I guess NPR has been completely taken over by the teenagers. Actual headline:

J.K. Rowling’s new book, about a transphobe who faces wrath online, raises eyebrows

As if “transphobe” were just a normal adult word like “woman” or “feminist” or “liberal”as opposed to part of the jargon of a new and destructive pseudo-political fad.

Observers noted that the plot appears to mirror Rowling’s own experience of taking heat and losing fans for expressing transphobic views in recent years. 

There it is again – “transphobic views,” as if we all agreed that there’s such a thing as “transphobia” and that “transphobic views” are clearly evil and to be shunned. Does NPR think no adults at all read or listen to … Read the rest

The future is here: the Guardian reminds us that a third of Pakistan is under water. Much of Pakistan is high mountains where people don’t live, but that won’t be the third that’s under water – so I’m guessing it’s substantially more than a third of the livable part of Pakistan. The photos are horrifying – rooftops and treetops and everything else water. Meanwhile cruise ships continue to burn their 80 thousand gallons a day.

As the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) launched an appeal to raise funds for the 33 million people affected, the European Space Agency released stark images based on data captured by its Copernicus satellite.

Those pictures appear to confirm the Pakistani government’s assessment that

Evil fascist wants to pardon the evil fascists who tried to impose a fascist takeover on what remains of the US:

Donald Trump said on Thursday he would pardon and apologize to those who participated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol on January 6 if he were elected to the White House again.

That’s nice. That’s charming. They killed several people, they tried to kill a bunch of legislators, they injured many, they wanted to overturn an election and install a corrupt idiot as dictator – the very same corrupt idiot who now threatens to apologize to them if we in the US are fascist enough to elect him a second time.

“I mean full pardons with an

Some of Trump’s lawyers may live to regret being his lawyers.

Two lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump are likely to become witnesses or targets in the investigation into how he hoarded documents marked as classified at his Florida estate — and secretly held onto some even after they claimed all sensitive materials had been returned, legal specialists said.

The lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, handled Mr. Trump’s interactions with the government over a subpoena in May seeking additional material marked as classified. In a court filing late Tuesday, the Justice Department strongly suggested that people in Mr. Trump’s circle concealed documents in defiance of that subpoena, putting a spotlight on the role of his

Sarah Palin LOST.

The Democrat Mary Peltola has won the special election for Alaska’s only US House seat, becoming the first Alaska Native to serve in the House after beating candidates including the Republican Sarah Palin.

Peltola, 49, who is Yup’ik, is also the first woman to hold the seat and the first from her party to gain the seat in more than half a century. During the campaign, she emphasized her support for such issues as abortion rights. She will serve the remaining months of the late Republican US Representative Don Young’s term until a general election in November.

Palin, the state’s former governor, had the backing of Donald Trump and was hoping to make a political

Lord of the Flies in Lancs:

Children as young as 11 have been subjected to brutal attacks by teenagers in a Lancashire town – with the assaults filmed and shared on social media.

Victims’ mothers say police aren’t doing enough to stop the group and have taken matters into their own hands.

They shared the videos with the BBC and urged showing them.

The videos show children being dragged to the ground – squealing and crying out as they try to shield their heads from kicks and punches. Voices of others can be heard, off-camera, egging-on the attackers.

Filming such violence and humiliation, and then sharing it online, has become known by the term “patterning” – with the aim

It turns out that Trump’s attempt to stall the Justice Department gave them an opportunity to hang him out to dry.

Former President Donald J. Trump may have thought that he was playing offense when he asked a federal judge last week for an independent review of documents seized from his residence in Florida — a move that, at best, could delay but not derail an investigation into his handling of the records.

But on Tuesday night, the Justice Department used a routine court filing in the matter to initiate a blistering counteroffensive that disclosed new evidence that Mr. Trump and his legal team may have interfered with the inquiry.

Like that photograph for instance.

In what read at times

Some said motte and bailey, I said bait and switch, others said it’s just plain lying.

What is this rhetorical strategy, where you omit the relevantly-controversial part of a debate (competing rights) to fool your audience that all the fuss is focussed on the uncontroversial part (live how you want)?

It must have a name? https://t.co/7oUPsAVGlE

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) August 30, 2022

Anyway. What Chris Bryant said. Caller asks: “What does it actually mean to transition?”

Chris Bryant replies:

I think I’ve answered your question and [shaking head in sorrow] I’ll tell you – something that really frightens me at the moment – is politicians who want to use this issue to stir division – because for me –

Why does Trump think it helps him to claim that he “declassified” all the documents? That would make it worse, not better. The issue isn’t one of nomenclature, or cataloging.

Donald Trump is repeating his assertion, debunked in the justice department’s legal filing, that he “declassified” the top secret documents seized by the FBI in their raid on his Florida home.

He “declassified” them so that he could do whatever he wanted with them. Yeah that’s not exculpatory. This isn’t some empty ritual; the point is that the documents are secret and meant to remain secret.

Among a series of posts by the former president on his favored Truth Social platform on Wednesday, he also accused federal agents of

Great god almighty.

Dr. Scott Mosser admits they have "secret missions" to normalize child sex change surgery at the Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco, no minimum age "at all" to get sex change surgery and he has done sex change surgeries on 13 year olds. This is what pure evil looks like. pic.twitter.com/uL5EXn3ncH

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 31, 2022

He’s “always been drawn to things that are deeply impactful” – like mutilating children’s genitals.

“We try to live with our values thirty to forty years in the future,” he says. “So and that puts us in a mindset of extreme affirmation cuz affirmation at that time is a foregone conclusion.”

Does he then explain how he knows … Read the rest

That Times piece on the perjury and treason of Trump and his lawyers is too dense for one post.

Investigators developed evidence that “government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago after the Justice Department sent Mr. Trump’s office a subpoena for any remaining documents with classified markings. That led prosecutors to conclude that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the government filing said.

The DoJ said give us the documents. Trump and his people hid two thirds of the documents, and his people told the FBI “That’s all of it.” Under oath.

You have to wonder what his people were thinking. Maybe Trump had convinced them that he still had such … Read the rest

New information about Trump’s systematic lying and concealment:

The Justice Department sought a search warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida after obtaining evidence that highly classified documents were likely concealed and that Mr. Trump’s representatives had falsely claimed all sensitive material had been returned, according to a court filing by the department on Tuesday.

In other words Trump’s people lied to the feds about highly classified documents.

The filing came in response to Mr. Trump’s request for an independent review of materials seized from his home, Mar-a-Lago. But it went far beyond that, painting the clearest picture yet of the department’s efforts to retrieve the documents before taking the extraordinary step of searching a former

Well Jackson, Mississippi is only the state capital and the largest city.

Some 180,000 residents in Jackson, Mississippi have “indefinitely” lost access to reliable running water after excessive rainfall and flooding.

That happened to New Orleans after Katrina, too. Remember? People desperately begging reporters for water to drink. Many people died because there was no drinking water.

Rising floodwaters over the weekend breached the city’s main water treatment facility, bringing it to the brink of collapse.

…Both the city and state are distributing bottled drinking water to residents as well as non-potable water via tanker truck.

I hope they’re distributing the drinking water in mass quantities and very fast. Death from dehydration is swift.

The southern state’s capital is more

Even if we turned it around right this second the sea levels would still rise. Also: we’re not turning it around right this second. We’re not even slowing it.

Research based on satellite measurements of ice losses from Greenland and the shape of the ice cap from 2000-19 has allowed scientists to calculate how the climate crisis has pushed the ice sheet from an equilibrium where snowfall matches the ice lost.

They found that a minimum 10.6in sea-level rise is inevitable regardless of action to limit carbon emissions after 110tn tonnes of the Greenland ice cap melted. A multi-metre sea-level rise also appears likely as the trajectory of environmental damage continues.

“The minimum of 27cm is the sea-level rise

Also the floods in Pakistan aren’t just “floods” – that is, not just expanses of water or torrents of water. They’re torrents of ROCK. Take a look.

Hard to comprehend the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan, the 5th most populated nation in the world.

Nearly 1400 dead, 1 million houses damaged or destroyed, and 50,000,000 people displaced.

1/3 of the country is underwater.pic.twitter.com/NFd15q3g7I

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) August 30, 2022

… Read the rest

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