Good god, this is getting intense.

Many news sources are running the same headline.

11 sets, some top secret.

That’s no joke.

He’s done, isn’t he? Unless he just unleashes his fascists on us?

Leo Igwe:

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.’—Humanists UK patron and novelist Salman Rushdie on freedom of expression.

Elham Manea:

„The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.“ – #SalmanRushdie #WordsMorePowerfulThanKnives #RushdiQuotes

Sigh.

Ash Sarkar. Of course.

From a year ago:

That’s like doctors offering a seminar for other doctors on “Understanding the immortal soul: answers for physicians.” There is no immortal soul, and there is no “gender identity” either – not in the sense of being a real, tangible thing that doctors can research and understand. There are feelings people have about their sex and “gender” but that’s more a social and/or psychological and/or emotional category than a medical one.

It’s all very phlogiston.

The BBC’s Frank Gardner on That Book:

The furore that followed the publication of his book, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, had far-reaching consequences. It sparked a deadly riot in Mumbai, the burning of both his effigy and his books in Britain, and attacks on translators and his Norwegian publisher.

It’s all nonsense. The whole idea of “blasphemy” is nonsense. The god is supposed to be omni-everything – all powerful, all knowing, all goodness and mercy, all perfection, all justice – peak excellence in all things. Why would such a god care about “blasphemy”? Do we care if ants think we’re stupid? No. We have better things to do than trying to make ants respect us or love us or say prayers at us five times a day. We know we know more than ants do, and that trying to force them to worship us would be pointless as well as futile.

It’s all nonsense. It’s human stuff – bossiness, meddling, dominance, loyalty-enforcing – superimposed on a pretend Perfect God Daddy in the Sky.

And for this bilge they slaughter the entire editorial board of a magazine, they pick off atheist after atheist in Bangladesh, they spark communal wars between India and Pakistan, and they stab a brilliant novelist in the neck.

The Guardian also has a live page on the attack on Salman.

New York governor Kathy Hochul posted a statement on Twitter about Rushdie’s attack, praising first responders at the scene who assisted Rushdie and apprehended the suspected attacker.

Thank you to the swift response of [New York state police] & first responders following today’s attack of author Salman Rushdie. Our thoughts are with Salman & his loved ones following this horrific event. I have directed State Police to further assist however needed in the investigation.

She talked about Chatauqua as a place and an institution.

Hochul commented further on Rushdie’s stabbing, confirming that the author is alive and receiving treatment at a local hospital.

“He’s getting the care he needs,” said Hochul, who also praised a state trooper at the event for saving Rushdie’s life .

Religion is a mistake.

Some piece of ordure physically attacked Salman Rushdie onstage just now.

The Booker Prize winner was speaking at an event at the Chautauqua Institution at the time.

Witnesses say they saw a man run on stage and either punch or stab Mr Rushdie as he was being introduced.

People rushed the stage. More is not currently known. Will update when.

Update:

There’s some irony there, because PEN America got cold feet about honoring Charlie Hebdo after the massacre and Salman was furious with them, for blindingly obvious reasons.

Update 2

Ok that’s not good.

Update 3

The BBC has a live page:

New York State Police have announced that Salman Rushdie has suffered an apparent stab wound to the neck.

A statement said he was flown by helicopter to a local hospital. It also confirmed the attacker was in police custody.

A statement said:

On August 12, 2022, at about 11 am, a male suspect ran up onto the stage and attacked Rushdie and an interviewer. Rushdie suffered an apparent stab wound to the neck, and was transported by helicopter to an area hospital. His condition is not yet known. The interviewer suffered a minor head injury.”

Update 4

This makes me very very very very angry.

Update 5

From the Beeb again:

Salman Rushdie is in surgery, Reuters news agency quotes his agent as saying.

That’s all we have at the moment, we’ll bring any more information on his condition as we get it.

Also the Rhine is shrinking.

Water levels on the Rhine River could reach a critically low point in the coming days, German officials said Wednesday, making it increasingly difficult to transport goods — including coal and gasoline — as drought and an energy crisis grip Europe.

All the same thing innit. Drought hinders transport making energy crisis worse.

From France and Italy, Europe is struggling with dry spells, shrinking waterways and heat waves that are becoming more severe and frequent because of climate change. Low water levels are another blow for industry in Germany, which is struggling with shrinking flows of natural gas that have sent prices surging.

…

HGK and other shipping companies are preparing for a “new normal” in which low water levels become more common as global warming makes droughts more severe, sapping water along the length of the Rhine from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea.

By the time they’ve prepared for that new normal there will be a newer new normal to prepare for.

H/t Mike Haubrich

Drought declared:

A drought has been declared across wide swathes of England after a meeting of experts.

The prolonged dry conditions, with some areas of the country not receiving significant rainfall all summer, have caused the National Drought Group to declare an official drought.

The Environment Agency has moved into drought in eight of its 14 areas: Devon and Cornwall, Solent and South Downs, Kent and south London, Herts and north London, East Anglia, Thames, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, and the east Midlands.

Documents seen by the Guardian show the Environment Agency expects a further two areas will move into drought later in August. These are Yorkshire and West Midlands.

Could it be that the globe is warming?

Those in the meeting were shown harrowing statistics about England’s food security. Half of the potato crop is expected to fail as it cannot be irrigated, and even crops that are usually drought tolerant such as maize have been failing.

The group was told “irrigation options are diminishing with reservoirs being emptied fast”, and losses of between 10% and 50% are expected for crops including carrots, onions, sugar beet, apples and hops. Milk production is also down nationally due to a lack of food for cows, and wildfires are putting large areas of farmland at risk.

Farmers are deciding whether to drill crops for next year, and there are concerns that many will decide not to, with dire consequences for the 2023 harvest.

This is one of the ways global warming is going to play out: bad harvests, and all that flows from that.

While previous dry summers have been offset by wet autumns, meaning the worst effects on water supply have not hit, those present at the meeting were told that was unlikely to be the case this year, with arid conditions predicted to continue due to climate breakdown.

Slides from the EA say: “An increased chance of warm conditions through August to October is consistent with an increased westerly flow from warmer than average seas, and our warming climate. With a typical north-west (wetter) to south-east (drier) gradation in rainfall most likely, there are no strong signals for a significant amelioration of current dry conditions.”

Tighten those belts.

The Post reported last night:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

…

Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said.

One former Justice Department official, who in the past oversaw investigations of leaks of classified information, said the type of top-secret information described by the people familiar with the probe would probably cause authorities to try to move as quickly as possible to recover sensitive documents that could cause grave harm to U.S. security.

“If that is true, it would suggest that material residing unlawfully at Mar-a-Lago may have been classified at the highest classification level,” said David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section, which investigates leaks of classified information. “If the FBI and the Department of Justice believed there were top secret materials still at Mar-a-Lago, that would lend itself to greater ‘hair-on-fire’ motivation to recover that material as quickly as possible.”

…

Former senior intelligence officials said in interviews that during the Trump administration, highly classified intelligence about sensitive topics, including about intelligence-gathering on Iran, was routinely mishandled. One former official said the most highly classified information often ended up in the hands of personnel who didn’t appear to have a need to possess it or weren’t authorized to read it.

…

Republicans around Trump initially thought the raid could help him politically, but they are now bracing for revelations that could be damaging, a person familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Could be. Possibly.

H/t What a Maroon

Et tu The Globe?

That’s the spirit. Let’s turn all the famous women into men. Rosa Parks can be Roger Parks. Virginia Woolf can be Victor Woolf. Ruth Bader Ginsburg can be Ralph Bader Ginsburg. Rachel Maddow can be Robert Maddow. Give them all chest binders, call them all they them, erase women from everything. What’s not to love?

Look at this. Look at her smiling face, her swinging hair, her cheerful smiles and nods. Look at the extra smile she gives when she says “a hysterectomy is the removal of the uterus.” Look at the grin she gives when she says the Fallopian tubes are attached to the sides of the uterus. Look how enthusiastically she shakes her head, making her hair bounce, when she says “people getting gender-affirming hysterectomies do not have to have their ovaries removed.”

It’s a thing out of nightmares.

They asked Trump nicely before they raided the place.

Former President Donald J. Trump received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned boxes of material he had improperly taken with him upon moving out of the White House, three people familiar with the matter said.

The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned.

In other words Trump handed over some of the documents but secretly kept others. The raid this week was because of the others, the ones he secretly kept. That’s not something he was supposed to be doing. It’s more like something a double agent would be doing. A Kim Philby without the brains.

Two people briefed on the classified documents that investigators believe remained at Mar-a-Lago indicated that they were so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act.

I’ve seen people point out that Trump could have been planning to use the documents to extort favors or $$$ or both.

The subpoena factored into a visit that Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, made with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago weeks later, in early June, one of the people said.

The officials met with Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran. Mr. Trump, who likes to play host and has a long history of trying to charm officials inquiring about his practices, also made an appearance. During the visit, the officials examined a basement storage area where the former president had stowed material that had come with him from the White House.

I wonder what Trump does by way of trying to charm officials inquiring about his practices. I mean I genuinely wonder, because I’ve never seen any trace of the kind of charm that would work on grownup people with serious jobs. We’ve all seen him try it with reporters, right? Being “affable”? But his affable is as repellent as his raging or sneering or insulting. I don’t think he has the ghost of an idea how to charm grownup people with serious jobs.

Mr. Trump’s team has declined to disclose the contents of the search warrant. A number of organizations, including The New York Times, are seeking in federal court to have it unsealed.

Some senior Republicans have been warned by allies of Mr. Trump not to continue to be aggressive in criticizing the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the matter because it is possible that more damaging information related to the search will become public.

Oh really. So they’re saying back off because it’s going to get worse so let’s not piss off the feds too much now? Is that it?

When archivists recovered 15 boxes this year, they discovered several pages of classified material and referred the matter to the Justice Department. But officials later came to believe that additional classified material remained at Mar-a-Lago.

Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have maintained that they were trying all along to cooperate with federal officials and had kept an open line of communication.

But others familiar with federal officials’ efforts to recover the documents have said that Mr. Trump resisted returning property that belonged to the government, despite being told that he needed to.

What does that “trying all along to cooperate” mean? What’s to try? Trump had to hand over the documents, end of story – there’s no “trying” and no “cooperate,” there’s just doing what the law says he has to do. He’s not a god-emperor.

There’s nothing like starting a news story with an agentless passive voice claim that doesn’t mean anything.

The Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) is being urged to reconsider its decision to ban transgender women from female contact rugby competitions due to fears it will set a “dangerous precedent” in other sports.

Oooooh really? By whom? You? Your cat?

That’s such crappy manipulative sneaky concern-mongering disguised as journalism; there ought to be professional standards against that kind of thing.

What about the fears of other dangerous precedents, like the dangerous precedent of letting men take over women’s sports? I urge the Irish Independent to pay attention to that, and to skip the passive voice intro in the future.

Para 2:

Equality groups and rugby clubs have described the move as “regressive and disappointing”.

Equality groups and rugby clubs have described the move as about fucking time.

A spokesperson for Emerald Warriors RFC, Ireland’s first LGBTQ+ inclusive rugby team, said the “blanket ban on a section of our community” was hugely disappointing and regressive.

No, what’s disappointing and regressive is allowing men to invade women’s sports. Women are part of “our community” too you know – quite a large part.

The club said the move “further reduces spaces for transgender people to exist safely”, affecting rugby, sport and society.

What about spaces for women to exist safely? Why do men who call themselves trans get to overrule women’s safety?

“This step does not follow the values of our game,” the club said. “We are gravely concerned with the messaging to transgender youth, their families, friends and allies clearly making them no longer welcome in rugby.”

That’s a lie. The messaging is “play on the team that matches your sex.” Being welcome in rugby can’t be dependent on men both cheating and ruining women’s sport by playing on women’s teams. That would make women unwelcome in rugby.

Moninne Griffith, co-director of Trans Equality Together, said: “It is setting a dangerous precedent for other Irish sporting organisations to follow their lead in banning trans players.”

Trans players are not banned.

This reads more like a letter from a hostage than a policy statement from a sporting institution.

IRFU Updates Transgender Policy

The IRFU will amend its gender participation policy for rugby from the forthcoming season, based on medical and scientific evidence and in line with World Rugby guidance.

The IRFU is keenly aware that this is a sensitive and challenging area for those involved and the wider LGBT+ community and will continue to work with those impacted, providing support to ensure their ongoing involvement with the game.

Ok? Ok? Ok? We’re keenly aware, we promise we are, so so so aware, we totally get how sensitive and challenging and agonizing and torturous and sensitive it is, have we grovelled enough yet?

When has any organization ever talked about women’s concerns in that anxious caring hand-holding way?

Recent peer reviewed research provides evidence that there are physical differences between those people whose sex was assigned as male and those as female at birth, and advantages in strength, stamina and physique brought about by male puberty are significant and retained even after testosterone suppression.

You don’t say. Recent peer reviewed research reiterates what everyone already knew, which was why women had separate sports in the first place. I mean yay research, but the default should have been the obvious all along.

Anne Marie Hughes, Spirit of Rugby Manager, who has worked on policy development in this area since 2014, said,

“The IRFU is committed to inclusivity and has worked with the players and other groups in the LGBT+ community to explain that this change is based solely on new research related to safety. This is a particularly sensitive area, and it is important that respect is shown to all members of our rugby family and the wider community.

“We will continue to work to be as inclusive as we can be and to explore areas such as tag and touch rugby, which we know some of our players are already considering, refereeing, volunteering, and coaching.

“We continue to stand with the LGBT+ community, and while we accept that today some may feel disappointed in this decision, we want to again underline to them – there is a place for everyone in rugby, and we can all work together.”

So much grovelling and apologizing and wringing of hands just because they’ve decided not to let men trample all over women in rugby matches.

Also there is no LGBT+ community. There’s an LGB community, up to a point (since women and men often have competing interests), but the T is a different thing altogether. The + is just stupid. (How can people sign up to the + when nobody knows what it is? We don’t have Feminism Etc because we would need to know what the etc stands for before agreeing to it; the same ought to go for the +.)

On the one hand a law firm is working up a class action type case against the Tavistock GIDS; on the other hand a chain of banks is…doing this.

When did banks and corporations and other profit-seeking institutions get so childish? And how, and why?

Some news about the law firm that is planning to sue the Tavistock GIDS:

The U.K.-based plaintiffs firm PGMBM, which operates as a partnership between British, Brazilian and American lawyers, is launching an office in Rio de Janeiro following a significant win for claimants harmed by a dam collapse at a mine co-operated by BHP Inc. in Brazil.

The firm is also changing its name globally, and will now be known as Pogust Goodhead.

…

The firm has secured a series of high-profile litigation wins over the past 12 months.

In addition to the court victory against BHP, Pogust Goodhead notched a settlement in May on behalf of 15,000 claimants against the Volkswagen Group, and in 2021 it won an award for 16,000 victims of a British Airways data breach. 

Maybe the source is a public relations outfit pretending to be a legal news outlet, but at any rate Pogust Goodhead doesn’t seem to be a couple of mail-order lawyers in a garage.

It must have been fun to be a political journalist reporting on Trump, right?

Well, no. I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure. He’d been around forever and his political act was largely derivative. His promise to “drain the swamp” was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” in 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign had vowed to “Make America Great Again” in 1980.

Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end.

It’s the truth. He’s mind-numbingly empty and boring and trivial. He’s that guy you hope doesn’t sit next to you on the bus.

Bottom line, Trump is an extremely tedious dude to have had in our face for seven years and running. My former New York Times colleague David Brooks wrote it best: “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

There’s nothing to understand. It’s all out there in the open – what you see is what there is. There’s nothing to probe or question or elucidate. He has the mind of a very young boring child.

The article is about why so many adult politicians helped the six fireflies in a jar. Lindsey Graham for example:

Graham was always saying how important it was to “get the joke” about Trump. “Getting the joke” is a timeworn Washington expression, referring to a person’s ability to grasp a shared truth about something best left unspoken. In the case of Trump, the “joke” was that he was, at best, not a serious person or a good president and, at worst, a dangerous and potentially criminal jackass.

Hey, that’s a really funny joke, isn’t it.

“Oh, everybody gets the joke,” Mitt Romney assured me in early 2022 when I asked him if Senate Republicans really believed what they said in public about how wonderful Trump was. “They still are very aware of his, uh, what’s a good word, idiosyncrasies.”

Cool cool cool, everybody gets the joke, but everybody goes right on helping the fireflies destroy everything.

Originally a comment by Papito on Boston Children’s Hospital.

In many American states (I haven’t added up which ones lately), therapy for kids identified as suffering from gender dysphoria, which does not affirm their transition, is considered to be “conversion therapy,” and is illegal.

In Massachusetts, the law is HR 140, passed in 2019.

The law has specific exceptions for therapists who are encouraging children to change their gender identification to the opposite gender. It only prohibits providing therapy to children that affirms their actual sex.

This law, similar to laws in dozens of other states, all passed in the last decade, makes it possible that a therapist could not only lose his license to practice, but be sued or prosecuted for providing therapy to a child that does not confirm and cement the child’s stated belief of being transgender.

In practice, this means that almost no therapists want to go anywhere near kids with gender issues, except for those therapists who most enthusiastically “affirm,” such as the ideologues hired by gender clinics. It’s hot potato with these kids until they get to a place like Children’s, which fits them in the surgical disassembly line.

Boston Children’s you might want to pay close attention to this report in the Times:

The Tavistock gender clinic is facing mass legal action from youngsters who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers.

Mass legal action? How mass?

Lawyers expect about 1,000 families to join a medical negligence lawsuit alleging vulnerable children have been misdiagnosed and placed on a damaging medical pathway.

Yikes! Very mass!

They are accusing the gender identity development service [GIDS] at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust of multiple failures in its duty of care.

Starting with failing to be not credulous idiots. These are doctors, not teenagers; why did they fall for this destructive nonsense?

This includes allegations it recklessly prescribed puberty blockers with harmful side effects and adopted an “unquestioning, affirmative approach” to children identifying as transgender.

For reasons that are not medical but political.

Last month we learned that GIDS was closing.

The law firm Pogust Goodhead has since announced it is pursuing a group litigation order against the trust, which has treated 19,000 children with gender dysphoria (the feeling that one’s emotional and psychological identity differs from one’s birth sex) since 1989.

…

The allegations of medical negligence are based on the findings of an interim report by Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who is leading a review of the service.

If the gender clinic had listened to a few terfs maybe they would have spared themselves and a lot of kids this horrible outcome.