Linkage

As global temperatures increase, Earth’s water cycle is changing. Over the past 50 years, this has led to an expansion of Earth’s tropical and subtropical zones. Tropical areas are moist and lush, but dry at the northern and southern edges.

These dry edges are pushing towards the poles. Regions that used to enjoy a gentler Mediterranean climate, as shown in the map below, are turning into dry subtropical zones.

They include highly populated regions, such as Southern California. Similarly, parts of Australia including Perth and much of southeast Australia has dried in recent decades, in a pattern consistent with tropical expansion.

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In addition to being The Sunniest Girl on the Internet™, Mimsy is able to break my heart and reduce me to tears. She does it on a regular basis, but in a good way.

My wife got me a cabbage patch doll as a solstice gift this year. I’m 47 years old. I started bawling as soon as I opened the package. This… is a complicated story.

[…]

I bawled. I held her against my chest and I cried, hard. I think I scared our kids a little bit. My wife gently prompted me to explain the significance of the gift, of the doll. I tried; I failed. And sorry to only say this now, near the end of the story, but I’m not going to be able to explain the full significance here, either.

I couldn’t put her down. Eventually the kids wandered away to do their own teenager things and my wife settled into one end of the couch to read. I leaned up against her and cuddled my doll. I was there for hours, cradling her, shifting her from one baby-holding position to another. I smelled her hair (it smells like yarn). I kissed her forehead.

I named her Elizabeth. I’ve always loved that name, especially because it has so many variants. I strongly suspect that she’ll end up being called Lizbet for short.

Because here’s the thing: when I hold her and I close my eyes, I’m an eight-year-old girl again. If I think about my parent’s house, I’m there. Eight years old and in a yellow play dress I never got to wear. Cradling Elizabeth. Hugging her. Talking to her. Watching television together. I’m an eight-year-old girl again but this time I got what I needed and I wasn’t too afraid to accept it.

Over the holidays, the technologist Sriram Krishnan was named as Trump’s AI advisor. Off of that, a battle over H-1B visas bubbled up, triggering a civil war in MAGA Land—where many say immigrants like Krishnan should not be prioritized over native-born citizens. That led to future DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswamy, whose parents were born in India, to take a swipe at American culture:

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote on X. He went on to recommend a different upbringing for America’s kids: “More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers.”

[…]

To which I say: Hold the corded kitchen phone. Okay, now put your mom on so she can talk to my mom about whose house we’re sleeping at.

[…]

At sleepovers, you came face to face with many versions of the American dream, or at least many versions of American snacks. You learned that different families had different cultures, and different rules, and you learned how to be a guest, and how to exist outside the sphere of your own family. It’s like a laboratory to see if your parents’ rearing, at least with regard to manners and to self-soothing, worked.

[…]

Kids show up to college today never having fostered intimacy with another person. When friendships are mediated by screen there is no opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty. Learning how to shave your legs, how to do your hair, how to use a tampon, or in my case learning that your eyebrows need an overhaul are all things that happen at sleepovers. But it wasn’t just about going to war with our own body hair; it was the crucible where girls grow up.

While serving as a contractor and senior adviser for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Alex Smith had a broad mandate.

He was tasked with offering insight on issues concerning gender, infectious disease, nutrition, and the health of mothers and children.

And all of those issues converged in Gaza, as Israel’s siege unfolded. […]

As he reflects upon his time in the Biden government, Smith notes a stark contrast between Biden’s support for war-torn Ukraine and his lack of support for Gaza, where entire neighbourhoods have been levelled.

“When we talk about Ukraine, we can condemn the bombing of hospitals. We can talk about the resilience of the people who are being attacked. We can talk about the perpetrators who are attacking them,” Smith said.

“But when it comes to Gaza, we don't talk about those people. We don't plan for their health systems to be rebuilt.”

When he voted in the 2024 presidential race, Smith knew he could not back Biden’s vice president, Harris, fearing a continuation of the president’s policies.

His home state of Maine employs a ranked-choice system, allowing residents to offer support to multiple candidates. Smith used his ballot to rank Harris as his last choice, behind the third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.

Smith explained he has a grim view of Biden’s legacy will be perceived in the years to come. “He will be remembered as the US president who manufactured a genocide against children in Gaza.”

A touching (and personally resonant) little story from Tattie, a dearly valued member of my Fediverse parasocial circle:

Even before marriage, I had always had an aversion to buying “stuff”. I always tried to get by with the bare minimum, the cheapest things, the most practical. I never felt I deserved good things, and often I didn't have a good sense of what it was I wanted, exactly.

Speaking to other transfems, it seems it's quite a common experience. Before we start to grow into our true selves, we tend to live small lives, unassuming ones. Self-sacrificing lives. If we can do without, we do without.

I remember in university feeling too guilty to buy name-brand chocolate biscuits, going for the store-brand ones instead. A matter of perhaps twenty pence, but twenty pence which I thought didn’t deserve to be spent on me. I remember living in the cheapest clothes I could find, and wearing them until they were full of holes. Cycling everywhere because getting a bus would be too bougie, apparently.

It wasn’t about needing to save money. It was about self-denial. Self-denial had become a virtue in my mind— I justified it with half-understood stoic philosophy and Buddhism, but even without that philosophical framework I would be doing it.

Why?

Because I had been told I had to live in self-denial. To pretend to all the world that I was a boy, to tamp my feminine nature right down so that nobody would notice, nobody would suspect. And if this was good and right, well, self-denial must in general be good. Otherwise what was I doing this all for?

The executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global challenges his readers:

The transgender community accounts for less than 1% of the U.S. population, which makes them an easy and “safe” target for persecution. But these are real people from real families.

Taking away their rights, taking away their health care, shaming them, scapegoating them — this is truly a death sentence. And if you gave a damn, you would speak up for them.

Whatever you think you know about transgender people is probably wrong if you don’t actually know any transgender people. If you heard their stories, you would know they are sincere. They do not seek attention; it’s only the people attacking them who seek attention.

Here’s the main thing I want to impart for now: Transgender identity is real. It is authentic. You do not have to understand it to accept it. And even if you won’t accept it, what harm is there in letting other people live peacefully and in good health? How does the existence of transgender people threaten you other than challenging your too-small view of the world?

This is a gem:

The more widespread fast vehicles are within a society, the more time—beyond a certain point—people will spend and lose on travel. It’s a mathematical fact.

The reason? We’ve just seen it: The cities and towns have been broken up into endless highway suburbs, for that was the only way to avoid traffic congestion in residential centers. But the underside of this solution is obvious: ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything. To make room for the cars, distances have increased. People live far from their work, far from school, far from the supermarket—which then requires a second car so the shopping can be done and the children driven to school. Outings? Out of the question. Friends? There are the neighbors… and that’s it. In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes. Of course, you can get yourself to work doing 60 mph, but that’s because you live 30 miles from your job and are willing to give half an hour to the last 6 miles. To sum it all up: “A good part of each day’s work goes to pay for the travel necessary to get to work.” (Ivan Illich).

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So, the jig is up? No, but the alternative to the car will have to be comprehensive. For in order for people to be able to give up their cars, it won’t be enough to offer them more comfortable mass transportation. They will have to be able to do without transportation altogether because they’ll feel at home in their neighborhoods, their community, their human-sized cities, and they will take pleasure in walking from work to home-on foot, or if need be by bicycle. No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

“People,” writes Illich, “will break the chains of overpowering transportation when they come once again to love as their own territory their own particular beat, and to dread getting too far away from it.” But in order to love “one’s territory” it must first of all be made livable, and not trafficable. The neighborhood or community must once again become a microcosm shaped by and for all human activities, where people can work, live, relax, learn, communicate, and knock about, and which they manage together as the place of their life in common. When someone asked him how people would spend their time after the revolution, when capitalist wastefulness had been done away with, Marcuse answered, “We will tear down the big cities and build new ones. That will keep us busy for a while.”

Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.

So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.

Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.

Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely. 

The French Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology (SFEDP) recently commissioned its own version of the Cass Review, and this study reached almost the exact opposite conclusions of Cass […]

Upon reading both the Cass Review and the SFEDP Review, what immediately jumps out is the very different tone of each—Cass takes a tone that feels skeptical to the point of excess, offering mysteriously curt phrasing, statements rife with implications of harm or conspiracy by mainstream providers, and an overall sense of invalidation. By contrast, the SFEDP Review reads like a scientific paper—its language is straightforward and sterile, and there is none of the innuendo of Cass. Reading both side by side feels almost like traveling from a land of paranoia and conspiracy into levelheaded reality.

These basic differences in language imply very different approaches to working with trans minors—gender-affirming vs gender-critical.

[…]

Perhaps nowhere is the difference between the Cass Review and the SFEDP Review more clear than here: Cass bemoans the lack of good evidence and recommends generating it, whereas SFEDP declares that it is ready to follow the science by supporting minors in their transition. One cannot help but suspect that even if further research is conducted, in another 20 years another Cass will come along and demand another round of research into trans youth.

One idea that Tennessee has floated — that sex-based laws related to biological sex difference are shielded from scrutiny — is particularly pernicious. As I have shown in research, this has never been the court’s approach. And for good reason. Throughout the history of sex discrimination, hiding bias behind biology has been a common tactic. Many sex-based lines that have been challenged in the court — from a male-only university admissions policy to rules distinguishing mothers and fathers when it comes to the citizenship of their children — have been couched in terms of physical sex differences. Upon examination, the court has acknowledged that sex stereotypes and not biological differences drive these laws. Without requiring that courts take a close look at all sex-based laws, we make it far too easy to legislate on sexual prejudice.

Just as important as addressing women’s subordination, equal protection has been a key tool in striking down laws that confine not just women, but men, to traditional roles and expectations. Equal protection has been used to invalidate laws that exclude men from caregiving or that require anyone to conform their behavior or appearance to sex-based conventions. In doing so, the doctrine helps to free all of us from limiting sex stereotypes.

Seen this way, it is not hard to appreciate that the law at issue here strikes at the heart of sex equality. The Tennessee law — and trans discrimination more generally — is not only about discrimination against trans people, but about ensuring that we all keep in our gender lanes. As Prelogar explained, the law here is “one that prohibits inconsistency with sex,” requiring that children born as boys and girls “look and live like boys and girls.” Tennessee’s argument would call into question the longstanding freedom we all enjoy to live our lives as we wish, regardless of sex.