Speaking of international commerce…

Customs officials in Ecuador discovered 185 baby tortoises packed inside a suitcase that was being sent from the Galápagos Islands to the mainland on Sunday.

The reptiles had been wrapped in plastic and were found during a routine inspection at the main airport on the island of Baltra.

Ten of them had died, officials said.

One of the biggest threats to Galápagos tortoises is illegal trading for animal collectors and exotic pet markets.

Many of the Galápagos tortoise subspecies are endangered. Also, wrapping live animals in plastic and shipping them in a suitcase is inhumane and disgusting.

Ecuador’s environment minister, Marcelo Mata, described the incident as a crime against the country’s wild fauna and natural heritage.

Also a crime against the specific 185 tortoises.

Staff from the Galápagos National Park are helping with the care of the seized tortoises

Dislodged and on the move.

Tug boats honked their horns in celebration as the 400m-long (1,300ft) Ever Given was dislodged on Monday.

Traffic is set to resume in both directions through the canal at 19:00 local time (17:00 GMT), according to local authorities.

…

The vessel was being towed for safety checks to Great Bitter Lake, which sits between two sections of the canal to the north of where the ship got stuck.

…

According to Lloyd’s List, there are currently more than 370 ships waiting to pass through the canal, including container vessels, tankers, and bulk carriers. Clearing that backlog is expected to take several days.

Some economies of scale aren’t.

She can go lower. Can and does.

Not that she’s gone at all conspiratorial in her thinking.

It seems that if a woman “identifies as” a gay man then that’s what she is. Simples.

Who is Chiyo? I had to look it up. The BBC last August:

Being judged on his masculinity is something Chiyo feels every time he steps outside the front door.

Chiyo is transgender and, in April next year, he’ll be standing on stage with a group of other men – who aren’t trans – to be judged in what is ultimately a male beauty contest.

He’s a finalist in the (coronavirus-delayed) Mr Gay England 2020.

In other words Chiyo is a woman, who next month will be standing on stage with a group of other actual men to be judged in a male beauty contest.

But no no how very dare we? Chiyo is “living his life as a gay man” therefore he is one. Only, how would anyone even know that? What does it mean? It’s not as if there’s an Inspectorate sending inspectors out to do surprise checks. Chiyo could be lounging around the house in girl-mode, as Eddie Izzard so obnoxiously calls it, and no one would be the wiser. “Living one’s life as” is just obfuscatory-speak for playing Let’s Pretend. It doesn’t transform you into what you’re pretending to be except in your own head, as an imaginative game or mind-expansion or whatever you want to call it. It’s fine to pretend; it’s not fine to force other people to say you are what you’re pretending to be, much less to punish them for refusing.

The gay man bullied by the Mr Gay England Twitt has deleted his account.

Graham Linehan boosts the message of a woman currently suspended by His Majesty the Twitter:

Trade unions are trade unions. What makes them think it’s their job to force women to call men “women” if the men demand it?

Hubble’s response:

No, I wouldn’t like to talk about it. I have not said one thing that is transphobic (which has become a meaningless word as it is used so often). I proudly stand for the rights of women and the single-sex exemptions that are enshrined in equality law, and if that is considered transphobic then the problem is with the definition not with my stance.

I believe in biological reality and do not subscribe to the notion of gender identity especially when it damages women and girls – the oppression of women is based on biology not gender identity and this movement is seeking to remove not only every protection women and girls have but to redefine what it means to be female.

The left is eating itself with identity politics and it pains me to witness it. Centuries of oppression and fighting to even be recognised as deserving of equality have been eroded in just a few years. Ask yourself this question, is it OK for me to identify as black because I feel black and I listen to Bob Malrley? Would it be fine for me to then claim to be more oppressed than those who don’t get to choose the colour of their skin? Is it OK for a person to claim to be disabled because they “feel disabled” and claim all the protections and systems put in place to allow disabled people to be equal within society? If the answer to those questions is no (rightly so) then why is it OK for a man to claim womanhood based on how he feels and what he wears?

Exactly what I keep wondering. For literally years I’ve been wondering it…and I’m not the only one.

Women and girls cannot identify out of their oppression in the same way that black and disabled people cannot identify out of theirs. I would never and will never discriminate against anyone nor would I treat anyone any differently based on their identity, in fact I have campaigned for LGBT rights and will continue to do so. I have been a left wing trade unionist and feminist my whole life and I will not apologise for my belief that a person who is born male cannot magically change sex and become more oppressed than females. I don’t think you or any man (no disrespect) can understand how upsetting it is to see so many left wing men, who have spent the past 5 years telling women like myself, to shut up, sit down, don’t talk, and calling them bigots, transphobes and TERFs for standing for their rights, suddenly “stand in solidarity with women and girls” because it is the latest cause celebre. The hypocrisy is mind-blowing and the intellectual disconnect involved in this is staggering.

Read on.

They’re building those things too damn big.

Over the past decade, out of the sight of most consumers, the world’s container ships have been quietly ballooning in size. A class of vessels that carried a maximum of about 5,000 shipping containers in 2000 has doubled in size every few years since, with dozens of megaships now traversing the ocean laden with upwards of 20,000 boxes.

The ocean can deal with it; canals, not so much.

The ships’ rapid growth has outstripped the capacity of marine infrastructure to follow. The Panama canal was expanded at a cost of more than $5bn (£3.6bn) more than a decade ago to meet the size of new container ships – only to be left behind as even larger vessels rolled out of Asian shipyards.

…

The Suez canal has been in the process of expansion to allow for larger ships and two-way traffic at its northern end. But its southern side was still one-way and narrower: vulnerable when one of the largest container ships in the world tried to pass through on a windy morning.

Sometimes economies of scale aren’t.

Updating to add:

Ted Cruz tries to go all Apocalypse Now and everybody just laughs at him.

In the style of a wildlife documentary, Cruz captured his experience with the help of professional photographers and shared his recent journey to the US-Mexico border Thursday night on social media, where he aimed to shed light on what Republicans have dubbed a crisis.

Sporting a dark green fishing shirt and matching baseball cap with the Texas flag, Cruz spoke at a press conference where he sought to paint a dramatic picture of his experience: “On the other side of the river we have been listening to and seeing cartel members – human traffickers – right on the other side of the river waving flashlights, yelling and taunting Americans, taunting the border patrol.”

Despite his claims that the border situation is a direct result of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, residents in the Rio Grande Valley have said no such crisis exists. In fact, the number of border crossings under the Biden administration largely mirror those under the former Trump administration.

Oh now cut that out, it’s a great big sweaty emergency and Cruz is a HERO for going down there to look at it.

After claiming he ran into heckling cartel members and saw a dead body floating in the Rio Grande, Cruz was derided by many, including former congressman Beto O’Rourke who said: “You’re in a border patrol boat armed with machine guns. The only threat you face is unarmed children and families who are seeking asylum (as well as the occasional heckler).”

And crocodiles! Sharks! Killer whales that jump and bite!

A Saturday soppy. Abandoned dog keeps returning to a store to try to take possession of a purple plush unicorn.

The business in Kenansville, North Carolina, called animal control on Sisu, a large male stray dog, because of his repeated thievery. He had come to the store five times to steal the same stuffed unicorn.

However, instead of being left empty-handed, the Duplin County Animal Control officer who went to pick him up ended up buying the toy for Sisu instead.

And Duplin County Animal Control advertised him on Facebook.

This is what happens when you break into the dollar general consistently to steal the purple unicorn that you layed claim to but then get animal control called to lock you up for your B & E and larceny but the officer purchases your item for you and brings it in with you.

Sisu

Male

Stray

1 yrs old

67.1 lbs

He’s been adopted.

Another first for a…man.

LGBT rights advocate Martine Delaney has become the first Tasmanian transgender woman to be recognised on the Honour Roll of Women — an award given to those who have made an “outstanding contribution” to the state.

That is, the first man to be recognised on the Honour Roll of Women. Much honour, very scruple.

Ms Delaney said it was “humbling” to have been recognised.

Not humbling enough, since he accepted. That’s an award that should have gone to a woman. There’s a woman who missed out because of him.

“It’s not been something that transgender women in Tasmania have been nominated or inducted into previously,” she said.

Naturally not, because they’re men.

One of the campaigns she is best known for is her fight to make the inclusion of gender optional on Tasmanian birth certificates — a “battle” she took on in 2004 and that became legislation in 2019.

And that’s a good thing why exactly?

“Tasmania has possibly the world’s most progressive and inclusive birth certificate legislation. You’re not going to find anything better anywhere else on the planet.”

What’s that even supposed to mean? Birth certificates aren’t clubs or universities or secret societies. How can they be progressive or inclusive? You might as well say they dance well or they make a mean paella.

It’s ok, the asteroid won’t hit for at least a century. Of course if you have descendants you might be worried for their descendants, but…sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, I guess.

Earthlings can breathe a sigh of relief after US space agency Nasa confirmed the planet was “safe” from a once-feared asteroid for the next 100 years at least.

…

“A 2068 impact is not in the realm of possibility any more, and our calculations don’t show any impact risk for at least the next 100 years,” Davide Farnocchia, a scientist who studies near-Earth objects for Nasa, said in a statement on Friday.

It waved from a distance recently.

The asteroid recently made a distant flyby of Earth on 5 March, passing within 17 million km (10 million miles) of the planet.

Astronomers were able to use radar observations to refine their estimate of the asteroid’s orbit around the Sun, allowing them to confidently rule out any impact risk in 2068 and long after.

You can take that one off the list for now.

This is just straight up a lie.

Of course he didn’t.

CNN reports:

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a transgender sports bill into law Friday requiring students to prove their sex at birth in order to play in middle and high school sports.

The bill states that “a student’s gender for purposes of participation in a public middle school or high school interscholastic athletic activity or event be determined by the student’s sex at the time of the student’s birth, as indicated on the student’s original birth certificate.”

Students must show proof of their sex at the time of birth if their birth certificate does not appear to be the original or does not indicate the student’s sex at the time of birth. This does not apply to students in kindergarten through 4th grade, the Tennessee bill says.

Before puberty the kids can play where they want. Why would that be? Because at puberty boys gain a lot of physical advantages over girls, which make it grossly unfair for boys to play on girls’ teams because they say they identify as girls. It’s pretty simple. The ACLU is just lying about the bill.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Sometimes America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a hastily passed voter suppression law that many are calling the new, new Jim Crow on Thursday night, surrounded by a half-dozen white men, he did so in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved.

The fitting symbolism is somehow both shocking and unsurprising. In using the antebellum image of the notorious Callaway Plantation — in a region where enslaved Black people seeking freedom were hunted with hounds — in Wilkes County, Ga., as the backdrop for signing a bill that would make it a crime to hand water to a thirsty voter waiting on Georgia’s sometimes hours-long voter lines, the GOP governor was sending a clear message about race and human rights in the American South.

Clear and ferocious. As Bunch notes, plantations weren’t just places where Black people were compelled to do hard labor for zero dollars, they were places where Black people were subject to horrific violence at the whim of the people who presumed to “own” them. Kemp’s pretty picture of the plantation is not all that far from Camp Auschwitz guy’s sweatshirt.

The portrait of the plantation was the starkest reminder of Georgia’s history of white racism that spans slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and today’s voter purges targeting Black and brown voters — but it wasn’t the only one. At the very moment that Kemp was signing the law with his all-white posse, a Black female Georgia lawmaker — Rep. Park Cannon — who’d knocked on the governor’s door in the hopes of watching the bill signing was instead dragged away and arrested by state troopers, in a scene that probably had the Deep South’s racist sheriffs of yesteryear like Bull Connor or Jim Clark smiling in whatever fiery hellhole they now inhabit.

Why was Kemp’s signing of the bill a behind closed doors ceremony in the first place? Is that normal? If it is, why is it?

As Kemp’s tweet of the closed-door bill-signing ceremony was making the rounds Thursday night, I had questions about the Old South-looking scene that the governor’s office had centered in the photo. Thanks to crowd-sourcing and specifically the help of my Twitter pal Brendan McGinn (@TheSeaFarmer), I learned that the painting is called “Brickhouse Road — Callaway PLNT” (PLNT for “Plantation … subtle, right?) by Siberian-born artist Olessia Maximenko, who now resides in the area of Wilkes County in east-central Georgia.

Today, the Callaway Plantation is a 56-acre historic site where — as the Explore Georgia website cheerily notes — tourists can get “a glimpse into the by-gone era of working plantations in the agricultural South.”

I’ve seen advertising like that; it always makes my hair stand on end. Camp Auschwitz, baby.

In short, the Callaway Plantation is a monument to Georgia’s history of brutal white supremacy that unfortunately didn’t disappear when Mariah Callaway and the other enslaved people were emancipated in 1865. By the 1890s, Georgia’s white ruling class enacted a series of harsh Jim Crow laws to segregate all public facilities and block most Black people from voting. The state, for all of Atlanta’s “Too Busy To Hate” bluster, was a KKK hotbed in the 1960s’ civil rights era, and in the 1980s Georgia blazed a trail into the new era of mass incarceration and voter suppression, epitomized by Kemp and his purges of legitimate voters and other Jim Crow-inspired tactics.

In 2021, it’s tempting to call Kemp signing the bill in front of the plantation painting “ironic,” when in fact it’s all too fitting. Understanding the symbolism here helps us to understand what’s really important, that the voting law is the latest cruel iron link in an unbroken chain of white supremacy that extends all the way back to 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in North American soil. But familiarity shouldn’t deaden our sense of outrage.

I’m not at all tempted to call it “ironic.” It’s about as ironic as a kick in the face.

H/t What a Maroon

Hadley Freeman writes:

A recent YouGov survey found that 86% of women aged 18-24 in the UK have been sexually harassed. This statistic shocked me: did the other 14% not understand the question? To live in fear of harassment or assault is such a universal female experience that many of us don’t even think about it, having learned to accept it from an absurdly early age. It doesn’t break you but it shapes you, like a rock face getting battered by strong waves.

She provides ten examples from her own life.

Aged seven: my friends and I are in the park when a bush next to us trembles. A man climbs out holding his penis towards us, as if he’s offering a special on the menu. This is the first time I’ve seen a penis, and it is disgusting and terrifying, an impression it takes decades to shake.

Her point in the piece is that all women have experienced this kind of thing. Interesting to think about how that shapes their feelings about sex.

Aged 33: I am having a one-night stand and suddenly he puts his hands around my neck and squeezes. This is how it ends, I think. In some guy’s flat in Harlesden. “I can tell you like it,” he whispers in my ear. When I sneak out the next morning, a man comes up to me on the street: “I can smell your cunt,” he snarls.

…

Aged 42: I take my children to Clapham Common for Sarah Everard’s vigil. Bath-time schedules mean we miss the later arrests, so we only see the flowers, the sunset, the women, all of us knowing we are no different from Everard, only luckier.

How to explain any of this to a pair of five-year-old boys? “A woman called Sarah got hurt,” I told them beforehand. “Why?” they asked. “Because men are bigger and stronger than women, and some are bullies,” I said. The boys make signs: “I don’t like bullies” and “Be gentle” they read, and we tape them on to sticks and go to the common. One of them asks if a bully ever hurt me. Not really, I say. I was lucky. They went away, eventually.

Eventually.

If it’s not a felony, the arrest is facially unconstitutional.

H/t Rob

Voter suppression is riding high.

Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon was arrested on Thursday and charged with felony obstruction as Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp signed a controversial new voting reform bill into law.

Cannon was detained after knocking on Kemp’s door.

Kemp, a Republican, was announcing the signing of the bill over a live stream when he was interrupted by Cannon, a Democrat. Cannon’s arrest was also captured during a live stream, as the lawmaker was joined by others who came to the state Capitol in Atlanta to protest the bill.

This kind of shit is what the Voting Rights Act was meant to stop, but since the Supreme Court kneecapped it we’re going backwards.

Police said Cannon was moved to the Fulton County Jail and charged with obstruction of law enforcement, a felony, and preventing or disrupting General Assembly sessions or meetings of members, a misdemeanor.

A felony.

I wonder if the cops would have arrested her if she were white. I wonder if she would have been charged with a felony if she were white.

White guys.

Point taken.

Cohesion, we must have cohesion. All that means is that everybody has to agree about everything. Simple!

On Thursday, protests erupted over claims a teacher had shown a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad to pupils at Batley grammar school and now there are fears the row could be hijacked by extremists on both sides.

…

Outside the gates of the school, Hassan Mahmood said the protest was about educating people and raising awareness with the hope of increased community cohesion. “This is about generating that positive awareness so that there’s no sort of untoward reaction and there’s no disruption or disharmony in the community,” he said.

Mahmood explained that the issue centred on the potential impact on children, especially non-Muslims, and their knowledge of what is deemed offensive.

“The kind of message that’s going out from this school is quite dangerous for all children. You’re giving out the wrong information, you’re setting a wrong mindset, which doesn’t help community cohesion,” he said.

Shehram Farrukh, a fellow protester, said the demonstration had been about opening up a conversation. “So the thing is, if something happens, anywhere in any part of the world about the prophet Muhammad, we Muslims are very sensitive. We are not maligning anybody else, we just want to say, don’t make fun of our prophet. That’s all we want,” he said.

That’s all! It’s so simple! All they want is for everyone in the world to obey the “rule” that nobody can tease “their prophet.”

Rukhsana Khaliq and her daughter Maariha, 16, agreed the protest was warranted. Maariha went to the school but is now in sixth form elsewhere.

She said: “There’s nothing bad about the school. It’s just what he did was offensive and he didn’t know that. I feel like now that this has happened he understands.”

“There’s no way of accommodating that,” added her mother.

She feels like now the teacher has had to go into hiding with police protection, he understands. Her mother adds that there’s no way of accommodating “that.”

All everyone has to do is what believers in this one religion say is mandatory – that’s literally all. Cohere or elese.

The students at Batley Grammar have better sense than the adults outside the gates.

Death threats. The guy died 15 centuries ago, he doesn’t care what people say about him.

Originally a comment by Sastra on In a free society.

Back when New Atheism was a ‘thing,’ liberal believers and liberal atheists criticized it for being simply the flip side of religious fundamentalism. New Atheists were attacking people’s faith; New Atheists weren’t making the proper distinction between good religion and bad religion; and, worst of all, they were trying to get people to agree with them. Reasoned debate and rational persuasion on the truth and benefits of religion were lumped in with proselytizing and conversion. It was saying “I’m right and you’re wrong.” The unforgivable sin.

People have the right to be who they are.

A lot of conservative religionists were guilty of manipulative tactics and double standards when it came to attacking faith, granted. But I remember there were plenty of conservatives I’d call “liberal,” in that they played by the rules, respected the doubter, and believed, deep down, that truth mattered. “If you became convinced that Christianity wasn’t true and God didn’t exist, would you want to change your mind and become an atheist?” And in between the epistemic meltdowns, the topic-changings, the gruesome scenarios, and the flat denials of the bare possibility, there were cool voices saying “Of course. And I’d still be me. And I’d still care about the same things. And I could just be wrong about God..”

There’s being a parent (“We must protect the weak”) and then there’s being an adult (“Follow the evidence and be damned.”) I understood some of my opponents better than I understood some of my friends.

Ah yes supermarkets, those hubs of progressive enlightenment. Pronouns are on sale this week.

A Sainsbury’s supermarket in Edinburgh has introduced pronoun name badges for staff to avoid misgendering staff members.

Meaning…so that staff won’t “misgender” colleagues? Or so that everyone, including customers, will avoid doing that murderous thing? The wording is clumsily ambiguous.

Workers at the Murrayfield supermarket have been wearing tags that declare their preferred gender pronouns, such as she/her or they/them.

Managers and cis colleagues have also been adding their pronouns to their badges to show solidarity to the LGBTQ+ community.

Cis colleagues? What does that mean? Are there trans colleagues there too? People who identify as Sainsbury’s staff but don’t actually get paid?

I think somebody should start a custom of wearing badges that declare one’s favorite adjectives. Adjectives are way more interesting than pronouns. Pronouns are just the dull functional undergirding, adjectives are where the fun starts. I’ll start the betting with “intransigent.”

It comes as Asda announced a similar move to make their workers feel more inclusive by introducing pronoun badges for staff to help avoid the “distress” of misgendering colleagues.

Nonsense, the “distress” is the whole point. Bespoke pronouns are there to trap people and provide occasions for displays of righteous correctitude.