Flatulent tosspottery

A global transgender health organisation has recommended that children as young as 14 should be allowed irreversible gender transition treatment, despite growing concern that medical interventions at such an early age may cause more harm than good.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (Wpath), based in Illinois in the United States, is advocating for health professionals to allow children to begin life-changing treatment with cross-sex hormones at 14, two years earlier than it recommended previously. It also believes that girls should be allowed to have breast removal surgery as young as 15.

There’s a fundie American church that tries to explain the story about millstones by saying they were used as a method of execution. Thus JC is saying that folk that mess with the kiddies should be executed.

That doesn’t make sense, millstones are highly expensive pieces of capital equipment. You’d not throw one of those away to execute someone when a rope and a tree is virtually free.

The sentiment does have its value here though.

Cambridge music students are being instructed to “decolonise the ear” and consider the classical canon as “an imperial phenomenon”.

The works of composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giuseppe Verdi are being taught in relation to topics including European imperialism and Orientalism, as the music faculty pursues work on “curricular decolonisation”.

Undergraduates studying for the course, titled Decolonising the Ear, are taught to consider listening to sound in a “postcolonial” way, while a “music, power, empire” module explores how the classical repertoire is a middle-class and imperial phenomenon.

Rather famously Mozart had nowt to do with colonisation. As the German speaking world didn’t have anything to do with it until the 1880s or so.

Well, OK, there was quite a bit against Slave and Wends and all that, as East Prussia shows, but that’s not really what these folk mean by colonialism.

Which of these buildings is the horrible shite that must not be allowed?

Hint, it’s not the grey slabs to the right, the ones that look like a nuclear bunker weathered up through the soil. Because that’s speshul that is.

Musk continues to tell his 80 million followers all sorts of things. I disagree with many of his positions, but ever since I posted a tweet two years ago criticizing him for how he treated his Tesla workers he has blocked me – so I can’t view or post criticisms of his tweets to his followers.

Seems like an odd move for someone who describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”. Musk advocates free speech but in reality it’s just about power.

What follows is an attempt to summarize that agenda—although the full picture, comprised as it is of activist splinter groups, bizarre conspiracy theories, social-media hate campaigns and titanic global funding initiatives, is both too complex and too weird to ever fully summarize. It’s a story in which “eco-fascists” infiltrating lesbian folk festivals bump up against anti-Semitic conspiracy bloggers and Vladimir Putin’s global dark money operations; strange enough that it’s hard to take seriously, but very serious, and increasingly dangerous to us all. This is how trans-eliminationist thought became mainstream politics, and it has grave implications, not just for trans people, but for democracy itself.

Yep, that pesky resistance to belief in chicks with dicks being wholly and entirely female in the same manner as someone with a dilating cervix must be because Uncle Vova is directing it all from the undersea volcano lair.

Stands to reason.

To understand the argument over conversion therapy, at least from the government’s perspective, you need to think about two children. One is growing up in a household with deeply traditional views on sexuality. Another is a teenager whose parents are far more tolerant of LGBT rights. When the first child starts to have unfamiliar feelings about the same sex, they are dragged before a pastor or another authority figure, who forces them to crush those feelings. When the second child starts to feel uncomfortable about their gender identity, their parents are supportive — but urge them to wait until they are an adult before making any irreversible medical interventions.

There’s another case to be added.

I don’t know.

This is true of any “conversion therapy” ban, restriction, outlawing. It’s true of Teh Gay, trans, whatever.

Some people do not know. Some people are unhappy with what they do know, or think they do. Therapy includes being able to talk through, with someone who does know, the implications of any decision. So, for example, some might agree that they are trans. Also that they desire to have their own biological children. This is something of a conflict – certainly it is where full surgery might be concerned. Therapy – if it were to be allowed – would include the conversation about which is the more important? That live life fully as the desired gender? Or that own biological children?

Now, a ban on conversion therapy – if Stonewall is allowed to define what that is – will have it made illegal to even raise the question of biological children. Because that will be trying to convince people not to be full on trans.

Or with Teh Gays. It’s possible to be both same sex attracted and also a devout Catholic. Which means that sure, one is as God made one – but also that the same sex attraction should never be acted out. Juggling those two would also be therapy. And if anyone ever said that the immortal soul (no, we must look at it from the viewpoint of the devout Catholic here) takes precedence then that would be illegal under a full ban on “conversion therapy”.

To ban raping someone to make them appreciate the joys of heterosexual sex is entirely fine. To ban the therapy that aids people in making sense of their lives is insane. But that is what a ban on conversion therapy would be, that second, not the first.

Men are being asked if they are pregnant before undergoing scans at NHS trusts in England, it has emerged.

Male cancer patients and those having X-Rays and MRI scans are being asked if they could be expecting after the Government removed the word “female” from the law governing the medical procedures and replaced it with “individuals”.

The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust, in Liverpool, now asks “ALL patients under the age of 60, regardless of how you may identify your gender”.

That it’s stupid isn’t going to stop them now, is it?

Meanwhile, as the thinktank Common Wealth points out, the monopoly owners of the grid are achieving 40% profit margins, and pay out over £1bn a year to shareholders.

Sigh.

What is truly remarkable about the neglect of the GNDs and DNOs from debates about
the energy crisis is the fact that they are by far the most profitable sectors in the UK. As Table 1
shows, electricity distribution is at the top of the list with eye-watering operating profit margins
(operating profits / revenues) of 42.5%.

Operating profits in a capital intensive business aren’t a good guide to anything. Because, of course, operating profits do not include any of the capital costs of running a capital intensive business.

Lying toads.

Putin’s aggression makes clear the case for an anti-war movement
Owen Jones

Thing is, you’ve gotta go and tell that to the aggressor, haven’t you? Convince him, even.

Would buy you an air ticket but they’re not operating any more. Think the trains are still running though, willing to chip in to get you onto one of those so you can pace Red Square with a banner or two….

Trans rights groups have expressed outrage and fear after the Texas state attorney general Ken Paxton called gender-affirming surgeries and medical care “child abuse” and state governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas department of family and protective services (DFPS) to conduct an investigation into such practices.

Abbott said: “There is no doubt that these procedures are ‘abuse’ under Texas law, and thus must be halted. [DFPS] has a responsibility to act accordingly. I’ll do everything I can to protect against those who take advantage of and harm young Texans.”

Cutting the tonker off a child is abuse.

Note the “surgeries” in there.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, a leading authority on energy economics, said: “At today’s elevated gas prices, nearly all of the emissions [of methane] from oil and gas operations worldwide could be avoided at no net cost. The IEA has been a longstanding champion of stronger action to cut methane emissions. A vital part of those efforts is transparency on the size and location of emissions, which is why the massive underreporting revealed by our Global Methane Tracker is so alarming.”

Russia is one of the biggest sources of methane emissions from its vast oil and gas operations, but few efforts are made there to control the leaks. According to the IEA, Turkmenistan and Texas are also leading sources of leaks.

So, it might be true when gas prices are 5x normal. I suppose. But of course the current system was built when prices were 1 x normal.

But I’ll go further and make a bet. The IEA has waved away a large portion of the costs of preventing those leaks. They’ll be measuring the value of the gas captured but doing so at a price of gas delivered. And that’s not the way to do it at all. There’s an awful lot of “orphan” gas out there already. Gas that’s in hand but worth nothing because of the cost of transport.

If the government wants open debate in universities, why stifle it in schools?
Halima Begum

Because adults can – and should – have conversations but with children it tends to end up as propaganda?

Jus’ sayin’

‘Back to the Future’ is a cishet fantasy of repression

Nurse! Tablets!

Fairy tales are full of life lessons and stern warnings about the fate awaiting those who break rules or transgress a community’s boundaries. Little Red Riding Hood’s troubles begin when she ignores her mother’s instruction to keep to the path. Beauty and the Beast is a moral primer on not judging people by their appearance – especially when they are excessively rich. We lose the importance of these lessons if we begin to tamper with the characters that deliver them.

That’s why the revolution is against fairy tales. When there’s a new world to fantasise about who wants to have anyone reminded of the wisdom of the ages in easy, bite sized, pieces?

Seven men have been arrested in north London as part of a probe into castrations broadcast live on a pay-per-view channel.

An investigation into a subculture known as “nullos” – people who endorse castration, or “genital nullification” – led to the raid in Finsbury Park, where police spent three days searching the basement flat.

No, really:

Nullos willingly undergo removal of external genitalia as an extreme body modification procedure.

They afterwards may call themselves eunuchs or “smoothies”.

New greenfield housing developments are locking residents into car dependency, making everyday journeys impossible without a vehicle, a new report has found. Meanwhile, pledges for walking, cycling and public transport are often left unfulfilled.

The group Transport for New Homes (TfNH) visited 20 new housing developments in England, finding that while those on urban brownfield sites generally lived up to sustainable transport pledges, greenfield sites were often far from shops and amenities, without public transport, cycling links or even pavements, and the homes themselves were seemingly designed around car parking.

Lucky that we have invented the car then, so that folks can live out there where they desire to live. Rather than being crammed into Dickensian slums.

John Dicey, the chief executive of Allen Carr’s Easyway, said: “There is no doubt that there is a nicotine time-bomb ticking away amongst UK youngsters who become addicted to nicotine at an early age and the unregulated promotion of vapes on a whole variety of social media platforms (such as TikTok) is ensuring that youngsters become easy prey to those pushing the drug.”

Nicotine isn’t the problem, tar is. Nicotine delivery systems that don’t include tar are wondrous things therefore….

Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality business is to introduce a mandatory distance between people’s digital avatars after warnings that the social media tycoon’s plans for a metaverse will lead to a new wave of online harassment.

On the basis that the number of people getting, and the level of, the creaming abdabs is a constant. So, if people are screaming about this sorta shit we need a war so that they concentrate upon things that actually matter.

Of course, we can also run this logic the other way around. If this is the sort of thing people get the abdabs about then we’ve solved all the big problems, haven’t we?

Have you got yourself an “offence adviser” yet? This new breed of professionals are trained like sniffer dogs to detect even the faintest whiff of explosively un-woke material in anything that might be publicly shared, from company reports and social media posts to university lectures, early drafts of books, songs, screenplays and art works.

To create jobs for those doing the complaining.

My favourite example is a bloke who campaigned for certain paperwork restrictions on mining in certain countries. Big global charity campaign, success, into law!¬ At a cost of $4 billion in year one and to no great effect on the problem being addressed.

The bloke who thought up, designed and ran the campaign resigned to set up a consultancy aiding folk in filling out the paperwork.

Creating nice indoor jobs, no heavy lifting, that’s what this grift is all about.