This clip is an oldy, but it’s still interesting.

Yes.

Michael Ann Devito is an Assistant Professor in Khoury College of Computer Sciences, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication Studies. She works in the areas of AI & Social Justice and Extraordinary HCI. Dr. Michael Ann DeVito (she/her) is a qualitative, interdisciplinary researcher and designer. She studies how users and communities understand and adapt to the challenges of AI and machine learning-driven sociotechnical environments…

Michael Ann most often acts as a member-researcher, employing her own positionality as a neurodivergent, transgender lesbian as a key tool in her grounded theory-based approach.

Such as sharing clips of himself warbling that if you don’t “date” trans folks you’re a transphobe.

Yeah great, let’s throw all those unemployed little kids off school lunch programs.

CNN’s Pamela Brown asks Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) about President Trump’s administration pausing aid for federal grants and loans that could affect millions of Americans. McCormick defended President Trump’s move and argues that aid programs, including ones that help vulnerable students eat lunch at school, should be evaluated.

And in order to “evaluate” the programs it’s necessary to snatch them away first, because poor people, especially children, must be punished.

Noah Berlatsky on The Terror:

Donald Trump spent the first week of his second term using the presidency to glorify political violence and weaponize the threat of it against anyone who might consider criticizing him.

Trump pulled the security detail from former chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is an enemy of MAGA thanks to his efforts to fight covid. He also ended security details for his former National Security Advisor John Bolton and his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both of whom have been targeted by Iran because they worked to advance Trump’s hard-line policies during his first term.

Bolton of course is an outspoken Trump critic, but Pompeo campaigned for his former boss just last fall. Trump repaid him by using mobster logic to justify endangering his wellbeing, cold-bloodedly telling reporters who asked him last week about the decision to pull the security detail that “there’s risks to everything.”

Trumpese for “nice little place you got here.”

Trump’s moves against Fauci and company last week were overshadowed by his pardons of about around 1,500 people convicted of crimes in connection with the January 6 insurrection, including some who brutally beat cops. Trump also commuted the sentences of individuals associated with violent rightwing groups and convicted of seditious conspiracy related to their involvement in the attack on the Capitol, including Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio, who had been sentenced to 22 years, and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years.

There’s precedent. Hitler freed all imprisoned Nazis in a 1933 amnesty.

The most obvious past example of Trumpist terror, of course, is the January 6 coup attempt. On that date in 2021, Trump used his social media platforms and speech to incite a mob to storm the Capitol. There, they assaulted police officers and threatened the lives of lawmakers. As many as nine people died in the violence and its aftermath.

And yet, after all that, he was allowed to run again, and he won. This makes the US a failed state.

Reuters tells us

California on Tuesday denied President Donald Trump’s claim that the U.S. military entered the state to release more water in the wake of deadly wildfires.

In a Truth Social post late on Monday, Trump wrote: “The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.” California’s Department of Water Resources responded hours later.

“The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful,” the agency said early on Tuesday in an X post.

On Sunday, he ordered the federal government to override the state of California’s water-management practices to bolster firefighting efforts. The order directed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to deliver more water and hydropower through the Central Valley Project, a network of dams, canals and other infrastructure, even if that conflicts with state or local laws.

A spokesperson for Newsom said that move would not have made a difference in the state’s firefighting efforts as the Los Angeles region gets most of its water from other sources and did not have a shortage.

In short, Trump threw a lot of mud at a random wall in a random location and announced “Look, Mommy, I made everybody dead!”

Some hydrants in the Los Angeles area ran dry during the height of the wildfires, but local officials say that was because they were not designed to deal with such a massive disaster.

No hydrants are, because they can’t be. Hydrants are not magic. Hydro systems are not magic. The LA wildfires were a new thing on the earth, and nobody is a bad webbis for not magically conjuring up a miracle water system that could douse them in minutes.

Wut?

Wtf is that even supposed to mean? Is there a giant faucet in Redding or somewhere that a couple of majors “turned on” to send all the water here to LA County?

No, so what’s he babbling about?

Also it’s not a Fake Environmental argument that the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades gets more rain than LA County, it’s just reality. LA is in a desert; western Washington and Oregon are not in a desert.

So far I’m still getting water from the tap so I guess he hasn’t sent it all to Malibu yet.

Trump’s revenge:

The Justice Department said Monday that it fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting Donald Trump, escalating the president’s campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies.

The employees worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that led to now-dismissed indictments against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Two extremely serious crimes that he committed basically in front of our faces, especially the attempted theft of the election.

As a country we’re rolling around in the mire like a herd of hyperactive pigs.

“Today, Acting Attorney General James McHenry terminated the employment of a number of DOJ officials who played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” a Justice Department official wrote to NBC News. “In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda. This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”

Oh it’s the prosecutors who are weaponizing government! Here I thought it was Chief Criminal Trump.

This is all so shaming. We’re all in filth up to our eyeballs. Only a week in, 200+ weeks to go.

Former Justice Department lawyer Julie Zebrak, an expert in federal employment law, said career civil servants cannot be summarily fired. “They have civil service rights. They have due process rights,” she said. 

If the Justice Department is arguing that the lawyers are not performing properly, they must be subject to what is known as progressive discipline, she said, including warnings and notice. They must be allowed to hire lawyers before they lose their jobs. “There is a reason people say it’s so hard to fire federal employees,” she said.

Trump will do it anyway. It’s a dictatorship.

Trump is not messing around: he’s already bullying Denmark to underline his rude demands that it give him Greenland.

Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.

Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described [as] aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

He doesn’t get to order any head of state to give the state to him. Who does he think he is?

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”

He was very firm the way the guy with a gun standing in your living room is very firm. He was very firm the way any violent macho bully is very firm.

Another person who was briefed on the call told the outlet: “The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode.” Someone else said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”

According to one former Danish official, the call was a “very tough conversation” in which Trump “threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs”.

Trump has previously said that the US needs to control Greenland and has refused to rule out using US military force to take over the territory. During a press conference a few weeks ago, Trump said that the US needed Greenland “for economic security”. The 836,300-sq-mile (2,166,007-sq-km) Arctic island is thought to be rich in oil and gas, as well as various raw materials for green technology.

So he wants to steal them.

There’s this fella named Philip Low who knows Elon Musk all too well. He has this to say about Musk and the Nazi salute:

Elon is not a Nazi, per se.

He is something much better, or much worse, depending on how you look at it.

Nazis believed that an entire race was above everyone else.

Elon believes he is above everyone else. He used to think he worked on the most important problems. When I met him, he did not presume to be a technical person — he would be the first to say that he lacked the expertise to understand certain data. That happened later. Now, he believes he has all the solutions.

All his talk about getting to Mars to “maintain the light of consciousness” or about “free speech absolutism” is actually BS Elon knowingly feeds people to manipulate them. Everything Elon does is about acquiring and consolidating power. That is why he likes far right parties, because they are easier to control. That is also why he gave himself $56 Billion which could have gone to the people actually doing the work and innovations he is taking credit for at Tesla. His lust for power is also why he did xAI and Neuralink, to attempt to compete with OpenAI and NeuroVigil, respectively, despite being affiliated with them. Unlike Tesla and Twitter, he was unable to conquer those companies and tried to create rivals. I fired him with cause in December 2021 when he tried to undermine NV.

Elon did two Nazi salutes. He did them for five main reasons:

1. He was concerned that the “Nazi wing” of the MAGA movement, under the influence of Steve Bannon, would drive him away from Trump, somewhere in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, rather than in the West Wing which is where he wants to be. He was already feeling raw over the fact that Trump did not follow his recommendation for Treasury Secretary and that the Senate also did not pick his first choice;

2. He was upset that he had had to go to Israel and Auschwitz to make up for agreeing with a Nazi sympathizer online and wanted to reclaim his “power” just like when he told advertisers to “go fuck yourself”. This has nothing to do with Asperger’s;

3. There are some Jews he actually hates: Sam Altman is amongst them;

4. He enjoys a good thrill and knew exactly what he was doing;

5. His narcissistic self was hoping the audience would reflect his abject gesture back to him, thereby showing complete control and dominion over it, and increasing his leverage over Trump. That did not happen.

All very unreassuring, wouldn’t you say?

H/t Rob

How NOT to talk about the Holocaust on a tv news program.

As well as millions of others THAN WHAT?

They erase women by saying “people” and they erase Jews by saying “people” – and they do it right in plain sight.

It’s surrogacy day at the BBC.

A couple said they decided to document their journey to have a child via a surrogate after feeling there was “no information” available about the process.

Kevin Pittuck-Bennett, 46, and his husband Michael, 38, from Chelmsford, had their two-month-old daughter, Peggy, in 2024 via surrogacy, which is when a woman carries a pregnancy for another couple or individual.

…

Sarah Jones, the chief executive officer at Surrogacy UK, said: “The UK surrogacy community in the UK is really unique in the fact that we operate altruistically, so nobody is allowed to make profit, nobody is allowed to financially profit from surrogacy in the UK.”

It’s interesting how all the altruism is from women. Men can’t be surrogates either altruistically or commercially.

Helen Gibson, the founder of the campaign group, Surrogacy Concern, said: “We don’t support surrogacy for anyone, we understand that a lot of people want to have a genetic child of their own, but it is very exploitative for women.

“No-one looks at it from the perspective of the child” who needs their biological mother when they are first born, she said. “Fostering, adoption and co-parenting are all options before surrogacy.”

That is, instead of surrogacy.

H/t Freeminder

Originally a comment by Bruce Everett on A pause, a freeze, a ban, a cancellation.

This is going to be a pretty big global economic storm that Trump’s brewing. I’m kind of glad to be in Australia right now, where we certainly have economic problems, just not as fundamentally bad as a lot of other economies. We may be well positioned to mitigate a lot of the chaos.

That being said, we’ve got an opposition that’s great at talking up its economic cred, but hasn’t done a competent job since 2007, despite being in government for most of it, and they weren’t even that s**t hot when they were okay (The Howard Gov’t 1996-2007 coasted on Keating’s economic reforms and a long-lasting mining boom). Since 2007, the Labor party has been better at micro-tweaking the economy through catastrophe (see the Rudd gov’t during the GFC), and there’s every sign that they’re competent to do as best as possible through this current mess, barring perhaps some issues with the reserve bank and how it operates.

On cultural issues, Labor is actually doing alright here when dealing with Nazis and various anti-Semites, despite what the opposition (repeatedly) says. It’s not adopting the worst of the left, and it’s not losing its spine in response to demands from the right.

However, Labor isn’t doing at all well when it comes to the erosion of women’s rights by gender woo, and yet, the opposition is leaving this alone. It’s conspicuous that the conservatives aren’t focusing on this, but then perhaps they aren’t prepared to touch the issue after the way the party messed up in the way it treated Moira Deeming.

I’ve heard a number of local GCs express the view that a Liberal Party (our conservatives) will solve the issue, but I really, really doubt it. It seems like rank tribalism, or opportunism. Both of the major parties are serving up s**t sandwiches on this issue, sans bread.

And gawd. The lynch pin of the conservatives’ economic plan; building nuclear plants magically faster than more experienced, trained and infrastructure-rich nations ever did, in a country with a grid that’s ill-suited to using nuclear. I’m not anti-nuclear (where else are we going to get a constant supply of Molybdenum-99?), and if we had industries that required a constant, high level output (such as high volume silicon lithography), then we’d absolutely need to at least consider nuclear. But Australia doesn’t.

Australia has a grid that flip-flops all over the place when it come to demand, while the price to run nuclear reactors doesn’t scale well with output – they’re not cost-effective at lower outputs. And that’s before considering difficulties in ramping output up and down fast enough to respond to demand. (And before considering questions of proliferation, how that effects regional geopolitics, and where we’re going to store the waste).

Hugely expensive tech, a phenomenally unrealistic timeline for implementation, costings as substantial as crepe paper on a rainy day, and a completely poor fit for existing demands and infrastructure; that’s the conservative economic plan here. And they’re definitely in striking distance of wining the election this year.

Conservatives the world over are selling a lot of economic cockamamie. A lot more than I remember them selling in my youth. Yet for some reason they’re retaining an illusion of economic credibility like an echo from decades past.

The specter of “efficient” conservative administration similarly haunts bodies politic the world over. Both the Tories in the UK, and the GOP in the US handle their bureaucracies in a manner that would be best narrated with a string of Hanna Barbera sound effects, and yet adherents will still believe. Just one slip from a centrist government seems enough to get people into a fit of buyer’s remorse over the supposedly “progressive” regime they supported, and then you’re back with delusional clowns with fetishes for white elephants and firing people.

My apologies for the rant. Maybe it wouldn’t have built up so much if I commented here more often.

Trump is doing the deportations thing just as he said he would, but the reporting reveals that the Biden and Obama administrations did plenty of deporting themselves. It’s not clear to me that Trump is doing anything radically different.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants out of the US and the promise of “mass deportations”. To that effect, the defence department has said that it will provide military aircrafts to deport more than 5,000 people [who] have been detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

ICE statistics show that over 1,000 people were removed or repatriated on Thursday, the fourth day of the Trump administration.

…

Deportations are not unique to the Trump administration. Biden carried out deportations as well, with 271,000 immigrants deported to 192 countries in fiscal year 2024.

In total, Biden carried out 1.5 million deportations in his four years, according to figures by the Migration Policy Institute. That is around the same that was carried out under Trump’s first term. That number is lower than deportations carried out under Barack Obama’s first term, which added up to a total of 2.9 million.

Aka twice as many. Obama deported nearly twice as many as Trump in their respective first terms.

I gotta say, the reporting hasn’t always reflected that fact.

Pure oblivious selfishness on display as if it were completely normal.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want my own family. Even in my early twenties, as a gay man before gay marriage was legal, I imagined that I’d probably marry a woman to have a family and then sleep with men on the side. It might not have been the best scenario, but that’s how much I wanted kids. I’d originally had it in my head that I’d like to be a dad by the time I was 40. But here I am at 44 – still trying.

He thought he’d marry a woman so that he could “have” some kids, and that he would fuck around on the side, no doubt without telling the pesky woman and without protecting her from potential STDs. That’s how much he wants what he wants and doesn’t care about anyone else.

I first looked into surrogacy as a single person in 2016. I didn’t realise it wasn’t legal then to do it on your own. It wasn’t until 2019 that the law changed to allow single people to become legal parents of children conceived through surrogacy in the UK. 

Selfishness encoded into law.

It was important for me to have my own biological child. 

It wasn’t important to him for the child to have two parents.

I said to him: “Look, I want to pursue surrogacy.” Unfortunately, we split up. It wasn’t because I wanted to try for a baby, but I knew he wasn’t that keen. I just thought: “I’m not prepared to wait any longer [for the right partner], or to have a relationship get in the way of my dream of becoming a parent.” So within a couple of weeks, I decided to do it alone.

He just thought he wasn’t prepared to try to create the best situation for the baby, so he decided to saddle the baby with a selfish oblivious single father who bought the baby as he might buy a car or a sailboat.

I bought a large pack of 10 eggs rather than a standard pack of six – although they gave me 13. Then last April I did ICSI, a fertility treatment in which they inject live sperm into the eggs. All 13 of the eggs survived the thawing process – nine were fertilised. I’ve now got five viable embryos out of the 13 eggs. It cost me about £15,000 for the whole package including ICSI and the eggs.

I’m still looking for a surrogate. It is illegal to pay a surrogate in the UK, except for their reasonable expenses. I can’t find one abroad because it’s too expensive – in Mexico City it’s about £70,000 and in America it’s more like £100,000. I don’t want to go to a cheaper place with poor aftercare and take any risks. It was the same when I got a hair transplant – I did it in the UK and not Turkey.

Oh how sweet, he’s as careful with his future human as he is with his hair transplant.

How long will it take to have a baby via surrogacy ? I mean… how long is a piece of string? People often say the average is 18 months to two years. Some people get pregnant within a year. Other times it could be four or five years. And once you’ve found a surrogate, there’s no guarantee that they’ll fall pregnant. I’ve heard stories of people having two or three failed transfers, then a couple of miscarriages and finally getting pregnant. So of course just finding the surrogate is one of the first steps.

Ah look what a good guy he is – he’s careful not to call his hired uterus a woman, because the uterus-haver might very well idennify as a man. Peak virtue achieved!

It’s so hard not having a partner to bounce off and be buoyant for you, and help you make hard decisions. Am I ready for it? I don’t know. But I know I want it.

And that’s all that matters.

It’s always hate women day at Number 10.

A drag queen who criticised JK Rowling over her views on trans people was invited to celebrate Burns Night at No 10.

Sir Keir Starmer was pictured alongside Lawrence Chaney, a former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, in an event Downing Street said was intended to “honour the life and legacy” of Scotland’s national bard.

Starmer wanted to celebrate Burns so he invited a mockery of women to help the celebrating. It’s funny how men like Starmer don’t invite blackface comedians to help them celebrate things, but they do think it’s just fine to invite womanface comedians to do that. Women don’t matter, is that it? Women are obviously inferior so it only makes sense to jeer at them by putting on a skirt and wig?

The move provoked a backlash over controversial remarks previously made by Chaney, who was heavily made up and in Scottish dress for the event, including accusing the Harry Potter author of stoking up “hate” towards transgender people.

Chaney also recently shared a post on X which appeared to compare women concerned at the loss of single-sex spaces to racist segregationists in 1960s America.

So women are the equivalent of racists while men are the equivalent of the victims of racism. Women have all the power, and abuse it, while men have no power, and are punished for trying to get some. Is that what we’re saying now? Women are the all-powerful immovable oppressors and exploiters of men? Men are the brave determined underlings struggling to defend their dignity?

In the post shared by Chaney in November, an image of US Congresswoman Nancy Mace, in front of a sign which says “biological” in front of women on a bathroom door, is set alongside a woman smiling in front of a “white women only” bathroom door in 1962 Mississippi.

And there it is. The answer is yes. Women are now the oppressor class and men are their victims. Adjust your maps accordingly.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Down is up.

This important statement details why a sex based approach to violence against women is problematic.

Anything other than a sex based approach to violence against women endangers women and girls you idiot. It’s only “problematic” if you insist on “including” people who don’t belong, i.e. men. A clear boundary is only a problem for those who wish to blur it in order to violate it. Why do you hate women so much, Sally? Why do you find it more important to placate men than protect women?

A girl or woman is anyone who has lived experience as a girl or woman, or identifies as a girl or woman.

How does this help women Sally? The only people who benefit from your expanded “definition” are men. Under your terms, women lose. All of the people who have ever had or will ever have “lived experience as a girl or woman” are female. Being female is a state of being such that those born into it will always accumulate “lived experience” as a woman with no effort whatsoever. All they have to do is exist and metabolize. The rest comes automatically. On the other hand there is no way at all for a male to ever have such “lived experience”, whatever the effort put into the attempt. Pretending to be a women can’t do it. Being mistaken for a woman can’t do it. “Identifying” as a woman can’t do it. No choice of wardrobe, accessories, comportment, hormones, or surgery can turn a man into a woman, a male into a female. You can’t get there from here.

However convincing my costume, no amount of time dressed as a furry will give me even a fraction of a second’s worth of “lived experience” as a lion, tiger, or bear. The only way I can “become” one of them is to be eaten by one of them. If I want to fly away as a bird, my only real option is a sky burial. But then I can’t write home about it, or enjoy any of the “lived experience” that my molecules are now having as the new species of which they’re now inhabitants and constituents. You can’t have your cake and be it too.

Womanhood isn’t something that can be won, acquired, or conferred. There’s no “gatekeeping”. It’s not a matter of some kind of evaluation or recognition of how well a given male “performs” femininity. Being female isn’t a performance. It’s not filling up a bingo card. It’s not like a coffee card where, instead of getting a free latte when the last entry is punched or stamped, you “become” a woman. That’s not how reality works. There is no authority “excluding” them, or a committee failing to admit them, it’s just life. It’s nobody’s fault or decision. No authority or pronouncement can change that. A GRC is not binding on the universe. It means nothing whatsoever. It gives its bearer no rights or privileges, or at least it shouldn’t. Appealing to argumentum ad clownfish won’t help you, though such appeals are not surprising coming from a movement owing more to postmodern literary criticism than it does to natural science. Never bring a metaphor to a biology fight. Obfuscatory word salad is no match for a gamete.

Jane Clare Jones on Musk’s Nazi salute and the quarrels over whether it was or was not a Nazi salute.

There seems to be a common conviction among several commentators in and around the anti-woke sphere that Elon Musk’s ‘awkward gesture’ at Trump’s inauguration on Monday could not possibly have been a Nazi salute and that anyone who thinks it was is probably a) stupid b) nuts or c) a sanctimonious virtue-signalling wanker posturing for woke-points. I find this easy dismissal troubling. 

There’s a lot of that kind of thing around. I think the Left has lost its tiny mind when it comes to women and trans ideology, but thinking that doesn’t make me think Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be a Nazis-admiring ratbag.

JCJ points out that Musk did make the gesture and the gesture was what it looked like.

The claim that ‘that isn’t what that was’ can’t then be a claim that that isn’t what Musk did, or isn’t what people saw, but rather, a claim that that isn’t what he meant. That is, it’s an interpretative claim, and interpretation can be a somewhat nebulous business, and is probably not something people should be making such cut-and-dried pronouncements about.

As in…he did just happen to make a very Nazi Nazi gesture, but he didn’t make a Nazi gesture.

I don’t claim to know what is in Elon Musk’s soul. All I, and other concerned observers, can do, is interpret the performance of a particular gesture within its political context, and be explicit about why we are reading the context in a certain way. That context is enormous, and unpicking its strands is one of the main things I want to do with this project. It involves, among many factors, Musk’s turning of Twitter into an engine of far-right radicalisation, to the extent that the last two years have been like watching a lot of people you thought had their heads screwed on being slowly boiled in increasingly fascist-flavoured water. It includes his many recent interventions in European politics, his support of far right and populist parties, his efforts to whip up racially motivated civil unrest, and to undermine the democratically elected government of Britian (twice!). It includes what we know about the anti-democratic, techno-feudalist, anarcho-capitalist, white supremacist, neo-reactionary ideologies that inform the worldviews of Silicon Valley’s broligarchy, many of whom lined up, literally, behind Trump on Monday. And it includes Musk’s central role in an incoming administration that has already set about rounding people up, shredding government departments, threating other sovereign nations, and releasing convicted criminals who were involved in trying to violently overturn the results of a democratic election.

Read the whole thing; it’s excellent.

Rape Crisis Scotland still crapping on women.

Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS), the organisation which provides support to rape victims, has published new guidance on how it defines a woman – saying that this is anyone who self-identifies as one.

The new document, called Draft Guidance On Protected Spaces For RCS Member Centres, says a woman can also be “someone whose sex at birth was assigned as female and lives as a woman”.

Oh gee, thanks for the permish. A woman can be a woman, but it’s second-best; the ideal kind of woman is the male kind.

The document, which has taken almost a year to prepare, aims to set out detailed guidance on the provision of women-only spaces within Scotland’s 16 rape crisis centres, along with options for inclusion of trans people.

Why? Why along with options for inclusion of trans people? Why not just include female people and leave it at that?

In the document, RCS – which receives millions in public funding – explains that when it uses the word “female” it is “signifying an ordinary biological perspective on women.”

It states: “This language has been selected as it corresponds to the language of the Equality Act in relation to the protected characteristic of sex.

“When we use ‘woman’, we mean anyone who self-identifies as a woman. We use this language as it corresponds to a gendered perspective.”

So females are women but women are men and women.

Campaigners have now criticised RCS’s long-awaited new guidance, with one describing it as “just another set of ­weasel words allowing men to continue using the service.”

Former child protection officer Jane McLenachan, of women’s rights campaign group the Evidence-Based Social Work Alliance, said: “Rape Crisis Scotland continue justifying their belief gender ideology is more important than biological sex.

“Rape Crisis centres were set up to support women who have experienced violent assault and rape by men. Victims shouldn’t have to work out this nonsensical definition of female and women before accessing services. Clear words such as ‘men who identify as transgender’ should be used instead of the obfuscated language RCS has adopted.”

But that would hurt the men’s feefees. It’s far more important to make men happy than it is to make women safe.

Brindley said: “We are committed to ensuring that anyone who needs support can access it in a way which feels safe and right for them.

“Local rape crisis centres are independent organisations overseen by their own governing bodies, who are responsible for employing staff and the operation of their services. RCS do not employ staff in local centres.

“We are working with member centres to develop a shared approach, so that no matter where in Scotland someone lives, they know what they can expect when they reach out for support from what survivors describe as a lifesaving service.”

That is, male someones know they can expect to be welcomed into rape crisis centres whether women like it or not.

Norwegians don’t mess around.

Late on Monday night, in the bright sunlit tundra of the South Pole, another record is broken as 21-year-old Norwegian Karen Kyllesø stepped past the line of national flags and stood next to the red and white striped pole representing the southernmost point on Planet Earth.

After just under 54 days of trekking 702 miles through no man’s land, Kyllesø became the youngest person ever to reach the South Pole on Skis, solo and without assistance.

Not too shabby.

That’s the one that Scott and four of his men died trying to reach first. Amundsen and his team got there ahead of him and without casualties – on skis. Scott and his team didn’t use skis. Big mistake.

Born on May 9, 2003, Kyllesø has made it a goal of hers to reach the South Pole ever since she became the youngest girl to cross Greenland on skis in 2018, being 15 at the time.

Her mentor, Lars Ebbesen told AFP, “She had barely even arrived (in Greenland) before she asked me: ‘Do you think I can also go to the South Pole?'”

This feat is guaranteed to go down in history, as Kyllesø surpassed the previous record of youngest person to ski to the South Pole, solo and unassissted by a 5 year age gap. At 26, Pierre Hedan of France first broke the record in 2024, according to Guinness World Records.

High five, Karen Kyllesø!

Sally Hines is a menace to women.

The Guardian has a detailed backgrounder on Trump’s confusion plus lying about California v water.

On his first day in office, Trump directed the secretary of commerce and the secretary of the interior to develop a new plan that will “route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply”.

Cool plan, but then what to do about the people who will desperately need a reliable water supply after Trump “fixes” things?

In a memorandum titled “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California”, Trump directed the agencies to reprise the efforts of his first administration, which challenged the state’s environmental protection regulations, and allowed more water to be pumped for agriculture and cities.

Because who needs environmental protection? Environments aren’t a real thing, they’re just some fancy idea invented by a bunch of hippies. Pump that water into cities and almond orchards until it’s all gone and everybody moves to some place where there’s water.

[T]he order, which relied heavily on misinformation about the fire disaster in Los Angeles to give urgency to the directive, showed a sweeping disconnect between Trump’s view of the issues and the intricate and layered policies already in place.

Moreover, experts told the Guardian, it could bring a new layer of turmoil to California’s complicated negotiations over water use, derailing years of discussions between state and federal officials, water policy experts, tribes, conservationists and farmers over how best to steward and distribute water.

Here’s the thing: there isn’t enough water. There’s a disconnect between California and its agriculture and its cities on the one hand and its water supply on the other. California has acted as if it had access to infinite water, but it doesn’t. This isn’t the fault of lefty wackos.

Formed at the convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the delta flows through the San Francisco Bay and out to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the largest estuary on the west coast, supplying water to roughly 30 million people, irrigating 6m acres of farmland and supporting endangered species and threatened ecosystems. It has also long been center stage in complicated and protracted conflicts over the state’s essential and increasingly sparse water resources.

Plans completed by the Biden administration and California officials, only just announced last December, have already increased the amount of water flowing to urban areas and farms, even as delta species continue to decline.

The plans were years in the making, according to water officials, and the work to find paths forward that supply millions of residents, support swaths of the $49bn agriculture industry, and leave enough in the systems for threatened ecosystems and communities severely affected by the declining waterways – including tribes that closely rely on them for sustenance and cultural identity – has been an enormous challenge.

Why’s that? Because there isn’t enough. Magic Trump can’t change that just by babbling at it (or any other way).

In posts on Truth Social over the past two weeks, Trump brought up the battles from his first term and blamed state water policies for the catastrophic outcome of the Palisades fire, which killed at least 11 people in Los Angeles earlier this month.

In a press conference on Tuesday, he repeated the critique, saying California “created an inferno”, with its water policies. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn on the valve,” he said, a confusing mischaracterization of how water systems operate.

There’s this valve, see. It sits in the Golden Valve Hall, waiting for the golden man from Queens to turn it on.

Speaking on Fox News later on Tuesday, Trump went even further, threatening to deny California federal aid to recover from the wildfires over the issue.

“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down,” he said.

There’s that “down” crap again. “Down” from where? Is he thinking there’s a giant Mount Reservoir somewhere in California, with all the water in a tub on the peak?

Experts have refuted the claims that the fires could have been stopped with more water, and in particular with more water from the delta. Los Angeles gets most of its water from other sources, including Owens Valley and the Colorado River. There was also ample water available at the time the fires erupted.

Hoses went dry during the harrowing firefights in the Pacific Palisades, not because the city was out of water but because the municipal water systems are ill-equipped to handle multiple and simultaneous withdrawals at such a scale.

Because they’re not magic. We don’t think about them much because they mostly work, but the Palisades fire wasn’t a mostly fire.

“There is no need to increase water deliveries from the Bay-Delta or any other source from which LA imports water for the region to be able to fight the current fires,” the advocacy organization LA Water Keeper said in a resource page issued to the press, adding that the real threat to the region’s water supplies was climate change.

“The sources of our water imports – Mono Lake, Bay delta, Colorado River – are drying up due to climate change, and are themselves at risk of future interruptions due to natural disasters.”

Colorado River – that’s the one that used to flow through the Grand Canyon and out to the Pacific but has now dried to a trickle in some places. We done overused it. If Trump knew things he would know this.

“Despite recent misinformation, California is delivering more water to farmers and southern regions of the state than under the Trump administration,” the office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a statement, crediting strategic negotiations with the Biden administration. “Regardless, these water flows have zero impact on the ability of first responders to address the fires in southern California.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Just turn on the valve.