Reports are that Trump gets crazier every day. That’s 28 more days of upping the crazy while he still has access to the nukes.

[A]mid reports of a president unhinged – one report said: “We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are” – and while Trump continued to stoke a Republican civil war by attacking Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, a group of GOP representatives visited the White House to plan one final push to reverse the will of the American people.

There were about 12 of them.

Trump continues to make baseless accusations of mass electoral fraud and reportedly to rage against aides he deems insufficiently zealous in his defence. According to the news site Axios, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief of staff Mark Meadows are prominent among such hapless targets.

So is McConnell, whom Trump claims to have saved in his re-election fight this year, the president sending a slide to Republicans in Congress which purported to show the restorative effect of a presidential tweet and robocall.

“Sadly, Mitch forgot,” the slide said. “He was the first one off the ship!”

But Trump and his stalwart band of 12 Republicans will prevail! You’ll see!

Trump remains actively engaged in the fundamentally anti-democratic campaign. He is said to have spent an hour poring over the details of the 6 January session with the group from Congress.

Ah so he does know how to pay attention to details!

But only when they concern him personally as opposed to presidentially. When they concern him in his role in the job he is supposed to be doing, he has urgent tv to watch.

The closer the president gets to removal from office, the more volatile he becomes, and the more wild his invective grows. According to Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine, since election day White House aides have been “outright avoiding the president out of concern he might end up using any nearby staffer as a human stress ball”.

But he’ll always have The Twelve.

Oh the bravery, oh the courage, oh the heroism.

Headline: Eddie Izzard to use the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’

Wot? Everyone uses those pronouns. Dialogue: “Alice forgot her coat, can you take it to her? She’s down the hall.”

Subhead: Stonewall praises comedian for her bravery after announcement on Sky Arts show

“Bravery” for using words we all use?

Eddie Izzard has adopted the pronouns “she” and “her”, saying she wants “to be based in girl mode from now on”.

You can’t “adopt” pronouns. They never had parents, so you can’t adopt them.

Journalists and “activists” have to use this stupid baby-talk for this subject because of the fundamental absurdity of it. What they mean is that Izzard is now ordering the rest of the world to use bespoke pronouns to talk about him, which is a good wheeze because it will force everyone to pay more attention to him if they talk or write about him at all. Like right there – I didn’t deliberately decide to say “him” the first time, it was just automatic, because I know he’s a man. Then I noticed I’d done it and the second two were not automatic. To avoid calling him (there it is again) “him” I would have to devote extra thought to him (deliberate that time). It’s not easy to contradict your own ingrained knowledge that way – Izzard is ordering everyone to make a huge effort if they decide to mention him (deliberate that time).

That’s not courage, it’s just greedy ego.

The actor and comedian made the announcement during an appearance on the Sky Arts series Portrait Artist Of The Year last week in which she described herself as gender-fluid, prompting the LGBT charity Stonewall to praise her for her bravery.

The announcement? How pompous. “Listen up everyone, I have orders for you all about how you are to refer to me from now on.”

But more annoying, what I started out to say before I got distracted by the extra effort issue, is this burbling about “bravery” and “courage” when what we’re talking about is a man demanding attention for Special Order Pronouns. He’s a man! A rich man! A rich white man who is not an immigrant or the wrong religion! I don’t think it should be headline news that he’s telling us to refer to him as “her” and I don’t think his doing that should be called “courage.”

How about a sense of proportion? Hmm?

Let’s see. 1-7 dictators and semi-elected heads of state who caused the deaths of millions. 8 & 9 assassins, 10 a cynical and ruthless senator who helped 6 get away with his many crimes.

Dawn Ennis is suggesting these ten are all comparable to a popular author who wrote an essay about why women’s rights matter and how they depend on grasping that women are not men and men are not women.

Not really a very good comparison, I think.

Guy rapes one woman, rapes and murders another. Judge finds a woman to blame.

“Your mother rejected you; that may go some way towards explaining your attitude towards women,” said Justice Geoffrey Venning in a New Zealand high court court in November this year as he sentenced Kempson to three-and-a-half years in jail for the rape.

Yes, because hatred of women is so rare and unusual that it must have a particular cause, to be specific, a woman.

On learning he had been found guilty of the 2018 rape, Kempson screamed at the judge: “You have no reason to convict me. You’re full of shit mate.” At his sentencing last month, Justice Venning said it was clear Kempson did not accept his offending and told him: “You have no remorse or insight into it.”

In another trial earlier this year, also suppressed until now, Kempson was convicted of terrorising his live-in girlfriend for months in 2017. He subjected her to violent assaults, threatened her with a butcher’s knife and forced her into sex acts after telling her he had been sent by the CIA to kill her. He was sentenced in November this year to seven-and-a-half years in jail.

What a good thing we can blame his mother.

Speaking of the fatuous claim that Good Writing is Simple Writing, I was tempted to quote a bit of Sir Thomas Browne on that post but didn’t, but now that Tim Harris has cited him as a counter-example I have to.

I give you: Hydrotaphia, or Urn Burial, published in 1658:

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting register. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.

Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration;–diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.

Go ahead, tell me that would be better if it were all short words.

Trump has given an order that federal buildings from now on have to be beautiful.

But then…beautiful according to whom? Trump? But…

Donald Trump decreed on Monday that all new US federal buildings should be “beautiful”, in a long-expected executive order which excoriated architectural modernism but stopped short of demanding that all such projects should be in the classical style.

So he’ll allow for some in the modern vulgarian goldy goldy goldy style?

When a draft of the order first surfaced, in February, critics reacted with horror to its promise to “make federal buildings beautiful again” by mandating a return to “the classical architectural style”.

So there’s no beauty in this?

Ten months later, and with the end of Trump’s time in office looming, the finished order arrived.

Its text extols examples of classical US public architecture including “the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, and the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in New York City”.

“In Washington DC,” it adds, “classical buildings such as the White House, the Capitol building, the supreme court, the Department of the Treasury and the Lincoln Memorial have become iconic symbols of our system of government.”

Therefore, be it hereby decreed, all new buildings have to look like a blend of those five structures. (The Lincoln Memorial is not a building. It’s big like a building but it’s open to the elements. It’s a structure.)

Given his career in real estate developments marked by a love for gold, gilt, black marble and baroque excess, not to mention the brutal treatment of beloved old buildings, Trump’s professed love for classicism has attracted critical comment.

Dude wants to control everything, in perpetuity. He can’t.

BBC media editor Amol Rajan has made a prize for best writing and he announced the winners today.

And so we come again to that glorious moment, just ahead of what I hope is a restful festive season for you and your family, when I wheel out my favourite prose of the year, under the auspices of an implicit endorsement from my long dead hero.

You know, to give you a bit of holiday reading when you’ve eaten too many pies.

Welcome to the Russell Prize 2020.

Why Russell?

Before we get to them, I should remind you that the Russell Prize is named for my hero, Bertrand Russell, who together with George Orwell wrote the best non-fiction prose in English of anyone alive in the 20th Century. (Ernest Hemingway wrote the best fictional prose, and if you haven’t read Joan Didion’s 1998 essay on his “mysterious, thrilling” style, you haven’t lived; but we’ll leave that for another day).

No he didn’t. I mean there is no one such person in the first place, but if there were, it wouldn’t be Russell. As for Hemingway…

Russell’s prose united the unholy trinity of virtues that make the best essayists: plain language, pertinent erudition, and moral force. Orwell achieved it in Shooting an Elephant and several other essays; Russell achieved it through most of his work.

Here we see the problem. “Plain” language is not a universal good and un-plain language is not invariably bad. That’s a dumb, wrong, philistine view, and it needs to die. Sometimes simplicity and hyper-clarity are what one wants, but not always.

Other truly great, even canonical, essayists often have two out of three. For instance, Christopher Hitchens’ best essays combined pertinent erudition with moral force, but lacked plain English, (the moral, intellectual and artistic case for which Orwell himself made peerlessly).

This is where that silly view takes you: thinking Hitchens didn’t write as well as he could have because his English wasn’t plain enough. Puhleez. What he had to say wasn’t always sayable in short words, and what he said in long words is not necessarily the worse for them. Also Orwell did not write 100% “plain” English – far from it.

But the reason I saw this is another story. His #3 winner is JK Rowling for That blog post.

JK Rowling is almost certainly the greatest writer of English children’s fiction of her generation, and a remarkable humanitarian. It turns out she writes exhilaratingly powerful prose too.

(Sometimes. Her adult fiction is not all that well-written, at least the examples I’ve read aren’t, which is why I haven’t read more of it.) (I don’t like anything about Harry Potter.)

In a blog about the transgender debate, she offended many people. Offence is the price of free speech. Those offended felt she was questioning their identity and even attacking their human rights, which they argue is a form of discrimination or hate speech.

I take absolutely no view whatsoever on the issues that she raises.

I do take an issue on abuse and trolling, and Rowling has achieved the inglorious honour of topping many a league table for those. The deluge of hatred that she faced before writing this blog made it brave, and it was nothing compared to what came after. Talking about bravery, so too, by the way, was Suzanne Moore’s engrossing, long, personal essay for Unherd on why she left the Guardian.

Which, also by the way, was not written in particularly plain English. A random paragraph to illustrate:

Maybe they were steering me away from certain subjects because they thought they were dealing with some mad old bint, or maybe they were scared and had been indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. At its best, the paper deserves to see itself as a beacon of the Left, but lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation. During the Corbyn years the paper had a difficult job to do: support Labour but to be honest about Corbyn and his cronies’ monstrous failings.

It’s a mixture, as good writing generally is – “mad old bint” followed by “indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness.”

We should all applaud bravery in writers – even those with whom we disagree. And Rowling’s essay contained moments of both real beauty and piercing honesty, as when she revealed that she is a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

What the judges – that is, the voices in my head – most admired about the writing was the plain English. It is an interesting fact about rhetoric that if you want people to understand something, plain, mono-syllabic words are usually your best bet: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”.

Yes the words are short, but what of this “ask not” business? That’s not how we usually say that – we usually say “don’t ask.” The plain English is not as plain as the short words might suggest. It just is not true that the most effective language is the most like a grocery list or dentist’s reminder.

Or think of the final line from Enoch Powell’s most notorious speech: “All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

I’m not endorsing the argument; but the rhetorical power of that line comes from the fact that there are 16 words, the first 15 of which have one syllable, and the last of which has three.

But that’s not where the rhetorical power of that line comes from – if indeed it has any great rhetorical power, which I’m not convinced it does. The power comes also from the words themselves, as opposed to their number of syllables. This simple-minded “always write short words” doctrine gets on my nerves.

Anyway – that aside, good about the award.

So a few hours before he leaves Barr sets fire to his enslavement to Trump. Way too late, dude, you won’t get any credit for it now.

Still, the rest of us can take a little pleasure from how much it will enrage the rotting pumpkin.

Attorney General William Barr used his final public appearance to undercut President Donald Trump on multiple fronts Monday, saying he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to look into the president’s claims about the 2020 election or to name one for the tax investigation of President-elect Joe Biden’s son.

In the course of breaking with Trump on matters that have been consuming the president, Barr also reinforced the belief of federal officials that Russia was behind a massive hack of U.S. government agencies, not China as Trump had suggested.

Ok that’s all very nice but could he also go up to Trump and deliver a painful flick to his nose? And then mess up his hair? And then push him over?

Trump was interested both in a counsel to investigate the younger Biden’s tax dealings and a second to look into election fraud. He even floated the idea of naming attorney Sidney Powell as the counsel — though Powell was booted from Trump’s legal team after she made a series of increasingly wild conspiratorial claims about the election.

That’s sort of hilarious (only sort of because of course as always it’s more sinister than hilarious) – they fire her because she made claims too loony even for them, then Trump talks about wanting to make her a special counsel, because you definitely want your special counsel to be a loony.

Trump’s mind is on………..

…………getting someone to get the necessary process going to get an Important airport named after him.

(What do Donald Trump and Eddie Izzard have in common? Laser-like focus on The Self to the exclusion of all others.)

In the dying days of his presidency, Donald Trump has taken to asking some aides and advisers about the process of naming airports after former U.S. presidents, according to two people who’ve heard him recently inquiring on this.

He asked one of the two what kind of paperwork is necessary to get an airport named after a former president. Sir, you need to request Form 4728B from the Department of Egotism sir.

Another individual close to Trump told The Daily Beast that they could recall the president mentioning at least a couple times since early 2018 his desire for having a national or international airport in the United States named after “Donald J. Trump,” and that he hoped there would be an aggressive organized effort to do so akin to the push to name the Washington, D.C.-area national airport after President Ronald Reagan.

Well I hope he’s keeping a proper list. It needs to include hospitals, post offices, train stations, bus terminals, licensing offices, weather bureaus, schools, universities, garden centers, ice cream plants.

Trump, very likely, will have a number of allied state and national politicians eager to demonstrate their devotion to him with an airport-naming push. But the process isn’t supposed to come until after he leaves office. The fact that it’s on his mind now, amid an exploding coronavirus crisis and accompanying economic problems, demonstrates how far his attention can drift even during weighty and difficult moments.

More precisely, it demonstrates how intensely focused his attention is on himself rather than on some irritating pandemic or hackers meddling with the nukes or the climate we accidentally broke.

Rupert Murdoch got the vaccine.

Media baron Rupert Murdoch received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine this week, a day before prominent opinion host Fox News’s Tucker Carlson raised suspicion over the marketing strategy for the vaccine.

The 89-year-old executive chairman of Wall Street Journal owner News Corp and chairman of Fox News’s Fox Corp received the vaccine at his local doctor’s office in Britain on Wednesday after being told he was eligible, a spokeswoman confirmed on Friday.

There are frontline workers and healthcare workers who haven’t had it yet, but he was eligible.

On Thursday evening, Carlson, host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” one of the highest rated shows on U.S. cable news, opened his show highlighting the case of a health worker in Alaska who suffered an adverse reaction to the vaccine and warned viewers to be skeptical of the “glitzy” public campaign.

In other words Murdoch’s poisonous network is making ever effort to make the pandemic worse, while Murdoch gets one of the first scarce jabs.

Via Glinner’s post, Eddie Izzard’s heart-rending story of being persecuted by three teenage girls when he joined them in the women’s toilet on his first day going out dressed in “women’s clothes.”

Most of what I remember about my first day walking around outside in makeup and a dress was fear. The fear of being stared at, which I knew I would be. This was partly because I wasn’t that good at applying makeup.

Ah the fear of being stared at. A little different from the fear of being assaulted.

I had a little bag I’d brought with me with my other clothing to change back into. So at the end of the afternoon, I came back on the Underground to Highbury Corner in Islington and went to the ladies’ loos as planned. I’d expected to go in, quickly change my clothes, wipe off my makeup, then slip back out in boy mode so I could go home with no one the wiser.

What I wasn’t expecting in the ladies’ loos at about three o’clock in the afternoon were three teenage girls smoking cigarettes. They were probably just skipping school. So there they were, smoking cigarettes, while I was just trying to find a stall, change clothes, and get out of there.

Or to put it another way, while he was just trying to invade their loo to take his clothes off and golly gee there they were having the audacity to be in the women’s loo when he wanted to use it. The entitlement is breathtaking.

I could hear the whispering going on. In the third cubicle there was a lock. So I locked the door and quickly managed to change my clothes and wipe the makeup off my face, not using the handy makeup wipes that you can buy today, but probably with liquid makeup remover or something else incredibly inconvenient.

Finally, the dress was off, the heels were off, the makeup was off, and jeans and flat shoes were back on. Now I had to make it out quickly before the girls could react.

But that was impossible.

The girls were ready to act. They were just waiting for me. And when I finally came out of the cubicle, they shouted, “Hey, mate! Hey, mister! Why are you wearing makeup? Why are you dressed as a woman?”

Why are you in the wrong loo?

So I was heading away from home, walking and walking and walking, around Highbury Corner, down Canonbury Road, while they continued to shout at me. Finally, I thought: Screw this. They’re just going to shout at me forever. Let’s confront this. So I stopped and I turned around to face my teenage inquisitors.

I shouted back, “You want to know why I’m wearing a dress? I’ll tell you why.”

But before I could say anything else, the girls just screamed and ran off in the other direction. I was stunned. Wow. That wasn’t as hard as I thought.

No shit, Sherlock: that’s because you’re a man.

I think that was the first time I was overtly intimidated because of my sexuality.

You assume older people intimidate younger people, but those three thirteen-year-old girls had power over a twenty-three-year-old man.

He, an adult man, goes into their toilet and takes his clothes off, and then he shouts at them and then he claims that they are the ones who have power over him. You couldn’t make it up.

I learned something that day when those girls ran off: If you confront aggression—Sometimes just standing your ground or even with cheeriness and politeness—sometimes you can shut it down. It’s not a perfect science, but it feels better than being scared. I also learned that you could feel empowered by facing people down. They were only thirteen or fourteen, but the turning around and saying, “All right, I’ll tell you,” felt almost like a second coming out because I had to say, “Okay, you want to put me in a corner? I’ll face this down as opposed to screaming and running.” Which I always thought I might do. But I didn’t scream and run—in the end, they did.

Yes, an adult man scared off three 13-year-old girls after he perved on them in the women’s toilets. He didn’t molest them, assuming his story is true, but he did do a thing that girls and women know to be afraid of. If it had been just one girl in there she would have been fucking terrified.

And all this callous behavior and interpretation is because he likes to dress up in clothes coded female. His kink is brave and stunning, while their self-preservation is “aggression.” It takes my breath away.

It’s no skin of James Harris’s nose, is it. Men ignoring women’s boundaries is no threat to him, so by all means Eddie Izzard should do whatever he wants.

Graham Linehan is not impressed with what his colleague is doing.

I know a woman who met Eddie and he thought it would be a laugh to go into the women’s toilets with her. She was embarrassed and uncomfortable but felt she couldn’t say anything. This discomfort and embarrassment is now Eddie’s gift for every woman who has the bad luck to encounter him in the wild.

…

Eddie, how are women supposed to know the difference between men like you, and men like Mark Brown? How are they to know that Mark is not one of the ‘nice ones’ like you? .

And how are they to know you are not one of the nasty ones like Mark Brown? We can’t know either way, which is why we’re not brought up being told to trust all strangers no matter what.

Mark Brown by the way is the student who put on a long silver wig and a dress to chase a woman through the streets and then assault her.

It is the height of male privilege to intrude into women’s spaces and expect women to just love it. In fact, when a group of teenage girls DIDN’T love it, Eddie painted them as nasty bullies, instead of young women protecting their privacy and dignity.

So, Eddie, don’t be so fucking stupid. You’re not a woman, you’re just a man with oddly low levels of empathy for the sex you’re appropriating.

Oddly but all too familiarly.

The philosopher Miroslav Imbrišević has a post at The Electric Agora on language and the concept of “women.”

Conceptual engineering has been taken up by some feminist philosophers. A central concept in feminist philosophy is ‘woman’. Ordinarily it means “adult human female,” but some feminists would like to include transwomen under the term ‘woman’. This view is now widely accepted in academic feminism. If you dare to question this, you will be considered “transphobic,” as Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor at the University of Sussex, has experienced.

But the rest of us are still struggling to understand how any feminist can think it’s feminist to include male people in the concept “woman” on the grounds that they are trans women.

By including transwomen under the umbrella ‘woman’, these well-meaning philosophers suggest that there is no real difference between the type of women in expressions like ‘young women’, ‘German women’, ‘married women’, ‘happy women’, ‘single women’, ‘tall women’ and ‘transwomen’ (or ‘trans women’). They are all women. The aim here is to shape reality; to change how we view the world.

The class of women – by which I mean, adult human females – can be understood as a natural kind; that is, as something that is part of nature.  There is a material, biological reality to it. The class of transwomen, on the other hand, is a social kind; that is, something we find in society. It is a notion that is socially constructed. We invented it. It relies on the idea that some people have a gender identity which can be in conflict with their sex. Male-bodied persons wish they were female or believe that they are female, and many want to express this through their gender presentation, which might include body modification. The natural kind term ‘woman’ refers to a material reality (sex), the social kind term ‘transwoman’ refers to a psychological reality (attempting to disregard your sexed body).

And the issue here is that wishing you were a something you’re not is not necessarily the same as being that something. It can be, in some cases, where desire and will can make you into the wished-for something. You can wish you were kinder and become kinder by working at it. You can wish you were more educated and get there by buckling down to the studies. But wishing you were a gibbon or Saturn or Chomolungma isn’t going to make you those things.

The social category ‘woman’ has a biological foundation: women, understood as a natural kind. The social kind supervenes upon the natural kind; that is, the social category has an underlying material basis: being of the female sex. There is nothing similar with respect to being a transwoman. In this case, one social kind (transwoman) supervenes on another social kind (woman). Transwomen, in this sense, represent a kind of supervenience squared; a supervenience of supervenience. And because the concept ‘transwoman’ is free-floating, without a tether (a female sexed body), there is a fundamental difference between women and transwomen.

Take the concept of marriage. We now accept that same-sex attracted people can get married. Our linguistic (and legal) practice has changed and with it the concept of marriage. But ‘marriage’ is a social kind term, something we created by agreement, and we can extend/alter its meaning through further agreement. Contrast this with the concepts: ‘tiger’, ‘water’ or ‘woman’. These three are natural kind terms and their concepts are not open to radical revision through our linguistic practice, because they are tied to how things actually are in the world. There are facts about tigers which we cannot alter. For example, we cannot simply decree that it would be good to class lions among the tigers. Admittedly, they have something in common: they are both big cats, but ‘tiger’ and ‘lion’ are distinct concepts, as tigers and lions are distinct species.

Because they are tied to how things actually are in the world.

That.

Stupidest headline ever.

Gosh what has happened to Trump, Mitt Romney wonders.

Trump’s flirtation with declaring martial law in battleground states and appointing a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to help his attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden are “really sad” and “nutty and loopy”, Mitt Romney said on Sunday.

Or, more precisely, criminal and traitorous.

“He’s leaving Washington with a whole series of conspiracy theories and things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their head wondering what in the world has gotten into this man,” the Utah Republican senator said.

No we’re not. Nothing has gotten into him: this is what he is. He’s psychopathic in his indifference to everyone but himself, and he’s a hardened criminal in pretty much everything. This is what he’s been all along.

During the Friday meeting, Giuliani pushed Trump to seize voting machines. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made clear that it had no authority to do so. It is unclear what such a move could accomplish.

Shock and awe? Souvenirs? Paperweights?

The public coup plotting keeps chugging along.

President Trump said Sunday that he has spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican who suggested last week that he supports a potential challenge to the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene next month to formally affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

A “challenge” meaning “No no no we don’t want to!!”

Trump told Giuliani in a radio interview that he talked to the future senator last night.

Biden last week achieved formal victory over Trump, winning his 306 votes in the electoral college and advancing one more step toward inauguration. But the president and his supporters are redoubling their efforts to block the normal transfer of power, including a potential challenge on Jan. 6, when both chambers of Congress conduct the final tally of electoral votes.

That is, Trump and his supporters are working even harder to overthrow the legitimate government.

Some incoming Republican members of the House, including Reps.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Barry Moore (Ala.), have suggested they will join Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) in using an 1880s law that allows members of Congress to dispute a state’s results and make the House and Senate vote on the challenge to the electoral vote tally.

Too bad for them that McConnell has already said Biden won and the game is over.

The Post has a big wrap-up story on how badly Trump failed to deal with the pandemic.

In mid-November, expecting a surge of cases after Thanksgiving, four members of the task force decided to try to move the needle.

After their warnings had gone largely unheeded for months in the dormant West Wing, Deborah Birx, Anthony S. Fauci, Stephen Hahn and Robert Redfield together sounded new alarms, cautioning of a dark winter to come without dramatic action to slow community spread.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among the many Trump aides who were infected with the virus this fall, was taken aback, according to three senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussions. He told the doctors he did not believe their troubling data assessment. And he accused them of outlining problems without prescribing solutions.

What business does Mark Meadows have telling four medical experts that he doesn’t believe what they’re telling him about the pandemic? He was a real estate developer before he got into politics. How would he know better than they do?

The doctors explained that the solutions were simple and had long been clear — among them, to leverage the power of the presidential bully pulpit to persuade all Americans to wear masks, especially the legions of Trump supporters refusing to do so, and to dramatically expand testing.

Emphasis mine. He could have done that and it would have made a big difference. He could have used the bully’s pulpit to tell people to socially distance, to stay away from crowds, to make some sacrifices, and to wear a goddam mask.

On Nov. 19, hours after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against Thanksgiving travel, Vice President Pence, who chairs the coronavirus task force, agreed to hold a full news conference with some of the doctors — something they had not done since the summer. But much to the doctors’ dismay, Pence did not forcefully implore people to wear masks, nor did the administration take meaningful action on testing.

As for the president, he did not appear at all.

So thousands of people die of the virus every day, so what.

“We were always going to have spread in the fall and the winter, but it didn’t have to be nearly this bad,” said Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner in the Trump administration. “We could have done better galvanizing collective action, getting more adherence to masks. The idea that we had this national debate on the question of whether masks infringed on your liberty was deeply unfortunate. It put us in a bad position.”

And why did Trump blow it so comprehensively? Partly out of deep stupidity, for sure, but the rest? I don’t know. Because he’s a psychopath, because he got his jollies mocking the whole idea of trying to avoid the virus, because he’s a psychopath, because he’s jealous and resentful of Fauci, because he’s a psychopath. I don’t know. I can’t make it make sense.

The catastrophe began with Trump’s initial refusal to take seriously the threat of a once-in-a-century pandemic. But, as officials detailed, it has been compounded over time by a host of damaging presidential traits — his skepticism of science, impatience with health restrictions, prioritization of personal politics over public safety, undisciplined communications, chaotic management style, indulgence of conspiracies, proclivity toward magical thinking, allowance of turf wars and flagrant disregard for the well-being of those around him.

His combination of evil and stupidity, in short. I wish we could dig a hole in the ground and push him into it and pile a ton of dirt on him and walk away singing a tune.

“There isn’t a single light-switch moment where the government has screwed up and we’re going down the wrong path,” said Kyle McGowan, who resigned in August as chief of staff at the CDC under Redfield, the center’s director. “It was a series of multiple decisions that showed a lack of desire to listen to the actual scientists and also a lack of leadership in general, and that put us on this progression of where we’re at today.”

So imagine you’re on a train, you and 350 million of your closes friends, and up ahead you see the railway bridge fall down into the gorge – do you pull the emergency cord or do you just shrug and laugh? Trump shrugged and laughed.

At the heart of the problem, experts say, have been Trump’s scrambled and faulty communications.

“Words matter a lot, and what we have here is a failure to communicate — and worse than that, the effective communication of policies, of myths, of confusion about masks, about hydroxychloroquine, about vaccines, about closures, about testing,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director in the Obama administration. “It’s stunning.”

Maybe he just doesn’t understand cause and effect. Maybe he doesn’t grasp that if the big boss sneers at the experts and makes a point of ignoring their advice, other people will do the same and then bad things will happen.

Oh dear, we’re unacceptable.

In the past weeks there has been an unacceptable upsurge in Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) and transphobic talking points as well as false narratives being expressed within Irish media.

Unacceptable. I guess that means we should be locked up and deprived of all means of communication?

This is happening while the trans community is currently facing massive disruption in the implementation of healthcare reforms, including the potential collapse of healthcare for trans children and teenagers.

It’s not healthcare though. It’s destructive quackery. Women saying that one’s sex can’t be taken off the way one takes off a jacket does not cause the collapse of actual healthcare – the medical kind – for anyone, including children and teenagers who say they are trans.

Meanwhile, a recently successful case in the UK Supreme Court has had terrible consequences for the delivery of healthcare for trans people under the age of 18.

Again – it’s not healthcare.

In the backdrop to all this is an increased online harassment campaign from a handful of Irish TERFs, many of whom have a history of living in Britain, with important sounding Twitter accounts. The list of their Twitter followers is stuffed with transphobes from the UK who are systematically targeting womens’ rights organisations in Ireland for their use of trans-inclusive language and for supporting transgender rights.

The person who wrote this sludge is barely literate, in addition to being a dishonest polemicist. And yet, a department of University College Dublin thinks the piece is good enough to promote.

Cringe.

Oh gee, it would be a little bit unpleasant if Trump staged a coup.

Got it; so do we really have to stand around looking helpless while he continues to do this? Wouldn’t it maybe be a better idea to force him to stop, say by kicking him the fuck out?

Jonathan Swan at Axios:

Senior Trump administration officials are increasingly alarmed that President Trump might unleash — and abuse — the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election.

So do something. Don’t just be alarmed; do something.

Their fears include Trump’s interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance.

Got it. Do something.

A senior administration official said that when Trump is “retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends.”

“People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe,” the official added. “These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.”

Oh shut up about loathing bureaucrats and do something to stop this evil berserk criminal.

Time for a quick demo at Target!

A group of about 30 people spray their aerosol all over the entrance to a Target store and then depart.

Is that departing line “Bye retards!” or “Buy retards!”? It is a store, after all, and it does sell a large array of objects.