Another first for a…man.

LGBT rights advocate Martine Delaney has become the first Tasmanian transgender woman to be recognised on the Honour Roll of Women — an award given to those who have made an “outstanding contribution” to the state.

That is, the first man to be recognised on the Honour Roll of Women. Much honour, very scruple.

Ms Delaney said it was “humbling” to have been recognised.

Not humbling enough, since he accepted. That’s an award that should have gone to a woman. There’s a woman who missed out because of him.

“It’s not been something that transgender women in Tasmania have been nominated or inducted into previously,” she said.

Naturally not, because they’re men.

One of the campaigns she is best known for is her fight to make the inclusion of gender optional on Tasmanian birth certificates — a “battle” she took on in 2004 and that became legislation in 2019.

And that’s a good thing why exactly?

“Tasmania has possibly the world’s most progressive and inclusive birth certificate legislation. You’re not going to find anything better anywhere else on the planet.”

What’s that even supposed to mean? Birth certificates aren’t clubs or universities or secret societies. How can they be progressive or inclusive? You might as well say they dance well or they make a mean paella.

It’s ok, the asteroid won’t hit for at least a century. Of course if you have descendants you might be worried for their descendants, but…sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, I guess.

Earthlings can breathe a sigh of relief after US space agency Nasa confirmed the planet was “safe” from a once-feared asteroid for the next 100 years at least.

…

“A 2068 impact is not in the realm of possibility any more, and our calculations don’t show any impact risk for at least the next 100 years,” Davide Farnocchia, a scientist who studies near-Earth objects for Nasa, said in a statement on Friday.

It waved from a distance recently.

The asteroid recently made a distant flyby of Earth on 5 March, passing within 17 million km (10 million miles) of the planet.

Astronomers were able to use radar observations to refine their estimate of the asteroid’s orbit around the Sun, allowing them to confidently rule out any impact risk in 2068 and long after.

You can take that one off the list for now.

This is just straight up a lie.

Of course he didn’t.

CNN reports:

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a transgender sports bill into law Friday requiring students to prove their sex at birth in order to play in middle and high school sports.

The bill states that “a student’s gender for purposes of participation in a public middle school or high school interscholastic athletic activity or event be determined by the student’s sex at the time of the student’s birth, as indicated on the student’s original birth certificate.”

Students must show proof of their sex at the time of birth if their birth certificate does not appear to be the original or does not indicate the student’s sex at the time of birth. This does not apply to students in kindergarten through 4th grade, the Tennessee bill says.

Before puberty the kids can play where they want. Why would that be? Because at puberty boys gain a lot of physical advantages over girls, which make it grossly unfair for boys to play on girls’ teams because they say they identify as girls. It’s pretty simple. The ACLU is just lying about the bill.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Sometimes America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a hastily passed voter suppression law that many are calling the new, new Jim Crow on Thursday night, surrounded by a half-dozen white men, he did so in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved.

The fitting symbolism is somehow both shocking and unsurprising. In using the antebellum image of the notorious Callaway Plantation — in a region where enslaved Black people seeking freedom were hunted with hounds — in Wilkes County, Ga., as the backdrop for signing a bill that would make it a crime to hand water to a thirsty voter waiting on Georgia’s sometimes hours-long voter lines, the GOP governor was sending a clear message about race and human rights in the American South.

Clear and ferocious. As Bunch notes, plantations weren’t just places where Black people were compelled to do hard labor for zero dollars, they were places where Black people were subject to horrific violence at the whim of the people who presumed to “own” them. Kemp’s pretty picture of the plantation is not all that far from Camp Auschwitz guy’s sweatshirt.

The portrait of the plantation was the starkest reminder of Georgia’s history of white racism that spans slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and today’s voter purges targeting Black and brown voters — but it wasn’t the only one. At the very moment that Kemp was signing the law with his all-white posse, a Black female Georgia lawmaker — Rep. Park Cannon — who’d knocked on the governor’s door in the hopes of watching the bill signing was instead dragged away and arrested by state troopers, in a scene that probably had the Deep South’s racist sheriffs of yesteryear like Bull Connor or Jim Clark smiling in whatever fiery hellhole they now inhabit.

Why was Kemp’s signing of the bill a behind closed doors ceremony in the first place? Is that normal? If it is, why is it?

As Kemp’s tweet of the closed-door bill-signing ceremony was making the rounds Thursday night, I had questions about the Old South-looking scene that the governor’s office had centered in the photo. Thanks to crowd-sourcing and specifically the help of my Twitter pal Brendan McGinn (@TheSeaFarmer), I learned that the painting is called “Brickhouse Road — Callaway PLNT” (PLNT for “Plantation … subtle, right?) by Siberian-born artist Olessia Maximenko, who now resides in the area of Wilkes County in east-central Georgia.

Today, the Callaway Plantation is a 56-acre historic site where — as the Explore Georgia website cheerily notes — tourists can get “a glimpse into the by-gone era of working plantations in the agricultural South.”

I’ve seen advertising like that; it always makes my hair stand on end. Camp Auschwitz, baby.

In short, the Callaway Plantation is a monument to Georgia’s history of brutal white supremacy that unfortunately didn’t disappear when Mariah Callaway and the other enslaved people were emancipated in 1865. By the 1890s, Georgia’s white ruling class enacted a series of harsh Jim Crow laws to segregate all public facilities and block most Black people from voting. The state, for all of Atlanta’s “Too Busy To Hate” bluster, was a KKK hotbed in the 1960s’ civil rights era, and in the 1980s Georgia blazed a trail into the new era of mass incarceration and voter suppression, epitomized by Kemp and his purges of legitimate voters and other Jim Crow-inspired tactics.

In 2021, it’s tempting to call Kemp signing the bill in front of the plantation painting “ironic,” when in fact it’s all too fitting. Understanding the symbolism here helps us to understand what’s really important, that the voting law is the latest cruel iron link in an unbroken chain of white supremacy that extends all the way back to 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in North American soil. But familiarity shouldn’t deaden our sense of outrage.

I’m not at all tempted to call it “ironic.” It’s about as ironic as a kick in the face.

H/t What a Maroon

Hadley Freeman writes:

A recent YouGov survey found that 86% of women aged 18-24 in the UK have been sexually harassed. This statistic shocked me: did the other 14% not understand the question? To live in fear of harassment or assault is such a universal female experience that many of us don’t even think about it, having learned to accept it from an absurdly early age. It doesn’t break you but it shapes you, like a rock face getting battered by strong waves.

She provides ten examples from her own life.

Aged seven: my friends and I are in the park when a bush next to us trembles. A man climbs out holding his penis towards us, as if he’s offering a special on the menu. This is the first time I’ve seen a penis, and it is disgusting and terrifying, an impression it takes decades to shake.

Her point in the piece is that all women have experienced this kind of thing. Interesting to think about how that shapes their feelings about sex.

Aged 33: I am having a one-night stand and suddenly he puts his hands around my neck and squeezes. This is how it ends, I think. In some guy’s flat in Harlesden. “I can tell you like it,” he whispers in my ear. When I sneak out the next morning, a man comes up to me on the street: “I can smell your cunt,” he snarls.

…

Aged 42: I take my children to Clapham Common for Sarah Everard’s vigil. Bath-time schedules mean we miss the later arrests, so we only see the flowers, the sunset, the women, all of us knowing we are no different from Everard, only luckier.

How to explain any of this to a pair of five-year-old boys? “A woman called Sarah got hurt,” I told them beforehand. “Why?” they asked. “Because men are bigger and stronger than women, and some are bullies,” I said. The boys make signs: “I don’t like bullies” and “Be gentle” they read, and we tape them on to sticks and go to the common. One of them asks if a bully ever hurt me. Not really, I say. I was lucky. They went away, eventually.

Eventually.

If it’s not a felony, the arrest is facially unconstitutional.

H/t Rob

Voter suppression is riding high.

Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon was arrested on Thursday and charged with felony obstruction as Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp signed a controversial new voting reform bill into law.

Cannon was detained after knocking on Kemp’s door.

Kemp, a Republican, was announcing the signing of the bill over a live stream when he was interrupted by Cannon, a Democrat. Cannon’s arrest was also captured during a live stream, as the lawmaker was joined by others who came to the state Capitol in Atlanta to protest the bill.

This kind of shit is what the Voting Rights Act was meant to stop, but since the Supreme Court kneecapped it we’re going backwards.

Police said Cannon was moved to the Fulton County Jail and charged with obstruction of law enforcement, a felony, and preventing or disrupting General Assembly sessions or meetings of members, a misdemeanor.

A felony.

I wonder if the cops would have arrested her if she were white. I wonder if she would have been charged with a felony if she were white.

White guys.

Point taken.

Cohesion, we must have cohesion. All that means is that everybody has to agree about everything. Simple!

On Thursday, protests erupted over claims a teacher had shown a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad to pupils at Batley grammar school and now there are fears the row could be hijacked by extremists on both sides.

…

Outside the gates of the school, Hassan Mahmood said the protest was about educating people and raising awareness with the hope of increased community cohesion. “This is about generating that positive awareness so that there’s no sort of untoward reaction and there’s no disruption or disharmony in the community,” he said.

Mahmood explained that the issue centred on the potential impact on children, especially non-Muslims, and their knowledge of what is deemed offensive.

“The kind of message that’s going out from this school is quite dangerous for all children. You’re giving out the wrong information, you’re setting a wrong mindset, which doesn’t help community cohesion,” he said.

Shehram Farrukh, a fellow protester, said the demonstration had been about opening up a conversation. “So the thing is, if something happens, anywhere in any part of the world about the prophet Muhammad, we Muslims are very sensitive. We are not maligning anybody else, we just want to say, don’t make fun of our prophet. That’s all we want,” he said.

That’s all! It’s so simple! All they want is for everyone in the world to obey the “rule” that nobody can tease “their prophet.”

Rukhsana Khaliq and her daughter Maariha, 16, agreed the protest was warranted. Maariha went to the school but is now in sixth form elsewhere.

She said: “There’s nothing bad about the school. It’s just what he did was offensive and he didn’t know that. I feel like now that this has happened he understands.”

“There’s no way of accommodating that,” added her mother.

She feels like now the teacher has had to go into hiding with police protection, he understands. Her mother adds that there’s no way of accommodating “that.”

All everyone has to do is what believers in this one religion say is mandatory – that’s literally all. Cohere or elese.

The students at Batley Grammar have better sense than the adults outside the gates.

Death threats. The guy died 15 centuries ago, he doesn’t care what people say about him.

Originally a comment by Sastra on In a free society.

Back when New Atheism was a ‘thing,’ liberal believers and liberal atheists criticized it for being simply the flip side of religious fundamentalism. New Atheists were attacking people’s faith; New Atheists weren’t making the proper distinction between good religion and bad religion; and, worst of all, they were trying to get people to agree with them. Reasoned debate and rational persuasion on the truth and benefits of religion were lumped in with proselytizing and conversion. It was saying “I’m right and you’re wrong.” The unforgivable sin.

People have the right to be who they are.

A lot of conservative religionists were guilty of manipulative tactics and double standards when it came to attacking faith, granted. But I remember there were plenty of conservatives I’d call “liberal,” in that they played by the rules, respected the doubter, and believed, deep down, that truth mattered. “If you became convinced that Christianity wasn’t true and God didn’t exist, would you want to change your mind and become an atheist?” And in between the epistemic meltdowns, the topic-changings, the gruesome scenarios, and the flat denials of the bare possibility, there were cool voices saying “Of course. And I’d still be me. And I’d still care about the same things. And I could just be wrong about God..”

There’s being a parent (“We must protect the weak”) and then there’s being an adult (“Follow the evidence and be damned.”) I understood some of my opponents better than I understood some of my friends.

Ah yes supermarkets, those hubs of progressive enlightenment. Pronouns are on sale this week.

A Sainsbury’s supermarket in Edinburgh has introduced pronoun name badges for staff to avoid misgendering staff members.

Meaning…so that staff won’t “misgender” colleagues? Or so that everyone, including customers, will avoid doing that murderous thing? The wording is clumsily ambiguous.

Workers at the Murrayfield supermarket have been wearing tags that declare their preferred gender pronouns, such as she/her or they/them.

Managers and cis colleagues have also been adding their pronouns to their badges to show solidarity to the LGBTQ+ community.

Cis colleagues? What does that mean? Are there trans colleagues there too? People who identify as Sainsbury’s staff but don’t actually get paid?

I think somebody should start a custom of wearing badges that declare one’s favorite adjectives. Adjectives are way more interesting than pronouns. Pronouns are just the dull functional undergirding, adjectives are where the fun starts. I’ll start the betting with “intransigent.”

It comes as Asda announced a similar move to make their workers feel more inclusive by introducing pronoun badges for staff to help avoid the “distress” of misgendering colleagues.

Nonsense, the “distress” is the whole point. Bespoke pronouns are there to trap people and provide occasions for displays of righteous correctitude.

Much as I hate to agree with a Tory…

Protests outside a school where pupils were shown a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad are “deeply unsettling”, a government minister has said.

Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said teachers should be able to “appropriately show images of the prophet” in class.

In other words religion is a subject as well as a practice. Comparative religion can be taught in schools, and schools should be able to teach it without protests and complaints and teachers getting suspended.

Mr Jenrick called for the “deeply unsettling” scenes outside the school to “come to an end”.

“In a free society we want religions to be taught to children and for children to be able to question and query them,” he told the BBC.

“We must see teachers protected and no-one should be feeling intimidated or threatened as they go into school.”

That is, in a free society we want children to be taught about religions, which requires freedom to ask questions and discuss.

Kenan Malik observes:

Oh goody another Motoon uproar. That should be enlightening.

A teacher who showed pupils an “inappropriate” cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad – sparking protests outside a school – has been suspended.

Classic BBC – it always does this, as does the Guardian. The teacher did not “spark” protests outside the school; some people decided to protest outside the school. The BBC loves to sneak the blame in that way.

The image depicting the founder of Islam was used in a lesson at Batley Grammar School on Monday.

…

Head teacher Gary Kibble apologised “unequivocally”, adding the member of staff had “given their most sincere apologies” and been suspended pending an investigation.

“We have immediately withdrawn teaching on this part of the course and we are reviewing how we go forward with the support of all the communities represented in our school,” he said.

“It is important for children to learn about faiths and beliefs, but this must be done in a sensitive way.”

Must it though? Maybe it should be done in a brisk and rational way. School isn’t church or mosque, and it’s not self-evident that schools have to let churches and mosques tell them what they can teach and how they can teach it.

Parts of the Koran are taken to mean that neither Allah nor Muhammad can be captured in an image by human hand and any attempt to do so is seen as an insult.

Yes and parts of the bible are taken to mean that uppity women should be stoned to death; what’s your point? Schools can’t and shouldn’t shape their teaching according to what various holy books say.

One of the protesters, a local resident who gave his name as Abdullah, said the cartoon offended “the whole Muslim community”.

Abdullah, who told the BBC he was not a parent but had relatives at the school, said up to 100 people, including pupils, had taken part in the protest.

“This is a time when we can’t stay quiet, we need to stand up and let them know, the head teacher, the school and the governing body, that this is not something light. There’s a line you can’t cross,” he said.

There are lots of lines you can’t cross, and this isn’t one of them.

Originally a comment by Freeminder on Stuck.

I served as a Deck Officer on containerships (usually known as ‘boxboats’) for several years.

Evergreen, as a shipping line, was, and still is, regarded as a menace on the high seas. I saw an Evergreen ship run aground just outside Port Suez about twenty years ago, amongst other mishaps. The Evergreen ships were blatant in their recklessness: cutting across shipping lanes, ignoring the ‘Rules of the Road’ and even cutting through prohibited areas to save time. Sometimes we wondered if there was anyone on watch on the bridge…several times we had to alter course to avoid collisions, even when we had right of way or arrived at the pilot station on our allotted time (they would literally barge their way in).

The Suez Canal is very narrow in parts and sometimes it didn’t help that the pilots would speed up or slow down depending how much they were bribed (normally US Dollars, whiskey or Marlboros) by the Master of the vessel. They would openly demand this just for turning up on the bridge. Refusal to give them anything would delay passage or bring in other serious problems. I joke not, the pilots frequently left the bridge for twenty minutes and prayed, often during manoeuvres into the lakes, anchorages or passing points. The boxboats are very high sided even when not fully loaded (‘windage’) which can make them difficult to keep on a course at low speed (steerage was lost at about 5-6knots). However, in this case I think the blame lies solely with the canal pilot. If moving too slowly,in strong winds, (which I have experienced there) the ship would have started swinging off course. Speeding up would have brought it back on track. Having been through it over twenty times, its nickname of Sewage Canal is rightly earned. As for the corruption of the other authorities…we all nicknamed Misr (Egypt) as Misery.

As for alternative power supply, Pliny is right. Nukes need specialists and lots of them, and armed guards (cargo ships go to virtually every nation with a seaport, including PROC, Iran and other unfriendlies. Commercial ships are normally built cheap for a 25 year life, and then get scrapped. There were funnel emission scrubbers on my company’s ships. These big ships can run for about a month without refuelling, at 24knots or more. Cargo ships are usually in a rush, operating at full tilt between ports. We could get through 3000+ tonnes of fuel a month. We normally had a crew of about 20. So in terms of efficiency, very, very cost-effective.

Ari Berman at Mother Jones:

During the 2020 election cycle in Georgia, Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state. His efforts to manipulate the electoral process failed after Raffensperger stood up to the president and defended the integrity of the election. But if the Georgia legislature has its way, Republicans could have a much easier time overturning the will of voters in future elections. 

The Georgia House of Representatives passed a major power grab on Thursday on a party-line vote that would remove Raffensperger as the chair and a voting member of the state election board, which oversees the certification of elections and voting rules, and instead allow the GOP-controlled legislature to appoint a majority of the board’s members, including the chair. “This is extraordinarily dangerous,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the former election protection director of the Georgia Democratic Party. “When you’re appointing the majority of the body that you’re responsible to, it’s self-dealing.”

The state board, in turn, would have extraordinary power under the bill to take over county election boards it views as underperforming, raising the possibility that elections officials appointed by and beholden to the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature could take over election operations in Democratic strongholds like Atlanta’s Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread conspiracy theories about “suitcases” of ballots being counted by election officials in November after GOP poll monitors had left.

This is baaaaaaaaaaaad.

The Georgia House bill not only affects who will oversee elections, but also who gets to vote. In January, the right-wing group True the Vote challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in runoff elections won by Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, based on an unreliable postal database. Only a few dozen votes were actually thrown out, but under another provision of the House bill, future challenges could find much greater success. If the bill becomes law, conservative activists would be able to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters, and local election boards would be required to hear these challenges within 10 days or face sanctions from the state election board, which could pressure county officials to hastily remove eligible voters from the rolls or wrongly reject their ballots.

In short they’re openly rigging the system in their favor, and if it goes to the Supreme Court it will be upheld by the conservative majority.

It will be Selma 1964, or worse.

More from Ari Berman (who wrote the book on the subject).

Watching the clip did give me a horrific “is this 1964 again?? are we really going back there???” feeling.

This is dreadful. Brian Kemp just signed Georgia’s filthy new voter suppression law, and the cops arrested a state representative – Dem AND BLACK of course – for trying to observe the signing. Watch the clip and be horrified.

Originally a comment by Pliny on Stuck.

WooHOO!, a discussion about ships, something this old salt can contribute to. Carbon footprint wise, it’s hard to compete with these giants on an emissions per cargo ton carried level. They are extremely efficient which is why there has been a move to larger and larger ships – fewer sailors and lowered fuel costs per ton. Remember, the construction and operating costs of these ships pencils out in a global marketplace. It’s part of the reason you can buy less expensive goods manufactured overseas.

If you want to rail against emissions, it’s better to go after interstate trucking in the USA. Compared to rail transport, semis double the carbon footprint per ton carried. They also suck when following too closely during rush hour.

As for nuclear power, only one civilian transport has ever been nuclear powered under a US flag – the Savannah. Why? Construction costs and maintenance are at least 50-100% higher. There are restrictions on access to ports. Even the profligate US Navy can only afford nuclear power for carriers and subs because the mission effectiveness value is felt to justify the cost, but only just. Most other navies build less expensive non-nuclear subs but since the USN tactical doctrine involves forward deployment, diesel-electric (Or AIP) subs are less effective in that role.

And of course if something goes wrong – well, if a diesel engine leaks fuel it can be bad – if a reactor does, they call it a meltdown…

There’s this

And, in reply, there’s this

Lindsay Crouse of the New York Times “produced the Emmy nominated Opinion Video series “Equal Play,” which brought widespread reform to women’s sports.”

Now, however…

This year, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports, under the guise of protecting women and girls. Bills have already passed in Mississippi and Idaho.

Not “transgender kids” but boys. The issue, as I’m sure she knows, is boys playing on girls’ teams.

The cause is catching on: One recent Politico poll found that 46 percent of women support a ban on transgender athletes (as do 43 percent of young adults born since 1997).

Again: not a ban on transgender athletes, a ban on male athletes competing against female athletes.

It’s telling how consistently the defenders of boys competing against girls obscure what they’re actually defending.

This is disappointing. We might look to champions like Megan Rapinoe, Billie Jean King and Candace Parker, who have been outspoken supporters of inclusion, as well as trans athletes who are shouldering the brunt of this fight. Exclusion elevates nobody.

But inclusion of what, exclusion of what?

If girls and women can’t have their own sports then they can’t ever win anything. This is Crouse’s subject yet she gets it completely wrong.

She goes on for many more paragraphs saying much the same thing – why worry about trans kids when women’s sports are already devalued? – without making any more sense, let alone addressing the actual issue.