Also the Rhine is shrinking.

Water levels on the Rhine River could reach a critically low point in the coming days, German officials said Wednesday, making it increasingly difficult to transport goods — including coal and gasoline — as drought and an energy crisis grip Europe.

All the same thing innit. Drought hinders transport making energy crisis worse.

From France and Italy, Europe is struggling with dry spells, shrinking waterways and heat waves that are becoming more severe and frequent because of climate change. Low water levels are another blow for industry in Germany, which is struggling with shrinking flows of natural gas that have sent prices surging.

…

HGK and other shipping companies are preparing for a

Drought declared:

A drought has been declared across wide swathes of England after a meeting of experts.

The prolonged dry conditions, with some areas of the country not receiving significant rainfall all summer, have caused the National Drought Group to declare an official drought.

The Environment Agency has moved into drought in eight of its 14 areas: Devon and Cornwall, Solent and South Downs, Kent and south London, Herts and north London, East Anglia, Thames, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, and the east Midlands.

Documents seen by the Guardian show the Environment Agency expects a further two areas will move into drought later in August. These are Yorkshire and West Midlands.

Could it be that the globe is warming?

Those

The Post reported last night:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

…

Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries

Et tu The Globe?

Our new play I, Joan shows Joan as a legendary leader who uses the pronouns ‘they/them’. We are not the first to present Joan in this way, and we will not be the last. We can't wait to share this production with everyone and discover this cultural icon.https://t.co/19T7baWsRk pic.twitter.com/lrgOC59TvQ

— Shakespeare’s Globe (@The_Globe) August 11, 2022

That’s the spirit. Let’s turn all the famous women into men. Rosa Parks can be Roger Parks. Virginia Woolf can be Victor Woolf. Ruth Bader Ginsburg can be Ralph Bader Ginsburg. Rachel Maddow can be Robert Maddow. Give them all chest binders, call them all they them, erase women from everything. What’s not to love?… Read the rest

Look at this. Look at her smiling face, her swinging hair, her cheerful smiles and nods. Look at the extra smile she gives when she says “a hysterectomy is the removal of the uterus.” Look at the grin she gives when she says the Fallopian tubes are attached to the sides of the uterus. Look how enthusiastically she shakes her head, making her hair bounce, when she says “people getting gender-affirming hysterectomies do not have to have their ovaries removed.”

It’s a thing out of nightmares.… Read the rest

They asked Trump nicely before they raided the place.

Former President Donald J. Trump received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned boxes of material he had improperly taken with him upon moving out of the White House, three people familiar with the matter said.

The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned.

In … Read the rest

There’s nothing like starting a news story with an agentless passive voice claim that doesn’t mean anything.

The Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) is being urged to reconsider its decision to ban transgender women from female contact rugby competitions due to fears it will set a “dangerous precedent” in other sports.

Oooooh really? By whom? You? Your cat?

That’s such crappy manipulative sneaky concern-mongering disguised as journalism; there ought to be professional standards against that kind of thing.

What about the fears of other dangerous precedents, like the dangerous precedent of letting men take over women’s sports? I urge the Irish Independent to pay attention to that, and to skip the passive voice intro in the future.

Para 2:

Equality

This reads more like a letter from a hostage than a policy statement from a sporting institution.

IRFU Updates Transgender Policy

The IRFU will amend its gender participation policy for rugby from the forthcoming season, based on medical and scientific evidence and in line with World Rugby guidance.

The IRFU is keenly aware that this is a sensitive and challenging area for those involved and the wider LGBT+ community and will continue to work with those impacted, providing support to ensure their ongoing involvement with the game.

Ok? Ok? Ok? We’re keenly aware, we promise we are, so so so aware, we totally get how sensitive and challenging and agonizing and torturous and sensitive it is, have we grovelled enough … Read the rest

On the one hand a law firm is working up a class action type case against the Tavistock GIDS; on the other hand a chain of banks is…doing this.

We’re so proud to sponsor this year’s Trans Festival. While we’re there, we’ll be joining a panel to talk about how businesses can support the trans community. Because everyone is welcome. pic.twitter.com/eLjbqflaYU

— NatWest (@NatWest_Help) August 11, 2022

When did banks and corporations and other profit-seeking institutions get so childish? And how, and why?… Read the rest

Some news about the law firm that is planning to sue the Tavistock GIDS:

The U.K.-based plaintiffs firm PGMBM, which operates as a partnership between British, Brazilian and American lawyers, is launching an office in Rio de Janeiro following a significant win for claimants harmed by a dam collapse at a mine co-operated by BHP Inc. in Brazil.

The firm is also changing its name globally, and will now be known as Pogust Goodhead.

…

The firm has secured a series of high-profile litigation wins over the past 12 months.

In addition to the court victory against BHP, Pogust Goodhead notched a settlement in May on behalf of 15,000 claimants against the Volkswagen Group, and in 2021 it won an

It must have been fun to be a political journalist reporting on Trump, right?

Well, no. I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure. He’d been around forever and his political act was largely derivative. His promise to “drain the swamp” was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” in 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign had vowed to “Make America Great Again” in 1980.

Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily

Originally a comment by Papito on Boston Children’s Hospital.

In many American states (I haven’t added up which ones lately), therapy for kids identified as suffering from gender dysphoria, which does not affirm their transition, is considered to be “conversion therapy,” and is illegal.

In Massachusetts, the law is HR 140, passed in 2019.

The law has specific exceptions for therapists who are encouraging children to change their gender identification to the opposite gender. It only prohibits providing therapy to children that affirms their actual sex.

This law, similar to laws in dozens of other states, all passed in the last decade, makes it possible that a therapist could not only lose his license to practice, but be … Read the rest

Boston Children’s you might want to pay close attention to this report in the Times:

The Tavistock gender clinic is facing mass legal action from youngsters who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers.

Mass legal action? How mass?

Lawyers expect about 1,000 families to join a medical negligence lawsuit alleging vulnerable children have been misdiagnosed and placed on a damaging medical pathway.

Yikes! Very mass!

They are accusing the gender identity development service [GIDS] at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust of multiple failures in its duty of care.

Starting with failing to be not credulous idiots. These are doctors, not teenagers; why did they fall for this destructive nonsense?

This includes allegations it recklessly

Someone ratted the trumpster out.

The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek.

That person had better go far away and hunker way down.

The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away.

Well duh. Nobody wants to spend time with the trumpster for the fun of it.

FBI decision-makers in Washington and

Of course he did.

Trump said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and did not answer questions during a deposition on Wednesday with New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office.

In a lengthy public statement, Trump lambasted James as a “failed politician” and accused her of having “intentionally colluded with others” in her three-year probe of the Trump Organization, calling the inquiry a political fishing expedition against his family. 

Please. That pool is so full of fish they don’t have room to swim.

The statement continued: “If there was any question in my mind, the raid of my home, Mar-a-Lago, on Monday by the FBI, just two days prior to this deposition, wiped out any uncertainty.

Polio is back:

The UK Health Security Agency said that, since early February, 116 polioviruses had been identified in 19 sewage samples from boroughs in north-east and central London including Barnet, Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Waltham Forest.

…

While a small number of polioviruses are detected in sewage in the UK each year, the large number detected over recent months is unusual, and appears to reflect transmission of the virus in the community.

…

Public health experts said it appeared such transmission was asymptomatic, and was likely to have been caused by an individual recently vaccinated with live oral polio vaccine (OPV) entering the UK. OPV generates excellent gut immunity against polio; however, people who have been recently

Wait what?

Hysterectomies at a children’s hospital???

No joke.

Meet the Center for Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital:

Gender dysphoria occurs when there is a conflict between the gender you were assigned at birth and the gender with which you identity. This can create significant distress, and you may feel uncomfortable in your body. The Center for Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital offers gender affirmation surgery services to eligible adolescents and young adults who are ready to take this step in their journey. It is the first center of its kind in the U.S. in a major pediatric hospital setting.

Well isn’t that just lovely. Congratulations on your first.

As the first pediatric center in

The Huffington Post, or Alanna Vagianos who writes for it, or both, doesn’t/don’t know which people do the baby-having.

They know, of course, but they pretend not to.

Emphasis added:

[Kris] Kobach has continually called for the Supreme Court to repeal Roe v. Wade, and believes there should be no exceptions for abortion restrictions. In 2018, Kobach supported legislation to ban all abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected. In 2004, he was a proponent of a bill that requires people seeking an abortion to get an ultrasound and mandates the state to tell patients that an abortion will cause a fetus to feel pain — an often cited anti-choice talking point that has not been scientifically proven.

Marina Hyde on The Great Intrusion:

FBI raids on former presidents; filing stuff in the U-bend – another hugely uplifting 24 hours in politics. Not for the first time, much of the most unwittingly revealing commentary on it all comes from Trump himself, who says of the raid, “nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before”. Well quite.

Well quite, indeed. Why would that be? Oooh it’s a tough one…let me think hard for a second…oh I know, couldn’t it be because no president of the US has been such a determined criminal before? Not even Nixon?

The whole business has appalled freedom-loving anti-elitist Nigel Farage, who this morning announced himself to be

Some gossip about the Conceptual James v Twitter quarrel:

Even if you’ve never heard of James Lindsay, you probably know a few of his hits.

He was part of that “grievance studies hoax” a few years back, where he and a couple of other anti-woke activists published a handful of ridiculous papers (the most headline-grabbing was arguably one about “rape culture” at Portland dog parks) in academic journals. It became known as the “Sokal Squared Hoax,” and to its admirers it was a devastating exposé of how far the humanities in higher education had sunk in service of identity politics.

The couple of other activists were Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose.

At the time, in