Even if we turned it around right this second the sea levels would still rise. Also: we’re not turning it around right this second. We’re not even slowing it.

Research based on satellite measurements of ice losses from Greenland and the shape of the ice cap from 2000-19 has allowed scientists to calculate how the climate crisis has pushed the ice sheet from an equilibrium where snowfall matches the ice lost.

They found that a minimum 10.6in sea-level rise is inevitable regardless of action to limit carbon emissions after 110tn tonnes of the Greenland ice cap melted. A multi-metre sea-level rise also appears likely as the trajectory of environmental damage continues.

“The minimum of 27cm is the sea-level rise deficit that we have accrued to date and it’s going to get paid out, no matter what we do going forward,” said Dr William Colgan, from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus). “Whether it’s coming in 100 years or 150 years, it’s coming. And the sea-level rise we are committed to is growing at present, because of the climate trajectory we’re on.”

We’re too clever and not clever enough. We’re so clever we invent all these technologies, and we’re so unclever we can’t stop using them even when it becomes clear we’re destroying our own habitat.

Also the floods in Pakistan aren’t just “floods” – that is, not just expanses of water or torrents of water. They’re torrents of ROCK. Take a look.

Much of Pakistan is under water.

Heavy rains over two months have caused the worst flooding in more than a decade and damaged more than 1m homes.

[UN secretary general António] Guterres said on Tuesday that south Asia was a hotspot for the climate crisis and that the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan that has left tens of millions needing help was a warning to every nation of the destruction wreaked by human-caused global heating.

…

Flash floods fuelled by the climate crisis have affected more than 33 million people, officials have said. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDA) said on Monday the death toll from the monsoon rains and floods in Pakistan had reached 1,136 – with 75 killed in the last 24 hours.

Not a drill.

The absolute minimum sea level rise that’s already inevitable, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels right this second, is bad enough. We are, of course, not stopping the burning right this second, or tomorrow, or in ten years.

Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight.

…

“It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Prof Jason Box from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus), who led the research. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

…

Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and the Alps are already on course to lose a third and half of their ice respectively, while the west Antarctic ice sheet is also thought by some scientists to be past the point at which major losses are inevitable. Warming oceans also expand, adding to sea-level rise.

“There is growing support in the scientific literature for multi-metre levels of rise within the next 100 to 200 years,” said Colgan. A collapse of the colossal east Antarctic ice sheet, which would lead to a 52-metre rise in sea levels if it all melted, could be averted if rapid climate action is taken.

But it won’t be. It never will be. We didn’t evolve to be able to react to future global threats, we evolved to be able to react to the right here right now.

All these years I thought, or assumed without thinking about it much, that “custard powder/instant custard” was actually custard in powder form. Today I learned otherwise. I saw this –

Those two packets above the porridge oats are custard powder. Even though we were told to ignore the custard, I became curious about how much protein was actually in the custard powder, figuring it was not much. (There’s been some chat about Monroe’s food advice over the past couple of days, and she does seem to me to have some odd ideas, or at least say odd things, like that oats and mushrooms are good sources of protein.) SO I looked it up, and was mildly shocked to find that the stuff never sees an egg, not even a tiny fraction of an egg. Eggs have nothing to do with it. But but but, said I, in all my bumpkin ignorance, how can they call it custard when zero egg? I have no idea, but they do.

What’s the stuff made of?

Custard powder and instant custard powder are the generic product names for similar and competing products. The product is a powder, based on cornflour, which thickens to form a custard-like sauce when mixed with milk and heated.

Cornflour and milk (and lots of sugar, I’m betting). Paste, basically. Not food.

Also in Trump today: demanding an immediate re-do of the election.

Philip Bump asks innocently what is the difference between warnings and threats.

…there is an important difference between understanding the existing threat and leveraging it.

In an interview on Fox News on Sunday evening, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rationalized why Trump supporters would be furious at an indictment.

“There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump,” Graham told host Trey Gowdy.

As we’ve already noted, of course there isn’t. Hillary Clinton didn’t take boxes of White House documents home with her in January 2001 or 2016, much less spread them around a large golf club and brag about them on social media. Hillary Clinton didn’t steal top secret documents and refuse to give them back when asked politely and repeatedly. However mistaken or reckless her handling of the email situation was, it wasn’t remotely comparable to the crimes Trump has committed.

“If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement,” Graham said, “there literally will be riots in the street. I worry about our country.”

Now, is that a worried prediction, or is it a threat?

I’m gonna go with threat.

Soon after the segment aired, Trump shared a clip of it on Truth Social, without comment.

Threat.

A whopping catch-22:

A judge ruled this morning that Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp must testify before a special grand jury that’s investigating possible illegal attempts by then-president Donald Trump and others to influence the 2020 election in the state – but not until after the November midterm election, the Associated Press reports.

See, this is a problem. It’s clear enough why it’s not desirable to have criminal investigations of political candidates happening close to an election, but, and this is a huge “but,” it’s also not desirable to remain in ignorance of the criminality or complicity in criminality of political candidates until it’s too late. You see what I mean? We get why Kemp doesn’t want to be investigated or testify two months before an election, but we don’t want to remain in ignorance of exactly how criminal or implicated Kemp is until it’s too late.

It’s really not clear to me why the first want outweighs the second.

If Kemp is dirty, shouldn’t Georgia voters learn that before the election rather than after? Isn’t it relevant?

The move now is to threaten violence if the criminal Trump is treated like the criminal he is.

Amid growing fears about political violence in the US, a senior Republican senator predicted “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is prosecuted for mishandling classified information.

For “mishandling” top secret classified information by stealing it and keeping it in his hotel, including leaving it lying around in the open while fake Rothschilds wandered around the place.

Graham said: “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him. There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump.”

Really. What other ex-president has stolen whole boxes of top secret documents and stashed them in their resort hotels while Russian spies wandered in and out? Name one.

Alleging a failure by the FBI to investigate Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, Graham added: “I’ll say this, if there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”

Hunter Biden is a sleaze and Joe Biden absolutely should have done whatever it took to keep him Hunter from profiteering off his Joe’s job, but the fact remains that the two items are radically different.

Law professor and former White House ethics chief Richard Painter referred to Trump supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol when he said: “A senator who calls for ‘riots in the streets’ if Trump is indicted should be expelled from the Senate. He’s inciting January 6 all over again.”

The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, said the “prediction that violence may follow any prosecution of the former [president] may not qualify legally as incitement but it is irresponsible all the same as it will be seen by some as a call for violence. Public officials are [obliged] to call for the rule of law.”

But

Trump indicated his approval, posting video of Graham’s remarks to Truth Social, the platform Trump set up after being suspended from Twitter over the Capitol attack.

Of course he did.

In snooker news –

Jamie Hunter has won her first ranking title with victory in the US Women’s Snooker Open on Sunday in Seattle.

The Englishwoman secured the biggest triumph of her career so far with a 4-1 defeat of pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna in the final.

Hunter comfortably advanced from the initial round-robin phase with four successive 2-0 wins to earn a spot in the quarter-finals.

There’s just one tiny detail not mentioned in the article – Hunter is not a woman. The Daily Star is more forthcoming, aka more honest.

WPBSA chairman Jason Ferguson has congratulated Jamie Hunter after she became the first transgender player to win a ranking event.

Hunter, who came out as transgender in 2019, defeated pre-tournament favourite Rebecca Kenna 4-1 to win the US Women’s Open on Sunday. The topic of transgender athletes in sport has become a major talking point in recent years, with swimming, rugby union, rugby league banning transgender women from competing.

All sports should ban trans women from competing in women’s sports, because women’s sports are for women.

Representation:

I’m always hungry for historical queer representation,” says Charlie Josephine, the non-binary playwright of I, Joan, a sweaty, heady, joyously queer new drama about the patron saint of France. “Because our history has been erased – particularly transgender people’s – there is very limited documentation of us throughout history, even though we have existed since the beginning of time.”

Whose history? “Queer” people’s? So the fix is to erase the history of women?

To Josephine, Joan being written as non-binary felt both obvious and natural. “I could have written this play as a cis woman who is feminist and passionate about expressing themselves in this way,” says Josephine, shrugging the idea away. “But the more I read about Joan, the more I think they’re what we would now call non-binary or trans.”

Because feminism is so yesterday, so your mama. Non-binary and trans are so much more up to the minute and exciting…until they too become your mama.

There was, however, one part of the backlash that caught Josephine by surprise. “I forgot I was blaspheming a saint!” they say with a laugh, hands lifting to their head and almost forming a halo. When first considering how to write the play, they add, Joan’s devotion did prove a challenge.

All those confusing theys – I have every sympathy.

Originally a comment by Rob on Watch out: too girly!

I’m not at all convinced that the style of learning has a big impact on whether boys or girls do better. As a purely anecdotal point, I always did much better with internal assessment and assignments, because my technique and discipline for a single end of year exams swot absolutely sucked.

I suspect the biggest factor in declining male academic success is simply that over recent decades male heroes and role models are no longer scientists, engineers, academics, poets or ‘elites’ generally. They’re anti-heroes, the fighters, drinkers, womanisers, sneerers. In fact, engineers, scientists, or educated males in popular culture are more likely to be cast in either the role of the bad guy or a sidekick. It’s not just Bond films. Popular culture, the current zeitgeist, just doesn’t push boys to want to become highly educated and expert men, so fewer of them do. Girls by contrast have been told loud and clear – and have seen – that the way to get ahead and not be stuck in the kitchen or working as a cleaner or in a shop, is to become educated. They’ve done so in droves.

Now, what happens when some activity becomes seen as a ‘girl’ thing to do? It becomes even less attractive to boys, because sexism (at best) and misogyny (at worst) is the air we breathe and the water we swim in.

You can make pathetic excuses about how boys need to be taught differently, but frankly, until society gets over itself and values education and doesn’t denigrate anything and everything girls do as icky, pointless or loserish, male under-performance will be the result.

Pick a country. Keep the education system exactly the same, but ban woman from education. Simultaneously increase academic and professional salaries by 30%, and make such people societies heroes. I guarantee that within a generation boys will be falling over themselves to succeed academically.

Climate crisis/rising energy cost solved – just do everything at the office.

This is apparently meant as serious advice:

Office workers could be better off at their desks than working from home from October because of the money they will save on heating, making coffee and charging devices.

Becoming an energy freeloader who outsources the bulk of their consumption to their office, local café or gym over the next few months could save you about £28 a week, roughly £120 a month, from October.

This assumes you worked in the office five days a week and charged a phone, laptop and smart watch while you were there, made two cups of tea or coffee and reheated your lunch, and that you could shower there or at a gym or sports centre five days a week.

But who the hell wants to shower at the office instead of at home after leaving the office to get the office stink off you? Who the hell wants to go home stinking of office and go on stinking of office until you go back to the office the next day?

This would outweigh the average of about £22 you could spend on petrol driving to and from work over five days, based on the average UK commute of 59 minutes a day published by the TUC in 2019. If you cycle to work you will save the full amount, but train commuters could be better off staying home.

In other words you’d save £28 but lose £22 in the process, leaving you with a triumphant £6 savings at the small small cost of going to the office instead of not going to the office. Also you’d have to do all your coffee-making and lunch-heating and device-charging and even showering at the office. Does that sound worth £6 to you? Or to anyone?

Not to mention of course the strong likelihood that the boss would not be particularly thrilled to have you showering and washing your undies and cooking your dinner at the office.

The BBC craps on lesbians from a very great height. Headline:

No place for hate, says Pride Cymru after Cardiff protest

So it was a homophobic protest?

Pride Cymru has said there is “no place for hate” after protesters interrupted an LGBTQ+ march in Cardiff.

A video emerged on social media showing police asking a group to leave for safety reasons on Saturday.

South Wales Police said no arrests were made after a “small protest group” had “assembled themselves on the route to block the procession”.

Bigots, right? A small group of fundamentalists perhaps?

Protest organisers Get The L Out were carrying banners, including one which read “transactivism erases lesbians”.

Ohhhhh…not god-botherers, not the God Hates Fags crew, but lesbians. How odd for the BBC to set it up that way, as if lesbians were aliens and outsiders at a Pride march.

Pride organisers said the group was “drowned out by shouts of solidarity from the community and spectators”.

Solidarity with what? Excluding and bullying lesbians? Trying to force lesbians to pretend men can be lesbians? That kind of solidarity?

“There is no place for hate at Pride. And as our parade said today loudly and clearly ‘trans rights are human rights’,” said Gian Molinu, chair of Pride Cymru, in a tweet posted by the organisation on Saturday evening.

Then why is Molinu whipping up hate for lesbians?

And nobody is claiming trans people shouldn’t have human rights. The issue is pseudo-rights, like the pretend “right” to be “validated” as a woman when you’re a man.

Hannah Blythyn, Deputy Minister for Social Partnership, tweeted: “There can be no place for hate – we stand together with and within the LGBTQ+ community.”

She says, tacitly encouraging people to hate lesbian protesters.

Julie Bindel on lesbians and Pride:

The lesbian group Get The L Out UK, founded to protest gender ideology and the pressure on same-sex attracted women to date trans women, joined Pride Cymru yesterday to make their voices heard amidst a sea of hostility. Ever since the trans movement decided that lesbians who reject sleeping with trans women are somehow morally deficient, same-sex attracted women have been harassed, defamed and abused in the name of trans equality. Get the L Out represent those old-fashioned lesbians that reject the penis and all that is attached to it.

“All that is attached to it” is witty.

The women at Pride Cymru were carrying banners adorned with the words, ‘trans activism erases lesbians’ and ‘lesbians don’t like penises’, which caused a major kerfuffle amongst the crowd. Rather than having a word with the individuals that were screaming abuse, police decided to eject Get the L Out. So, lesbians were kicked off a so-called Pride procession whilst the rest of the LGBTQQIA2Spirit+ crowd, many of whom will doubtless be heterosexual kinksters, stayed.

In other words Pride, like the rest of the world, is male-dominated, and bullies or expels women whenever it feels like it.

The hostility towards any lesbian that stands her ground amongst the new cool queers has been building for some time. In 2018, at the first Get the L Out protest, the gay male MC joked on stage that the protesters should be dragged off the parade ‘by their saggy tits’.

New boss just like the old boss.

A brief history lesson: the very first pride-type march I attended was Lesbian Strength, in 1981. The majority of lesbians involved in the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s had walked out, having become fed up with the sexism from the men in the organisation. It would appear that sexist stereotypes are not only confined to heterosexuals. The women have since reported that their needs are always placed second to the men; demeaning and often misogynistic comments were made about women; and that they were pretty much expected to make the tea and take care of the men, just as straight women were.

In other words, sadly, being gay doesn’t automatically block being a sexist pig. Misogyny is pervasive, and being gay isn’t a magical shield against it.

Lesbian Strength was a wonderful antidote to Gay Pride. It meant that lesbians, many of whom did not wish to be lumped in with men, could be front and centre of our own liberation movement. We argued back then, and I would argue now, that lesbians have very little in common with gay men, except that we are same-sex attracted. Gay men don’t face the double bind of sexism along with anti-gay prejudice. And, like it or not, some gay men hate women, just as do some of their straight brothers.

Emphasis mine. Gay men don’t face that double bind, and because they don’t face it, they’re not aware of it. That makes a difference.

Andrew Weissmann, who was a senior prosecutor in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, clarifies some things.

The release of the redacted affidavit provides further clarity on why Attorney General Merrick Garland took the extraordinary step of approving the search of certain locations at Mar-a-Lago. The short version is that nothing else had worked and top-secret information was at stake.

Trump tried to leverage the search of Mar-a-Lago into a shocking violation of Trump’s rights and privileges and holy status as god-emperor, but it’s the other way around – the necessity of searching Mar-a-Lago underlines Trump’s repeated criminal refusals to return the documents he stole. It was a crime to take them and it was another crime to refuse to return them on request – a crime he repeated over and over as the feds kept asking him to return them. Each refusal is a crime.

In any normal case, in my experience, with a responsible, upstanding citizen who may have inadvertently taken government documents, a simple voluntary request for their return would ordinarily suffice. If that failed, a grand jury subpoena would typically do the trick. In this case, neither approach worked. The attorney general had to resort to the most intrusive method of obtaining the return of the documents, a search warrant approved by a federal court.

Because Trump isn’t your normal responsible upstanding citizen, but rather a hardened criminal with no moral compass of any kind, even the most rudimentary.

The redacted affidavit is further proof that Mr. Trump’s flouting of criminal statutes persisted for a long time and gives every appearance of being intentional.

But with Trump the possibility of sheer stupidity is always there.

The head of Vale of Glamorgan Council calls lesbians at a Pride march “hate-filled protesters.”

Love? She calls it love? She calls a malicious lie about lesbians at Pride “love”?

Joan Smith reviews the new JK Rowling novel:

Like its predecessor, The Ink Black Heart is a doorstopper, giving Rowling space to explore the psychology of individuals who abuse women online, but it is evidence of her ingenuity as a writer that this intention only gradually becomes clear.

…

“He’s convinced people I worked as a prostitute when I was broke,” Edie tells Robin. “He sent me pictures of my dead mother, claiming I told lies about her death. And the fandom believes all of it, and they attack me for stuff I’ve never done, never said, things I don’t believe.” The final sentence is not just heartfelt, it could be Rowling speaking about herself after a couple of years of persecution by individuals posting wild misrepresentations of her work and views online.

It could be many many other women, too.

Academic debate 2022:

There is but one Idea, and many academics to exchange it.

Originally a comment by Army Ant on People became slotted.

This isn’t surprising at all. Anthropologists are very in love with all types of quackery (cultural relativism, post-structuralism, etc). It isn’t even a new phenomenon, BTW – they’ve been like this for several decades now. They also often seriously say things like (paraphrased, of course) “there’s no objective reality”, and basically that a cultural group’s emotional truth about its past/history is objective truth or at least should be treated as such.

This bullshit claim that sequential hermaphrodites (like clownfish and some arachnids) somehow “prove” biological sex isn’t real or that there aren’t just two of them is so utterly asinine. It’s akin to one of those “age sliders” claiming that since many organisms (including us) change from pre-pubescent child (juvenile, immature) to adult and then to old person/individual (senescence), biological ageing doesn’t exist – and we should totally accept that creepy 50-year-old who claims to be a 6-year-old as *~valid~* and let him play with the real 6-year-olds unsupervised. *facepalm*

A little history lesson…

All of the ancient cultures that used the oldest writing systems we’ve found and deciphered* (cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, oracle bone script -Chinese-) had terms/words for male and female (animals and humans). In fact, some ancient languages (notably Sumerian; sort of) used the same word to designate human females and their non-human counterparts. Others lacked an adult/non-adult distinction for human females (that is, no separate terms for “woman” and “girl”; IIRC Old Tamil was such a language, young or old, human or animal, everyone female is just called “pen”).

Anyway, none of the earliest cultures that wrote and whose writing we’ve deciphered were under the delusion that we’re a single-sex species, or that there are more than two sexes – or that people are whatever they say they are. The Sumerians especially (I’ve read a lot of the private letters they wrote) would have absolutely no patience for things like someone wanting to be addressed only by special snowflake pronouns that person just invented.

Most of these ancient scripts had symbols for “male” and “female” and/or “woman” and “man” that were completely unambiguous (case in point: Sumerian’s stylized penis and stylized vulva symbols, or the oracle bone script’s “seated person with protruding breasts” symbol). The same is true of the ancient languages written with those scripts/systems: in most of them, the terms for male and female were biologically descriptive (in contrast, the Nahuatl term for woman means “skirt and huipil”, the Mongolian one means “beltless”, and the one most Tibetan languages use means something like “a person of low birth”).

So, as a whole, the most ancient cultures with deciphered writing were a bunch of binarist, trans-excluding, heteronormative, allonormative** fucks.

* One of the scripts we haven’t yet deciphered (the Indus script; y’know, Harappa/Mohenjo-Daro) almost certainly had a specific sign/hieroglyph to refer to males.

** A term the asexual community uses to refer to people who aren’t under the delusion that everyone is asexual.