In weather/climate news:

A powerful storm has brought destruction to Norway, causing landslides and leaving an entire town stranded, as meteorologists warned of the strongest rainfall in a quarter of a century.

The storm – named Storm Hans – has killed two people, ripped off roofs and caused widespread disruption across northern Europe in a summer that started with wildfires across much of the region.

…

Strong winds and rain continued across the region, also causing disruption, cancelling ferries, delaying flights, uprooting trees, flooding streets and also causing outages across Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden.

…

The Swedish meteorological and hydrological institute issued a red warning for Halland and parts of Småland for Tuesday and Wednesday. The institute said Hans had also brought in warm air across the north, leading to tropical nights in multiple locations in Norrland. On Tuesday, Haparanda recorded a temperature of 30.2C – its highest August temperature since 1969.

Meanwhile, in Estonia, nearly 10,000 people were left without power. In Denmark, waves of up to eight metres were reported and beach houses were washed into the North Sea. In Finland, authorities urged people to reconsider whether they needed to go out to sea.

H/t Harald Hanche-Olsen

Joan Smith has thoughts on the unabashed misogyny of Mhairi Black.

Does the SNP approve of abusing women? Opponents of the party’s extreme views on transgender rights have long highlighted the poor quality of debate in Scotland, but remarks by a leading SNP politician provide dramatic evidence of a hostile climate towards outspoken women. Mhairi Black, Deputy Leader of the party at Westminster, has dismissed women who disagree with her views on transgender rights as “50-year-old Karens”. 

Maybe she thinks women should be terminated at age 40, or perhaps 35. She’s 28…I wonder if it’s ever crossed her mind that she will eventually be 50.

Some observers might think it is a bit rich for a party represented by such confused and incoherent people to pass judgement on the rest of us. But it is much worse than that. The SNP now promotes magical thinking, expecting everyone to go along with its belief that men can become women simply by saying so. It’s telling that Black singled out older women for her vile comments, recycling centuries of prejudice that allowed them to be characterised as witches.

This is pure misogyny, expressed in language designed to silence and shame women who hold perfectly rational views. A feminist organisation, For Women Scotland, has suggested that Black’s comments call into question her fitness for office. But the SNP leadership has bigger questions to answer. Are they going to repudiate Black’s repellent views? Or is misogyny now official party policy?

I’m not going to risk any money on that bet.

Always worse than predicted.

It is “virtually certain” that future extreme events in Antarctica will be worse than the extraordinary changes already observed, according to a new scientific warning that stresses the case for immediate and drastic action to limit global heating.

A new review draws together evidence on the vulnerability of Antarctic systems, highlighting recent extremes such as record low sea ice levels, the collapse of ice shelves, and surface temperatures up to 38.5C above average over East Antarctica in 2022 – the world’s largest ever recorded heatwave.

…

The rate of ice sheet loss from Antarctica “matches the IPCC worst case” for predicted ice loss under high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, Hogg said. “The observations show we’re tracking [along] the most extreme prediction of what might happen.” This is despite global emissions currently tracking closer to an intermediate emissions pathway.

Ice shelves, which fringe three-quarters of the Antarctic coastline, have also retreated in recent decades. Large sections of the Larsen-A, Larsen-B, and Wilkins ice shelves “collapsed catastrophically” in 1995, 2002 and 2008 respectively, the study noted. Ten Antarctic ice shelves have also experienced major ice calving events since 2009.

“We should be deeply concerned about the environment of Antarctica in the years that are coming under continued fossil fuel burning,” said the study’s lead author, Prof Martin Siegert of the University of Exeter.

We will, we’ll be very deeply concerned. We just won’t do anything about it.

If you don’t think men can be women you’re like WHITE SUPREMACISTS. Don’t try to deny it.

Gender-critical campaigners are comparable to white supremacists, the SNP’s deputy Westminster leader has claimed.

Mhairi Black said that “bad actors” and “50-year-old Karens” were responsible for the debate over transgender rights and suggested those who vocally disagreed with her views on such issues could not be “decent” people.

Ah yes those pesky women who are rude and evil and white supremacist enough to stop being 30, they should all be locked up. How dare a woman be 50?! You’ll never see Mhairi Black being 50, because she’s far too enlightened and perfect for that sort of thing.

Progressives today, honestly – going through a box of Kleenex a day crying over men who say they are women, while insulting and belittling actual women every chance they get.

In comments likely to deepen an already bitter divide in Scotland, she said those who made “intellectual” arguments against extending trans rights were akin to past generations who claimed non-white ethnic groups were inferior.

Except that that’s not even slightly true. There are sound reasons for declining to “extend trans rights” so far that they let men invade and destroy and take everything that belongs to women. Men are not the underdogs here. Mhairi Black is thick as ten planks.

For Women Scotland, a prominent gender-critical campaign group, claimed that the MP’s comments called into question her fitness for office.

Well, yes, they do. They’re lies, for a start, and they’re grotesquely insulting. I suspect quite a few of her constituents are women who are 50 and older.

“To me, a decent person is someone who tries to make others comfortable and accept them, particularly when it’s a marginalised, oppressed group.”

I guess she’s unaware that women are a marginalised oppressed group?

Susan Smith, a director at For Women Scotland, said Ms Black’s comments were a “damning indictment of her intellectual capacity and her fitness to act as a legislator”.

She added: “Her inability to grasp why highly vulnerable women in prison, fleeing domestic violence, or being cared for in hospital might not want to share intimate spaces with someone of the male sex suggests that it is long past time she got out of her highly cosseted, gilded bubble.

“Women who disagree with her should not be forced to be silent like some latter-day scold, nor are they the racist or religious fundamentalist bogeywomen.”

Or even Karens.

Well now that’s just silly. Why would God build a cathedral upside-down and buried in the ground?

(Not knocking the protecting public and indigenous lands part. Just saying a big hole in the ground doesn’t have to be “God”‘s doing. Shout out to the Colorado River here; peace be upon it, or what’s left of it.)

Originally a comment by What a Maroon on Intern runs amok.

This does sound like fun! Let’s dog the Mary Rose collection.

Dogging the Mary Rose collection:

Octagonal mirror: an octagon has eight sides, twice the number of paws of a dog. As social beings, dogs like to be around at least another dog, so the number 8 has special significance. (And did you know that if you turn the 8 sideways, you get the symbol for infinity?! How cool is that! We love our dogs to infinity!) As for the mirror itself, dogs don’t recognize their own reflection, so they may see the dog in the mirror as a rival, perhaps causing anxiety. On the other hand, they may see their human in the mirror, bringing them great joy!

Comb: Dogs love to be combed, as long as you don’t tug any knots in their fur too hard!

Ring: dogs often suffer from ringworms, leading to a loss of hair (c.f. combs). On the other hand, a ring is circular in shape, just like a collar. And put two together, and you have the number 8! (or infinity)

Paternoster: all dogs are good boys or girls (or enbies!) and they all go to heaven!

Oh look, hours of fun for the whole family: Queering the Mary Rose’s Collection.

How can we understand The Mary Rose’s collection of personal objects through a Queer lens?

This blog does not attempt to identify the sexuality or gender identity of crew members, which would be an impossible task. Instead, we will use ‘Queerness as an interpretative tool’ to represent LGBTQ+ stories.

Who’s “we”?

Turns out it’s Hannah.

Queering The Mary Rose’s Collection by Hannah (Collections & Curatorial Intern)

I wonder if the non-intern staff are regretting having an intern, especially one with no last name.

How can we understand The Mary Rose’s collection of personal objects through a Queer lens?

This interpretation of historical objects is inspired by ‘Queering the Collections’, a collective movement that occurs in museums around the world. From the Tate Britain and the Wellcome Collection, to the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, museums are reinterpreting and Queering their objects. 

Ready? No one needs to go potty first? Ok let’s begin.

Octagonal mirror

There a photo of an octagonal wooden frame.

A circular, reflective surface would have sat within this beech frame. This mirror would have been considered a luxury item on the Mary Rose. Looking at your own reflection in a mirror can bring up lots of emotions for both straight and LGBTQ+ people. For Queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities. On the other hand, we may experience gender euphoria when looking in a mirror, when how we feel on the inside matches our reflection.  

Well! There’s the Mary Rose queered for you!

Hannah goes on to queer nit combs, a ring, and paternosters in the same inventive way. The nit combs were for getting rid of lice but combs are for hair and for queer people hair is a central part of their idenniny. The ring could be a wedding band and queer people can marry each other you know. Paternosters are a churchy thing, and Henry VIII made churchy law state law, and some queer men people were executed for having sex with men queer people.

It’s profound stuff!

The Times offers detail on the protective order:

The first miniskirmish in the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election involves a step that is taken in the early phases of many prominent criminal cases: a proposal to impose rules on how the voluminous discovery evidence in the matter should be handled.

The disagreement started on Friday, when prosecutors in the office of the special counsel asked the judge who is overseeing the case for what is known as a protective order governing the disclosure of discovery material to Mr. Trump’s lawyers. The entreaty was routine, although in making their request, the prosecutors took what could be considered an extra step.

The extra step was citing Trump’s I WILL COME AFTER YOU tweet.

The prosecutors did not ask Judge Chutkan to issue a gag order against Mr. Trump because of the post. But they did use the message to suggest there should be clear rules in place to keep the former president from posting online any evidence that his legal team would get through the discovery process, an apparent acknowledgment that for Mr. Trump, few things are ever routine.

Aka an apparent acknowledgement that Trump is a raging psychopath who will do whatever pops into his head in his efforts to save his ass.

On Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers responded to the government’s request by arguing in court papers that prosecutors, by asking Judge Chutkan to limit the former president from publicly discussing the evidence in his case, [were] infringing on Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights and [were] having “the court assume the role of censor.”

Which to an outsider seems just silly. If he goes to prison that will infringe on his rights to freedom of motion and yadda yadda, too, because that’s how that works. You lose some rights when you are convicted of serious crimes.

On Monday night, in what has become a typical tit for tat, prosecutors fired back, accusing Mr. Trump’s legal team of proposing its own version of the order “designed to allow him to try this case in the media rather than in the courtroom.”

Might as well make ourselves even more of a laughingstock than we already are, right?

Oh wait, Swansea University West Ham Society is on board. This changes everything!!!

(What do you mean “who?”? SWANSEA UNIVERSITY WEST HAM SOCIETY. It’s a society. At Swansea University. Devoted to West Ham. The football club. 36 people follow it on Twitter. It’s kind of a big deal.)

Fulham eat your heart out.

Hanan Razek at the BBC reports:

A hidden world of sex abuse and exploitation by men working as “spiritual healers” has been uncovered by BBC Arabic.

Spiritual healing, also known as “Quranic healing”, is a popular practice in the Arab and Muslim world. It is mostly women who visit healers – believing that they can solve problems and cure illness by expelling evil spirits known as “jinn”.

Naturally. Women are ferociously subordinated in the Arab and Muslim world, which makes them unlikely to have much education, which renders them credulous about scams like “Quranic healing.”

Testimonies gathered by the BBC from 85 women, over a period of more than a year, named 65 so-called healers in Morocco and Sudan – two countries where such practices are particularly popular – with accusations ranging from harassment to rape.

It’s like that Boccaccio story about the priest who Drove Out The Devil with his dick. In fact it pretty much is that story.

Dalal (not her real name) sought treatment for depression from a spiritual healer in a town near Casablanca a few years ago, when she was in her mid-20s. She says the healer told her the depression was caused by a “jinn lover” who had possessed her.

At a one-to-one session he asked her to smell a scent he said was musk – but which she now believes to have been some kind of drug, because she lost consciousness. Dalal, who had never had any sexual experience before, says she woke to find her underwear had been removed, and realised she had been raped. She says she began screaming at the raqi (Quranic healer), asking him what he had done to her.

“I said: ‘Shame on you! Why did you do this to me?’ He said: ‘To make the jinn leave your body.'”

Boccaccio wasn’t just making it up.

The ACLU rejoices that girls will be forced to take their clothes off in front of boys.

Trans students must have access to bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender, but there is zero need for girls to have access to bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their sex. Why is that exactly?

Peter Tatchell tries to LGBT+ a Jewish lesbian who escaped the Nazis.

She did not become an “LGBT+” activist. She was a lesbian activist.

David Semple in The Guardian November 5, 2013:

My friend Sharley McLean, the lesbian activist, has died aged 90. She was born Lotte Reyersbach in Oldenburg, north Germany, and escaped to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. Her father, Franz, a socialist, and her Jewish mother, Grete, were both killed in the Holocaust. Her gay uncle, Kurt Bach, died, wearing a pink triangle, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

…

After 1945, Sharley continued working for the NHS, and had two children. In 1950, following a breakdown and an unsuccessful attempt to take her own life, she was told by a psychologist that she was a lesbian. This came as a shock, and when she later visited the Gateways, a lesbian club in Chelsea, she felt she didn’t fit in with the tweedy women she met there. But in 1953, she began a relationship with a West Indian woman, Georgina, which lasted for 24 years, although Sharley carried on living with her husband. Divorce would have meant losing her children.

Georgina’s death in 1977 was a body blow; Georgina had kept her sexuality secret and her family refused to allow Sharley to attend the funeral. But she threw herself into political activism, working for the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and later the Terrence Higgins Trust. In 1982, she founded the Hyde Park Gays and Sapphics and gave public speeches from a rickety stepladder at Speakers’ Corner every Sunday for more than 20 years. She showed great courage and enriched many lives by speaking about gay rights at a major London tourist attraction, week after week, to a largely hostile crowd.

Gay rights. Lesbian rights. Gays and Sapphics. Don’t thrust the T on people who are dead and can’t consent.

What fresh hell is this?

“PLANET GIRL” is pink – “PLANET BOY” is blue – now there’s progressive for ya!

“Which planet were you sent to as a baby?”

I beg your fucking pardon?

Why is “NON-BINARY PLANET” much bigger than PLANET GIRL and PLANET BOY and also the original or parent planet that the inferior two are sprouting out of?

The people from PLANET IDIOT need to go away and stop messing with children.

It should have happened years ago! He’s not wrong there.

Trump continues to do whatever he wants all the time.

t Donald Trump’s arraignment last Thursday for trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election, magistrate judge Moxila A Upadhyaya warned him that he could be taken into custody if he violated the conditions of his release, including attempting to influence jurors or intimidate future witnesses.

…

The judge then warned Trump: “You have heard your conditions of release. It is important you comply. You may be held pending trial in this case if you violate the conditions of release.”

She asked Trump: “Do you understand these warnings and consequence, sir? Are you prepared to comply?”

Trump responded: “Yes.”

But not 24 hours later, Trump posted on social media a message that could be understood as an attempt to influence potential jurors or retaliate against any witness prepared to testify against him: He wrote: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

More than could be, I think. He’s facing a trial. He’s been told not to try to influence or intimidate jurors. He shouts a threat on social media. Can jurors feel 100% confident that he doesn’t mean that threat for them? I don’t think so.

On Friday evening, prosecutors from the office of special counsel Jack Smith asked the court for a protective order to stop Trump from making public any of the information they were about to deliver to his lawyers under the discovery phase of the upcoming criminal trial, such as the names of witnesses who will testify against him.

…

On Saturday, the presiding judge in the case, Judge Tanya Chutkan, ordered that Trump’s lawyers respond to the prosecutor’s request for a protective order by 5pm Monday.

All through the weekend, Trump continued to threaten potential witnesses.

“WOW, it’s finally happened! Liddle’ Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him VP, has gone to the Dark Side,” he posted Saturday.

And Trump hasn’t stopped attempting to obstruct justice.

On Sunday he called Jack Smith “deranged”, and in another all-caps message he accused Smith of waiting to bring the case until “right in the middle” of his election campaign.

In another post he asserted that he would never get a “fair trial” with Chutkan and jurors from Washington DC.

These statements directly violate the conditions of Trump’s release pending trial.

But he’s not just some raggedy ordinary person, he’s DONALD TRUMP, so he gets to ignore what judges tell him to do and refrain from doing.

Trump is now under the supervision of the court, as would be any criminal defendant after an arraignment.

But he will continue to test the willingness and ability of the court to treat him like any other criminal defendant unless he’s reined in.

The court must fully assert the rule of law during these proceedings, even if that requires threatening Trump with jail pending his trial. And if he continues to refuse to abide by the conditions of his release, it might be time to actually jail him.

Ya think?

Trump loses another round.

A federal judge has dismissed Donald Trump’s counter defamation lawsuit against E. Jean Carroll, dealing another legal blow to the former president.

In an order Monday, Judge Lewis Kaplan said that Trump had not proven that Carroll’s statements on CNN the day after the jury awarded her $5 million after finding that Trump sexually abused Carroll and defamed her were false or “not at least substantially true,” which is the legal standard.

Yikes, that’s a clumsy sentence. I’d start over if I were CNN. Break it into shorter sentences for the sake of clarity.

Carroll’s attorneys have argued the only issue for the jury in January is how much in damages Trump should pay her. Trump’s attorneys argued there should be a cap on damages to avoid double counting from the jury’s verdict in the ASA case.

Nah. Gouge the mofo until he screams.

Women may not meet together. It is not allowed.

So all women are terrorists, is that where we are now?

Extraordinary.

Swansea [University] Union issues a statement:

The University recently informed the Union that an external community group, Swansea Bay ReSisters, is hiring Swansea University’s Taliesin Arts Centre for an event on 31^st August 2023 focussing on legal and social issues affecting women and girls in Wales.

This event has not been promoted, encouraged, or planned by the University, the Taliesin or the Students’ Union.

Wait, what? Why the need to frantically distance the university and the union from a discussion of legal and social issues affecting women and girls in Wales? Is that a taboo subject in Wales?

The Union acknowledges the impact this event could have on students, staff and the wider community, but also understands that the Taliesin is bound by the same legislation and statutory duties as the wider University.

Impact? Impact? What impact? What’s so horrifying about a discussion of legal and social issues affecting women and girls in Wales? To be clear: I haven’t skipped anything from this statement, so there is no missing explanation in these first three paragraphs. That’s all there is: women are meeting to discuss issues; we apologize for the horror.

The University has previously engaged with and explained to the Students’ Union that in the UK, Universities have a statutory duty to ensure freedom of expression and freedom of speech the way in which the law defines it. This legislation binds the University to protecting the rights of any individual to express their opinions on topics, regardless of the University community or Union’s stance on the issue. The University informed us that in order to discharge its statutory duty, it took the decision to accept the booking.

The booking of a discussion of legal and social issues affecting women and girls in Wales. We still haven’t been told what the problem is.

As a Students’ Union, we have always firmly stood with our Trans and Non-Binary students and wish again to echo our support for the community at this time.

What’s that got to do with anything?

We understand that for many of our students, your officers included, this event taking place on our campus is upsetting and uncomfortable.

They understand that? How? Why is this event upsetting and uncomfortable? They’re upset and uncomfortable because women are meeting to discuss issues that affect women and girls? Why????

Please be assured that your Union will continue to work closely with the University on the impact this event may have on the student community.

There is support available for anyone affected by this issue, through our Advice & Support Centre or through the Welfare Team in Campus Life, their contact details are below.

Still not a word of explanation of how and why this event may have some mysterious kind of “impact on the student community.”

If you have any further questions, you can contact our team on fto@swansea-union.co.uk.

Trans rights are human rights.

–  Your Full-time Officers

The end. Not one word to explain the connection between women talking about women’s issues and all this upset and discomfort and impact. There are just the totemistic mentions of trans people and trans rights, but no link to the upset n discomfort n impact. Are trans people allergic to women, so allergic that they can’t be on the same campus with them even for an hour or two? Is that it?

Back in May, staff at the Edinburgh comedy club The Stand tried to shut down a planned Fringe event with Joanna Cherry, but were foiled by public outrage. Now there are new threats.

Joanna Cherry has claimed that the need for unprecedented security measures such as metal detectors at her Fringe show are “a disgrace in modern Scotland”.

The MP, who is well known for her gender critical views, is the headline act at a show at The Stand comedy club on Thursday, an event it is feared trans activists will attempt to prevent going ahead.

Her appearance had initially been cancelled after staff refused to work at it due to Ms Cherry’s views, but the venue backed down and reinstated it after she threatened legal action.

The Stand said that after taking police advice, it had been forced to take “extra measures to ensure the safety of everyone involved with staging the show and members of the audience”.

All because we know that men are not women.

She’s the perfect judge for Trump – from our point of view, not from his.

LAWYERS WHO’VE DEFENDED clients before Tanya S. Chutkan, the judge assigned to Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 election conspiracy case, have some advice for the former president and his attorneys: buckle up.

Far from the more indulgent* Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, attorneys tell Rolling Stone that Chutkan is perhaps the toughest judge he could have gotten in the Washington, D.C. district court.

*the more hand-picked and underqualified Aileen Cannon.

“It’s probably the worst draw for Trump. She’s the worst judge he could’ve gotten handed,” one attorney with experience representing a January 6 defendant tells Rolling Stone. “She’s pleasant, she’s nice, and she’s fair, but she’s a tough judge with these January 6 cases.”

Good.