Grim:

Canada is warming on average at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the world, a new scientific report indicates.

The federal government climate report also warns that changes are already evident in many parts of the country and are projected to intensify.

Canada’s Arctic has seen the deepest impact and will continue to warm at more than double the global rate.

The report suggests that many of the effects already seen are probably irreversible.

…

Hotter temperatures could mean more heat waves and a higher risk of wildfires and droughts in some parts of the country.

Oceans are expected to become more acidic and less oxygenated, which could harm marine life.

Parts of Canada’s Arctic Ocean are projected to have extensive ice-free periods during summer within a few decades.

A rise in sea levels could also increase the risk of coastal flooding and more intense rainfall could cause problems with flooding in urban centres.

So, you know, floods, droughts, crop failures, collapse of the marine life that feeds billions…stuff like that.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Trump’s America:

An employee at a South San Jose, Calif., gas station was fired after ranting against a customer who was speaking Spanish in the store and demanding the customer prove she was a U.S. citizen.

According to ABC 7, San Jose resident Grecya Moran was speaking Spanish with an employee who, she said, had greeted her initially in Spanish. The two carried on a conversation in Spanish until another employee demanded that the two speak English, the outlet reported Tuesday.

In the video, Moran can be heard telling the employee, who is white, that she is allowed to speak Spanish before the employee asks for proof that Moran is a U.S. citizen.

It’s not the job of gas station cashiers, or any other random person, to demand proof of citizenship from people speaking a foreign language…or from anyone else.

“I even went up to her and I apologized,” Moran told ABC 7. “I said, ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry. All she was saying is– she was greeting me in Spanish. How my day’s going.’ And she said, ‘I don’t care, you talk in English because this is America.'”

Moran told the outlet that the employee, who is not named, became more agitated.

“She started saying something about, ‘Trump needs to hurry up and build the wall.’ That’s when I was like oh my God, she’s being serious,” Moran told ABC. “I just got my phone, started videotaping her.”

Trump and Fox News.

Meanwhile Trump is spraying racist venom at Puerto Rico and Carmen Yulín Cruz.

Trump, who has reportedly said in private that he doesn’t want “another single dollar” going to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, again complained about funding for the island and called San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, a frequent critic, “crazed and incompetent.”

“The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any ‘place’ in history,” Trump tweeted around 11 p.m.

What’s with “place”? What are we supposed to think? That places are only for pale people, or people who speak English only, or people whose last name is Trump? That Puerto Rico isn’t really a place because it’s actually what Trump so adultly calls “a shithole”? It’s clearly intended as a sneer of some kind, but it doesn’t exactly fit any known pattern; “place” is not generally an honorific.

“The people of Puerto Rico are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt.”

Says the most incompetent and corrupt president we’ve ever had, by a huge margin. Project much?

In his tweets, Trump raised a familiar, contested figure for disaster relief in Puerto Rico. Although the president has repeatedly claimed that $91 billion has been spent there, that figure actually reflects a high-end, long-term estimate for recovery costs; a fraction of that has so far been budgeted, and even less has been spent.

Speaking of incompetent…a guy who thinks he gets to talk about projected long-term estimates as already spent rings the bell.

He was so talkative on this one that the Post didn’t get to all the tweets. Like this one:

Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019

Yet again, despite countless reminders that Puerto Rico is part of the USA, he talks about it as if it were another country. Meanwhile he takes a lot more from the USA than Puerto Rico does, and with less legality.

The Trump administration has decided it wants less information about domestic terrorism, because hey, who needs to know anything about a trivial thing like that?

Pittsburgh, Charleston, Santa Barbara – no big deal, right?

The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism, The Daily Beast has learned. Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism—including white supremacist terrorism—is growing.

In the wake of this move, officials said the number of analytic reports produced by DHS about domestic terrorism, including the threat from white supremacists, has dropped significantly. People in and close to the department said this has generated significant concern at headquarters.

Just stay home and you’ll be fine.

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.

Well you see there’s this Crisis at the Border…

Rachel ratchets.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1112793015934910468

Again: nobody says trans people shouldn’t compete or denies their right to compete. The issue is people with male bodies competing against women. Funny how McKinnon consistently avoids mentioning that in these slogans and T shirt logos.

So what is the merch like?

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1112876621210509312

There’s a second one, I guess for emphasis.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1112878194686873600

“I’m not touching her, Mom!”

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1113012119392477186

Metaphorically hahahaha not really.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1113013200310734849

Throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick throw a brick!

Metaphorically, of course.

Imagine someone tweeted the same thing repeatedly / compulsively with Black Lives Matter substituted for transphobia. What would we think? We would think what we were meant to think: that it’s a threat and incitement of violence against BLM. Oh but BLM isn’t a person! It’s an idea, a concept, a political view! Talking about throwing a brick at it is just a metaphor. And that rally in Charlottesville was just a Saturday picnic for likeminded friends.

In case you missed it the first six times –

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1113029441041678337

And after all that let’s have a sober thoughtful professorial coda:

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1113045611786498049

Via quixote in a comment, Alessandra Asteriti on the very material reasons women need legal protections:

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111710344836194306

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111711025898967040

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111711750330540033

Let’s pause there. An estimated 830 women a day die in childbirth. Is that cis privilege?

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111712389710430209

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1111713135600246784

Meanwhile “activists” like Rachel McKinnon concentrate all their venom and rage on women, as if their discomfort with being male were our fault. When are trans women going to be told to be more intersectional?

Originally a comment by iknklast on Thanks I guess?

If there is no right way to be a woman – or to be a man – then how in the world can anyone know that they “feel like a woman”? That is the main question we are asking. We are not the ones assuming there is a “right” way to be something, and therefore the idea that one who doesn’t “feel” right needs to be the other…CAN THEY NOT EVEN SEE THE ILLOGIC? (sorry, I know the answer to that).

Who counts as a woman black? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood blackness, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman black person will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?

Seriously, some of the speakers at freethought conferences (the black speakers) have seemed to imply just this…that all black people experience the exact same thing, and that no white person can experience any of it because we are just so different, and they are so alike.

And the goals of feminism – equality of pay, right to decide what one does with one’s own body, right to have the same opportunities and rights as males, right to work at a job of our choice – I am so tired of having these seen as straight, rich, white women’s issues. The idea that those of us born poor (as well as those not straight and/or not white) somehow don’t need or deserve or want those things? I’m calling bullshit. I grew up in squalor and filth, and feminism was a glorious light that helped point the way out of that gutter. Poor women need these rights even more than rich women; black women are searching for these things as much as white women; lesbians needs these things as much as straight women. Yeah, there have been some missteps in feminism, but the fact that feminism was led by straight, white, rich women (mostly middle class, if we want to be honest about it, but calling them rich makes it seem even more removed from “real” women) is a factor of time – the rest of us didn’t have time to fight that battle while working 3 jobs, raising kids, keeping house, and doing all the things that feminism tried to help us with (helping us a lot more than our husbands, in most cases). For those of us who have moved into that status of middle-class, we now have joined the fight only to see ourselves dismissed as “rich” (I am not), “white” (I am, but I know many feminists who are not and march in the same marches I do), and “straight” (I am, but so what? My lesbian friends also want the same things I do, except sexually).

As someone who was able to pull herself out of the squalor because of feminism, I think it’s time for people to shut up until they actually inform themselves about things. Thanks.

Soooo this is horrifying:

A whistle-blower working inside the White House has told a House committee that senior Trump administration officials granted security clearances to at least 25 individuals whose applications had been denied by career employees, the committee’s Democratic staff said Monday.

The whistle-blower, Tricia Newbold, a manager in the White House’s Personnel Security Office, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in a private interview last month that the 25 individuals included two current senior White House officials, in addition to contractors and other employees working for the office of the president, the staff said in a memo it released publicly.

…

Ms. Newbold told the committee’s staff members that the clearance applications had been denied for a variety of reasons, including “foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct,” the memo said. The denials by the career employees were overturned, she said, by more-senior officials who did not follow the procedures designed to mitigate security risks.

It’s breathtaking. People who know what they’re doing say no, these are security risks, and people higher up the hierarchy who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t give a rat’s ass just throw that out the window.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who is the Oversight Committee’s chairman, included information provided by Ms. Newbold in a letter to Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel*, on Monday again demanding that the White House turn over files connected to the security clearance process and make administration personnel available for interviews.

That sentence is slightly confusing. Cummings sent a letter to Cipollone, and in the letter he included the information from Newbold.

Mr. Cummings said he was prepared to authorize subpoenas as soon as Tuesday to try to compel the White House to comply with an investigation into whether national secrets were at risk — an escalation that could force Mr. Cipollone either to reach an accommodation with Congress or fight in court.

The White House, as you may recall, has been flatly refusing to comply with any Congressional requests…which is, yet again, not how any of this is supposed to work.

Mr. Cipollone has argued repeatedly that the power to deny or grant security clearances “belongs exclusively” to the executive branch and therefore Congress has no authority to make such “unprecedented and extraordinarily intrusive demands.”

And if a hostile power succeeds in getting a traitor elected to the executive branch then that’s just how it is, and the executive branch has the authority to run the entire country off a cliff.

Mr. Cummings said he planned to issue a subpoena for the testimony of Carl Kline, who until recently served as the head of the personnel security division and was Ms. Newbold’s boss, and he identified five other senior White House officials whose testimony he planned to seek.

He requested summaries of the security clearance adjudication process and any related documents for nine current and former officials, including Mr. Kushner; Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and White House adviser; and John Bolton, the national security adviser. Mr. Cummings also asked for a document Ms. Newbold said she assembled on the 25 individuals whose clearance denials she said were reversed.

This is all rather frightening.

If you look at it as a test of faith / proud defiance of reason in favor of faith, it all fits.

Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans rights are human rights. This is not up for debate. #TransDayOfVisibility pic.twitter.com/CaYu0iprpt

— National NOW (@NationalNOW) March 31, 2019

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/1112672398892036096

https://twitter.com/marstrina/status/1112673326357532673

A day late for #transdayofvisibility, here's some TERF-bashing I just published in the @nytimes. https://t.co/RRIENvwr9E

— Carol Hay (@DrCarolHay) April 1, 2019

Oh. Ok. Always fun to read more about bashing feminist women.

Who counts as a woman? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?

That’s the wrong question. It’s a leading question, set up to bash “TERFs” for claims they don’t make. The point isn’t about adventures and exploits, and it isn’t about who “counts” as a woman – it’s not a contest or an exam, it’s just a brute material fact.

It’s not about “counting” as a woman; it’s about being female and thus being subject to all the subtle and not so subtle cues in the culture that female people are 1. different and 2. subordinate. I say “subordinate” instead of “inferior” because many of the cues aren’t specifically about inferiority, but they are about “femininity,” delicacy, prettiness, compliance, seductiveness, flounces, stiletto heels, thongs, waxing, giggling, submitting. The subtle and not so subtle cues in the culture that male people get are different; they’re the ones appropriate for the sex that gets to dominate.

We’re treated to a quick visit to Judith Butler via an explanation that bad old feminism was about “the experiences of the wealthy, white, straight, able-bodied women who already have more than their fair share of social privilege.” Then we arrive at:

Any attempt to catalog the commonalities among women, in other words, has the inescapable result that there is some correct way to be a woman. This will inevitably encourage and legitimize certain experiences of gender and discourage and delegitimize others, subtly reinforcing and entrenching precisely those forces of socialization of which feminists claim to be critical. And what’s worse, it will inevitably leave some people out. It will mean that there are “real” women whom feminism should be concerned about and that there are impostors who do not qualify for feminist political representation.

The women who are accused of being impostors these days are often trans women. You might think that a shared suspicion of conventional understandings of sex and gender would make feminists and trans activists natural bedfellows. You’d be wrong.

It’s all Janice Raymond’s fault, apparently.

Feminists who deny “real woman” status to trans women seem to rely on a false assumption — that all trans women have lived in the world unproblematically as men at some point — and claim the importance of affirming the identity and experiences of those who’ve spent entire lives in women’s shoes.

Wait. One, as far as I know we don’t assume trans women – or for that matter any men – have lived in the world unproblematically as men at some point. The expectations of boys and men are far from unproblematic, and feminism has been underlining that since forever. Two, it’s not a matter of denying anyone any status, it’s simply a matter of declining to play let’s pretend forever. Being a woman isn’t like being upper class or a Nobel laureate, it’s just a brute fact. If we say that enough times maybe it will sink in.

After that the piece falls off a cliff, as she agrees how repellent it was when Caitlyn Jenner made it all about the clothes and says you can see why feminists wouldn’t like that, and then just says “but suck it up anyway.”

Nah.

Isn’t there some norm about how appropriation is a bad thing? I could have sworn there was.

Designed this poster yesterday to help Our Community Bikes in #Vancouver celebrate #TransDayOfVisibility . pic.twitter.com/8WnzL54YMQ

— Bria (@LifeofBria) March 31, 2019

Temporary fill-in substitute interim pretend White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is out there trying to convert the Mueller report into a reason to forget all about Trump’s obstruction of justice.

“The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,’” Barr wrote to lawmakers, adding that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that Mueller’s investigative findings are “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

“That is not what these documents do,” Mulvaney said, referring to Mueller not reaching a verdict on obstruction.

“When you do an investigation like this, there’s typically two outcomes — either criminal indictments come down or it just quietly goes away. These types of investigations are not designed to exonerate people.”

Ah yes, they’d like that, wouldn’t they – if it just quietly went away. Firing Comey? Telling Lester Holt he (Trump) fired Comey because of this Russia thing? Telling Kislyak and Lavrov he fired Comey to take pressure off himself? Repeatedly meeting with Putin alone? Trump Tower Moscow? Yes, they’d just love it if all that just quietly went away.

Mulvaney declined to say whether the White House would release the written responses the president provided to Mueller during the course of the special counsel’s investigation and blamed Mueller’s appointment on “a small group of people within the law enforcement community, specifically the FBI and the DOJ, who really did want to overturn” the results of the 2016 election.

“They cannot accept the fact that he’s president and from the very beginning, in fact before the election, they actually set the table to try and prevent him from becoming president,” he said.

Because he’s a threat to the country. It’s not because they’re all libbruls, it’s because he’s left a long trail of what looks like entanglement (to put it politely) with Putin and Putin’s Russia. It’s because he could be compromised, and so could his family. It’s because that fact has very large implications for all of us.

Fox News today:

Lionel Shriver is a crap writer. Witness:

For it’s more the case that the EU is a bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered timeservers inventing gratuitous regulations to justify their sinecures.

The first sentence of the second paragraph of a piece in Harper’s. That’s a crap sentence. “more the case that” – why use a clunker like that? “bloated bureaucracy packed with pampered” – have you no ear?? Then that long string of lifeless stale words. It’s just a terrible sentence, and there’s something wrong with a writer who doesn’t notice.

And that kind of thing makes a difference, because it makes the reader suspect she’s not really thinking about what she’s saying, but just rolling out a punditty reaction. And she does it again in the very next sentence – “the profligate, power-hungry body has warped into a centralizing political project without asking the irrelevant little peons” – come on. Way too many Ps for one sentence, coupled with stale pseudo-opinion.

She needs a better editor.

Trump decides the way to make people stay home is to make their lives at home even worse.

US opposition politicians and aid agencies have questioned a decision by President Donald Trump to cut off aid to three Central American states.

Mr Trump ordered the suspension of aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to push their governments to stop migration into the US.

To stop it how? A Berlin Wall type of thing? Just tell them they can’t leave, end of story? We tend to see that as tyrannical and unjust, those of us in the “no you’re not supposed to bully and torment people” community.

In 2017, Guatemala received over $248m while Honduras received $175m and El Salvador $115m.

“I’ve ended payments to Guatemala, to Honduras and El Salvador,” Mr Trump told reporters on Friday.

“No money goes there anymore… We were paying them tremendous amounts of money and we’re not paying them any more because they haven’t done a thing for us.”

Those are actually not tremendous sums of money, and as for not doing a thing for us…why should they do a thing for us? We’ve done quite a few things to them in the past, not-good things, so I don’t really think they owe us a few million dollars’ worth of whatever it is he wants from them.

It would be funny/tragic if it turned out that cheating at golf is what did him in.

Shortly after he became president, Trump played with Tiger Woods, the current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson and the veteran PGA Tour pro Brad Faxon. Given the quality and profile of his companions, you might have thought Trump would have been on his best behavior. Not so.

On one hole, Trump dunked a shot into the lake, but as his opponents weren’t looking he simply dropped another ball — and then hit that into the water, too.

“So he drives up and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green,” recalls Faxon.

Apparently someone was looking.

During a game with Mike Tirico before Trump was elected, the former ESPN football announcer hit the shot of his life, a 230-yard 3-wood towards an elevated green he couldn’t see. But he knew it was close.

When he got to the putting green, however, Tirico’s ball was nowhere to be seen. Instead, it was 50 feet left of the hole in a bunker.

It made no sense — until Trump’s caddy caught up with him after the round.

“Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5?’” Tirico says. “‘It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it.’”

Well the caddy is probably Adam Schiff’s cousin or something.

One judge says No.

Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed bans on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic, a judge said in a ruling that restored the Obama-era restrictions.

In a decision late on Friday, US district court judge Sharon Gleason threw out Trump’s executive order that overturned the bans that comprised a key part of Obama’s environmental legacy.

Presidents have the power under a federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, Gleason said.

“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” said Gleason, who was nominated by Obama.

And Trump isn’t Congress.

Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice, welcomed the ruling, saying it “shows that the president cannot just trample on the constitution to do the bidding of his cronies in the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our oceans, wildlife and climate”.

Earthjustice represented numerous environmental groups that sued the Trump administration over the April 2017 executive order reversing the drilling bans. At issue in the case was the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

One is better than none.

Whoa.

Paleontologists have found a fossil site in North Dakota that contains animals and plants killed and buried within an hour of the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. This is the richest K-T boundary site ever found, incorporating insects, fish, mammals, dinosaurs and plants living at the end of the Cretaceous, mixed with tektites and rock created and scattered by the impact. The find shows that dinosaurs survived until the impact.

The beginning of the end started with violent shaking that raised giant waves in the waters of an inland sea in what is now North Dakota.

Then, tiny glass beads began to fall like birdshot from the heavens. The rain of glass was so heavy it may have set fire to much of the vegetation on land. In the water, fish struggled to breathe as the beads clogged their gills.

The heaving sea turned into a 30-foot wall of water when it reached the mouth of a river, tossing hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh-water fish — sturgeon and paddlefish — onto a sand bar and temporarily reversing the flow of the river. Stranded by the receding water, the fish were pelted by glass beads up to 5 millimeters in diameter, some burying themselves inches deep in the mud. The torrent of rocks, like fine sand, and small glass beads continued for another 10 to 20 minutes before a second large wave inundated the shore and covered the fish with gravel, sand and fine sediment, sealing them from the world for 66 million years.

This unique, fossilized graveyard — fish stacked one atop another and mixed in with burned tree trunks, conifer branches, dead mammals, mosasaur bones, insects, the partial carcass of a Triceratops, marine microorganisms called dinoflagellates and snail-like marine cephalopods called ammonites — was unearthed by paleontologist Robert DePalma over the past six years in the Hell Creek Formation, not far from Bowman, North Dakota. The evidence confirms a suspicion that nagged at DePalma in his first digging season during the summer of 2013 — that this was a killing field laid down soon after the asteroid impact that eventually led to the extinction of all ground-dwelling dinosaurs. The impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period, the so-called K-T boundary, exterminated 75 percent of life on Earth.

Down we continue to go.

Trump’s presidential campaign has started selling $28 “Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff” T-shirts that feature a drawing of Rep. Adam Schiff with a pencil for a neck and a clown nose.

It really has.

Little Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff

He spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking. He should be forced to resign from Congress!

Everyone should buy a Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff shirt today!

BUY Now: https://t.co/5SMsrJC8nU pic.twitter.com/v3Vvmma0e6

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) March 29, 2019

While we’re here, let’s pay a visit to Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign.

By promoting values such as healthy living, encouragement, kindness, and respect, parents, teachers, and other adults can help prepare children for their futures.

Mmm, encouragement, kindness, and respect – that would be nice.

When children learn positive online behaviors early-on, social media can be used in productive ways and can effect positive change. Mrs. Trump believes that children should be both seen and heard, and it is our responsibility as adults to educate and reinforce to them that when they are using their voices—whether verbally or online—they must choose their words wisely and speak with respect and compassion.

That too would be nice.