More on the Yellowknife evacuations:

This is Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 265 in the Northwest Territories. Experts say climate change has exacerbated the wildfire problem.

Drought has been a contributing factor to the number and intensity of this year’s fires, officials say, with high temperatures exacerbating the situation. Much of Canada has seen abnormally dry conditions.

Shane Thompson, the territorial environment minister, said the evacuation order had been issued late Wednesday to give people time to get out before the weather turned bad.

“The urgency is, fire changes drastically … the conditions are in our favor right now, but that will change on Saturday,” he told the CBC.

The show must go on… pic.twitter.com/VF8L9FHxah

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) August 17, 2023

… Read the rest

Oh shut up bro.

There’s no such thing as “cis” female pals, much less feminist ones. Women are in no need of a prefix or adjective to indicate that we are women, because the word “women” already does that. “Cis” is superfluous. It’s there to trick us into thinking there are two kinds of women, the female kind and the male kind. There aren’t. There is only the one.

It’s perfectly possible to “support trans people” without insisting that men can be women.

If empathy is a good thing why not have some for women? There are a hell of a lot more women than there are men who call themselves women, so why all the exaggerated concern for … Read the rest

Farking hell.

The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC isn’t naming the website for obvious reasons.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. District Attorney Fani Willis faced racist threats ahead of the return of the indictment, and additional security measures were put in place, with some employees being allowed to work from home.

The grand jurors’ purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for

There are norms, and there are laws. Trump likes to smash both.

The Trump presidency generated an enormous amount of discussion about “norms”—the unwritten rules of American political life that everyone tacitly agrees to and that keep democracy functioning. Many of these norms had been somewhat invisible until Trump began shattering them, by doing things like profiting from his business during his time in office or demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political enemies.

But what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious

His what?

Former President Donald Trump’s promised press conference to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton County DA’s Office is now very much in doubt, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

He wants to blather about the indictment in a press conference? Is there any limit to his stupidity?

Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisors have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.

Trump announced the planned press conference with a social media post shortly after he and 18 co-defendants were indicted late Monday in

How we live now:

Yellowknife residents have been ordered to begin evacuating the city immediately as wildfires approach, N.W.T. officials said Wednesday evening.

While the city is not in immediate danger, Environment Minister Shane Thompson said a “phased approach” to evacuating will allow citizens to get out safely by car or by plane.

People most at risk go now, the rest have until noon tomorrow.

“The fire now represents a real threat to the city,” Thompson said at a news conference Wednesday evening, adding it could reach the outskirts of the city by the weekend. The fire was about 17 kilometres from the city on Wednesday, he said.

…

Thompson said Wednesday that the highway from Yellowknife to Alberta is safe to

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on WHO snake oil.

A small logical, and ethical, point: The claim that most Western countries are ‘the least racist countries there has (sic) ever been, anywhere’, whether it is true or not (I happen to think it largely true), does not entail that no racism occurs in them, nor that instances of racism should be ignored. And we might remember that the existence of these ‘least racist’ societies has depended upon people struggling to achieve fairness & justice. I wonder on which side certain commentators would have been on fifty, a hundred, or 150 years ago? I wonder also why, say, the Windrush business in the UK, or Republican efforts to suppress … Read the rest

How disgusting.

An Israeli journalist reported being pressured to change seats on an international flight on Tuesday, complaining that she was told by airline staff that any flight delays caused by ultra-Orthodox men attempting to enforce gender segregation would be her fault.

In a tweet, Neria Kraus, a U.S.-based correspondent for Channel 13 News, wrote that she had been asked to move by ultra-Orthodox men and alleged that she received no assistance after she turned to the Delta Air Lines flight crew for help.

Burying the lede. Why wasn’t the important bit in the first paragraph? Male religious fanatics tried to force a woman out of her seat because they think women are too filthy and whorey to sit … Read the rest

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Here is a thought experiment about academia.  Let us imagine that, about 40 years ago, a few academic operators had invented a newish subject called “Critical Chemical Studies”.   The focus of this subject would not be actual chemicals, but rather the language used in writing or talking about  Chemistry:  catalogues of the frequency of words like element, molecule, valence,  bond,  reaction, intermediate, rate, etc. etc.; and then endless gabble about the philosophical implications of the words’ spelling,  font type, sound, pronunciation, association, and usage.

    Before long, journals would be established to publish disquisitions in this vein.  The scholars of Critical Chemical Studies would not need laboratories, beakers, or spectrophotometers, for they would not … Read the rest

Talk about an own goal.

Unintentionally rather makes Glinner’s point for him given he valiantly stands with us gay people deeply concerned about the experimental genital mutilation carried out on the vulnerable young in our community in the name of gender. pic.twitter.com/d9sde9MgiX

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) August 16, 2023

FGM he says? FGM??????? GM is what trans ideology DOES to its believers. Trans ideology does “espouse” gender mutilation, along with breast removal and puberty blocking and related horrors. Of all things to choose to illustrate “You wouldn’t talk that way about _____” he chose genital mutilation. Think, man, think.… Read the rest

Interesting. Prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers in an opinion piece at CNN:

RICO also carries sentencing benefits. A conviction under Georgia’s RICO law would carry a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years, and most of the other 40 charges in the indictment likewise involve mandatory minimum sentences of one year.

None of the other charged cases include a mandatory minimum, upping the stakes for a Georgia conviction not only for Trump, but his co-conspirators, who will be deciding in the coming weeks and months whether they want to take a plea deal that might help them avoid this consequence by allowing them to plead to a count without mandatory minimum penalties.

Here’s hoping they all abandon him, every last one … Read the rest

In another part of the Fringe…

So there! Nyah!… Read the rest

BBC insults women with a headline:

Celebrity MasterChef: Cheryl Hole on why LGBTQ+ representation is important

So the BBC is cool with calling women “holes”?

Drag artist Cheryl Hole said LGBTQ+ representation on shows like Celebrity MasterChef is important with “the community under attack”.

She appears in the penultimate week of heats of the celebrity cooking show.

Is “Hole” a drag artist or a she? He can’t be both, now can he – only males can do female drag, because that’s what drag means.… Read the rest

Why on earth does the WHO do this?

[Ignore the first tweet.]

That crap isn’t a “first stop for health and well-being,” it’s just woo.… Read the rest

Joan Smith asks what Humza Yousaf thinks he’s doing talking about toxic masculinity.

“Men cannot be passive bystanders when it is our actions that are causing such pain, suffering and misery,” he declares.

The pain of being punched in the face for supporting women’s rights, for instance? The suffering that comes from being locked up in a women’s prison with a convicted rapist? Or the misery of being forced to refer to the man who attacked you as “she” in court because he “identifies” as a woman?

Noooo. Women who don’t comply with the orders issued by men who claim to be women don’t count as women or as having pain.

Of course not. Giving a woman a black eye 

A shocking headline:

Seven police interviewed, station raided over ‘false’ non-binary claims

Victoria Police officers have searched the force’s Frankston station and interviewed several officers accused of claiming to be non-binary to fraudulently claim more money for civilian clothing allowances.

You mean claiming to be non-binary when they’re not actually non-binary?

So…how can they tell? What’s the difference? What were they searching for when they searched the station? Binary fingerprints? Binary clothes, binary badges, binary socks? What? What exactly is there to search for? What is the difference between real non-binary and fake non-binary? What happened to “people are who they say they are”?

Chief Commissioner Shane Patton announced a probe into the issue in July, after reports that some

The Herald on Leith Arches and its smug abrupt rude cancellation of a scheduled event because Leith Arches doesn’t like its “views.”

An Edinburgh Fringe venue has axed a show involving Father Ted creator Graham Linehan following a number of complaints.

“You can’t have a show involving Graham Linehan, he knows which people are women!!!”

The writer was the “surprise famous cancelled comedian” at the night being promoted by Comedy Unleashed at the Leith Arches.

He was due to appear in the show alongside Bruce Devlin, Mary Bourke, Dominic Frisby and Alistair Williams on Thursday night.

Today is Tuesday. How charming of Leith Arches to do this with all of two days’ notice. What exquisite manners.

Taking to X, formerly known

It may be unlawful but it’s super enlightened, so no one will mind.

So Leith Arches wants to be number 7 on this list?

How many more before businesses learn that this is unlawful ? https://t.co/XQzghJe5co pic.twitter.com/rppwsAtrnh

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) August 15, 2023

It’s more coherent and human-grammar-based than the first frenzied Announcement, but it’s just as ridiculous.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Now ineligible.

Beware of anyone telling you there are clear answers here.

I’m sympathetic to the arguments in the paper, though I wouldn’t draw any conclusions without hearing an opposing view. But even the authors of that paper concede that the major precedent on the “self-executing” issue is a case from shortly after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and it’s by the then-Chief Justice Salmon Chase (in his capacity as a circuit justice), and it comes out the other way.

I don’t want to get into a long discussion about stare decisis and such. Suffice it to say that it’s a perfectly acceptable argument to say that Chief Justice Chase got … Read the rest