Seen on Facebook: cat mosaics purported to be from Pompeii. Snopes says no, they’re by a contemporary artist. Still nice cat mosaics though.

A new misogyny role model:

When Abbie Marsh (not her real name) overheard a 15-year-old boy in the West Midlands school she works in praising Andrew Tate, the social influencer known as the “king of misogyny”, she asked him if he understood Tate’s views on women. The boy replied: “Well, men are better than women, so he’s right.” His friends all nodded in agreement.

…

Many parents may be hearing about Tate for the first time, but schools across the country say he is already a hugely familiar figure to many of their pupils. Many are giving teachers training on how to talk to students about him. Some are holding special assemblies, or using personal social and health education lessons to encourage students to question the content he puts out.

Men who claim to be women on the one hand, fans of men like Andrew Tate on the other. Heads women lose, tails men win.

Teachers say boys are often sucked into his “glamorous” ultra-macho world by more benign content on fast cars or fitness. But in his videos he also says women are a man’s property, cannot do jobs as well as men, and belong at home. He thinks rape victims should “bear responsibility” for their attacks and boasts about seeking out 18-year-old girls because they are “fresh”.

Plus fast cars and fitness.

This is how it should work – the disadvantage is only to the gender-swapper, not to all the women in the gender-swapper’s chosen sport.

Transgender male swimmer Iszac Henig has admitted that his transition has made him a statistically worse swimmer after he finished 79th out of 83 at men’s meet –  but says he ultimately ‘lives more’ as a man. 

Fine. No problem. Nobody loses.

Henig, 21, has begun swimming for the Yale men’s team after placing as an All-American on the women’s team the previous year.

In an op-ed published Thursday, Henig notes that his times are ‘about the same’ as last season when he swam with women but that as a result, in a November meet, he finished 79th out of 83. 

Yes, and that’s exactly why men should stop making this move: the people who pay for it are the women the men compete against.

It’s a far fall in terms of competing, given that Henig was such a heralded women’s swimmer she competed in the 2016 Olympic trials and was named one of the top 100 female swimmers in the country. 

But the fall is taken by Henig alone, and Henig considers it worth it; no harm no foul.

The objection to men doing this to women isn’t arbitrary and it isn’t “transphobic”; it’s specific to men doing it to women, because it’s damaging and unfair.

Would be considered.

“Crime report”

“the rainbow ‘pride’ flags which represent the LGBTQ community”

“These comments are targeting specifically the LGBTQ community”

“would be considered ‘grossly offensive'”

“I therefore require you to contact me to arrange a voluntary interview”

“If I do not hear from you”

This is in the UK, where

New scorecards show under 1% of reported rapes lead to conviction.

Under 1% yet the police have the time and money to haul people in for questioning over a tweet about A RAINBOW PRIDE FLAG.

And the combined idiocy and authoritarianism of the language is mind-numbing.

“Crime report” – what crime??? I don’t know what the tweet in fact said, but I do know there’s been a lot of mockery and criticism of “rainbow flags” in crosswalks, some of which point out they interfere with the actual purpose of marked crosswalks, which is pedestrian safety. I really don’t think Mr Goddard swore a genocidal oath in his tweet, and I do wonder why the police have the time and resources to interview people over tweets rather than just telling Twitter to have a word with the naughty tweeter.

Then there’s “”the rainbow ‘pride’ flags which represent the LGBT community.” No they don’t. They may refer to them, or serve as a symbol of resistance and/or solidarity, but it’s not really the job of the police to enforce such meanings. Also there is no such thing as “the LGBT community”; the LGB and the T have conflicting goals and interests. Also, even if there were such a thing, again it’s not the job of the police to police “communities” except in the most literal sense. Town and village police can be said to police communities, but the metaphorical kind are none of their business.

Then “These comments are targeting specifically the LGBTQ community” – but are they? I haven’t seen them (or it – a single tweet was mentioned), but I can say there’s a difference between disputing and targeting. The putative LGBTQ community says a lot of stupid untrue things these days, especially about women who don’t grovel to men in dresses. People have a right to dispute the stupid untrue things that putative community says.

Then “would be considered ‘grossly offensive'” – “would be” if what? By whom? For what reason? Why the conditional? Does the cop mean “I consider” the tweet grossly offensive? If so, why not say so? If not, why not let the people who do consider it offensive write to the “suspect”?

Then of course there’s “I therefore require you to contact me to arrange a voluntary interview” – if you require it it ain’t voluntary.

News out of West Virginia:

CHARLESTON – A federal judge has ruled a state law passed in 2021 keeps a transgender student-athlete who was born male from participating in girls’ sports.

In his 23-page opinion issued January 5, U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin said he suspects the aim of House Bill 3293, which was known as the Save Women’s Sports Bill, was “to politicize participation in school athletics for transgender students.”

Why is it “politicizing” to keep boys out of girls’ sports but not politicizing to let boys invade women’s sports? Who politicized first? Why is it political to protect girls’ sports but not political to destroy them?

“Nevertheless, there is not a sufficient record of legislative animus,” Goodwin wrote. “I find that it is substantially related to an important government interest.”

What kind of animus, flowing in what direction, from whom?

Heather Jackson filed her complaint in federal court in May 2021 on behalf of Becky Pepper-Jackson against the West Virginia Board of Education, then-Superintendent Clayton Burch, the Harrison County Board of Education, county Superintendent Dora Stutler and the West Virginia Secondary Schools Activities Commission. Becky is 11 years old [and] identifies and lives as a girl.

In other words Becky is a boy.

In 2021, as she prepared to enter middle school, Becky expressed an interest in trying out for her school’s girls’ cross country and track teams. The school informed her mother the decision to let Becky participate depended on the outcome of HB 3293, which then was pending in the state Legislature. When the law passed, the school told Becky she could not try out for the girls’ team.

Goodwin says the law “was clearly carefully crafted with litigation such as this in mind.”

That’s because it’s not fair to girls and women to let male people compete against them.

A spokesman for the West Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which was co-counsel on the case for the plaintiffs, said it is reviewing the ruling with co-counsel to determine the next steps.

Of course it is. The ACLU is hell-bent on destroying women’s sports.

Scotland is contemplating a rather intrusive new law…

The Scottish government is on a collision course with the courts again as it prepares legislation criminalising conversion therapy, according to a KC.

It all depends on how you’re defining “conversion therapy.” Conversion from what to what, for a start, and then conversion by what means, and for what reasons, and so on.

The SNP-Green alliance is considering plans to outlaw any activity – including parental chats, prayer and preaching – deemed to be an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.

Those are two radically different things. Sexuality, aka sexual orientation, isn’t spooky or magical or based on fantasy. It’s both pointless and cruel to try to talk people out of a sexual orientation, but on the other hand parents surely can talk about it without damaging their kids. At any rate, “gender identity” as we know much too well is not the same kind of thing at all. It rests on beliefs, and the beliefs happen to be very bonkers. Everyone should be free to talk about it.

They appointed an expert group which made a series of recommendations for a new criminal offence, which it claims will be within Holyrood’s devolved powers.

Ah, an expert group according to the SNP-Green alliance – we know what kind of “experts” those are likely to be.

The opposition reported here comes from the Christian Institute, so it’s theocracy versus gender idenniny, which makes it hard to pick a side.

Simon Calvert, a deputy director at the CI, said his organisation is preparing the ground for legal action similar to the named person challenge.

…

“Church workers, feminist activists, mums and dads – all sorts of innocent people could find themselves on the wrong end of a prosecution if this becomes law. And I think Scottish taxpayers will eventually find themselves picking up the legal bill for another court defeat.

“LGBT people are rightly protected from physical and verbal abuse by existing law just like anyone else. But these proposals go much, much further. The Scottish government is considering a law that could criminalise churches and gender-critical feminists alike simply because their conversations around sex and gender don’t conform to a narrow, state-approved brand of LGBT politics.”

Wings Over Scotland has more:

The root of the story is a report produced for the Scottish Government by something called The Expert Advisory Group On Ending Conversion Practices (henceforth “the Group”). Its membership is a Who’s Who of the sort of people the Scottish Government likes to pay to agree with it.

Most of the “experts” have an institution after their names but several hail from “lived experience.” It seems the Scottish government thinks “lived experience” of thinking of yourself as the other sex is a credential. Fantasy=credential. What could go wrong?

So it’s already pretty evident that the Scottish Government has heavily stacked the makeup of the Group in order to produce the conclusions it wants. But what ARE those conclusions? On reading the Group’s report, it’s hard to avoid the view that if anything Aidan O’Neill KC has in fact played down its ramifications in his comments in Scottish Legal News.

…

In short, your children CAN consent to irreversible hormone treatments and surgeries rendering them permanently infertile and incapable of orgasm, and should be actively encouraged to do so, but they CANNOT consent to talking about their mental health in any way which might result in them changing their minds about that path, because to do so would render any person they talked to a criminal.

In other words, it will be legal to help them transition to a different “gender”, but a crime to help them detransition, or even to persuade them not to do it in the first place.

That sentence sounds self-evidently absurd and mad (although it does help to explain why we never got any answers to these questions), but it is the unequivocal recommendation of the report. Read the screenshots above. Read the entire document for yourself. It’s simply what it says.

From John Knox to this. In a weird way it makes sense.

Speaking of Jack Monroe, Kathleen Stock is very funny on the subject:

…austerity guru Jack Monroe has a new book, Thrifty Kitchen, to cheer us all up.

Some of the suggested “home hacks” in this book have attracted particular mirth, seeming as they do to involve great effort and even high personal risk for exceptionally low reward. For instance, should you be desperate to get your hands on an egg ring — that is, a metal ring that helps you form perfectly round fried eggs — but unable to afford the £2.10 that would obtain you one from Amazon, Monroe suggests removing the lid and the bottom from a tuna tin, sanding the rough edges away, and washing afterwards to remove “any tiny dusty bits of metal”.

But why would you be desperate to form perfectly round fried eggs? And in the unlikely event that you were thus desperate, why wouldn’t you just trim fried eggs into circles (of course eating the cut away scraps so as not to waste them)?

Should you be poor enough to lack a tin opener, meanwhile — currently on sale in Tesco for 60p — she suggests using a “small sharp knife that you are not particularly attached to, a hammer or mallet, a bit of vigour, some patience and a VERY steady hand”.

So…you lack a 60p tin opener but you do have a hammer or mallet and a small sharp knife you’re happy to ruin opening a tin. Pardon me while I think you don’t exist.

Is Monroe really poor or does she just identify as poor?

In the last year or so, an army of determined internet sleuths has arisen to challenge the official back story of poverty, obsessively documenting internal discrepancies within Monroe’s voluminous Twitter output, cross-referenced with her many heartfelt Guardian op-eds, interviews, and blog posts…

Personally, although I find Monroe’s online persona more grating than — as she might have it — a metal sheet into which you’ve just punched several large holes with a sharp knife, I don’t think she’s a deliberate scammer. She strikes me as more of a disorganised, constitutionally inconsistent type who can’t remember what she last said from one moment to the next. Either way, I’m not too bothered. I’m just grateful for the lolz provided by some of the recipes — and specifically, the juxtaposition of Monroe’s middle-class culinary sensibilities with her cheap, ultra-processed ingredient list.

Like “spaghetti hoops” for instance. Spaghetti whats now? Hoops, which aren’t spaghetti at all, they’re some weird brand-nightmare canned pasta in Horrible Sauce. Canned pasta is of its nature revoltingly overcooked and mushy; it can’t be repurposed into something edible.

A much-derided blogpost of Monroe’s from last year suggests buying a tin of spaghetti hoops, washing the tomato sauce from the hoops, then grating some cheese on top to produce “Anellini Con Cacio e Pepe”. (Readers are also told that the washed-off tomato sauce can be reduced down “in a vigorous boil to concentrate it” to make something approximating tomato purée.) In the latest book, Monroe waxes lyrical about such culinary temptations as “moonshine mash” (Instant Mash mixed with pureed tinned sweetcorn), chicken cooked in Fanta, and cornflake ice-cream.

That’s the point where I had to stop reading to laugh for a long time.

Kathleen goes on to make a case that Monroe is presenting herself as a kind of Ma Ingalls from the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, “ingeniously building a succession of bright, glowing homes for herself and her child out of nothing, in the midst of a punishing economic wilderness.” It doesn’t work but it’s a comforting fantasy.

So much lying patronizing stupid bullshit in one little tweet.

ALL rabbits have a right to be safe and live free from violence and discrimination – #trans rabbits [aka wolves] included!

To itemize the lying patronizing stupid bullshit –

One: it’s not a “reminder”; it’s a stand-alone announcement that relies on a dishonest label.

Two: we know all too well what “ALL women” means: it means women including men who say they are women – in other words it means women and some deluded or fraudulent men.

Three: trying to shove us into agreeing that men are women if they say they are is insulting as well as dangerous (to us, women) as well as an outrageous injustice.

Four: men are the sex that is the source of most violence and discrimination toward women, so it’s not just ludicrous and insulting to try to push us into pretending some men are women, it’s also a complete negation of our centuries of effort to end that violence and discrimination.

Five: hashtags don’t make lies true. Trans women are not women; that’s what “trans” means.

Six: we do stand up for human rights, but it’s not a human right for men to force women to agree that men are women if they say they are.

Seven: the image of the lantern-jawed guy in lipstick and earrings is just another insult.

Welsh language: Non-binary speakers want gender-neutral help

That’s one of the more cryptic headlines I’ve seen today. People who speak non-binary want help with what? What is gender-neutral help? What does Welsh language have to do with it?

Non-binary Welsh speakers have said they feel unable to express their identities in the language due to its gendered nature.

Oh, that.

Here’s a helpful tip: nobody cares. Non-binary Welsh speakers don’t need to “express their identities,” because nobody cares. Nobody cares about other people’s identities. Don’t adults explain that to children any more? It’s the universal truth: nobody cares as much about you as you do. Nobody wants to hear about you as much as you want to talk about you.

They want to see more awareness and use of inclusive LGBTQ+ language.

There is no such language. The TQ+ is an invader. Most people are deeply tired of it.

Many non-binary people use the plural “nhw” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

…

The lack of knowledge of LGBTQ+ terms in Welsh means when people use “nhw” sometimes they are unable to be understood, according to Rowan Gulliver, a 22-year-old teacher in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan.

You don’t say. If you invent silly new bits of language then people aren’t going to understand what you’re saying. That’s how it flibblez.

Working in a Welsh-speaking school, Rowan – who uses the non-binary Mx prefix and they/them pronouns – had to come out to colleagues in English because they did not feel they could be understood in Welsh, nor did they have the vocabulary to do so.

They who? The colleagues? Rowan? You see the problem here?

“You should be able to speak about your identity and other people in your first language,” they said. “It’s like a little part of you is dying when you have to say it in English.”

Not if your “identity” is silly trendy nonsense.

Ah yes, the party of the workers.

Republicans care deeply about those impoverished workers.

Discussion will be a crime.

The Scottish government is on a collision course with the courts again as it prepares legislation criminalising conversion therapy, according to a KC.

But what are they defining as conversion therapy? Oh, only almost everything.

Double silk Aidan O’Neill KC has warned that the proposals would be outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.

The SNP-Green alliance is considering plans to outlaw any activity – including parental chats, prayer and preaching – deemed to be an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.

Just for a start, they shouldn’t put sexuality and “gender identity” in the same law. The two are not comparable. Sexual orientation has nothing at all to do with mutilating the body, while “gender identity” has way too much to do with it. Sexual orientation doesn’t intrude on anyone else’s rights; “gender identity” takes a blowtorch to women’s rights.

The rest of the pieces focuses on religion and its rights, so I’ll stop there.

“Anarchists” decree that feminist women must not be allowed to speak.

Rich, isn’t it – bring placards and noisemakers to drown them out, also watch out they are violent!!!

Climate.gov provides an interesting set of figures.

In State of the Climate in 2019, glacier expert Mauri Pelto reported that the pace of glacier loss has accelerated from -171 millimeters (6.7 inches) per year in the 1980s, to -460 millimeters (11 inches) per year in the 1990s, to -500 millimeters (1.6 feet) per year in the 2000s, to -889 millimeters (2.9 feet) per year for the 2000s.

That’s a huge increase in a short space of time. It’s kind of terrifying.

Over the same period of course the global population has increased hugely. Humans go up up up and the stored water they require for survival goes down down down. More humans depend on that stored water, and more humans are why that stored water is melting away.

Deutsche Welle last July on South Asia and the melting glaciers:

Heat waves are melting Himalayan glaciers on which hundreds of million people rely, flooding villages and leaving residents without drinking water. Climate change heats up Asia’s highlands faster than other regions.

…

The central Asian mountain region – also known as High-mountain Asia – includes the Himalayan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains. Stretching from China to Afghanistan, it is home to 55,000 glaciers that together store more fresh water than anywhere else on the planet outside the North and South Poles. The meltwater feeds the 10 biggest riverrs in Asia, in whose basins almost 2 billion people live. The Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra rivers alone are sources of water for the livelihoods of 750 million people, according to a 2015 World Bank report. The Yangtze river in China – the biggest on the continent – and the Mekong in South-East Asia also dependend on Himalayan waters.

But hotter temperatures put them at risk. According to the United Nations Development Program, temperatures in the Himalayas are rising twice as fast as the global average, melting ice and cutting snowfall. If world leaders fail to honor their promise to try to limit global warming to 1.5 C, between half and two-thirds of the total ice mass in the mountains of Central Asia will have disappeared by the end of the century.

World leaders are failing to honor their promise.

World leaders are always too busy worrying about the price of oil, inflation, recession, The Economy, industry, growth, profits, to do anything about global boiling. It’s the short term versus the slower but fatal long term.

Speaking of Himalayan glaciers…CNBC reported a year ago:

Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting at an “exceptional” rate, according to new research that shows the massive ice sheets in the region have shrunk 10 times faster in the past four decades than during the previous seven centuries.

The research, published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports, found that mass ice loss from nearly 15,000 ice sheets in the Himalayas is especially rapid compared with other parts of the world.

The Himalayan mountains are also referred to as the third pole because they hold the world’s third-largest amount of glacier ice, following Antarctica and the Arctic. The ice melt threatens agriculture and water supply for millions of people in South Asia, the report said, and will contribute to rising sea levels that threaten coastal communities across the world.

Oh well, it’s only the disappearance of food and water, accompanied by floods.

The predicted floods are already happening: just ask Pakistan.

There is scientific consensus that human-caused climate change has resulted in accelerated ice melt from glaciers and polar ice sheets, as well as higher ocean temperatures across the globe.

And there is no political consensus that we should do anything about it.

And speaking of violence and threats…

Let the bullets fly, eh?

The new Republican majority in Congress has decided to remove the metal detectors that outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed outside the House chamber after the Capitol riot on January 6, according to Rep Lauren Boebert.

“When I arrived in Congress two years ago, Nancy Pelosi put this hunk of garbage outside of the House chambers for members of Congress to go through,” Ms Boebert of Colorado said in a video in front of a metal detector being hauled down on Tuesday. “Today, they are being removed and we are turning Pelosi’s house back into the People’s House.”

When Boebert arrived in Congress two years ago it was attacked by a heavily armed mob which injured many people; a few were killed. That’s why Pelosi installed “this hunk of garbage.”

Republican members of the chamber chafed against the presence of the metal detectors, meant to keep members safe in the midst of an increase in political violence in the US and fears that Republican members were carrying weapons onto the floor.

Republicans are in favor of guns everywhere.

Climate change means (among other things) running out of water. We’ve talked about Phoenix and water, the Sierras and water, the Colorado River and water…there are also the Alps and water.

Switzerland’s glaciers have lost more than half their volume in less than a hundred years, and the long hot summer this year has accelerated the thaw, a new study shows.

More than half gone and the melt is speeding up, so that’s not good. Since we’re not doing much of anything to stop it, it’s very bad.

The glaciers support ski resorts and attract climbers and hikers in summer, but are also essential to Europe’s water supply. Now, communities across the Alps are worrying about their future.

Climbing and hiking are luxuries. Water, not so much.

The findings are in line with long standing evidence that Europe’s glaciers are shrinking, and that there is a direct link between the ice loss and global warming.

Ice caps are particularly sensitive to changes in temperature, so if the earth warms, glaciers are the first to notice, and respond, by melting.

Well they don’t notice, but they react.

Mauro Fischer, a glaciologist at the University of Bern, is responsible for monitoring the Tsanfleuron and Scex Rouge [glaciers]. Every year in spring he installs ice measuring rods, and checks them regularly over the summer and autumn.

When he went to check them in July, he got a shock.

The rods had melted completely out of the ice, and were lying on the ground. His ice measurements, he says, were “off the chart – far beyond what we’ve ever measured since the beginning of the glacier monitoring, maybe three times more mass loss over one year than the average over the last 10 years”.

…

Glaciers are often referred to as the water towers of Europe. They store the winter snow, and release it gently over the summer, providing water for Europe’s rivers and crops, and to cool its nuclear power stations.

The news item is from August, but I don’t think global warming has gone into reverse since then.

Just one thing about that…

NOT A WOMAN.

Deep rifts.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican congressman-elect who rose to prominence under former President Donald Trump’s wing, went rogue after the former president endorsed GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy of California for House speaker.

Gaetz told Fox News Digital that Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy for speaker has not changed the congressman’s view on the former president or GOP leader, nor has swayed his vote.

“Sad!” Gaetz said in a Wednesday statement. “This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.”

What happened to loyalty? What happened to payback? Where would Matt Gaetz be without Trump??

Gaetz wants the shirtsleeves molester guy.

Gaetz has led the House Freedom Caucus charge against the GOP leader’s speakership bid, where he and 19 other Republican members have frozen the House in opposition to McCarthy while solidifying their support behind Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.

They’re quarreling over who is the absolute worst so that they can elect the winner.