation on the campaign trail.

“Climate change covers everything. It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold….”

That’s exactly right, and that’s a huge part of the goddamn problem. It’s not just a “change” like flipping a switch on or off; it’s the disruption and destabilization of established, reliable patterns upon which human civilization (and the biosphere in general) depends. It is the removal of “pattern” itself, which makes human planning much more difficult, in this instance, the rescheduling, or the end of the concept of a hurricane “season” itself.

Looking more closely, it’s not just a “climate change” problem, but a nightmare weave of disasters arising from the collective appropriation by eight billion humans of ever more of the Earth’s species and materials for their own exclusive use. Even if we weren’t destabilizing the climate, we’d still be in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, a water crisis, a food production crisis, a pollution crisis, and a resource scarcity crisis. Our numbers alone impose an irreducible footprint and load upon the normal, healthy cycling of the planet and the health and wellbeing of all of its other inhabitants. Multiply anything each of us does by eight billion. We take up a lot of biogeochemical space simply by existing. Our cumulative impact starts at the molecular level and goes up from there, with our fingerprints on change and influence at every scale over the entire planet. We are a growing herd of bulls in a china shop that is still as small as it ever was, but there are now fewer things left to break. Taking everything for ourselves is a self-defeating strategy. Looking at the trend lines we’re following, it looks like our goal is a human monoculture. More humans mean less of everything else, and that “everything else” gives us the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. There are no substitutes. There are no alternative brands we can switch to, no other store we can go to that will stock these items if they disappear from the shelves.

The Earth system is not going to restabilize until we stop dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into it (among other things). If and when that happens, it is likely to have shifted to a new regime unprecidented in human experience, which is not a phrase one wants to hear in conjunction with the very conditions upon which human society depends. The Earth is still recovering from the last such major perterbations we’ve induced; the widespread extirpation of Ice Age megafaunal communities, and the European conquest of the Americas, both of which are still unfolding, and both of which have involved massive disruptions and reorganizations of biomes on a continental scale, the first over a timescale of millenia, the second over centuries. It’s harder to dance if the beat keeps changing. Our current crises (which are developments of and elaborations upon these two previous convulsions) are operating at a decadal level, with things getting worse faster than our models had predicted. We’re not dancing anymore. Now we have to run just to keep up. This is not good news for a global, Just-On-Time civilization, because at some point it means we’re not going to be sure where our next meal is coming from. Multiply that by eight billion.

Humans are a pattern-seeking species. It has been one of our vital survival skills, allowing us to see fleeting parts of a whole and infer the signal “predator” lurking in the undergrowth. The occasional “noise” of a false positive where it’s a false alarm is a small price to pay compared to the lethal and overconfident false negative that resulted in a non-forebear becoming dinner. Pattern-seeking is the basis of all science. But we are pattern-creators too, with the false-positive noise of mistaken inference being elevated to the level of meaningful “signal” Our pattern-seeking instincts can be hijacked and redirected by our cultural expectations and turned into elaborate, whole-cloth delusional structures, like astrology. Or, they can be incorporated into an existing cultural construction where there is a resemblance to expected imagery. Pareidolia can be quite culturally specific. From this we get the veneration of a random pattern on a leaky oil storage tank because it happens to look vaguely like some peoples’ idea of the appearance of the Virgin Mary, and that this is actually a vital message, a call for repentance and renewed faith. That’s a lot of baggage to load onto a stain. Non-Catholics and non-Christians are much less likely to see any such resemblance, and even less likely to ascribe any meaning or urgency to any such “apparition,” and yet still succumb to triggering by a resemblance to something culturally salient to themselves. Catholics and other Christians will in turn see nothing of interest or import in someone else’s “significant” patterns of burnt toast, or stained walls. Message not received. (This cultural naivety/gullibility can be used by the unscrupulous, with “images” created for power and profit, the “Shroud” of Turin being the most well known among all the relics of the Saints, and splinters of the True Cross.)

There’s money to be made in the other direction as well. What we’re dealing with now is a denial of pattern, a claim that there is no connection, no signal in the supposed pattern of phenomena ascribed to “climate change.” That this denial happens to align perfectly with the economic and financial interests of those promoting it is supposed to be disregarded (in effect, the denial of another pattern) and ignored, their hand poorly hidden behind made-to-order astroturf organizations whose sole purpose is to sow doubt. Denial of the tobacco-cancer link was just the audition. In a nice bit of judo, this conflict of interest is projected upon the researchers studying climate change, with the charge that they are grifters making a buck out of the climate change “industry,” and that their calls for “more research” are just grabs for more money. This accusation, coming as it does from the oil industry’s side of this grotesque power imbalance, would be laughable if it weren’t leading us on into disaster. But it’s part of the fine human tradition of hiding from ourselves the true costs of our behaviours. It’s as old as calling cows, pigs, and chickens “beef”, “pork” and “poultry,” and of a piece with hiding sweatshops overseas, and euphemistically naming suburban property “developments” for the natural features plowed under and bulldozed away to make room for them. We’re encouraged to look the other way, to not concern ourselves with how others have to pay for what we have and how we got it. If we lose our appetite for what’s on our plate, we no longer buy their product, but we still have to find something to eat.

Part of this pattern denial is hiding alternatives to the way things are now. Products labeled “fair trade” offer a hint of this. What does that say about products that aren’t labelled as such? What of the treatment of people at the other end of the supply chain? Isn’t it possible to run a profitable business that doesn’t rely on oppression and expoitation in service to the bottom line? These are choices that have been made, not things that just happen. Somebody signs those paycheques and decides how many zeros follow the number on the line. It shouldn’t be remarkable or noteworthy to treat people working for you with dignity and respect, and to take less in profit in order to pay them a living wage. The end price that consumers pay should reflect these considerations, rather than be used as an inflexible position to use as leverage against workers’ conditions in a race to the bottom. One would hope that a knowledgible, educated, compassionate society would be aware of this and realize that our economic relationships should be more like a partnership or collaboration, and less like a dictatorship or theft. We’re all in this together, and we shouldn’t let sociopaths set the agenda or write the rules. At this point in time, a “winner take all” mentality ends up with everyone losing.

Making choices depends upon knowing their are choices to be made, that choice is even possible. Hiding this fact, and acting as if our current conditions are somehow “natural”, “inevitable” and not themselves the products of past and current choices prevents us from making informed decisions. Ultimately we are constrained by the physical limits of material reality (limits which are making themselves felt more keenly as time ticks away). But the most important limits might be both imaginary and imaginative, dependent upon our ability to discern the importance of patterns that are actually present, our ability to overcome cultural and economic blindness to those patterns, and our willingness to change what we’re doing. Not all changes are improvements, so having a clear understanding of where we are, how we got here, where we want to go, and how we might get there, are crucial to choosing our actions. The human impact on the Earth can be found everywhere, at all scales. This knowledge is sobering, but it means that opportunities for action to heal those injuries is possible at all scales, everywhere. Wherever we are, there are things we can do. We’re capable of so much. We have produced more than our fair share of cruelty and barbarity, destruction and thoughtlessness. But we also have an amazing aptitude for creativity and genius, curiousity and determination, understanding and compassion, physical and mental courage, stamina and perseverence; for imagining things that one would scarcely believe possible, both individually and collectively, and doing them. Multiply that by eight billion.

Roll up your sleeves: there’s work to do.

What’s the big deal?

A trans rights activist who poured tomato juice over controversial women’s rights activist Posie Parker is seeking to have her conviction overturned, with her lawyer saying it was out of proportion to the offending.

Eli Rubashkyn previously pleaded guilty to assault after she poured tomato juice over Parker – also known as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull – and another woman at Auckland’s Albert Park in March 2023.

Eli Rubashkyn ain’t no she.

Rubashkyn earlier pleaded guilty to two charges of assault and was convicted and discharged by Judge Kirsten Lummis in September.

On Tuesday, Rubashkyn’s lawyer, James Olsen, appealed the conviction at the High Court at Auckland. Olsen told Justice David Johnstone that Judge Lummis was not correct to convict his client given the low gravity of the offending.

Really. It’s no big deal for a man to stop a woman speaking by assaulting her, is it. Is that because women just don’t matter?

Rubashkyn was deeply remorseful for her actions and the impact it had on the two victims and the wider communities on both sides of the aisle, Olsen said.

Was he? Why? Why be deeply remorseful if the actions were low gravity?

Olsen said Rubashkyn’s offending was born out of her attempt to support those within the LGBTQI+ and transgender communities and was significantly affected by Parker’s attendance.

Wait, what? Why do trans people get counted twice? Why the LGBTQI+ and the transgender communinnies?

Olsen said Judge Lummis hadn’t properly considered the general consequences of the conviction and submitted it was out of all proportion given the offending.

“This was pouring tomato juice as an act of protest to prevent Ms Keen from speaking,” Olsen said.

No it wasn’t. It wasn’t “pouring tomato juice”; it was pouring tomato juice over a woman’s head to prevent her from speaking. Also keep in mind that she couldn’t know at the time that it was only tomato juice.

She is a qualified pharmacist and researcher and an advocate for intersex and gender issues at the United Nations. The conviction will have an impact on her ability to travel for work and gain employment in pharmacy.

Good. It ought to.

H/t Rob

Interlude for hilarity.

The image. I just can’t love the image enough.

Trying to make who is what sex a matter of law instead of fact:

Amnesty International has been given permission to intervene in a landmark Supreme Court case on the legal definition of woman.

The charity, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Scottish Lesbians, and Sex Matters have all been granted permission to take part in For Women Scotland vs Scottish Ministers at the end of next month.

…

The case at the UK’s highest court is the latest development in a long-running legal battle over whether someone who is biologically male can legally be regarded as female for the purposes of the Equality Act.

The answer to that ridiculous question is so obviously “no” that it’s hard to grasp how it can be a long-running legal battle. Can rich people be legally regarded as poor for the purposes of the Equality Act? It would make just as much sense. The relationship among women, men, and equality is that women have historically globally been treated as unequal, so changing that has nothing at all to do with endorsing the fantasies of men who cosplay as women.

For Women Scotland had initially challenged the SNP government over a new law designed to increase the number of women on public boards. The legislation stated that anyone “living as a woman” would be eligible.

Thus defeating the whole purpose. Making men eligible for a law designed to increase the number of women on public boards is an exercise in futility. It’s like trying to make a car go faster by standing on the brake pedal. If you want to increase the number of women on public boards it won’t do you a bit of good to add more men even if they wear lipstick.

The group’s first action was successful, forcing the publication of new statutory guidelines which stated that transgender women should still be counted as female, so long as they held a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).

For Women Scotland challenged this, arguing that the Scottish Government had overstepped its powers by effectively redefining the meaning of female…An appeal by For Women Scotland was rejected by the Inner House last November prompting the Supreme Court bid.

Amnesty International UK said: “Amnesty International is intervening because we believe it is vital the Court is assisted by submissions setting out why legal gender recognition is a human rights issue and that trans people should not be expected to live without it.”

It’s a human rights issue all right but Amnesty is on the wrong side of it.

A bid to intervene by the Good Law Project was rejected. The group was representing Victoria McCloud, the UK’s first transgender judge and Prof Stephen Whittle, an academic who has been campaigning for transgender rights since the 1970s.

The one bit of good news.

Public Notice on Trump’s relentless lying about climate change:

With another historic storm, Hurricane Milton, now bearing down on Florida, Trump not only still refuses to acknowledge that climate change is happening and creates conditions more favorable to severe storms, but he’s actively lying about it.

“Nobody thought this would be happening, especially now,” Trump said during a photo op in a Helene-impacted part of Georgia on October 1. “It’s so late in the season.” 

The season is June 1 to November 30, so now is late in a sense, but it’s also irrelevant. Hurricanes don’t look at the calendar and think “Aw damn I can’t possibly get there in time” and decide to stay home. Trump means, as always, that he failed to understand that this could be happening now. He makes all his failures to think a universal failure.

Trump’s decompensation on the campaign trail this year has been undeniable, and his rhetoric about climate has if anything gotten worse.

“Climate change covers everything,” Trump blathered at a Wisconsin campaign stop last Tuesday, while western North Carolina was under water. “It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold. Climate change. I believe I really am an environmentalist. I’ve gotten environmental awards.”

Yes and he’s also a physicist and a brain surgeon and a rocket scientist and an Olympian and a ballet star.

[This story is a couple of years old but what the hell, a second thrashing is well deserved.]

The Times reporting does eventually hint at how appallingly reckless and women-hating the “Marceline” Harvey story is.

It is unclear where [Susan Leyden’s] path first crossed Ms. Harvey’s, but at the time Ms. Harvey posted about Ms. Leyden, she was seeking her own placement in city shelters. Immediately after her 2019 release, she sought housing in the Bronx. [In other words Harvey was seeking placement in city shelters.]

Ms. Harvey “presented as a mild spoken, very tall Black man,” said Anne Brennan, the nurse practitioner who ran the intake. “I said, ‘Well, why are you in the women’s shelter?’”

Ms. Brennan said she told Ms. Harvey that placing her in a women’s shelter seemed like a bad idea, given her history of killing women. Despite her objections, Ms. Brennan said her supervisors allowed Ms. Harvey entry.

“Apparently his feelings and identity were far more important than all the other women that were terrified of him,” she said.

And apparently the NY Times can’t find the nerve to call him “him” even in a story of this kind, even when it sows confusion about who is doing what to whom. It’s despicable. The choice to pamper him at the expense of clarity about her is despicable.

Julia Savel, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Social Services, said rules were followed.

“Our policy — in accordance with the law — is to place individuals in shelters based on their reported gender identity,” she said.

Well that’s a bad, evil, dangerous to women policy. To hell with that policy, and the law.

“Being homeless or transgender does not make you inherently violent and are not connected to the crime that was committed.”

No shit, stupid, but the fact that he had murdered a woman does hint that he might do it again.

Also, being a man does make you inherently stronger than women and more potentially aggressive toward women.

The reporting of this story is outrageous.

The New York Times, July 30, 2022:

The person before the parole panel in June 2019 was tall and slim, in far better shape than 81 years of life might have suggested. Mild and polite, the supplicant seemed nothing like the murderer who had spent decades in prison, first for shooting a girlfriend dead in 1963, and then for stabbing another in 1985, stuffing her corpse into a bag and leaving it in Central Park.

“I’m no longer that person,” the inmate told the parole board commissioners. Despite misgivings, they would rule in favor of release.

Two and a half years after leaving Cayuga Correctional Facility, Marceline Harvey was accused again, charged with killing Susan Leyden, 68. Parts of Ms. Leyden’s body were found in March inside a shopping cart in East New York, stuffed in a bag. In Ms. Harvey’s apartment, investigators found a bloody mop, a tub full of towels and a box for an electric saw.

You’ll never guess what the NY Times is concealing here. Note the first two words – “The person.” Note the “Ms. Harvey.” Yes, really: even in reporting crimes against women this horrendous, the Times takes care to lie about what sex he is. The reporters are both women. Many more blood-chilling paragraphs follow before they admit he’s…a trans woman. They don’t of course admit he’s a man.

For seven decades leading up to her latest arrest, Ms. Harvey navigated New York’s intricate criminal justice bureaucracy: the country’s largest police apparatus, the state’s overlapping welfare agencies, its prisons and the officials charged with deciding who remains in them. She confronted the system in some moments, manipulated it in others. Behind her was a trail of crimes so grisly that for decades, parole officials refused to let her out.

…

Decades worth of police documents and court records detail the life of Ms. Harvey, a transgender woman who transitioned at some point after her release from prison. Central to her tale are more than three decades of parole board minutes obtained through the state’s Freedom of Information Law. In them, she insists that authorities exaggerated evidence, changes stories about crimes she admitted and veers between contrition and blaming those she killed.

The records include several examples of her harassing or attacking women throughout her life. She was accused of attempted rape at 14; the victim was an 8-year-old girl. Ms. Harvey, who by her own account struggled with her mental health, said she had to choke down rage when women challenged her manliness before she transitioned — making fun of her soft voice, for example.

This was a boy and then a man, harassing and attacking women all his life, yet the NY Times carefully pretends he is and always was a woman. Two women put their names on the lie.

A homeless shelter worker and people close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms. Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.

Gosh, really??? How horrifically transphobic of them. You won’t catch the New York Times being like that.

Sometimes the disgust is enough to choke a person.

The Times interviews Sandi Toksvig:

Toksvig certainly boasts the widest-ranging CV imaginable. Her most recent achievement was officiating at the Abba star Björn Ulvaeus’s third wedding last month in Copenhagen. She and Ulvaeus, it transpires, have been friends since 2015, when she organised a Scandinavian-themed Women of the World festival at the Royal Festival Hall, where an all-female orchestra played Waterloo and Ulvaeus appeared. “You can be feminist and fun, you see.” More recently they collaborated on writing the interactive show Mamma Mia! The Party.

“Björn is a very gentle, not divaish person; he and I are both humanists,” she says…

I knew that about Björn. That time I went to Stockholm when Hatar Gud Kvinnor? was published, his daughter picked me up at the airport. I pretended not to know.

But that’s not why we’re here. This is why we’re here:

“I’m easygoing, but I’m also keeping an eye on things. The world is still full of people who take against your life. Homophobia’s increasing. The only good thing about lesbians is they titillate men so it’s marginally less aggressive towards us. I don’t know what they think Deb and I are doing. Mainly we’re discussing if the tomatoes have gone off.”

The hostility, Toksvig continues with quiet fury, is fuelled by “intemperate language on social media around the trans discussion. That’s opened the door to people thinking it’s now fair to have a general go at diversity, that the world is too woke. I don’t know how you can be too woke — woke means being awake to the dangers that are around you. Mental health within the LGBTQ community is not good and that’s not because you’re not comfortable with who you are. It’s the way society treats you.”

She is especially angry by [about] how many “radical feminists” attack trans people. “How could you be so white and privileged and heterosexual and never marginalised in your life yet you decide to punch down on people?”

Excuse me? Excuse me???

Who tf says we’re all privileged? Who says we’re all heterosexual? Who says we’re all never marginalized?

What utter bullshit. Women are not privileged in the sense of seen as and treated as better than the other sex. That’s rather the point of feminism. We have to fight to be seen as and treated as not the worst, the stupid, the weak, the sly, the whoreish, the disgusting sex. We have to fight to be seen as not inferiors. That doesn’t suddenly stop being true just because some men pretend to be women and berate us when we say they’re not.

Behold: a dishonest fool.

Yesterday:

Today:

Calling JK Rowling “the worst person in the UK” is not equivalent to “I don’t agree with JK Rowling’s views.”

Thus: a dishonest fool.

From Inside Climate News, a discussion of the implications of Helene and North Carolina.

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with Abrahm Lustgarten, author of “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.”

…

Helene’s huge size and speed are linked to increasingly hotter water in the Gulf of Mexico, and a stark reminder that with global heating, weather forecasts based on history are becoming [worse] guides to present dangers. Hurricanes have usually weakened when they make landfall, but to the surprise of many, Helene’s impact was just as devastating in the inland mountains of western North Carolina as on the Gulf Coast of Florida. 

…

CURWOOD: Preparing for that worst case costs a lot of money—and people think that is a waste of money.

LUSTGARTEN: I talk about this a lot, and it’s one of the more depressing elements of the climate adaptation story for the United States: The costs of adapting to climate change are going to prove so unfathomably expensive that I don’t think we collectively, or our governments, can really wrap their minds around that yet. 

The flip side of what that investment will require is what I believe is the reality, the truth, that certain places will never be able to afford that adaptation. This may be a very long way into the future, and it depends on the frequency of disasters, but there will become places that are unprotectable, where we cannot afford to rebuild, where we cannot afford to build in the way that is truly resilient, because it is too expensive. We’re more likely as a society to spend that money and make those investments in the larger urban places where there’s a collectivization of the services and community support for the population that lives there. 

We’re trending into the science-fiction realm here—or at least my imagining of the future—but when I try to imagine what a community that is failing on the far end of this transition looks like, the researchers that I talk to tell me to expect the disappearance of publicly provided services like garbage pickup, 911 service and emergency services, and the availability of insurance and those basic community fundamentals first. That might follow the decrease of a tax base that dwindles as the population shrinks, which also precipitates a drop in the quality of schools and a drop in the quality of infrastructure. 

All of these things start to self perpetuate and spiral downwards, and then once you lose that consistency of services and economic stability, I think of it as communities kind of de-evolving back into what we would call a rural state, where eventually you have people who have to be self-sufficient and self-dependent in order to live there. 

So, basically, going back to what human life was like 5 or 10 thousand years ago.

Another turn of the screw:

What is a woman? This now highly controversial issue will be decided in November by the highest court in the land.

No it won’t. It’s not the kind of thing that can be decided by a court, however high. The question would have to be “What will we all be required to call a woman?” or some similar wording for the claim to be true. Courts decide law; they can’t decide reality.

The justices — three men and two women — will be led by Lord Reed of Allermuir, 68, president of the court and the UK’s most senior judge. He is undaunted by the task. “When we hear cases … we are not trying to decide what social policy ought to be. That’s not our function. What we are trying to do, generally and in this particular case, is to interpret a particular statute or provision.”

What I’m saying. The Times really should have worded it that way. This business of confusing “what we are going to tell you to say” with truth or reality is the fundamental trick that gender ideology has been using and getting away with all this time.

Weirdness report:

A number of Donald Trump critics have mocked Elon Musk over his appearance alongside the former president at a Pennsylvania rally.

What, just because he jumped up and down like a lunatic?

Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter, and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, joined Trump onstage in Butler on Saturday to show his support for the Republican and state that he is “not just MAGA — I am Dark MAGA.”

After Trump introduced Musk to the stage, the tech mogul enthusiastically jumped in the air several times while supporters cheered. Musk, who wore a black Make America Great Again cap, warned in his speech that “this will be the last election” if the former president does not win in November while urging people to vote.

That is an idiotic thing to say.

I’m so tired of the clown show.

Billionaires unite to trash everything.

If @realDonaldTrump doesn’t win, the “Democratic” Party will legalize so many illegals that there will be no swing states!

America will become a single-party socialist state, just like what happened to California, where they just made requiring voter ID illegal. https://t.co/I9FhicDbfP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 5, 2024

We’re doomed.

Shit just got real.

Financial services firms have been forced to pay hundreds of pounds in compensation to non-binary customers over “discriminatory” application forms. 

MoneySuperMarket (MSM), the comparison website, and Transunion, a credit union, were hit with separate complaints because their application forms did not include options for non-binary customers in their gender section.

But…that’s not a thing. It’s not real. It has nothing to do with realities like credit. You might as well say credit applications should include options for witches.

According to the complaint, MSM argued that changes to their website are bound by the information their insurance partners ask for and that many of them have not made provision for customers who identify as non-binary.

Why would they, when it has nothing to do with anything?

Transunion argued that the title Mx is not legally protected under the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and that the individual’s title has no bearing on their ability to gain access to credit.

What I’m saying. It has nothing to do with credit so why make a fuss about it? The usual, no doubt: for attention.

The ruling said: “Mx E has told us that the events surrounding the complaint made them feel they had to justify their non-binary identity and go through a process of ‘proving I exist’. It was (or should’ve been) foreseeable to Transunion that this was potentially offensive and distressing. Having listened to Mx E’s account, I’m persuaded that they experienced both stress and upset as a result of this matter.”

Self-induced stress and upset. How about telling Mx Ex that applying for credit is not about Mx Ex’s fascinating personality so grow up and shut up and go away?

A spokesman for MSM said: “Many of the insurers and financial services providers that we work with have systems that currently only refer to a binary concept of gender. We’re actively working with our partners to make non-binary options available.”

Why? Why on earth? Surely insurers and financial services want to know applicants’ sex for reasons of verification and/or risk level and the like? Knowing applicants are “non-binary” is not useful for anything…unless being a self-absorbed buffoon affects your credit rating.

Anna Dews, a solicitor in Leigh Day’s human rights team, said: “Although there is currently no statutory legal recognition of non-binary gender identities in the UK, it is completely fair and reasonable that a non-binary person should be able to refer to themselves using the correct pronouns as a customer in the online space.”

But the only correct pronouns for people referring to themselves are “me” and “I” – which are already “non-binary.”

This crap gets stupider every day.

If only we could have not-idiots. Never mind nice things, that’s too much to ask, but just not…this…

Marjorie Taylor Greene challenges YOU to prove Hurricane Helene wasn’t an inside job.

As the death toll from one of the worst U.S. storms in recent memory topped 200 on Friday morning, the Republican congresswoman and noted conspiracy theorist posted a timely reminder on X that “yes they can control the weather” and that “it’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

I wonder who “they” are. The Jews? The Dems? People with some brain cells?

The Georgia Republican drew widespread mockery and derision in 2021 after it was revealed she’d previously suggested devastating wildfires in the state of California had been sparked by laser beams controlled by the wealthy Rothschild family from outer space.

Who knew the wealthy Rothschild family lived in outer space??

Greene’s apparent belief in the existence of these so-called Jewish space lasers reared its head again earlier this year with the congresswoman’s proposed amendments to an Israel funding bill amid the war in Gaza.

The MAGA representative wrote in her proposal that “by the funds made available by this Act, such sums as necessary shall be used for the development of space laser technology on the southwest border”—an apparent bid to turn the nefarious fictional weapons toward the perceived good of vaporizing vulnerable migrants attempting to enter the U.S.

“America needs to take our national security seriously,” she said at the time.

America needs to take voting seriously.

It seems the hot new thing is to claim that the Feds are ignoring the hurricane victims.

I did a little exploring and, of course, found that it’s the usual bullshit – baseless claims being amplified by fools.

Ok due warning, this is the Washington Post, which of course is in on the sinister plot to kill us all with hurricanes and then throw a big party, but anyway – the Post tells us:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has deployed more than a thousand personnel and millions of meals and liters of water to the communities hard hit by Helene, but is struggling to reach some communities deep in mountainous and remote areas of North Carolina that were most affected by the storm.

I’ve been to that part of North Carolina. I’ve been up a mountain in a car in that part of North Carolina. I can testify: it is not easy terrain on a good day, let alone after a lethal hurricane.

FEMA has deployed more than 1,500 personnel to respond to Helene. As of Friday, the agency had shipped more than 11.5 million meals, more than 12.6 million liters of water, more than 400,000 tarps and 150 generators to the affected region. The agency sent a similar number of personnel — roughly 2,000 — to Florida and the Southeast a week after Hurricane Ian struck there in 2022, according to a news release.

About 6,700 National Guard members from 16 states were involved in relief operations as of Thursday, said Maj. Gen. Win Burkett, director of domestic operations and force development for the National Guard Bureau, along with roughly 1,000 active-duty troops.

Is that “sending no help”?

But the sheer scope of the disaster area, which stretches across six states in the Southeast, has presented an enormous logistical challenge. And as federal officials help state and local agencies respond, they are battling significant misinformation — only underlining and adding to the challenges of the mission that has no immediate end in sight. As of Friday, at least 221 people have died in six states as a result of the storm.

Several Republican governors and senators from storm-battered states that could prove pivotal in the 2024 election have praised FEMA’s response. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Friday offered a robust defense of the federal recovery efforts so far.

“I’m actually impressed with how much attention was paid to a region that wasn’t likely to have experienced the impact that they did,” Tillis told reporters, adding, “I’m out here to say that we’re doing a good job, and those who may not be on the ground, who are making those assessments, ought to get on the ground.”

Or even just have some idea of the ground. There is no swift easy access to much of the area pounded by the hurricane. There is only slow difficult access. That’s part of why the disaster is such a disaster, as the news media have been saying from the outset.

FEMA is at the center of a number of debates about the administration’s ability to respond to the crisis — fueled in part by the agency’s comments but also by mischaracterizations or incorrect information repeated on social media about the agency’s response.

Politicians and others have spread false information about the response to the storm on social media. For example, some have claimed that the agency has run out of disaster response money and that storm victims can only receive $750 in federal assistance.

Several right-wing influencers have used their large online followings to amplify these claims on X, which has declined to remove these posts or label them as misleading. The trend underscores how election-year politics — combined with lax misinformation policies by major tech platforms — are complicating efforts to keep communities safe.

And KJK is being one of those right-wing influencers, from thousands of miles away in a comparatively flat and small country.

It’s annoying.

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on These rococo claims.

Maya Forstater won her landmark employment case in the UK Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) on Thursday, June 10, 2021. The UK EAT is a high court, so she won a binding precedent for lower court cases (e.g. in the more recent case of Elizabeth Pitt that the FSU reported above).

Later that day, Freddie Sayers interviewed Maya about her case, and Ophelia posted the interview video here. In my comment #6 there, I transcribed part of the video, where Maya explained that her legal position had two parts to be taken together:

(1) The scientific FACT that “sex is real” — as her shorthand for “binary, immutable”, and “a scientific fact”.

(2) Her philosophical BELIEF that “sex matters” — as her shorthand for “it’s a social and political, and economic, salient, important thing.”

In my comments on my transcript, I noted my relief that her legal position did not claim the fact of sex to be a belief. My transcript is a good reference to read her explain this more.

On a brighter note, meet the Falkirk Wheel. It joins two canals that are at different heights. They used to be joined by 12 locks that took almost an entire day to go through. Now the joining takes minutes.

Adding another, filmed by a drone.

Cheltenham Literary Festival is in a panic because – oh my god – people might have unpopular thoughts which they might utter aloud.

Cheltenham Literature Festival has come under fire after issuing a warning notice to speakers comparing gender-critical views with racism and homophobia.

The festival, which begins today, sent an email to people who are hosting talks at the event, asking them to follow new guidance “in order to protect both yourselves and the [festival] from complaints”. It said: “If, during any of your events, a speaker shares an opinion that could be deemed controversial, please reinforce that everyone is entitled to express an opinion, however Cheltenham Festivals [the organiser] does not endorse the views shared on stage. By controversial we mean those views that may be harmful to an individual or group of people, particularly those who have been historically marginalised or oppressed.”

So what did they lead with? I’ll give you one guess.

It gave a list of examples headed by “gender-critical views”. 

First item on the list, knowing that men are not women. That’s their peak historical marginalized and oppressed. Not women. Not women being treated the way the Taliban treats women. Not indigenous people, not enslaved people, not workers, not immigrants, not Jews, not Uighurs, not lesbians and gay men, but people who pretend to be the “gender” opposite their own. They lead the list; they are the most oppressed.

The list went on to include “misogyny; extreme political views including on migration, sexuality, gender, and military action; potentially problematic views on race, religion, or ethnicity; homophobia, including opinions linked to religion; extreme views on abortion and female reproductive health; widely disputed conspiracy theories”.

So, what does the festival want people to talk about then? Chocolate? The weather? Plums? Sealing wax? Tree houses?

Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at the human rights charity Sex Matters, said: “Heaven forbid that a book festival should allow mention of biological reality without immediately distancing itself.

“It is of course outrageous to compare gender-critical views to racism or conspiracy theories. But Cheltenham Literature Festival is only revealing publicly the degree of hostility routinely suffered in private by gender-critical women in literary circles.

And political circles, and artistic circles, and sporting circles, and all the other circles, except the ones that form around men who claim to be women.