The Post reports that history is repeating itself as Bozo Trump bullies and harasses witnesses and legislators in an effort to obstruct the impeachment inquiry.

President Trump has sought to intimidate witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, attacking them as “Never Trumpers” and badgering an anonymous whistleblower. He has directed the White House to withhold documents and block testimony requested by Congress. And he has labored to publicly discredit the investigation as a “scam” overseen by “a totally compromised kangaroo court.”

All of that is attempted obstruction, and obstruction itself is an impeachable offense. Trump seems to be too stupid and too ignorant to grasp that, since he’s doing it all in public, rather than in secret as Nixon tried to do.

The centerpiece of House Democrats’ eventual impeachment charges is widely expected to be Trump’s alleged abuse of power over Ukraine. But obstruction of Congress is now all but certain to be introduced as well, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and aides, just as it was five decades ago when the House Judiciary Committee voted for articles of impeachment against then-president Richard Nixon. But Nixon resigned before the full House vote.

“It’s important to vindicate the role of Congress as an independent branch of government with substantial oversight responsibility, that if the executive branch just simply obstructs and prevents witnesses from coming forward, or prevents others from producing documents, they could effectively eviscerate congressional oversight,” said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.). “That would be very dangerous for the country.”

Democrats argue that the Trump administration’s stonewalling — including trying to stop subpoenaed witnesses from testifying and blocking the executive branch from turning over documents — creates a strong case that the president has infringed on the separation of powers and undercut lawmakers’ oversight duties as laid out in the Constitution.

From the Department of First World Problems (aka Dear Muslima aka You Think YOU Have It Bad aka We Walked 10 Miles To School In A Blizzard) – the ACLU’s star Trans Person Chase Strangio tweets:

The cost of being trans: I still get mail in my old name. Because of this, I am afraid to check my mail. Because of that, I sometimes miss bills that I need to pay. Because of that those outstanding bills have gone to collection. Because of that, my credit gets worse.

Replies are not universally sympathetic.

• I have the same surname as my violent abusive alcoholic father. I’ve never thought about using it to get out of paying my mortgage but thanks for the tip.
• No, this is a consequence of changing your name. Happens to lots of people. If you are afraid of seeing your former name, you should get some help – both practical and emotional. I hope life gets easier for you, bc no one can rely on the rest of the world changing to protect them
• The cost of being a woman – I get mail, and organisations and systems and relatives and friends, using a name I have NEVER had. How? They unilaterally decided I had changed my name when I married. I didn’t, haven’t and never will do. I still pay all my bills. Life sucks. Tough.
• Imagine losing a baby and getting mail from all the companies that latch into you once you’re pregnant. Did my best to cancel them all but still got a “your baby is now 4 months old” email. Life is painful sometimes.
• I still get mail addressed to my dead spouse. That’s a sucker punch in the gut. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be for a bereaved parent.
• I get mail addressed to my late wife. This can be upsetting. I am not afraid of it though. I open it, pay it if it’s a bill, ask them to change the name or stop sending it. Might I suggest you do the same and stop being so f***ing precious.

This is a built-in hazard with a putative Rights Campaign that is so thoroughly rooted in self-obsession. It can’t be anything else. An adult level of awareness of other people and their other minds and other views would tell you that how they see you is in effect what you are. Be a monarch or a pirate or a Nobel laureate or a movie star in your head all you like, but stop there.

People who aren’t narcissists do stop there. Narcissists try to force it on everyone, and call that “trans rights.”

The Mirror doesn’t mess around.

Racist American President Donald Trump has endorsed Boris Johnson, praised Nigel Farage and attacked Jeremy Corbyn.

The bumbling bigot waded into the British election just hours after Mr Corbyn warned that Tory trade plans would see sections of the NHS auctioned off to American companies.

The US leader, who caged children on the American border before sending them to detention camps, told Nigel Farage that he believed that Mr Johnson was “the right man for the times”.

Ok but tell us what you really think.

Earlier today, Mr Trump was told impeachment proceedings into allegations he withheld aid to Ukraine, to try and bounce them into investigating potentially politically embarrassing allegations against Jo Biden’s son, would go ahead.

So obviously Mr Trump took time to attack the Labour leader.

Guy’s gotta have a hobby, right?

A tweet:

Antivax nurse brags about deliberately infecting children with chicken pox. @qldhealthnews @QldPolice #StopAVN

I tried to find the post on the Stop Mandatory Vaccination Facebook page but gave up, but an Australian news outlets reports the story:

An apparent push by an anti-vaxxer mum from Brisbane to contaminate Halloween lollies with chicken pox then distribute them to others is being investigated by police.

Pro-vaccination charity Light for Riley has shared a screenshot of a post to the Facebook page Stop Mandatory Vaccination in which the woman claims to want to “help others with natural immunity”.

“So my beautiful son (name redacted) has the chicken pox at the moment and we’ve both decided to help others with natural immunity this Halloween!” the post reads.

The person claims to have the opening and closing of packaging “down pat”.

…

It’s unclear whether the author’s post was a joke or not.

However, Greg Hughes, who started Light for Riley to promote the importance of immunisation after his baby son Riley died of whooping cough, slammed the post.

“Have you ever seen something that instantaneously makes your skin crawl?” he said on Facebook.

He lamented the “plan to intentionally infect other people’s children unknowingly by distributing contaminated lollipops to the community” and questioned why the parent would be “excited” by their child being infected with chicken pox.

He was also concerned the woman behind the post’s social media profile contained information indicating she was a nurse at a Brisbane hospital.

When contacted by 7NEWS.com.au for comment, Queensland Health stated they had no current or former employees who shared the name of the poster.

“This is a serious issue and has been referred to police, who are investigating,” a spokesman said.

People are disappointing.

Trump’s people have to be careful not to…confuse him.

He tweeted this on Tuesday:

Why are people that I never even heard of testifying about the call. Just READ THE CALL TRANSCRIPT AND THE IMPEACHMENT HOAX IS OVER! Ukrain said NO PRESSURE.

That’s Trump shouting in public that he’s never even heard of his own NSC people.

Steve Benen at MSNBC explains:

At first blush, that didn’t make any sense: how could the president, who’s been deeply engaged on U.S. policy toward Ukraine for months, not know his own top Ukrainian expert?

Yesterday, the answer to that question came into focus, though the answer wasn’t altogether satisfying.

After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Vindman was eager to brief Donald Trump on the implications of the change in leadership in Kyiv. Politicoreported, however, on why that did not happen.

[H]e was instructed “at the last second” not to attend the debriefing, Vindman told lawmakers, because Trump’s advisers worried it might confuse the president: Trump believed at the time that Kashyap Patel, a longtime Nunes staffer who joined the White House in February and had no discernible Ukraine experience or expertise, was actually the NSC’s top Ukraine expert instead of Vindman.

Vindman testified that he was told this directly by his boss at the time, NSC senior director for European and Russian affairs Fiona Hill.

Er. The top Ukraine expert was told not to share his expertise with Trump because it might confuse him because he thought it was this other random dude who knows nothing about Ukraine.

Godalmighty.

That other person, Kashyap Patel, is an acolyte of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, and according to Vindman, Patel “misrepresented” himself to Trump in order to help guide the White House’s policy toward Ukraine.

…

The Politico report added, “Vindman also testified that he was told Patel had been circumventing normal NSC process to get negative material about Ukraine in front of the president, feeding Trump’s belief that Ukraine was brimming with corruption and had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats…. It’s still not clear what materials Patel was giving Trump, or where he was getting them.”

It’s a wonder there’s anything left standing.

When it all becomes just mindless knee-jerk formulas with absolutely no thinking involved…wtf can you do?

Jean Hatchet asked Marks & Spencer a question:

Cubicle or no cubicle. Curtain or no curtain. Open space changing or not. Men should not have access to any of these female spaces alongside women. @marksandspencer please clarify your policy on female changing rooms.

The reply was a mindless formula:

As a business, we strive to be inclusive and therefore, we allow customers the choice of which fitting room they feel comfortable to use, in respect of how they identify themselves. This is an approach other retailers and leisure facilities have also adopted.

But that’s not “inclusive.” It excludes people who don’t want to take their clothes off in the presence of the other sex. Lots of women don’t “feel comfortable to use” a fitting room with men in it, but Marks & Sparks is not allowing them the choice of a fitting room where that can’t happen.

Put down the formulas. Think.

Pliny wishes us all a happy Halloween:

Helen Saxby on Garden Court Chambers and the monstering of Allison Bailey:

Two years ago, on Tuesday October 3rd 2017, I attended a meeting in central London entitled ‘Progress and Challenges in Advancing Equality for Trans People in the UK’. It was held at Garden Court Chambers, in association with the Human Rights Lawyers Association. The meeting took place just two weeks after a well-publicised assault on a middle-aged woman in Hyde Park by a young male protester, which resulted in a conviction for assault by beating. The conflict between increasing rights for trans people and the rolling back of women’s rights was in the news. The Hyde Park Corner incident illustrated the lengths to which trans allies were prepared to go in order to prevent women talking about their rights and organising to uphold them. I attended the meeting at Garden Court fully expecting the emphasis to be on securing rights for trans people, of course, but I also expected existing law to be respected and upheld. I thought that women’s rights were human rights and that this would not be forgotten. I assumed there might be discussion as to how to square the difficult circle of trans rights versus women’s rights, but that lawyers would be the very people with the knowledge and skills to be able to do this.

But, no. Of course not. She describes the talks given in interesting and depressing detail.

There was then a Q and A which was mostly used up by requests for Bex Stinson to talk about transitioning at the bar, and for Bernard and Terry from GIRES, who were in the audience, to stand up and speak about their work. My companion that evening, Julia Long, kept her composure long enough to ask a question about the changing meaning and definition of ‘gender identity’, and Michelle Brewer answered with an assertion that ‘what gender means to the individual’ is the best way forward for trans people to explain themselves, so this is the definition needed in legislation.

Let’s go back up the page a bit to learn who Michelle Brewer is:

Next up was Michelle Brewer of Garden Court Chambers and the Trans Equality Legal Initiative (TELI). Brewer started by pronouncing that chambers is a safe space: there would be NO DEBATE about trans rights existing.

And no doubt also NO DEBATE about how you can have laws protecting “gender identity” while defining it as “what gender means to the individual” without creating a legal system designed to be chaotic.

Think about it. Trans rights exist, and there will be NO DEBATE about it; also gender identity is whatever each person says it is to that person. To sum up: people who call themselves trans have an absolute and non-debatable right to have absolute and non-debatable rights, and there is no way to define  or question who is trans and who is not. Sounds like a recipe for ruthless exploitation and bullying, doesn’t it. Well guess what.

Saxby continues:

The rights of women were never on the table. Female prisoners expected to be housed with potentially violent males, female prison officers expected to intimately search male bodies, female asylum seekers expected to be housed with males, female litigants expected to refer to their male attackers as ‘she’, female crime statistics expected to incorporate male rapists, females in general expected to take a man’s word for it rather than believing what their own experience is telling them: none of these examples apparently merit a human rights approach when they are set against the perceived rights of trans people.

In other words human rights are for trans people. Women can have ones that are left over, provided they don’t conflict with the human rights of trans people, but that’s all – women can’t have specifically women’s rights because that would be discomfiting to trans people. Trans people come first and there will be NO DEBATE about it. Cue mobs baying at Meghan Murphy if you have any doubts about the NO DEBATE stipulation.

In April 2018, in a court of law, the victim of the Hyde Park assault, Maria MacLachlan, was forced by the judge to refer to her attacker as ‘she’. This removal of a woman’s right to speak the truth as she perceived it, whilst under oath, did not merit any public disapprobation.

A woman is assaulted by a much younger (thus physically advantaged) man, and the judge forces her to call the assaulting young man “she” – in other words forces her to pretend, in court, that her attacker was a woman. The assaulter has an absolute right to be called “she” because trans rights come first; the woman he assaulted has no right to call the man who assaulted her “he” because women’s rights come far far behind.

Two years on from the ‘Advancing Trans Equality’ meeting, and this week a barrister from Garden Court Chambers became the subject of a public shaming on social media for the sin of expressing her views on gender. Allison Bailey is a founding member of the new LGB Alliance, a group which has been formed to do the job which Stonewall once did, and look after the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. A lesbian herself, Bailey has publicly voiced her support for those who are same-sex orientated, in opposition to Stonewall’s new insistence on same-gender attraction. She compounded her transgression by chairing the Woman’s Place UK meeting in Oxford on Friday October 24th. The backlash has been instant and severe, including a Twitter pile-on instigated by Owen Jones, a call to arms from Gendered Intelligence (since deleted), and subsequent complaints to her employer, which Garden Court Chambers are ‘investigating’.

Any chance one of the investigators won’t be Michelle Brewer of Garden Court Chambers and the Trans Equality Legal Initiative (TELI)? My guess is no; my guess is she’ll be all over it like a bad rash.

Apart from their association with TELI, Garden Court is also home to other trans activists and allies. Alex Sharpe is a prominent trans activist on Twitter, unafraid to use offensive slurs against women. Sharpe submitted written evidence to the Trans Inquiry in 2015, as did Claire McCann. Both pieces of written evidence ignore women’s existing sex-based rights. Despite this, Garden Court members know they can wear their trans-allyship with pride, and they are duly celebrated on social media for doing so. The same pride cannot be assumed by those standing up for women, or for same-sex attraction. On the contrary, to be seen as an ally to women is often to invite condemnation. There is little support out there for the supporters of women. A law firm, especially one which has signed up as a ‘Stonewall Diversity Champion’, can promote the rights of one group of people at the expense of another and be applauded for it, as long as the group they are overlooking is women.

Well you see it turns out that that whole feminism thing was a big mistake: women are actually the top oppressors, and need to be ground down and kept down.

Ah yes, climate change as an opportunity to rake in the bucks with your Monopoly On Water.

WINTHROP, Okanogan County — Follow the water and you’ll find the money.

That’s how it often works in the dusty rural corners of Washington, where a Wall Street-backed firm is staking an ambitious venture on the state’s water.

Crown Columbia Water Resources since 2017 has targeted the water rights of farms on tributaries of the mighty Columbia River.

This March, the company sealed a $340,000 deal for Douglas County water.

The same day, it paid $1.69 million for a farming partnership’s water in Columbia County.

And so on. Buying up water rights – the way some movers and shakers did in the Owens Valley in California back in the day, in order to divert the water from the Owens River to Los Angeles.

Piece by piece, the company’s lawyer, Mark Peterson, is constructing a portfolio to span the state, building out a plan he hopes will untangle the arcane world of water rights, and thrust it into a 21st-century free market.

Meaning, make it sellable for the highest possible price.

Some critics fear business models like Crown’s could lead to speculation or consolidation.

“We’re potentially allowing a marketplace to develop here that could be pretty destructive in the future,” said Paul Jewell, a policy director for the Washington State Association of Counties. “With a growing population and growing need for water, we’re going to be beholden to private interests with a profit motive for something that’s supposed to be a public resource.”

What could possibly go wrong?

I wrote a column for The Freethinker about being interrupted by Jehovah’s Witnesses the other day.

Barry Duke, the editor, provided fine illustrations.

Three (male, of course) sociologists of sport look at trans activism and sport:

“A biological male claiming to be a transgender woman, won the 2018 UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Los Angeles over the weekend.” That’s how the alt-right news website Breitbart greeted Rachel McKinnon’s victory last October. Since then McKinnon, a Canadian track cyclist who transitioned from male to female and competed in the women’s 33-39 sprint category, has been in a kind of limbo, never properly acclaimed as a world record holder, derided by some as a counterfeit champion, but praised by many as a trailblazer for gender fluidity. Recently, in Manchester, McKinnon successfully defended her title. Again, the response was ambivalent.

If they mean no one properly acclaimed McKinnon for his “victory” then they’re just wrong, because the trans cheering squad certainly did.

More to the point it’s interesting what they leave out of that opening paragraph – any mention of the women he competed against, and the whole notion of “fairness.”

A few days before McKinnon’s win, ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” host Piers Morgan failed to appear in his usual role amid gossip that he had been dropped from the show. He sparked a furious debate when he claimed he identified as a penguin in an on-air rant about transgenderism last month, leading to a petition that demanded that the TV host be axed. Morgan has consistently castigated, ridiculed and, according to critics, “dehumanized” trans persons, especially athletes who have transitioned from male to female (MtF) and opted to compete in women’s competitions.

Why? Just to be a shit? (Certainly highly possible in his case.) Or because there is in fact an issue of fairness?

Earlier this year, Morgan aligned himself with former tennis champion and stalwart LGBTQ+ campaigner Martina Navratilova, who spoke out against the inclusion of trans athletes in women’s sport. Support for Navratilova, herself a lesbian, seemed to indicate that there is a large swathe of people who are out of sympathy with transgender athletes. But, if anything, it disguised the depth and intensity of hatred of trans people.

Ok well that makes it clear that they’re just not going to be fair at all. Just a coincidence that they’re all men, I’m sure. It’s not a matter of being “out of sympathy with transgender athletes”; it’s about thinking that male transgender athletes should not compete against women, for the simple reason that they have a large unfair advantage. McKinnon is a crap athlete when he competes against men. So is Laurel Hubbard, so are the Connecticut runners. They all lose against men. That matters, and it’s not reducible to being in or out of sympathy with transgender athletes.

Transgender people are met with the same level of hostility ethnic minorities faced in the 1960s, the same resentment to women’s progress with the Equal Pay Act, and the hatred of gays in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic was rampant.

No they’re not, actually; it’s not the same but different.

While it’s unlikely that all sport would readily accept self-identifying MtF athletes, many other areas of society have made accommodations. Education, occupational sectors, the military and the criminal justice system are among those that have changed to meet the challenge of gender fluidity. Sport is less inviting, primarily because it remains binary. Objectors to the presence of MtF trans athletes in women’s sport contend that at least some of the physical advantages of those who have gone through male puberty are maintained after transitioning. As a female participant from Bristol, stated: “Transwomen will always have the competitive edge as men are just stronger than women.”

Female athletes, in particular, suspect an MtF domination and the effective exclusion of athletes who are natal women. The premise of the argument is questionable, not least because scientists disagree over the effects of testosterone over periods of time.

And yet…McKinnon and Hubbard and Miller and Yearwood all lost when they competed with males and won when they competed with females. Is that just a coincidence?

Whatever physical and social scientists say, opinion on trans persons remains divided. It is as if hostility is justified or rationalized when a seemingly logical excuse is found to exclude or, at best, make trans athletes unwelcome. “Women need safe spaces from people with the advantages of physique that men have,” argued a 40-year-old woman from London, suggesting trans persons were a dangerous presence.

Yet there are calmer voices. Consider the view of a 20-year-old woman from Adelaide: “There are so few transgender athletes in women’s sport, and very few dominating their sports, that their presence won’t disrupt women’s sport as a whole.”

It’s so fucking easy for men to give away women’s opportunities while patting themselves on the back for being calmer voices.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Embrace the diversity.

It really is so lazy of Taylor isn’t it. She says she thinks it’s possible that “safe spaces and diversity can coexist” but she wants to silence the only person around who is actually doing the work of thinking and talking about how to fairly make that happen.

If you want women’s rights and trans rights to coexist, you have to let both sides have a say.

Let’s flash back to the year 2005 for a moment. (Picture it: Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” on the radio; Harry Potter 4 at the movieplex; Grey’s Anatomy on the teevee… It wasn’t that long ago, is what I’m saying.)

That was the year the UK introduced the Gender Recognition Act, to enshrine trans rights in UK law. What’s absolutely wild is that the language of the Act and the language of the trans rights advocates who backed it is virtually indistinguishable from the language of most people who’d be considered dangerous TERFs today. Trans advocates openly acknowledged that there was a conflict between women’s rights and trans rights and that a compromise had to be made, which involved strict conditions on which males could be considered legally women and even then it allowed for strict sex-segregation where it was deemed reasonable to protect women’s rights.

So what the hell happened between then and now? Hell, they’re still making new episodes of Grey’s Anatomy! That’s how not long ago all that was. How is it that opinions that were considered the height of enlightened progressiveness when Grey’s Anatomy was in its first season have been likened to neo-Nazism by now?

I can tell you one thing that happened: just over a year after 2005 ended a little website was launched: http://www.tumblr.com.

I think the rise of social media played a big part in this madness.

Vindman says he tried to make the transcript more truthful.

The National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert told House impeachment investigators on Tuesday that he tried to make changes to the White House’s rough transcript of the July phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President, including that Trump mentioned tapes of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified that one example of his attempts to change the transcript was to include Trump telling Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky there were tapes of Biden, which The New York Times reported occurred where there’s an ellipsis in the transcript that was released. The change was not made. The assertion that some portion of the conversation was replaced by an ellipsis contradicts the White House’s statement in September that the ellipses in the transcript did not represent missing words or phrases. It also contradicts the President who has insisted the transcript the White House released was an exact depiction of the call, even though the memo itself describes it as rough.

Uh huh. I remember those ellipses, and wondering what they were hiding, and noting that the White House said “Oh nothing, just coughs and things.”

Vindman also said that he would have edited the transcript to specifically show that Zelensky mentioned Burisma — the company that hired Hunter Biden — rather than just “the company,” according to sources.

“He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue,” the rough transcript cites Zelensky as saying.

Vindman’s testimony that some specific details were left out of the rough transcript adds further insight about how the White House handled the call and Democrats’ concerns that the Trump administration engaged in a coverup.

No I’m sure they stashed the real transcript in the super-secret computer just because they didn’t want their colleagues eating it when they weren’t looking.

Trump says he is too so smart enough to try to force Ukraine to investigate a political rival of his in exchange for military support. He’s totally that smart.

Last week, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal launched a novel defense of Trump, who Democratic lawmakers allege—as Capitol Hill testimony from senior administration officials suggests—attempted to force the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a top political rival of Trump’s, in exchange for military aid that was being held up. The newspaper’s esteemed board argued that any talk of impeaching Trump is silly, in large part, because this president is likely too bumbling to execute that kind of scandalous quid pro quo.

“Intriguingly, Mr. [Bill] Taylor says in his statement that many people in the administration opposed the [Rudy] Giuliani effort, including some in senior positions at the White House,” the editorial board wrote. “This matters because it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it.”

What?? But he’s a genius! It says so right here!

Trump, a routine morning reader and skimmer of several newspapers’ print editions, saw this editorial—which was obviously meant to defend him—last week. And the president promptly began complaining about it to some of those close to him.

“[The president] mentioned he had seen it and then he started saying things like, ‘What are they talking about, if I wanted to do quid pro quo, I would’ve done the damn quid pro quo,’ and… then defended his intelligence and then talked about how ‘perfect’ the call [with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] was,” said a source familiar with Trump’s reaction to the Journal editorial. Another person familiar with the president’s comments on the matter corroborated the account.

The public “transcript” doesn’t show a “perfect” conversation, but in any case the “transcript” was doctored. Some of what he said was removed.

Trump has long been highly sensitive to any jabs, real or perceived, at his level of intelligence or competence. In July, for instance, he tweeted that he is “smart,” a “true Stable Genius!” and also “so great looking.”

Senior officials working in Trump’s West Wing are also often tasked with defending the president’s alleged brain power.

But it doesn’t work like that. They can say it all they like, but we can still watch him when he says things, so we can see how absent his brain power is.

I remember posting articles about golden rice when B&W was brand new; that was a long time ago.

It’s still being held back because of GMO-panic.

Stifling international regulations have been blamed for delaying the approval of a food that could have helped save millions of lives this century. The claim is made in a new investigation of the controversy surrounding the development of Golden Rice by a team of international scientists.

Golden Rice is a form of normal white rice that has been genetically modified to provide vitamin A to counter blindness and other diseases in children in the developing world. It was developed two decades ago but is still struggling to gain approval in most nations.

“Golden Rice has not been made available to those for whom it was intended in the 20 years since it was created,” states the science writer Ed Regis. “Had it been allowed to grow in these nations, millions of lives would not have been lost to malnutrition, and millions of children would not have gone blind.”

Vitamin A is abundant in rich countries but in developing ones it’s not.

Lack of it is believed to be responsible for killing more children than HIV, tuberculosis or malaria – around 2,000 deaths a day. On a global scale, about a third of children under five suffer from the condition which can also lead to blindness.

As a solution to this crisis, Peter Beyer, professor of cell biology at Freiburg University in Germany, and Ingo Potrykus of the Institute of Plant Sciences in Switzerland, turned to the new technology of genetic manipulation in the late 20th century. They inserted genes for a chemical known as beta-carotene into the DNA of normal rice. In this way, they modified the rice genes so that the plants started to make beta-carotene, a rich orange-coloured pigment that is also a key precursor chemical used by the body to make vitamin A.

“In Bangladesh, China, India and elsewhere in Asia, many children subsist on a few bowls of rice a day and almost nothing else. For them, a daily supply of Golden Rice could now bring the gift of life and sight,” states Regis in his book, Golden Rice, which is published this month.

But it hasn’t happened, partly because of groups like Greenpeace that think GMO food is Of The Devil and more because of…

The real problem has rested with an international treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an agreement which aims to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms, and which came into force in 2003.

The Cartagena Protocol contains a highly controversial clause known as Principle 15 or, more commonly, the precautionary principle. This states that if a product of modern biotechnology poses a possible risk to human health or the environment, measures should be taken to restrict or prevent its introduction. The doctrine, in the case of Golden Rice, was interpreted as “guilty until proven innocent”, says Regis, an attitude entirely out of kilter with the potential of the crop to save millions of lives and halt blindness.

Precaution is good but you have to look at the risks in both directions – the new thing has these risks and not adopting the new thing has these risks. Millions of children going blind or dying ought to be in the scales.

Now there’s a compelling argument. WIRED Science:

Some critics claim transgender athletes are ruining competition for cis women and girls, but they forget: Sports—and life—have never been fair.

Ah. Very true. Therefore let’s make sports – and life – even more unfair, especially for girls and women.

They lead with a photo of this glorious project:

See, bitches? Unfair! Life and sports are already unfair! Sucks to be you.

Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won two gold medals at the Pacific Games, and college senior CeCé Telfer became the NCAA Division II national champion in the 400-meter run. Another senior, June Eastwood, has been instrumental to her cross-country team’s success. At the high school level, Terry Miller won the girls’ 200-meter dash at Connecticut’s state open championship track meet.

Funny how those are all trans women, aka men. Funny how the paragraph starts with “transgender athletes” but actually cites only male transgender athletes, the ones who have a massive physical advantage over the female athletes they compete against. Funny how the article sneaks that in there in such a dishonest way.

These recent performances are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort.

They’re not, actually, because they all involve cheating. Remember Lance Armstrong? What he did is not considered inherently praiseworthy or a shining example of what humans can accomplish with training and effort. These recent performances are sleazy examples of what men can accomplish by cheating women.

But as more transgender athletes rise to the top of their fields, some vocal opponents are also expressing outrage at what they see as transgender athletes ruining sports for cisgendered girls and women.

More sneaking – not transgender athletes but male transgender athletes. Males who claim to identify as female and then compete against females.

But is that really unfair? What do we mean by “fair” anyway? Let’s ask an expert.

“Fair is a very subjective word,” says Joanna Harper, a transgender woman, distance runner, and researcher who served on the IOC committee that developed that organization’s current rules. It boils down to whom you’re trying to be fair to, Harper says. “To billions of typical women who cannot compete with men at high levels of sport?” Or “a very repressed minority in transgender people who only want to enjoy the same things that everybody else does, including participation in sports?”

That is, including participation in sports for men competing against women. None of this is about women who identify as men competing against men, because that wouldn’t take anything away from men.

For all the hand-wringing about transgender women ruining women’s sport, so far there’s little evidence of that happening. Although CeCé Telfer and June Eastwood garnered attention for their outstanding performances on women’s collegiate running teams, they are hardly the only transgender athletes in the NCAA.

So are there lots of men who identify as women who didn’t trample all over the women the way Telfer and Eastwood and Miller and Hubbard and McKinnon have? Not that we’re told.

The solution to this problem is to talk in generalities and then run swiftly away.

Where to draw the line between inclusiveness for transgender athletes and fairness for cis ones is an ethical question that ultimately requires value judgements that can only be informed, not decided, by science. Even basic notions of a level playing field aren’t easy to codify. Which means that at some point the question of who is a woman becomes a cultural inquiry: How athletically outstanding can a girl or woman be before we no longer see her as female?

That’s…not the question at all.