Yay more theocracy for us:

In the moments before he was to face a vote on becoming speaker of the House this week, Representative Mike Johnson posted a photograph on social media of the inscription carved into marble atop the chamber’s rostrum: “In God We Trust.”

That inscription of course should not be there.

His colleagues celebrated his candidacy by circulating an image of him on bended knee praying for divine guidance with other lawmakers on the House floor.

That’s just downright revolting. “I believe in a magic daddy in the sky so I’m better than you.”

And in his first speech from the chamber as speaker, Mr. Johnson cast his ascendance to the position second in line to the presidency in religious terms, saying, “I believe God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.”

Which being interpreted is: Daddy God put me here.

Very humble and meek.

Mr. Johnson, a mild-mannered conservative Republican from Louisiana whose elevation to the speakership on Wednesday followed weeks of chaos, is known for placing his evangelical Christianity at the center of his political life and policy positions. Now, as the most powerful Republican in Washington, he is in a position to inject it squarely into the national political discourse, where he has argued for years that it belongs.

That is, he wants to impose theocracy on us.

Mr. Johnson also played a leading role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and has expressed skepticism about some definitions of the separation of church and state, placing himself in a newer cohort of conservative Christianity that aligns more closely with former President Donald J. Trump and that some describe as Christian nationalism.

…

In remarks to a Louisiana congregation in 2016, Mr. Johnson linked school shootings to no-fault divorce laws (he is in a covenant marriage with his wife, which makes divorce more difficult), “radical feminism” and legal abortion.

School shootings are the fault of radical feminists. I’d like to see a map of that journey.

In lectures to student groups he addresses across the country, Mr. Johnson has lamented: “There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.”

It is a viewpoint fervently embraced by much of the hard-right Republican base, which reveres Mr. Trump and identifies with his frequent claims of being persecuted, aggrieved and looked down upon by liberal elites.

Ok again I’m going to need a map of the route from absolute standards of right and wrong to revering Donald Trump. A really large-scale detailed map with no blurry bits or Miracle Street.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on More bags.

The trouble with Western democracies is that the people who stand for political office are commonly not themselves democrats. They prefer their own wills to prevail rather than those of the population-at-large. Some prize examples of elected anti-democrats spring readily to mind.

I always wondered what the purpose of a divided government was, why didn’t the founders set up a parliamentary system where the majority party holds the executive? The way it is, the executive branch can be hamstrung as it is about to be when the next U.S. government shutdown battle comes along (and Johnson will not make a deal like McCarthy did). But, when someone like Trump or Sanders comes along as a populist who promises to “fix things” and have a “people’s revolution,” we are far better off with a strong Congress that can say “hold on there. Not so fast.”

People don’t vote for who would be the best administrator as President in the U.S. They vote for who would be a Strong Leader and make the country over by will and inspiration, and that’s bad for democracy. In Minnesota, the Democrats had a weak opposition in the most recent session and passed through a cornucopia of liberal wetdreams (some of which I think are pretty good.) But the opposition had no fangs and the Democrats were able to label any opposing voices on issues as being the plaints of RW bigots, they were basically toothless. So, the trans sanctuary bills, and “anti-conversion” bills were passed with no dissent among the Democrats and the Republican objections were dismissed.

That’s what happens when demagogues rule, the groupthink takes over. If our governor had faced a legislature with at least one house on the opposition party, he would have had to listen to them. Instead, we become yes-men, and I am thankful that the governor doesn’t have the power to do as much as a president would. I may secretly give money to Republicans in the next election here, not because I like them, but because I think we need opposition in the government. Slow down, fight for the hard compromises, and make sure all of the people have some voice and not just the members of the majority party.

Democracy depends on deliberation, but power is more attractive to the voters.

That sounds like a brilliant parody:

The trans “struggle for justice” hahahahahahahaha hilarious.

Let’s have a look.

Acknowledging the formidable hurdles trans and nonbinary athletes face in their struggles for inclusion, acceptance, and freedom, this book documents and analyses their resistance across a range of social-cultural and geopolitical contexts, from community sport to high-performance competition.

It looks like a parody but apparently isn’t.

So let’s talk about this “struggle” for “inclusion, acceptance, and freedom.”

Inclusion. We’ve been over this. We’ve been over this a billion times by now. Athletic competitions have categories and qualifications. End of story. There are age categories, sometimes weight categories, amateur/professional categories, and yes sex categories. There are categories for women. Women had to fight for them. They won the fight – the fight for inclusion, in fact. If men who identify as trans are allowed to compete against women then women are excluded from their own sports all over again.

Acceptance. That’s just another way of saying “inclusion”; see above.

Freedom. No one is taking away trans people’s “freedom.” Telling men they can’t invade women’s sports is not a violation of their freedom, it’s an enforcement of women’s rights. Women matter too.

The list includes Mein Kampf and gender critical books…and nothing else.

Works by authors including Helen Joyce and Prof Kathleen Stock were hidden from view by a library service of the Labour-run Calderdale council, and are now barred from being promoted in displays in order to protect the public from offence.

The only other book similarly censored by the library service by being hidden was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

So, it seems, the Calderdale library system considers gender-skeptical feminism to be on a level with genocidal Nazism.

That’s puzzling for a number of reasons. Like, for instance, the fact that gender-skeptical feminism is not genocidal or genocidal-adjacent or remotely in any way similar to or connected to genocide. Like, also, the fact that there are many cruel or destructive or murderous ideologies promoted in many books other than Mein Kampf yet they are not on Calderdale Libraries’ list of books to hide.

The Telegraph previously revealed that six books discussing the dangers of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery were hidden from public view by Calderdale librarians.

Now council documents shown to The Telegraph indicate that staff had not previously taken such direct measures to conceal books, except on one occasion when “a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was moved to our stores following complaints from some customers some years ago”.

In other words Calderdale librarians are saying gender-critical books are as evil and dangerous as Hitler’s book and that no other books in their system are that evil and dangerous.

Ms Joyce, the author of one of the six gender-critical books, told The Telegraph: “I was disgusted, but not surprised, to discover that the only previous example Calderdale Libraries could give of hiding away a ‘toxic’ book concerned Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf.

“Its senior staff have apparently surrendered to the demands of trans ideologues to such an extent that when a crybully threw a strop about a top ten bestseller on the subject of women’s, children’s and gay people’s human rights, they agreed to treat that book as if it was Nazi propaganda.”

What’s the thinking?

Calderdale council officers cited best-practice advice that the books should not be promoted, advice which comes from the group Book 28, an LGBT organisation which has pushed councils to take steps to prevent LGBT people seeing “offensive” and “transphobic” gender-critical books in their libraries .

So why do Calderdale council officers and library bosses take advice from Book 28 and no one else? Why does it not take advice from, say, LGBAlliance? And feminist organizations? And free speech organizations? Why do they give the Trans Police the final and only word?

The controversy began with an internal HR grievance lodged in January 2023 about gender-critical books on display in council libraries .

Calderdale’s library agreed to remove six gender-critical books from public view.

After The Telegraph revealed that these books had been hidden, Calderdale library staff lodged a complaint against their own employer and demanded the books be reinstated on library shelves.

Calderdale council undertook a review of its policies following the outcry against censorship, while stating it had to balance these concerns against what it termed some people’s “acute vulnerability”.

Ok stop right there. That’s where you go so wrong. There is no such thing as some particularly specially inordinately “acute vulnerability” that afflicts trans people and no one else.

It’s more the other way around, really. Trans people – especially the male ones – are pulling a very elaborate and very destructive long con, and women are the people who are rendered “acutely vulnerable” as a result.

This week Ian Day, the council’s director for public service, said that while the books are likely “to cause offence to some people”, the titles do not reach “the threshold required to interfere with legal rights such as the right of freedom of expression”.

He recommended that the council decide to reinstate books, with the proviso that they are not promoted.

So just mild censorship. Thanks a lot.

Sorry but this is too hilarious to pass up.

Like the fact that there were five men and one woman discussing an issue about women? No, of course not that, that’s fine. Fred’s choices on the other hand…

Oh no, Inja and Fred are quarreling!

Take your time, boys. Be thorough.

They killed the patient trying to save her.

An Iranian girl, 16, has died after she was allegedly beaten by morality police for not wearing a hijab.

Why is it so important for women to wear bags on their heads that it’s necessary to beat them to death for not doing it?

It’s not to protect them from anything, especially not from the sexual violence of godbothering men. It’s to make a big fuss about the “honor” of men, which is besmirched by the existence of those horrible oozing sluts known as “women.” If they’re not tightly wrapped like a supermarket cheese, they flop down in the street and spread their legs, so that explains why the “morality” police have to kill them for taking off the wrapping.

Activists have alleged Geravand was attacked because she was not wearing a hijab. 

They also demanded an independent investigation by the United Nations’ fact-finding mission on Iran, citing the theocracy’s use of pressure on victims’ families and state TV’s history of airing hundreds of coerced confessions.

Maybe the CIA should have left Iran alone…

Aw yeah, solidarity forever. Islamists and sex workers, unite and fight!

The Guardian reports there is conflict over the revamped NHS gender idenniny development service.

The opening of the hubs has been delayed by more than a year amid difficulties in recruiting staff, and tensions over how to train employees in caring for young people with gender dysphoria. Meanwhile, the waiting list of young people seeking help has grown to 5,766.

As delays to the openings continue, NHS England (NHSE) has started to divert thousands of 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds who turn 17 before next March, towards the adult waiting list, where they are likely to receive a different, less exploratory form of treatment.

This development so concerned the mothers of two 17-year-olds that they launched a judicial review challenging the stark disparities between the child and adult services.

You can see why they’d worry. “Less exploratory” probably means more eager to offer drastic interventions because hey, once you’re 17 you’re totally immune to being deluded about being the sex your body isn’t.

To complicate matters further, an NHS consultation designed to gather views on how best to support children with gender dysphoria has identified two irreconcilable outlooks on the best approach: one group is cautious about the prescription of puberty blockers, while the second is suspicious of exploratory therapy, arguing that it could enter the realm of conversion practices.

And clearly it’s far more risky to avoid blockers and surgery than it is to embrace them, right?

Tensions have also emerged in the small team charged with developing teaching materials for staff at the new clinics. There are polarised views on how quickly patients with gender dysphoria should be assisted towards social and medical transition, and how much focus should be given to other issues present in their lives, such as trauma and homophobic bullying.

In other words same old same old same old. Some people think being trans is the best thing since pumpkin lattes and other people think it’s a warped fad that is going to ruin a lot of lives.

Meetings are said to be polite, but privately clinicians have dismissed those holding opposing views variously as “activists”, for promoting trans rights, or “conversion therapists” or “transphobes”, for questioning a child’s self-diagnosis.

So it’s like Twitter but with physical consequences.

One current member of Tavistock staff said: “What they are proposing to do is gender exploratory therapy. My view, as a clinician working in gender services, is that this is tantamount to conversion therapy for trans youth. It’s very problematic and very unethical.”

But it’s not problematic and unethical to charge ahead with diverting teenagers’ puberties. How can they be so confident of that?

Originally a comment by Holms on We know that something is being waved in our faces.

The claim that using someone’s pronouns of demand is a mere ‘kindness’ is belied by the fact that they are also claimed to be non-optional. Kindness is not mandatory, and mandates are by their nature not kind as there is the implication of enforcement, punishment, for failure to comply. It is further undermined by the revisionism we see at play with trans identities. When someone declares they have a gender identity, name, and/or pronouns at odds with their sex, it is immediately forbidden to mention even obliquely that the person ever had anything other than those even in the past. This is especially visible with famous people, as their pages on wikipedia, imdb, and others are immediately edited to match the new demand even for past events under their previous name.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this inflexibility can be seen in the very public tragedy of Elliot Page, formerly Ellen. The wiki page for Hard Candy states the protagonist’s actor as Elliot Page, despite being Ellen at the time, and despite her character being a 14 year old girl. The plot of that movie begins with that character tempting another man into meeting her via online flirting, as she suspects he is a paedophile who killed an earlier victim of his predation. In particular, she suspects he is a heterosexual paedophile – the entire interaction thus depends on her being female. Yet that of course does not stop all references to Elliot referring to her as grammatically masculine.

A footnote on that page gives us another absurdity: “Elliot Page, in his memoir Pageboy, revealed that a member of the production gave him a ride home after the wrap party, and then sexually assaulted him.” Him him him, despite the glaring incongruity: Ellen page was sexually assaulted 16 years prior to ‘coming out’ as a man. The assault was due to lust for her as a woman. Elliot’s own page contains a stream of further absurd lies.

The ‘kindness’ claim is a flimsy defence, part of a coercive effort to promote mass lying.

The CBC is shocked, shocked to have discovered that Buffy Sainte-Marie invented an indigenous identity for herself.

When Buffy Sainte-Marie strolled onto Sesame Street in 1975, she was making history.

The Dec. 9 episode was the launch of the program’s efforts to present Indigenous culture to millions of viewers.

…

From the early days of her career, Sainte-Marie has claimed to be a Cree woman, born in Canada. She has also allowed herself to be celebrated as an Indigenous icon and success story.

In 2022, CBC broadcast a concert that was held in her honour at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where Anishinabe musician ShoShona Kish told the audience: “Buffy Sainte-Marie has led the way for Indigenous music on this beautiful land since her first album.”

However, almost 50 years after stepping onto Sesame Street, the iconic singer-songwriter’s claims to Indigenous ancestry are being contradicted by members of her own family and an extensive CBC investigation.

Late last year, CBC received a tip that Sainte-Marie is not of Cree ancestry but, in fact, has European roots. She is the latest high-profile public figure whose ancestry story has been contradicted by genealogical documentation, including her own birth certificate, historical research and personal accounts — the latest chapter in the complex and growing debate around Indigenous identity in Canada.

Interesting. Genealogical documentation, historical research, and personal accounts are enough to justify the CBC questioning Sainte-Marie’s indigenous idenniny but nothing is enough to justify anyone questioning someone’s gender idenniny. That’s super interesting because what sex people are – aka their “gender identity” – is a lot more self-evident and concrete and unmistakable than their indigenous ancestry is, yet it’s treated as downright evil to question (let alone disbelieve or deny) that a guy who calls himself Josephine Sexgoddess is a man.

If it’s evil to question anyone’s gender identity why isn’t it evil to question anyone’s ethnic identity? Why is one taboo while the other is The Right Thing To Do? Why is it wrong to try to usurp indigenous identity but brave and stunning to usurp female identity? Please explain.

Indigenous scholars like Kim TallBear, a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and a member of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, say it’s unacceptable for non-Indigenous people to speak for Indigenous people and take honours set aside for them.

“It’s theft of opportunities, resources. It’s theft of our stories,” she said.

Hey! I know what she means! Women feel exactly the same way! But we’re not allowed to say so.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce

Brilliant and enraging: Helen Joyce dissects the intense deliberate sustained suppression of women’s views on Magic Gender.

There’s the double bind, for one thing – you get mostly silenced but if you manage to utter a peep that means you haven’t been silenced.

This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead.

Most of the stifling is secret and carefully hidden, but occasionally a bit of the curtain gets caught in someone’s zipper. Helen gives enraging examples – Intelligence Squared, the Irish Times, the BBC, ABC [the Australian one], Sky News.

All that Sky told me when I asked was this: “After reviewing [the show], we felt that we weren’t really happy with it — basically our production standards were not good enough … This is absolutely no reflection on you (or for that matter Joanna [Harper, trans woman]): you were engaging and interesting, and we’d love to invite you back on Sky News.” 

Reader, they haven’t.

I’ve no such striking story for BBC Woman’s Hour, because it’s never got as far as recording anything with me that it could then drop. The nearest I have to proof that this is deliberate rather than an oversight is something that happened in early 2022. 

Grace Lavery, a trans-identified man whose book Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis was about to come out, had claimed that none of the feminist critics of trans ideology were willing to debate him. I sighed heavily and decided to take one for the team. UnHerd agreed to host a debate between him and me, booked a venue and started selling tickets — at which point Lavery pulled out, insinuating that I, UnHerd and anyone on my side were fascists.

And who did Woman’s Hour invite on after this performance: the best-selling campaigner for women’s rights or the bloke who had written a book about his penis, and who insults and demeans women’s-rights campaigners? It’s not like the show’s producers and presenters can possibly think this is what its audience wants. Every August they tweet requests for topics and interviewees for “listeners’ week”; let’s just say I’m mentioned a lot in the replies and Lavery isn’t.

How grotesque and disgusting is that? They chat warmly with the hideous woman-hating Lavery and they freeze out the brilliant Helen Joyce. Woman’s Hour does. Every day, every hour, we get reminded of how expendable women are, of how ready and eager the people in charge are to silence women while listening to every word from men who wear short skirts and fishnets.

Why all this matters isn’t because it’s unfair to me, although it is. It’s because what I’m trying to shout from the rooftops is that women’s rights are being destroyed in the name of a parody of social justice; that politics and policymaking are turning towards ideology and away from evidence; and above all that a socio-medical scandal is being played out on the bodies of children. 

All that and because we get jumped on and beaten up and silenced for saying so.

Joan Smith is. not. having. it.

Referring to Izzard or any other trans-identified man as “she” is profoundly insulting to women. In this instance, it happens to be the Guardian talking to Izzard “ahead of the release of her new film”. The word “her” has no place in that sentence, creating an immediate sense of cognitive dissonance. We know that something is being waved in our faces, challenging us to object to our own erasure. 

What’s being waved in our faces is the [implicit] dick along with the explicit dick move of ordering us to ignore the dick as we are forced to submit to it.

For years we were told that using someone’s preferred pronouns was a matter of “being kind”, when it’s nothing of the sort. “Look at this obvious man and dare to challenge a suffocating orthodoxy that insists he’s a woman,” is what it says. Suffocating and silencing, because once you accept that, everything else flows from it — men demanding to be in women’s refuges, changing rooms and prisons.

All those people adding “he/him” or “she/her” to their email signatures are telling us they accept the argument that someone’s sex is a matter of personal choice.

And they’re telling us we’re evil shits for not doing likewise. It’s very much an attempt at social control, at forcing us to submit to the new boss.

It’s a form of gaslighting, promoting an ideology that’s hugely controversial, not to say scientifically illiterate. When a newspaper or website does it, it’s making a conscious decision, lining up behind the idea that men can become women at will. It could only happen in a culture where women’s legitimate concerns are laughed at and disregarded.

And stamped “KAREN”.

Princess doesn’t want to testify. Princess loses appeal.

Ivanka Trump will have to testify in a business fraud case against her father and brothers, a New York judge ruled. She had previously sought not to take the stand, arguing that she had moved out of the city and had stepped away from the Trump Organization. But Judge Arthur Engoron said she still maintains ties to Trump businesses and real estate in New York.

Wull can’t she just pocket the money without any of the consequences? She’s a princess!

Prosecutors have argued that Ms Trump has important information to share about the case. In his ruling on Friday, Judge Engoron sided with the prosecutors, writing: “Ms Trump has clearly availed herself of the privilege of doing business in New York.” He cited documents showing that she still had ownership or management ties to some businesses in New York, and that she still owns Manhattan apartments.

Wull, yeah, because she’s a property princess, duh, but that doesn’t mean she should be held accountable for anything, much less have to testify. Ew.

So women don’t get to have unions any more.

What an absolutely disgusting way to treat workers who have the bad taste to be women.

First there’s the stupid lie that the LGB Alliance “attempts to marginalise trans and gender-diverse people.” No it doesn’t! Saying men are not women is not an attempt to marginalize men. It’s simply the truth that men are not women. If anyone is marginalizing anyone it’s men who claim to be women – they are in many ways pushing women even more to the margins.

Then there’s the stupid lie that it’s a “phobia” to know the difference between women and men.

Then there’s the grotesque anti-solidarity of saying most women are not welcome in a union movement.

Then there’s the brain-dead repetition of the big lie. Trans men are not men; trans women are not women. Unions should not be in the business of ordering workers to lie about such a basic fact, let alone barring them from membership if they refuse.

Blood Knight alerted us to Kessler syndrome so I found When Elephants Fight in Space:

When spacecraft collide with other objects conducting routine space activity or are intentionally destroyed via anti-satellite tests, this creates orbital debris and risks creating a cascading chain reaction of collisions and debris propagation. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) explains that “collisions with orbital debris can pit or damage spacecraft in the best case scenario and cause catastrophic failures in the worst.” Collisional cascading, also known as the Kessler Syndrome, is a dangerous phenomenon because it renders orbits less accessible for all states to reap the scientific, technological, and economic benefits. For these reasons, NASA maintains that the top threat to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts is orbital debris.

…

According to the U.S. nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, orbital debris in LEO—orbits with an altitude of 2,000 kilometers or less—can travel “30 times faster than a commercial jet aircraft. At these speeds, pieces of debris larger than 1 cm (half an inch) can severely damage or destroy a satellite, and it is not possible to shield effectively against debris of this size.”

…

Space history is a human story of customs and contradictions with its genesis in the influential 1967 Outer Space Treaty. It’s important to keep space history in mind when evaluating the environmental risks facing the international community and strategizing how to develop multilateral frameworks for cooperation. This is especially pivotal as more commercial actors are launching mega-constellation commercial satellites.

Ping! Like for instance…

Helping lead the call to action is Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, who is apprehensive of orbital slots becoming congested and disproportionately dominated by entrepreneurs.

In an interview at NewSpace Europe, Aschbacher took particular aim at SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, which is preparing to grow its Starlink satellite internet service up to $30 billion. “You have people like Elon Musk, just launching constellations and satellites and throwing Teslas up into orbit. We need to set common rules. Colonisation, or just doing things in a completely deregulated space, is a concern,” Aschbacher said.

This is a branch of Musk’s domineering reckless not giving a shit that I wasn’t aware of.

Peter Tatchell says oh yes there is too so such a thing as a “gender identity.” What’s more, we all have one. What’s more, we can all tell what everyone’s “gender identity” is by looking at what everyone IS WEARING. So neat, so easy, so simple. Why didn’t anyone tell us this before???

For once I’m not indulging in hyperbole. He really does say that, and after the whole room squawks and shouts and says no, he says it all over again.

Allow me to join all the women in the audience saying “No I don’t!!” The only sense in which I can be said to wear “women’s clothes” is that I wear colors – red, purple, orange, yellow, pretty much all the colors. It’s sad for men that that’s coded female, but if Peter Tatchell’s shirt and necktie were pink and red instead of peculiarly dismal shades of brown, he still would be a man.

Also from that event – Fred Wallace drunk and disorderly, Tatchell telling him “No no no no more drink.”

What actual girls get:

A woman has been found guilty of taking a three-year-old British child to Kenya for female genital mutilation (FGM). Amina Noor, 39, is the first person to be convicted of assisting a non-UK person to perform FGM. Noor, from Harrow in north-west London, took the child to a private house for the procedure in 2006.

…

It was only in 2015 that the girl – who is now aged 21 and who cannot be identified – confided to a schoolteacher that she had suffered FGM and police were informed.

Following an examination at University College Hospital in 2019 it was found that the girl’s clitoris had been completely removed.

That’s right: make sex a tiresome duty (or worse) because otherwise women will fuck every man within a ten-mile radius.

Many are sharing this little gem.

Again – he’s a 57-year-old man doing an impersonation of a particularly silly 13-year-old girl. A 57-year-old man playing dressup for the edification of Twitter. A 57-year-old man saying “Haha you’re ugly.” A 57-year-old man smirking and pouting at the same time while taking selfies in the world’s stupidest hat. A 57-year-old man doing this. Not 15, not 20, not 22, but FIFTY SEVEN. Aren’t most people embarrassed to do silly teenage look-at-me shit in public once they’re, I don’t know, 35 or so?

But hey, being incloosive of trans laydeez is the most pressing issue on the Left since the General Strike.

The points are tipping.

Humanity is moving dangerously close to irreversible tipping points that would drastically damage our ability to cope with disasters, UN researchers have warned, including the withdrawal of home insurance from flood-hit areas and the drying up of the groundwater that is vital for ensuring food supplies.

These “risk tipping points” also include the loss of the mountain glaciers that are essential for water supplies in many parts of the world and accumulating space debris knocking out satellites that provide early warnings of extreme weather.

I didn’t know that about the space debris.

The risk tipping points are different from the climate tipping points the world is on the brink of, including the collapse of Amazon rainforest and the shutdown of a key Atlantic Ocean current. The climate tipping points are large-scale changes driven by human-caused global heating, while the risk tipping points are more directly connected to people’s lives via complex social and ecological systems.

“As we indiscriminately extract our water resources, damage nature, and pollute both Earth and space, we are moving dangerously close to the brink of multiple risk tipping points that could destroy the very systems that our life depends on,” said Dr Zita Sebesvari, at UNU’s Institute for Environment and Human Security. “We are changing the entire risk landscape and losing our tools to manage risk.”

That seems like a bad idea, but we have no clue how to stop it.

One risk tipping point is the inability to get insurance. I’ve posted about that quite a few times. Why would anyone insure housing in Miami or on the Jersey shore? Or the wildfire-prone areas of California and Nevada?

The groundwater risk tipping point has already been passed in some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, and is close in India, the report said. Saudi Arabia was a major wheat exporter in the 1990s but now imports the cereal after the groundwater wells were exhausted.

…

The other risk tipping points covered by the report were the point when water supplies from melting mountain glaciers start to decline; when Earth’s orbit becomes so full of debris that one collision with a satellite sets off a chain reaction; when heatwaves pass the point when natural sweating can cool the human body; and when losses of interdependent wildlife species snowball into the collapse of an ecosystem.

All of those seem to be in progress.