Ha! No.

And then this idea that he said “I’m your leader” and he said it more than once and I can understand why certain people would think that sounds a little dictatorial but the president is the leader and I think the president’s sort of mapping

Wait wait wait I have to stop you right there.

No he is not. He is not. He’s the chief government administrator; he presides over the government. That’s it. He is not our leader. We don’t have one and we don’t need one. Remember Il Duce? Remember Der Führer? Those were avowed Leaders, and they led everyone right over a cliff. We don’t have or want a governmental Leader. Get out of hear with that crap.

Remember “thought leaders”? Remember that ridiculous gang of celebrity secularists that Edwina Rogers tried to set up, with lots of cringe-worthy gabble about “thought leaders”? Boy did that fade fast. The label is a thing though – I keep hearing it in tv ads. That must be where it originated: advertising.

From Stat News in February 2017:

Sharissa Derricott, 30, had no idea why her body seemed to be failing. At 21, a surgeon replaced her deteriorated jaw joint. She’s been diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition. Her teeth are shedding enamel and cracking.

None of it made sense to her until she discovered a community of women online who describe similar symptoms and have one thing in common: All had taken a drug called Lupron.

Thousands of parents chose to inject their daughters with the drug, which was approved to shut down puberty in young girls but also is commonly used off-label to help short kids grow taller.

I guess this is like the “safe, properly regulated access to puberty blockers” that Jolyon Maugham is talking about with such affection?

There have been more than 10,000 adverse event reports filed with the FDA.

In interviews and in online forums, women who took the drug as young girls or initiated a daughter’s treatment described harsh side effects that have been well-documented in adults.

Women who used Lupron a decade or more ago to delay puberty or grow taller described the short-term side effects listed on the pediatric label: pain at the injection site, mood swings, and headaches. Yet they also described conditions that usually affect people much later in life. A 20-year-old from South Carolina was diagnosed with osteopenia, a thinning of the bones, while a 25-year-old from Pennsylvania has osteoporosis and a cracked spine. A 26-year-old in Massachusetts needed a total hip replacement. A 25-year-old in Wisconsin, like Derricott, has chronic pain and degenerative disc disease.

So what I’m wondering is…why do activists for trans ideology see it as such a slam-dunk that none of that matters compared to the joy of blocking puberty? And how, how, how are they so confident that none of this is to do with social contagion? How are they so confident that they’re not cheering on and spreading the very delusion that encourages teenagers to take this drastic step? How do they even sleep at night?

The FDA is also reviewing deadly seizures stemming from the pediatric use of Lupron and other drugs in its class. While there are other drugs similar to Lupron, it is a market leader and thousands of women have joined Facebook groups or internet forums in recent years claiming that Lupron ruined their lives or left them crippled.

But the FDA has yet to issue additional warnings about pediatric use, and unapproved uses of the drugs persist.

H/t Papito

The barrister is fuming.

But it’s not “for trans children” versus “the hate campaign.” People who think it’s not healthy or useful for teenagers to take drugs that block puberty don’t think that because they “hate” those children – they think it because there are good reasons to think it. People who think it’s wonderful for teenagers to take drugs that block puberty don’t think that because they are “for” those children but because they are “for” the ideology that has built up “being trans” to a permanent, easily detectable and impossible to make a mistake about state of being that is inherently progressive and enlightening.

It’s not hatred to think that we are our bodies, it’s not hatred to think there’s no such thing as a “gender identity” that makes people the opposite of their bodies, it’s not hatred to think it’s better and simpler and easier and healthier to get used to our bodies and how they change over time than it is to take drugs to stop normal changes.

It’s also peculiar that the barrister thinks advocating to protect children from puberty blockers is not advocating for their interests while insisting that puberty blockers are necessary for trans children is.

About that tweet from the misogynist barrister yesterday…

Which, if you don’t want it, is a pretty massive takeover of your body. It’s pretty massive if you do want it, but if you don’t want it it’s all that plus the not wanting it part. Men like the barrister should think about that just a tad more than they normally do.

Nathan Robinson at the Guardian considers Trump’s fraud-skills.

Donald Trump has one particular skill: pretending things are different than they seem. He was never a good businessman, but he was fantastic at playing a good businessman on TV.

Was he? I never saw it, so I don’t know, but from his performances that I have been seeing for the past four years plus a few months, my guess is that he was successful rather than fantastic. I don’t think it’s about his talent so much as it is about the eager willingness of his audience to be impressed. Why that is I don’t think I will ever understand, but I get that it is. The behaviors that make me feel sick – the sadism, the bullying, the shouty stupid ranting – make others feel elated and in love. I find the disconnect depressing.

His coronavirus response has been abysmal, but his public insistence that everything is fine has somehow managed to keep him from losing significant support. Trump’s specialty is PR – spinning bad things rather than doing good things.

Well, yes, but that’s putting it too mildly, and thus too kindly. His specialty is lying and manipulating. His specialty is taking a blowtorch to truth in all directions in order to direct more money and power toward him and away from everyone else. It’s not a kind of winsome fact about him that he’s all talk and no action, it’s a sinister fact about him that he’s a lying thieving murdering sadist who has accrued massive power.

Oh I see. I thought Trump was just randomly saluting in that Trumpolini moment on the White House balcony Monday, but it turns out he was saluting the helicopter.

He went up the outside stairs, which is not the custom; he stood there gasping like a fish, which is obviously not a sign of robust health and recovery from the virus; and finally he saluted the Marine helicopter as it departed, which is…just wacko.

Yesterday he shut down the Congressional attempt to pass a new stimulus bill, which is savagely cruel to the millions of people who are struggling in the shutdown.

Today he has cranked out a massive barrage of venomous retweets and tweets, which betrays a total failure to do any actual work, apart from anything else. Remember those staged “working” photos from Walter Reed? Of Junior in his shiny blue jacket practicing his letters in the middle of a blank sheet of paper? Should have been photos of him thumbing his phone. That’s the only “work” he does.

He’s dangerously manic and insane.

(He originally spelled “caught” as “cought”…probably while coughing.)

(Also, what difference does he suppose it will make if people “remember” that he thinks he’s entitled to a third term in defiance of the 22d amendment? They can’t give it to him by voting this year, but they could deny it to him by voting for the other fella.)

The Trump energy department has issued a long report saying “YEAH FOSSILE FUELS AWESOME BRING ON THOSE FOSSIL FUELS IGNORE THOSE WILDFIRES AND PUT SOME MORE FOSSIL FUEL IN THE TANK!”

Released a month before the election, the report is strikingly at odds with the realities of climate change that the American public has been coping with over the past few months, from huge wildfires to destructive derecho storms and a series of intense hurricanes.

As in, huge wildfires that killed 31 people in California so far and displaced thousands and polluted the air throughout much of the country. Kind of a major drawback, you’d think, but not to Trump’s energy department.

The report doesn’t cover any of the industry’s downsides – from fueling climate change to polluting communities where it operates and providing the feedstock for plastic waste that is covering the earth. It focuses on the national security values of US energy independence but does not mention that the defense department frequently names the climate crisis as a threat.

It’s not, because we’ll overcome it by being STRONG.

Now we’re talking.

Stephen Miller has tested positive.

I guess Marina Hyde is not a huge fan of Trump’s.

A rare moment of unity in the US election, as Donald Trump marked his return to the White House by gasping along with his detractors. On Monday night, the president puffed up the front staircase of his residence, his face coated in several more gallons of paint than the front elevation of the building. “Don’t let it dominate your lives,” he panted of the virus, a bad case of which tends to dominate your death.

…

Still: don’t call him Wussolini. He beat this illness – which he still very much has – like a man. One of the really manly ones, who takes all the best drugs and leaves everyone else exposed and misled and unprotected. Even so, early reactions to the gasping spectacle suggest the move could only have backfired more if Trump had ascended the front steps via a hastily installed stairlift carrying a pack of adult diapers.

Once he’d wheezed through the unpleasantries, all that remained was to remove his mask and set about infecting any remaining staff yet to be exposed to his droplets…

…One current secret service agent assigned to the first family’s detail expressed frustration, telling CNN: “We’re not disposable.” Two housekeeping staff have already tested positive for the virus.

Way to show the socialists, right?

Speaking of physicians who really need to heal themselves, what a striking misinformation campaign it’s been from presidential medic Sean Conley, who has been continually obfuscating about Trump’s condition since calling his symptoms “mild”, only for even the White House to contradict him. For me, that’s the new low. Of course, we now expect the president of the United States to lie as default – to tell us black is white, or up is down, or to claim he never said something he’s on camera saying. But for a professional and senior doctor to mislead apparently without remorse shows how necrotic the body politic has become, from the very top down. The lying, the reality-denying is not a one-off case – it’s the other epidemic.

H/t Omar

It’s That Barrister Again.

Here’s the thing:

They’re not reversible.

Also, comparing puberty blockers to abortion is just random. You might as well compare them to espresso machines or luxury yachts.

It’s not just aides who are at risk in the White House.

The West Wing has reportedly turned into a “ghost town” amid complaints that the White House has failed to trace potential contacts of Trump and his infected aides, with many now working from home even as the president exhorted Americans “not to be afraid of Covid”.

Aides can work from home. You know who can’t?

That has left behind a skeleton staff of about 100 butlers, ushers, cleaners, custodians and maintenance workers, who are often older and drawn from groups at higher risk of developing severe symptoms of the virus, including a butler’s corp that has historically almost exclusively been black.

That work is hands-on, and it’s also not what gets on the news shows.

Members of the Secret Service, who protect the president, have also been thrown into the spotlight with some present and former members complaining anonymously they felt Trump had put service members at risk when they accompanied him on a controversial “drive-by” stunt outside the Walter Reed hospital.

That’s not a feeling, it’s a fact. A frivolous unnecessary trip in a sealed car with someone who has the virus just is risky. Masks help but they don’t make social distancing unnecessary; we’re told to do both. A ride in the car-car with zero ventilation is not doing both.

A still contagious Trump returned to the White House on Monday and defiantly took off his mask on entering the building as complaints grew inside over the lack of precautions taken by the president and his entourage.

Reporting on this has been incensed at his strolling into the building without a mask.

Reports from within the White House paint a picture of workers spooked by a lack of information over when and how certain officials became infected, with many blaming the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for the information vacuum.

Others have pointed to the fact that Trump and his medical team have refused to disclose when the president received his last negative test, making it impossible for many to know if they had contact with him in a period when he was potentially contagious.

Why would they do that? Why would they refuse? No doubt because the information is damning. Did he know he was infected Wednesday? Tuesday? It makes a difference. So he tries to cover his ass at the expense of other people’s safety. Of course he does.

Oh and by the way that’s a big no on the contact tracing.

According to the New York Times, quoting an unidentified official, the White House had decided not to trace the contacts of guests and staff members who were at the Rose Garden celebration 10 days ago for Trump’s supreme court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, where at least eight people, including the president, may have become infected.

Instead, the source told the paper the efforts had been limited to notifying people who came into close contact with Trump in the two days before his Covid diagnosis on Thursday evening.

“This is a total abdication of responsibility by the Trump administration,” Dr Joshua Barocas, a public health expert at Boston University, told the paper. “The idea that we’re not involving the Centers for Disease Control to do contact tracing at this point seems like a massive public health threat.”

Yes but you see they don’t care.

Trump issued a “the flu is worse, COVID is nothing” tweet and Facebook post this morning. For once Twitter and Facebook stomped on it.

Twitter not only flagged it, it veiled it. It doesn’t always take that second step.

Psssssst wanna buy a commemorative coin?

The White House gift shop, which is not affiliated to the White House, has started taking pre-orders for a “President Donald J. Trump Defeats COVID” commemorative coin.

It’s in the same department as the “President Donald J. Trump Walks On Water” coin and the “President Donald J. Trump spins shit into gold” coin.

Note: he has the virus, it caused him two drops in oxygen level and a fever, he tested positive Thursday and the virus is known to get much worse 7 to 10 days after infection, he is in at least two high-risk groups, and…the virus is still infecting thousands of people a day and killing many. Trump hasn’t in any sense defeated COVID. He hasn’t defeated his own case and he hasn’t defeated it as a national disaster.

Ah family life.

It seems Kellyanne picked up COVID at the superspreader event and gave it to her daughter and husband. Then she has the gall to tell her daughter: “You caused so much disruption.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have been in quite such a hurry to leave.

“Gasping” is trending on Twitter.

This is why:

Nick Cohen on the ongoing passion for bullying people into silence:

The current issue of the literary journal The Dark Horse contains a grim and resonant essay by the poet Jenny Lindsay, which shows how Scottish poetry allowed the extremes to define it. In Anatomy of a Hounding she describes the process of humiliation and denunciation she has recently experienced.

…In June 2019 she objected to a writer for the Skinny, who said they believed in ‘violent action’ against Terfs (in this instance lesbian feminists at a Pride March). Lindsay contacted the magazine on Twitter and said:

Hello! One of your commentators here advocates violence against lesbian activists at Pride. I find it extraordinary that such views are given an airing in The Skinny.

It’s The New Progressivism – women are Karens, therefore lesbians are (obviously) Karens. Violence is appropriate for Karens. Why? Because they’re Karens.

You should be able to offer support to transwomen, as Lindsay has done during her career, while deploring incitement to violence against lesbians. Although the magazine privately admitted to her it had made a mistake, Lindsay was publicly accused of transphobia.

And you know what that means. It’s all-out war; no surrender is possible; the defeat must be total.

She was told about private forums where colleagues were denigrating her. Collaborators were warned to steer clear. A young poet she did not know was praised for saying she shouldn’t appear on stage with her at a conference. Other writers agreed, and said they would not share a platform with her. When Lindsay protested, they told her she was ‘punching down’: using her position of power to intimidate a weak, young man.

Because Karen. It’s really very simple.

The anonymous smears, the denigration, the false accusations became so much that the Scottish Poetry Library rather nobly spoke out. It issued a statement saying it supported freedom of expression, inclusivity, collaboration and a respect for pluralism. ‘What we do not support, and will no longer ignore, is bullying and calls for no-platforming of writers in events programmes and in publishing.’

Far from welcoming the library’s stand, Scottish PEN, which once stood for free expression and would come to the aid of writers in trouble, cut Lindsay off at the knees. It said it was ‘disappointed’ by the library’s statement and offered Lindsay no support. As JK Rowling has found, when the pile-ons pile up, Scottish PEN and other free speech organisations duck for cover.

Don’t do it to us, do it to her. Always do it to her.

Witch hunters will tolerate only two possible outcomes to their chase. Either they destroy the heretic by driving her out of work and making her name a by-word for ignominy. Or they force her into a total capitulation. The artist, politician, journalist or left-wing activist must engage in public self-flagellation. They must make an obsequious apology. They must accept that their critics were wholly right and beg forgiveness for the offence they caused.

I am always struck by how no one cares that the apology is fake and has been forced from the target. Sincerity is not required. Rather the accusers demand that their victims bend the knee and acknowledge their mastery. If rape is about power not sex, then witch-hunts are about power not truth.

Exactly. That’s how it was when they tried to do it to me, too. That’s why I was so disgusted by that post of PZ’s (that we were talking about a couple of days ago): it said I had to “own my mistakes” when I didn’t and couldn’t agree that they were mistakes, and I’m sure he knew that perfectly well. He was saying I had to agree with the frothing bullies who comment on his blog, or at least I had to say I agreed with them. But I didn’t agree with them, and he knew that. This means he was saying I had to obey their orders. Why? Why did I have to? And what would it even be worth if I did? What could he possibly think was the point of trying to force me to pretend to think what I didn’t think? Especially when it’s something so batshit crazy and silly and the reverse of what we all know?

But that’s where we are. We are all under orders to say we agree with the trans ideology, and to echo it on all occasions.

But more and more of us are saying “Shan’t” and slamming the door behind us.

MAKE IT STOP

Don’t let Covid dominate your life, the stupid reckless dribbling fool tells us because he’s only a few days into his case and because he had the undivided attention of a whole team of doctors. Yes brilliant advice genius IF you have a mild case but many people DON’T have a mild case so

STOP

TALKING

NOW

I just want to underline how much I hate his high-on-steroids video from yesterday. How much I hate his giddy high-pitched grinning glee.

And especially how much I hate the part that starts 50 seconds in, where he says

It’s been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school, this is the real school, this isn’t the let’s read the book school, and I get it, and I understand it.

I hate the content and I hate the style. I hate the style because his giddy squealy good mood escalates – I hate it because he gets all excited about how well he understands it all now. I hate that because of the thousands he’s killed and the thousands he’s left permanently damaged and because of the disruptions he’s made so much worse by being such a feckless piece of shit.

And I hate the content because he hasn’t learned anything, and he never will, and he’s too stupid and narcissistic ever to grasp that.

I had to get that off my chest. Thank you for your patience.

The CDC says a new thing about how the virus spreads:

Two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed online guidance about airborne transmission of the coronavirus, the agency has replaced it with language citing new evidence that the virus can spread beyond six feet indoors, adrift in the air.

“These transmissions occurred within enclosed spaces that had inadequate ventilation,” the new guidance said. “Sometimes the infected person was breathing heavily, for example while singing or exercising.”

Or shouting or haranguing…

Despite the time former Vice President Joseph R. Biden spent with President Trump during the presidential debate, Mr. Biden is continuing to campaign because he did not meet the C.D.C. requirement for close contact — less than six feet of distance from an infected person.

But in a statement to the press accompanying the new guidance, the C.D.C. said, “People are more likely to become infected the longer and closer they are to a person with Covid-19.”

Mr. Trump talked loudly and at length during the debate, which experts said could have released ten times as much virus as breathing alone.

Um.