Priorities.

The Russian Football Union said it will go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) to appeal against its ban from international competitions after the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

On Monday, Russian football clubs and national teams were suspended from all competition “until further notice” by Fifa and Uefa.

The union said it would file one lawsuit against football’s world and European governing bodies, demanding Russia’s men’s and women’s national teams be allowed to compete.

Or, you know, they could just look at the bigger picture and take the hit. Putin is not their fault, but he’s not Ukraine’s fault either, and look what’s happening to them.

ACLU pushing girls in front of the train again.

Nobody’s trying to “push trans youth out of public life.” We’re trying to prevent males from invading and destroying everything women have. The ACLU couldn’t care less about women and our rights.

Be careful.

A personal trainer died after taking caffeine powder the equivalent of up to 200 cups of coffee, an inquest heard.

At one time, that is – not drinking 200 cups, which would take a lot of time, but taking 200 cups’ worth of caffeine all at once.

Caffeine is used by some gym-goers, with some fitness websites recommending it for improving sports performance in certain doses. However, experts have warned that when taking powders there is a risk of consuming over the recommended amount.

On Tuesday an inquest heard Mr Mansfield began clutching his chest and complaining his heart was beating fast after consuming the product. Minutes later, after going to lie down, he began foaming at the mouth.

And then he died.

The hearing was told the scales Mr Mansfield had used to measure the powder had a weighing range from two to 5,000 grams, whereas he was attempting to weigh a recommended dose of 60-300mg.

Caffeine is powerful stuff. Be careful.

More on Prymachenko and the Russian war crime:

The Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum, located northwest of the capital city Kyiv was burnt to the ground, along with 25 works by Prymachenko, according to the Kyiv Independent.

Vlada Litovchenko, director of the Vyshhorod Historical and Cultural Reserve, confirmed the “irreparable loss.”

“Numerous historical and architectural monuments and archaeological sites are under threat of artillery shelling and uncontrolled movement of heavy military trucks,” Litovchenko wrote in a statement on Facebook that was translated into English.

From that statement:

Click on the tweet to see all five paintings.

How sweet.

LB+ women? What’s that supposed to mean? Men, I guess. Lesbian, bi, and male women.

That’s not what it’s called though. It’s called Lesbian Lives.

Reminds me of the time a man renamed the last Women in Secularism conference “Women and Femmes in Secularism.” It wasn’t his conference to rename.

The shoutout to the man Susan Stryker of course underlines the point. “Hahaha women you don’t get to have anything of your own. Hahaha lesbians we get to make you pretend this hulking man is a lesbian, and give him top billing. Sucks to be you.”

Smash their culture, smash their art, smash their history, smash their beauty.

Wrong sort of lesbians, wrong sort of women, wrong sort altogether – must not be allowed to say no to men.

An academic and gay rights campaigner has claimed critics of Nicola Sturgeon’s transgender reforms are being “excluded from the political process” in Scotland after she was blocked from joining a Holyrood LGBT group.

Dr Shereen Benjamin said that she was viewed as “the wrong sort of lesbian” after MSPs and pro-trans rights lobbyists unanimously decided to refuse her membership of a Scottish Parliament forum, which she said she had wanted to join to find common ground with opponents.

The right sort of lesbian is a male one, and the only slightly less right sort is the fan of the male one. Male lesbians and allies of male lesbians are welcome; real lesbians with a concern for women’s rights are very unwelcome indeed.

It’s bizarre, really, how taken for granted it is the the T belongs with the LGB when in fact it’s the opposite of the LGB. The T expects the L and the G to look right past sex and pay attention only to the detachable accessories of sex – and all this half an hour or so after the L and the G finally succeeded in getting some rights and protections.

Last December, she applied to join the Scottish Parliament’s cross-party LGBTI+ group as a representative of For Women Scotland, one of the most prominent grassroots campaign groups, which opposes SNP plans to overhaul the Gender Recognition Act.

But nooooooooo – we can’t have a lesbian feminist on the “LGBTI+” group; that would never do.

At the previous meeting of the group, set up in 2016 to “promote and discuss issues of importance to the LGBTI+ community in Scotland”, members had backed the idea of hearing from more “women’s sector” groups.

…

“It seems the only lesbians the Scottish Parliament wants to work with are those who deny the materiality of sex. As same-sex attracted women, it appears that we’re the ‘wrong sort of lesbians’ and can be excluded from the political process, with no reason given.”

It’s the same-sex part. That used to be because of homophobia, but now it’s…um…Perfect Enlightenment.

The meeting, which saw Ms Benjamin’s application turned down, was attended by seven MSPs and 26 others, including representatives of Stonewall, the Equality Network and Scottish Trans, which are outspoken supporters of the SNP plans.

Stonewall is there to keep the lesbians out. Bitches.

At least three of the non-MSPs in attendance have shared a cartoon image online which links For Women Scotland, which formed in 2018, with the Ku Klux Klan.

What cartoon?

This one:

Updating to add:

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on The single most stunning response.

In the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA64), in Title VII protecting employment for example, it is unlawful to discriminate against an individual “because of” this list of protected characteristics:

race, color, religion, sex, or national origin

Promoters of the Equality Act (EA) say it “completes” the CRA64 by “adding” protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. The public might assume this means the EA would “add” those characteristics to the list like this:

race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity

If so, then the word “sex” would still mean the sex binary (as the Supreme Court interpreted “sex” in the CRA64 as recently the 2020 Bostock decision), and we could discuss how some rights may need to be balanced (e.g. between “sex” versus “gender identity”).

But no, in the text of the EA, in Section 7 for employment for example, it says to strike the word “sex” and replace it with the phrase “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)”. That would make the list:

race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), or national origin

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that in the EA: 1) The word “sex” no longer means the binary (undoing 50+ years of case law), 2) The word “sex” is undefined (and I see no preamble to define it), and 3) It is not clear how to talk about balancing rights of “sex” (e.g. female sex) versus “gender identity” with the EA word “sex” undefined.

The ACLU is operating in this framework, where the word “sex” is undefined, so they can simply remove it as superfluous, and protect “gender identity” instead.

President Biden signed an Executive Order on his first day in office to apply the EA wording to all federal organizations. So while the EA is not yet the law for everyone, there is broad support for the EA, including the Biden administration.

Kara Dansky’s book The Abolition of Sex has much more to say along these lines. I have a copy, but I have not read it yet.

Yesterday we saw that University College Cork is putting on the 25th annual Lesbian Lives Conference, and that the first Keynote Presenter is Susan Stryker, a man. It’s interesting to see how he presented himself as a visiting professor at Yale.

He looks a little bit…burly.

Normally, of course, it’s obnoxious or worse to judge people on their appearances, but there is a genuine issue of male v female bodies here, along with issues of presentation and what one can get away with and so on. Stryker looks a bit like Steve Bannon. Very few women can get away with looking like Steve Bannon, and even fewer would feel 100% safe challenging him.

In other words why doesn’t it bother Susan Stryker that he looks intimidating? Why does he feel so okay with looking intimidating that he has a photo of himself with tatoos in a muscle shirt on his Yale faculty page?

I don’t know the answer to that.

Even Switzerland.

Switzerland will adopt all the sanctions that the European Union has imposed on Russian people and companies and freeze their assets to punish the invasion of Ukraine, the government said in a sharp deviation from the country’s traditional neutrality.

“We are in an extraordinary situation where extraordinary measures could be decided,” President and Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis told a news conference in Bern on Monday, flanked by the finance, defence and justice ministers.

What a beautifully Swiss name. Italian and French, plus it means black currant aperitif.

Switzerland also adopted financial sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, effective immediately, and closed its airspace to most Russian aircraft.

Switzerland has steered clear of imposing sanctions in a string of crises, including when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

But now Russia is invading and pummeling the whole damn country.

The EU’s head diplomat, Josep Borrell, welcomed the move and said it was “good news” that transferring money to Switzerland would no longer help Russian oligarchs.

…

[T]he government faced growing pressure from the EU, the United States and thousands of protesters who marched in Bern on Saturday calling for it to side clearly with the West against Moscow.

Well done protesters.

Glinner has a transcript as well as a backup of the video.

A couple more excerpts:

The Ivy League released their statement literally dripping with sexism. I quote “the Ivy League releases the following statement of support regarding Penn’s Lia Thomas’s participation on the women’s swimming and diving team. Over the past several years, Lia and the University of Pennsylvania have worked with the NCAA to follow all the appropriate protocols in order to comply with the NCAA policy on transgender athlete participation and compete on the Penn women’s swimming and diving team. The Ivy League has adopted and applies the same NCAA policy. The Ivy League reaffirms its unwavering commitment to providing an inclusive environment for all student athletes while condemning transphobia and discrimination in any form. The League welcomes her participation in the sport of women’s swimming and diving and looks forward to celebrating the success of all of our student athletes throughout the season.”

It sounds so right-on, so solidarity fist in the air, doesn’t it – “The Ivy League reaffirms its unwavering commitment to providing an inclusive environment” – but of course it isn’t. The Ivy League is providing a non-inclusive environment: it’s excluding women. The man Lia Thomas is occupying a woman’s place on the team, and he’s stealing wins that would have been women’s. That’s not “inclusive.” Nor is it celebrating the success of all its student athletes, since it’s allowing a man to take that success away from a woman. The Ivy League is just blatantly lying by saying it’s committed to inclusivity for all.

Mandatory meetings were called with scripts read off by coaches from the athletic department or in some cases handed out. The girls, already caught off guard and intimidated but upset, were now silenced. They were manipulated, coerced and emotionally blackmailed. They were told their leagues and their schools had spoken and made their positions clear. They as athletes had made the decisions to be a part of these schools and this league and they needed to support it. They were told if they had opinions, or were asked to speak, they had to clear it through their coaches and their athletic department leaders. This was also of course for their own protection as no one wants their team slung through the mud. Finally, they were told their first priority needed to be the safety and protection of their trans classmates who are being thrust into the media. Any harm or damage that befell their classmates due to expressing opinions that might not support them would be their responsibility.

Breathtaking. Move over; resign yourself to being bumped down a notch by a man who claims to be a woman; shut your damn mouth about it; if anything bad happens to the man it’s your fault.

How do these people live with themselves? I’ll never understand it.

The Mother of Swimmer video is back up.

At 3:45 she talks about calling the ACLU to ask about the obvious conflict here between women’s rights and…whatever this other thing is. She tried to be respectful, she tried to use the Approved Words.

I made clear that I didn’t want to offend, but pleaded that it seemed there was an obvious conflict here, for women who already have so much less opportunity in sports, to now have to give spaces away to individuals who identify as women. I was met with the single most stunning response I’ve ever received on any issue. [deep breath] I was told that the words “biological” and “genetic” have no business being in a discussion around sex and gender, I was told trans women are women, they’re female, they’re girls, no language that minimizes that point should be tolerated. I was told it was an offensive question, my language was out of date. I was told that sex and gender are equally important and that the ACLU is actively removing “sex” from legal documentation

It’s what???

My hair stood on end when I heard that yesterday, too, but I wanted to listen to the whole thing before flailing at the particulars, and then the video was taken down before I got back to it.

The ACLU is actively removing “sex” from legal documentation – in other words the ACLU is actively and energetically demolishing women’s rights, in full knowledge of what they’re doing. It takes my breath away.

I was told that sex and gender are equally important and that the ACLU is actively removing “sex” from legal documentation and legal language. I tried to gently prod at the preposterous arguments I was hearing, and I was met with an absolute brick wall when she concluded with “Let me tell you with certainty, the ACLU will never represent cis women against women.”

Holy shit. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.

Mother of Swimmer didn’t sleep that night.

Fox & Putin & Carlson:

Hours before Putin ordered his forces into Ukraine, Fox News’ biggest star was still praising the Russian president.

Putin’s bellicose threats towards Ukraine and assembling of up to 190,000 troops on the country’s border, was, Carlson said, a mere “border dispute”. Carlson, who played into Kremlin talking points by declaring that Ukraine was “not a democracy”, launched an apparent attempt to humanize Putin.

“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?” Carlson said as he then recited a rightwing tip sheet of pet causes.

Putin has never called me a racist either, nor has he called me a terf or a bigot or a CIA agent. Despite that heartwarming generosity and forbearance, I still think Putin’s an evil man and that his invasion of Ukraine is an evil act.

Carlson went on:

“Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?”

That’s a very far-fetched kind of whataboutery. It’s possible to come up with a long list of bad things Putin isn’t doing, just as one could come up with such a long list for anyone else, but it doesn’t follow that Putin isn’t doing bad things that aren’t on the list. No one can do all the bad things at once.

By the end of the week Carlson’s colorful defense of Putin was being played on Russia 1 and the Kremlin-backed RT television network.

He’s the Lord Haw-Haw de nos jours.

It seems Tucker Carlson that’s TUCKER CARLSON of Fox News is indignant that people are saying he sides with Russia. Oh?

Salon:

Why pregnant people were left behind while vaccines moved at “warp speed” to help the masses

One way to leave pregnant women behind is to refuse to mention them, the way Salon did in the headline.

Clinical trials of COVID vaccines excluded pregnant people, which left many wondering whether to get vaccinated

And in the subhead.

A year ago, there was little to no vaccine safety data for pregnant people like Slade, because they had been excluded from clinical trials run by Pfizer, Moderna, and other vaccine makers.

The Slade in question is of course a woman. Salon knows she’s a woman.

Lacking data, health experts were unsure and divided about how to advise expectant parents. Although U.S. health officials permitted pregnant people to be vaccinated, the World Health Organization in January 2021 actually discouraged them from doing so; it later reversed that recommendation.

The uncertainty led many women to delay vaccination, and only about two-thirds of the pregnant people who have been tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were fully vaccinated as of Feb. 5, leaving many expectant moms at a high risk of infection and life-threatening complications.

Hedging their bets. Sometimes they admit it’s women, other times they pretend it’s people.

More than 29,000 pregnant people have been hospitalized with covid and 274 have died, according to the CDC.

“There were surely women who were hospitalized because there wasn’t information available to them,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Vaccine developers say that pregnant people — who have special health needs and risks — were excluded from clinical trials to protect them from potential side effects of novel technologies, including the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and formulations made with cold viruses, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

But a KHN analysis also shows that pregnant people were left behind because including them in vaccine studies would have complicated and potentially delayed the delivery of covid vaccines to the broader population.

The incoherence persists.

A growing number of women’s health researchers and advocates say that excluding pregnant people — and the months-long delay in recommending that they be immunized — helped fuel widespread vaccine hesitancy in this vulnerable group.

“Women and their unborn fetuses are dying of covid infection,” said Dr. Jane Van Dis, an OB-GYN at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has treated many patients like Slade. “Our failure as a society to vaccinate women in pregnancy will be remembered by the children and families who lost their mothers to this disease.”

It goes on and on the same way – it’s a long piece – saying mostly “people” with an occasional “women” thrown in to confuse us. The campaign to erase women from reporting and eventually the language continues.

Better hide those mega-yachts…

Oops!

Even now the ACLU is promoting its stupid all-trans all the time babble on Facebook. They’re obsessed. I’ll never understand why. Maybe because they missed out on the earlier struggles and want to experience something like them? But it’s a hiding to nothing, because the trans issue isn’t like Civil Rights or feminism or lesbian and gay rights or the peace movement. They want it to be but it isn’t. One it’s a tiny fraction of any population, and two it’s fictitious, and three it’s unavoidably narcissistic. People who aren’t narcissists don’t consider their personal discomforts worth a political campaign, let alone one that destroys the rights of women and lesbians and gays. It just doesn’t work to try to gin up political fervor about bratty narcissists telling other people what pronouns to use.

Anyway. Their wisdom:

Trans women are women.

Bad beginning. No they’re not. And as always, it’s just women they push around. They don’t bother to say Trans men are men. New boss exactly like the old boss – and they can’t even see it.

“Cisgender women should be concerned whenever an alleged concern for ‘protecting’ our well-being is invoked to justify exclusion.” — Shayna Medley & Galen Sherwin

Exclusion of what though? Of men from the class “women.” That is, of course, not “exclusion” in any pejorative sense, it’s just reality. It’s not “exclusion” to pat the dog instead of the table or the window, it’s just knowing what is what. There is nothing invidious about “excluding” men from the category “women.” The ACLU can keep its thoughts about “protecting” women to itself, because they’re bad and destructive.

Trans people have always been here.

They don’t know that. How would they know that?

“Trans people are not new. We have always been here. As long as there’s been recorded human history, we have always existed. But we have been written out of the human story — and when you come from a community that is without a full range of possibility models, it raises the question, in yourself as well as others, of whether or not you deserve rights or a place in society.”

If trans people have been written out of the human story, how do they and the ACLU know they’ve always been here?

You couldn’t make it up. “We’ve always been here, and we know this because there’s no record of it.”

It’s sad. There isn’t much time left, and apparently what little there is is going to be spent replacing women with petulant men talking about their pronouns.

Jon Pike flagged this up as a must listen and boy is he right.

I took the deep breaths during more than before, but I made it through.

I might make “mother of swimmer” a new swear.

Not playing games any more.

Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.

And, one more item, does it look as if anyone is doing enough to avoid its worst ravages? Hell no.

Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday.

As we keep noting – it’s already happening. Not soon, but now.

In what some scientists termed “the bleakest warning yet”, the summary report from the global authority on climate science says droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather are accelerating and wreaking increasing damage.

And they’re not all happening Somewhere Else.

Allowing global temperatures to increase by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as looks likely on current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, would result in some “irreversible” impacts. These include the melting of ice caps and glaciers, and a cascading effect whereby wildfires, the die-off of trees, the drying of peatlands and the thawing of permafrost release additional carbon emissions, amplifying the warming further.

And that last item is a big unknown, because the scientists don’t have enough data yet.

The report says:

• Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.
• About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change.
• Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.
• Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.
• 1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a “critical level” beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.
• Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.
• Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

And still we’re not really doing anything.

We’re just a primate species, just great apes who have developed some impressive talents, but it turns out those talents have empowered us to destroy our own and everyone else’s ecosystem, without empowering us to stop.