Gee, they finally noticed.

‘Dangerous’ inmate Barbie Kardashian to move prisons amid fear she could follow through on threats.

Prison bosses are struggling to find a suitable segregation unit for dangerous transgender inmate Barbie Kardashian.

The 21-year-old was last month jailed for four-and-a-half years for threatening to rape, torture and murder her mother.

It is understood Kardashian will be moved from Limerick Prison in coming weeks because staff do not feel safe with her being housed there.

…

A source said Kardashian, who was born Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile and changed her name by deed poll, is deemed too dangerous to mix and poses a serious threat to inmates and staff.

The source told the Irish Sunday Mirror: “Meetings are set to take place this month to discuss a better location for Kardashian.

“She is deemed very dangerous and requires a number of prison staff to open her cell and accompany her anywhere she goes.”

Like Hannibal Lecter.

In 2020, Ms Kardashian was granted a gender recognition certificate by the Department of Social Protection, in recognition of her identifying as female.

Which couldn’t possibly be just more aggression, right?

The court heard Ms Kardashian is currently on a waiting list to be assessed for “appropriate medical treatment” in relation to her gender.

What would appropriate medical treatment in relation to her gender be? Medical treatment for the gender you aren’t isn’t “appropriate” so what can that claim mean? I can’t parse it.

We need to set up a campaign group of women, says Ellie Mae O’Hagan, Head of External Engagement at The Good Law Project. Huh. We women agree, which is why several such groups exist. Standing For Women is one.

https://twitter.com/elliemaeohagan/status/1647585735883517952

Oh, women who support “trans rights,” by which the Good Law Project means “do everything men who identify as trans tell us to do.” No thanks – no anti-feminist women’s groups for me.

Oh no, we’re emboldened and vocal. How horrifying.

Honestly what a fool to set herself up for derision that way, complaining about women being emboldened of all things. We’re supposed to be timid and shy and in hiding? She sounds like men complaining about the Pankhursts. We’re supposed to be afraid and we’re supposed to be silent. What an enticing political stance!

Snerk. Yep, that is right.

Remind us why they deserve all this?

Queen Elizabeth II may have been styled the “people’s monarch”, but for much of her reign, and especially its last 40 years, the amassing of vast wealth was simply de rigueur for the UK’s financial and landed elites.

As the Guardian investigation into the cost of the royal family reveals, the late queen was at the forefront of her class’s pursuit of wealth extraction. Using royal privilege, the crown secretively exempted itself from public scrutiny and taxation. Royal fortunes soared. And this was the rule, not the exception.

She wasn’t “styled ‘the people’s monarch'” by me thank you very much.

The consequent optics for the incoming head of state are [bad]. His family’s vast accumulation of wealth is all the more glaring when juxtaposed with soaring levels of poverty and hardship among his subjects, including as many as 3 million children. But the one is part of the cause of the other. While the king may not have uttered “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, the parallel with the “great princess” who apparently did is not fanciful. Monarchy helps make vast disparities of wealth seem normal and natural, an enchanting part of our jolly heritage to be questioned only by mean-spirited and unpatriotic scoundrels.

Plus also their vast wealth is itself one of those vast disparities, to put it mildly.

This is where an incoming Labour government might make a stand. It could embrace rather than resist the change symbolised by the crowning of a new king. And it could do so in ways that in turn symbolise a new conception of public life: built on transparency, not the hiding of wealth in tax havens; on integrity, instead of the easy acceptance of gifts and payoffs; and on economic justice, rather than the hoarding of wealth by a few.

You’d have to start over with a completely different crew though.

The police are on the scene.

I’m wondering what the temperature is in Belfast. Two people in short sleeves, one person in a puffa jacket. Is it cold or hot?!

But more seriously I’m wondering if the cop will arrest the victim.

More from the annals of violence against people who reject gender ideology.

There’s also this but the audio is useless so I can’t actually tell what he said.

That “refusing to serve” thing…what does that remind me of…hmmmm…………….

Judy steps up next to Joanne and Hadley Freeman tells us about it. Power trio!

You can try to explain Judy Blume in numbers: her books for children have sold 90 million copies worldwide, most famously Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Over a 54- year career she has won more than 90 literary awards and been translated into 32 languages.

But this doesn’t explain her impact on generations of children, particularly girls. Blume, more than any other author before or since, taught kids about masturbation (in Deenie), menstruation (. . . It’s Me, Margaret) and sex (Forever). She reassured them that hating your younger sibling sometimes is normal (Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing) and that terrible things can happen to good kids and they’ll survive (Tiger Eyes). Most of all she taught them that it’s fine to be exactly what they are: ordinary kids.

There’s a new movie adaptation of It’s Me, Margaret.

I tell Blume how strangely thrilling it is to see a movie about children where none of them are in possession of magical powers. “Yes, children are so used to superheroes now, aren’t they?” she says. Even in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books the kids are magic, and I love those, I say.

“And I love her,” Blume immediately interjects. “I am behind her 100 per cent as I watch from afar.” Blume is referring to the abuse Rowling has received for speaking up in defence of women’s sex-based rights, and given that Blume has faced repeated attacks since the 1980s, for her books’ descriptions of adolescent sexuality and puberty, she knows what it’s like to be pilloried as an author.

Why was she pilloried?

[The movie] also keeps in all the details — adolescent lust, the chat about menstruation, Margaret’s anxieties about religion — that have caused the book to be attacked multiple times by right-wing religious groups, alongside other Blume books for similar reasons. Blume has long been a courageously punchy critic of these groups, and just the day before she and I talk it was reported that Florida politicians are considering a ban on any discussion of menstruation in schools’ sex education before the 6th grade, when children are 12.

Well you can see their point. If you teach kids about menstruation when they’re 10 they might just start doing it right then and there.

“It’s so bad. If it was bad in the 1980s, this is triple quadruple that, because this time it’s coming from the government, who are making laws. They say they want to protect kids, but it’s more like they want them to not think or ask questions,” she says.

It’s strange how the attacks on you have come from the right, whereas the ones on Rowling have come from the left, I say.

But a strange, twisted, upside-down version of the left, that believes in magic and detests women.

The only way to defend “the right to bear arms” is to make sure everyone has more and more and more guns. Literally everyone: toddlers included.

South Dakota’s governor told an audience of people that her two-year-old grandchild has several guns.

While speaking on Friday at a National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbying leadership forum in Indiana, the Republican governor Kristi Noem told audience members her toddler grandchild has multiple guns, reported Mediaite.

The toddler granchild is not yet two, and she has a rifle and a shotgun. (It’s not clear what “having” means. I don’t suppose they’re in her toy box. It could just mean that they’re officially her guns, but she can’t just grab one and start shooting. Then again these are lunatics, so maybe she is literally packing heat.)

Noem also signed an executive order during her remarks that seeks to “further protect the second amendment rights of South Dakotans”, and was joined on stage by the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre.

“South Dakota is setting the standard for the most second amendment friendly state in the nation,” said Noem when discussing the executive order.

By which she means gun-friendly. The way you demonstrate your extreme cuddly friendliness toward the second amendment is to have more guns than anyone else, which requires buying new guns every few days in order to keep up.

Like this kind of thing for instance. Why aren’t the BBC and Labour and the Independent constantly lamenting the fact that abused women can’t escape their abuse because they have nowhere to go? Why isn’t that as tragic and desperate as the plight of men who enjoy pretending to be women?

More than 10,000 women escaping domestic abuse across England were refused safe housing last year, amid warnings that many could be left homeless or driven back to dangerous partners as a result of a “woeful” lack of safe accommodation.

Official figures seen by the Observer found that almost 8,000 households referred to a safe accommodation service did not receive support because there was no capacity. A further 3,000 were denied places because the shelter “could not meet the needs of the household”, with figures suggesting this was often due to mental health issues, drug and alcohol use or disability.

Why do we hear so much about the tragic plight of men who claim to be women and so little about actual women trapped in violence and/or homelessness?

“Anyone who’s facing domestic abuse and who is not assisted to enter safe accommodation is at such huge risk. The consequences are that they’re exploited and abused on the streets, or they are driven back in an abusive relationship,” said Hannana Siddiqui, head of policy, campaigns and research at the women’s rights group Southall Black Sisters. “If they’re not provided with proper housing and support for themselves and their children, then what choices have they got left? A lot of them are very low income or no income.”

But we don’t hear much about this, because so much oxygen is used up on bemoaning the anguish of men who say they are women.

Even this article manages to steer the conversation back to those men.

Leni Morris, chief executive of the LGBT+ anti-abuse charity Galop, said: “We see LGBT+ victims of abuse having to choose between staying in dangerous abusive situations or risking street homelessness. We often spend days trying to find accommodation for people we work with – sometimes for that person to arrive at that refuge space and face homophobia or transphobia from other residents and have to flee again.”

What kind of “transphobia”? Does she mean Galop sends a man who claims to be a woman to a women’s shelter and the women are terrified? That kind of “transphobia”?

Ahhhhhh just in case you wanted a little cheerer-upper…

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Oppression for the Bugatti set.

I think collective guilt and shame about the past’s homophobia casts a long shadow in the minds of progressive Euroamericans. And as for gay people ourselves, we can add personal trauma to the mix. We seem as a society, gay and straight alike, to be transferring all of our unresolved feelings about gay rights over to the trans phenomenon.

I was having dinner with someone the other night, who is sympathetic to my position. But he was very gravely concerned about the plight of “vulnerable feminine gay boys” and their anguish in the hands of cruel Republicans passing so many “anti-trans hate bills.”

I tried to take apart each of the preconceptions packed into such sentiments: trans doesn’t mean gender nonconforming; there are many ways to address anxiety over gender nonconformity that don’t involve gender identity or gender medicine; a lot of legislation being introduced is no doubt partly cynical culture-war baiting on the part of Republicans, but nevertheless, legislation to pull back on medical experiments on kids and the elimination of women’s spaces is agreeable in principle; mostly this movement is driven by entitled transvestites who’ve found a loophole and are making a giant power-grab; the curbing of free speech and general environment of panic around this topic is dangerous; homophobic and misogynistic tropes are being reinforced; etc, etc…

And he didn’t disagree with any of my points at all. But I could see that his heart wasn’t budging. A deep, emotional attachment to this cause has been generated, and it’s going to take a lot of deprogramming to undo it. This is the domain of religious belief, not rational thinking. Even among some of the most atheistic people.

I keep wondering about this “most vulnerable” thing – the endless repetition of the claim that trans people are “among the most vulnerable” or just plain “the most vulnerable.”

Why do people think that?

In a world where we have wars, genocides, torture, rape, poverty, earthquakes, floods, droughts, poverty, epidemics, secret police, criminal gangs, poverty, racism, enslavement, exploitation, poverty – how is it that people who claim to be the gender that doesn’t match their bodies are described as “the most vulnerable”?

That’s a genuine question, because I have no idea what the answer is. It’s like sitting in front of a person with multiple broken bones and severe burns, complaining about a scratch. It’s Luxury Oppression. It’s Pretend Oppression for the Comfortable. You’d think even lefty men who hate women would notice that part.

University and College Union aka UCU issues a statement:

The Government’s plan to review the Equality Act 2010, with a mind to change existing provisions in relation to sex and gender, is an attack on the limited rights and protections to which trans people are currently entitled.

Changing the understanding of ‘sex’ to refer solely to ‘biological sex’ would effectively eradicate the ability of trans people to gain full legal recognition for their gender identity. This flies in the face of established UCU policy in favour of self-identification, and would enable acts of discrimination against trans and non-binary people to go unchallenged.

So UCU has a policy in favour of self-identification. Is that an inclusive policy? Does it include all possible self-identifications? Should people be able to force everyone to endorse their self-identification no matter what they identify as?

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)  is there to protect and uphold the rights of all groups who face discrimination. This must include trans and non-binary people…

But it must also include women, and some of the purported “rights” that trans ideologues demand have the unfortunate side effect of obliterating women’s rights. Why should the demands of trans people outweigh the rights of women? Please explain.

This must include trans and non-binary people, but at the moment the EHRC is failing in this part of its remit. It’s advice to the government on this issue has highlighted a number of ways in which trans people would be excluded as a result of the changes being considered. 

Excluded how, from what? You mean women’s sports and prizes and records and firsts? But all those things are meant for women, not men who call themselves women. If women are forced to share them with men, that excludes women.

Time and again, the Tory Government has shown itself to be against trans and non-binary inclusion – from blocking the path of Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reform in Scotland to their manufactured culture war against the trans community, one the of the UK’s smallest and most vulnerable groups.

Mindless cliches repeated for the billionth time instead of anything thoughtful or reasonable. No thought about what inclusion means, no analysis of what a “community” is in this context, of how we define “groups,” of why trans people are “most vulnerable” while apparently women are not. Childish activisty slogans in the place where thought should be. Where are the adults??

No legislation is perfect, but seeking to change an established law in a way that would actively remove rights from a marginalised group is deeply troubling.

What about all the women who have had their rights removed? Why does the UCU not even mention them?

We are also clear that our own union is an inclusive one which recognises that trans men are men, trans women are women and non-binary people’s identities are valid. 

It doesn’t “recognise” that nonsense, it capitulates to it while trying to make the rest of us do the same.

Where where where are the adults?

Another victim of the crossfire:

AS Scotland emerged from lockdown restrictions in the summer of 2021 Mandy Rhodes began to feel deeply uncomfortable at her work. As the long-time editor of Holyrood magazine, Ms Rhodes is one of Scotland’s most influential political journalists. Her workplace is the Scottish Parliament where she has been reporting and commenting on the business of government for nearly 20 years.

Well we know how that’s going to go.

In recent years she’s become one of several prominent feminists who have found themselves targeted by transgender activists for espousing gender-critical views. Yet, nothing in her long career had prepared her for what she calls the malice beginning to filtrate Scotland’s corridors of power.

Infiltrate, I think he means. Or insinuate it way into, or similar.

She recalls a day in August 2020 when she says it became clear to her that the Scottish Parliament could no longer be considered a welcoming place for women like her who were refusing to remain silent over trans issues.

“I was applying the final touches to a magazine looking back at that term in Parliament and had asked each of the party leaders to reflect on what they felt had been achieved in the preceding months. We were sitting almost on deadline, waiting for Patrick Harvie’s piece to come in.”

Patrick Harvie:  Scottish Green Party, MSP for Glasgow.

“Eventually, it came through very late at night. Basically, it was a diatribe about how Holyrood magazine was part of a transphobic campaign and how much I was personally part of it.

“No one who knows me would ever describe me as shy and retiring. Yet I sat in my office crying. It felt like I was – and I don’t like the term ‘bullying’ as it’s used far too much – under siege at that point. I found it very disturbing that a political leader would send me something I’d requested for publication in the nation’s only political magazine and which is part of the architecture around that parliament and use it to call me a transphobe. So, for me going into Parliament now in the knowledge that there are people there who think I’m a bigot is truly astonishing.”

The term “bullying” does get used a lot, but on the other hand there is a lot of it, so that’s at least part of why it’s used a lot. Often it’s the only word that really names what we’re talking about, so we end up having to use it.

Lucy Bannerman at The Times on Daniel Radcliffe’s confidence in the wisdom of children:

Daniel Radcliffe, the Harry Potter actor, has said that children should be trusted to transition from one gender to another if they wish.

The actor said that it was “condescending” for adults to question whether such a life-changing decision was in a child’s best interests.

Radcliffe appeared to support gender transition for young people of any age, while hosting a group discussion for an American LGBT charity, the Trevor Project.

Hosting it quite badly, I would add. I watched the brief clip where he says that fatuous thing, and discovered that he’s remarkably clumsy and inarticulate for a professional actor.

In the half-hour conversation, which has been viewed almost 100,000 times on YouTube, Radcliffe asked six young people about their experiences of identifying as transgender and non-binary.

When Daley, a participant who was born male but identifies as female, insisted that it was possible for an 11-year-old to decide to change gender, Radcliffe said: “But there are also people who do have a slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of like, ‘Well, people are young and like . . . you know, that is a huge decision’. I’d love to hear from all of you about, like, why we can trust kids to tell us who they are.”

He’s like down with the kids but like he can’t like form a complete sentence, especially not a complete sentence without the word “like” appearing several times.

Daley replied: “I don’t understand why I can’t just decide that I’m a girl. You don’t have to be 18 to decide, ‘oh I am who I am’.”

Another participant, who transitioned from male to female, added: “I don’t think we give children enough credit for coming into the world and having a sense of purity and understanding for themselves.”

When that participant, Deity, revealed how she started hormone treatment at an undisclosed age, a week after deciding she was transgender, the actor replied: “Wow, that’s amazing.”

Yes, it is.

Julie Burchill is enjoyably unimpressed by Daniel Radcliffe.

Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe has opined – more in sorrow than in anger, no doubt, with a caring, sharing smile on those sensitive lips – that adults concerned about children changing gender are ‘condescending’. More specifically, he ‘affirmed’ the beliefs of six trans and nonbinary children at a discussion organised by LGBTQ charity The Trevor Project this week, saying: ‘There are people who also have a slightly condescending, but well-meaning attitude of “People are young… and it is a huge decision”.’ According to Radcliffe, ‘We can trust kids to tell us who they are’.

Can we? Then why can’t they vote or join the military or marry that nice rapist they met online?

No, we can’t automatically “trust” what kids tell us, because kids are vulnerable and also because kids can get things wrong. Certainly parents should pay attention to what their kids tell them, but that’s quite different from a blanket assertion that children never make mistakes about “who they are.”

Half of the 5,000 children referred to the NHS’ Tavistock clinic from 2020 to 2022 were under 15 – and over a dozen were under four years old. This is despite the fact that teenagers’ brains are still growing. Unless they swallow gender ideology, of course – then the brain growth stops and they stay stupid.

Funny but also tragically accurate.

One of the handy effects of wokeism is that it conveniently ignores class as a form of privilege. So if you went to a fee-paying school, but then identify as ‘queer’ or an ‘ally’, you can then behave as if you had a tougher start than, say, JK Rowling. As a child, Rowling was told that, due to her social class, the nearest she could ever get to her dream of being a writer was being a teacher.

But now the born to class privilege Daniel Radcliffe gets to lecture Rowling from a very great height, thanks to darling gender ideology, which insists (loudly) that being trans is by far the worst oppression there is.

Uh oh, Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri seems to have missed the memo.

Oh, good. I was just thinking: I have too many rights. We’ve got to cull, cull, cull! Do I really need to be voting and controlling my own body? That feels like much too much. Also, it’s spring! What better time to go through all the rights and see which ones spark joy (access to assault weapons) and which ones don’t (uncensored proximity to books, bodily autonomy). Just like they’re doing in Florida! Constitution? Please! If we were all meant to be covered by it, we would have been explicitly included!

Isn’t all this rights nonsense getting in the way of more important things, like the ability of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to consider exciting hypotheticals not borne out by science: What if a drug that has been proven safe for decades … weren’t? Plus, millions of Americans have been given the gift of learning the name Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, most often used in the sentence, “Wait, Judge Kacsmaryk can undo the FDA approval of a drug used safely by millions for 20-plus years just … because?” It was good that the 5th Circuit did not need to think about the people most impacted by the decision to overturn Food and Drug Administration approval. After all, we’re not really people! If we were supposed to be people, we wouldn’t have uteruses.

Oops oops oops – trouble ahead. You’re not supposed to say aloud that women have uteruses. It makes men who call themselves women very angry, so angry that they threaten to assault you.

“But wait,” you are saying. “What about the enormous stress and pressure that losing access to a safe medication abortion will place on people?” Easy! They are not people, for the purposes of this case. The math works if you remember that women are people only sometimes. All the math works if you remember that only certain folks get to be people all the time.

Ok now she’s really on thin ice.

But then she catches herself, and makes up for it.

It is a mistake to think that harm to the possibly millions of pregnant people nationwide at risk of suddenly losing access to a safe drug commonly used in medication abortion due to a single judge’s whim might be considered when deciding whether to stay the ruling that denied them access to a safe drug commonly used in medication abortion due to a single judge’s whim!

Whew. That was close. Women’s rights, uteruses, women are not people – but she probably caught it in time.

Headline:

Green MSP says rapist Isla Bryson has right to become a woman

Lede:

Rapists such as the convicted criminal Isla Bryson should be able to legally become women, a Green MSP has claimed.

Right or no right, men can’t “become women.” We can’t just “become” any old thing we fancy. We can’t “become” buildings or planets or tigers or the opposite sex. We can become lawyers or mountain climbers or citizens of various countries. There are things we can do and things we can’t do. There are things we can change and things we can’t change. There are realities and there are fantasies. It’s best to know the difference, and it’s not acceptable to try to force the entire world to endorse one’s personal fantasies. It’s also not acceptable for people in government to try to force everyone to endorse other people’s personal fantasies.

Maggie Chapman said that “any trans person” should be entitled to legal recognition of their gender. She refuted claims from Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s new First Minister, that Bryson was only pretending to be trans to get into a female prison.

No she didn’t. She rejected them, she didn’t refute them.

Asked whether people such as Bryson should be able to legally change their sex and be treated as a woman, Ms Chapman said: “I think any trans person should be able to get the gender recognition certificate that they seek, that recognises, in law, something that the rest of us just take for granted.”

Oh ffs. The rest of us “take it for granted” because it’s reality. Rabbits take being rabbits for granted; that doesn’t mean that anyone who has to seek to be a rabbit is a rabbit.

That’s such a ludicrous version of oppression or subordination or intersectionality – the fact that men don’t get to take it for granted that they’re women.

When it was put to the MSP that Bryson was only identifying as trans to avoid serving time in a male prison, Ms Chapman told the BBC that she did not agree.

“Well we don’t know that was the only motivation that Isla Bryson chose to do that,” she said. “Isla Bryson is a trans woman… it’s very very clear that we cannot let single cases determine the entire legislation that we’re talking about here.”

It’s true, philosophically speaking, that we don’t know that was Bryson’s only motivation, because we can’t know, because we can’t get inside other people’s heads. But we can have a damn good informed opinion on the subject, especially when the whole idea that men can be women is an absurdity in the first place. Rapists aren’t usually also up on the latest progressive belief system, and the criminal justice system is not based on knowing with absolute certainty in the first place. We have plenty of good reasons to think Bryson is pretending to be trans and no good reasons to think he isn’t, so let’s err on the side of safety for women, ok?

Disinformation rules.

Hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts are thriving on Twitter after Elon Musk wiped out the team that fought these networks, the BBC has found.

The unit worked to combat “information operations”, coordinated campaigns by countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, made to influence public opinion and disrupt democracy.

But experts and former employees say the majority of these specialists resigned or were laid off, leaving the platform vulnerable to foreign manipulation. 

But now they’re gone.

Oh well. I’m sure Russia, China and Iran want only what’s best for everyone.

We approached Twitter for comment but received no response other than a poo emoji – the standard auto-reply from the company to any press enquiry.

Russia-China-Iran-Trump on one side of us, cooking planet on the other. A poo emoji is about right.

Approximately 88 billion gallons:

A complex of slow-moving thunderstorms dropped tornadoes and extreme rainfall across Broward County in Florida this week, causing historic flooding that forced residents to abandon vehicles and scramble to higher ground.

…

The excessive rainfall, which fell at rates briefly topping six inches per hour, was a product of slow-moving thunderstorms anchored atop a stalled frontal boundary. The initially unanticipated deluge stemmed from the natural randomness of the atmosphere, but it fits into a pattern of a warmer, wetter world with higher rainfall rates.

Statistically, the episode easily qualifies as a thousand-year rain event — or one that would have a 0.1 percent chance or less of occurring in any given year.

Approximately a third of the city’s average annual rainfall came down during an eight-hour window. With reports of up to 25.91 inches at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, the event obliterated the previous record for wettest calendar day, which was 14.59 inches, set April 25, 1979.

26 inches in one day!

I first tried to get more information via a National Weather Service video, but it started with an ad and when that finished and I again clicked start it began to load another ad so I gave up. But guess what the ad I did sit through was for. An SUV. Lots of aerial shots of shiny new SUV driving along mountain roads. Irony much?

H/t J.A.

The rich get richer and the poor get…drought.

Swimming pools, flower gardens, indoor fountains — and the urbanites who can afford them — are big factors behind the increasingly dire water crises plaguing cities, an international research team says.

Published in the journal Nature Sustainability, a new study found socioeconomic disparity to be just as influential as climate change and population growth when it comes to explaining why the water supply in so many cities is shrinking.

Rich people can afford to waste water; poor people can’t.

Even 25 years after South Africa’s apartheid ended, Cape Town is still segregated in distinct geographic lines, making it easier to track water usage among income groups, Savelli said. The city also experienced a major drought from 2015 to 2017, a crisis so severe that the city narrowly averted “Day Zero,” when it believed water sources would dry up entirely.

In the same time period, Cape Town’s elite households consumed roughly 571 gallons of water daily, compared with 47 gallons for households in lower income brackets, the researchers found.

Despite only representing about 14% of the population, the wealthiest residents used more than half of the water (51%) consumed by the entire city.

And most of the water used by those privileged social groups went for nonessential needs, such as irrigation, swimming pools and water fixtures. Other social groups used the most water for basic functions like drinking or bathing.

Well obviously. You’re not going to take 20 showers a day because you’re rich, or drink 100 gallons of water, or wash a billion dishes. You’re going to use water for non-basic stuff, because you can.

It’s hard to imagine solutions like fines and restrictions being immediately effective in places like the U.S.

Take for example Los Angeles, a city with an infamous lack of groundwater sources. In 2022, celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Kevin Hart and Sylvester Stallone were called out for blatantly flouting fines and “notices of exceedance” for their drought-era water usage.

“For the celebrities or musicians or athletes who all live in the area, monetary penalties are going to be meaningless to them because it doesn’t matter. They have plenty of money and if they want to, they could spend $5,000 a month on a water bill,” said Mike McNutt, a spokesman for the local water district.

After increasing frustration, the district took the infrastructure route after all, installing automatic flow restriction devices capable of turning lawns brown and reducing even Kardashian’s Instagram-famous sink faucet to a mere trickle.

From let them eat cake to let them swim in a smaller pool.