I’m very pleased to report that Dog Treat Lady’s cyst is looking miles better: the swelling’s gone, it’s dull red in a “healing nicely” way rather than angry-looking, and it’s barely oozing. She’s confidently saying it’s fine and she won’t need surgery, and I hope the nurse agrees when she goes back to have it looked at in a few days.

Oh look:

Playing to the Gallery: The Sarah Jane Baker Verdict

Sarah Jane Baker has been cleared of inciting violence against women.

It has since come to light that Judge Tan Ikram, who allowed this dangerous man to pass of [sic] the threat of violence against women as nothing more than a joke, is a ‘Diversity specialist’ and a contributor to the ‘Equal Treatment Courts Benchbook’.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/31/trans-paedophiles-are-laughing-at-britain/ It is outrageous that crime statistics are being skewed by police and courts recording men such as Dominic Carter as women when they commit sex crimes. Let’s close this loophole now. Men that perpetrate acts of sexual violence and abuse must never be allowed to hide behind a gender-identity smokescreen. Using a transgender identity in court as a mitigation in sex crime cases is the very opposite of what should happen. There should be an assumption that any man charged with sex offences who subsequently self-identifies as a woman should be questioned about his ulterior motives. https://archive.ph/DxQ32

The Spectator

Why Iranians don’t hate Israel

One is an oppressive regime that guns down its own people, promotes a radical Islamist theology and hangs gay people from cranes. The other is a li...

The Ayatollahs believe in an extreme Islamist ideology in which a devastating world war will pre-empt the coming of the Mahdi, or 12th Imam, who has been concealed by God until the end times. They believe that when the world is in flames, this Messianic figure will emerge. He will assemble a group of 313 trusted lieutenants who will wage war on the infidels, and rule the globe in 313 cantons after their victory. The principal obstacle to the coming of the Mahdi, they believe, is the existence of Israel and the Jews. And the three pillars of their campaign are nuclear weapons, overseas militia and an arsenal of ballistic missiles. Make no mistake: they have a strategy and they are pursuing it. Within this worldview – which appears absurd to the secular western mind – it is entirely rational to wage nuclear war on the Jewish state. After all, that way lies the Messiah.

Make it even easier for the Dog Poo Fairy to tidy up after you!

Behold, my mighty tomato harvest! (And some beetroot and a turnip. Oh look, it started raining.) I’ve given up on the squash and outdoor tomatoes, and put cold-season greens like pak choi in their place. Still picking peas, though!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/29/mohammed-al-ghamdi-death-sentence-saudi-arabia-twitter/

UnHerd

The NHS doesn't need to be an 'LGBTQ+ ally'

If you have to visit a hospital, you will probably have lots of questions. Are the results of those tests as scary as you fear? Who will look after...

It’s yet another example of institutional capture, a fact confirmed by questions for staff in hospitals signed up to the scheme. “Does the service have sensitive guidance in place to support a noncarrying parent to breast/chest feed?” is classic trans activist framing. The Royal Free seems to have gone further down this route than most. According to guidance posted on a staff noticeboard, staff are apparently being advised not to ask “inappropriate questions” such as “what is your name?” because trans patients might not want to disclose their birth name. A hospital spokesman denied that this was official policy, but could not say who created the guidance.

These two cases are the usual disgusting paedos trying (and in one case effectively managing) to get off by claiming to be women, but check out the language. Only one “she” and one “her”, both direct quotes from the defendant’s lawyer. Admittedly, no accurate pronouns used, and no mention of sex for the second one, but the reader is left in no doubt. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/30/paedophile-changes-gender-sophie-carter-court/ But a sentencing hearing at Southampton Crown Court was told that despite being a man when arrested, Carter now goes by the name Sophie Carter. Carter attended court dressed in a pink T-shirt, pink shorts and wearing pink nail polish. Carter admitted three counts of making indecent images of children in relation to an incident on April 3 2021. https://archive.ph/Hnx4d

Potato hare.

The trans threat to freedom

Gender ideology relies on censorship to survive.

It should come as no surprise that politicians in thrall to the trans movement are proposing authoritarian policies in the name of ‘trans rights’. This is, after all, a fundamentally anti-liberal, regressive ideology. It goes well beyond campaigning for the right of individuals to articulate whatever identity they wish. Even during those dark days when homosexuality was outlawed in the UK, it was not illegal to present as another gender. Britain, after all, has a long tradition of transvestitism among both men and women. Rather than liberate people from repressive laws, trans ideology seeks to impose a whole range of oppressive obligations upon society at large. It is but one branch on a wider tree of allied ideologies – including critical race theory and extreme environmentalism. The ultimate objective of these movements is to forcibly restructure society and to severely restrict the expression of competing views.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/blaming-climate-change-for-everything-is-lazy-vdch2zxpp The media, including the BBC, now robotically tack on to every story about a geological event or bad weather (all weather stories are bad stories; a good weather story is just a nice day) that “scientists say” the phenomenon is due to human-induced climate change. It’s obvious, too, that news gatherers no longer feel obliged to consult said “scientists” to ascribe every planetary unpleasantness to the burning of fossil fuels, because the “scientists say” mantra is trotted out with the unthinking habituality of “that’s all for tonight”. So we’re told the wildfires in Canada (also explained by other factors) and southern Europe and the heatwaves in Spain and the southwestern US are all caused by climate change, though you can be sure that if these same regions were unusually cold this summer that would be caused by climate change as well. There are even outliers determined to pin volcanoes and earthquakes on climate change. Any day now I expect to hear that soaring rates of gender dysphoria are caused by climate change. Does this knee-jerk allegation, often unsupported by evidence, really serve the cause? Sloppy attributions on a daily basis sound like propaganda — because that’s what they are. Surely these reports would be more persuasive if a news presenter occasionally announced, “Scientists say that the wildfires in Maui may have little or nothing to do with climate change”. Wouldn’t that make the alarmist stories seem more reliable? Doesn’t this numbingly predictable and doctrinally partisan assertion regarding every event under the sun sneakily undermine the save-the-planet message with its suspicious consistency? While we’re at it, too, “the planet” doesn’t need saving. If the activists are right, we need saving. “The planet” will be happy as Larry, even if our species disappears. https://archive.li/7rbjn

The Spectator

Ukraine’s real killing fields: An investigation into the war’s first aid crisis

Donetsk It’s past midnight and I am standing in silence with the crew of a military ambulance on the edge of the Donetsk region. The village is d...

Investing in decent tourniquets is money well spent. The medics I speak to say that two-thirds of Ukrainian soldiers die from blood loss. I meet Bilka, 24, a medic in the 243rd Territorial Defence Battalion, who has just returned from Bakhmut. She explains what happens to the injured person on the front line: ‘You have to drag a person with your hands approximately three to five kilometres. You can’t drive there even in armoured vehicles because of the heavy shellings and mines.’ Medics, she says, try to avoid using the official first aid supplies issued to them, because of the admin that is involved. Each component of a government-issued medical kit must be accounted for, including equipment that is obviously sub-standard. ‘If a drug has expired, the write-off procedure is so difficult that it is easier to record that it has been destroyed by fire,’ she says.