Ominous signs.

A top Republican senator has said that “democracy isn’t the objective” of America’s political system, sparking widespread outrage at a time when his party has been accused by Democrats of plotting voter suppression and questioning a peaceful transition of power in November’s election.

He did say that.

Of course, how liberty, peace, and prospefity are defined will be up to the undemocratically selected Rulers, so the 90% of us on the bottom might not fare all that well.

His democracy tweet immediately prompted alarm, including from a number of former government officials.

Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI assistant director, tweeted: “‘Democracy isn’t the objective’. Our suspicions are confirmed.”

Walter Shaub, former director of the US office of government ethics, said: “People of my grandfather’s generation knew what to do about fascists. Now a member of Congress is urging us to join them. I wonder what made you hate America so much.”

Oh that’s easy. America is a mongrel country. That’s why Hitler hated it too. It lacks that all-important virtue, purity.

This is some ominous shit right here.

Some concerns:

Just days after being prescribed a powerful cocktail of drugs to treat his coronavirus infection, President Trump returned to the Oval Office on Wednesdayas he delivered a barrage of incendiary tweets that referred to a “treasonous plot” and “coup” against him.

Trump’s behavior, which included tweets about ending negotiations with Democrats over an economic stimulus package and then more tweets about resuming those negotiations, appeared erratic even by his standards and raised questions among some medical professionals about the effect of the treatment on his mental state and whether it impacted his ability to govern.

And not just among medical professionals! Among complete amateurs too! Trump’s behavior raises very pressing questions among me for instance.

Similar drugs, known as corticosteroids, have also been linked to a wide range of other psychiatric symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and various cognitive difficulties, said Dr. Jacob Appel, a psychiatrist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

“Doctors would want to keep a careful eye on any patient using dexamethasone to make certain that he is not behaving erratically or displaying mood or memory symptoms,” Appel said.

You’d think! But that doesn’t seem to be happening. At all.

“The president’s own doctors would be wise to monitor all of his actions, public and private, including Twitter postings, to determine whether there is a possibility of psychosis,” he said. “If they have any significant concerns, then direct evaluation by an independent psychiatrist would certainly be appropriate.”

Indeed. But instead we have Sean Conley saying what Trump tells him to say. It’s not very confidence-inspiring.

“The president this morning says, ‘I feel great,’ ” wrote Conley, who provided no additional information about Trump’s treatment, including whether he is still taking dexamethasone or other medication.

Yes we know what he says he feels but we kind of hoped you would probe a little more deeply than that.

While Trump may betolerating the drugs without psychological impact, it’s important that he designate someone to evaluate him and empower them to take action if they determine he is impaired, Wynia said.

Yeeeaaah that’s not happening.

NPR explains about the dexamethasone:

Dexamethasone is an anti-inflammatory drug used for a range of ailments, including arthritis, kidney, blood and thyroid disorders and severe allergies. The drug is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines and is also used to treat certain types of cancer.

Earlier this year, a large clinical trial in the U.K. found that giving dexamethasone to patients hospitalized with COVID-19 reduced their risk of dying. Patients were given 6 milligrams of the drug for 10 days.

The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in July, found the drug cut mortality by a third among severely ill COVID-19 patients who were on ventilators, and by a fifth for patients receiving supplemental oxygen. It was found not to have any benefits for patients with mild illness, and there was some evidence of potential harm.

Which confirms that Trump does not have a mild case. He clearly thinks he’s flat-out cured, and he’s in for a rude awakening.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America now recommends giving 6 milligrams of the drug for 10 days to critically ill COVID-19 patients on ventilators and those requiring oxygen support. But it recommends not using the drug on people with mild illness who do not require supplemental oxygen.

But Trump did require supplemental oxygen. He’s sicker than he thinks.

There are known side effects, including psychiatric ones.

“Anything from feeling like you’re on top of the world … your arthritic aches and pains of age just melt away, you have lots of energy,” she said. “There may be some grandiosity.”

Boom! There’s our boy. He’s grandiose Like Nobody’s Ever Seen Before without dexamethasone, and with it he’s manic like a beachball.

The drug can also cause agitation, insomnia, and even psychosis, Gounder said….

All these side effects point to the need to monitor people on these drugs carefully, she added.

Especially, she said in a tense whisper, when the people on the drugs can launch the nukes.

If the president’s physicians prescribed him the recommended dose, Trump will finish his course of treatment early next week.

Sweet. He’s only got four or five days when he might go all General Jack D. Ripper on us. Fabulous.

Also

Official statement by official manager of official Trump campaign:

President Trump won the first debate despite a terrible and biased moderator in Chris Wallace, and everybody knows it. For the swamp creatures at the Presidential Debate Commission to now rush to Joe Biden’s defense by unilaterally canceling an in-person debate is pathetic. That’s not what debates are about or how they’re done. Here are the facts: President Trump will have posted multiple negative tests prior to the debate, so there is no need for this unilateral declaration. The safety of all involved can easily be achieved without canceling a chance for voters to see both candidates go head to head. We’ll pass on this sad excuse to bail out Joe Biden and do a rally instead.

It’s a fact that Trump will have posted multiple negative tests before the debate? How can Bill Stepien (for it is he) possibly know that? He can’t, of course. The whole point of tests is that one doesn’t know, and one does the test in order to find out.

Also “multiple” doesn’t make any difference. They just can’t get this right, can they. Here’s how it works: no matter how many tests you take, it’s still possible for the next one to be positive, if you’ve been infected. There’s no cumulative thing going where if you get a big enough number of negative tests the universe rules that you can never get a positive one. Not how it works. You know how sometimes you don’t have a cold, and then the next day you don’t have a cold, and the day after that, for weeks and weeks? And then one day you have a cold? It’s like that.

And isn’t Bill Stepien one of the people who has tested positive?

Yes, he is.

He’s still taking the steroid so that’s why he’s still so hopped up.

The president confirmed he is still taking the strong steroid dexamethasone. It’s widely available in hospitals and doctors have highlighted it can make the patient feel better than they actually are, which could help explain some of the president’s unusually upbeat descriptions of how he is feeling over the past several days.

It almost certainly does explain it. That’s not the normal Trump we’re seeing. Normal Trump doesn’t keep telling us he loves us.

Trump downplayed the drug’s strength while sort of describing what medications he is still taking. “They have a steroid, it’s not a heavy steroid, they have that go a little longer. I’m almost not taking anything. I feel great.”

Yes, because of the steroid.

Oh goody another hopped-up manic video. That accordion is going to fall to bits at this rate.

He loves us! He really loves us!

It’s yesterday’s bullshit all over again. He likes to repeat himself, likes to repeat himself. He likes to repeat himself. Himself? He likes to repeat.

He took this stuff, it was incredible, incredible, ya gonna get it, ya gonna get it free, he got it approved, it woulda taken months, he got it approved, he’s done more in 47 months than Biden has in 47 years, he loves ya.

Trump wants to be seen as Mister Strong (that’s President Strong to you peasants).

Trump has sought to project the strongman image, flying to the White House by helicopter at sunset, standing on the balcony and taking off his face mask while still contagious, bragging that he feels better than he did 20 years ago and urging the public to neither fear the virus nor let it dominate their lives.

But if he wants to project the strongman image, why…

He’s not in that photo because he chose to ride in a golf cart instead. It was only a short walk…

His campaign has sent out fundraising emails preaching a similar if-I-can-beat-it-so-can-you-message, hoping to turn personal and political disaster to their electoral advantage against the cautious Joe Biden.

Wait though. It doesn’t follow. If he can beat it it doesn’t follow that so can we, because he got special treatment. He didn’t have to go get in line for admission to a crowded hospital full of other covid patients, with insufficient ventilators and PPE and beds and nurses and doctors. He got rushed straight to his very own suite at Walter Reed and the undivided attention of a whole staff of doctors and whatever medication they suggested. The rest of us don’t have that.

Trump says it’s the parents of dead soldiers who gave him the virus.

In an interview on Fox Business, Trump told host Maria Bartiromo that he “figured there would be a chance” he would become infected with the coronavirus, citing his meetings with the families of America’s war dead.

…

He said the family members would approach him to “tell me a story about, ‘My son, sir, was in Iraq.’ Or, ‘He was in Afghanistan.’ And, ‘Sir, he did this, and he did that, and then he charged in order to save his friends.’ And, ‘Yes, sir, he was killed, but he saved his friends. He’s so brave, sir.’”

That’s four “sir”s in that one short passage.

Apart from the meetings the president described Thursday, he has held large-scale campaign rallies in recent months where attendees do not practice social distancing and many of his supporters do not wear face masks.

Trump also presided over a packed, mostly mask-less White House Rose Garden ceremony last month where he nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

That ceremony, which was attended by numerous administration officials and members of Congress, has since been identified as a potential superspreader event.

Yes yes yes but that can’t have been it, those were all important people, rich people, Republican important rich people, they can’t have been infected, it has to be one of those dirty common people whose children join the military.

Timothy McVeigh lives on.

The FBI says it thwarted what it described as a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and federal prosecutors are expected to discuss the alleged conspiracy later Thursday.

…

The court filing also alleges the conspirators twice conducted surveillance at Whitmer’s vacation home and discussed kidnapping her to a remote location in Wisconsin to stand “trial” for treason prior to the Nov. 3 election.

“Several members talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor,” an FBI agent wrote in the affidavit. “The group decided they needed to increase their numbers and encouraged each other to talk to their neighbors and spread their message.”

…

The FBI was already tracking the militia in March after a local police department learned members were trying to obtain addresses of local law-enforcement officers, the FBI agent wrote.

“At the time, the FBI interviewed a member of the militia group who was concerned about the group’s plans to target and kill police officers, and that person agreed to become a (confidential source),” the agent wrote.

In late June, Fox posted on Facebook a video in which he complained about the state’s judicial system and COVID-19 restrictions on gyms operating in Michigan.

“Fox referred to Governor Whitmer as ‘this tyrant bitch,’ and stated, ‘I don’t know, boys, we gotta do something,” according to the court affidavit. “You guys link with me on our other location system, give me some ideas of what we can do.”

Trump has encouraged and fostered this kind of thing.

No.

But Munroe Bergdorf is not a woman.

A woman was displaced from that summit so that a man who role plays “woman” could be on it.

Also that photograph? That’s a very male idea of what women are supposed to look like and pose like and be seductive like and appear on a list of women as gamchangers like.

Even Don Junior thinks Trump is acting dangerously manic.

Donald Trump’s erratic and reckless behavior in the last 24 hours has opened a rift in the Trump family over how to rein in the out-of-control president, according to two Republicans briefed on the family conversations. Sources said Donald Trump Jr. is deeply upset by his father’s decision to drive around Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last night with members of the Secret Service while he was infected with COVID-19. “Don Jr. thinks Trump is acting crazy,” one of the sources told me. The stunt outraged medical experts, including an attending physician at Walter Reed. 

According to sources, Don Jr. has told friends that he tried lobbying Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner to convince the president that he needs to stop acting unstable. “Don Jr. has said he wants to stage an intervention, but Jared and Ivanka keep telling Trump how great he’s doing,” a source said.

Way to go Ivanka and Jared; nothing reckless and irresponsible there, no indeed. (Trump isn’t acting unstable though; he is unstable. He always is, and he’s manic and speedy now.)

The Trump family’s private concern about Trump’s behavior could raise questions about his fitness for office. Trump has been prescribed drugs that medical experts say can seriously impair his cognitive function. Last night the New York Times reported that steroids, which Trump is reportedly taking, specifically dexamethasone, are known to “affect mood, causing euphoria or a general happiness.”

And what might a reckless fool like Trump do in a state of manic euphoria?

I can think of a few things.

H/t catwhisperer

Originally a comment by Holms on Who advocate for their rights or interests.

Sastra

I just had a TRA tell me that thinking that a child going through puberty naturally […] is the Naturalistic Fallacy.

There seems to be surge in people calling things fallacies without realising a statement needs to meet a certain extremely basic formulation “A because B” in order to be an argument at all; before it can be declared a fallacious argument, it must first be an argument. And so it is extremely common lately for people to declare that any insult in a comment renders the entire comment an ad hominem argument, irrespective of whether the insult was relied upon in making an argument, or if the insulting thing was a conclusion of the argument rather than being a premise of it, or if the comment made an argument at all.

This seems to be part of a broad trend in TRA arguments – words and terms have simply lost their original meanings. Trying to set the record of a conversation straight, regarding who said what and when, with references to comment numbers and direct quotes? Gaslighting. Pointing out someone’s abusiveness? Sea Lioning. Responding to abuse in kind? Ad hominem. Explaining the difference between infer and imply, because someone leapt to an idiotic conclusion and called that lunacy a ‘direct implication’ of what I said? Intent is not magic.

And so on throughout arguments with TRAs on the usual topics… I have been told, in a discussion about the origins of public toilets being sex rather than gender segregated, bringing up the history of toilets is an Appeal to Tradition fallacy. I have been told, in a discussion about the meaning of the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’, pointing out that word meanings in natural languages arise from common use is an Appeal to Popularity. Oh and forget about etymology in a discussion of historical words meanings and their changes, that’s just another Appeal to Tradition.

Any specious argument or catechism will do, if it is convenient in the moment.

Voter suppression in Houston.

The Texas Supreme Court on Wednesday forbade the state’s most populous county from [to] mailing unsolicited applications for mail-in ballots to millions of registered voters ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

…

In a 14-page opinion, the state Supreme Court reversed lower-court rulings and held that the Democratic clerk of Harris County, which includes Houston, lacked the statutory authority to distribute unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to some two million voters.

Harris County clerk Chris Hollins said the planned mailers—which would include information about who is and isn’t eligible to vote by mail—fell under his duty to conduct early voting and would serve as a helpful guide. The state sued to block the mailings, alleging that mass mailing would confuse residents about the voting rules, and that Mr. Hollins was overstepping his authority under the Texas Election Code.

And that too many not-white people would vote.

“It is disappointing that the court has sided with political forces seeking to limit voter access this November,” said Mr. Hollins.

John Roberts brought voter suppression back from the dead.

The full image:

That’s the Chair of the Society of Authors, Joanne Harris, saying

People with power, money and influence do not experience the same effect from online abuse as those with less power. That doesn’t mean we should approve of abuse. But ‘silencing’ a person in power doesn’t actually silence anything.

So there, JK Rowling. You’ve had success and money from your books (even though you’ve given away a lot of the money), so abusing you online doesn’t actually silence anything. Good news, yeh?

Joanne Harris seems to think Amanda Craig is somehow responsible for what Private Eye wrote.

But Joanne Harris has power, money and influence, so she shouldn’t mind about dogpiling, right? Isn’t that how it works?

There’s a New Video from the king. He tweeted it himself. He plays a lot of accordion on it. He explains that he doesn’t know what “therapeutic” means. He says everybody is going to get Regeneron, for free. He says China is gonna pay a very big price. He plays the hell out of that accordion.

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.