The Freemasons are now going to allow women!

Their secretive society has been male-only for centuries. Now the Freemasons are to allow women members — but only if they were men when they joined.

The United Grand Lodge of England, founded in 1717, has issued guidance to its 200,000 members that “a Freemason who after initiation ceases to be a man does not cease to be a Freemason”.

Its “gender reassignment policy” says that anyone wishing to join must be male but once admitted can remain a member as a woman. Anyone who has become a man can also apply.

Daaaaaaaaaaamn is that enlightened or what? Open to all at last!

Well, except women. But other than that…

I’ve been putting this off all day because I’m lachrymose enough already, but here it is: my much (and widely) loved friend Maureen Brian died this morning. She’s been a regular (though not terribly frequent) commenter here since forever, so you may know of her that way.

I met her in person at QED (in Manchester) in 2012. It was between talks and I was cruising around and this woman came up and started a conversation with me, and we drifted into the next talk together and sat down – and then I saw her badge and exclaimed “Oh, you’re Maureen! I know you!” I knew her via Pharyngula rather than here, but I knew her as fierce in a good way.

After that we were friends, and a very wonderful friend she was, and god damn it I’m going to miss her.

PZ remembers her.

Updating to add: here’s a guest post she wrote in April.

Is access to the bodies of women a right, or is it not? Can access to women’s bodies be treated as a right without making women into commodities?

Cherry Smiley at Feminist Current tells us about a change in views and policies at a Vancouver rape crisis center:

In 2008, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), a rape crisis centre in Vancouver BC, published a position paper documenting a two-year collaborative process between their staff, board, volunteers, and practicum students exploring the issue of prostitution. It states:

“The argument of supporting individual women’s choices pales when one considers the way in which prostitution plays out in the global arena. As a global phenomenon, it must be analyzed in its capacity to enhance women’s lives and in its capacity to end violence against women. Viewed in the broad social context, and not in the context of individual choice and unique experiences, prostitution operates as a function of capitalism, colonization, and slavery. It destroys cultures, communities and women through objectification, sexual violence and exploitation.”

Ten years later, on July 18, 2018, WAVAW published a new statement, explaining that their previous position — which criticized the actions of men as sex buyers, pimps, and profiteers of the sex industry — had harmed sex workers, that they take accountability for causing that harm, and that they now support “sex work.” The organization also apologized for articulating their (previously) critical position through written text, as they claimed publishing and sharing this position had caused harm to “the sex worker community and their allies.”

So has it now become the case that viewed in the broad social context, and not in the context of individual choice and unique experiences, prostitution does not operate as a function of capitalism, colonization, and slavery? Is it now a function of glorious freedom, opportunity, and profit?

As feminists, we should all be concerned with the depoliticization of what was once called the “women’s liberation movement.” Today, we are more likely to hear about “gender-based violence” than “male violence against women,” which wouldn’t be such an issue if “gender-based violence” weren’t replacing “male violence against women” as a central component of the feminist movement. As feminist women, our ability to unapologetically voice our realities, name the problem, and set boundaries is being undermined.

What happens when women and our interests are pushed out of the core of our own liberation movement? One consequence is the transformation of rape crisis centres from expressly politicized organizations — where women who have been assaulted by men can receive support from other women and where women come together to develop feminist theory and take action — into apolitical “service-providers” that are open to all.

The feminist movement — like other political movements — is expressly political, and has focused political goals. This means that the feminist movement, like other political movements, is inherently exclusive. For example, a group of hotel workers who are organizing for better working conditions would not include hotel management or the hotel owners in their political movement. Yet, women’s rape crisis centres are pressured to include services for everyone.

What does that sound like? It sounds like the way feminism is pressured – aka bullied, threatened, ostracized, ejected, disinvited – to include everyone. Isn’t it interesting that it’s women who are under constant relentless bullying pressure now to move over and “include” everyone else in their feminism? Isn’t it interesting the way that expectation and that bullying neatly aligns with the way women have always been expected to move over and shut up?

There is an unresolvable contradiction when a rape crisis centre supports “sex work.” One might assume that a rape crisis centre would challenge male entitlement to the bodies of women and girls — whether that entitlement takes the form of sexual harassment on the street; fathers who molest their daughters; or men who beat, rape, and kill the women they claim to love. Male entitlement to sexual access to women and girls is a pillar of misogyny and patriarchy — what has now been termed “rape culture.” Without male entitlement to the bodies of women and girls, prostitution would not exist.

While rape crisis centres that support the system of prostitution may believe the message they are sending is progressive and inclusive, the message actually being sent is: male entitlement to sexually access the bodies of women and girls is not ok unless you pay for it.

Supporting “sex work” as an occupation means supporting and affirming male entitlement. Supporting “sex work” means supporting the ideologies and corresponding behaviours of men who buy sex, pimp, and profit off of women.

In a different, perfect world that wouldn’t be the case, but then that world wouldn’t need feminism.

I guess despite decades of flat wages for workers, despite the fact that the richest 1 percent in the United States now own more $$$ than the bottom 90 percent, despite the massive burden of debt on the non-rich, despite skyrocketing housing and health care costs and aforementioned flat wages – despite all that Trump and the Republicans want to make rich people even richer, because why have 4 yachts when you could have 10?

The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.

…

Currently, capital gains taxes are determined by subtracting the original price of an asset from the price at which it was sold and taxing the difference, usually at 20 percent. If a high earner spent $100,000 on stock in 1980, then sold it for $1 million today, she would owe taxes on $900,000. But if her original purchase price was adjusted for inflation, it would be about $300,000, reducing her taxable “gain” to $700,000. That would save the investor $40,000.

And it would cost the government that 40k, which would have to be made up by someone else, and who would that be? The rest of us, of course, the 99 or 90 percent who don’t own most of the wealth.

“At a time when the deficit is out of control, wages are flat and the wealthiest are doing better than ever, to give the top 1 percent another advantage is an outrage and shows the Republicans’ true colors,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.

But her emails.

But Appalachia.

But Starbucks.

Capital gains taxes are overwhelmingly paid by high earners, and they were untouched in the $1.5 trillion tax law that Mr. Trump signed last year. Independent analyses suggest that more than 97 percent of the benefits of indexing capital gains for inflation would go to the top 10 percent of income earners in America. Nearly two-thirds of the benefits would go to the super wealthy — the top 0.1 percent of American income earners.

Yes but they will use it to buy more yachts and houses in the Dordogne and cars made in Germany, so it’s all for the best. See?

According to the budget model used by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, indexing capital gains to inflation would reduce government revenues by $102 billion over a decade, with 86 percent of the benefits going to the top 1 percent. A July report from the Congressional Research Service said that the additional debt incurred by indexing capital gains to inflation would most likely offset any stimulus that the smaller tax burden provided to the economy.

But it would be nice for very rich people and nasty for everyone else, so that’s fine then.

Well this is sleazy:

President Trump has become personally involved in plotting a new FBI headquarters in downtown D.C., an interest that for now has left the project in limbo and the agency stranded in a building that no longer suits its needs, according to officials and people familiar with the administration’s deliberations.

For years, FBI officials have raised alarms that the decrepit conditions at its current headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, constitute serious security concerns. A year ago, federal officials had finally decided on three finalist locations in Maryland and Virginia and Congress appropriated $913 million toward the more than $3 billion project.

Six months after Trump entered the White House, his administration abandoned the plan and proposed in February that the government build a smaller headquarters to replace Hoover in downtown D.C. and move 2,300 other FBI staff out of the Washington area altogether, to Alabama, Idaho and West Virginia. At the time, the decision baffled real estate experts and some members of Congress.

Be baffled no more.

Those decisions, by the General Services Administration and the FBI, were made after Trump took a personal interest in the project, according to two people, who spoke Monday on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were meant to be private. One of them said that Trump has frequently raised the issue of the FBI building with appropriators, and his desire for it to be torn down. The website Axios reported Sunday that Trump was obsessed with the project and was “dead opposed” to plans to move it out of D.C.

The GSA is the FBI’s landlord, and who else’s? Oh yes, Trump – it owns his hotel.

The GSA issued a statement Monday saying the decision to stay downtown was made by the FBI, which did not respond to requests for comment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it should not be surprising that the president, a former real estate developer, would take a role in such a project.

The issue isn’t whether or not it’s surprising, it’s whether or not it’s corrupt. Is this just more of Trump’s focus on his own bank accounts.

News of Trump’s involvement prompted alarm among Democrats on Capitol Hill, with some suggesting the president’s business — which owns his hotel and from which he still benefits financially — may have motivated his interest. At a February hearing, senators sharply asked administration officials whether they were aware of any involvement from the president.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) issued a statement Monday saying, “there is no question that the President stands to gain financially by keeping the FBI in its existing building and blocking any competition for the Trump Hotel from being developed there.”

“One has to wonder if the Trump administration’s decision to cancel the previous procurement process has anything to do with the proximity of the current FBI headquarters building to the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), in a statement Monday.

I just consulted Google maps. The Old Post Office aka Trump Hotel is diagonally opposite the FBI building. A posh new hotel there would definitely compete with Trump Dump.

https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1024047795794321408

The elves are busy.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the Department of Justice is creating a “religious liberty task force.”

Sessions said the task force, co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio and the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, Beth Williams, will help the department fully implement the religious liberty guidance it issued last year.

The guidance was a byproduct of President Trump’s executive order directing agencies to respect and protect religious liberty and political speech.

Huh. That’s a little surprising, given the way Trump explicitly banned people from selected “Muslim countries” from traveling to the US.

I’m just kidding. Of course he doesn’t mean those other people. He means fanatical conservative theocratic Christians.

The announcement came during the department’s religious liberty summit.

Sessions said the cultural climate in this country —and in the West more generally — has become less hospitable to people of faith in recent years, and as a result many Americans have felt their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack.

By “practice their faith” he of course means pester or punish other people in the name of a narrow coercive brand of Christianity.

“We’ve seen nuns ordered to buy contraceptives.”

Oh no we haven’t you lying dog. We’ve seen Catholic institutions told they have to treat their employees equally and provide health insurance coverage for contraception as other employers are required to do. It’s not “religious freedom” to refuse to provide health insurance coverage for contraception because you have the delusion that your god doesn’t like it. It’s an intrusion on the freedom of other people to refuse such coverage.

“We’ve seen U.S. senators ask judicial and executive branch nominees about dogma — even though the Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for public office. We’ve all seen the ordeal faced so bravely by Jack Phillips,” he said, referring to the Colorado baker who took his case to the Supreme Court after he was found to have violated the state’s anti-discrimination laws for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

So brave, refusing to make a cake.

Sessions said the guidance he issued in October lays out 20 fundamental principles for the executive branch to follow, including the principles that free exercise means a right to act — or to abstain from action — and that government shouldn’t impugn people’s motives or beliefs.

“In short, we have not only the freedom to worship — but the right to exercise our faith. The Constitution’s protections don’t end at the parish parking lot nor can our freedoms be confined to our basements,” he said, according to his prepared remarks.

In other words we can harass, pester, interfere with, reject, refuse, proselytize and otherwise mess with other people as much as we want to as long as it’s in a goddy cause.

Liberty for them, but not for us.

A couple of weeks ago:

University of Virginia professors, alumni and others are up in arms over the school’s plan to hire President Donald Trump’s former legislative affairs director, calling it “unconscionable” as the one-year anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, approaches.

Marc Short, a frequent Trump spokesman on television, is leaving the White House Friday and is slated to serve as a senior fellow at the Miller Center, a wing of the university focused on presidential history and public policy. Short received an MBA from the university’s business school.

A business degree, and a job working for Trump. That seems like a very odd CV for a wing of a genuine university focused on presidential history and public policy. Granted Short probably has insider knowledge of the Trump presidency, but surely senior fellow is more of an academic position than a source material position.

Short said he sympathized but on the other hand Trump did put out a strong statement condemning racism (a statement written by others that he promptly undercut with the “on both sides, on both sides” remark, but Short didn’t say that).

Short also said he and his family “feel a particular bond and closeness to the community” of Charlottesville. He said he’s been visiting the town and the campus since he was a kid attending sporting events there.

“I think that there is, as well, a cherished tradition at Thomas Jefferson’s university, hopefully, of welcoming diversity of opinion,” Short said. “I hope that the message isn’t that anyone who worked in the administration can’t work at a university.”

Well, if it’s not, it should be. The administration is intensely hostile to any kind of intellectual work or inquiry or background. Trump attacks the press daily, and he is no fan of diversity of opinion when it comes to himself and his doings. Diversity of opinion is a good, but “opinion” isn’t the issue.

On Thursday night, a spokesman for the Miller Center said it is committed to nonpartisan and bipartisan study of the presidency and employs former officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“We understand and respect those UVA faculty members and other critics — even some from within the Miller Center — who disagree with the decision to name Marc Short a senior fellow. One of our core values is fostering robust, but civil, debate across our nation’s bitter partisan divide,” said Howard Witt, director of communications and managing editor at the Miller Center, in an email.

Yes but again, it’s not a matter of partisan or non-partisan. It’s a matter of truth telling, of rights respecting, of bullying avoidance. Trump and his people aren’t partisan, they’re Trumpan.

Today two historians resigned from the Miller Center in protest.

William I. Hitchcock and Melvyn P. Leffler announced Monday they are resigning from the Miller Center, a wing of the university focused on presidential history and public policy, over its hiring of Short, Trump’s former legislative affairs director. They remain tenured faculty in the university’s history department.

In their resignation letter, the historians blasted Short for not distancing himself from Trump’s response to the August 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted in the death of a 32-year-old woman and in which Trump famously blamed “both sides.”

“By not speaking out at the time, by not emphasizing the threats to human decency posed by the public display of Nazi symbols and racist diatribes in our own neighborhood, Mr. Short was complicit in the erosion of our civic discourse and showed an appalling indifference to the civility of our own city and university,” they wrote.

It’s the latest fallout over the center’s decision to appoint Short to a one-year fellowship. Professors, alumni and others have strongly objected, calling it “unconscionable” as the one-year anniversary of the violent rally in Charlottesville approaches. An online petition with thousands of signatures blasts the school for hiring Short, saying “the university should not serve as a waystation for high-level members of an administration that has directly harmed our community.”

Leffler is a former dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at UVa. Hitchcock is a New York Times bestselling historian and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Hitchcock posted their letter on Facebook so we can read the whole thing.

The appointment of Mr. Short runs counter to the Center’s fundamental values of non-partisanship, transparency, openness, a passion for truth and objectivity, and civility.

Mr. Short has been a partisan activist during his entire professional career. He has associated himself with people and institutions who disregard, circumvent, and even violate the norms and laws that are fundamental to civil discourse and democratic politics. He began his career working for the Senate campaign of Oliver North, a man who had been engaged in illegal covert actions and who directly and knowingly contravened congressional legislation. Mr. Short worked for years for the Koch Brothers Freedom Partners fund, an organization that prides itself on the surreptitious funneling of big donor money into the political arena, thereby violating the transparency on which a democratic polity must rest.

In his recent work in the White House Mr. Short has associated himself with ongoing attacks on a free media. He has associated himself with rhetoric and policies that have empowered and emboldened white supremacists and that have led to spectacular increases in racist and misogynistic talk and behavior. He has been a visible and active spokesman for an administration that has attacked our law enforcement agencies, that has tried to disenfranchise millions of voters, and that has separated immigrant asylum-seeking mothers from their children. By associating himself with an administration that shows no respect for truth, he has contributed to the erosion of civil discourse and democratic norms that are essential to democratic governance and that are central to the mission of the Miller Center.

That even understates it – the administration doesn’t just fail to show respect for truth, it actively undermines and attacks it. The administration is hostile to truth.

We firmly believe that Mr. Short has a right and should be given an opportunity to present his views at the Miller Center. The Miller Center has welcomed, and should always welcome, people of diverse political views. We ourselves have brought many Republican and Democratic policymakers as well as many distinguished conservative and liberal scholars to the events we have coordinated at the Miller Center. But it violates the practices of the Miller Center to hire such a notoriously partisan political appointee as a paid distinguished fellow, and to do so without any open discussion – prior to his appointment – with the faculty and staff. This seems all the more true because Mr. Short will be joining the powerful Washington lobbying firm, Guidepost Strategies, an explicitly partisan organization.

Democracy in the United States today is in peril. As teachers, we have often told our students that the defense of democracy and its basic ideals – respect for truth, inquiry, reason, decency, civility, and humanity – requires constant vigilance and active engagement. We must not normalize or rationalize hateful, cruel and demeaning behavior. We should not reward and honor those who defend such behavior. When we see things we believe to be wrong, we must speak out and take a stand. We do so now by tendering our resignations from the Miller Center.

Sincerely,

William I. Hitchcock Melvyn P. Leffler

More righteous enraged outraged indignant furious huffy anger:

!!!!! OPEN LETTER FROM A MELBOURNE SEX WORKER TO READINGS RE: HOSTING JULIE BINDEL. PLEASE SHARE !!!!!

Dear Readings,

I am a Melbourne-based sex worker writing to express my concerns about an event that is being held at the Readings store in Hawthorn on Thursday, the 26th of July: the launch of Julie Bindel’s book The Pimping of Prostitution. This event involves a Q&A between Bindel and Mary Crooks, the Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust.

Where to begin.

Bindel is a whorephobe, plain and simple. She has spent decades doing her utmost to stigmatise sex workers, misrepresent and demonise our peer organisations, and campaign for the Swedish Model, an approach to sex work regulation that has been proven to undermine our labour rights and human rights. Where it has been implemented, the Swedish Model has led to increased violence against sex workers and other negative impacts on sex workers’ safety, health, and wellbeing.

Blah blah blah all the phobias blah blah well documented blah blah opinions blah blah platform blah.

Her (incoherent at best) writing is regularly featured in high-traffic news publications such as The Independent and The Guardian. She is regularly invited to speak on television programs and at public events. She travels the world to plug books she has the time to write and capital to get published. When she does, books shops are more than happy to profit from the ‘buzz’ created by her hatespeech.

It must be stopped!!1

And now Readings is one of them.

This is the point at which I’m accused of stifling ‘debate’. Surely, a bookshop is a place in which diverse views about controversial topics can be expressed and challenged?

I am actually quite comfortable with diverse opinions, and as a reader, writer, and heretic, I am grateful that stores like Readings stock texts that Dymocks won’t touch. I’m also a fan of debate, but only when it is fair — that is, when both sides have the platform and resources to make their case on their own terms.

Yes, that’s very clear – big big fan of debate.

She went on in the same vein for several more paragraphs. As far as I can tell the event went ahead as scheduled.

Also, this happened:

This afternoon pro-sex trade protesters broke into the #asase2018 conference to shout over world-renowned Professor S. Caroline Taylor speaking about her experiences of horrific child sexual exploitation. They threw objects at audience members and trashed display tables.

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

They were unwilling to engage with us in our attempts to have conversations with them, they told us they were there to disrupt the event- again, the speech of a survivor of child sexual abuse who is now a strong advocate against #childsexualabuse.

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

The tactics of the pro-sex trade are disgusting. I cannot fathom how anyone would think it appropriate to hijack the speech of a survivor of child sexual abuse and attack her in an attempt to advance their cause #asase2018

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

Women present left shaking and crying after abuse from pro-sex trade protesters. One threw a bag in the face of speaker, a survivor of child sexual exploitation, while she was trying to address audience.

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

Social justice, eh?

There’s an upside to all this grabbing immigrant children away from their parents – MONEY.

Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.

Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals amid a growing effort by the White House to keep immigrant children in government custody.

Persecution and profit in one exciting package.

Currently, more than 11,800 children, from a few months old to 17, are housed in nearly 90 facilities in 15 states — Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

They are being held while their parents await immigration proceedings or, if the children arrived unaccompanied, are reviewed for possible asylum themselves.

That’s a lot of potential cash.

I’ve been reading the New Yorker pretty regularly since Trump got elected, thanks to some useful person in the nabe who puts them in a Little Library a couple of days before the publication date. Reading it more regularly I’ve started to wonder what the hell has happened to their cartoon department, and why they have so many now that are just not funny even a little bit. Cartoon after cartoon after cartoon I look at and move on, stonefaced. They are not funny. But some of them are not just not funny, they’re also faintly or intensely repellent, and of those, the standout is one Edward Steed. I just decided to search him on Google images and find his cartoons as hideous as ever.

One from Facebook:

Conde Nast store:

Weird, isn’t it? The New Yorker used to have great cartoons. Or am I missing something?

The northern half of the planet is bursting into flames in many places, and in a few months it will be the southern half’s turn. We’re seeing the stories, but the stories aren’t disturbing our slumbers by mentioning the underlying mechanism. David Wallace-Wells considers what the reasons for that may be.

In a single week earlier this month, dozens of places around the world were hit with record temperatures in what was, effectively, an unprecedented, planet-encompassing heat wave: from Denver to Burlington to Ottawa; from Glasgow to Shannon to Belfast; from Tbilisi, in Georgia, and Yerevan, in Armenia, to whole swaths of southern Russia. The temperature of one city in Oman, where the daytime highs had reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit, did not drop below 108 all night; in Montreal, Canada, 50 died from the heat. That same week, 30 major wildfires burned in the American West, including one, in California, that grew at the rate of 10,000 football fields each hour, and another, in Colorado, that produced a volcano-like 300-foot eruption of flames, swallowing an entire subdivision and inventing a new term — “fire tsunami” — along the way. On the other side of the planet, biblical rains flooded Japan, where 1.2 million were evacuated from their homes. The following week, the heat struck there, killing dozens. The following week.

In other words, it has been a month of historic, even unprecedented, climate horrors. But you may not have noticed, if you are anything but the most discriminating consumer of news. The major networks aired 127 segments on the unprecedented July heat wave, Media Matters usefully tabulated, and only one so much as mentioned climate change. The New York Times has done admirable work on global warming over the last year, launching a new climate desk and devoting tremendous resources to high-production-value special climate “features.” But even their original story on the wildfires in Greece made no mention of climate change — after some criticism on Twitter, they added a reference.

Why? Ratings. News outlets have to make a living, and it seems that we’re happy (and I mean that literally) to watch fires and hurricanes but not to hear talk of climate change.

As I’ve written before, and as Wen Stephenson echoed more recently in The Baffler, climate change is not a matter of “yes” or “no,” not a binary process where we end up either “fucked” or “not fucked.” It is a system that gets worse over time as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases. We are just beginning to see the horrors that climate change has in store for us —but that does not mean that the story is settled. Things will get worse, almost certainly much, much worse. Indeed, the news about what more to expect, coming out of new research, only darkens our picture of what to expect: Just over the past few weeks, new studies have suggested heat in many major Indian cities would be literally lethal by century’s end, if current warming trends continue, and that, by that time, global economic output could fall, thanks to climate effects, by 30 percent or more. That is an impact twice as deep as the global Great Depression, and it would not be temporary.

They’ll get worse and they’re already horrific. The hurricanes and fires last summer were horrific and very expensive; if things keep getting worse this fast or in fact faster, we won’t be able to keep up. Maybe part of the reason the media don’t talk about that is because…you know, what do you say? “We’ve got maybe a couple of decades left and that’s it? And in the meantime a lot of us are just plain going to fry?”

Television networks covered those heat waves 127 times. That is, actually, a very lot! They just utterly failed to “connect the dots,” as Emily Atkin put it incisively at The New Republic —broadcasters told the story of the historic temperatures, but chose not to touch the question of why we were seeing so many of them, all at once, with the atmosphere more full of carbon, and the planet hotter, than it has ever been at any point in human history.

When you think about it, this would be a very strange choice for a producer or an editor concerned about boring or losing his or her audience — it would mean leaving aside the far more dramatic story of the total transformation of the planet’s climate system, and the immediate and all-encompassing threat posed by climate change to the way we live on Earth, to tell the pretty mundane story of some really hot days in the region.

Yes but some really hot days with fires or people dropping dead are immediate, while climate change is long-term and complicated.

At any rate, the real point is, it looks as if the doom brought by climate change is happening a lot faster than most of us expected.

Those evil demons.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to eliminate regulations that forced for-profit colleges to prove that they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll, in what would be the most drastic in a series of moves that she has made to free the for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

The so-called gainful employment regulations put into force by the Obama administration cut off federally guaranteed student loans to colleges if their graduates did not earn enough money to pay them off. That sent many for-profit colleges and universities into an economic tailspin because so many of their alumni were failing to find decent jobs.

In a tailspin is where they belonged, then, because that’s a red flag for “colleges in name only.”

The Obama regulations — years in the making and the subject of a bitter fight that pulled in heavy hitters from both parties who backed the for-profit schools — also required such schools to advertise whether or not they met federal standards for job placement in promotional materials and to prospective students.

Now, a draft regulation, obtained by The New York Times, indicates that the Education Department plans to scuttle the regulations altogether, not simply modify them, as Ms. DeVos did Wednesday with new regulations that scaled back an Obama-era debt relief plan for student borrowers who felt duped by the unrealistic appeals of for-profit colleges.

Appeals? The word is advertising. For-profit schools advertise in order to attract paying customers, and they promise the moon.

The move would punctuate a series of decisions to freeze, modify and now eliminate safeguards put in place after hundreds of for-profit colleges were accused of widespread fraud and subsequently collapsed, leaving their enrolled students with huge debts and no degrees. The failure of two mammoth chains, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institutes, capped years of complaints that some career-training colleges took advantage of veterans and other nontraditional students, using deceptive marketing and illegal recruitment practices.

But hey, they make a profit, so to Republicans that’s gud bizness.

The DeVos approach would undo nearly a decade of efforts to create a tough accountability system for the largely unregulated and scandal-riddled for-profit sector of higher education.

Which would not exist if it were not for federal student loans, which trap people under a mountain of debt; when the degrees are worthless that’s the final turn of the screw. The sour joke is that people could get better training for a fraction of the cost at a public community college, but the for-profit ones claim to be the gold standard.

So apparently “inclusion” requires not mentioning lesbians and gays. Funny how “inclusion” somehow gets us back to the 1950s and calls it progressive.

One of the longest running LGBT film festivals has changed names for its 31st birthday. The Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival, happening September 6-9, is now officially the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival. Festival director Jim Brunzell says this year is the perfect time to address issues of inclusion and intersection the queer community has faced all year. And judging by the festival’s lineup it’s totally walking its talk.

And this is different from “all lives matter” and “I don’t see color” how exactly?

Spoiler: the Advocate doesn’t say.

There are mantras. This is one of the mantras.

https://twitter.com/shonfaye/status/1022080203663785985

“I am a woman because I say I am.” It’s supposed to be, and often is, a conversation-ender. But that seems to be not so much because it’s convincing or persuasive (let alone a good argument) but because it’s a mantra. Repetition makes it true and shouting makes it mandatory – something like that. I googled the sentence in quotation marks and got about 96,600 results, so definitely a mantra.

But it’s strange that it is when it seems so obviously not true. There are some “because I say I am”s that work that way – like “I say I am quitting” for instance. Performative speech, as a linguist friend pointed out. If I say I quit, I resign, I refuse, I object, then that works. “I quit because I say I quit” makes sense. “I apologize” is another, though it’s possible to say it in such a way that it self-undermines. But it’s not the case that saying “I am a _____” necessarily makes me that ______. I could say I’m a government official who has the authority to fire Trump from the presidency, but it wouldn’t get me anywhere, not even if I went to DC and said it to John Kelly.

Humans aren’t magic. We can’t just say things into existence. We can perform certain things with words, certainly, but there are limits. We can’t change material reality just by saying “I am.”