It’s not clear what county council this is (possibly Hampshire), but whatever council it is, it’s interesting in more than one way. Or maybe it’s just variations on one way. It’s interesting but highly irritating that any council or anyone else is trying to train anyone via childish cartoons.

If you play it you will see how insultingly crude and infantile it is, and you will wonder what the hell is the point. Who in charge thinks it’s effective to treat the public like a concert hall full of toddlers? Full of potentially racist/anti-immigrant toddlers? What’s the deal with the slow drawing of a line through a day on the calendar over and over?

More substantively though there is the ubiquitous mashing together of “anti-immigrant” with resistance to a particular monotheistic religion. Islam is the worst of the monotheisms (they’re all bad), and it has to be resisted. Islam teaches that all non-marital sex is the fault of women and that therefore women have to be ferociously hidden and controlled and deprived. Dopy patronizing cartoons don’t change that.

Appropriate advertising to have on public transportation? Or no?

Tom Harris at the Telegraph on Duffield v Starmer:

Starmer only became an MP in 2015, but was already talked about as a future leader, despite his lack of campaigning or political experience. It is the complaint most often heard from Labour politicians and ex-politicians: he’s just not that political.

This lack of political skills nearly condemned him to political oblivion just one year after being elected leader of his party, with the loss of the Hartlepool by-election. Sitting governments winning a seat from the official opposition half-way through a parliament is a strange and rare event. Fortunately for Starmer, the Conservative Party came to his aid with a series of fratricidal misjudgments, dispensing of two prime ministers and gifting the next election to the Labour Party without its needing to make much effort to win.

But Duffield has exposed Labour’s victory for what it really was: a vote of no confidence in all the political parties, but one from which Labour happened to be in a position to benefit.

It would be a huge mistake for the party to now ignore Duffield, but it is also likely. Keir Starmer is thin-skinned – another weakness – and has refused on a number of occasions even to acknowledge Duffield’s existence. The woman who in 2017 won Labour’s only seat in Kent was condemned to the political wilderness by a man peeved to be called out on his previous naïve and ill-informed acceptance of trans ideology. 

Some men – grown-ass adult men at that – are astonishingly thin-skinned about women who disagree with them.

Yet when Starmer himself slowly and painfully reneged on the catechism that “trans women are women”, he could not bring himself to acknowledge that Duffield had been right all along. During the general election campaign, he attributed his conversion to the realities of biological science (“Men have penises and women have vaginas”, apparently) to Tony Blair. 

First rule of Boys’ Club: find a man to credit.

Probably not random:

A 14-year-old schoolgirl has been seriously injured after a substance, believed to be acidic, was thrown at her and another teenager outside her school in west London, with a staff member also becoming hurt while trying to help them. The girl remains in hospital with potentially life-changing injuries following the incident at Westminster Academy, Westbourne Park, which took place after school hours on Monday afternoon.

The Metropolitan Police says it believes the two teens were approached on Alfred Road by a male “who threw a substance at them before fleeing down Harrow Road”.

I think “potentially life-changing” probably means the acid melted her face.

Wellllll he didn’t support a national ban on abortion, he said he wanted a national ban on abortion. Totally different thing. To be fair.

J.D. Vance attempted to distort his own position on abortion in the vice presidential debate on Oct. 1, suggesting that he “never supported a national ban.” In the past, he has said that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and was “sympathetic” to the view that a national ban was needed to stop women from going to another state to get an abortion.

It’s silly to say “suggesting” when it’s simply what he said. Sometimes you just have to use the same word over and over, for the sake of meaning.

Anyway, it’s what he said.

Pro Publica reports on one pregnancy made fatal by Georgia’s woman-hating law.

Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her. “They said it was going to be more painful and her body might not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.

But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.

At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.

Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.

It’s Savita Halappanavar all over again.

Georgia women get to make decisions about their own bodies and lives again.

A judge in Georgia has struck down the state’s abortion law that has prohibited abortions after six weeks of pregnancy since it took effect in 2022. Georgia’s Life Act was fully nullified by Judge Robert McBurney’s decision, meaning that the state must now allow abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.

The judge wrote in his order that “liberty in Georgia” includes “the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices”.

It’s quite an important liberty, when you think about it.

Gov Kemp’s office criticised the judge’s ruling on Monday. “Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives have been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge,” Garrison Douglas, Kemp’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “Protecting the lives of the most vulnerable among us is one of our most sacred responsibilities, and Georgia will continue to be a place where we fight for the lives of the unborn.”

The category “the most vulnerable among us” does not include processes in other people’s abdomens. Pregnancy is a process; it’s not yet a person.

Maggie Chapman MSP throws women under a whole fleet of buses.

“The prophet he told us in the hadith”

“a woman should not allowed [sic] to put perfume on if she leaves the house”

Is that so? What if it’s her house, and she lives there without any men? Who’s going to do the not allowing? Will the local mosque be sending parole officers to sniff her for perfume?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on One rough hour.

Someone who says out loud that he’d love to suspend due process isn’t someone you want to have in power. At all. I’m sure your Founding Fathers had something to say about that. Oh yeah, it’s called THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, which, in the past, Trump has sworn to defend. Guess it didn’t take. I’m a goddamn foreigner and I know his tiny mind’s little thought experiment is completely illegal, and exactly the sort of abuse of government power the framers were so very keen to prevent when establishing your Republic. They had very different ideas about what would make America “great.” Besides, Trump has already given America “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day.” That was January 6, 2021. He shouldn’t be given a chance for a do-over.

But this kind of daydream is not surprising coming from him, given his attempts at freelance, millionaire vigilantism with the Central Park Five. And ironic, with how much he himself has benefitted from due process. Never pick up a weapon you’re not prepared to give to your opponents. Turnabout is fair play. Maybe the people he’s stiffed over the years stringing him up could have been a deterrent to other prospective fraudsters. Same principle, just wearing a suit and tie for gang colours. Then again, laws are for other people, and Donald Trump, president or not, is above the law.

Trump has a plan:

As he often has in the past, Trump complained at the rally that police are “not allowed to do their job” because of political pressure and that crime is rampant in President Joe Biden’s America as a result. (It is not.) And that’s when he proposed his “Purge”-esque solution: If police were allowed “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day,” he said, crime would be eliminated “immediately.” He was taken enough by the proposition that he returned to it later, saying, “One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know? It will end immediately.”

A Trump campaign official told Politico afterward that he was “clearly just floating it in jest.”

That’s true, in a way. If you watch it you can see that he’s just throwing stuff out there in his usual wannabe standup comedian fashion. But then, the fact that he thinks that’s a jest is more than bad enough all by itself. His nauseating reveling in dreams of violence is one of the worst things about him. It’s like falling into a septic tank, watching him bloviate and “joke” about all the disgusting things he would like to do. His fantasies are just as revolting as his “serious” plans.

Also, the fact that it is in a sense just talk doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. It just means that he can’t do it right this second.

The Trump campaign’s “in jest” excuse should be dismissed. As I’ve written before, for the better part of a decade Trump has used a comic tone and “I’m just kidding” caveats to float trial balloons for his most extreme ideas.

Even though Trump obviously wouldn’t have the authority as president to permit the police to indulge in a day of extreme violence, that he’s articulating the idea in public at all is still significant — and corrosive. It signals an attitude toward police misconduct that helps to set the Republican agenda — at federal and state levels — on legislation related to police reform.

And it encourages everyone else to think this way. And it shows the world what an evil human we once elected president. In short it taints everything. Every damn thing.

It seems it has started. Four minutes ago:

Explosions can be heard above Tel Aviv and the sound of warning sirens wailing across the city, Israel’s largest urban and economic metropolis.

In Jerusalem, explosions are also being heard, witnesses have told Reuters.

Israeli media is reporting that Iran has launched more than 100 missiles at Israel. It’s unclear whether missiles are hitting home or being intercepted in the sky above the cities. This is a rapidly unfolding, ongoing situation.

The Israeli military is now reporting that sirens are sounding across the country.

Update:

Explosions can be heard above Tel Aviv and the sound of warning sirens wailing across the city, Israel’s largest urban and economic metropolis.

In Jerusalem, explosions are also being heard, witnesses have told Reuters.

Israeli media is reporting that Iran has launched more than 100 missiles at Israel. It’s unclear whether missiles are hitting home or being intercepted in the sky above the cities. This is a rapidly unfolding, ongoing situation.

The Israeli military is now reporting that sirens are sounding across the country.

9 minutes later:

Guardian reporters in Jerusalem witnessed dozens of missiles heading over the city going towards Israel’s main coastal cities in a huge attack at not long after 7.30 pm local time, with the engines of the rockets clearly visible as they passed over.

While some interceptions could be heard over the city many of the missiles appeared to continue on unharmed and proceed towards the coast and central Israel to the sound of distant bombs.

On the edge of the Old City many stood to watch the missiles flying overhead in what appears to have been an unprecedented attack.

The shouters win again.

Note the “We appreciate all feedback on our services, especially from residents who asked us to reconsider holding this program.” Why especially the no-sayers? Why them? Why appreciate them more than the yes-sayers? More pointedly, why especially the fans of magic gender rather than the people who don’t believe in magic gender? Why does team magic win? Why is their feedback “especially”?

Also note that the people of no already had their program last March, and this one was supposed to be the turn of the other point of view. Magic gender had its say, and now disbelief in magic gender has had its say shut down.

Then note the ubiquitous dishonest waffle “transgender participation in sports.” The issue isn’t “transgender participation”; the issue is men in women’s sports. We know they know this, because they’re always so very careful not to say it.

Also note that they cite the bullying as a reason to let the bullying win.

Pack of idiots running a library.

Straight up lying.

Female people=slaves.

Trump is a shameless inveterate liar.

We are now heading to Valdosta, Georgia, in order to pay my respects and bring lots of relief material, including fuel, equipment, water, and other things, to the State. Many politicians and Law Enforcement will be there. We’ll be saying hello to Franklin Graham, Burt Jones, Tyler Harper, Mike Collins, Austin Scott, Russ Goodman, Sam Watson, and the Mayor of Valdosta Scott James. They are working very hard. I was also going to stop into North Carolina, which has really been hit hard. I have a lot of supplies ready for them, but access and communication is now restricted, and we want to make sure that Local Emergency Management is able to focus on helping the people most affected, and not being concerned with me. I’ll be there shortly, but don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas. MAGA!

He’s not getting any reports about the Feds and the governor not helping Republicans. Liar liar liar.

The New Republic:

Trump didn’t elaborate on where these “reports” were coming from, which don’t seem to have any factual basis. Much of North Carolina votes Republican, so it would be near impossible for any relief efforts to occur that would neglect conservatives. Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor since 2017, has deployed the National Guard and undertaken statewide efforts to help those affected by the hurricane, which has hit his state hardest, killing nearly 50 people and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power.

President Biden has pledged “every available resource, as fast as possible, to your communities, to rescue, recover, and to begin rebuilding,” and even plans to visit communities affected by the hurricane later this week. On Sunday, Biden approved disaster declarations for both Florida and North Carolina, which allows immediate access to emergency funds for recovery efforts.

Trump is just lying, as usual.

Trans man regrets

My name is Tiger Reed. I am a 44-year-old librarian in St. Louis, Missouri. Since 2016, I have been married to Jamie Reed. She is the whistleblower who exposed the alarming effects of “gender-affirming” medical care given to minors at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in a 2023 article for The Free Press. Her story shocked the nation. I am also “Dad” to the five children we are raising together—two from Jamie’s previous marriage and three we have adopted.

And now, after 13 years of living as a man, I am in the process of tapering down my weekly testosterone injections to begin the process of becoming a woman again. 

…

I realize the thing that threatened me the most about Jamie going public was something I didn’t want to face. This was the knowledge that my spouse and a growing chorus of knowledgeable critics were right. They were right that there was something fundamentally amiss with the message, especially to young people, that a swift gender transition was a safe, all-purpose solution to profound problems. 

Especially to young people. I remember being a member of the young people community, and how swiftly and easily everything could change. I also remember being kind of stupid about a lot of things. I’m glad I didn’t indulge in any hasty amputations when I was a young person.

I want to speak out about adult gender medicine, and how people have been misled—sometimes unintentionally—by gender clinicians about its safety and effectiveness. 

Note the sometimes unintentionally. Indicates that other times it was intentional.

I know there isn’t a lot of sympathy for those of us who transition as adults. People assume you made your choice, and you knew what you were signing up for. But in recent years we have been finding out that reliable research for transition, especially concerning its long-term effects, is virtually nonexistent. The comprehensive Cass Review showed the lack of scientific underpinning for the commonly accepted medical treatments for gender dysphoria—hormones and surgery—especially for kids. 

In other words people don’t know what they’re signing up for, yet they’re hotly and passionately urged to sign up for it anyway. Why? Why are we doing this?

I knew that going on testosterone at age 31, and five years later having my breasts removed, would bring profound physical changes. But no one I consulted prepared me for the emotional consequences of transition—for how the hormones would change not only my appearance but how I felt about myself and the world. 

Why not? Probably because the whole thing is so intensely politicized that people are afraid to do that kind of preparing. Probably because anything that’s not enthusiastic encouragement is branded transphobic. If you talk about the potential downsides and risks, you must be a monster who wants to hurt Members of the Trans Communinny. It’s safer not to. Not safer for the person transitioning, of course, but for the people enabling the “transition.”

Today, the harmful physical effects of over a decade on testosterone have started to make themselves known: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, high triglycerides, sleep apnea, and issues with my kidneys. While some of these problems are hereditary, the testosterone in my system only exacerbates them. 

That sounds like a lot.

I’m going public because I want people like me who have complex and nuanced reasons for their gender distress to be part of the conversation. I want people to know there are more options than medicalizing their bodies for the rest of their lives. 

I hope there will be many more.

Let’s visit the LGBT page for St Jude’s Primary School (Church of England of course) in Southwark.

 Valuing All God’s Children

LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender. The “plus” represents other sexual identities.

This is primary school, remember. The youngest kids are 5.

In 2018, almost 250,000 people in London identified as Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual and there are now at least 20,000 children growing up in same-sex parent families. Many children will have or know relatives, family friends or neighbours who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Trans.

Notice how the “Trans” bit is added on. Start with LGB, then when they’re not looking add the T.

It is important to us at St Jude’s that we represent different families in our community as we know that children who see their families reflected in class and around the school will grow up to be confident, respectful and successful citizens.

Not if their parents are trans they won’t. Parents of 5-year-olds who claim to be the other sex are bound to be terrible parents, too self-involved and reckless to meet the needs of small children.

Aside from our moral duty, it is also our statutory duty to teach children about different families and relationships and therefore all primary schools in England are expected to teach Relationships Education. In teaching Relationships Education we ensure that the needs of all pupils are appropriately met, and that all pupils understand the importance of equality and respect. We ensure that all of our teaching is sensitive and age appropriate in approach and content.

And we teach small children that people can change sex.

Sorry Saint Jude’s but you can’t do both. It’s neither sensitive nor age appropriate to teach small children that people can change sex.

In order to prepare children for the diverse society they live in and to prevent bullying and discrimination, it is important to talk about difference in general and different families in particular. At St Jude’s, the children learn about and celebrate different family structures primarily through our PSHE scheme of work, science scheme of work and during our celebration of LGBT+ History Month. In addition, our school library and class book corners are stocked with books that represent different family structures and some of the texts we use within our English lessons feature an LGBT character.

What’s an “LGBT character”?

They include a horrible rainbow graphic chart of all the ways they inclooooode LGBT content in their “Progress Curriculum”.

They conclude by saying they are proud of being a Stonewall Champion School.

Yet again…there aren’t enough swears in the universe. Genevieve Gluck tells us:

Reduxx has learned that a man serving a 30-year sentence for the fatal beating of a 55-year old woman has quietly been transferred into New Jersey’s Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women. Elliot Rivera Jr., 35, now calls himself Jamie Belladonna and is described as “female” within the state Department of Corrections (DOC) system.

Rivera’s total prison term amounts to 40 years, to be run concurrently, on the basis of two convictions. In November 2011, he was sentenced to a mandatory minimum term of 30 years for the 2009 murder of Patricia Cantaloupe. In a separate case, Rivera was sentenced to 10 years in prison for carjacking a 57 year-old woman in the parking lot of a supermarket on February 26, 2010.

Patricia Cantaloupe was repeatedly bashed in the head with a hammer. The arrest for the carjacking turned up evidence that Rivera was the guy with the hammer.

Since 2011, Rivera had been serving his sentence in the New Jersey State Prison (NJSP) in Trenton. In February 2023, independent news site The Appeal reported sympathetically on Rivera’s situation as a “trans woman” who was unjustly incarcerated in a men’s facility.

I have to wonder why The Appeal had more sympathy for the man who bashed a woman in the head with a hammer than for the woman he bashed in the head with a hammer.

In 2019, an ACLU lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Corrections resulted in a settlement which required the state to allow violent male inmates to self-identify into the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women.

Bashing women in the head with a hammer is a civil liberty, is it?

Guardian headline:

Will Ferrell’s Netflix doc Will & Harper is flawed but vital viewing for cis people

Vital? I really doubt that. It’s not as if we don’t get lectured on the subject enough already.

Let’s admit it: cisgender people are really curious about us trans women.

Ok stop right there. First sentence and already you’re off the rails. No, we really really aren’t. We’ve heard way more than we want to about trans women. I can’t begin to express how much more we’ve heard than we ever wanted to. The only thing we can be described as “curious” about is where the hell do you get the nerve?

They want to know things such as: what’s it like to have a surgeon rearrange your genitals? How did you know you were really a girl all along? Does it suck having to be on the downside of sexism now?

Nope. I don’t. I really really don’t. I promise you. I’m not interested. You talk and talk and talk and talk about yourselves day in and day out and we are not curious about you. I for one think you desperately need to shut up about yourselves and think about other people for a change. Being trans has turned out to be a wildly effective excuse to be publicly self-obsessed all day every single day.

For our own part, trans women are curious about cisgender folk, too. We want to know things like: do you actually think I’m female, or am I just a deluded guy in a dress to you?

That’s hilarious. He’s actually reproduced, without noticing he’s doing it, the jokey catchphrase: “Enough about me, let’s talk about what you think about me.”

Skipping several boring paragraphs –

It’s extremely hard to survive a transition with your dignity intact, in large part because very few people stop to consider that a man trying to transform into a woman is in such an infinitely more disempowered position than they are.

It’s a good thing very few people stop to consider that, because it’s horseshit. No you’re not. You’re a man. The fact that you’re hell-bent on making a fool of yourself is your choice, so if that “disempowers” you because people now know you’re a fool, that’s your own work. You’re still a man; you still have that power.

It’s uniquely vulnerable, to feminize your appearance and your personality, and to put yourself out there for the world’s approval.

Try being a woman surrounded by a group of drunk men.

You are doing the one thing that – for your whole life – you have been absolutely screamed at to never, ever do. You are going against every last survival instinct you have, because it’s the only way.

Try being a woman surrounded by a group of drunk men.

He just has no clue, does he.