It seems the Bristol police did as little as possible to stop the intimidation.

Mark Shelford is Avon and Somerset Police and Crime Commissioner, and ASPBristol is the Bristol police.

Women are still the enemy.

Shouty men out in force in Bristol today, bellowing in the faces of women.

Colston is the slave merchant whose statue was thrown in the harbor.

The blessings of empire:

During the heyday of the British empire, thousands of women from India and other parts of Asia were brought to London to look after young children – but many of these nannies were later abandoned and left to fend for themselves. Now, a building in London which housed them is set to be commemorated with a blue plaque.

That’s nice. Drag them half way around the world and then abandon them.

“Ayahs and amahs were basically domestic workers and the backbone of British families in colonial India. They looked after the children, entertained them, told them stories, and rocked them to sleep,” says Rozina Visram, historian and author of Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History.

When these families returned to Britain, they would often bring their ayahs back with them. Some were asked to accompany the families just for the long, difficult voyage, Ms Visram says, while others were employed for a few years.

Usually they were given a ticket back home when the time came, but many were just dumped.

By the second half of the 19th Century, as the empire grew stronger, travel between England and India became more regular – and the number of nannies travelling to Britain also increased.

“Every year up to 200 ayahs stayed at the Ayahs’ Home. Some stayed for a few days whereas some stayed for months,” Dr Visram says.

Stranded amid the alien corn.

They just can’t ever word it honestly. BBC headline:

Fina stops transgender swimmers from competing in women’s elite events

Male swimmers.

Fina, swimming’s world governing body, has voted to stop transgender athletes from competing in women’s elite races if they have gone through any part of the process of male puberty.

They could have worded it so that the male puberty part comes first, but no, it has to be the “transgender” part first.

The decision was made during an extraordinary general congress at the ongoing World Championships in Budapest.

…

The issue in swimming has been catapulted into the spotlight by the experiences of American Lia Thomas.

Not so much the experiences as the photos and video clips. We can all see how massive he is, so we can all see how grotesquely unfair it is. (We can also see how little he seems to be even pretending to think he’s actually female.)

More than 300 college, Team USA and Olympic swimmers signed an open letter in support of Thomas and all transgender and non-binary swimmers, but other athletes and organisations have raised concerns about trans inclusion.

There it is again. Put the rah-rah trans bullshit first and the reality second.

A win at last!

I had to look up FINA: it’s a [or the] competitive swimming organization type thing.

The vote was massive.

Good news at last.

Man tries to get group of women barred from popular London pub:

He likes to go there himself. He doesn’t want those icky women in a place where he likes to go.

Everyone should have the right to tell bars and pubs and restaurants and bowling alleys to bar groups of women from going there. It’s only fair.

Why we can’t do anything about climate change chapter eleventy billion:

Within days, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision that could severely limit the federal government’s authority to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants — pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

It shouldn’t be optional. It shouldn’t be up for grabs. We shouldn’t have the power to decide future generations have to face the full horror show.

The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.

Nobody should be doing anything to weaken anyone’s ability to slow global warming. But here we are.

The plaintiffs want to hem in what they call the administrative state, the E.P.A. and other federal agencies that set rules and regulations that affect the American economy. That should be the role of Congress, which is more accountable to voters, said Jeff Landry, the Louisiana attorney general and one of the leaders of the Republican group bringing the lawsuits.

No. Wrong. Here’s why: global warming pays zero attention to voters. Voters can’t vote global warming out. It’s not a policy, it’s a process, one that’s spiraled way out of our control. Votes are irrelevant.

If you’re in a big city that’s in the path of a colossal tornado, you don’t ask the city council to vote on what to do, you take shelter. If your house is on fire you don’t poll the neighbors on how to act, you call in the fire trucks. If the planet is on a path to catastrophic heating you don’t take a god damn vote on what to do about it.

But Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change. Instead, for decades it has delegated authority to the agencies because it lacks the expertise possessed by the specialists who write complicated rules and regulations and who can respond quickly to changing science, particularly when Capitol Hill is gridlocked.

That’s the other half. The emergency nature of the problem is one half and the technical nature of the subject is the other. Democracy is a good thing except when it isn’t.

West Virginia v. E.P.A., No. 20–1530 on the court docket, is also notable for the tangle of connections between the plaintiffs and the Supreme Court justices who will decide their case. The Republican plaintiffs share many of the same donors behind efforts to nominate and confirm five of the Republicans on the bench — John G. Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

In short the process is corrupt as well as mistaken and the highway to mass extinction. Brilliant.

The pattern is repeated in other climate cases filed by the Republican attorneys general and now advancing through the lower courts: The plaintiffs are supported by the same network of conservative donors who helped former President Donald J. Trump place more than 200 federal judges, many now in position to rule on the climate cases in the coming year.

At least two of the cases feature an unusual approach that demonstrates the aggressive nature of the legal campaign. In those suits, the plaintiffs are challenging regulations or policies that don’t yet exist. They want to pre-empt efforts by President Biden to deliver on his promise to pivot the country away from fossil fuels, while at the same time aiming to prevent a future president from trying anything similar.

These people are consigning their children and grandchildren to a hideous future and short, painful lives. It’s a strange thing to watch.

If they win the feds won’t be able to slash tailpipe emissions or force electric utilities to replace fossil fuel-fired power plants with wind and solar, or consider the economic costs of climate change when deciding whether to approve a new oil pipeline or similar project or environmental rule.

Those limitations on climate action in the United States, which has pumped more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, would quite likely doom the world’s goal of cutting enough emissions to keep the planet from heating up more than an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with the preindustrial age. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic hurricanes, drought, heat waves and wildfires significantly increases.

And when all those things increase, crops fail, and famine spreads. When that happens people try to move to more hospitable places, and the people already there try to stop them, and you get border wars everywhere. It seems this is what “conservative activists” want.

Who does this guy think he is??

Who does he think he is interrupting women on Twitter to demand when they are going to start doing what he tells them?

Who DOES he think he is? When is he going to get back to not telling women what to do?

Wo, here’s a crack in the ice: academics refused to sign a new Trans Declaration of What You Have To Do. Just up and said no, as if they had a right to.

A programme to encourage universities to follow guidance on trans discrimination is to be changed after Cambridge academics refused to sign it.

“Here’s our guidance on how you have to coddle us, sign right here.”

“No.”

Advance HE, a charity that advises higher education institutions, has bowed to pressure and pledged to alter its guidelines requiring universities to foster a “collective understanding” on the belief that gender can be chosen.

Should universities foster a collective understanding that the sun circles the earth every day? How about a collective understanding that elephants are smaller than grasshoppers?

Cambridge University academics had refused to commit to the Athena Swan programme, arguing that the issue should be a matter for debate.

Shouldn’t even be that really. You can’t change species. You can’t time travel. You can’t change sex.

Arif Ahmed, a reader in philosophy at Cambridge University who objected to the scheme, said: “It’s welcome that Athena Swan is reconsidering what could have been a charter for thought-control, as many of us had been warning. A university should absolutely not be ‘fostering collective understanding’ on controversial issues but encouraging open debate.

…

Johns said Advance HE was responding to the concerns raised.

“We have been working with the sector-led Athena Swan governance committee to amend and remove the wording on ‘fostering a collective understanding’.

“While this amendment will protect academic freedom, the charter principles will still recognise that individuals can determine their own gender identity and that the specific issues faced by trans and non-binary people needs tackling.”

But they can’t, not the way you mean it. If “gender identity” is defined as just how you present, then sure, but it never is confined to that, is it. It’s all “trans women are women,” and that’s where women who can find their noses in the dark say no.

Climate disaster hasn’t thrown anything at us here in the PNW so far this summer – it’s been unusually cool and cloudy, which is fine with me. Elsewhere though it’s not so mellow.

Summer in the American west is off to an explosive start, with extreme weather events ravaging multiple states in recent weeks. In Montana, historic flooding devastated communities and infrastructure in and around Yellowstone national park and forced a rare closure. Further south, reservoirs sank to new lows, triple-digit heatwaves left millions sweltering, and wildfires ripped through Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and California.

Natural disasters, from floods to droughts to wildfires, have always occurred in areas across the west, and it will take time for scientists to study the precise connections between events like the destruction in Yellowstone and the climate crisis. But it is clear that, in a warming world, combinations of factors are increasingly likely to align and turn routine events into a catastrophe. But it is clear that, in a warming world, combinations of factors are increasingly likely to align and turn routine events into a catastrophe. So-called “compound extremes”, where a combination of contributing factors come together, are on the rise, [NOAA Meteorologist Andrew] Hoell said.

You don’t want a drought and a wildfire and a windstorm all at the same time. No you don’t.

Or melting snow and heavy rain in a dried-out area.

Warming weather flushed melting snow into the waterways as a deluge pelted the [Yellowstone] region, dropping up to three months-worth of summer rain over the span of just a few days, according to an accounting done by CNN. Researchers with the US Geological Survey (USGS) and two universities had already sounded the alarm that an event like this was increasingly likely, publishing a report last year on how the climate crisis could threaten the park. Noting that average temperatures could increase by up to 10 degrees in the coming decades, they concluded that the region should expect intense dry conditions peppered with dangerous downpours.

The Dust Bowl will turn into the Scour Bowl. No soil left.

The unprecedented and sudden flooding earlier this week toppled telephone poles, knocked over fences, wiped out roads and bridges, and threatened to cut off fresh drinking water supplies to the state’s largest city, after officials in Billings, Montana, were forced to shut down its water treatment plant.

States in the southwest meanwhile have been having horrific fires.

States in the south-west have been hammered by dozens of conflagrations this spring, including a ferocious fire in New Mexico that became the worst in the state’s history.

The number of square miles burned so far this year is more than double the 10-year national average, and wildfires have already set records and destroyed hundreds of homes.

And it’s only going to get worse.

The Post of course thinks this is a good thing, or at least wants to appear to. Gender idennniny taught in schools:

Some lessons are direct: “Who can describe what transgender means?” In other classes, the discussion is more subtle: “Remember, families can come in all shapes and sizes!”

Yes all! In some families the parents are shaped like pyramids and the children are shaped like orcas!

In Florida and several others states, educators are restricted in teaching about gender identity, but elsewhere, teachers are embracing the topic as the number of transgender and gender nonbinary children rises.

If it’s true that’s unfortunate, because transgender is a fiction and “gender nonbinary” is simply meaningless. If the number of transgender and gender nonbinary children is rising it’s probably partly because they’re being taught about it in school.

Resources and lesson plans for those who want to teach about gender identity are becoming much more common. Seven states now require that curriculums include LGBTQ topics.

Wait, stop. LGB is one thing and T is another. (Q is nothing.) There is no soup that is LGBTQ, there are 5 separate things, and they don’t all combine well.

The National Sex Education Standards, developed by experts and advocacy groups, name gender identity as one of seven essential topics, alongside puberty, consent, sexual orientation and other subjects.And the federal government recommends that schools include gender identity in their sex education programs.

What kind of experts? Why include advocacy groups? What if “gender identity” is just a made-up label for a contested mental state? Why teach it to children?

Opponents argue that teaching about gender identity is driven by liberal ideology and is inappropriate for children, especially young children.

The ideology isn’t really liberal though. It thinks it is, but it isn’t. Instead of being relaxed and liberal about who can wear skirts or like Lego, it shoves children into gender boxes for wearing skirts or liking Lego.

The restrictions often go beyond the classroom.Many districts have resisted efforts to allow transgender students to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity, and 18 states limit transgender women from competing in women’s and girls’ sports, though some measures are on hold pending a court challenge.

The usual lie. The issue isn’t transgender, the issue is males in female toilets and sports.

Classes that address gender identity are still the exception in American schools. But an increase in the number of young people identifying as trans or gender nonconforming has prompted many schools to change course and adopt lessons that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

In other words they see a trend and decide the thing to do is speed it up. But what if being trans is actually not a particularly happy fate? What if all these young people would actually be vastly better off if they were urged to perform a nonconforming gender all they liked but stay away from meds and surgeries until their brains have finished developing? What if they shouldn’t be encouraged to think they’re trans as opposed to mildly eccentric?

The approaches vary, particularly for elementary schoolchildren. In some classrooms, lessons about gender identity focus on gender stereotypes. Students in first grade, for instance, may be prompted to consider that there are no “boy colors” or “girl colors.”

Do that. Go with that. Hold that thought. Say we’re all a big soup of “gender” and nobody has to change any organs or appendages to fit anything.

Even at his dumbest and most dogmatic and fingers-in-ears how can he think he knows this?

He can’t know that; no one can; it’s not possible. It’s not knowable that zero men who identify as women will ever rape anyone or that zero men who identify as women ever have raped anyone. There are in fact reports of trans women raping women. I would love to know how he, a philosopher, thinks he can know that it has never happened and will never happen.

Financial Times reporter Edward Luce talks to Hillary Clinton over lunch:

With an eye on the likely coming reversal of Roe vs Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that enshrined women’s right to abortion, I ask Clinton how far such unfinished business is likely to go. “If you go down the rabbit hole of far right intellectuals, you see that birth control, gay marriage — all of it is at risk,” she replies.

What is the Christian right’s endgame, I ask. Presumably they would not be able to create the theological dystopia depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale? My question triggers a passionate response. Clinton speaks about how some states will make it illegal to abort after rape and incest if Roe vs Wade is overturned. One state — “and this is hard even to speak about”, she says — would require the woman to get the permission of her rapist before aborting. Others plan to criminalise women who have the procedure in states where it is legal.

…

I ask whether things would have turned out differently had Clinton, not Trump, won in 2016. Her answer makes it clear she thinks the January 6 2021 storming of Capitol Hill to stop Joe Biden’s certification would simply have happened four years earlier. “Literally within hours of the polls closing in 2016, we had so much evidence pouring in about voters being turned away in Milwaukee and not being able to vote in Detroit,” she replies.

Milwaukee and Detroit, what do they have in common? Both destination cities for the Great Migration: heavily Black and heavily Democratic-voting.

It seems like a good moment to ask Clinton about Russia’s leader, whom she once quipped had “no soul”. Though Clinton talks about today’s situation in Ukraine, she keeps referring back to Putin’s role in America’s 2016 election, which she believes was in revenge for an “anodyne” statement she had made as secretary of state in 2012 in support of the pro-democracy protests against his return to Russia’s presidency.

She relates an anecdote about a restaurant dinner in London several years ago, where the guests debated the wisdom of Nato’s post-cold war expansion. After a while, the waiter interrupted: “‘Before I take your order, I am from Poland and I have one thing to say: never trust the Russians,’” Clinton recalls approvingly. She adds: “I always believed in expanding Nato and I find the arguments against that to be naive at best, because what we have seen is proof positive of why it was necessary.”

Putin once said of Clinton: “It’s better not to argue with women.” Was Putin as scathing towards Clinton in private as he was in public, I ask. Clinton draws a breath. “Yes, he was very sexist towards me. We had some interesting, even helpful, interactions in private and then the press would be invited in and he would say something insulting about America. He would then manspread for effect.”

The FT shows the manspreading in a photo above that paragraph, so I had the opportunity to see and notice and roll my eyes at the manspreading before Luce quotes the words.

I cannot allow the lunch to end without questioning the direction of her party. I say that Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority. What sense does it make to depict JK Rowling as a fascist? To my surprise, Clinton shares the premise of my question.

It doesn’t surprise me much.

Many are telling Jesse it’s not becoming religious, it’s been religious all along.

Anyway. Planned Parenthood is firmly in the cult.

Being a woman is an inner experience (a lived experience, of course, as opposed to the other kind), a feeling, a sense, a gnosis, a revelation. It’s nothing to do with genitalia or any other physical attribute.

Unless…

It’s “she,” he says, I’m “she,” he says, but to emphasize or illustrate or verify his claim he includes a photo of himself, as if to say “LOOK, you can see for yourself I’m she, in a tight dress, with long hair, and a sexy sexy pose, and a receding hairline a girly smirk.”

(He also, I’ve only just noticed, has those weird fake eyebrows drawn on his forehead well above where the real ones were. Do people who do that think we can’t see the place where the real eyebrows were? When it’s so obvious?)

This PrideMonth, the Audobon Society partnered with a man who pretends to be a woman to bring us a message of hope future planet climate change yadda yadda. God knows why a real woman talking sense wouldn’t have done just as well or in fact much better.

Your Name’s not Bruce? tells us they’ve blocked a lot of people as a precaution against hearing any impertinent questions on this brave mumblemumble.

My opinion of people has just shot up. I thought I’d be the only one to say “Ew he thinks he’s doing Fine Writing,” but on the contrary, most people out of a large number said so, and more wittily. I hate hate hate wannabe Fine Writing except from geniuses.

Along with the bogus Fine Writing of course there’s the Don’t you wish you could have a nice vaycay in Cyprus? along with the Get me I’m writing, I’m a writer, you thought I was just a QC but I’m also a writer.

Transgender Trend summarizes some of what is known about puberty blockers and brain development:

When a child’s natural puberty is blocked we can expect to see effects not only on the body but on the developing brain. It is the surge of sex hormones at puberty which triggers the important changes in the adolescent brain which only reach completion in the mid-twenties. Hormonal changes at puberty  are thought to influence the development of both brain structure and function.

Recent research indicates that there is a window of development for some cognitive functions, and if this window is missed, cognitive development does not resume later even if blockers are discontinued. A reduction in long-term spatial memory was found to persist after discontinuation of blockers in a recent study on sheep, which concluded:

This result suggests that the time at which puberty normally occurs may represent a critical period of hippocampal plasticity. Perturbing normal hippocampal formation in this peripubertal period may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function. 

You’ll notice the wording is far from absolutist. The result suggests, the time may represent, perturbing normal formation may have lasting effects. This isn’t the usual Guardian-style manipulation, this is normal caution with new and sparse research.

Two previous studies which analysed IQ performance in girls taking puberty blockers for central precocious puberty also suggest the possibility that GnRHa treatment may have an adverse impact on cognitive functioning in children. The first study of 25 children in 2001 found a drop of 7 IQ points after two years on blockers. The second study in 2016 found a drop of 8 IQ points in 15 girls compared to a matched control group. An analysis of these studies is here.

Oy. On the other hand is there a control group? Maybe everybody sheds IQ points during puberty?

A study in 2017 of men with late stage prostate cancer found that treatment with GnRH analogs affects cognitive functions such as language ability, short-term memory capacity, mental flexibility, and inhibitory control.

Oy. Not functions you want to reduce. Also – could help explain the childish unreasonable bad-tempered nature of the “activism.”

At any rate, the issue needs more attention, if you ask me.

We need more oil to get those prices down but don’t go producing more oil because climate.

Next up: fly us to the moon on gossamer wings.

The Post:

Battered politically by high gasoline prices and pressed to increase oil and gas production, Biden nonetheless attempted to convince countries to keep pursuing policies aimed at combating climate change.

“We cannot, we cannot afford to let the critical goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to slip out of our reach,” the president said to leaders at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. “The science tells us the window for action is rapidly narrowing.”

And the news media and vox pop tell us we have to get those gas prices down.

It’s not just a few wannabe-Hitlers, it’s the Republican party.

[T]he immediate danger to American democracy stems from the fact that the Republican party is justifying all this, remains united behind the man responsible, and, worst of all, actually wants to put him back in power. This is about Trump, but not just about Trump. This is what the Republican party is: the very few voices siding against Trumpism are being shunned and ostracized, and most Republicans are united in their quest to install authoritarian rule by a reactionary minority.

And even if conservatives aren’t necessarily on board with all the specifics of Trump’s conspiracy claims, the right in general is united behind the idea that progressives are out to destroy “real” America and must be stopped by whatever means. White conservatives consider themselves the sole proponents of “real America” and therefore entitled to rule, as is the party that focuses almost solely on their interests and sensibilities.

See for instance this tweet from the repellent Jim Jordan today:

What’s a fascist takeover compared to expensive gas?!

This is the basis on which 147 congressional Republicans voted to overturn the election results even after the assault on the Capitol. This is why the Republican party officially defended the violent attack of January 6 as “legitimate political discourse” and lashed out against the few Republicans who publicly dared to object. This is why Republicans are either explicitly running on the big lie or, at the very least, are lending legitimacy to the idea that there was something wrong with the 2020 election.

…

And how are the people the hearings present as Team Normal, as standing up to Trump’s coup attempt, dealing with all this? Take Bill Barr: he’s on record saying he would vote for Trump in 2024. In his testimony for the committee as well as in his book, Barr has left no doubt that he believes Trump is either willfully pushing treasonous conspiracy theories or is completely detached from reality – yet Barr is still willing to help put him back in the White House.

Barr’s ability to rationalize this astonishing balancing act is the main reason I am skeptical that the hearings, by focusing narrowly on Trump, could succeed at turning Republicans away from him. When confronted with how he could possibly still support another Trump presidency during his book promotion tour earlier this year, Barr replied: “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party.” There it is: after everything we have been through, conservatives still see the Democrats (or progressives, or liberals, or the left – they see them as interchangeable) as the biggest threat.

I suppose that’s because Barr is a religious fanatic and a theocrat, and the Dems with all their faults (gender ideology very much among them) are not Team Theocracy.