So we screwed that up completely.

The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.

The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S. 

But that peak wasn’t bad enough, so we decided to make it much worse.

“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore

Household work? Children? Oh that’s for other people to do.

The fact is, though, Covid-19 has taken women’s roles back to the 50s. Women are home schooling, working and doing huge amounts of domestic work. The answer to 50s-style problems may be some 70s-style consciousness raising about gender roles.

It’s really quite simple. There is nothing about being female that equates to special skill at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers, and there is nothing about being male that equates to special ineptitude at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers. People who live in households should share the work equitably and fairly.

But, instead of discussing how gender roles are regressing; how the virus has derailed women’s careers; how childcare

CNN says it’s really that bad:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

Oh. Well, … Read the rest

Reddit shut down the gender critical group today.

According to Reddit, a group of predominantly straight, white middle-class and upper-middle-class males can become a vulnerable minority group by changing their pronouns, and women are hateful oppressors for pointing out that this is a sexist trick. https://t.co/X3gywp3Hd7

— Arty Morty (@artymortyarty) June 29, 2020

Let’s look at that page:

Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability

Interesting choice of words. We are told often and relentlessly that trans women are “vulnerable,” including (or indeed especially) vulnerable to women. If trans women are vulnerable to women…well naturally feminist women can’t be permitted to dispute the claims of trans women to one, be women, and two, be vulnerable to women. That would … Read the rest

There’s a penalty for insisting on being actively stupid and uninformed. Unfortunately the penalty is paid by everyone, not just the people insisting on being actively stupid and uninformed.

The US is “unlikely” to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus even with a vaccine, according to the country’s leading public health expert, who warned that a “general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling” is likely to thwart vaccination efforts.

In an interview with CNN, Dr Anthony Fauci also said people not wearing masks was “a recipe for disaster” and said of the Trump administration’s attempts at contact tracing: “I don’t think we’re doing very well.”

Oh well, it’s just a lethal pandemic.… Read the rest

One bullet dodged in the war on abortion rights.

Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal justices on the Supreme Court on Monday to block a controversial Louisiana abortion law that critics said would have closed nearly every clinic in the state.

The 5-4 ruling is a win for supporters of abortion rights who argued that the law was not medically necessary and amounted to a veiled attempt to restrict abortion. The law barred doctors from performing the procedure unless they had admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Not really veiled, is it – everyone knows it’s about killing abortion rights.… Read the rest

About UN Women – what is it? I found myself wondering if it was just one of those fake-official outfits that are nothing but a Twitter account and a person, so I looked it up. It’s a genuine part of the UN – called a UN “entity”…and I don’t really know what that means, but at least it’s not another “Catholic League” which is really just Bill Donohue. It was established by the UN General Assembly in 2010.

It says it’s there for the women and girls.

UN Women is the global champion for gender equality, working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her human rights and live

Very progressive.

None of this can work unless everyone carefully changes the meaning of core words, and why should we agree to do that in such a fatuous delusional cause?

The Guardian solemnly explains about these genius new young people who think you can change material reality by changing the vocabulary.

Who decides your gender?

Don’t be silly. You mean “sex,” and no one decides. The question makes no more sense than “Who decides your species?”

A growing number of kids say it is up to them – and are rejecting the traditional markers of “male” or “female” in favor of identifying as “genderqueer”, which refers to people who don’t fall squarely within the gender binary. Stars like Indya Moore have come

Trump says he never heard a word about it.

President Trump is denying a New York Times report that he was briefed on an alleged Russian effort to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill Western forces — including U.S. troops — in Afghanistan.

Please. He was briefed. Maybe he didn’t read it, maybe he didn’t listen, maybe he was too busy tweeting, maybe he instantly forgot it because he doesn’t give a shit – but he was briefed.

Citing unnamed officials, the Times report, published Friday, details how U.S. intelligence officials reached the conclusion about the secret payments and then briefed the president in March. The White House National Security Council conferred an interagency meeting that same

That’s better.

CHECK THIS OUT: Brian, Tricia and Brady Hurt were fishing in Northern Wisconsin when they spotted this bear with a plastic container over his head. After a few attempts they were able to remove the container and the bear made it back to shore!

Video courtesy of Hurt Family. pic.twitter.com/fLKVWdo2AC

— WMTV 15 News (@wmtv15news) June 28, 2020

… Read the rest

What’s one of the very best ways to spread COVID-19? Singing in a choir. Great! Let’s have a great big choir sing today when Pence is giving a speech. That will put us on the map!

A choir of more than 100 people performed without masks at a robustly attended event in Texas at the First Baptist Church on Sunday that featured a speech by Vice President Mike Pence.

Nearly 2,200 people attended the “Celebrate Freedom Rally,” in the Lone Star State, according to rally organizers, which has seen a severe surge in coronavirus cases since easing restrictions. The venue capacity for the indoor event was close to 3,000 attendees, organizers say.

Throughout the service, the members of the

About that Stephen King retweet…never mind.

Yes. Trans women are women.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 28, 2020

… Read the rest

About this whole issue of men just not seeing women as a class of people who face systematic unequal treatment, a class of people who are dismissed and ignored and ridiculed because they are that class of people. There really are a lot of men who just don’t see that, who don’t believe it’s true, who don’t think it matters. Who see us as “Karens” or potential “Karens” and who feel no embarrassment about dismissing women as “Karens.” Harvey Jeni points out that Lloyd Russell-Moyle is one such man.

Russell-Moyle has since apologised, but it is worth noting he is not alone in his point of view. The idea that women are cynically using their experiences of domestic and

Noteworthy.

When JK Rowling quotes Andrea Dworkin and Stephen King retweets her doing so…we may be seeing some fissures widening.… Read the rest

Rowling has thoughts on Lloyd Russell-Moyle.

Today I discovered that I was accused of hate by shadow environment minister Lloyd Russell-Moyle in the pages of @tribunemagazine. He claimed I was ‘using’ my experiences of sexual assault and domestic violence to ‘discriminate’ against trans people. 1/9

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 28, 2020

For those who’d like to know what triggered the shadow minister’s original accusation, these are the relevant paragraphs of the essay I wrote a couple of weeks ago. The full piece can be read here https://t.co/Vs4V1yfGkA pic.twitter.com/6H90WZfqPG

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 28, 2020

Some emails came from professionals working in women’s refuges, the prison service, the social work system, the criminal justice system and the police.

Of course he did.

A video shared by President Trump on Twitter Sunday includes a man who appears to be a Trump supporter saying “white power” in response to protesters.

In the video, apparently taken at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, people wearing Trump shirts and with Trump signs on their golf carts drive by protesters yelling insults at them and about the president.

In one exchange — eight seconds into the two-minute video — a white man holding a sign that says “Make America Sane Again,” a reference to Trump’s campaign slogan, yells: “Where’s your white hood?” In response, a white man driving a golf cart with signs reading “Trump 2020” and “America First” yells back

Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Tribune:

Recently, of course, we saw people like JK Rowling using her own sexual assault as justification for discriminating against a group of people who were not responsible for it. Trans people are no more likely to be rapists; in fact, they are more likely to be victims of sexual assault themselves. That’s why, despite JK Rowling’s hate towards them, hundreds of trans people wrote to complain to The Sun when it trivialised her domestic abuse on a recent front page.

Of course Rowling isn’t advocating “discriminating against” trans people. It isn’t “discriminating against” people to say they are not a thing that they are not. It isn’t “discriminating against” people to say they … Read the rest

We’re doing it wrong.

The number of confirmed new coronavirus cases per day in the US hit an all-time high of 40,000 according to figures released by Johns Hopkins on Friday, eclipsing the mark first set during one of the deadliest stretches in late April. It’s a resurgence that has led some governors to backtrack or at least pause the reopening of their states.

Wrong direction. Goal is down, not up.

… the Florida department of health reported that the state confirmed 8,942 new cases of coronavirus yesterday, breaking a record set earlier this week.

The Florida health department also reported a frightening rise in the rate of positive test results. On Thursday, 13.1% of test results come back

Behold: an advertisement:

I find it interesting because it’s so in your face, so perverse (not perverted, mind, perverse), so nyah nyah. Saying “we mean every” about a conspicuously male male, with beard and hirsute chest and legs, decked out in dainty catch me-fuck me laydeez underwear. They’re not saying it about a man seriously trying to “dress as” a woman or to look like a woman or to convince anyone he’s a woman, they’re saying it about an unmistakable man with a “Fuck you, bitch” look on his face, dressed and posed like a prostitute.

It’s hard to unpick all the levels here. There’s the “you WILL agree that this is a woman” level, but there’s also the “haha … Read the rest