Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on The most important word.

Two incidents from last week at the Paralympics.

Partially-sighted Australian runner, Jaryd Clifford, accidentally let go of the tether linking him to his guide 4998 metres into the 5000 metres final. He was the only runner in that race to use guides, i.e. the ‘most’ blind runner in the field, finished in third place but was disqualified from recieving the bronze. Essentially, letting go of the tether at any point in the race, whether intentionally or not, suggests that the guide isn’t really needed and therefore the runner is gaining an unfair advantage. Clifford was disqualified because he broke the rules, and cheats don’t deserve medals, right?

Polish athlete, Roza Kozakowska, who competes in the class for the most severely disabled in her category, made a world record hammer throw, tearing her shoulder so severely in doing so that she had to withdraw from further attempts. Still, it was a gold-winning throw…until she was disqualified because the neck support pillow on her wheelchair was slightly above regulation size. Granted, it was a matter of just a few millimeters, but it gave her neck a tiny amount of extra support that her similarly-disabled rivals didn’t have. Apparently, when you lack the ability to properly coordinate your muscles over your entire body, a couple of millimeters extra support makes a difference. Kozakowska was disqualified for breaking the rules, and cheats don’t deserve medals, right?

And yet the very people who disqualified two genuine competitors from medal-winning positions for very minor and almost certainly inadvertent breaches of the regulations are cheering on a man who is openly, nay, proudly cheating his way through the competition. It’s utterly fucking insane.

The march of stupidity continues.

A Victorian breastfeeding expert is facing legal action over a series of social media posts denying that transgender women can breastfeed.

Jasmine Sussex is being taken to Queensland’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal by a trans mother after labelling attempts by transwomen to breastfeed their children “experimental’’ and calling it a “dangerous fetish”.

Ms Sussex raised concerns about Queensland trans mother Jennifer Buckley – who was born male but later transitioned into a woman – taking hormones to grow breasts and induce lactation to breastfeed her newborn baby.

No he didn’t “transition into a woman” – there is no such thing. He later started to pretend to be a woman.

The Victorian woman is preparing to be called before the Tribunal after Ms Buckley alleged that she had vilified her online, calling her statements “hurtful”.

Hurtful shmurtful. Try thinking about the wellbeing of the baby instead of your revolting fetish, dude.

Ms Buckley said she had begun transitioning but was able to conceive using IVF, meaning she is the biological father.

Imagine being a journalist and writing that ridiculous sentence.

She began taking hormones to stimulate milk production as her wife prepared to give birth because she wanted to breastfeed as well.

“For the past 6 weeks I have been taking a drug called domperidone to increase prolactin in an attempt to be able to produce breast milk so that I can have the experience of breastfeeding,” she wrote in a Facebook post. The drug domperidone is traditionally an anti-nausea medication.

And it’s just a brilliant idea to feed a baby superfluous medications so that its selfish piggy father can pretend to be a mommy.

Ms Buckley, who described herself as a “loving mother of a beautiful little boy”, told the Saturday Herald Sun her wife had encouraged her to try breastfeeding following advice from her endocrinologist. She said she was told it was “no different to inducing lactation in non-pregnant mothers or those mothers who are not producing enough milk”.

The people who told him that are insane. Of course it’s different from inducing lactation in women. Women can lactate; men cannot lactate. Inducing artificial “lactation” passes the artifice on to the baby, which is not a good idea. Primum non nocere, remember?

They’ve all lost their damn minds.

The Irish Times:

A transgender woman, who was referred for gender-affirmation surgery in Germany, says she was unable to receive “basic healthcare” on her return to a Dublin hospital.

It wasn’t “basic” healthcare though. It was very specialized.

Paige Behan (26) from Ballyfermot, Dublin, felt “humiliated” and “devastated” when neither the urology, gynaecology nor plastics teams would treat her at St James’s Hospital – the largest acute academic teaching hospital in the State – last month, despite her being referred by her GP for a worsening wound infection at the site of her surgery.

What was his surgery? A “neo-vagina” – which is not basic healthcare, and is arguably not healthcare at all.

Instead she was advised to travel late at night, while distressed and bleeding, to the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) at Holles Street, which St James’s Hospital said was “more equipped to deal with neo-vaginal complaints”.

Which seems surprising for a maternity hospital.

Ms Behan says she knew she was female since she was 12. From age 18 she was prescribed hormone therapy though she felt despair at being unable to access timely gender-affirmation surgery. She was hospitalised for several suicide attempts.

She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria following psychiatric evaluations that she found gruelling. Last year she was referred for “life-saving” surgery at the Rotkreuzklinikum München hospital in Munich, by the HSE at St Colmcille’s Hospital, Loughlinstown. This surgery is not available in Ireland.

Surgery to create a vagina was performed by plastic surgeons at the Munich hospital on July 14th. A hospital-contracted infection delayed her return home and she travelled back on August 9th.

There’s no such thing as “surgery to create a vagina.” The surgery creates an imitation vagina, which is not the same thing. At all.

Anyway, he got his name in the papers.

Janice Turner on the Taliban’s gender apartheid:

The Afghan men’s cricket team is one of 12 Test match sides. The limited-overs team competed in last year’s World Cup — with prestigious victories over Pakistan and England — and on Monday in India the Test side will play New Zealand. Why? The only possible answer is that the international community cares not a damn for Afghan women.

Why isn’t there a global boycott?

The Taliban is certainly thorough. First it stopped girls attending school and university, removed women from most jobs and demanded they cover themselves in chadors head to toe. Then it pondered other female pleasures, barring women from gyms, beauty salons, hairdressers and public parks, and making shopping trips, eating out, even buying a coffee illegal without a male chaperone. But a few chinks of happiness remained, so last month it banned the female voice from singing, reciting and speaking in public.

…

Later this month, in the UAE, the Afghan men’s cricket team will play South Africa. A bitter irony. Throughout the apartheid years, sporting boycotts were used to pressure Pretoria to end violent white supremacist rule and to punish its bar on black cricketers. The world took a moral stand: we refused to fill stadiums with cheering fans for a racist state.

Without wishing to diminish that evil regime, the Taliban is a far more meticulous oppressor. Black children received an inferior education but could still attend school. Black people were barred from many jobs and received pitiful pay yet could still earn a living. Those corralled into black townships kept the most basic human freedoms: to play music and sport, to dance, sing, laugh and chat with friends, or simply feel the breeze in their hair.

…

Campaigners are enraged to hear that female advances in every sphere of life, from law to sport, were a mere blip. They say the Taliban’s edicts are neither social “norms” nor Islamic law but mechanisms of social control (and of men, too, who are brutally punished for not keeping “wayward” womenfolk in check). What they endure needs a name and in October the UN legal committee will debate codifying a new crime against humanity into international law: gender apartheid. Existing laws address abuse of women but campaigners, from Nobel laureates to Amnesty, believe none fully capture the codified, systemic abuse of Afghan women.

…

Like many women observing an unfolding dystopia that exceeds even the The Handmaid’s Tale, I’ve despaired that there is anything we can do for Afghan women. But there is: it starts with regarding their human rights as no more negotiable than those of black South Africans and treating the Taliban as what it is, the ruler of an apartheid state.

This has to happen.

Liz Cheney endorsed Harris for president the other day. She also had some thoughts on the other candidate.

The former Republican Wyoming representative spoke with Atlantic writer Mark Leibovich in Texas on Friday, following her endorsement of Harris for president this week. In her conversation, she shared words of wisdom for Harris—and a brutally honest condemnation of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

Well there’s no point in being gently dishonest about those two, is there. They want to destroy everything. They’re bad men. They have to be stopped.

When asked how Harris should approach Tuesday’s presidential debate against Trump, Cheney responded by saying that Harris should relish the fact that this is an “opportunity [where] Donald Trump gets to show the American people who he is.” And who he is, in her words, is a “misogynistic pig.”

“This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs,” Cheney said, speaking of Vance and Trump as the audience erupted in applause. “I think that will become clear.”

She’s not wrong.

Trump is throwing hissy fits.

Former President Donald Trump, frustrated by the state of the race and his continued legal troubles, on Friday sought to claim the spotlight for himself.

Wedging a hastily called press conference into an otherwise packed day of campaign events and court-related issues, he angrily complained to reporters inside the lobby of Trump Tower about his appeal in a sex abuse and defamation case. He criticized his legal team’s performance. Trump accused the moderators of the upcoming ABC debate of being unfair — and slammed Harris for not addressing reporters as often as he has.

In other words, wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

Very edifying.

“This is a disgraceful case and disgraceful, in particular, because it is about a former president of the United States who is now leading in the polls to be the president again,” Trump said, before proceeding to voluntarily rehash salacious details of the sexual assault allegations he has denied.

He isn’t leading in the polls. Also, he shouldn’t be a former president of the US because he should never have been president of the US. He’s not competent and he’s a terrible human being.

After saying he would be discussing Friday’s jobs report, which was weaker than expected, Trump only briefly mentioned the topic after speaking for 45 minutes, then quickly touching on migration and migrant crime before ending his remarks. Most of his comments centered on the civil and criminal cases against him. 

In other words he’s only interested in himself. He doesn’t care about “migration” or “migrant crime” except as a pretext to bully people who aren’t Donald Trump.

Trump’s 50-minute, often rambling speech — billed as a “press conference,” though he took no questions from reporters — was the latest of several media events he has held in recent weeks as he has worked to reclaim his lead in the race, and to steal the spotlight back from Harris. The vice president has enjoyed favorable polling, a fundraising windfall and large, energetic crowds even as she has largely avoided speaking to the news media.

He’s not going to be able to steal the spotlight back. He’ll still get some spotlight, but he won’t get it by subtracting from hers. He’s going to get more and more furious…and this time, thankyoubabyjesus, he can’t do much with his fury other than wave his tiny fists around.

It turns out you have to have expertise in “gender” to be able to say that men are not women.

It’s a very complicated, difficult, technical subject. You can’t just rock up and say that man is not a woman. You need to have, at least, read a book by Sally Hines first.

Vance thinks mass shootings are just a fact of life, like the weather. Nothing we can do about it, folks!

Vance’s comments – in the wake of the latest deadly shooting, at Apalachee High School in Georgia – ignited a political row after Democrats depicted them as evidence of a lack of empathy while Republicans claimed the remarks had been taken out of context.

Vance called for more security measures in schools without mentioning gun control, while Democrats including Kamala Harris and the US president, Joe Biden, want a ban on assault-style rifles, more background checks, and other gun safety action.

Asked about the Georgia shooting while speaking at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday evening, Vance said: “I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realise that our schools are soft targets.”

Well it’s not a “fact of life” that any damn fool can go into a gun shop and come out armed as if for war. It’s a decision, an insistence, that it’s a human right to stroll around in public with an assault rifle.

Vance continued: “We’ve got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … and wants to kill a bunch of children – they’re not able to. As a parent, do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

The remarks, which were prefaced by an attack on the pro-gun control stance of Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election, were immediately seized on by the Harris campaign.

Yeah gee why would we not want to turn schools into armed camps rather than having laws against weapons of mass murder?

Trump, responding to a question on the Georgia shootings at a Fox News town hall meeting from the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday, said: “It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons and we’re going to make it better, and we’re going to heal our world.”

Is there anyone less likely to make the world less sick and angry than Donald Trump? He feeds on sick anger, he fosters sick anger, he whips up sick anger, he loves sick anger as long as it’s not directed at him.

Aw yeah, Donald Trump as the guy who “isn’t stodgy, who likes to have some fun, and likes to tell some jokes” about women and other inferiors.

It’s telling that Vance’s notion of a freewheeling, lighthearted campaign involves disparaging political opponents with baseless slander and sexist screeds.

For example, Vance took a typically cheap shot at Harris prior to her interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. He posted a 2007 clip of Miss South Carolina Teen USA Caitlin Upton bombing an answer to a question about why Americans couldn’t find their own country on a map. He wrote: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”

Vance’s “joke” was lousy politics that distracted from any actual gaffes Harris might’ve made. (You’ll note that the Harris social media team consistently hangs Vance with his own awful words.) When Berman later reminded Vance that Upton is a real person, who was so humiliated by the 2007 incident that she contemplated suicide, Vance expressed zero remorse and refused to apologize.

“Look, I’ve said a lot of things on camera; I’ve said a lot of stupid things on camera,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re in the public eye, you make mistakes. And again, I think the best way to deal with it is to laugh at ourselves, laugh at this stuff and try to have some fun in politics.”

Laugh at ourselves, sure, but he isn’t doing that, and Trump never does that. What Trump does, constantly and often and with sadistic enthusiasm, is laugh at other people, especially women and other weaklings. He’s not a good guy who laughs at himself and is trying to have some fun in politics, he’s a sadistic bully who has jeered at other people his entire life.

It’s in telling contrast to the collective MAGA freakout when Tim Walz joked in a video about his limited spice palate and affection for “white guy tacos.” Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Megyn Kelly and other right-wingers accused Walz of “self-loathing” anti-white bigotry. These are people who don’t appreciate or even comprehend self-deprecating humor, because for them, humor is solely another form of exerting dominance over people who are more vulnerable.

Exerting dominance plus casual sadism. Don’t ever forget about the casual sadism, because it matters.

Massive collective cringe.

Daily Kos sweetly transcribed the incoherent jabber, but for the full effect it’s necessary to watch him jabbering. It’s as if he’s been wound up like a clock and has to make a noise until he winds down. His only concern is to keep saying words, so he does keep saying words, without any meaning or connection to each other at all.

Question: If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable?

And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

Trump’s Answer:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue, it’s a very important issue, but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because the child care is child care, it’s something you have to have it.

And so on. Daily Kos punctuated it as if it were a series of sentences but I de-corrected the excerpt back to the punctuation-free sustained babble it really was.

What no leprechauns?

The schoolbook publisher, The Educational Company of Ireland (Edco), has apologised for some content in one of its Junior Cycle curriculum books, adding that upon “closer inspection”, it will remove it.

In a section entitled “All Different, All Equal”, an Aran-jumper wearing Irish family is described as eating bacon, cabbage and potatoes every day and not liking change or difference, while a mixed-race family is depicted as eating more varied foods and travelling internationally.

In other words the Irish family are boring bigoted hicks while the “mixed-race” family are fascinating and cosmopolitan. No doubt there are plenty of families who fit both descriptions, but didactic tales about them can…shall we say, go wrong.

The publisher issued a statement to RTÉ News in response to queries around the book’s depictions, which had led to widespread calls for the book to be pulled.

In the statement, Edco said: “Firstly, we would like to say that we welcome the public’s interest in this issue and the whole area of SPHE.

“By means of background and context, the main function of this activity (‘Looking at Difference’) is designed to help students understand the importance of diversity in our lives, to introduce students to the Equal Status Acts and to highlight the types of discrimination they cover.

“Following the students’ introduction to the Equal Status Acts, the activity uses exaggeration and hyperbole to convey the nature and effects of inclusion and bias.” However, it said that “on closer inspection, we now appreciate that our approach should have been different”.

Well, yeah. Assigning kids in Irish schools a book that portrays Irish people as boring bigoted hicks is probably not the best way to go.

Reduxx tells us:

A Canadian man in his sixties who abandoned his wife and children to live as a six-year-old girl is currently promoting his memoir about his transition. Stefonknee Wolscht, formerly known as Paul Andrew Wolscht, is a father to seven children and was married to his wife for 23 years before claiming to be transgender in 2009.

I call fake on his claim to be trans. If he were serious he wouldn’t name himself Stefonknee. He might as well have named himself Pederast.

Prior to “coming out” as transgender, Wolscht was a father to seven children and had been married to a woman for over two decades. In his memoire, he claims that after telling her his wife that wanted to begin living openly as a “woman” in 2009, she demanded he move out.

Though [he is] portraying himself as a victim of transphobia, Reduxx has located old posts Wolscht made to social media in which he admits to threatening his wife and children after announcing his gender transition.

It woz the gender anguish wot made him do it, guvnor.

Disturbingly, Wolscht has claimed that he is “welcomed into classrooms to educate children on gender and sexuality.”

In an exchange on X in which one user expressed criticism of Wolscht’s sexual proclivities, he replied: “We have a long way to go. Perhaps I’ll teach a TERFs kid soon.”

Yes but trans people are the most persecuted demographic ever of all time. Shut up.

God damn it Guardian.

Pregnant people and fetuses not being protected from wildfire risks – report

Wildfires pose serious risks to pregnant people and their developing fetuses, including low birth weight and preterm birth. But public health officials are not doing nearly enough to keep these vulnerable populations safe, according to a new report.

“While we know that wildfires are continuing to intensify in the US, and we’re increasingly clear on what damages wildfires represent to maternal and newborn health, we’re still not seeing the kind of response from policymakers and public health officials that we need,” said Skye Wheeler, a researcher at Human Rights Watch and one of the report’s authors.

Maternal health? How did that get in there? Surely xir meant parental health, not maternal.

Wheeler and researchers with the perinatal health non-profit Nurturely surveyed more than 50 doctors, midwives, doulas, lactation consultants and other community-based birth workers in Oregon, which this year has experienced its worst-ever fire season.

Midwives? Surely that should be midspouses.

They said public health officials were not doing enough to communicate warnings and safety information to vulnerable communities, particularly the unhoused and those who speak little English…

But deleting the word “women” from the language is a brilliant way to communicate warnings and safety information to vulnerable communities, right?

Health providers said that authorities had not provided them with guidance on the specific risks wildfires posed to pregnant people – and that they typically had to rely on their own research to answer patients’ questions.

Please inform what the research has turned up about the usefulness of never saying “women.”

In a statement, the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) said it “recognizes and remains highly concerned about the negative health effects that wildfire smoke poses to people who are pregnant, those who are unhoused, and people with limited English proficiency. We have promoted and shared educational materials in multiple languages since 2017.”

Great. Brilliant. We are hugely relieved to know that the Oregon Health Authority carefully avoids using the word “women” when talking to pregnant women.

“Environmental risks like wildfire smoke and heat are increasing every day,” said Rebecca Schmidt, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis who was not involved with the report. “Right now, I don’t think clinicians have been trained very well on those potential exposures and what they might be doing to [patients’] health.”

Oh look – the Guardian actually altered what she said, changing “women’s” to “patients’.” That takes some fucking gall, I must say. It’s not enough for the Guardian to lie in order to erase women, it has to make its sources lie in order to erase women too.

But, suddenly, the rules change, I guess because Black women have walked to the front of the stage?

“The US is the only high-income country in the world where that’s true,” Wheeler said. “The US can’t afford more pressure on its maternal health systems, and public health officials need to do everything they can to try and reverse worsening maternal health, especially for Black and other women of color.”

Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women, with risk spanning income and education levels. They are also disproportionately exposed to air pollution. Exposure to harmful pollutants, poor air quality, and high temperatures are associated with women of color delivering babies with lower birth weights.

Yikes. Four “women” in that short passage – it’s dizzying.

It’s at the very end though. It’s notorious that vanishingly few people read news articles all the way to the end.

Punishing women for refusing to compete against men:

Female darts players have been threatened with disciplinary action if they refuse to play transgender opponents.

Male opponents, they mean. I suppose there could also be an issue of playing women on testosterone, but that doesn’t seem to happen, maybe because women aren’t as shameless as men who pretend to be women.

Almost four months after a British female player forfeited a match against a trans woman at a World Darts Federation event, the governing body has begun a controversial crackdown on such protests.

Ahead of announcing the provisional fields for this year’s World Championship, the WDF said in a statement: “The WDF wishes to clarify its position on player withdrawals.

“Once the first dart has been thrown in a tournament, any player that subsequently withdraws from playing a match may be considered to be bringing the game into disrepute and could face disciplinary action.”

Hey, you know who is really bringing the game into disrepute? Governing bodies that allow men to infiltrate and destroy women’s sports, that’s who. You. Look in the mirror.

The statement was issued barely a month after Deta Hedman, who pulled out of her Denmark Open quarter-final against Noa-Lynn van Leuven in May, withdrew from a second competition upon learning she would face another trans opponent.

…

Hedman, who has launched a petition against darts’ current gender participation policy, accused the WDF of putting the mental welfare of trans women ahead of those born female.

“They haven’t shown any regard for the mental health of anyone female-born at all,” she said. “It’s all about the mental health of transgender women.”

And so we are forced to conclude that they see women as garbage.

Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at human rights charity Sex Matters, said: “As if it’s not bad enough that women face unfairness, they’re being forced to play or lose their future chances as well. They lose twice over. It shouldn’t be left to women to take a stand, but if they do, they will be punished. Some people say, ‘Why don’t women refuse to play?’ This is why.”

Van Leuven, who has divided her sport since joining the women’s circuit after beginning transitioning in 2022, made headlines in March after winning two Professional Darts Corporation titles – the PDC Women’s Series in Wigan and a PDC Tour event in Hildesheim, Germany.

Journalists really should not follow the “call him ‘her'” rule in a story of this kind. They never should, but especially in a story of this kind.

Sigh. Gosh, yes, why shouldn’t men be allowed to dress up as parody prostitutes at work?

A minister has told civil servants that they are not allowed to come into work wearing ‘fetish clothing’, after a war erupted over dress code regulations.

Employees in the Department for Work and Pensions are said to have objected to the ‘highly inappropriate’ workwear of a fellow official which prompted a Tory peer to ask the Government about its ‘policy on civil servants wearing fetish clothing in the workplace’.

It is understood that Baroness Jenkin of Kennington tabled the unusual question to reflect her general concerns about the dress code and also in response to the specific issues raised by civil servants about one Whitehall diversity ambassador. 

Ah yes the diversity ambassador…meaning, not working class, not female, not from Jamaica, but a man who dresses up as a parody of women who sell themselves for sex. How diverse.

Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a trans woman who works for the DWP, has previously come under fire for saying that trans children’s demands for puberty blockers should take precedence over their ‘parents’ will’. 

The name is a jokey insult too.

The civil servant, who co-chairs the Civil Service LGBT+ network, has also been criticised for linking women’s rights groups to the far-Right and suggesting they are calling for trans genocide 

And the Mail on Sunday last month revealed Tweedale, 58, is facing controversy in the workplace as fellow staff members say their colleague regularly wears fishnet tights, low-cut black corsets, high heels and a gothic choker with a pentagram to work…

As women don’t.

Last month Tweedale was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Bradford in recognition of a career which has ‘helped people through trade unionism’ and also ‘her diversity and equality work’.

Of course he was.

Speaking of incoherent incontinent babbling…

The words below were taken verbatim  from a campaign speech former President Donald Trump delivered in Potterville, Michigan, Thursday when he was attempting, at least initially, to criticize Kamala Harris’ record in San Francisco, presumably referring to her tenure as district attorney there:

She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?

Wut?

Trump’s deteriorating ability to clearly communicate is a consequential feature of his 2024 candidacy. That deterioration may not have been as salient when Trump, 78, had 81-year-old President Joe Biden as an opponent. But it’s all the more clear as he now faces off against 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Well, yes. This was always going to be the case. Once Harris replaced Biden, it was impossible to ignore the coherence gap between the two candidates.

The incoherence of the Potterville speech is just one of countless examples. During a recent event in Wisconsin, Trump’s response to a question from the audience about reducing inflation entailed darting from his belief that Americans don’t eat bacon anymore to his assertion that wind energy doesn’t work. During remarks this spring, he stumbled from an attack on Biden’s age into a nonsensical reverie about the actor Cary Grant, which then spun off into an anecdote about a conversation he had with Michael Jackson. Compared even to his first term in office, Trump’s inability to focus on one train of thought appears to be growing significantly worse.

…

Trump’s qualities as an entertainer, as an agent of disinformation and as a proud policy illiterate have made it easier for him to mask his apparent decline and to identify its precise significance. 

Yet I’m still obstinate enough to wonder why people want an entertainer and proud policy illiterate as president.

Jaw-dropping – for once not in a bad way.

This bird came back from extinction – now scientists in an aircraft are teaching it to migrate

I could stare at that photo all day.

The northern bald ibis was extinct in central Europe for 300 years. Now, it has returned – and scientist “foster parents” aboard a tiny plane are teaching the birds to fly their long-forgotten migration routes.

Thirty-six of these endangered birds are now following an ultralight aircraft 1,740 miles (2,800km ) from Austria to Spain, on a trip that could take up to 50 days to complete.

During the flight, human foster parents sit on the back of the microlight, waving and shouting encouragement to the birds as they fly. Biologist Johannes Fritz – who came up with the idea – pilots the small aircraft, which has a small fan-like motor on the back and yellow parachute keeping it aloft.

It is the first attempt to reintroduce a migratory species using this technique, said Fritz. “It’s an almost surreal experience, to be up there in the sky with these birds, experiencing them in the air, perfectly shaped for flying. It’s a touching and extraordinary experience.”

Fritz was inspired by the 1996 film Fly Away Home in which the main character flies an ultralight plane to show orphaned geese their migratory path. The film was based on the work of “Father Goose” Bill Lishman, a naturalist who taught Canada geese in the same way in 1988.

It would be better if humans hadn’t made this necessary, but read the Guardian piece and gape at the photos anyway.

Tucker Carlson and the Hitler Fanboy:

Tucker Carlson is just asking questions. Questions like: what if Andrew Tate’s camgirl harem is actually the height of masculinity? And: isn’t the Russian grocery equivalent of Aldi absolutely incredible, just as the Moscow train station is perhaps the most beautiful thing mankind has created? And this week: why don’t we fully appreciate the total bind Adolf Hitler was in when he had just so many prisoners of war thanks to German success on the battlefield?

…

Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper, an amateur revisionist historian and podcaster, attempted to rewrite the history of World War Two with Winston Churchill cast as a malevolent villain and Adolf Hitler as a misunderstood man of peace:

“You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re… so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says, “Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”

Got it? It wasn’t a matter of war crimes, and it wasn’t genocide, it was just a big accident. They forgot to get enough groceries to feed all those people so they thought it would be kinder just to kill them all. With ZyklonB.

If you’re going to put people in very tall buildings, you need to make sure those buildings are safe.

A damning report on a deadly London high-rise fire concluded Wednesday that decades of failures by government, regulators and industry turned Grenfell Tower into a “death trap” where 72 people lost their lives.

The public inquiry into the 2017 blaze found no “single cause” of the tragedy, but said a combination of dishonest companies, weak or incompetent regulators and complacent government led the building to be covered in combustible cladding that turned a small apartment fire into the deadliest blaze on British soil since World War II.

…

The search for answers focused on a refurbishment completed in 2016 that covered the 1970s building in aluminum and polyethylene cladding — a layer of foam insulation topped by two sheets of aluminum sandwiched around a layer of polyethylene, a combustible plastic polymer that melts and drips on exposure to heat.

The report was highly critical of companies that made the cladding. It said they engaged in “systematic dishonesty,” manipulating safety tests and misrepresenting the results to claim the material was safe.

It said insulation manufacturer Celotex was unscrupulous, and another insulation firm, Kingspan, “cynically exploited the industry’s lack of detailed knowledge.” Cladding panel maker Arconic “concealed from the market the true extent of the danger,” the report said.

…

The inquiry said the combustible cladding was used because it was cheap and because of “incompetence of the organizations and individuals involved in the refurbishment” -– including architects, engineers and contractors — who all thought safety was someone else’s responsibility.

It concluded the failures multiplied because bodies in charge of enforcing building standards were weak, the local authority was uninterested and the “complacent” U.K. government — led in the seven years before the fire by the Conservative Party — ignored safety warnings because of a commitment to deregulation.

Ah yes good old deregulation – let the market decide! So the market decides that profit on combustible cladding now is the way to go.

The Grenfell tragedy prompted soul-searching about inequality in Britain. Grenfell was a public housing building set in one of London’s richest neighborhoods, near the pricey boutiques and elegant houses of Notting Hill.

Well, between one of London’s richest neighborhoods and some more downmarket ones. Notting Hill itself used to be quite scruffy, and Ladbroke Grove is far from elegant. Notting Hill isn’t Kensington or Chelsea, let alone Belgravia or Mayfair.

The victims, largely people of color, came from 23 countries and included taxi drivers and architects, a poet, an acclaimed young artist, retirees and 18 children.

The acclaimed young artist had just won a prize for her work.

The ruined tower, which stood for months after the fire like a black tombstone on the west London skyline, still stands, covered in white sheeting. A green heart and the words “Grenfell forever in our hearts” are emblazoned at the top.