Marina Hyde on Andrew Windsor’s claim to be shocked, shocked by the news about Jeffrey Epstein:

Or as Buckingham Palace finally put it in a statement denying any impropriety on behalf of the prince: “The Duke of York has been appalled by the recent reports of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes.”

I’m slightly sorry for the royal flunkies who had to issue this line, given that most of us are suffering eyeball strain from all the rolling we’re doing. Even so, I do feel we need further clarification on what precisely the Duke is appalled by. Is it just the “recent reports”? Because if we’re meant to believe that Prince Andrew is appalled by ALL of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein – both the ones alleged and the ones he served actual jail time for – then allow me to treat this statement with all the dignity it deserves. To wit: BULL. SHIT. Bullshit Prince Andrew didn’t know what sort of guy his friend was when he was snapped walking with the Tier 1 sex offender, after he got out of jail, in a photo the New York Post headlined “PRINCE & PERV”. Bullshit he didn’t know why his close friend WENT TO PRISON FOR A YEAR, but kept hanging out with him anyway. Bullshit if, as Brockman recounts, he lay on his back in that guy’s house, with a Russian attending to his feet, talking over her head to men of the world about the nocturnal licence afforded to minor European royals, and he didn’t know roughly what he was swimming in. Bullshit. I get we have to pay for Andrew’s lifetime of jollies; but we don’t have to have our intelligence insulted by him.

Andrew was complaining because Prince Albert of Monaco got to go out in the evenings and nobody cares but if Andrew does he’s in big trouble. Wah. Sounds like Trump, doesn’t he.

The plain fact is that Andrew continued to be friends with Epstein even after he pleaded guilty to procuring an underage girl for prostitution. I guess it was the old she-said, he-said thing. Or as the then-Palm Beach police chief put it: “This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ – and the shes all basically told the same story.” Obviously, Epstein got away lightly with his grotesque plea deal, because 50-something:1 isn’t the ratio you need. Even last year, they still needed 60 accusers to stop Bill Cosby. Donald Trump’s 17:1 she-he ratio is nowhere near enough to keep him from the highest office on the planet.

As for where we go from here, perhaps a multimillion-pound royal wedding would indeed be helpful. It should be quite the opposite. Where Princess Anne pointedly didn’t, Prince Andrew demanded all the titles and trappings for his two daughters – security details, civil list money, full royal weddings – and was furious when denied some of them. Yet Beatrice and Eugenie still live like … well, princesses.

So instead of distracting from the miserable stories of the female attendees of various Epstein mansions, these gilded lives should throw them into even more shameful relief. They suggest the kind of man – and we’ve all met them – who has a two-tier view of the female sex. There is a world for their daughters, hopefully insulated from men like their friend Jeffrey, and then there is another world for the girls who service their friend Jeffrey.

Yet decent, humane people know there aren’t two kinds of women and girls – there are just women and girls.

But there aren’t as many decent, humane people as we would like there to be.

And so with the girls in the stories that swirl around Epstein and his circle, which includes the Duke: either broken, or yet-to-be-broken. But ultimately, breakable. They are all daughters, too, your Royal Highness. The Russian masseuse on your feet, the 17-year-old runaway on whose bare hip you have your hand in that fateful picture in London, the terrified 14-year-old who ran screaming from your great friend’s house in her underwear, who you must have read about at the time, because I did, and I didn’t even know the guy. And all the others.

Because there aren’t two kinds of women, the good and the slutty. There is only the one kind.

Back in June I did a post about a lawsuit by a trans woman against the Times.

The hearing at the Edinburgh Employment Tribunal, which began on Wednesday, could have far-reaching implications for UK’s news outlets. In addition to the standard employment law charges such as discrimination and victimisation, the case also rests on an argument that has never before been tested.

O’Donnell and her lawyer — Robin White of Old Square Chambers — allege that it wasn’t just what happened in the newsroom but also what those inside it published in the newspaper about trans people that constituted a hostile, anti-transgender place to work.

Sly. Very very sly. Bring one case and (if you win) make it so that the news media can no longer write or broadcast anything critical of trans activism or trans ideology. Wouldn’t that be awesome.

The Tribunal has ruled.

A transgender former journalist at The Times has lost an employment tribunal claim that she was the victim of discrimination and unfair dismissal.

Katherine O’Donnell had claimed that there was a “toxic environment for trans people” at the newspaper and criticised its reporting of transgender stories.

…

John Witherow, the editor of The Times, appeared as a witness at the tribunal and defended the paper’s coverage of transgender issues. He denied that there was bias or inaccuracy in its reporting.

Judge Jane Porter dismissed Ms O’Donnell’s claims of direct discrimination, harassment, victimisation and unfair dismissal after hearings that lasted a total of 19 days. In her judgment she wrote: “The tribunal does not accept the evidence of a ‘boys club’ during the claimant’s employment . . . there was a significant number of senior women in powerful positions.”

A spokeswoman for The Times said: “We are pleased this judgment dismisses all the claims made by the claimant and confirms that The Times took reasonable and appropriate decisions and did not show any anti-transgender bias towards its staff.”

I don’t think trans women should be complaining about boys’ clubs as applied to themselves.

The evil David Koch is dead but his evil will live on until planet death snuffs it out too.

While he certainly enjoyed the fruits of his labors to deregulate U.S. industry and reduce taxes on the super-wealthy like himself, he will never have to experience the consequences of his biggest achievement: putting the entire planet on the brink of crisis in the service of enriching himself and a few other fossil fuel billionaires. And we, the people and future generations who are going to live with the fallout, will never see him or the small cadre of wealthy conservatives who funded decades of climate denial face any form of justice.

Koch’s death was first reported by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer Friday morning and confirmed by his surviving brother, Charles, shortly thereafter. The two brothers were tied as the 11th richest people on the planet on the Forbes 100, with an estimated net worth of $50.5 billion each. They amassed so much wealth in part through business savvy—you likely don’t go a day without coming in contact with something made by some subsidiary of their privately owned Koch Industries conglomerate—and in part because they spent a comparative pittance of that fortune on turning our political system into a fucking nightmare. Funding astroturf groups like Americans for Prosperity and conservative politicians has led to widespread deregulation and huge tax breaks for their businesses, allowing them to take an even bigger share of the pie.

And above all it has blocked efforts to deal with global warming.

[T]he Koch brothers’ businesses from fossil fuel extraction and refining to petrochemical and fertilizer production all rely on being able to emit carbon pollution with abandon. In the 1990s, as the world moved toward an awakening on climate change and the need to address it, the Koch machine moved to block any regulations or price on carbon that would cut into their profits by funding doubt and denial. Greenpeace estimates the brothers spent $127 million from 1997 to 2017 funding 92 organizations that muddied the waters on climate change, a move that helped make international efforts to combat climate change, like the Kyoto Protocol, worthless. They funded a network of overlapping climate denial organizations to kill a 2009 bill that would have created a cap and trade system, a very business-friendly climate solution they rejected on principle.

It’s a pity they didn’t both die decades sooner.

The smoke from wildfires was bad here last summer but it didn’t actually get dark in the afternoon. Stinky and unhealthy, yes, but dark, no. São Paulo on the other hand…

In the middle of the afternoon on August 19th South America’s largest city went dark. Under a thick, black cloud at 3pm, the lights flickered on in São Paulo’s skyscrapers; on the motorways brake lights started to glow in the city’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, and many Paulistanos were worried. Social-media users posted pictures of the gloom, juxtaposing the dystopian afternoon sky with fictional apocalyptic places such as Gotham City from “Batman”, Mordor from “Lord of the Rings” and “the upside down” from “Stranger Things”.

Meteorologists scrambled to explain what was going on. But the most likely explanation, most accept, is that fires burning far away in the rainforest are to blame. Climatempo, a popular private meteorology website, reported that a cold front brought low-lying clouds which then combined with smoke to form the thick black smog.

And there’s another one.

Meanwhile in the US, middle distance runner Jonathan Eastwood will be running as ‘June’ in the women’s races. Jonathan can run 800m faster than @damekellyholmes at her peak. Looks like we have another ‘exceptional woman’ about to hit the track. Sorry women, time to move over.

More joy of sport for you.

It all makes a sick kind of sense.

Jeffrey Epstein reportedly told women and young girls that he was a modeling scout for Victoria’s Secret. The financier never worked for the lingerie retailer, or even, technically, for its parent company, L Brands. But he had a close relationship with the head of L Brands, Leslie Wexner, assuming an unusual degree of control over Wexner’s assets and personal life, according to reporting by The New York Times. Epstein seems to have exploited his proximity to Victoria’s Secret to facilitate his alleged crimes. According to Alicia Arden, a model and actress, this was Epstein’s ruse when he lured her to a Santa Monica hotel room and assaulted her in 1997. When Maria Farmer, who worked the door at Epstein’s New York mansion, asked why so many young girls were going in and out of his home, she says she was told that they were auditioning to be models for the lingerie brand.

It’s the sexism from both directions thing.

Girls and women are bombarded with messages telling them they have to be hot and gorgeous and fuckworthy, and that they’re contemptible and disgusting if they’re not.

They’re also subject to assault for being hot and gorgeous and fuckworthy as well as for not being hot and gorgeous and fuckworthy.

It totally makes sense that a prolific rapist and trafficker would use catch me-fuck me underwear modeling as a lure for the young humans caught in this stupid trap.

L Brands executives were reportedly made aware, in the mid-1990s, that Epstein was posing as a modeling recruiter for the company. Although they alerted Wexner, he seems to have taken no action. His relationship with Epstein endured, and in 1998 Wexner let Epstein take possession of his palatial mansion on East 71st Street in Manhattan where much of Epstein’s abuse is said to have taken place. Even after Wexner severed ties with Epstein, Victoria’s Secret continued to work with MC2 Model Management, an agency whose owner, Jean-Luc Brunel, has been accused of operating a sex-trafficking operation for wealthy men, Epstein among them. Models from MC2 walked in the brand’s televised fashion show as recently as 2015.

It’s all basically the same thing – an industry based on shaping female humans into fuck toys, and people connected to and raping the products of that industry.

It’s always been about the male fantasy.

Founded in 1977 by a California man named Roy Raymond, Victoria’s Secret was initially imagined as a haven for straight men, something more titillating than the mainstream department-store offerings but less salacious and fringe than sex shops. Raymond told Newsweek in 1981 that he started Victoria’s Secret after having a bad experience in the lingerie section of a department store. The offerings weren’t sexy enough, and the saleswomen seemed uncomfortable with his presence. He wanted to make a place where men could buy provocative, elaborate sexual garments for their wives or girlfriends, and he opened the first store with the help of a $40,000 loan from his relatives.

Men are weird. “Sexual garments” for god’s sake. Somebody should come up with a line of sexy oven mitts; it makes just as much sense.

To make the store more appealing to women, Raymond invented “Victoria,” an imaginary British woman whom he cast as the owner of the company. In the early days, the mail-order catalog featured letters to customers from Victoria, written in the first person. Raymond chose the name of the boutique and its titular owner from the Victorian era, and modeled the store interiors after 19th-century British brothels. It’s unclear exactly what the “secret” was meant to be: Maybe that “Victoria” had sex, or maybe just that she wore underwear.

I’ve had a few laughs over the years wondering what the secret might be. “Ooooh I have a vagina.” “Oooooh I’m naked under these naughty knickers.” “Ooooh I sit down to pee.”

When The Limited took over the brand, the new chief continued the theme. “Women get a little pip, a little perk out of,” wearing lingerie, Howard Gross told Faludi. Gross, who was the president of Victoria’s Secret from 1985 to 1991, went on to narrate what he imagined to be the inner monologue of a woman wearing Victoria’s Secret garments. “It’s like, ‘Here I am at this very serious business meeting and they really don’t know that I’m wearing a garter belt!’”

laughs hysterically

Yeah no guys that’s you, that’s not us. We’re at that very serious business meeting wishing Bill from Accounting would quit staring at our tits.

What does Victoria’s Secret think about women? It doesn’t think of them very much at all—instead, the company speculates about what men want women to be, and then sells that. The result is a bleak vision of heterosexuality, one in which desire is a one-way street running from male to female, in which all women merely want to be wanted by men, and all men want the same thing from women, namely some combination of malnourishment and silence. It’s a vision of sex in which women are not participants or collaborators or subjects with desires or agendas of their own, but something more like ornaments.

So it’s no wonder that Epstein was into it.

[W]e are kidding ourselves if we do not concede that images like those put forward by Victoria’s Secret enable sexual violence like that which Epstein is accused of. Images of women and girls as thoughtless and hypersexual have contributed to a culture of sexual abuse and impunity, a culture in which men feel entitled to treat the women they desire the way those women have always been depicted: as objects.

If we believe in the power of words and images to shape our minds and our lives, then we must also believe in the power of advertising, the power of the assumptions and messages of that advertising, to inform our behaviors. Although the Victoria’s Secret marketing strategy is not, again, a moral equivalent to the rape and abuse of women and girls, this does not mean that we must ignore the plain reality that the two things partake of the same logic: a logic in which women’s inner lives don’t matter, or in which they are at least much less important than men’s sexual gratification. We don’t know what Epstein thought of the girls he abused, but he perhaps thought of them more or less the way Victoria’s Secret assumed men did.

Since I’m writing a blog post and not a piece for the Atlantic, I don’t feel any need to point out that Victoria’s Secret’s marketing strategy is not a moral equivalent to the rape and abuse of women and girls, because duh, so I can just get on with saying both are part of the same hideous, creepy, mistaken, sinister view of women as mindless lumps attached to valuable genitalia.

The BBC celebrates a male rugby player who has moved to a women’s team:

Kelly Morgan is a trailblazer.

Born Nicholas Gareth Morgan, she played representative rugby for east Wales as a teenager.

Then he spent ten years “wrestling with gender identity” and now is playing with (and against) the wims.

Transgender women participating in female sport is a divisive subject, and one not confined to Welsh rugby.

Brushing it off with “divisive” is lazy and cowardly. The BBC might as well say it’s “divisive” for men to punch women in the face whenever they get annoyed.

Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) guidelines – which are “fully committed to the principles of equality” – state Kelly can play providing her blood-measured testosterone levels are within a certain range.

They can say they’re fully committed to the principles of equality all they like, but that doesn’t make it true, and letting people with male bodies trample over women has nothing to do with any “principles of equality.” It has to do with letting men get what they want while women get stomped.

Kelly has been taking estrogen for 18 months. Kelly still has a male body.

At nearly 6ft she stands out among her team-mates, and club captain Jessica Minty-Madley recounts a time she folded an opponent “like a deckchair”.

I guess Minty-Madley is ok with that because the folded one was an opponent? But that’s called “cheating” and it’s frowned on.

But coach Wayne Mansell notes: “I’ve seen Kelly struggling more than a lot of the girls with the demands our of training.”

That said, Kelly, 33, accepts transgender women may have an advantage in terms of size and strength.

“I do feel guilty, but what can you do?” she says. “I don’t go out to hurt anybody. I just want to play rugby.”

What can you do? What can you do? WHAT CAN YOU DO? You can refrain from cheating, that’s what. You can grasp that you feel guilty for a reason and stop doing the bad thing you’re doing that makes you feel guilty. Play mixed-sex non-professional rugby if there is such a thing, or play on a men’s team if there isn’t, but don’t make women pay the price for your desire to play rugby while pretending to be a woman.

Brian Minty, who founded the team four years ago, says: “I’ve always taken rugby as a totally inclusive sport and we’re happy to welcome Kelly to the club.”

Inclusive how? Anyone can be on the team, no matter what the level of skill or fitness or preparation? Toddlers can play alongside huge adult men?

“Inclusive” in this context ought to mean no arbitrary barriers – no exclusion for race or class or sexual orientation or political allegiance or immigration status and the like. But if you have a women’s team, as they do, it’s not arbitrary to exclude men from the women’s team. Possession of a male body is not an arbitrary attribute in this context.

“One of the main things Kelly does is give confidence to the other people around her. We’ve got a number of people who’ve only just started playing.”

He can’t resist a joke, though, adding: “She’s going to be a good, good player for the next few years, as long as we can stop her injuring players in training.”

Oh hahahahahahahaha that is hilarious, it’s funny the way Trump’s jokes are funny. Hahahahahaha he might injure the women hahahahahaha what could be funnier than that.

Minty-Madley says Kelly is not treated differently to other members of the squad.

“Kelly has become completely and utterly absorbed into the team,” she says.

“She’s one of us. She comes in, trains hard, plays hard and parties hard with us afterwards.

“She folded a girl like a deckchair during a game, which was quite funny, but they’re still friends.”

So funny. So very hilariously uproariously funny.

Mansell sees Kelly as a great addition to his squad.

“Straight away we just saw there was a load of ability there,” he says.

“Some days are good, some days are bad, but at the end of the day can you really exclude people?”

Can you really exclude men from playing on women’s teams? Yes of course you can, and you have to.

I thought this was just some random (albeit blue-checked) person on Twitter responding to a Fox News tweet about Ocasio-Cortez’s saying the Electoral College is a scam.

Actually @AOC, eliminating the Electoral College would silence our voices here in Iowa and in many other states across the country.

This is just more evidence of how out of touch the Democrats have become.

So I pointed out that an equal vote doesn’t silence anyone and it’s the outsize vote for less populated states that’s the real silencing, and then I looked to see who she is.

She’s a senator! A US senator!

And it’s the Democrats who are out of touch. Oy.

About that Amazon rain forest…

Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.

That’s the gist of an announcement this week by the country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in the Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year, and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.

Over half of those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as all of 2018 combined. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities such as São Paulo.

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus puts it this way:

The Amazon rainforest—an irreplaceable part of what makes life on Earth possible—is burning at a record rate. Global CO2 emissions are at a record high. Last month was the hottest month on our planet in recorded history. We are in a climate emergency.

You know what happened to Rapanui, aka Easter Island?

The Easter Island of ancient times supported a sub-tropical forest complete with the tall Easter Island Palm, a tree suitable for building homes, canoes, and latticing necessary for the construction of such statues. With the vegetation of the island, natives had fuelwood and the resources to make rope. With their sea-worthy canoes, Easter Islanders lived off a steady diet of porpoise. A complex social structure developed complete with a centralized government and religious priests.

It was this Easter Island society that built the famous statues and hauled them around the island using wooden platforms and rope constructed from the forest. The construction of these statues peaked from 1200 to 1500 AD, probably when the civilization was at its greatest level. However, pollen analysis shows that at this time the tree population of the island was rapidly declining as deforestation took its toll.

Around 1400 the Easter Island palm became extinct due to overharvesting. Its capability to reproduce has become severely limited by the proliferation of rats, introduced by the islanders when they first arrived, which ate its seeds. In the years after the disappearance of the palm, ancient garbage piles reveal that porpoise bones declined sharply. The islanders, no longer with the palm wood needed for canoe building, could no longer make journeys out to sea. Consequently, the consumption of land birds, migratory birds, and mollusks increased. Soon land birds went extinct and migratory bird numbers were severely reduced, thus spelling an end for Easter Island’s forests. Already under intense pressure by the human population for firewood and building material, the forests lost their animal pollinators and seed dispersers with the disappearance of the birds. Today, only one of the original 22 species of seabird still nests on Easter Island.

With the loss of their forest, the quality of life for Islanders plummeted. Streams and drinking water supplies dried up. Crop yields declined as wind, rain, and sunlight eroded topsoils. Fires became a luxury since no wood could be found on the island, and grasses had to be used for fuel. No longer could rope by manufactured to move the stone statues and they were abandoned. The Easter Islanders began to starve, lacking their access to porpoise meat and having depleted the island of birds.

We’re doing the same thing to the whole planet, and the disappearances and dryings up and plummetings are speeding up.