Helpful tip: if it’s 119F / 48C, outside it’s not a good time to go for a strenuous hike on a trail with no shade or water.

A Florida man and his teenage stepson died after hiking during extreme heat at Big Bend National Park in Texas, officials said.

The boy fell ill along the trail and lost consciousness, and his stepfather was killed in a car accident as he tried to find help, authorities said.

Bad stepfather. Don’t take your kids out hiking in extreme heat.

The man, 31, and his two stepsons were hiking along the Marufo Vega Trail on Friday in 119F (48C) heat when the 14-year-old fell ill. While the stepfather hiked back to his vehicle to seek help, the teen’s 21-year-old brother tried to carry him back to the trailhead, according to the National Park Service.

The Big Bend National Park’s Communications Center received a call requesting emergency assistance at about 18:00 local time (23:00 GMT). “The Marufo Vega Trail winds through extremely rugged desert and rocky cliffs within the hottest part of Big Bend National Park,” the park service said. “No shade or water makes this strenuous trail dangerous to attempt in the heat of summer.”

And this was the heat of summer under a heat dome that was breaking records, so yeah, not the time or place for strenuous exercise.

There it is.

Link

H/t NightCrow

Stoney Creek Camels Rugby Club is on Facebook.

Their most recent post is June 23, announcing the game the next day.

There is one comment on the post, but it’s “not visible” – which I surmise means it has been hidden, which I further surmise means it was a question about the man who played in the match, and perhaps about why the video of the match was made private yesterday.

It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.

Originally a comment by Sastra on She stands by the vulnerable i.e. men.

But the platitudes about “standing by the downtrodden” only make sense from a feminist perspective if you genuinely believe that men who sincerely believe they’re women really are women. How did we get there?

Confusion, analogy, and platitudes. Such as:

1.) Women have historically been “defined by” their sex, limited by patriarchal assumptions about how having a womb means you must have babies and being physically appealing to men means they can own you as a commodity.

2.) If only people would consider women as people in their own right, regardless of what’s under their skirts! Let women make their own choices!

3.) So let’s do feminism. Let there be more choices. Choice is good. Being true to yourself is good. Recognizing that every woman is different is good. Getting rid of stereotypes is good. Separating the woman as a person from the accident of her biology is good. Letting women “define themselves” is good.

4.) Therefore, defining “woman” as a sexual category must be bad. If we trust women to know who they are that must include trusting them to know they’re women in the first place.

5.) This naturally entails that trans women are women just like a black woman is a woman or a disabled woman is a woman. If it’s difficult to believe this — well, it’s always difficult to overcome entrenched bigotry and include people who are different. Those women who don’t even try to accept other women into feminism aren’t being consistent feminists.

I think the 4th step is where the mischief gets serious.

The BBC is excited about London Pride.

Some of London’s buses and trains are being wrapped in rainbow colours as part of this year Pride celebrations. Transport for London (TfL) is launching a campaign celebrating the city’s LGBTQ community ahead of Saturday’s parade.

Those featuring on posters include Gok Wan, Bimini from RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nick Grimshaw and Queen MoJo. “We are proud to continue to support Pride by sharing Pride messages across our network,” Patricia Obinna, TfL’s director of diversity & inclusion said.

That’s nice but…has London Transport ever wrapped some of its trains and buses in feminist colors? Or celebrated the city’s female community in any way?

It seems not. If you do a Google image search for “London Transport Pride” you get a riot of colors. If you do a Google image search for “London Transport feminism” you get a rather drab mishmash.

I guess women just aren’t fun the way the LGBTQ+++++++ community is.

This is thinking deeply? I’d hate to see what shallow looks like.

By “the vulnerable” she of course means men who say they are women, as opposed to the women who say they are not.

How did we get here? How did we get to a place where adults solemnly insist that men who claim to be women are vulnerable while the women who say no they’re not are the bigoted persecutors of those poor weak vulnerable men?

“Pride”

Where we are now:

Ok. Got it. There was a man playing. Not even a “trans woman” – just a man. How did that happen? Did he just say “My name is Susie” and that was all it took? Or what? I’d love to know more.

But. We still have no indication that three women were dropped on their heads, apart from one person on Twitter saying so. Arty seems to have watched the damn thing and didn’t see any serious injuries.

Inching toward progress maybe?

I googled NRU Stoney Creek v Fergus and found a video of a match, which I shared, but she replied to say that’s the wrong match. Why not link to the right match then? I don’t know. I can’t tell if she’s playing games or just unfamiliar with how to share information on Twitter.

A first-time commenter called “anon” provided this link, which does seem to fit.

Greg Abbot condemns construction workers to death:

In a week when parts of the state are getting triple-digit temperatures and weather officials urge Texans to stay cool and hydrated, Gov. Greg Abbott gave final approval to a law that will eliminate local rules mandating water breaks for construction workers.

Abbott and the Texas legislators who wrote and passed this law are knowingly, deliberately increasing the risk of heat stroke and death for construction workers in a very hot state. The deaths will happen.

The law will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin in 2010 and Dallas in 2015 that established 10-minute breaks every four hours so that construction workers can drink water and protect themselves from the sun. It also prevents other cities from passing such rules in the future. San Antonio has been considering a similar ordinance.

People die that way. It’s not unusual.

Texas is the state where the most workers die from high temperatures, government data shows. At least 42 workers died in Texas between 2011 and 2021 from environmental heat exposure, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers’ unions claim this data doesn’t fully reflect the magnitude of the problem because heat-related deaths are often recorded under a different primary cause of injury.

But the bosses don’t want to give away those ten minutes every four hours, so pfffffffft, let them die, there are always more crossing the border.

Unions expect heat-related deaths to go up if mandated water breaks go away.

“Construction is a deadly industry. Whatever the minimum protection is, it can save a life. We are talking about a human right,” said Ana Gonzalez, deputy director of policy and politics at the Texas AFL-CIO. “We will see more deaths, especially in Texas’ high temperatures.”

The National Weather Service is forecasting highs over 100 degrees in several Texas cities for at least the next seven days.

Never mind, Abbot and the legislators are inside with the AC going.

H/t Rev David Brindley

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Week 3.

Welcome to the new normal.

One of the things that gets brushed aside in the right’s politicization of climate change is that things don’t just get warmer; they get destabilized. Not only do weather patterns change, they become chaotic. It’s not just a different set of new temperatures and amounts of precipitation to be adapted to, but a constantly changing kaleidoscope of conditions, without enough stability for things like growing crops, which rely on particular, reliable combinations of conditions. The further our excursion from previous conditions, the more unstable things get. And this is just the agricultural realm. What happens to all of the current biomes when the patterns of flower and pollinator, plant and grazer, predator and prey are uncoupled suddenly and unpredictably? The emergence of a new, stable climate regime is unlikely to happen on a timescale convenient to human civilization; it can’t start at all until we stop doing all the things that are causing this disruption in the first place. We have to stop lighting fires before we can hope to see what might be left after the flames have gone out.

These are issues that can’t be fixed by dialing up the AC. This is food on the table stuff. At some point, those that have it will be unwilling to sell it to those that don’t, whatever the price, because you can’t eat money. Climate change denialism has always ignored these underlying issues in their preference to maintain the status quo, prioritizing the preservation of profit under business-as-usual to retooling how we do things to allow our continued survival without destroying the bio-geo-chemical basis of that survival. We’ve invented a technologically driven culture that thrives on ever accelerating change and innovation. But that culture has been dependent upon a steady, reliable basis for growing food. If we push the the Earth to the point where it becomes an ever-accelerating engine of change and “innovation,” that will erode or destroy the foundations of our being that we have taken for granted for too long. Turnabout is fair play, and the laws of physics play for keeps. We’re all along for the ride on this submarine, and its implosion is as inevitable, as that of the Ocean Gate Titan; it’ll just take a bit longer. It’s “Fuck around and find out,” writ on the largest scale we could possibly manage. Having failed to learn from the smaller scale, regional failures we’ve already passed through unnoticed, because there were still places outside the zones of failure that carried on, we’ve now graduated to disaster at a planetary level. Go us. We will suddenly discover that food doesn’t come from supermarkets, and parking lots, and highways, but from clean air, clean water, reliable rain and sunlight, and the interplay of life, climate, and geology that give rise to them.

Another man takes another place that was supposed to be for a woman.

Ok this is going well.

So this is a quiz now? Or a treasure hunt? Dig where? With what kind of tools?

Then why announce it on Twitter at all? Why tell the world it happened, and then get offended when people ask for the specifics? Who are “they”? If there’s a spokesperson why not just say who and quote her/him? Why the bizarre mix of “hey guess what!” and “it’s a secret”?

What room?? If you want the journalists to take over why bring it up in the first place?

Then why bring it up?? If you can’t tell us how you know then why bring it up?

The issue isn’t what I believe, the issue is why anyone should believe any of it in the total absence of sources or even specifics? “Rugby” and “Hamilton, Ontario” aren’t quite enough.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s Rachel McKinnon in heavy disguise.

Sigh. This isn’t how to go about it.

1,126 shares so far, and 3,582 likes, but – no source. The tweet author says it happened in Hamilton, Ontario, but also that it has not hit the news yet. She doesn’t say how she knows it happened. So – useless. Worse than useless, because being shared.

Come on now. Don’t be reporting stuff like this if you have absolutely nothing besides your own word. It could be a snare for all we know – look at how easily the terfs are fooled blah blah blah.

Updating to add:

So this is a game?

No. If you assert a thing happened you need to (at a minimum) say how you know. That’s all the more true on a hotly contested subject like this.

How did we not know this until now???

Don’t visit Texas right now.

A record-breaking heat wave is entering its third week in Texas, as temperatures reach triple digits in the broader US south and tens of thousands of people in affected states are without power and lack air conditioning.

More than 40 million people in the US are under a heat alert.

Texas cities have reached an unprecedented heat index – which combines temperature and humidity. Corpus Christi has hit 125F (51C), while Rio Grande Village notched 118F (47C) and Del Rio marked 115F (46C). States including New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri are also experiencing scorching heat, with the National Weather Service predicting the temperatures to rise further and last into the week of 4 July.

The heat follows a weekend of destructive storms that left hundreds of thousands of people without power. The heat dome, as it is known, has settled above Mexico and parts of the US south-west and is caused by hot ocean air that has become trapped in the atmosphere.

Lots of people will die.

When you’re going to do an extremely dangerous thing, the key is to find cheap parts that are cheap because they’re inferior. Yep, that’s the ticket.

Arnie Weissman, the editor in chief of Travel Weekly, nearly went on that fatal trip on the Titan. He had a chat with Stockton Rush the night before the dive.

Weissmann said Rush told him how he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan “at a big discount from Boeing.” Weissmann wrote in Travel Weekly that Rush said he was able to get the carbon fiber at a good rate “because it was past its shelf life for use in airplanes.”

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Rush had hailed the lighter carbon fiber as an innovation in a field that has long relied on more expensive titanium and claimed the company had worked with Boeing to make sure the pressure vessel, the carbon-fiber tube that keeps passengers alive, was safe. But the carbon fiber and the shape of the Titan had raised concern among maritime regulation experts and experienced mariners. And Weissmann said he felt that the man who he thought was going to lead him on a 13,000-foot dive to the ocean floor came off as “cocky” when talking about safety.

Boeing says it hasn’t found any record of selling the carbon fire to Ocean Gate.

The Post includes a rather telling clip of Rush boasting of breaking some rules.

H/t Bruce Coppola

The header for Dublin Pride’s Twitter:

Fake. That sign just above the rainbow flag – that’s fake.

Thanks to clamboy for the tip.

Rewriting history.

Yesterday evening I started a frivolous read of a novel about life at the Barbizon Hotel for Women in the ’50s. I stopped reading at the top of page 12. Here’s why:

Page 2, in an account of marital sex: “she had instead surrendered to the enormity of him.”

Page 6, of an elderly fellow resident of the Barbizon: “Only her tentative movements…and the lines around her mouth and down her neck, belied her advanced age.”

Page 12: “Leave it to Patrick to bury the lead.”

Great god almighty are there no editors any more? How did no one catch these? Just in the first 12 pages!