Utopia, you are standing in it!

As I reported the other day, Scarlett Johansson was set to star in a movie called “Rub & Tug”, recounting the life of Dante “Tex” Gill, a transgender man who transitioned at a late age, and then was jailed for tax evasion after having run a string of massage parlors that were fronts for prostitution. After an outcry from the transgender community, Johansson apologized and withdrew from the movie. Now, as many predicted, the movie’s future is dicey because its big bankable star is gone. Click on the screenshot below to read about it in The Wrap.

A quote:

The future of “Rub & Tug” is in limbo following Scarlett Johansson’s exit from the project because of objections to her playing a trans man.

According to an individual with knowledge of the project, it is unclear if “Rub & Tug” will actually go into production. The insider…

Environmentalists should be encouraging NZ’s development of ryegrass with the potential to substantially increase farm production, reduce water demand and decrease methane emissions.

We are told the grass has been shown in AgResearch’s Palmerston North laboratories to grow up to 50 per cent faster than conventional ryegrass, to be able to store more energy for better animal growth, to be more resistant to drought, and to produce up to 23 per cent less methane (the largest single contributor to New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions) from livestock

On top of these environmental benefits, the potential value of GDP based on AgResearch’s modelling “is in the range of $2 billion to $5 billion in additional revenue depending on the adoption rate by farmers,” AgResearch principal scientist Greg Bryan said almost two years ago.

There’s just one snag.

British media outlets published reports on the latest violence between Israel and Gaza terror groups, characteristically muddling the sequence of events by highlighting the Israeli response to Gaza terror, whilst downplaying or ignoring completely the terror itself. 

Here’s what occurred.

On Friday night, an Israeli soldier was moderately wounded by shrapnel from a grenade lobbed at him from the northern Gaza Strip during violent riots by thousands of Palestinians at the border. 

Early on Saturday morning, the IDF attacked sites used by Palestinians to build and distribute incendiary kites – bombs which have caused thousands of fires and destroyed over 7,400 acres of land, context regarding the current tensions between Israel and Gaza largely ignored by the media.  

Israel’s air force also bombed two attack tunnels near the border.

Later Saturday morning, terrorists fired scores of rockets on Israeli communities in the south, forcing thousands to flee for bomb shelters, and included a…

Irish lawmakers have positioned Ireland to be the first country in the world to divest from fossil fuels. According to the The New York Times, legislation was passed Wednesday in the country’s lower house of parliament, the Dail, requiring Ireland’s sovereign wealth fund to sell off its holdings in fossil fuel companies as soon as is practicable.

As The Times points out, the Irish environmentalist group, Trocaire, has been supporting the bill and called it both substantive and symbolic while Ireland’s Green Party called it a historic day on Twitter. However, what is largely left out of the press’s reporting shows that the proposal is meaningless.

According to The Financial Times, included in the bill are exemptions for fossil fuel companies that are declared to be in compliance with Ireland’s climate objectives. The legislation also includes exceptions for exchange traded or hedge funds which were added as…

We previously discussed the irresponsible proposal to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) by a rising number of Democratic members and leaders. It is the Democratic version of the equally irresponsible proposal from Republicans to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or Internal Revenue Service.  This type of demagogic call however was answered this week when the Republicans called the bluff of three members and actually put their bill to abolish ICE on schedule for a vote.  Reps. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Parmila Jayapal of Washington, and Adriano Espaillat promptly declared the vote a stunt and said that they would vote against their own bill.

As reported in multiple venues, actor Scarlett Johansson, set to play a transgender man in an upcoming movie, has been vilified for what I guess can be called “gender appropriation”. How dare she, ask the critics, take a role that could be played more “authentically” by a genuine transgender man? As the New York Times reports: