Wow.
Wildfire smoke has drifted all the way to Pennsylvania.
Mind you, there’s a big difference between wildfire smoke and dense wildfire smoke. If the smoke here looked like the smoke over Pennsylvania I’d be out taking a two hour walk after all this being locked up inside.
Interesting marketing ploy.
People are weird.
Updating to add the whole message.
Alison Flood in the Guardian reviews Rowling’s new novel. (Oh does she have a new novel? I hadn’t heard.)
Before it had even come out, criticism of JK Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith thriller, Troubled Blood, was already wall-to-wall, after an early review in the Telegraph claimed that its “moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”.
In other words people who hadn’t read it were already tearing it to shreds because of a highly dishonest remark in the Telegraph.
As the pair look into the disappearance – and this is a spoiler – one of the avenues they investigate is the possibility Margot was murdered by Dennis Creed, a now-imprisoned and notorious serial killer who once tricked some of his female victims into his van by wearing a wig and a woman’s coat to appear unthreatening. This has now been cited across the internet as further proof of Rowling’s transphobia, after her earlier essay, tweets and decision to return a human rights award after the organisation behind it denounced her views. Amazon has now suspended reviews of the book due to “unusual reviewing activity”, while the hashtag #RIPJKRowling trends on Twitter.
The Telegraph review chose to go big on Creed, describing him as “a transvestite serial killer”, and asking “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues” would make of it. But Creed is just one of many suspects – and without giving too much away, he is not the main villain, nor is he portrayed as trans or even called a “transvestite” by Rowling.
…
Creed is described as a “genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from [his landlady] Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth”.
Perhaps some will still consider this depiction transphobic, given Rowling’s rightly widely criticised views on trans people.
Notice that nervous “rightly.” Nervous, placating, and wrong. Anyone would think Rowling wanted trans people punished or ostracized or otherwise harmed, but she doesn’t – basically she just wants them to stop doing that to women.
It is, at best, an utterly tone-deaf decision to include an evil man who cross-dresses after months of pain among trans people and their allies.
Pain shmain. It’s worked-up pain, manufactured pain, hyperbolic pain, deranged furious socially constructed and encouraged pseudo-pain.
And we should also be wary of how one review has been reproduced without question by countless newspapers and websites, by journalists who have shown no indication of having read the book themselves.
And by cowards who think they have to say Rowling was “rightly criticised” for not echoing every word of the Trans Catechism.
H/t Arnaud
In the more long-term bad news…
The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade, according to a devastating new report from the UN on the state of nature.
From tackling pollution to protecting coral reefs, the international community did not fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets agreed in Japan in 2010 to slow the loss of the natural world. It is the second consecutive decade that governments have failed to meet targets.
Well let’s look forward to 2030. Or 2050. Or maybe 2100.
The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, published before a key UN summit on the issue later this month, found that despite progress in some areas, natural habitats have continued to disappear, vast numbers of species remain threatened by extinction from human activities, and $500bn (£388bn) of environmentally damaging government subsidies have not been eliminated.
Meanwhile the left is throwing all its energy behind…forcing all women to take orders from their trans “sisters.”
The report is the third in a week to highlight the devastating state of the planet. The WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s Living Planet Report 2020 said global wildlife populations were in freefall, plunging by two-thirds, because of human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture. On Monday, the RSPB said the UK had failed to reach 17 of the Aichi targets and that the gap between rhetoric and reality had resulted in a “lost decade for nature”.
…
A leading target to halve the loss of natural habitats, including forests, has not been met. While global deforestation rates have decreased by about a third in the past five years compared with pre-2010 levels, the degradation and fragmentation of biodiversity-rich ecosystems in the tropics remains high. Wilderness areas and wetlands have continued to disappear and freshwater ecosystems remain critically threatened.
And fires are raging.
Nick Cohen tells us that in addition to being crappy the latest attack on Rowling is wrong on the facts. He knows this because he’s actually read the novel they’re screaming about, because he has a review copy. It hasn’t even been released yet.
The hideous hashtag #RIPJKRowling was trending as trolls and their easily manipulated followers poured out their hatred. Rowling was a rat and a racist. She should ‘Sit Down and Shut the Fuck Up For The Rest of Time You Transphobic Bitch’. She wants trans people ‘to die’.
The ‘evidence’ that provoked the malice was so flimsy, even Twitter should have been embarrassed to publish it. Pink News, which dominates the LGBTQ+ outrage market, gave the case for the prosecution. According to the first review, ‘JK Rowling’s latest book is about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims’, it announced.
It is about nothing of the sort, I thought. And I could say that with authority because I had just finished a review copy of Troubled Blood, the fifth novel in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, as research for a long piece on her politics and art I’m working on for the Critic. No honest person who takes the trouble to read it can see the novel as transphobic. But then honest people are hard to find in a culture war.
But a reviewer for the Telegraph has read it and reviewed it, and that’s where the lunatic bullies are getting their fact-free facts.
The meat of the book, he declared is ‘the investigation into a cold case: the disappearance of GP Margot Bamborough in 1974, thought to have been a victim of Dennis Creed, a transvestite serial killer. One wonders what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress’.
That slippery ‘seems’ should have put readers on their guard. The moral of the book is not ‘never trust a man in a dress’. Transvestism barely features. When it does, nothing is made of the fact that the killer wears a wig and a woman’s coat (not a dress) as a disguise when approaching one of his victims. Maybe this tiny detail is enough for the wilfully ignorant to damn Rowling as a ‘witch’ – I’m not making it up, for this is how Everton goalkeeper turned Twitter celebrity Neville Southall described her. But no one else should be satisfied.
The guy in a wig and a “woman’s coat” is on one page of a 900 page novel; it’s a minor detail. It’s as if Kitty Scherbatsky put on a pair of man’s gloves on one page of Anna Karenina and some ingenious literary critic decided that means Tolstoy was trans and the whole novel is about being trans.
In contrast to her opposition to Scottish nationalism, which to my mind makes a clumsy appearance in the novel, Rowling makes no attempt to nudge the reader towards today’s arguments about women-only spaces and the safeguards or lack of them governing the clinics that offer hormone suppressing drugs or surgery. Nothing flows from Creed’s disguise. It leads to no wider conclusions.
In one respect, however, her critics are right to scream ‘witch’. Rowling’s writing is becoming ever-more feminist; ever-more conscious of women’s physical and emotional abuse. The novel’s descriptions of how men condescend to Robin Ellacott, how they send her lewd pictures, grab her, talk over her, and refuse to accept her opinions because they are from a woman form one of the novels most convincing themes.
In this sense, if nothing else, Rowling’s latest work honestly mirrors her online life. She knows, as her characters know, that women who speak out of turn find themselves alone in a free-fire zone.
Well said, Nick.
Social media ACLU continues to make a fool of itself, no doubt because it lets Chase Strangio set policy on trans issues.
Trans women are murdered by men, usually in a context of “sex work.” Men are not inspired by feminists to commit violence against women who identify as men; that’s not how any of this works. Male violence is not the fault of women.
Also…quite a few women have been murdered in the US this year too. What about them?
Also, nice job of amplifying the bullying of Rowling yet again.
Also, there’s no such thing as “transmisogyny.” Misogyny is hatred of women, end of story. Men don’t get to appropriate the term to describe attitudes to them. Jessica Klug doesn’t get to complain of “transracism” and Caitlyn Jenner doesn’t get to complain of “transmisogyny.”
It’s clear why they want to do it: it means they get to square the oppression. Multiply misogyny by hostility to men who wear dresses and boom you have a much bigger number than mere Karens get to have. Neener neener we are too so more oppressed than you.
Within weeks – i.e. before the election. Definitely before the election.
Donald Trump has been on Fox & Friends this morning. Among the tidbits are that he said he had read Bob Woodward’s book Rage last night, and that it was “boring”. The book runs to some 400 pages.
Trump can barely read at all. People who can barely read read very slowly. They read one word at a time instead of a sentence or phrase at a time; it’s slow work. Being barely able to read rules out being able to skim effectively.
(By the way whatever happened to “speed reading”? Remember that? Claims of being able to read an entire page at a glance and thus read an average-length book in an hour? It never made any sense to me and still doesn’t.)
The president has promised there will be a coronavirus vaccine within “weeks”. “I’m not doing it for political reasons. I want the vaccine fast” he said.
News flash, pumpkin head: we all want the vaccine fast. You want it before the election.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, has said he is cautiously optimistic a vaccine will be approved by the end of the year or early next year. But Fauci has also emphasized the vaccine will likely not be widely distributed until well into 2021.
End of the year is too late. Has to be before the election. There will be announcements that a vaccine has been perfected before the election. Caputo and Alexander will issue them even if no one else will.
Why is this man laughing…
That’s Trump in California yesterday meeting with Gavin Newsom and other officials.
He’s not wearing a mask.
He’s not social distancing.
He’s sitting right next to them, breathing on them, laughing in their faces, and he’s not wearing a mask.
This is an annoying thing that Twitter does.
Who wrote that? Is there a person called Twitter who wrote it? Of course not, so who did? It looks like a diktat from god. That matters because it’s not neutral fact-reporting, it’s tendentious. The word “cisgender” is new jargon which is meaningless and redundant unless you buy into the nonsensical novel dogma that sex is not a matter of what body you have but of “identity.” Without that dogma there is no need for any “cisgender” in front of “man” or “woman” and it doesn’t mean anything when it is there. We might as well start talking about cis daffodils and cis squirrels and cis oak trees. A “cisgender male serial killer” is just a male serial killer. Male serial killers have featured in quite a few movies over the decades, and nobody ever felt any need to clarify that they were cis male serial killers as opposed to…um…that other kind, whatever that might be.
And who are all these reviewers who are saying what Twitter says they are saying? List them, link to them, don’t just anonymously announce them without any substantiation.
And what exactly is “an anti-trans plotline”?
And two uses of the word “community” in one sentence is overkill. The “cis” community says fuck off.
He did say it. And then laughed stupidly.
He also says all this shit, which is just…
There really aren’t.
President Dodo went to California and said the scientists are wrong about climate change – as he knows from his years of rigorous research on the subject.
“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump said at a Monday briefing with officials in McClellan Park, California, with a laugh.
Haha, yes, it’s hilarious.
He told Wade Crowfoot, secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency: “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.”
Also the pandemic will go away, like a miracle. You just watch.
Also what is “it”? Much of the northern hemisphere will start getting cooler over the next few weeks, yes, because that’s the time of year it is. If “it” means the planet, one does wonder how he knows.
(Not really. He’s just bullshitting, as always.)
Trump was also directly confronted by the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who has been adamant about climate change’s role in the wildfires, bluntly telling the President: “Climate change is real.”
“We obviously feel very strongly the hots are getting hotter,” Newsom said. “The dries are getting drier. When we’re having heat domes, the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”
And who is Trump to bounce up and deny that, on the basis of absolutely nothing but his own contempt for people and knowledge and research and everything else that isn’t Donald Dodo?
News outlets need to stop adopting the language of trans ideology.
“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling was hit Monday with renewed criticism calling her views transphobic as she releases her latest book, a mystery novel about a serial killer who dresses as a woman to prey on his victims.
The novel, “Troubled Blood,” is to be published Tuesday as the fifth installment in the “Cormoran Strike” detective series, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Strike’s latest mystery revolves around a cisgender man who dresses as a woman, according to a review from The Telegraph.
There’s no such thing as “cisgender.” Referring to “a cisgender man” makes about as much sense as referring to “a man with a head.”
I also don’t much like that “Rowling was hit Monday” in the opening sentence; looks too much like wishful fantasy.
The theme is being called out by those who have highlighted Rowling’s history of sharing transphobic opinions online
Aaaaand by the third paragraph we’ve tipped our hand: Rowling is assumed guilty and the people bullying her are assumed stunning and brave.
Some tweeted that although Rowling is still alive, her career is most likely dead, while others imagined Rowling gone so they could enjoy the “Harry Potter” series without associating the novels and films with her.
“in memory of jk rowling,” one user tweeted. “she ain’t dead, but she killed her own career by proudly hating trans people & no one would really miss her that much anyway #ripjkrowling”
All this is fine, apparently.
Actress Cynthia Nixon spoke about the impact of Rowling’s comments on her transgender son, Samuel, in an interview with The Independent posted Monday. Nixon said the author’s comments were “really painful” for her 23-year-old, who has loved the “Harry Potter” series throughout his childhood.
So Cynthia Nixon is encouraging her offspring to live a delusion, and also expects the world to do the same. Not a very reasonable approach.
The rest of the piece is all the usual guff. It’s pathetic.
Yes sure, this is fine.
But also –
Bitch Media calls itself “A Feminist Response to Pop Culture.” Nope, not feminist.
Today in disgusting: #RIPJKRowling is what they call “trending” on Twitter. That’s nice; that’s progressive; that’s humane; that’s decent.
I’m pretty sure Twitter could tweak something so that it would no longer be “trending” but Twitter of course has chosen not to do that, instead adding a smirky “no JKRowling is not dead.” No, she’s just being bullied and abused on social media for not agreeing that men who say they are women are literally women.
Perhaps this is what set it off:
Meanwhile –
The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus accused career government scientists on Sunday of “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and warned that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.
Michael Caputo, 58, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump.
That is astounding. It’s Nazi-level manipulation and lying and provocation.
This is the guy who’s been trying to force the CDC people to change their reports to match Trump’s stupid lies.
“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Mr. Caputo, a Trump loyalist installed by the White House in April, told followers in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page.
Very sane, very normal.
Mr. Caputo delivered his broadside against scientists, the media and Democrats after a spate of news reports over the weekend that detailed his team’s systematic interference in the C.D.C.’s official reports on the pandemic and other disease outbreaks. Former and current C.D.C. officials described to Politico, The New York Times and other outlets how Mr. Caputo and a top aide routinely demanded the agency revise, delay and even scuttle the C.D.C.’s core public health updates, called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, that they believed undercut Mr. Trump’s message that the pandemic is under control.
The PR guy is fiddling the professional medical reports by the scientists to help his boss the warped murderous dictator. He’s apparently also lost his marbles.
Despite the criticism of his team’s interference with C.D.C., Mr. Caputo said he expected to remain in his post because Mr. Trump supported him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I swear to God, as God is my witness, I am not stopping.”
He’s a hero! He’s Scarlett O’Hara!
His Facebook presentation comes as Mr. Trump has increasingly singled out federal government scientists as targets, complaining without evidence that they were deliberately trying to subvert his administration’s efforts to fight the pandemic for their own political reasons.
The government scientists are trying to do their jobs despite Trump’s efforts to contradict and silence them for his own political reasons.
Mr. Caputo echoed those sentiments, saying scientists “deep in the bowels of the C.D.C. have given up science and become political animals.”
No dude. That’s projection.
Then he babbled about a Trump fan who was killed in Portland, and said it was “a drill.”
The man suspected of the shooting, Michael Forest Reinoehl, was later shot dead by officers from a federally led fugitive task force in Washington State. He “went down fighting,” Mr. Caputo said. “Why? Because he couldn’t say what he had inside him.” He then spoke of “squads being trained all over this country” — a conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence.
No, no, it’s true, I’ve got 700 of them right here next to me.
Mr. Caputo continued his social media effort after the Facebook event, retweeting a conspiratorial post that hinted with no evidence that armed camps were being established in Washington, D.C.: “Occupants don’t look like vagrants. Looks like forward basing for militant street ops,” J. Michael Waller, a conservative provocateur, posted.
Nah, the forward basing for militant street ops is all at the Marriott.
Mr. Caputo has no background in health care. He worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign for a time but was passed over for a job early in the administration. He remained friendly with Dan Scavino, who oversees the White House’s social media and is among the few of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign aides still on the administration’s staff. Mr. Scavino played a role in reconnecting Mr. Trump and Mr. Caputo. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies heralded Mr. Caputo’s appointment at Health and Human Services, describing him as both media savvy and intensely loyal to the president.
They might as well have given the job to a circus clown.
[Caputo] accused officials at the C.D.C. and other government agencies — including the Department of Health and Human Services — of deliberately subverting the president’s efforts to contain the pandemic. The C.D.C., he said, was riddled with anti-Trump researchers who “walk around like they are monks” and “holy men” but engage in “rotten science.”
Which he knows how? Given the fact that he’s a PR guy not a scientist?
But he singled out Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the agency, for praise. He “is one of my closest friends in Washington,” he said. “He’s such a good man.”
Former and current agency officials have asserted that Dr. Redfield has allowed so much political interference with the agency’s work that some career scientists are on the verge of resigning.
Right; as he said, such a good man.
Mr. Caputo’s scientific adviser, Dr. Paul Alexander, was heavily involved in the effort to reshape the C.D.C.’s weekly reports on morbidity and mortality. The reports are widely read by the nation’s health professionals, who depend upon them for medical guidance.
Mr. Caputo acknowledged in a brief interview this weekend that it was unusual for a public affairs officer to hire his own scientific adviser. But he described Dr. Alexander, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Canada, as “a genius” to his Facebook audience, saying the public criticism had only served to make his position “permanent” as a watchdog over politically motivated scientists.
“To allow people to die so that you can replace the president is a grievous venial sin, venial sin,” he said. “And these people are all going to hell.”
Meanwhile Trump continues to do things that cause thousands of people to die.
The abuse continues.
This is not normal. It doesn’t happen in other intra-left disagreements. Why is this so different? I can only conclude that it’s because misogyny is the most deeply rooted hatred of all. We’re watching lefty men fall all over themselves in their ecstatic eagerness to rip lefty women to pieces because these lefty women refuse to agree that men – men – magically turn into women by saying they are women. If we did agree with that claim we would instantly lose the right and the ability to resist male hatred of women and its attendant injustices, because the men wouldn’t be men any more, they would be women. Our words would fall to the floor, useless.
Men like Adrian Harrop and Owen Jones are already making it ever more difficult for women to resist male hatred of women and its attendant injustices, and if we gave in it would be game over.
Not going to happen.
Ooh a rally in Vancouver. Too bad they too are having a hazardous air day, but when it’s for a good cause…
Join A Celebration of Freedoms and Rights, No New Normal, The Line, Hugs Over Masks, CLEAR, Liberty Talk Canada and Unify the People in this event for all of BC to attend!!!!!
This is where we put our feet down and declare “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.”
It’s a rally for DO NOTHING ABOUT THE PANDEMIC FREEDOM FREEDOM.
ANY topic you OPPOSE such as MANDATORY masks / vaccines, contact tracing, 5G, communism, social distancing, media lies, child trafficking, lockdown measures, curfews, etc.
Any “topic” I oppose? Anything at all? What if I oppose stupid people who refuse to follow medical guidance during a pandemic? What if I oppose conservatism? What if I oppose anti-vaxxers?
ANY topic you DEMAND such as informed consent, my body my choice, privacy rights, exposing child traffickers, democracy, freedoms and rights etc.
I DEMAND my body my choice so my body gets to live in your house and you have to go live somewhere else.
We will also be supporting Berlin’s efforts, Montréal’s efforts, Dublin’s efforts, the citizens of Melbourne as well as ANY other country where draconian lockdown measures are being implemented.
Yayyyyyy! Sounds like a partay!
Sure enough.
There are eleven thousand comments on Amy Hamm’s public Facebook post about the Rowling billboard. One particularly deep thinker says it’s about white women (wot no Karen?):
Imagine having this amount of money to actually help people in need and instead using it on a billboard to promote a hateful person. White women findings ways to make feminism exclusive to them and theirs is a tale as old as time though.
Yup yup yup that’s it, it’s nothing to do with men trying to take over being women from women, it’s all about white women taking over everything from everyone, the way we always have.
Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano wrote a book about the Paradise Fire. They tell us some things:
Prior to European settlement in the West, fire flowed freely, sparked by lightning or intentionally by Native Americans to encourage the growth of favored plants or clear areas for easier hunting. As much as 4.5m acres of California’s 105m acres might burn every year. These low-intensity fires did not kill large trees, and some plants even came to depend on fire to regenerate themselves. A shrub called chamise appears to encourage fire by releasing combustible gases in the presence of flames.
The shift to a different approach occurred after several instances in which wildfires became appalling urban fires. In October 1871, railway workers sparked a brush fire in northern Wisconsin, which swept into the city of Peshtigo and killed 1,500 people there and elsewhere across a gargantuan footprint of 1.2 million acres. And in the great fires of 1910, fires burning across several Western states killed hundreds and razed a number of towns. People escaped by train as the fires virtually licked at their heels.
So the US decided no more out of control fires.
Fire activity decreased, it is true, but with scouring flames removed from the environment, forests grew far denser and brushier than they had been before. In one Arizona forest, 20 trees per acre became 800 trees per acre. These forests can and will burn more severely. In addition the climate crisis is rendering vegetation ever drier, and by 2050 up to three times more acreage in Western forests will burn as a result of global warming. Meanwhile 60m homes can now be found in or close to high-risk areas where wildfires have previously burned.
Cue urban fires. The fire that obliterated Paradise on the morning of November 8, 2018 was sparked in a rural river canyon several miles to the east of town. As we describe in our new book, Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy, it approached the community at speeds previously thought impossible, chewing through almost 400 American football fields’ worth of vegetation per minute. It hit like a hurricane. Strikingly, many of the hundreds of thousands of trees in the town were spared – it was the homes that became matches setting fire to the next. The fire was so quick, so hot, that people died seeking shelter under their cars, in the driveways of their homes while holding a hose, or huddled in their bathtub.
They go on to say it could happen anywhere, including in big cities.
