Also speaking of cruise ships…

On the fourth day of a seven-day Mexican Riviera cruise, Jesse Suphan and other passengers onboard the Carnival Cruise Line’s Panorama were denied entry at the port of Puerto Vallarta, because of the number of onboard coronavirus cases. That was the first Mr. Suphan heard about the virus spreading on the ship.

“The captain announced that five people had tested positive for Covid and were quarantining,” Mr. Suphan, a 39-year-old revenue cycle manager, recalled in a telephone interview. “But, then, talking to the crew, they told me there were between 100 and 150 crew members who also tested positive, but the captain didn’t mention that.”

Well naturally not. That might have a harmful effect … Read the rest

Speaking of cruise ships…

The Crystal Symphony left Miami on Jan. 8, as scheduled, on a two-week cruise. On the way back, things took an unexpected turn.

The climate changed?

The ship was scheduled to arrive in Miami on Saturday, but mid-trip, a United States federal judge ordered the cruise ship seized over a lawsuit regarding unpaid fuel bills. The ship changed course for Bimini, in the Bahamas, according to a cruise tracker, rather than sail into the clutches of federal authorities.

In other words the ship went on the lam. Such an ethical industry.

Steven Fales, 51, an actor and playwright, was on the cruise with a couple of friends “hoping that the pandemic would end and trying

… Read the rest

The Gwent cops certainly seem terrified about these OffenSive posters.

We are investigating a number of posters containing offensive material being installed throughout #Newport.

Please do not remove any posters yourself. Instead, call 101 or send us a direct message on social media. The relative authority will then be alerted to safely remove.

— Gwent Police | Newport Officers (@GPNewport) January 21, 2022

“Safely” remove – because they’re radioactive, you see, and poisonous, and wired to explode, and laced with razor blades. Stay 500 feet back and summon the helicopters.

Although this may explain why you dislike women talking about DV.https://t.co/p2Xg7GJLce

— For Women Scotland (@ForWomenScot) January 24, 2022

Well no wonder they’re mad at women. Male … Read the rest

The dangerous sticker-poster tells the story herself:

https://twitter.com/quetiapina1/status/1485524288195244035 https://twitter.com/quetiapina1/status/1485524297141694464 https://twitter.com/quetiapina1/status/1485524301176528898

Meanwhile rape is hardly ever prosecuted. Let’s look at the stats in Gwent, shall we?

MORE than 500 alleged rapes were reported in 2021 – but only five charges were made, according to Gwent Police figures.

Only five charges have come from the incidents, however a large majority of the reported cases – 436 – are still under investigation. Nineteen of the cases have completed investigations with no identified suspect.

Well they probably just don’t have time, when they’re so busy interviewing disabled women in the middle of the night.… Read the rest

Strange doings.

Police seem to be doubling down after the Court of Appeal decision. Latest DM asking for advice about woman who is bi polar and using mobility scooter arrested for ‘feminist’ graffiti and stickering. Waiting for interview. pic.twitter.com/9PJAlj0SZj

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 23, 2022

In other words, We Are Fair Cop received a direct message about the arrest of a woman for feminist graffiti and stickering. They didn’t stop with arresting her though. They held her until 3:30 a.m. and then threw her out to get home on her mobility scooter, without her phone, which she always keeps with her in case the battery on the scooter dies.

The police are at her house with search warrant. These are

… Read the rest

Trump thinks it’s very very very unfair that anyone is investigating his darling little children who just want to play with their teddy bears in peace.

Former President Donald Trump believes that his children are being targeted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 commission and the New York attorney general to deflect attention from President Joe Biden’s failings.

Or – and hear me out for a second – it could be that they did illegal things.

“It’s a very unfair situation for my children. Very, very unfair,” he told Secrets in a telephone call.

You know how he could have avoided it? By maintaining a wall of separation between them and his crimes. Instead of course he raised them … Read the rest

It’s Nominate a Queer Icon Time.

Meat Loaf, arguably the most unlikely musician to have ever become a full-fledged pop star, has reportedly died at the age of 74…He was also known, at least by some of us, as an icon of queer masculinity—an inspirational and aspirational figure of manhood and butch lesbianism for people of all genders.

Ooh, Mabel, how queer is that. An icon of manhood and butch lesbianism! I’m so out of touch I can remember when those were two different things, not the same thing with different labels. That’s the joy of queering things though: you get to talk complete nonsense and pretend it’s “iconic.”

Gay and queer aesthetics are known for stepping outside

… Read the rest

Trump had perhaps his worst week ever:

It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The week ended with the leaking of a document showing that Trump at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

Aka his attempts to steal the election in order to make himself … Read the rest

Sonia Sodha on the triumph of the karenphobes:

Last week, it was announced that [Kate Clanchy] and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work.

The book that prompted this is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her memoir of a 30-year teaching career. Rave reviews and an Orwell prize gave way to mixed reactions from readers: some adored it, others thought she used racial and ableist stereotypes to describe her diverse students. Among the readers of colour I know, reactions were just as mixed: some found her descriptors offensive, others thought they were OK, especially in the

… Read the rest

Anna Slatz on the Cork outrage:

Susan Stryker, a transgender Professor of gender studies at the University of Arizona, is the first of three keynote presenters at the 25th Lesbian Lives conference, which is being held in March at the University of Cork in Ireland. Its 2022 theme is “solidarity.”

Stryker was one of the first academics who sought to apply critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” to males who insisted they could become women. In 2020, Stryker wrote an article for Time Magazine drawing and relying on the history of racial segregation to claim that women were merely a social construct. Such comparisons have been extensively decried by Black feminists.

Thus performatively underlining … Read the rest

A conference. University College Cork. In March.

The 25th Lesbian Lives Conference will take place in University College Cork, Ireland from 4th-5th March 2022. The LGBT+ Staff Network of University College Cork, in conjunction with the community organisation LINC and scholars from University College Dublin, Cambridge University, and University of Brighton Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender Research, are delighted to host the conference.  

Cool.

The theme for the 2022 Lesbian Lives Conference is Solidarity.  

Uh oh. We’ve learned that that can have some oddly limited applications – that it can, weirdly enough, mean not solidarity with lesbians but solidarity with men, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a Lesbian Lives Conference … Read the rest

More on the Huxley issue:

Imperial College must not “disown” one of its founding fathers, Thomas Huxley, eminent scientists have warned as they urged the university not to remove his bust or rename a building named after him.

…

In a letter to The Telegraph, a group of 39 leading scientists – including 17 from Imperial College – are imploring Imperial College not to turn their back on him.

“Huxley was an ardent abolitionist who fought the virulent pro-slavery scientific racism of his day and publicly welcomed the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865,” they say.

“From childhood poverty, Huxley rose on merit to become President of the Royal Society and Privy Counsellor. ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, he fought for the

… Read the rest

Starts well, and then messes it up.

When Sapna Palep was younger, she was mortified by conversations about menstruation. “It was like, ‘Let’s not talk about this, I need to leave the room,’” said the 43-year-old mother of two. The mere mention of periods evoked “pure embarrassment and fear.”

Ms. Palep’s 9-year-old daughter, Aviana Campello-Palep, in contrast, approaches the topic with zero self-consciousness or hesitation. “When my friends talk about getting their period, they just talk about it,” Aviana said. “It’s just normal in a girl’s life.”

These frank conversations have led Ms. Palep and her daughters, Aviana and Anaya, who is 8, to create Girls With Big Dreams, a line of undergarments for tweens, which includes reusable period

… Read the rest

Libs of Tik Tok is probably not a potential comrade from my point of view, but this is…piquant.

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1484347783020646400

It’s about “ways to support your LGBTQ students” – which rather assumes “you” will have lots of them, which in fact is unlikely.

Step one, she says, is to “normalize pronouns in your classroom.”

You what? Nobody needs pronouns “normalized” in a classroom or anywhere else – they’re a core part of our language, which we start learning by osmosis in infancy. Children aren’t stumped for how to express “you” or “I” or “them” or any other pronoun, they’re dab hands at it by the time they’re in school.

A great way to do this, she goes on, is to use … Read the rest

Scientists write a letter to Nature:

Once again a group of us—this time a different group—got together not to protest an article in Sci. Am. or Nature, but to make a public statement in Nature about the impending defenestration of a great scientist: Thomas Henry Huxley. As the Guardian and other sites have reported, Imperial College in London is pondering—and almost certainly will execute—the relocation of a statue of Huxley, and is also considering renaming one of its structures, the Huxley Building.

That’s annoying. Huxley was a progressive guy, more so than Darwin.

The Guardian wrote:

An investigation into Imperial College London’s historical links to the British empire has recommended the university remove a statue and

… Read the rest

Jupiter from the James Webb telescope September 12, 2019.

See comments for correction.… Read the rest

No racism here folks, move along.

Hours before a failed effort by Democrats to pass a voting rights bill in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was asked in a news conference on Wednesday for his message to voters worried about access to the polls during the midterm elections.

Mr. McConnell described those worries as a ginned-up controversy, and misleadingly cited data on voter turnout.

“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he responded.

Note that he thinks African Americans are not Americans.

Leaving that aside however – come on. The issue is future elections, not past … Read the rest

Today I learned there’s a thing called Pop ‘n’ Olly, which bills itself as “LGBT+ and Equality ‘Edutainment’ for children and young people”…without of course saying anything about what qualifies it to educate children and young people (or for that matter to edutain them).

It showed us…this.

https://twitter.com/PopnOlly/status/1483777528812744706

It is – surprise surprise – absolutely dire. It starts by “explaining” how infants are “assigned” a sex and then says gender is different…without bothering to say what “gender” is. “A person’s gender is who they feel that they are,” it says in a smarmy voice, but of course that’s not what they mean at all, they just mean the usual gender bullshit. Here’s an interesting thing: there’s more to “who … Read the rest

The police can’t cope.

Scotland’s national police force has warned that it cannot comply fully with the demands of new hate crime laws until next year, as officers struggle to cope with a surge in reported offences caused by Twitter rows.

In its quarterly report Police Scotland said there were “hurdles to overcome” if officers were to carry out their duties within the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, passed nine months ago, with training and guidance still to be addressed, along with a requirement for new IT systems.

They want to postpone because they’re having trouble keeping up with people who call the police because they’re OfFended by something on Twitter.

A 76 per cent rise in

… Read the rest

Parody or serious effort to delete the word “women” from the language? It can be hard to tell.

According to two former competitors, players with vaginas received extra underwear on the latest season of “Survivor,” which aired in 2021. 

…

Wallace said it “makes sense” to give players with vaginas more than one pair of underwear because “we got stuff going on own there” and they have different needs than those with penises. 

…

Insider has reported that wearing the same underwear and clothes for an extended period of time can have potentially life-threatening consequences, with the health risks, such as severe urinary tract infections, being higher for people with vaginas. 

According to Wallace, shortly after she and her

… Read the rest