So, let’s make the pandemic worse, yes?

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) on Monday issued an executive order blocking local governments from requiring COVID vaccinations for worker, AZ Central reports.

What to do – reduce the spread of a lethal virus? Or increase it? Let’s go with increase.

Ducey’s move follows the Tucson City Council’s sweeping 6-1 vote that would “require that city employees must show proof of at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by Aug. 24, or face a five-day suspension without pay and possibly higher health-insurance premiums.”

Why would the City Council do that? To reduce the spread of the virus. Apparently that’s a bad thing to do?

Matt Burdick, a Tucson city spokesperson, also pushed back against Ducey’s order.

“It is the surest form of protection against COVID-19,” Burdick said in an email. “However, we recognize that obtaining a vaccine is a personal health decision.”

Yes, but no. Yes, it is literally that, but it’s not only that. It’s personal but it’s not only personal. It’s a personal decision that affects other people. It’s childish to keep pretending not to know that. Personal decisions can affect other people. If you make a personal decision to throw heavy objects around in a crowded room, you’re likely to injure other people.

It’s surprising it’s taken this long.

The Colorado River has been shrinking for years. It’s all been a pretty massive mistake.

CNN goes on:

The federal government on Monday declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, as climate change-fueled drought pushes the level in Lake Mead to unprecedented lows.

States in the Southwest include Arizona, where the population of Phoenix continues to grow at speed, which is ridiculous – criminally ridiculous. It’s too hot for human habitation, so air conditioning is everywhere, and air conditioning uses a lot of power. Also? Water. Phoenix shouldn’t exist, let alone be getting bigger and bigger.

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US by volume, has drained at an alarming rate this year. At around 1,067 feet above sea level and 35% full, the Colorado River reservoir is at its lowest since the lake was filled after the Hoover Dam was completed in the 1930s.

Lake Powell, which is also fed by the Colorado River and is the country’s second-largest reservoir, recently sank to a record low and is now 32% full.

This is not sustainable or desirable.

The significance of the reservoirs’ rapid decline cannot be overstated. The Colorado River supplies water to more than 40 million people living across seven US states and Mexico.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell provide a critical supply of drinking water, hydropower and irrigation for many communities across the region including rural farms and tribal nations.

No joke.

Owen Jones pretending not to be a misogynist.

The thing about OJ is that he wants to pretend to be a feminist while still dismissing women’s concerns and protests at being appropriated or pushed aside or both by…guys like him.

Always a charmer.

Oh, cool then. Men slapping women “because they’re being racist” is just fine, and obviously not coercion.

Medical workers protesting…medical precautions.

They were hard to miss on the corner of a busy four-way intersection at the entrance to Winchester Medical Center: a group of about 20 people — many of them nurses, some in scrubs — protesting the hospital’s recent coronavirus vaccination mandate.

Yes, gee, why would a hospital want the staff not to spread a lethal virus?

The nurses’ employer, Valley Health, the parent company of Winchester Medical Center, had given them an ultimatum: Get the shot or face termination. And those standing on the street corner Tuesday had already made up their minds.

Valley Health announced a vaccine mandate for its 6,300 employees at its six locations on July 19, while offering religious and medical exemptions for eligible applicants.

Religious exemptions should be out of the question. That’s a grotesque, insulting reason to allow people to spread a killer virus.

Margaret Foster Riley, a public health sciences and law professor at the University of Virginia, said the unvaccinated health-care workers probably do not have a case that their rights are being violated. The nation has a long history of legal vaccination requirements, especially for health-care workers, she said. What’s different is that entities are requiring shots that are under emergency use authorization and not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

On account of how the virus isn’t going to stand by politely and wait until the FDA approves the shots. It’s just going to go ahead and do what a virus does.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labeled the vast majority of Virginia counties, including Warren and Frederick, as having “high” virus transmission. For the first time since April, more than 1,000 Virginians are hospitalized with covid-19, and daily new cases are back to February levels.

Inside Winchester Medical Center, other staffers have watched their colleagues’ protestations with unease.

“Being in the health-care profession, it’s bigger than just yourself,” said Sherri Thornton, a nurse in the emergency room. “You’ve dedicated your life and your profession to taking care of people and doing no harm to anyone, and I think you have to protect not only yourself but your patients.”

You’d think.

H/t What a Maroon

On the one hand, real freedom – freedom to get an education, to work, to leave the house, to travel, to be around other people, to be godless. On the other hand, fake freedom – to refuse to wear safety belts in cars, to refuse to heed warnings about building in flood zones or fire zones, to refuse to wear masks during a pandemic.

The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, will temporarily be allowed to enforce an order banning mask mandates, the state supreme court ruled on Sunday.

So the governor is free to force other people to risk their health by allowing third parties to risk the health of their employees and students or patients or customers by not mandating masks. It seems like a very perverse and frivolous kind of “freedom.”

However, the ultimate fate of mask mandates in Texas is far from clear, as school districts and localities fight to maintain control of public health orders and Covid-19 caseloads driven by Delta variant infections among unvaccinated people surge.

They want to have mandates, and the governor wants to ban mandates. Whose freedom is more important here? Yes, having to wear a mask is an interference with freedom in a sense, but then so is being on a ventilator. Freedom from COVID is a more profound freedom than freedom from wearing a mask.

Abbott has said his order does not ban mask-wearing.

“Anyone who wants to wear a mask can do so, including in schools,” he said in a tweet on Sunday.

Cute, but since wearing a mask protects other people more than the self, that’s not as consoling as it might sound.

Making lists.

For one last day?

From Kabul:

Early on Sunday morning I was heading to university for a class when a group of women came running out from the women’s dormitory. I asked what had happened and one of them told me the police were evacuating them because the Taliban had arrived in Kabul, and they will beat women who do not have a burqa.

We all wanted to get home, but we couldn’t use public transport. The drivers would not let us in their cars because they did not want to take responsibility for transporting a woman. It was even worse for the women from the dormitory, who are from outside Kabul and were scared and confused about where they should go.

Meanwhile, the men standing around were making fun of girls and women, laughing at our terror. “Go and put on your chadari [burqa],” one called out. “It is your last days of being out on the streets,” said another. “I will marry four of you in one day,” said a third.

Haha heehee. So funny.

She and her sisters went home and hid all their diplomas and other evidence of higher education.

All I could see around me were the fearful and scared faces of women and ugly faces of men who hate women, who do not like women to get educated, work and have freedom. Most devastating to me were the ones who looked happy and made fun of women. Instead of standing by our side, they stand with the Taliban and give them even more power.

…

Then today, when I heard that the Taliban had reached Kabul, I felt I was going to be a slave. They can play with my life any way they want.

I also worked as a teacher at an English-language education centre. I cannot bear to think that I can no longer stand in front of the class, teaching them to sing their ABCs. Every time I remember that my beautiful little girl students should stop their education and stay at their home, my tears fall.

Welcome to the 8th century.

A freelance foreign correspondent writes

It was catastrophic for women and girls in the city. Within days all women were ordered back into their homes and told not to come out without a male relative accompanying them. Working women, even those in high ranking positions including judges and magistrates, were ordered to stay home. Women who did venture out were told to wear a burqa: the Islamic fashion of the day was a long blue pleated nylon garment that covered from head to toe and had a small thick woven panel across the eyes.

It was so completely dehumanising, people started referring to women as “burqas” as in: “Look, there’s a couple of burqas over there…” The “morality police” would patrol the streets and markets with batons hitting women who showed any flesh as they walked (toe, ankle, wrist…)

Afghan women suddenly found they had no access to health care. They were not allowed to be seen by a male medic, but all the female medics had been sent home. A grief-stricken pregnant woman whose baby had died in the womb was turned away from the hospital.

Girls were told there would be no more school. There was to be no more sports, no games, no music, no dancing… As a female reporter, interviewing became problematic: Mullah Omah, the head of the Taliban, had decreed that the sound of a woman’s voice should not reach the ears of his men. So, when interviewing them, I had to ask my question to the male photographer with me, who would repeat it to the male translator who would ask it of the Taliban soldier. Most of them were young, barely-educated boys straight out of the madrasas of Pakistan and didn’t have a clue. Some weren’t even ideologically driven: several said they had been Mujahideen and had changed sides because the Taliban was winning in their area or the Taliban paid them more. One marched right up to me, raised his automatic rifle at my head and screamed at me to cover my face. What surprised me most of all was that he did so in perfect English. Clearly, they were not all uneducated. I was lucky: I got to fly home. The Afghan women and girls who risked their lives by just speaking to me, had nowhere to go.

I have often wondered what happened to them. How did the widow with only daughters, who had lost her husband, father, uncles, brothers and every male relative in successive wars manage to get out to buy food to feed her family? What happened to the poor pregnant woman? And the teenage girls who were terrified they were going to be married off to a Taliban soldier?

Sigh. I was interested, I wanted to read this, but then –

Mine is a predictable photo album – a baby transforms across a camera roll from limpid mole to Ian Hislop in leggings, kittens simper beside screengrabs of news stories, pink cake, a very big plum. It was the juxtaposition of three pictures that documented April though, that pricked my fury. A photo taken from our car of one of the anti-vaccine marches that shut down London sat beside a headline that pregnant people were finally being offered the coronavirus vaccine, then a picture of my son’s first birthday party.

Her son gets to be her son, Ian Hislop gets to be Ian Hislop, but pregnant women aren’t allowed to be pregnant women, they have to be concealed behind “pregnant people” just as elsewhere they’re concealed by yards of cloth.

And it’s spreading. A New Yorker Talk of the Town piece a few weeks ago about Sarah Hoover, a former director of the Guggenheim Gallery who gave a lecture there called “Maternal Instincts: An Art Historical Review of Motherhood.”

“I had terrible postpartum depression and anxiety,” she said. “It ended. But it actually gave birth to a whole new me in the end. I wrote about how I opened up all the cracks in the narrative around motherhood for me, and I really want to change it all. I want women – and people who give birth, who are not all women – “

So I don’t care how she finishes her sentence or what the rest of the piece says, because you can’t do both. You can’t pretend you’re doing this for women and then hastily throw a dropcloth over them. I don’t care how she wants to change the narrative, because she just betrayed the whole idea.

Women have been colonized, again.

I don’t think Owen Jones is the right guy to talk about it.

In fact I think he’s absolutely the wrong guy to talk about it. Not the only or the most wrong guy, but still the wrong guy.

It’s entitled men who hate women, that’s what it is and what’s driving it. Owen too is entitled and Owen too hates women. The up front reasons for the hatred are different, but the gut instinct is the same.

Solution to the problem of violent men found at last.

Make sure that women are given to these men – like so many apples or hats or tennis rackets.

Of course that is the arrangement in all too many places, like Afghanistan for instance, but that doesn’t mean we like to see men saying it as if it were just common sense.

And given to them for what purpose? For the purpose of sticking the penis is. Without a living breathing female human to stick the penis in, the man is too likely to step outside and kill some people.

You’d think by now the engineers could have come up with a reliable replacement, a nice programmable vagina to stick the penis in without having to get an actual woman from somewhere.

Not then but now.

Heatwaves and the heavy rains that cause flooding have become more intense and more frequent since the 1950s in most parts of the world, and climate change is now affecting all inhabited regions of the planet. Drought is increasing in many places and it is more than 66% likely that numbers of major hurricanes and typhoons have risen since the 1970s…

And the consequences of humanity’s massive act of atmospheric interference are now clear: what is hot today will become hotter tomorrow; extreme floods will become more frequent, wildfires more dangerous and deadly droughts more widespread. In short, things can only get worse.

And they can only get worse faster. It’s happening fast. The massive wildfires are not a gradual thing.

Indeed, by the end of the century they could become threatening to civilisation if emissions are allowed to continue at their present rate.

If you ask me they’re threatening now.

In fact, they could become utterly catastrophic with the occurrence of world-changing events – such as continent-wide forest die-backs or collapsing Antarctic ice sheets, says Prof Andrew Watson of Edinburgh University. “The IPCC report gives a comprehensive update on the knowns of climate change, and that makes for grim reading. But it also makes the point that climate models don’t include ‘low probability-high impact’ events, such as drastic changes in ocean circulation, that also become more likely the more the climate is changed. These ‘known unknowns’ are scarier still.”

Or the collapse of the Gulf Stream, as we saw the other day.

The rest of the piece is about the need for radical action starting right now, and…we all know that’s not going to happen. It’s as if there are two planes, that don’t meet at any point. On one plane the earth is heating up like a skillet on a hot burner and we have to make drastic changes starting immediately, and on the other plane we can’t get people to wear masks during a pandemic, we can’t get people to drive less and walk more, we can’t get people to stop throwing litter out of their cars as they barrel down the freeway. Yes we have to make drastic changes immediately, and no there’s no way anybody can make that happen.

From Pliny:

See the original for sharper image.

Siberia is hot. Not just hot for Siberia, but hot – which makes it terrifyingly hot for Siberia.

It’s not just the Western region of the US that’s sweltering right now. Siberia in Russia is baking, and satellites are bearing witness to a brutal heat wave above the Arctic Circle. Copernicus Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B satellites captured a snapshot of land surface temperatures on June 20, and it was hot.

According to NASA, “Land surface temperature is how hot the ‘surface’ of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location.” The Sentinel image shows a peak ground temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) near Verkhojansk, a small town usually known for its extreme cold temperatures.

Siberia is where the permafrost is, and from what I recall, if the permafrost melts that’s another massive tipping point because it will release colossal amounts of methane. In other words the planet is doomed.

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space, which implements the Copernicus program, tweeted that the town of Saskylah saw air temperatures of about 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) on June 20, the highest on record there since 1936.

Not Texas, not Australia, but Siberia.

Remember that Times article I quoted from yesterday about Trump’s plan to fire the DoJ guy who wasn’t helping him steal the election? Remember how cautiously worded it was, so that it took extra effort and attention to grasp that they were reporting on Trump’s effort to steal the election?

On the other hand, today, we get Maureen Dowd:

Jay Gatsby gave big, lavish, new-money parties at his sprawling mansion on the water because he wanted to seem cool. He wanted Daisy to notice him.

Barack Obama gave a big, lavish, new-money party at his sprawling mansion on the water because he wanted to seem cool. Being cool is important to him.

On the one hand corrupt criminal evil man tries to steal election, on the other hand man who is none of those things…has a birthday party.

Is this high school? What did she write that for? Why didn’t the editor ball it up and throw it back at her desk?

I know, news and editorial are separate, opinion writers have a lot more freedom to be snide and worse than snide than reporters do, but all the fucking same. Obama had a party. That’s it? That’s what you’ve got?

It’s hard to stop thinking about the over-the-top fete the former president held at his Martha’s Vineyard manse for his 60th birthday. 

No it isn’t. It’s dead easy. Dowd was stuck thinking about it because it was such hard work to justify whining about it.

I mean yes, Obama is a rich dude now, and he knows a lot of famous people. No shit. But is that really such a hot issue that it’s worth griping about when there are rather more serious issues available?

We already knew Obama gravitated to stars but it was disillusioning to see it on such a grand scale last weekend.

Not if you paid no attention it wasn’t. You don’t actually have to care about what stars Obama invited to his party.

Debbie Hayton on Scotland’s “guidance” on how best to trans children:

Revelation, we are told, can come early in life:

Some young people are exploring their gender identity in primary school settings.

If a young person in the school says that they now want to live as a boy although their sex assigned at birth was female, or they now want to live as a girl, although their sex assigned at birth was male, it is important to provide support and listen to what they are saying.

Is it the same if they say they now want to live as a tiger? A dolphin? A tomato? Will it be important to take the children to the sea and throw them in, or plant them in the ground?

It’s really not teachers’ job to tell children their fantasies are true, or to encourage them to believe that they are what they are not.

Teachers are instructed to not only listen, but also believe:

If others deny this, it may have a detrimental impact on the young person’s wellbeing, relationships and behaviour.

On the other hand if others affirm this it may also have a detrimental impact on the young person’s wellbeing, relationships and behaviour. Quite a large one in fact, because the other children may well decide the deluded child is creepy and nuts and all wrong and thus in need of bullying. It’s not a simple and uncontroversial fact that if a very young boy says he’s a girl, the adults in the vicinity must rush to agree with him and say yes that’s exactly what he is. That’s not an established truth, it’s a new and stupid dogma.

Reports elsewhere suggested that children as young as four will be able to change their name and gender at school in Scotland without their parents’ consent. And teachers are told that, ‘if a young person comes out as transgender there is no immediate need to inform their parents’ meaning the child’s mother and father might not even know what is happening.

The authors appeal to emotion, and fear of the law.

A transgender young person may not have told their family about their gender identity. Inadvertent disclosure could cause needless stress for the young person or could put them at risk and breach legal requirements. Therefore, it is best to not share information with parents or carers without considering and respecting the young person’s views and rights.

Of course, among the young person’s rights are rights to the care and supervision of their parents, which they need because they are children. It’s not simply a slam-dunk that schools are inevitably and entirely correct about this while parents bumble around in the darkness of not being trans.

I fear that the Scottish government is suggesting that schools can say to children, ‘Don’t worry, this will be our secret. Your mum and dad need never know.’ That is not only chilling, it could potentially be a safeguarding catastrophe.

To put it mildly.

It’s also just offensively presumptuous. There are crap parents in the world, to be sure, and sometimes children do need outside help, but schools shouldn’t be just assuming that as the standard and making plans to hide children’s “trans status” from their parents.

Kindly Scotland even approves of girls wearing binders.

Binders can lead to shortness of breath, can be painful during physical exertion and there are health risks associated with wearing binders that are too tight.

Binders can, however, have a positive impact on a young person’s mental health so staff should allow a young person to decide for themselves about whether or not to wear a binder, to help them join in. Some transgender young people may be willing to wear a looser binder than usual during PE.

Soon they’ll be doing mastectomies in the cafeteria.

This, exactly.

So do I, and I see the lists all over the place. Race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity – the end.

YOU MISSED ONE

THE BIG ONE

THE ONE THAT APPLIES TO HALF OF HUMANITY

The recurring question – why are Republicans so hell bent on killing off themselves and their own fellow party-members?

Some Republican leaders are seeking to support Joe Biden’s efforts to beat the pandemic by encouraging the public to get vaccinated as soon as possible. But others are actively trying to undermine the president’s offensive by embracing what critics regard as [a] lethal mix of ignorance, irrationality and nihilism.

And that lethal mix is going to bite them in the ass a lot harder than it bites us.

These Republicans seem intent on scoring political points by appealing to a pandemic-weary’s public yearning to get back to something like normal life. Still in thrall to former president Donald Trump, they fiercely oppose mask or vaccine mandates by invoking traditional party tenets of individual freedom, personal responsibility and resisting state interference.

And blah blah blah, but we can’t have absolute individual freedom unless we abandon society altogether and go live on a barren rock for a few days until we starve to death. If we can find a barren rock, that is – if all 350 million of us try we’ll run out of rocks in a matter of minutes. The benefits of society entail giving up some freedoms. The freedom to spread a lethal virus isn’t really a freedom worth having, let alone defending.

But with America now averaging about 113,000 cases a day, an increase of nearly 24% from the previous week, and hospitalizations up 31% from the week before, Republicans stand accused of causing the deaths of their own voters as the highly contagious Delta variant scythes through red states where vaccination rates are low.

Oops. But freedom freedom freedom.

In the past week Florida and Texas, states whose leaders take pride in riling the Biden administration, have accounted for nearly 40% of new hospitalizations across the country.

“We’re number one!!”

Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, welcomed hundreds of thousands of people to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally where no masks or vaccines are required, while Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina, declared: “Mandating masks is not the answer. Personal responsibility is the answer, common sense is the answer. And we have an abundance of both in South Carolina.”

He says, displaying reckless irresponsibility and lack of common sense.

Critics say the governors have abandoned the conservative principle that decisions should be made at a local level but they have support from prominent Republican senators such as Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Paul, a licensed physician and senator for Kentucky, urged civil disobedience against coronavirus restrictions, saying in a video: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us.” He has been banned from YouTube for a week over a post that questioned the efficacy of masks.

That’s outright evil. Resistance is for when it’s the fucking Nazis pouring over the border, it’s not for public health measures DURING A PANDEMIC.

Democrats are dismayed by such willingness to turn even a matter of life and death into a partisan issue. They note that a minority of the population is hampering the entire nation’s recovery and needlessly endangering more lives, including children.

For political jollies, or just plain spite. The moral bankruptcy is a sight to behold.

It’s women’s fault.

The gunman who killed five people in a mass shooting in Plymouth ranted at a 16-year-old girl that “women are arrogant and entitled beyond belief” in some of his final online exchanges just a few days before he embarked on Britain’s worst mass shooting in more than a decade.

Arrogant and entitled in the sense of not offering to have sex with him?

His comments and membership of the incel community again raise questions over the police’s decision not to treat the worst mass shooting in Britain since 2010 as terror-related.

It depends on how you’re defining “terror-related.” If you decide that it means having explicit demands addressed to specific governments, then the Plymouth slaughter doesn’t count, but that’s not the only way to define it.

The incel movement is known to promote violent misogyny and has inspired a number of high-profile murders in the US.

These include the case of US student Elliot Rodger who in 2014 shot dead six of his contemporaries before killing himself after leaving a message saying that he was angry because he had failed to form a relationship with a woman.

…

Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said: “Incels are terrorists. They seek to teach women a lesson, to remould society, to change through violence that which they could never possibly achieve through the ballot box or persuasion.”

Ahmed said that ungoverned online spaces were allowing hateful views to propagate and radicalise new followers.

“Male supremacist incel communities form specifically to share and deepen one another’s hatred of women. There, they undergo a process of radicalisation unchecked by broader social norms because of these digital spaces’ isolation from the rest of society’s tempering institutions and forces,” he added.

Of course, society’s institutions also feature quite a lot of contempt for women, belief that women are subordinate to men, assumption that women are required to be attractive and compliant to men, and the like.

Ahmed added: “That so many malignant ideologies – from anti-vaxxers to antisemites to incels – are accelerating their radicalisation and developing violent mobilising elements is a function of both the ease with which they can build their communities online and the inherently radicalising nature of those spaces.”

Little slime pits everywhere.