WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump’s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.
At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged lawmakers to stick to criticizing Harris for her role in Biden-Harris administration policies. (snip-more)
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Monthly headlines are turning into daily headlines:
Monday was recorded as the hottest day ever globally, beating a record set the day before, as countries around the world from Japan to Bolivia to the United States continue to feel the heat, according to the European climate change service.
Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degree Fahrenheit).
Climate scientists say it’s plausible that this is the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change. While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the very hottest day throughout that period, average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture. (snip-more)
A 7-month-old tree kangaroo peeked out of its mom’s pouch at the Bronx Zoo and here is the video
The second baby of a tree-dwelling kangaroo made its public debut this week in New York, poking its pink head head out of its mom’s furry white pouch. (snip-click the Video hyperlink just above the title)
Six-rayed sea stars make great moms! Unlike most sea stars, mama six-rayed sea stars are VERY involved in their kids’ lives, caressing and protecting their babies for months. When they’re big enough, the youngsters venture out on their own to ruthlessly hunt down their tiny prey.
Jill has some memes so grand I grabbed a few, we let each other do that. But the more I read the more I loved each one. I try, but Jill finds the best. She is grand. As for fireworks. We have cats that are traumatic sufferers and our inside / outside cat ran just as Ron went to get him because the first of the fireworks went off. Ron stayed up until nearly 1 AM when he was able to get the cat back inside. The poor thing lay on the bed shaking and struggling like every boom was at attack on him and his frail old body. Like Jill, we had 6 to 8 hours of bangs and booms. When Ron and I used to work 12-hour shifts in the hospital, the 4th of July was a horrible night to try to sleep when we had to be up at 4:30. No respect for working people. Our park even forbade people from doing it … but they still did their fireworks all night. Really the people wanting to take other’s rights, others equality from them wanted to show their idea of freedom by again by infringing on the rights of others. Hugs. Scottie
A rodeo bull hopped a fence surrounding an Oregon arena and ran through a concession area into a parking lot, injuring at least three people before wranglers caught up with it, officials said.
The crowd at the 84th Sisters Rodeo in the city of Sisters was singing along with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” on Saturday night, most with their cellphone flashlights on, as the bull ran around the arena before what was to be the final bull ride of the night, when the bull hopped the fence, according to a video shot by a fan.
Videos posted online showed the bull running through a concession area, knocking over a garbage can and sending people scrambling. The bull lifted one person off the ground, spun them end over end, and bounced them off its horns before the person hit the ground.
One clip shared on social media shows the bull rampaging through a concession area and into a parking lot, violently colliding with a woman along the way. The victim is brutally tossed into the air and repeatedly hit by the bull’s horns before crashing to the ground, with horrified witnesses quickly rushing to her aid.
In the arena, an announcer could be heard telling the crowd: “Get to higher ground! There’s a bull out!” Sisters Rodeo said the bull was eventually “secured next to the livestock holding pens by our rodeo pickup men.”
“We wish the best to all affected,” the statement from the association read. “The safety of our fans is our highest priority and we appreciate their support.”
The truth is that the bulls are selectively bred for a predisposition to buck, which means they are especially sensitive to any negative stimulus, such as the riders they are trying to buck off. This is thought to be an evolutionary response to a predator jumping on the bull’s back. In other words, the bull feels it is under attack and is fighting for its life. The wild bucking seen at these events does not occur outside the arena.
In addition to being mounted by the unwanted rider, a “flank strap” is cinched tight around the bull’s torso just before it is released into the arena. This causes the bull discomfort, creating yet further negative stimulus to induce the bull to buck harder. One study on bucking bulls puts it very clearly: “The purpose of the flank rope is to produce an annoyance to the bull.”
I want to thank Ali for the link to this story. I will try to post the comment she left pointing me to it. I do not mind a link here or there in the comments if it leads me to new good article on issues. Ali has offered me many links in the comments and all of them so far have been worth reading, and yes many I end up posting like this one. Thank you Ali. Hugs Scottie Below is Ali’s comment.
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!
When I was a kid and well up until into my teens in the 1990s, the right wing in America sold us a dystopian vision of what would occur if gay and lesbian people were granted equal rights, most notably, the right to marry.
According to conservative pundits and politicians, if we allowed same-sex marriage to occur, every street in America would immediately, overnight, turn into the most extreme version of a San Francisco leather parade. Innocent families would be forced, Clockwork Orange style, to watch as bulging crotches were shoved into their faces, sparkling zippers twirling before them, women dressed in men’s clothes, men wearing dresses, the kinkiest sexual acts occurring in public at the drop of a hat.
On Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, equal marriage rights would surely end up in people marrying ducks, cows, goats, etc. Certainly.
But in the decades since then, after figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both now thankfully six feet under) blamed LGBTQ people for events like 9/11, none of that happened. For sure, there are sometimes leather parades, but they’re mostly happening in the same places where there have always been leather parades and nobody there is bothered by them.
Instead, after the epochal event of same sex marriage becoming legal, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No forced Pride parades breaking out in rural Alabama. No kids in Montana getting instructed on the fine art of same-sex kissing. No families in Orange County, California, compelled to learn the words to “YMCA” in gender reeducation camps. Nothing at all.
Why? Because the vast majority of LGBTQ people are just as boring as straight people. They have jobs, go to school and work, take care of their kids, have marital bliss and squabbles and all the rest of it. They aren’t activists militantly marching in the streets for issues or disco, but simply want to make it through another day in peace. Boring as hell, like all of us are.
And this is a triumph. Because for all of American history, the people in power – almost always wealthy, straight, white, men – have attained power and retained power by demonizing everyone else who doesn’t look like them. Black men were after their daughters, Muslim people are terrorists, women are emotional hysterics, and on and on and on. These people profit off of the dehumanization of others and by working overtime to scare people about the horror that could happen if we treated everybody with equality and respect.
Yet every time that the country gets over itself and fulfills the words of the Founders in ways that they could not comprehend in their limited view of the world and who truly deserved “liberty,” we collectively discover that the nightmare was always total nonsense.
This is a lesson to keep in mind as we watch in horror as the right whips up fears about immigrants, transgender people, and refugees from the Middle East in our current electoral cycle. Integrating LGBTQ families into the mainstream of American life made the country stronger, not weaker. Our collective understanding increased, the rich tapestry that is the United States benefitted from increased diversity. The only ones who lost out were close-minded bigots who can’t accept that the world doesn’t look like the deranged fantasies in their brains (and never existed in reality).
Boring is good. We’re all boring. Reject the lurid fantasy world of the haters and instead embrace the mundane reality of a diverse world. And throw a leather parade, if you feel like it. This is America, where you’re free to do so if you like.
If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!
Ali sent me this link on March 1st. Told you I have a lot of very old tabs just hang on because I want so badly to read them plus all the new ones I can’t keep up with. Thank you Ali. Hugs. Scottie
The first documented sex between two male humpback whales is just the latest challenge to our presumptions about sexuality
The sighting near Hawaii in 2022 of a male humpback whale penetrating another male has been confirmed in a new study.
Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/SWNS
A humpback whale’s penis entering another male. Same-sex behaviour has often been observed in cetaceans.
Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/Marine Mammal Science
Whales are extraordinarily sensuous creatures. Those blubbery bodies are highly sensitive, and sensitised. At social meetings, pods of sperm, humpback and right whales will roll around one another’s bodies for hours at a time. I’ve seen a group of right whales engaged in foreplay and penetration lasting an entire morning
I have also watched a male-female couple so blissfully conjoined that they appeared unbothered by our little fishing boat as they passed underneath it. And in what may sound like a career of cetacean voyeurism, I have also been caught up in a fast-moving superpod of dusky dolphins continually penetrating each other at speed, regardless of the gender of their partner.
That’s why this week’s report of the first scientifically documented male-to-male sexual interactions between two humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii is not surprising.
The remarkable image of a two-metre whale penis entering another male “leaves little room for discussion that there is a sexual component to such behaviour”, as one whale scientist, Jeroen Hoekendijk at the Wageningen Marine Research institute in the Netherlands, notes drily.
In fact, one of the whales was ailing and there has been speculation that the encounter may not have been consensual or that the healthy whale was actually giving comfort to the other. Whatever the truth, such “flagrant” acts also expose many of our human presumptions about sexuality, gender and identity.
Off the north-west Pacific coast of the US, male orcas often leave family pods to rub their erections against each other’s bellies. But females have also reportedly been seen engaging in sexual contact with one another, too.
Indeed, the graphic accounts of male-to-male behaviour may mask many “unseen” female-to-female sexual interactions.
Dr Conor Ryan, an honorary research fellow at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, notes: “It’s easy to visibly identify male ‘homosexual’ sex when an extruded penis can be two metres long.” It is less easy to diagnose when female sperm whales are seen “cuddling”, as Hoekendijk observes.
A humpback whale’s penis entering another male. Same-sex behaviour has often been observed in cetaceans. Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/Marine Mammal Science
Ryan has often witnessed same-sex behaviour between whales and dolphins. “I am interested in the things that we miss,” he says. He has recorded competitive behaviour by humpback whales in groups that seemed to be typically male, such as pursuing other whales.
But they proved, from DNA samples, to be genetically female. He speculates that humpback females may even use whale song – hitherto thought to be the province of mating males.
“If I were a female being harassed by horny males, maybe I would sing too,” says Ryan. “To attract more females, to take attention off me, while masquerading as a male.”
These observations throw up new ideas about the way these animals behave. Whale society is almost overwhelmingly matriarchal. Female sperm whales, for example, travel in large groups – sometimes thousands strong – in which males are only “useful” for their sperm, visiting the groups briefly, then leaving the females to their own society.
Male-oriented science has in the past made various judgments regarding sexual behaviour. But the idea of lesbian whales should not be surprising. Ryan even cites the case of a “non-binary” beaked whale, which was discovered to have both male and female genitalia.
Even identifying as a species can be fluid for cetaceans. In 2022, near Caithness in Scotland, a bottlenose dolphin was found to be identifying as a porpoise, swimming with a pod of porpoises and using their vocalisations. In one of the great queer pairings of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf referred to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, as “my porpoise”.
We cannot know how whales and dolphins themselves regard genital interactions. But in most cases they appear to enjoy them – without, perhaps, the preconceptions we humans as a species have historically projected upon such behaviour. They may make great clickbait on social media, but they have an important relevance for us, too.
When the Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl published his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity – listing 450 species exhibiting such behaviour, including whales and dolphins – it was used in evidence in a US supreme court case in 2003 that struck down, as unconstitutional, homophobic “sodomy” laws being used in Texas.
It is telling, too, that the best-known work of literary fiction written about whales, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, is a decidedly queer book. Melville conflates the queerness and diversity of his characters – his narrator, Ishmael, is declaredmarried to his shipmate, the multi-tattooed Queequeg, based on a Māori warrior – with the mysterious sensuality of the whales he is describing. He even spends an entire chapter describing a whale’s foreskin, with joyful innuendo.
The sea itself seems to be a queer place, where gender is at best a slippery notion at times. Slipper shells stuck together on the beach, which you might find when beachcombing, are in fact changing sex, from female at the bottom to male at the top. Cetaceans’ genitals are concealed, in any case, in genital slits. Sleek and streamlined, it is as if bothersome sexual definitions were overtaken by the sheer beauty of wondrous hydrodynamics.
So much of what we project on to whales and dolphins is about our own complexes. They seem to lead a free and easy life. They may not possess hands to manipulate, but they have the biggest brains on the planet, and highly sensual bodies to match. Having been around for millions of years, it is tempting to imagine their long-evolved existence as one that is beyond all the things that seem to hold us humans back.
A humpback whale’s penis entering another male. Same-sex behaviour has often been observed in cetaceans.
Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/Marine Mammal Science
Scottie's Playtime 
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!