One violent man stopped.

Anjem Choudary, the leader of the banned terror group al-Muhajiroun, has been jailed for life and may never leave prison alive. He was found guilty of directing the group and encouraging support for it through online meetings

The sentence means that Choudary cannot seek to leave jail on licence until he is more than 85 years old. Choudary appeared shocked and rocked on his feet in the dock as he was given a minimum term of 28 years at Woolwich Crown Court.

Shocked was he? How does he think his victims felt?

Mr Justice Wall said Choudary’s group was a radical organisation that intended to spread sharia law, by violent means, to as much of the world as possible.

That’s not “spreading” sharia, that’s imposing it.

Al-Muhajiroun, which emerged in the late 1990s, has been linked to dozens of acts of terrorism with followers committing acts of violence both at home and abroad. Choudary has been at the heart of the organisation since its earliest days and became leader in 2014 after its founder was jailed in Lebanon.

He gives us two choices: submission or slaughter.

The Telegraph’s chief sports writer Oliver Brown points out that someone could get killed.

Boxing, in case you have not already noticed, is based on trying to knock someone out as the quickest route to victory. It is the sporting realm where sexual dimorphism is most pronounced, since men are biologically favoured with not just wider shoulders and longer reach than women, but 90 per cent increased bicep strength and 162 per cent greater puncher power.

To spell this out, this means that a man’s average punch has over 2.6 times the force of one delivered by a woman. It is a stark illustration of the responsibility that boxing’s authorities must carry when they match fighters up. Quite simply, their primary duty is to ensure that somebody does not die. And yet the International Olympic Committee has decided that two fighters who failed testosterone and gender eligibility tests only last year have fulfilled the criteria to compete in the women’s category in Paris.

I guess that’s because it’s only women who could die, so meh.

Imane Khelif of Algeria and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting were both thrown out of the world championships in Delhi last year amid questions over their biological sex. Lest anyone imagines this is some state secret, it is openly acknowledged in the official Olympic profiles for both athletes. But where the International Boxing Association (IBA) saw fit to disqualify the pair, the IOC have given them a free pass to go up against female opponents in the most dangerous sport, and on the grandest stage of all.

Women, you see. Women don’t matter, unless of course they’re really men.

“You have to understand the unfairness,” says Dr Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist and a leading expert in how differences between the sexes translate to sporting performance. “Seeing three DSD athletes on the podium of a women’s 800m race was shocking, but at least you knew that nobody had risked their life. But this is a risk that is now being contemplated at the Olympics on ideological grounds. Instead of the IOC saying, ‘No, these athletes can’t be in a female sport, especially not in boxing’, they are trying to balance fairness, inclusion and safety. But safety is not about balance. Safety is a cut-off. If it is not safe, nobody cares if it is fair or inclusive. You canot do it.”

Unless of course you simply don’t give a shit if women are killed by men who claim to be women.

When unions go mad:

Why would unions be in the business of disrupting puberties and handing adolescents over to gender quacks to have their lives ruined? Why is submission to trans ideology a requirement for all trade unions? Why is it a requirement for any trade union?

Seriously though…what kind of lunatic goes to a hotel and lies around near the pool to take photos of his legs and post them on Twitter?????

Who does that?? And why???

Guardian lede omits the crucial point of the very story it’s reporting on:

The International Olympic Committee has confirmed that two boxers who were disqualified from last year’s world championships for failing gender eligibility tests will be allowed to fight in Paris.

Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) both start their Olympic campaigns this week, with Khelif meeting the Italian Angela Carini in the 66kg category and Yu-ting expected to face an unnamed opponent in the 55kg category on Friday.

Just look at the Graun carefully not saying that these are men who will be allowed to beat up women in Paris. If you’re familiar with the pattern then the mention of Angela Carini tells you where you are, but even that is in the second paragraph. Two male boxers who failed gender eligibility tests last year will be allowed to fight women in Paris. How chickenshit of the Guardian to go out of its way not to say that.

The IOC’s decision will be controversial, with the former world champion Barry McGuigan expressing his unease. In a post on X, he wrote: “It’s shocking that they were actually allowed to get this far, what is going on?”.

Why is it controversial? Why did the former world champion express his unease? Why does he say it’s shocking they were allowed to get this far?

…the boxing in Paris is now being run under the auspices of the IOC’s Paris 2024 Boxing Unit, which has more relaxed rules than IBA.

Oh more relaxed are they. Is that what you call it. It’s more relaxed to let men beat up women for public entertainment. I don’t suppose the women find it more relaxed.

Rules regarding who should compete in the female category have been hotly contested in recent years. However there has been less debate about combat sports, where the risk of serious injury and even death is far higher.

Scientific research has also found that the average punching power is 162% greater in those who have gone through male puberty compared to females.

Too bad that clarity comes at the very end of the story.

Well well. Is the ship starting to turn at last?

And today, they capitulated at tribunal, admitting liability for harassment and discrimination. Lizzy has won! Book World – there is a lesson in here, if you would only listen to it. Well done, Lizzy and her legal team!

It seems Cambridgeshire County Council just said “It’s a fair cop, guvnor” and that was the end of that.

Guido Fawkes tells us:

Jolyon Maugham and his Good Law Project have faced yet another defeat. Earlier this year, Jolyon’s brigade attempted to overturn former Health Secretary Victoria Atkins’ ban on puberty blockers, raising a whopping £60,000 from gullible donors to fight their case. The High Court has now upheld the ban, citing a study that identified “very substantial risks and very narrow benefits” of puberty blockers. Another one bites the dust…

The Good Law Project took to X to bemoan their loss, promising they are “consulting on next steps.” This marks the second case Jolyon has managed to lose in less than a week. When will credulous donors wake up and realise that when it comes to campaigns, Jolyon seems to be the kiss of death?

Probably around the same time they realize people can’t change sex.

The water is going away.

Two of the largest reservoirs in America, which provide water and electricity to millions, are in danger of reaching ‘dead pool status,’ a result of the climate crisis and overconsumption of water, experts say.

Lake Mead, in Nevada and Arizona, and Lake Powell, in Utah and Arizona, experienced their lowest ever levels last year. ‘Dead pool’ status would mean the water level in the dams was so low it could no longer flow downstream and power hydroelectric power stations.

The Lake Mead reservoir, which is the largest artificial body of water in America, was created in the 1930s by the construction of the Hoover Dam, an engineering masterpiece. Lake Powell, the second largest, was created in the 1960s with the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam.

“The conditions in the American west, which we’re seeing around the Colorado River basin, have been so dry for more than 20 years that we’re no longer speaking of a drought,” said Lis Mullin Bernhardt, an ecosystems expert at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “We refer to it as “aridification” – a new very dry normal.”

Other people just call it the desert.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell not only provide water and electricity to tens of millions in Nevada, Arizona, California, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Mexico, but they also provide irrigation water for agriculture. Experts warn that as the crisis deepens, water cuts will need to be introduced, but this may not be enough.

Ya think?

For refreshment, a rescue story. I love rescue stories.

Seattle tour boat captain rescues paddleboarder in distress

“I think on three occasions, [I’ve seen] humpback whales and on about six occasions, orca whales,” said Captain John Darmody, who has been a captain with Argosy Cruises in Seattle since 2021.

While being the captain for a private charter Wednesday, Captain Darmody chose to take a different route than normal due to high winds and the wind direction. “We went out past Alki Point and down towards Lincoln Park, which we pretty much never do,” said Darmody.

That’s where he saw something much more alarming than the normal sightseeing views. “I had noticed a paddleboarder earlier in that area paddling, and then on our way back, like out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the paddleboard, but I didn’t see anyone,” said Darmody. “So that was when I got my binoculars.”

He saw a man unsuccessfully trying to get on his paddle board multiple times, even going under water in the waves despite having a life jacket. “I got on the loudspeaker system to announce to the crew that we were going to assist a person in distress,” said Darmody.

There’s video of the moment the guy is pulled aboard. The captain looks about 16 years old.

The 40 billionth Trump didn’t mean it literally he was just being Trump.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu on Sunday dismissed Republican president nominee Donald Trump’s statement Friday telling people they “won’t have to vote anymore” if they elect him as standard Trump rhetoric.

Well yes but guess what, it’s a problem that an ex-president and hopeful future president’s standard rhetoric is totalitarian in nature. The fact that he’s happy to say that kind of thing is the problem. The fact that he constantly threatens/promises to act like a dictator is the problem. The fact that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any moral or political norms at all is the problem.

Furthermore, the fact (if it is a fact) that he doesn’t mean it literally is entirely irrelevant to what he would do if he got the chance. It’s not as if he would think back and say “Oh wait I was just kidding when I said that, tell the generals to stand down.” He doesn’t think back. He lives in the moment and does what he feels like. Whether he does or doesn’t mean what he says literally is neither here nor there.

“I think it was a classic Trumpism if you will,” he said to host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”

So why the fuck would anyone want such a person as president?

Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) posted the Trump clip on X and said: “The only way ‘you won’t have to vote anymore’ is if Donald Trump becomes a dictator.” And Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said on X: “This year democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism. Here Trump helpfully reminds us that the alternative is never having the chance to vote again.” Liberal commentator Keith Olbermann boiled it down to: “Oh. Trump just cancelled the 2028 election.”

Republicans found the situation to be considerably less problematic, with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the former president was “obviously making a joke.”

By their jokes shall ye know them.

So I read the Guardian’s story on the Tommy Robinson protest to see if it too hauled in the trans protest for no apparent reason, and I was more impressed by the Guardian’s ability to stay focused with every paragraph I read. I really thought the Graun was going to make it, but then the very last paragraph says…

The day also saw a Trans Pride march from Langham Place, near Oxford Circus, to Hyde Park Corner. The march was originally planned to start at Trafalgar Square, but organisers changed the route to avoid Robinson’s protest. Police said a ninth person was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a steward at that event.

So close, but no prizes.

BBC weirdness. It does a story on a huge protest in Trafalgar Square organized by Tommy Robinson…

Thousands of supporters of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson have filled Trafalgar Square in central London after a march. He claimed the event was the “biggest patriotic rally” the UK had ever seen.

A counter-protest by Stand Up To Racism and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project also took place in London. The Metropolitan Police said a major operation was in place to “keep the peace” between the two protests, amid fears of serious disruption.

But don’t worry – that doesn’t exhaust the full list of protests.

A Trans Pride event was also held in the capital.

Ok, got it. Two opposing rallies that could have clashed with each other, and oh by the way there was also the 40 thousandth Trans Pride march.

There’s a photo of the Tommy Robinson march and…a photo of the Trans Pride march.

There’s no further mention of the Trans Pride march, which clearly has nothing to do with anything, but by god a photo of it is right up there near the top, because HEY, sorry to interrupt, but TRANS PRIDE.

Many many short BBC paragraphs down there is finally a photo of the counter-protest. Obviously the unrelated TRANS PRIDE march gets top billing while the competing march that’s actually relevant is shunted to the bottom of the page.

The BBC is permanently drunk these days.

Day 1, selective outrage; day 2, selective apologies.

The organisers of the Paris Olympics have apologised after a drag queen parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper featured in the opening ceremony.

What, did it get there because someone opened the wrong box? Was it supposed to be Vermeer’s Milkmaid or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers?

The tableau, which recreated the biblical scene of Christ and his apostles, included drag artists and a naked singer. It was heavily criticised by politicians and members of the Catholic Church.

Hang on. What does that mean? How does one “recreate” a biblical scene of anything? Paintings that illustrate bible stories are just that – illustrations. They’re not photographic records of historical events, they’re imaginative illustrations of imaginative stories.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life expressed his disgust in the right-wing daily, Il Giornale, on Sunday.

The archbishop spoke of the importance of the Olympics and sporting values in promoting fraternity and equality before saying: “This high ideal has been besmirched by a blasphemous mockery of one of Christianity’s holiest moments.”

Dude. Get a grip. The painting is just one guy’s idea of what a purported “last supper” might have looked like. That’s all. It’s not a historical record of the event itself. The parody is not the painting itself.

The taunting of women, of course, goes unmentioned. The archbishop approves of fraternity but sorority apparently not so much.

Gotta have men in rape crisis centers says lunatic.

Biological men should still be able to work in rape crisis centres despite a scandal over a trans woman’s running of survivor services, a leading charity boss has claimed.

Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, confirmed that Mridul Wadhwa, a male who identifies as female and is chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, was not currently at work following a damning employment tribunal ruling.

Emphasis on “currently” no doubt.

Ms Brindley, who has previously championed Wadhwa as an “amazing sister”, denied that her organisation had any involvement in the appointment and declined to confirm whether the chief executive was suspended or on leave. She said she believed victims of sexual violence should be able to make “informed choices” about the sex of support workers.

However, she rejected claims that there was no place for trans women in rape crisis centres, despite admitting the employment tribunal ruling had been “damning and damaging.”

Well she’s wrong. You know why? Because women don’t want men for this job, but in addition to that, the problem with letting men work in rape crisis centers is the fact that they want to and feel entitled to push for the right to. It’s the fact that they put their wants ahead of the needs of the women. That should disqualify them all by itself. Women who’ve been raped don’t need to encounter men who put themselves first in a rape crisis center. That’s pretty much the last thing they need.

Marion Calder, a director at the For Women Scotland campaign group, said Ms Brindley had serious questions to answer over events at the Edinburgh centre. “She has previously described Mridul Wadhwa as a ‘warrior for women’s rights’ and repeatedly championed him, as well as the ludicrous notion that people can change sex,” she said.

“The culture at the centre was no secret and it was obvious for years that the needs of vulnerable service users were being sidelined for this deranged ideology. For her to claim that there is still a place for men in rape crisis centres shows she has learned nothing and means many women will simply not be able to trust these vital services.”

That’s how it looks from here.

PBS asks and answers:

Are the 2024 Paris Olympics gender equal? That depends how you measure it.

Well how about measuring it as the same number of women competing as men competing? Crazy, I know, but that’s what I understand “equal” to mean in this context.

The last time the French capital played host to the Olympic Games, 135 women competed out of the more than 3,000 athletes – a participation rate of about 4.4 percent.

A century later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has dubbed the 2024 Paris Games the #GenderEqualOlympics, with half of the athlete spots available to men and half to women, the organization says.

Cool; do they mean the “women” part?

The reality is more complex. Experts say that while the IOC has made substantial progress in leveling the playing field for women in its decades long push for gender parity, there is still a lot of work to do, for women, transgender and nonbinary athletes.

Nonononononono that’s not the question at all. Women; not “transgender and nonbinary.” Focus.

This year’s Games are the first to impose a cap on the number of participating athletes, which had steadily grown to more than 11,000 at Tokyo 2020. The IOC has since limited the Games to 10,500 athlete spots, half of which were designated for men and half for women. This year’s game schedule also works to balance the number of women’s and men’s events held daily.

The reasons are not always to do with fairness to women, you won’t be amazed to learn.

Skeet shooting was an open sport in Barcelona in 1992, when Zhang Shan, a Chinese woman, won the gold medal. Subsequently, skeet shooting became segregated by gender.

“There’s nothing in the record that says, ‘And then once a woman won, we decided to have gendered categories,’ but the timing is notable,” Donnelly said.

“Oops, a woman won, that won’t do – we’ll have to give them their own competition so that men will be guaranteed wins.”

In striving for gender parity at the Olympics, the IOC has also reinforced a gender binary that categorizes athletes as male or female, experts say. That overlooks transgender and nonbinary athletes, whose participation in sport is often contested or flat out banned.

Fuck off. All the way off. Yes, now, right now.

Reduxx tells us:

Two athletes competing at the Paris Olympics as “women” were previously disqualified from a women’s world championship for having “XY chromosomes.” Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan are scheduled to compete in Olympic women’s boxing next week despite past questions surrounding their biological sex.

The Women’s World Boxing Championships took place in March of 2023 and was hosted in New Delhi, India. A total of 324 boxers from 64 nations competed during the 10-day trial, marking the largest participation in any iteration of the championship ever recorded.

However, the grand event was marred by controversy after Umar Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association (IBA), announced the disqualification of multiple boxers from the championship.

Kremlev said that IBA executives had met towards the championship’s grand finale to discuss “fairness among athletes and professionalism,” after concerns were raised about the biological sex of some participants. He added that after “a series of DNA-tests,” the IBA “uncovered athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women.”

I wonder why it’s always women they’re pretending to be. Why don’t women pretend to be men so that they can compete against men? Don’t women want to punch the crap out of men the way men want to punch the crap out of women?

Despite having faced the disqualification just last year, both boxers will be competing in Paris as female boxers.

How sweet.

Framing.

The Associated Press:

In an unprecedented display of inclusivity, drag queens took center stage at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, showcasing the vibrant and influential role of the French LGBTQ+ community — while also attracting criticism over a tableau reminiscent of “The Last Supper.”

It’s astounding, isn’t it? Mockery of women is “inclusivity” – the only problem is bringing “the last supper” into it. One mustn’t tease religion, but jeering at women is inclusive and hilarious and edgy.

Le Filip, the recent winner of “Drag Race France,” expressed their positive “surprise” and “pride” at the ceremony’s scale and representation.

“I thought it would be a five-minute drag event with queer representation. I was amazed. It started with Lady Gaga, then we had drag queens, a huge rave, and a fire in the sky,” they said. “It felt like a crowning all over again. I am proud to see my friends and queer people on the world stage.”

Yeah, mockery of women on the world stage is brilliant, isn’t it. Allons enfants!

The opening ceremony came as drag and the voguing nightclub scene in France has experienced a revival. The cabaret club Madame Arthur, founded in 1946 in the ashes of World War II, is one of the world’s oldest continually running LGBTQ+ theaters. It opened as Europe was only just beginning to understand the extent of the widespread murder of members of the queer community in WWII and is currently experiencing a massive renaissance.

Drag is not just a pastime; for many minority French communities who feel alienated over tensions arising from divisive politics and scars from the anti-gay marriage protests a decade ago, it’s a statement of defiance. Many gay Black and Arab youths — especially those from Paris’ less affluent and religiously conservative suburbs — and others who feel a sense of disconnect with French society find voguing and drag events safe places where their identities can be expressed without fear of reprisal.

No mention at all of the mockery of women. Imagine the AP driveling on this way about a blackface routine at the Olympics opening ceremony – it wouldn’t happen.

Politico on Vance’s bumpy week:

THE VANCE CATFIGHT — The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. JD VANCE’s (R-Ohio) comments about “childless cat ladies.”

In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

This is the fly in the ointment for political hopefuls who campaign on misogyny – they forget that women get to vote and that they’re quite a large demographic, aka half the population.

But the most interesting bit is:

The dive into Vance’s transformation from Trump hater to Trump running mate continues with this NYT piece surfacing correspondence between Vance and a transgender friend. “He’s just a bad man,” Vance writes about Trump in 2016. “A morally reprehensible human being.” He also tells his friend, “The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that.”

So he knows. He knows Trump is just a bad human being. He knows and he’s doing this anyway. Quite the morally reprehensible human being himself then.

The BBC is obsessed with drag. It currently has a long, photo-rich piece on men dressed up as parody women, which must be somewhere around its 5 thousandth piece on the subject over the past month.

For Danny Beard, though, the real magic of Hastings’ work is about championing the diversity of local drag queens who haven’t been given – or don’t want – a platform like Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

Ah yes, championing the diversity of local drag queens. Not championing the diversity of local women – god, how boring would that be??? – but of men mocking them.

I wonder why the BBC doesn’t have a parallel obsession with blackface?

Originally a comment by Jim Baerg on Stuck in presentism.

It was only with Kepler’s elliptical orbits that a heliocentric model predicted planetary motions better than a geocentric model.

Galileo’s observation of Jupiter’s moons showed that there are at least some objects that definitely orbit something other than the earth. The phases of Venus are hard (impossible ?) to explain in a non-heliocentric model.

For a non-dogmatic thinker, it was really only the combination of all of those developments that would remove reasonable doubt about heliocentrism. Though the lack of observable parallax of stars bothered scientists until measurements became good enough to detect the parallax in the 19th century.

Similarly in the case of continental drift/plate tectonics. There was reasonable doubt until the 1960s. It was accumulated data better explained by plate tectonics that tipped earth scientists into general acceptance of plate tectonics.

Honest present day scientists can try to look at what evidence was available to their predecessors of a given time to judge what they might have believed under the circumstances.

How to apply similar considerations to ethical issues is another matter.