Much of Pakistan is under water.

Heavy rains over two months have caused the worst flooding in more than a decade and damaged more than 1m homes.

[UN secretary general António] Guterres said on Tuesday that south Asia was a hotspot for the climate crisis and that the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan that has left tens of millions needing help was a warning to every nation of the destruction wreaked by human-caused global heating.

…

Flash floods fuelled by the climate crisis have affected more than 33 million people, officials have said. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDA) said on Monday the death toll from the monsoon rains and floods in Pakistan had reached 1,136 – with 75 killed

The absolute minimum sea level rise that’s already inevitable, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels right this second, is bad enough. We are, of course, not stopping the burning right this second, or tomorrow, or in ten years.

Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight.

…

“It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Prof Jason Box from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus), who led the research. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

…

Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and the Alps

All these years I thought, or assumed without thinking about it much, that “custard powder/instant custard” was actually custard in powder form. Today I learned otherwise. I saw this –

Those two packets above the porridge oats are custard powder. Even though we were told to ignore the custard, I became curious about how much protein was actually in the custard powder, figuring it was not much. (There’s been some chat about Monroe’s food advice over the past couple of days, and she does seem to me to have some odd ideas, or at least say odd things, like that oats and mushrooms are good sources of protein.) SO I looked it up, and was mildly shocked to find … Read the rest

Also in Trump today: demanding an immediate re-do of the election.

Philip Bump asks innocently what is the difference between warnings and threats.

…there is an important difference between understanding the existing threat and leveraging it.

In an interview on Fox News on Sunday evening, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rationalized why Trump supporters would be furious at an indictment.

“There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump,” Graham told host Trey Gowdy.

As we’ve already noted, of course there isn’t. Hillary Clinton didn’t take boxes of White House documents home with her in January 2001 or 2016, much less spread them around a large golf club and brag about them on social media. Hillary Clinton didn’t steal top secret documents and refuse to give them back when asked politely … Read the rest

A whopping catch-22:

A judge ruled this morning that Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp must testify before a special grand jury that’s investigating possible illegal attempts by then-president Donald Trump and others to influence the 2020 election in the state – but not until after the November midterm election, the Associated Press reports.

See, this is a problem. It’s clear enough why it’s not desirable to have criminal investigations of political candidates happening close to an election, but, and this is a huge “but,” it’s also not desirable to remain in ignorance of the criminality or complicity in criminality of political candidates until it’s too late. You see what I mean? We get why Kemp doesn’t want to be … Read the rest

The move now is to threaten violence if the criminal Trump is treated like the criminal he is.

Amid growing fears about political violence in the US, a senior Republican senator predicted “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is prosecuted for mishandling classified information.

For “mishandling” top secret classified information by stealing it and keeping it in his hotel, including leaving it lying around in the open while fake Rothschilds wandered around the place.

Graham said: “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him. There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump.”

Really. What other ex-president has stolen whole boxes of top secret documents and … Read the rest

In snooker news –

Jamie Hunter has won her first ranking title with victory in the US Women’s Snooker Open on Sunday in Seattle.

The Englishwoman secured the biggest triumph of her career so far with a 4-1 defeat of pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna in the final.

Hunter comfortably advanced from the initial round-robin phase with four successive 2-0 wins to earn a spot in the quarter-finals.

There’s just one tiny detail not mentioned in the article – Hunter is not a woman. The Daily Star is more forthcoming, aka more honest.

WPBSA chairman Jason Ferguson has congratulated Jamie Hunter after she became the first transgender player to win a ranking event.

Hunter, who came out as transgender in

Representation:

I’m always hungry for historical queer representation,” says Charlie Josephine, the non-binary playwright of I, Joan, a sweaty, heady, joyously queer new drama about the patron saint of France. “Because our history has been erased – particularly transgender people’s – there is very limited documentation of us throughout history, even though we have existed since the beginning of time.”

Whose history? “Queer” people’s? So the fix is to erase the history of women?

To Josephine, Joan being written as non-binary felt both obvious and natural. “I could have written this play as a cis woman who is feminist and passionate about expressing themselves in this way,” says Josephine, shrugging the idea away. “But the more I read

Originally a comment by Rob on Watch out: too girly!

I’m not at all convinced that the style of learning has a big impact on whether boys or girls do better. As a purely anecdotal point, I always did much better with internal assessment and assignments, because my technique and discipline for a single end of year exams swot absolutely sucked.

I suspect the biggest factor in declining male academic success is simply that over recent decades male heroes and role models are no longer scientists, engineers, academics, poets or ‘elites’ generally. They’re anti-heroes, the fighters, drinkers, womanisers, sneerers. In fact, engineers, scientists, or educated males in popular culture are more likely to be cast in either the role of … Read the rest

Climate crisis/rising energy cost solved – just do everything at the office.

This is apparently meant as serious advice:

Office workers could be better off at their desks than working from home from October because of the money they will save on heating, making coffee and charging devices.

Becoming an energy freeloader who outsources the bulk of their consumption to their office, local café or gym over the next few months could save you about £28 a week, roughly £120 a month, from October.

This assumes you worked in the office five days a week and charged a phone, laptop and smart watch while you were there, made two cups of tea or coffee and reheated your lunch, and

The BBC craps on lesbians from a very great height. Headline:

No place for hate, says Pride Cymru after Cardiff protest

So it was a homophobic protest?

Pride Cymru has said there is “no place for hate” after protesters interrupted an LGBTQ+ march in Cardiff.

A video emerged on social media showing police asking a group to leave for safety reasons on Saturday.

South Wales Police said no arrests were made after a “small protest group” had “assembled themselves on the route to block the procession”.

Bigots, right? A small group of fundamentalists perhaps?

Protest organisers Get The L Out were carrying banners, including one which read “transactivism erases lesbians”.

Ohhhhh…not god-botherers, not the God Hates Fags crew, but … Read the rest

Julie Bindel on lesbians and Pride:

The lesbian group Get The L Out UK, founded to protest gender ideology and the pressure on same-sex attracted women to date trans women, joined Pride Cymru yesterday to make their voices heard amidst a sea of hostility. Ever since the trans movement decided that lesbians who reject sleeping with trans women are somehow morally deficient, same-sex attracted women have been harassed, defamed and abused in the name of trans equality. Get the L Out represent those old-fashioned lesbians that reject the penis and all that is attached to it.

“All that is attached to it” is witty.

The women at Pride Cymru were carrying banners adorned with the words, ‘trans activism

Andrew Weissmann, who was a senior prosecutor in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, clarifies some things.

The release of the redacted affidavit provides further clarity on why Attorney General Merrick Garland took the extraordinary step of approving the search of certain locations at Mar-a-Lago. The short version is that nothing else had worked and top-secret information was at stake.

Trump tried to leverage the search of Mar-a-Lago into a shocking violation of Trump’s rights and privileges and holy status as god-emperor, but it’s the other way around – the necessity of searching Mar-a-Lago underlines Trump’s repeated criminal refusals to return the documents he stole. It was a crime to take them and it … Read the rest

The head of Vale of Glamorgan Council calls lesbians at a Pride march “hate-filled protesters.”

Love? She calls it love? She calls a malicious lie about lesbians at Pride “love”?

On Twitter right now: the leader of a trade union condemning peaceful protests; the former leader of the Green Party denouncing a protest at the abolition of a same-sex institution in her own ward; the leader of a Welsh council reviling lesbians for asserting their homosexuality.

— Simon Edge (@simonjedge) August 28, 2022

But the time for that is over. When the leader of Vale of Glamorgan council blocks gay people for pointing out that lesbians have the right to be lesbians, she has taken the side of the

Joan Smith reviews the new JK Rowling novel:

Like its predecessor, The Ink Black Heart is a doorstopper, giving Rowling space to explore the psychology of individuals who abuse women online, but it is evidence of her ingenuity as a writer that this intention only gradually becomes clear.

…

“He’s convinced people I worked as a prostitute when I was broke,” Edie tells Robin. “He sent me pictures of my dead mother, claiming I told lies about her death. And the fandom believes all of it, and they attack me for stuff I’ve never done, never said, things I don’t believe.” The final sentence is not just heartfelt, it could be Rowling speaking about herself after a couple of

Academic debate 2022:

This promises to be a lively exchange of idea pic.twitter.com/gJ8gnPlHWW

— Tomas Bogardus (@TomasBogardus) August 26, 2022

There is but one Idea, and many academics to exchange it.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Army Ant on People became slotted.

This isn’t surprising at all. Anthropologists are very in love with all types of quackery (cultural relativism, post-structuralism, etc). It isn’t even a new phenomenon, BTW – they’ve been like this for several decades now. They also often seriously say things like (paraphrased, of course) “there’s no objective reality”, and basically that a cultural group’s emotional truth about its past/history is objective truth or at least should be treated as such.

This bullshit claim that sequential hermaphrodites (like clownfish and some arachnids) somehow “prove” biological sex isn’t real or that there aren’t just two of them is so utterly asinine. It’s akin to one of those “age sliders” claiming … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on People became slotted.

“It’s not just complex in the context of intersex … Our bodies are far more variable than our categories.”

This makes it sound like people with DSD (or “intersex” *as they would rather not be called), are more numerous than they really are, and their existence somehow blurs sex into a spectrum, ruining our ability to figure out who is male and who is female. It’s like saying that the existence of conjoined twins throws into doubt the classification of humans as bipedal tetrapods, and that to question that human limb number is anything but a spectrum is hateful bigotry.

Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and

There was a protest at the Hampstead Ladies Pond today. No doubt that’s why India Willoughby went there and took his gloating taunting misogynist selfie.

#LetWomenSwim Hampstead Heath Ladies' Pond 1pm today pic.twitter.com/gYORVDrBrx

— Women Of Camden & NW London (@WomenOfCamden) August 27, 2022

Here we are at the Stone of Free Speech on Hampstead Heath #LetWomenSwim @roseveniceallan pic.twitter.com/1Kc7OTM4e7

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) August 27, 2022

@MForstater & Kellie-Jay
👑 #LetWomenSwim pic.twitter.com/Q1p6wGwJ6F

— Let Women Speak Official (@StandingforXX) August 27, 2022

Thanks to all who came today.

This is us#AdultHumanFemales#LetWomenSwim pic.twitter.com/9LQiDyMVHz

— Let Women Speak Official (@StandingforXX) August 27, 2022

Really joyful mood at Hampstead Ladies Pond #LetWomenSwim pic.twitter.com/8GwHZ4Wkpi

— The Dinosaur In Black (@DinosaurInBlack) August 27, 2022