There’s been a surge in anti-Semitism in France.

Thousands of marchers joined French lawmakers in Paris on Sunday to condemn a surge in anti-Semitism in France during the conflict in the Gaza Strip, but arguments over political participation clouded an intended show of unity. 

The protest, called by the leaders of France‘s two houses of parliament, was prompted by a three-fold increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents compared with the whole of 2022, according to French authorities, since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Hamas attacks Israel so anti-Semitism increases. Seems fair.

Political figures, including Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and former presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, headed the march, holding a banner with the slogan “For the Republic, against anti-Semitism“. They led several renditions of the French national anthem.

Interesting. We don’t see that much (or at all?) in the US – former presidents heading protest marches.

“We had grandparents who escaped being transported to the concentration camps, luckily they aren’t here to see that (anti-Semitism) is back,” said Laura Cohen, a marcher in her 30s.

“We shouldn’t have to hide in 2023,” she added, saying her family planned to remove their name from the intercom in their building and the mezuzah, a Jewish religious object, from their door.

A friend of mine who recently moved to Paris from New York saw two guys with semiautomatic rifles guarding a Jewish school in the Marais yesterday. Makes my blood run cold.

Thomas Schlachter at CNN tells us:

The International Cricket Council (ICC) announced Tuesday that “any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty,” will not be allowed to partake in international women’s cricket.

In the announcement, the ICC did not define its criteria for “male puberty.” CNN has reached out to the ICC seeking more detail.

CNN doesn’t know what male puberty is?

“The new policy is based on the following principles (in order of priority): protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion, and this means any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty will not be eligible to participate in the international women’s game regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken,” the ICC said in its statement.

CNN doesn’t see this as a restoration of fairness to women, it sees it as cruelty to men who say they are women.

In recent years, some forms of gender affirming care for trans youth, like puberty blockers, have become more common. But many adult trans women today did not have access to care that would delay or prevent the hormonal changes associated with puberty in their youth, and these women would thus be excluded from competition under the new guidelines.

But “these women” are not women, they’re trans women, i.e. men. It’s only fair to exclude them from competition against women. Why is indulgence of men who call themselves women so much more important than basic fairness to women?

Mainstream science does not support the claim of athletic advantage in trans women over cisgender women.

Wo. That’s a big leap – from whining and manipulation to just plain lying.

Saying the quiet part out loud:

Just imagine: gender dysphoric males are not the priority of these wicked selfish women. How dare women campaign for female rights instead of male privileges?

When skeptics go all credulous.

“Humanist” chaplain approves.

What were they thinking even considering it??? Gosh I don’t know, maybe they were wondering if it’s really true that men can be women on the inside despite having male bodies? Maybe they were skeptical of claims that people are what they say they are and that it’s evil to question them?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Crank them out, ladies.

A healthy populace needs steady economic growth.

Steady economic growth comes from constantly increasing productivity.

Productivity growth requires the ongoing creation of new jobs.

New jobs require an ever-growing working-age population.

That’s been the formula for the past half-century or more. But it rests on a number of assumptions that can’t stay true forever. And just because this formula has worked up until now doesn’t mean it’s the only one that can ever work.

Firstly, and most obviously, civilization can’t just keep growing and consuming forever. The planet’s size is fixed, and so are the resources within it.

Secondly, there’s no actual law that states that a healthy populace needs steady economic growth. It’s just that in a capitalist system, that’s how things have turned out. An ever increasing amount of total resources can serve as a modest counterbalance to capitalism’s tendency to concentrate resources in the hands of the few. New resources just entering the system will be distributed somewhat evenly at first before the Gordon Gekkos of the world inevitably find ways to capture them.

So how about instead we build an economic model that stops the Gordon Gekkos stealing what we already have so we don’t have to keep mining new resources to make up the losses?

And lastly, there’s the sudden emergence of AI, which may at long last uncouple the link between productivity and human-powered jobs. At the very least it will certainly disrupt such a link. Our species is running out of skills to justify our existence in pure economic terms. A human life costs a lot ot maintain — a lifetime of food, water, shelter, and energy — and under the current economic model, we’re losing opportunities to earn our keep, as we get outbidded by the automatons of Artificial Intelligence.

Things are rapidly coming to a head all around the world, with climate change, overpopulation, and now the technological disruption of labour. If civilization manages to emerge from this period of maximal disruption at all, it will have to do so with a new economic model to sustain humanity at a much lower population, with a fixed or even declining rate of consumption of the planet’s finite resources.

It would be nice of some kind of Artificial General Intelligence could find a way to orchestrate a safe passage for humans through the upcoming mess.

But I’m not particularly hopeful. When we look up at the skies, there’s a reason we aren’t seeing a universe teeming with civilized planets. More and more I’m coming to believe it’s because civilization is intrinsically doomed to wipe itself out.

Ah yes, women don’t have any rights, women are simply machines for supplying the state with people.

Russian authorities are limiting access to abortions in an attempt to confront the country’s longstanding demographic crisis.

That is, Russian authorities are treating women as brood mares.

The Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Kremlin, is playing a key role in the anti-abortion campaign.

Because it’s up to men, in government or religious institutions or both, to decide what women get to do with their bodies and lives.

A stagnant population

Russia’s population is virtually the same size as it was over 20 years ago. According to official figures, there are now 144 million people in Russia – 2 million fewer than in 2001, when President Vladimir Putin first came to power.

Why is the BBC labeling that “stagnant”?

We can’t just go on having more and more people forever; the planet turns out not to be an infinite resource.

It comes down to scribbles in the margins.

Donald Trump had his worst day yet in his ongoing civil fraud trial in New York on Tuesday at the hands of his own key witness, a former Trump Organization executive who linked the former president directly to the fuzzy math at the center of the case.

The witness was Jeffrey McConney, who was the comptroller and spreadsheet czar at the Trump Org. McConney had been called to the witness stand by the defense, but on cross-examination by lawyers for the state attorney general’s office Tuesday, he linked Trump firmly to the conspiracy and fraud counts that have yet to be decided in the non-jury trial.

McConney was handed People’s Exhibit 3054, a draft of Trump’s net-worth statement for 2014. He was asked to look at a note scribbled in thin blue ink on the draft’s first page, “DJT TO GET FINAL REVIEW,” which he said he’d written.

…

The AG has alleged the net-worth statement that McConney was handed the draft for, from 2014, contained $3.5 billion in exaggerations.

Oh is that all.

“Donald Trump would get final review?” Andrew Amer, the state’s lawyer, asked McConney.

“That was my understanding, yes,” McConney answered from the witness stand, his voice gruff.

Amer asked next whether Trump would get the final review of every net-worth statement until leaving for the White House in 2017, after which Eric Trump would approve the drafts. “That was my understanding, yes,” McConney answered again. Asked whether that was his handwriting on the drafts — the thin blue pen marks — McConney also said yes, it was.

Trump has been claiming that he never knew anything about these petty details, it was the cleaners and elevator maintenance crew who took care of that.

But McConney’s blue-ink handwriting is all over the net-worth statement drafts, showing he revised language and even added cautionary notes that were then passed along for Trump’s “final review,” as McConney said in his own description of the drafting process.

In one key cautionary note from the 2015 draft, McConney made a notation in ink that “this computation also includes forecasted deals that have not signed yet.” In the note, McConney asked whether Trump wanted to exclude some $151 million in as-yet-fictional assets from the net-worth statement.

The final version of that year’s net-worth statement shows McConney’s suggestion was ignored, possibly by Trump himself. The AG alleges that Trump routinely padded out his net-worth statements with the same sorts of nonexistent assets.

Trump pads out absolutely everything with nonexistent something. That “IQ test” is the classic model – “woman man person camera tv” is his approach to life in a nutshell.

The NY Times:

Susan Sarandon, a five-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner (for best actress, in 1995’s “Dead Man Walking”), was dropped by United Talent Agency after making comments at a pro-Palestinian rally last week. An agency spokesman, Richard Siklos, confirmed Tuesday that the agency no longer represented Sarandon but declined to elaborate.

…

United Talent dropped Sarandon after she made remarks at a rally in New York City last week. “There are a lot of people that are afraid, afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence,” she said at the rally, where she called for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, according to a video published by The New York Post.

Ahh that’s lovely – that “getting a taste of.” That’s what vindictive sadists say when torturing someone they dislike. It’s also grotesque when you stop to think about what Jews have had “a taste of” over the centuries.

[A] former speechwriter for Israel’s delegation to the United Nations said on the X platform, formerly Twitter, that she had interpreted Sarandon’s remark as implying that Jews “have it coming — that we don’t deserve to live free from harassment and assault.”

Assuming what she said wasn’t scripted, I think it’s possible Sarandon meant “a taste of” as “a small fraction of” but that’s not a whole lot less disgusting.

Sarandon said at the rally that being critical of Israel should not be considered antisemitic. “There’s a terrible thing that’s happened where antisemitism has been confused with speaking up against Israel,” Sarandon said. “I am against antisemitism. I am against Islamophobia.”

Yeah well that’s another dumb thing to say. “Semitism” names an ethnic group; “Islam” names a religion.

Another brave heroic stunning man vows to keep working hard to take away everything women have.

The international career of Australian-born transgender cricketer Danielle McGahey would appear to be over after the International Cricket Council (ICC) ruled players who have been through male puberty will not be able to compete in international women’s cricket.

There it is again, the neutral “transgender” where “male” should be.

The change in regulations appears to have been prompted by the case of McGahey, who became the first transgender cricketer to take part in an official international match when she featured in a Women’s T20 fixture for Canada against Brazil.

But the problem isn’t “transgender cricketer”; the problem is a man playing against women and stealing a woman’s place.

The Brisbane-born 29-year-old, who played grade cricket as a man in Melbourne, moved to Canada in 2020. Having transitioned socially, then medically, to a woman she began playing women’s cricket in Canada and was called into the national team in October 2022.

Which just illustrates how ludicrous and destructive the new convention of calling men “she” is. He began playing women’s cricket, which was unfair to the other teams and to the woman who would have had his place on that team.

Transgender athletes have been banned from taking part in elite women’s competitions in other sports such as swimming, cycling, athletics, rugby league and rugby union.

Male transgender athletes.

It’s so interesting the way some misogynist men just can’t exercise their hatred of women without making it sexual. Why make it sexual when the issue isn’t sex? Why drag it in just for the sake of underlining how intense the hatred is? Why isn’t sex just plain irrelevant?

I suppose it’s because men of that type (there are lots of them, I’m afraid) just can’t think of women apart from their score on the Would I Fuck Her Index.

The lies people tell. This is a journalist.

“Eliminationist” implies genocidal. It’s an outrageous lie, and she must know it is.

“Genocidal.”

It’s a journalist saying this.

The BBC on the other hand finally manages to get it right.

Transgender women banned from playing international women’s cricket by ICC

Transgender women i.e. men, but I don’t expect the conventional media to start saying that any time soon.

Following a nine-month consultation process, the governing body said its new policy, which takes effect immediately, was based on “protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion”.

It shouldn’t take nine minutes to figure out that letting men play on women’s teams is not fair, but there it is.

“The changes to the gender eligibility regulations resulted from an extensive consultation process and is founded in science and aligned with the core principles developed during the review,” said ICC chief executive Geoff Allardice.

“Inclusivity is incredibly important to us as a sport, but our priority was to protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players.”

Now, wait a minute. What does he mean by that? How can “inclusivity” be important to competitive sport when the whole point of the competitive bit is to exclude everyone who doesn’t win? Exclusion is the whole point. It’s not unjust exclusion, it’s just what competitive sport is. I’ve never liked it much, as a participant or part of the audience, because I can’t seem to care very much who is more skilled at [whatever the sport is] than someone else, but that’s just me. Lots of people love it, and let’s be real: it’s the winning and losing that makes it exciting. So inclooosivviteee just can’t be “incredibly important” to people in charge of running a competitive sport. You can’t have everything.

Always this shameless sneaky obfuscating lie – it’s always “trans” instead of “male.” Why is that? Because, of course, “male” makes it all too obvious why they’re banned, while “trans” makes it look disskrimminittoree to people who aren’t paying much attention.

“Transgender players who have gone through male puberty,” the Graun says – in other words male players. The problem is not that they’re “trans”; it’s that they’re male. Nobody cares how people idennify; the issue is unfair artificial physical advantage. Sean Ingle must know this, of course, which means he must be deliberately hiding the reason for not letting men compete against women, even if they say they are trans.

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Students of geography and climate have long known that the climate of western Europe is more temperate, on the whole, than the climate of Africa.   Urban centers of government, finance, education, and culture in western Europe, such as London, Edinburgh, Paris, Amsterdam, and Geneva, are rarely as hot, and never hot for as long, as cities in Africa.  This clearly has disparate impact on the inhabitants of cities in the two regions, in regard to  health, activity, moods, ease of sleep, and so on.  Worse still, public knowledge of these temperature differences could tend to marginalize those who are subject to systems of temperature oppression.

   The principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion demand that this systemic inequity should be abolished as soon as possible.  To this end, we propose two steps.  First, notice that education systems have increased Diversity in various areas of advanced training by simply replacing numerical grades with pass/fail rating.  Therefore, our first step should be to stop reporting temperatures in cities of the world in degrees either centigrade or fahrenheit.  Instead, we should merely refer to the daily climate as inhabitable/uninhabitable, without the judgemental implications of using numbers.  The rating of “inhabitable” would apply to any temperatures below that on the surface of the planet Mercury, and above that on the moons of Saturn.  

   In the next step, we will prohibit reporting outdoor temperatures in any way, thus eliminating public knowledge about different regions of the world that might have disparate impact, and thus cause harm to inhabitants of one region or another.  To insure that the harmful effect of reported temperature inequities will be eliminated, we will ban the use of thermometers altogether. 

Spiked points out what you’d think would be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for three seconds.

Female athletes are fighting back against the trans takeover of their sports. In the past few months, sports as varied as cycling and angling have faced boycotts and protests from female athletes over their so-called trans inclusion policies. Across the sporting world, more and more women are arriving at the same conclusion – namely, that allowing men to compete in their sports is unfair at best, and downright dangerous at worst.

Or, women have known that all along but only now are starting to feel able to say so.

The latest sportswomen to revolt are professional pool players. The World Eightball Pool Federation and Ultimate Pool Group had previously promised to rewrite their rules on trans inclusion to prevent biological males from competing in women’s competitions. Then, last month, they performed a volte face. They revealed that ‘transgender and nonbinary players will be able to participate’ in future women’s series.

So women are walking away, which means the men still get to win (but their cheating is made that bit more obvious to onlookers).

Fourteen-times national champion Alexandra Cunha has outright refused to ever play against men in the women’s category.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Cunha says she is worried that many people don’t fully appreciate the advantages that biological males have over females, even in a precision sport like pool. ‘Players born male have longer arms and a longer range’, she says. ‘In 32 years, I have never witnessed any biological woman with anything like the power and velocity when it comes to the break shot.’

If the inclusion of biological males in precision sport is unfair, their inclusion in a contact sport is downright dangerous. Shockingly, Boxing Canada allows fighters to participate in whichever sex category they choose. It is little wonder that women have started to boycott its competitions.

It’s so interesting to watch entire sporting organizations cheerily allow men to batter women.

It’s good news that female athletes are taking a stand against men in women’s sports. Walking out of ‘trans inclusive’ competitions might well be the only way to force a response from sporting bodies. The tragedy here is that it still means women are losing out. Female athletes who have spent years training to reach the top of their game are now effectively being pushed into forfeiting their shot at winning titles. Women deserve better than to be forced to cede ground to mediocre men.

Quite so. It’s not really good news that women are walking away – it’s a horrible sacrifice they’re forced into making because the sports organizations have lost their fucking minds.

Why…………yes, we know. That’s our point. Didn’t they tell you you’re not supposed to say it in public?

Oh look, a trans emperor!

A Roman emperor has been deemed transgender by a British museum, The Telegraph can reveal.

The council-run North Hertfordshire Museum has decided to be “sensitive” to the purported pronoun preferences of the 3rd-century AD ruler Elagabalus.

Oh how kind. I don’t suppose Elagabulus cares all that much by now, but still, it’s fraffly kind of the museum.

The Roman Emperor will be treated as a transgender woman and referred to as “she”.

Elagabalus has been given female pronouns on the basis of classical texts that claim he asked to be called “lady” – but historians believe these accounts may simply have been a typical Roman attempt at character assassination.

Gaaaaaaaaaasp! How dare you!

Information on museum policy states that pronouns used in displays will be those “the individual in question might have used themselves” or whatever pronoun “in retrospect, is appropriate”.

You don’t use pronouns that other people say to refer to you. You use them when you refer to yourself or other people. Latin, like languages descended from Latin, doesn’t have female and male forms of the first person singular, so good old Ela G. wasn’t using any pronouns to declare his own sex.

The museum consults with the LGBT charity Stonewall and the LGBT wing of the trade union Unison on best practice for its displays, to ensure that “our displays, publicity and talks are as up-to-date and inclusive as possible”.

Let’s everybody consult with some different charities for a change. Ones that give a damn about women would be a good place to start.

Liberal Democrat councillor Keith Hoskins, executive member for arts at the Lib Dem and Labour coalition-run North Herts Council, claimed that: “Elagabalus most definitely preferred the ‘she’ pronoun and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times.”

“most definitely”?? How does he think he knows that?

Historians have said that feminine behaviour would have been a dishonour to men in Rome, and suggested that accounts of Elagabalus’ life are replete with the worst accusations that could be levelled at a Roman because they are character assassinations.

But the North Hertfordshire Museum knows better.

The Telegraph has the skinny on “Francesa” versus women.

At least four teams in a Sheffield women’s football league are boycotting matches after a club fielded a transgender player accused of causing a season-ending injury to an opponent.

Mexborough Athletic refused to play Rossington Ladies on Sunday night in protest at the presence of Francesca Needham, 31, amid outrage throughout the league at the openly trans player’s alleged connection to an incident that has left a rival out of action for several months.

He’s huge. There are photos. He stands out.

The Needham case has potentially far-reaching implications, with at least 50 transgender players understood to be registered in women’s leagues across England. The Football Association’s policy is to decide gender eligibility for players over 16 on a case-by-case basis, with biological males wanting to play in women’s football required to show their blood testosterone levels are “within the natal female range” for an “appropriate length of time so as to minimise any potential advantage.” These levels are meant to be checked annually.

That nonsense drives me crazy. It’s not just the testosterone! His whole body is different: bigger, heavier, thicker. Would men like it if an adult male gorilla played on the other team?

“We had a Zoom call together and you could feel the emotion pouring out,” a source said. “We’ve been terrified of saying anything. We don’t want to be accused of being transphobic. We don’t want the names of our clubs dragged through the mud. It has been like walking on eggshells.”

In other words they were under enormous social pressure to risk their bodies and well-being for the sake of a man who wants to be able to smash them.

Fiona McAnena, director of sport for Fair Play for Women, emphasised the scale of the debate unleashed by the Needham controversy. “People say, ‘It’s only a few trans players, what difference does it make? Well, here’s one male player in one team, affecting every team in that league – that’s over 150 women. They don’t want to play if it’s so unfair, they’re worried about injury, and some are even talking about giving up football, if this is how it’s going to be.

“There are 50 male players approved by the FA to play women’s football in England – and those are the ones they know about. So this is affecting thousands of women and girls in football. This is happening all over the country. We have raised this with the Equality and Human Rights Commission as a matter of urgency. They need to point out that female-only sport is lawful.

“Many sports governing bodies receive funding from the national sports councils to promote female participation. Surely it is time for the sports councils to insist that sport governing bodies provide fair and safe sport for women and girls – or lose funding.”

How about now?

A guy called Francesca Needham makes a “statement” on why he’s not playing football any more:

Subject: Important Announcement Regarding My Role at Rossington Main Ladies FC

Dear club, league, and all Football Association officials

It is with a mix of disappointment and resolve that I find myself having to address a recent development impacting myself and my team.

As some of you may have heard, Rossington Main Ladies FC has faced challenges from teams unwilling to play against us while I am on the field. This unfortunate circumstance has prompted me to investigate pursuing a case of discrimination, as I believe it represents a breach of the code of conduct regarding diversity and inclusion, as well as safeguarding of adults in football established by both the Football Association and the Sheffield and Hallamshire Women and Girls League.

You notice he doesn’t say why the teams are unwilling to play against him. It is, of course, because he’s a man. He considers it illegitimate wrong bad “discrimination” for women to refuse to be battered by him when playing football.

Therefore, in the best interests of my club and my supportive teammates who stand beside me, I have made the decision to step down from playing football for the foreseeable future.

This decision is rooted in the desire to safeguard the team and the club’s trajectory. It’s disheartening to acknowledge that this situation contradicts everything in the diversity and inclusion policies, given that I have diligently met every single requirement set out by the Football Association to play.

“Diversity” and “inclusion” should not mean forcing women to play football against men.

I sincerely hope that this issue of perceived discrimination against me can be resolved peacefully and promptly, with the full support of the Football Association and the policies they have written and approved.

Of course he is the only person who matters in this scenario. The women are just cardboard dummies; he’s the only actual person involved.

Kyle Rittenhouse Launches Foundation Aimed At Fighting Gun Control

This is a sick sick sick country.

Kyle Rittenhouse has launched an anti-gun control nonprofit in Texas, according to a filing with the Texas Secretary of State’s office, which was first reported on by the Texas Tribune—a sign the young man who became a conservative star after being acquitted of killing two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, is ramping up his political activity in Texas.

A star is born! Dude who kills lefties promotes guns!

Rittenhouse filed with the Secretary of State on July 23 to create the Rittenhouse Foundation, a nonprofit based in Fort Worth, Texas, which aims to protect “an individual’s inalienable right to bear arms” through “education and legal assistance,” according to the filing.

Rittenhouse is listed as a director alongside Chris McNutt, president of the gun advocacy group Texas Gun Rights and Shelby Griesinger, treasurer of the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which has financed the campaigns of right-wing candidates across the state.

Who is Rittenhouse again? Oh yes, the kid who went to a BLM protest and shot two people dead and one not-dead. Excellent example for us all.

The incident was widely condemned by liberals, but many conservatives came to his defense. U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) both offered the then-teenager internships, and then-President Donald Trump hosted him at his Mar-a-Lago estate. 

Because what is more admirable and worthy of reward than shooting people dead at anti-racism protests?