Speaking of Himalayan glaciers…CNBC reported a year ago:

Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting at an “exceptional” rate, according to new research that shows the massive ice sheets in the region have shrunk 10 times faster in the past four decades than during the previous seven centuries.

The research, published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports, found that mass ice loss from nearly 15,000 ice sheets in the Himalayas is especially rapid compared with other parts of the world.

The Himalayan mountains are also referred to as the third pole because they hold the world’s third-largest amount of glacier ice, following Antarctica and the Arctic. The ice melt threatens agriculture and water supply for millions of people

And speaking of violence and threats…

An example of the kind of emails you receive when you run a platform exclusively for women. pic.twitter.com/CLIS5lPrwd

— Sall Grover (@salltweets) January 4, 2023

… Read the rest

Let the bullets fly, eh?

The new Republican majority in Congress has decided to remove the metal detectors that outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed outside the House chamber after the Capitol riot on January 6, according to Rep Lauren Boebert.

“When I arrived in Congress two years ago, Nancy Pelosi put this hunk of garbage outside of the House chambers for members of Congress to go through,” Ms Boebert of Colorado said in a video in front of a metal detector being hauled down on Tuesday. “Today, they are being removed and we are turning Pelosi’s house back into the People’s House.”

When Boebert arrived in Congress two years ago it was attacked by a heavily armed mob which injured … Read the rest

Climate change means (among other things) running out of water. We’ve talked about Phoenix and water, the Sierras and water, the Colorado River and water…there are also the Alps and water.

Switzerland’s glaciers have lost more than half their volume in less than a hundred years, and the long hot summer this year has accelerated the thaw, a new study shows.

More than half gone and the melt is speeding up, so that’s not good. Since we’re not doing much of anything to stop it, it’s very bad.

The glaciers support ski resorts and attract climbers and hikers in summer, but are also essential to Europe’s water supply. Now, communities across the Alps are worrying about their future.

Just one thing about that…

A woman has become the first transgender inmate to be executed in the US, after stabbing her ex-girlfriend to death with a steak knife and dumping her body in a riverhttps://t.co/D9nuPHVytZ

— LBC (@LBC) January 4, 2023

NOT A WOMAN.… Read the rest

Deep rifts.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican congressman-elect who rose to prominence under former President Donald Trump’s wing, went rogue after the former president endorsed GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy of California for House speaker.

Gaetz told Fox News Digital that Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy for speaker has not changed the congressman’s view on the former president or GOP leader, nor has swayed his vote.

“Sad!” Gaetz said in a Wednesday statement. “This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.”

What happened to loyalty? What happened to payback? Where would Matt Gaetz be without Trump??

Gaetz wants the shirtsleeves molester guy.

Gaetz has led the House Freedom Caucus charge against the GOP leader’s speakership bid,

All the despised groups should have euphemisms, all of them. Murderers should be re-branded as population controllers and rapists should be called admirers of women. Jo Bartosch at spiked:

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Police Scotland were blasted for referring to those who abuse children as ‘minor-attracted people’, or ‘MAP’, in a report for a European Commission project.

As euphemisms go, that’s a pretty terrible one, because of course the issue isn’t attraction, it’s abuse. The issue with rapists isn’t attraction, it’s rape, and it works the same way with the rape or molestation of children.

After an online backlash, Police Scotland were quick to point out that the phrase ‘minor-attracted people’ was a quote from

Scandal in Wisconsin:

Early in 2020, an Indigenous artist urged the owners of a new music venue in [Madison] to change its name. 

It was called The Winnebago, after the street on which it stands. Many Indigenous people and allies let the owners know that wasn’t the best name for a white-owned music venue. One of them was nibiiwakamigkwe, also known as Kay LeClaire, a founding member and co-owner of the queer Indigenous artists’ collective giige, and budding leader of Madison’s Indigenous arts community.

I don’t think it’s all that clear that using indigenous names is bad if you’re not indigenous. You could be promoting awareness of indigenous culture, which could be not bad, it seems to me.

Anyway … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Holms on Marjorie.

For the last twenty years or so, there has been a strong push for movies, tv shows, theatrical productions (etc.) to have more widely representative characters and casts. Fewer male characters, more female; fewer white, more of every other ethnicity; fewer straight, more of other sexualities. It was emphasised that these characters were not to be reductive cliches. Further, this popular push emphasised that this was especially applicable to the lead role.

The reasoning was simple, and well understood by the left. People of demographic combinations other than ‘white male’ deserve to see themselves represented in movies, and not as insulting caricatures. Kids especially deserve to see their sex and/or skin colour … Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on Where are the skeptics?

Harald Hanche-Olsen@22ish

Your point reminds me of the characterisation of social media as Skinner Boxes, which I’ve written about here before. The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear and obviously designed to encourage people to take increasingly outspoken positions in the everlasting hunt for likes as returns diminish.

And of course once you’ve gone down one trouser leg of validation, it’s rather hard to come back. I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy is quite up to describing this effect because the increasing apparent conviction is based on diminishing returns for increasingly wild claims.

This is the only explanation I can come up with for the constant over-reaching of gender identity … Read the rest

Robert Reich points out that the Republican party veered into incoherence when it tried to combine libertarianism with cultural conservatism.

That kind of incoherence is inevitable though, when you have on the one hand two political parties and on the other hand more than two political philosophies or orientations or whatever you want to call them. It applies just as much to the Dems – they’re way too conservative on most issues for my liking, but they’re all there is.

The party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby created an opening for a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.

Or centering on whatever exactly it was that they saw in Trump. … Read the rest

Julie Bindel at Unherd:

In 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then rape their victims before pimping them to multiple men in exchange for alcohol, cigarettes and food.

…

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national

The Guardian heralds another first:

Missouri set to become first state to execute an openly transgender person

Progress! No, wait, that’s not what we mean. What do we mean? Uhh………..

Amber McLaughlin is facing the fate on Tuesday of becoming the first openly transgender person to be executed in the US – unless Missouri’s governor, Mike Parson, grants clemency and puts a stop to the planned lethal injection.

First transgender person but not first man.

Punishment by execution is a bad thing, but it doesn’t become worse because the executed person is a man who claims to be a woman.

There are no further court appeals pending. The clemency request focuses on several issues, including McLaughlin’s severely traumatic childhood and

Gee, I wonder why women get so angry about this kind of thing; I just can’t understand it.

Marjorie Roome is an extraordinary but real example of what happens to women's sport when men are allowed to compete in women's categories.
Marjorie is a man who says he 'identifies' as a woman. He took up indoor rowing and has been allowed to compete in women's championships 1/4 pic.twitter.com/foZI32LWBU

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) January 1, 2023

He won the 65-69 women's world championships every year and is now in his 70s. In 2022 he broke the British record for the 70-74 age category. However, most women now refuse to compete against him and Marjorie, a man, is typically the only competitor in

Paul Fidalgo has an interesting piece in Free Inquiry (where he is now the editor-in-chief).

Tim Minchin Reaches across the Algorithmic Chasm

Nice title, too.

In a “lecture” portion of his show recently posted online, which is introduced as being a “TED Talk” on confirmation bias, Minchin (winner of CFI’s 2021 Richard Dawkins Award) teases apart what he sees as the worsening phenomenon of tribalism, wherein the political right has come to hold bewilderingly absolutist, contradictory, nonsensical, and bigoted beliefs, while progressives have turned on themselves, creating an endless fractal of mini-tribes that are constantly ejecting their members over increasingly minor ideological infractions.

Also over what I would consider not infractions at all. Progressives have lost their grip on … Read the rest

Now we get to read the texts and phone logs and such from Trump’s Big Day.

The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.

The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win.

This will keep us busy for weeks.

Hope Hicks, to … Read the rest

In case anyone’s feeling like shedding a tear for Pope Benny (unlikely, I know), here’s a reminder from 2009:

The Catholic Church (and Pope Benedict XVI) were presented with a public-relations powder keg in March when news broke that a 9-year-old Brazilian girl underwent an abortion after she’d been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Catholics from São Paulo to Paris were outraged by the swift public declaration of the local Archbishop, José Cardoso Sobrinho, that the girl’s family as well as the doctors who performed the abortion were automatically excommunicated.

What, just because the local archbishop valued the “life” of the process inside the 9-year-old girl more than the very actual life of the girl herself? … Read the rest

Jordan Peterson is notoriously a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.

Example:

The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you're "allowed" to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea–and, make no mistake, it's part of a well-documented plan. https://t.co/QRrjVF615q

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 31, 2022

Ah yes, we live in that utopia where nobody decides were anybody can drive, so there are no freeways or highways or roads.… Read the rest

Oh ffs.

'So a woman can have a penis?'

Nick Ferrari puts Sir Keir Starmer on the spot amid a row over trans athletes.#LBCBestof2022 @NickFerrariLBC pic.twitter.com/Jh6AGy95Wg

— LBC (@LBC) January 1, 2023

And Sir Keir whines and gesticulates and flails like an idiot. He finally manages to utter the complete sentence “I don’t think discussing the issue in this way helps anyone.”

It helps women you fucking fool. This exciting new fad for pretending men can become women by saying so is bad for women, and men in power brushing that off is also bad for women. It does help us to keep reminding men in power like you that letting men pretend to be women and … Read the rest

Yet another one of these.

“Tiffany Newell” new Canadian Record in Masters Women Indoor 5000m run for the age group 45-49.

More than a stolen award from women athletes, this is a record that's been ratified because “Tiffany” apparently has “met all the World Athletics requirements to compete as a woman” pic.twitter.com/aCUCi7NPpr

— Amy E. Sousa (@KnownHeretic) December 30, 2022

“Tiffany” of course is not a woman.

This is Paula James, who held the Canadian F45 record before Newell. https://t.co/e76VOAshaa pic.twitter.com/AHSgaUWszH

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) December 31, 2022

Sucks for Paula James, doesn’t it.

We know that female athletes lose performance between the ages of 45-55. We know that this is the effect of peri/menopause.

I know how hard it