Stonewall responds to the EHRC:

Today’s statements from the EHRC are an attack on trans equality and undermine EHRC’s core purpose of regulating, promoting and upholding human rights.

What is trans equality? What does that mean? In what way do trans people not have equality? It’s not part of “equality” to identify as something you’re not and then force the world to accept your self-identification.

The two statements – in response to plans to legislate for a ban on conversion therapy in England and Wales, and Gender Recognition Act reform in Scotland – effectively seek to exclude trans people from improved rights and protections. 

But the putative conversion therapy isn’t conversion therapy, and it’s not a right for people to identify as other people and take all their rights.

We are deeply troubled by the approach that the EHRC is taking to trans people’s human rights. Their approach appears to focus on pleasing a noisy minority of anti-trans activists, rather than promoting human rights for all LGBTQ+ people. 

But the “trans people’s human rights” in question aren’t rights. They impinge on other people’s rights, and they’re not a defensible right in themselves.

The EHRC is also a UN-accredited National Human Rights Institution, and as such is expected to operate according to the ‘Paris Principles’, which include the commitment to promote and protect all human rights and to contribute towards a world where everyone, everywhere fully enjoys their rights.     

Women can’t fully enjoy our rights if men are given “rights” to usurp our spaces and sports and jobs and prizes.

UN Women on Twitter is so stupid.

I’ve “called out” @UN_Women’s sexist behavior several times. Fat lot of good it did me.

Only yesterday they behaved sexistly.

No, why we fight is not the same “no matter what our gender is.” If you say it is you’re saying there’s no need for feminism, and that, given the realities, is intensely sexist. Tell women in Afghanistan that “why we fight is the same.”

We want sex equality. “Gender” has become a tool for sneaking men in through the back door.

Am I? Even if I don’t agree that men can be women?

Femicide Census has written an open letter to Gwent Police.

Dear Chief Constable Pam Kelly and Superintendent Vicki Townsend,

Two women at the top, supervising cops who arrest and abuse a woman for posting feminist material.

We write from the Femicide Census, the UK’s only resource documenting the number of women killed by men. Our research has been used by the Home Office and the police, for example, when state bodies need to cite data on women killed by men. This is because the UK government and state agencies fail to collate this data.

Why? Why do they fail or refuse to collate the data? I’d be interested to know.

On 25 January 2022 we were alerted via Twitter to an incident where we understand a woman was arrested by Gwent police for ‘displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress’ after putting up posters, referred to by Superintendent Vicki Townsend as ‘offensive material’. In particular our attention was drawn to one poster that read ‘3+ KILLED BY MEN EACH WEEK – DOMESTIC VIOLENCE KILLS.’

It is unclear from communications from Gwent police why that particular poster that contains this statement constitutes ‘offensive material’ or is ‘threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress’. However, it is of great concern to us if this statement has led to an arrest, both for the woman concerned and as well as our organisation and all the journalists and other bodies that use our data, which effectively states the same thing: that women are killed by men.

And you know what? It’s also of concern to us that Gwent police are being so cagey and evasive about it.

All of our data is based on FOI requests to every police force in the country including your own. Gwent police have responded to our request every time. This is why we know that 85 women were killed by men in Wales from 2009 – 2020, 53 killed by a partner or former partner and at least 16 women were killed by men in the area covered by Gwent police alone. We should also point out that thankfully, not one trans person has been killed in Wales over the past 12 years since our data set began.

We are at a loss to understand why the true nature of men’s fatal violence against women could constitute ‘offensive material’ by stating facts of that violence. And particularly given these facts have been used nationally by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council in its own violence against women and girls delivery framework that Gwent police itself should be implementing.

I have a wild guess about why the police pretend to think the true nature of men’s fatal violence against women could constitute ‘offensive material.’ My guess is that they think, or pretend to think, that the next step is to remind us that trans women are men, and that thus trans women are potentially a threat to women if they’re allowed to share certain kinds of private spaces with women. In other words we’re not supposed to remind the world of male violence against women now because it might remind people that trans women are not automatically guaranteed safe in women’s private spaces. Don’t Mention The Male Violence lest it remind people that trans women are men. Men’s validation is infinitely more important than women’s survival.

It is crucial that women identify and name the violence than men perpetrate against us. It is women mobilising against men’s violence against women who have led the global movement against sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, FGM, stalking, image-based abuse and femicide.  Men’s violence against women includes harassment and causes alarm and distress to women. We ask you to focus your attention on the perpetrators of men’s violence against women rather than the women who campaign against it.

Do we think Gwent Police will respond? Nope. We think they’ll ignore it as they ignore all of us.

And so the incompetent hacks (unless, worse, they’re doing it on purpose) roll up to spread the malevolent lies. A “trainee community reporter” in the South Wales Argus:

GWENT Police have issued a plea to people in Newport to not remove any posters they see in the city – after sharp objects were found behind some.

No they weren’t. Someone claimed they were, and the police took the claim seriously, or pretended to.

The warning comes as a 53-year-old woman was arrested on Sunday, January 23 after being caught spraying stickers to two lampposts by patrolling police officers.

Lampposts that, as I understand it, are already covered in stickers. (Also you can’t “spray” them. The police said they were “sprayed” and trainee reporter simply repeated the nonsense.)

Superintendent Vicki Townsend said that the force had been receiving complaints about offensive posters since October and that on a search of the woman’s home, more stickers and posters were found.

We’re supposed to conclude that the stickers and posters that “were found” are offensive or worse, but it’s merely insinuated, so that the reporter and the paper can wriggle out of any libel accusations. It’s utterly disgusting reporting.

The nature of the posters has not been disclosed.

Then don’t insinuate that they were somehow evil.

The woman was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.

Except that second “on suspicion” is completely bogus. We’ve seen the posters in question and they don’t contain “threatening or abusive writing.” This stupid (at best, malicious at worst) trainee reporter is doing her best to malign Jennifer Swayne by repeating the police lies.

Superintendent Townsend said: “We’ve received several reports in relation to posters containing offensive material appearing in Newport between October and January.”

She continued: “We published a post on one of our Twitter accounts on Friday 21 January, asking the public to not remove posters, including those containing offensive material, in the city after sharp objects had been found behind them.”

Except they weren’t found. Were they? Has that changed? Have the police said “Yes we ourselves found sharp objects behind them?” Last I heard they hadn’t, they were simply sharing what someone told them, the someone quite possibly being that one goon who has been Twitter-bragging about spreading this bullshit.

The trainee reporter a couple of hours ago:

Guest post by Jon Gallant

Our increasingly woke life in the arts and sciences and in the groves of academe includes sanctification of membership (or claimed membership) in certain favored sub-populations.  In New Zealand, for one example, the Aukland artist Peter Robinson has built his career half-seriously as a Maori artist—out of a Maori inheritance of 3.125%, a single great-great-great-grandparent.  At the University of Saskatchewan, Prof. Carrie Bourassa (who sometimes presented herself as “Morning Star Bear”) has become an influential figure in “indigenous” Canada, based on a Metis grandfather who had, it turns out, as much reality as the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and Buraq, Mohammed’s flying horse.  I propose to follow a similar path, but one a little more realistic than that used by Professor Morning Star Bear.             

Most European members of the Homo sapiens species, which includes me, have in their genomes between 1.5% and 3.5% sequences that come from the sub-species of Homo neanderthalensis.  This is roughly comparable to Peter Robinson’s Maori inheritance, and much more than the 0.00% Metis ancestry enjoyed by Professor Bear.   
   

Therefore, I hereby identify myself a member of the Neanderthal Community. We have been oppressed and “othered” by the dominant group for too long!  Henceforth, I expect at all times to be addressed by the Neanderthal personal pronouns ᚼᛅᛚᛚᚬ and ᛘᛁᛏᚴᛅᚱ, and I will complain to the HR Office about any failure to do so. I will lodge complaints in the DEI Office about every use of “Neanderthal” as noun or adjective to mean backward: this flagrant microaggression marginalizes the Neanderthal part of my genome, and makes it feel unsafe.  
   

Needless to say, we need the formation of a Neanderthal “affinity group” at the university, where that part of our genomes can get together to compare grievances and micro-grievances.  I look forward to the insertion of Neanderthal wisdom into every academic curriculum, especially in STEM fields where the Neanderthal Way of Knowing is most urgently needed.  Since Neanderthal sequences constitute only a fraction of its bearers’ genomes, our abbreviation is ΦN and should be thus abbreviated in the relevant acronyms, such as BIPOC ΦN  and  LGBTQIX+ ΦN.  
   

Finally, I will petition my own University to establish a program in Neanderthal Studies.  Or rather, a full department, a Center, and a scholarly journal for research in Critical Neanderthal Studies.  An ample budget for the department and the Center and the journal will be required, but we can be sure the university administration will find the cash.    Yours in  ᛗᛁᛞᚷᚨᚱᛞ,  Jon Gallant (at least 3.125% Neanderthal)

Meanwhile –

A surprise? Why? It’s women they hate.

“Cute” characters who don’t suggest trans people in any way, thus promoting the happy-clappy fiction that trans people just need to be Who They Really Are (which is a cute anime character).

Gwent police have issued a statement about their ludicrous and abusive arrest of Jennifer Swayne on Sunday.

Statement following a 53-year-old woman from Newport being arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.

But there was no reason for “suspicion of displaying threatening or abusive writing.” All they had to do was look.

I don’t think it’s normal police practice to arrest people for putting posters on lampposts. I think they give tickets or citations; I don’t think they haul people off to jail.

Superintendent Vicki Townsend said:

“We’ve received several reports in relation to posters containing offensive material appearing in Newport between October and January.

“Officers on patrol in Newport saw a woman spraying stickers to two lampposts.

“A 53-year-old woman from Newport was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.”

I don’t believe that. I think the bit about suspicion of threatening or abusive writing is a stupid lie.

“The woman was arrested at 2.39pm on Sunday 23 January and was released from custody after interview at 3.23am on Monday 24 January.

Why? Why hold her for 11 hours and release her in the middle of the night? Why not book her and release her immediately? She wasn’t suspected of murder or rape or assault – why hold her until 3:30 in the morning? How fucking stupid are the Gwent police?

“While she was in custody, a mobile phone and stickers were seized as part of our enquiries.

“Following arrest, officers attended the women’s address and conducted a search after arrest. Further items, including stickers and posters, were also seized.

Why? They’d had time to look at the posters by then; why did they go looking for more innocuous posters? Why did they treat a smoky ashtray like a five-alarm fire?

“While [the woman was] in custody, a healthcare professional assessed the woman at 7.10pm and requested officers collect her medication from her address.

“A quantity of medication was brought into custody by officers at 10.23pm after attending her address.

“The healthcare professional was unable to prescribe it while in custody for safety reasons.”

She didn’t need to “prescribe” it, she needed to hand it over to its owner.

“The woman was released from custody in accordance with police guidelines and there was no legal reason to keep her in the custody unit after her interview.

“The custody sergeant spoke to the woman who did raise that her mobile phone had been taken and she was informed it had been seized as part of the investigation.”

“The investigation” of nothing. There was no crime so the cops had no business stealing her phone.

“Upon release, the woman was offered transport for both herself and her mobility scooter but declined and chose to make her own way home.”

I don’t believe that.

“We published a post on one of Twitter accounts on Friday 21 January, asking the public to not remove posters, including those containing offensive material, in the city after sharp objects had been found behind them.

“This public safety message was intended to make the public aware of the dangers of potentially removing a poster, after glass and pins had been stuck behind the posters.

“We would reiterate that if anyone finds such a poster that they leave it to the relevant authority to remove it safely rather than risk injury.”

I don’t believe that either. There’s apparently a malicious agent claiming there are posters with glass, pins, Novichok, nuclear bombs under posters,, but it’s a pack of lies.

Just disgusting.

Here’s a piece of good news at last – racial gerrymandering is racial gerrymandering.

Alabama Republicans illegally discriminated against Black voters when they drew the state’s seven new congressional districts last year and must quickly redraw the plan, a federal court has ruled.

The ruling is hugely consequential, a blunt assessment of the way lawmakers use their power to draw district lines to dilute the influence of Black and other minority voters.

Pending lawsuits in North Carolina and Texas similarly allege that lawmakers illegally drew districts on the basis of race.

It sounds as if this could be the undoing of the Shelby ruling. Unless of course the Supremes get involved.

The seventh congressional district in Alabama, which stretches from Birmingham to the rural Black Belt, has consistently elected a Black Democrat to Congress for 30 years. Nearly 56% of the voting-age population in the district is Black. The state’s other six districts have all been represented by white Republicans.

The plaintiffs in the case, including four voters, two state senators and several civil rights groups, argued that Alabama Republicans packed as many Black voters into the district as possible – about a third of Alabama’s Black population – in order to weaken their influence in other district across the state.

Let’s hope the ruling stands.

It seems like such a self-immolating way to sell one’s new book.

Eye roll. Of course Julie Bindel didn’t make “a huge fuss.” Laurie Penny, on the other hand…

They’re not a priority for her, but they are, but she wouldn’t want to make anyone feel coerced, but she would, but everyone should take responsibility for their own use of language, but everyone should also obey orders to remember specialty pronouns.

And then she has the nerve to claim that not using her specialty pronouns will “hurt” her. Please. Of course it won’t hurt her – it will give her that little thrill she seeks of being pretend-persecuted. And who comes across as more selfish and petty here? Does she really think it’s Julie?

Well, no, because…

Ooops.

Man writing about Lia Thomas in the Times pretends not to know what everyone knows:

So much is open to interpretation each time Thomas jumps into the pool. She is a transgender woman, and has excelled this season while competing on the women’s team. She owns the best marks in the nation among college swimmers in the 200 and 500 freestyle, but for some, her success has also set two pillars of the sporting ethos — inclusion and fair play — in conflict.

So little is open to interpretation if you’re not being dishonest. Thomas is a man, so of course he “has excelled” while competing on the women’s team. He’s excelled by cheating.

Thomas has become a red-meat topic for right-wing media, a divisive matter for L.G.B.T.Q. advocates and a thorny subject for competitors as well as the N.C.A.A. and other sports governing bodies, who are trying to chart a path for athletes who do not fit neatly into the sex classifications used in most sports.

Who says Thomas doesn’t fit neatly into the sex classifications used in most sports? Besides Thomas? He fits plenty neatly into the male classification from what I can see and have read.

While there have been an increasing number of transgender athletes who have transitioned while in college, the ones who generate the most attention (and criticism) are transgender women who compete in women’s events — and who win.

Yes, and they get the most criticism because they’re giving themselves a massive physical advantage. It’s very simple if you’re not pretending not to understand.

[T]he Ivy League championships lie ahead next month and then the N.C.A.A. championships arrive in March. That will almost assuredly raise the temperature again, as has happened when iconic figures like Michael Phelps, who is making a second career as a mental health advocate, and Martina Navratilova, a champion of L.B.G.T.Q. rights, questioned whether Thomas should compete on a women’s team.

Others, meanwhile, will wonder when the discussion will be centered less on the winner than on the human being.

What about the female human beings who are being cheated by William Thomas? Can we center the discussion on them?

And so if there was something enduring about Saturday, it was not the two races that Thomas comfortably won or the two relays where she gamely tried. It was the way she carried herself in the water — head down, with grace and ease.

Bros before hos.

The title is a story all by itself.

Laurie Penny drops a bomb on The Critic magazine in pronoun row

Pronoun row? Next up: all out nuclear conjunction exchange.

AUTHOR Laurie Penny has criticised Right-wing magazine The Critic as “rude and childish” for failing to use their preferred pronouns.

First sentence, and already we see why pronouns should be accurate as opposed to Crafted to Your Personal Taste. Whose preferred pronouns – the magazine’s? Laurie Penny’s? It’s not clear. That can happen anyway, when there is more than one she or he or they, but using the accurate ones at least keeps those ambiguities to a minimum. Using luxury pronouns does the opposite, with a vengeance.

And then of course there’s “rude and childish.” Which is more rude and childish, The Critic’s use of standard pronouns or Penny’s demand that she get special customized ones that will make the article more irritating to read?

Julie Bindel used the accurate ones, the article goes on, and that just wouldn’t do.

Penny’s publishers Bloomsbury asked that Penny be referred to as “them/ they”. The Critic refused to make the change, instead adding a reference to the request at the foot of the review.

Bloomsbury shouldn’t have asked. Language can’t be customized for individuals in this way without rapidly ceasing to be comprehensible. The whole point of language is to communicate, and specialty pronouns are just roadblocks to that project. Plus it’s all just so narcissistic and self-indulgent and stupid. See Laurie, see Laurie get free publicity by “dropping bombs” over her childish “my pronoun” demands.

Penny told us: “It’s rude, and it’s childish…”

No, what’s rude and childish is to expect special language rules for oneself. That’s rude and childish.

“They want to think of themselves as cool and edgy… it would be nice to see them engage with the actual arguments I’m making.”

Then stop bleating about your stupid pronouns!

If she really wants us to engage with her arguments then she’s a complete fool for distracting everyone with outrage that we don’t call her “they.”

Sarah Phillimore summarizes a podcast on which Jennifer Swayne talks about her experience in the Newport jail last night.

Yes seriously why IS this? Why can they put a disabled woman in a cell for ten hours because she posted some stickers they don’t like? And then push her out at 3 in the morning to get home on a battery scooter? WHY?

They arrested her for nothing then left her there for five hours, for nothing.

Meanwhile – rape cases? Pfffffffffffff, they don’t matter.

I fucking think so too.

Ok Newt.

Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stoked outrage on Sunday by predicting members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year.

So he’s saying the Republicans plan to kill what’s left of US democracy if they win.

One of two Republicans on the committee, Liz Cheney, said: “A former speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent attack on our Capitol and our constitution. This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.”

…

Calling the members of the 6 January committee “wolves [who] are going to find out that they’re now sheep”, he said that if Republicans take Congress in November, “this is all going to come crashing down … they’re the ones who in fact, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking”.

Except that they’re not.

LP keeps revealing herself to be…how shall I put this…not all that bright.

Like that. It’s not just that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s dim. Clumsy, inaccurate, clunky, backassward – just dim.

We’re not notable for windbaggery. We don’t talk more than other people. It’s just a sloppy label, that falls off because it doesn’t fit.

And then telling ourselves not using luxury pronouns makes us cool and edgy??? Could not be more wrong, or more absurd. She might as well say we think saying 2+3=5 makes us cool and edgy. Of course we don’t think that. It’s the other way around. We think their furious efforts to force us to use the specialty pronouns make them too “edgy” for their own or anyone else’s good. We think it’s fashion run amok. We think it’s a trend, and a stupid one, and a complete dead end.

As for childish and tiresome – well it’s too obvious so I won’t spell it out.

As for anti-intellectual – pull the other one. Trans ideology is not intellectual. It’s emotional, psychological, pseudo-political, but it’s not intellectual.

It is true that in some ways we feel threatened by the “ideas” of people like her, because they are doing damage and will continue to do damage. We do worry about women who need women-only refuges and rape crisis centers, about women in sports, about women’s prizes and promotions and jobs, about women’s representation in government and politics and education. We do worry about women being displaced by men who identify as women. But we (naturally) think the LPs are the ones who get it wrong, and we don’t think it’s all a matter of “the next generation” shoving us overboard because it’s so much more “progressive” than we are.

Remember, women, you are not allowed to have anything that’s for women only. If you try you will be hounded and pursued until the last cruise ship melts.

“Will this error be fixed?” the pretend-journalist asks. It’s not an error you miserable woman-hating creep.

The police are there to protect you. No wait, not you. Other people. Male people. The clean ones.

The Metropolitan police have apologised and paid compensation to an academic for “sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language” used by officers about her when she was strip-searched.

“What’s that smell? Oh, it’s her knickers,” officers at a north-east London police station said to each other after Dr Konstancja Duff was held down on the floor and her clothes cut off. “Is she rank?” another said.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Apologizing isn’t enough. Compensation isn’t enough. They need to fire people, and hire a lot more women, and put a stop to this kind of dehumanizing shit.

The Met apologised to Duff, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, after CCTV video capturing the officers’ conversations was disclosed to her as part of a civil action against the force.

How sad for the police, that they didn’t get to keep it a secret.

Honest to god shouldn’t they be better trained and supervised than this? They get to have people in their power, as they did here – they should be extra vigilant against dehumanizing people who are helpless in their hands.

Duff said: “In every detail the footage backed up what I had said in my statements for years and years.” Officers had claimed they had acted with professionalism, strip-searching her for her own safety because she would not give them her name.

What? How does “her own safety” come into that?

“It was such an effective gaslighting: ‘We were just concerned for your mental health, that was why we had to – for your own good – forcibly strip you naked and mash you up.’

“It was so obviously not what they were doing at the time. They were doing it as punishment, they were doing it as intimidation, they wanted to soften me up and get my details.”

Duff was arrested on 5 May 2013 on suspicion of obstructing and assaulting police after trying to hand a legal advice card to a 15-year-old caught in a stop-and-search sweep in Hackney – allegations she was later cleared of in court. She was taken to Stoke Newington police station, where Sgt Kurtis Howard, in charge of the custody area, ordered the search when she refused to cooperate with officers.

In 2018 Howard appeared before a disciplinary panel, which cleared him of gross misconduct. He argued the search was necessary to assess any risk Duff might pose to herself, and its chair concluded his actions were those of a responsible officer. The CCTV footage now obtained by Duff of the police station custody area on the day she was searched shows Howard telling officers to show her “resistance is futile” and to search her “by any means necessary”.

“Treat her like a terrorist,” he says. “I don’t care.”

Why? Handing someone a legal advice card isn’t at all like terrorism. Why didn’t he care?

In a cell, three female officers bound Duff by her hands and feet, pinned her to the floor and cut her clothes off with scissors. Duff described the ordeal, which left her with a number of visible injuries, as like a sexual assault.

…

Duff’s case has come to light as the Met finds itself under the spotlight for what critics have described as a culture of institutional misogyny. The rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a Met firearms officer, prosecutions of serving officers for rape, and revelations of sexist and racist online chats between officers have led to renewed questions about sexism in the force.

Which get drowned out by all the blather about men who identify as women.

Julie Bindel reviewed Laurie Penny’s long unawaited book on “feminism” for The Critic.

One of the key problems with Sexual Revolution is its very premise: that we can explain misogyny in its current form with the growth of right-wing ideology and fascism. This excuses a huge growth area in modern misogyny, which is the so-called male progressives: men on the left.

Excuses it and draws a tactful veil over it. An actual feminist wouldn’t want to do that.

And its style can be grating. Penny’s schtick has always been to overwrite her sentences to the point where they become tediously indulgent while saying little. For example, Penny says:

Something has broken. Something is breaking still. Not like a glass breaks or like a heart breaks, but like the shell of an egg breaks – inexorably, and from the inside. Something wet and angry is fighting its way out of the dark, and it has claws.

Ugh. That’s a stupid person’s idea of Fine Writing.

There is no doubt that Penny is genuine in her commitment to naming male violence, so long as it does not get in the way of her “trans women are women” and “sex work is work” ideology. Swotting up on her feminist history wouldn’t go amiss, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she can’t credit her theories on male violence to those deserving of it; after all, these women are now the baddies in her world.

No amount of fudging and outright denial will alter the fact that the feminists currently labelled “TERFs” and “SWERFs” are those who have changed laws, raised public awareness and established domestic violence refuges, rape crisis centres and other women-only services that have proved essential in a world where male violence is endemic.

And then there’s more to the story. The publishers of Penny’s book responded.

The publishers wanted Julie to rewrite the review to include Penny’s stupid illiterate Specialty Pronouns. Are they children?

Also speaking of cruise ships…

On the fourth day of a seven-day Mexican Riviera cruise, Jesse Suphan and other passengers onboard the Carnival Cruise Line’s Panorama were denied entry at the port of Puerto Vallarta, because of the number of onboard coronavirus cases. That was the first Mr. Suphan heard about the virus spreading on the ship.

“The captain announced that five people had tested positive for Covid and were quarantining,” Mr. Suphan, a 39-year-old revenue cycle manager, recalled in a telephone interview. “But, then, talking to the crew, they told me there were between 100 and 150 crew members who also tested positive, but the captain didn’t mention that.”

Well naturally not. That might have a harmful effect on the cruise industry. The cruise industry must be protected.

Two days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans to avoid travel on cruise ships, regardless of their vaccination status. The advisory, the agency’s highest coronavirus warning, came in response to a surge in cases in recent weeks, caused by the spread of the contagious Omicron variant.

There’s also the fact that cruise ships burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day and hello global warming? But let’s not talk about that, it’s not cheerful.

But even as case numbers rise, and criticism mounts about the safety of cruising and over cruise line protocols in reporting cases to passengers, ships keep sailing and guests keep embarking…

And 80 thousand gallons of fuel per day per ship keep getting added to the total but never mind, we still have a few good years left, maybe.

Most major cruise lines do not publicly announce the number of coronavirus cases on board their ships, but they are required to submit daily figures to the C.D.C. Currently, the agency is monitoring more than 90 cruise ships, because of reported cases that have reached the agency’s threshold for an investigation. (An investigation is undertaken when a certain number of cases is reported among a percentage of passengers.)

More than 90. How many cruise ships are there in total???

Speaking of cruise ships…

The Crystal Symphony left Miami on Jan. 8, as scheduled, on a two-week cruise. On the way back, things took an unexpected turn.

The climate changed?

The ship was scheduled to arrive in Miami on Saturday, but mid-trip, a United States federal judge ordered the cruise ship seized over a lawsuit regarding unpaid fuel bills. The ship changed course for Bimini, in the Bahamas, according to a cruise tracker, rather than sail into the clutches of federal authorities.

In other words the ship went on the lam. Such an ethical industry.

Steven Fales, 51, an actor and playwright, was on the cruise with a couple of friends “hoping that the pandemic would end and trying to do something adventurous.” The adventure came to an abrupt end when they learned the cruise was being rerouted.

Is there anything less “adventurous” than getting on a cruise ship? Cruises aren’t about adventure, they’re about eating a lot while being on a very large ship. Being rerouted is more adventure-like than staying on course.

Then again, going on cruises in defiance of CDC advice is at least risky, so maybe that should count.

H/t Sackbut

The Gwent cops certainly seem terrified about these OffenSive posters.

“Safely” remove – because they’re radioactive, you see, and poisonous, and wired to explode, and laced with razor blades. Stay 500 feet back and summon the helicopters.

Well no wonder they’re mad at women. Male cops are standing up for themselves at last!