Oh please. When has Trump ever read a word of Howard Zinn? Or any historian at all? Or any book that’s not about him?

This is Stephen Miller, with Trump as the carnival barker.

That’s funny because he’s the least patriotic president we’ve ever had. He’s trashing the country for his own entertainment and enrichment. That’s not patriotism.

An “activist” called Benjamin Butterworth was on the tv yesterday saying how terrible JK Rowling is. He has an interesting history.

On Tuesday 17th September The Times published a story about parents who are raising their child as ‘gender neutral’.

September 2019 that is.

Hobbit Humphrey and Jake England-Johns are keeping the sex of their 17-month-old child a secret, even from their own family. They refer to the toddler by the pronoun “they” and plan to allow them to choose their own gender.

Journalists Sonia Poulton and Benjamin Butterworth discussed this story on Sky News. They talked about the projection of harmful gender stereotypes onto children and the conflation of sex and gender before turning to the idea that one can be born in the wrong body.

BUTTERWORTH: Of course some people are born in the wrong body.

POULTON: No, no. I have to take complete issue with that. That is a really dangerous statement.

Butterworth continued to defend the absurd claim that one can be born in the “wrong” body (so many slapstick cartoons suggest themselves).

Butterworth is at least consistent – he “identified as” black for awhile – at least long enough to fill a slot meant for a black person at a conference.

LSE students wrote an open letter to Butterworth, asking him to stand down and give his place to a black delegate. He did not.

He stopped “identifying as” black after that, but he’s cheerfully dogpiling on women who say that being a woman isn’t like putting on a coat.

If this is how we decide what is true…we have a problem.

“Trans women are women legally.”

I’m not sure I believe the law has the power to change physical reality that way. The law can define people as citizens or non-citizens, criminals or not, and other social categories like that. It can define people as children or adults, I guess – certainly there are laws that rely on the categories. But can the law just decide that men who say they are women are in fact women? Maybe it has the power to do it, but does it have the right? And do we actually have to accept the law’s definition?

“The belief that trans women are men is not a protected belief”

But it’s not a belief. The shoe is on the other foot – the belief that a man becomes a woman by saying so is a belief, while saying that a man is not a woman is not a belief, it’s just reality.

It’s quite gaslighty, this business of pretending that it’s a mere frivolous lightly-adopted belief that men are not women.

” and was considered “not worthy of respect” by the judge in the Forstater case.”

Even a judge doesn’t get to tell us we have to stop knowing that men are not women. We do know that men are not women, and we couldn’t stop knowing it if we tried. We could pretend, we could lie and bullshit and flatter, but that’s the utmost that is possible. Given that some of us think lying and bullshitting are bad, we’re not very motivated to make the attempt.

House Whip Jim Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, is not impressed by Barr’s claim that pandemic restrictions are second only to slavery as a violation of rights.

That statement by Mister Barr was one of the most ridiculous, tone-deaf, godawful things I’ve ever heard. It is incredible the chief law enforcement officer in this country would equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives. Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives. This pandemic is a threat to human life, and the experts, the medical experts, the scientists are telling us what it takes to respond successfully to this pandemic. And if this administration – this godawful duo of Trump and Barr – were going about the business of doing what is necessary to protect the people of this great country, we would be beyond this pandemic by now.

Now let’s tie together Barr and the Trump admin attacks on reasonable pandemic precautions and scientific advice in general into one smelly package:

Attorney General William Barr argued Wednesday that coronavirus-related lockdown orders were surpassed only by slavery as the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in the nation’s history.

Oh yes. Certainly. The internment of Americans of Japanese descent in 1942 was as nothing compared to health measures during a lethal pandemic. The Trail of Tears? Pff, a walk in the park. Mass incarceration? Three strikes laws? HUAC? The Espionage Act of 1917? The Sedition Act of 1918? All mere vapor compared to inconvenient emergency health measures.

The remarks from the attorney general came during an event hosted by Hillsdale College, where Barr delivered a speech defending his intervention in high-profile Justice Department cases and comparing career prosecutors to preschoolers.

“You know, putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. It’s — you know, other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” Barr said during a question-and-answer session following his remarks.

Very cogent, except for the fact that it’s not like house arrest, because we are allowed to shop for necessities and go out for exercise and the like. We’re urged to stay home as much as possible and we’re told (in some jurisdictions) to social distance, but we’re not under house arrest. People in actual quarantine are, but the rest of us aren’t. I daresay Barr knows that perfectly well.

At one point, Barr seemingly suggested that the federal response to the pandemic should be guided by politicians and elected officials rather than medical experts and the broader scientific community.

“The person in the white coat is not the ‘grand seer’ who can come up with a right decision for society. A free people makes its decision through its elected representative,” he said.

That’s just great – feeding the idiotic fanatical hostility to medical expertise we’re already dealing with. Barr is such scum.

I don’t know how I managed to miss this yesterday – Caputo is taking a two month “leave of absence”…i.e. he’s been told to stfu and take a break until after the election. Alexander is out altogether.

The video is hilarious given the knowledge that he’s been told to fuck right off. If I’d watched it not knowing that it wouldn’t have been funny at all.

Just to refresh our memories (or maybe just mine – I find Caputo and Alexander very forgettable somehow), NPR on Caputo two days ago, so the day before he “went on leave”:

According to a report in Politico last week, Caputo and other officials tried to block or amend CDC reports, including the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, to make them appear more favorable to President Trump.

Caputo is a longtime political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He also recently published a book titled The Ukraine Hoax: How Decades of Corruption in the Former Soviet Republic Led to Trump’s Phony Impeachment.

A political operative. Not the right kind of job experience for a public health spokes.

Anyway he’s off on his hols and with any luck he won’t be back because Trump will be too busy packing his bags.

More from Barr:

Attorney General William P. Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition, according to two people familiar with the call.

The highly unusual suggestion to charge people with insurrection against lawful authority alarmed some on the call, which included U.S. attorneys around the country, said the people, who described Mr. Barr’s comments on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The attorney general has also asked prosecutors in the Justice Department’s civil rights division to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer, according to two people briefed on those discussions.

A DoJ spokesperson denies it.

The directives are in keeping with Mr. Barr’s approach to prosecute crimes as aggressively as possible in cities where protests have given way to violence. But in suggesting possible prosecution of Ms. Durkan, a Democrat, Mr. Barr also took aim at an elected official whom President Trump has repeatedly attacked.

And a woman, and the mayor of a city on the Left Coast, and yadda yadda. Meanwhile Trump’s constant stream of crimes continues uninterrupted.

The disclosures came as Mr. Barr directly inserted himself into the presidential race in recent days to warn that the United States would be on the brink of destruction if Mr. Trump lost. He told a Chicago Tribune columnist that the nation could find itself “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if Mr. Trump lost and that the country faced “a clear fork in the road.”

Oh ffs. Socialism! Biden is nowhere near a socialist; he’s a very conservative Democrat. Trump is far more of a literal fascist than Biden is a literal socialist. Plus Trump is an actual criminal, who is committing crimes now, right in front of us, as we watch slack-jawed; none of that is true of Biden.

The attorney general’s question about whether Ms. Durkan, the former U.S. attorney in Seattle, had violated any federal statutes by allowing the protest zone was highly unusual, former law enforcement officials said.

“The attorney general seems personally, deeply offended by the autonomous zone and wants someone to pay for it,” said Chuck Rosenberg, the former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. “If the people of Seattle are personally offended, they have political recourse. There is no reason to try to stretch a criminal statute to cover the conduct.”

Meanwhile about that whole far-right thing…

Two men associated with the Boogaloo, a far-right movement that supports the coming of a second civil war, were arrested on terrorism-related charges last week. Prosecutors said they used the protests as cover to try to sell weapons to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which the United States and other countries consider a terrorist group, and to use the money to support the Boogaloo movement.

But the real terrorist is…Jenny Durkan?

Trump’s consigliere is trashing the prosecutors who work for the Justice Department.

In scathing remarks criticizing his own staff, Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday that the Justice Department has recently acted “more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice” and equated some prosecutors to preschoolers and “headhunters.”

Too much deference is given to career prosecutors, rather than to politically appointed leaders who can be held accountable at the ballot box, he said in remarks that are likely to further strain relations between Barr and some of the Justice Department’s career prosecutors.

Ya think???

Barr did not mention any specific cases, but he has been criticized by current and former government lawyers for moving to abandon the prosecution of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and seeking a less harsh sentence for Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser. Career Justice Department lawyers quit the prosecution teams in both cases.

In other words Barr, who is supposed to be the Attorney General, is a corrupt conscienceless political hack who is working to prop up Trump rather than doing his real job.

“Name one successful organization where the lowest-level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct,” he said. “There aren’t any. Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it’s no way to run a federal agency.”

That’s just horseshit. What Barr is doing is meddling with federal cases to help Trump’s criminal allies and criminal Trump himself; he’s not doing disinterested apolitical quality control of the Justice Department.

Involuntary hysterectomies…why does that sound so familiar…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats demanded an investigation on Tuesday into claims by a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Georgia that detainees there have been denied basic medical care and possibly subjected to hysterectomies without their informed consent.

Dawn Wooten, a registered nurse who worked full-time at the Irwin County Detention Center until July, outlined her allegations in a complaint filed on Monday to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General by a coalition of advocacy groups.

“If true, the appalling conditions described in the whistleblower complaint – including allegations of mass hysterectomies being performed on vulnerable immigrant women – are a staggering abuse of human rights,” Pelosi said in a statement. “The DHS Inspector General must immediately investigate the allegations detailed in this complaint.”

Now why would ICE be doing mass hysterectomies? Trying their hand at eugenics are they?

In her complaint, Wooten said that she and other nurses had noticed female detainees getting hysterectomies at an improbable rate, and worried that the women didn’t understand what procedure they were receiving, as most medical staff members don’t speak Spanish.

…

LaSalle Corrections, the Louisiana-based company that runs Irwin, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The firm faced similar complaints about coronavirus safety at another facility it runs in Louisiana in July, which a company official denied in later congressional testimony.

It’s ludicrous and revolting that we use for-profit companies to imprison (and control and perhaps sterilize refugees and immigrants).

Wooten says there was widespread disregard for protecting staff members and inmates [from COVID] at the Georgia facility. The nurse worked at Irwin for three years over the course of separate stints, she told the Intercept, but was demoted in July to an on-call position with few hours — retaliation, she claims, for demanding stricter adherence to medical rules.

…

The 27-page complaint filed Monday details a laundry list of alleged failures at the facility: detainees being ignored or denied tests despite having coronavirus symptoms; others who have tested positive being placed back in the general population; and officials fudging statics on the number of infections.

Staff members, Wooten said, were pressured to “work symptomatic and work positive as long as we had a mask on.” Although ICE purchased two $14,000 rapid-test machines, she said, no nurses were ever trained to use them.

Detainees interviewed for the report said that social distancing was impossible and that everyone was given just one mask and no replacement.

…

Although ICE has reported just 42 cases and no deaths from covid-19 at Irwin, Wooten alleged that those numbers are not accurate because officials have not been “reporting all these cases that are positive.”

In general, Wooten outlined a failed medical system at the facility. Nurses there routinely destroyed the paper requests detainees have to fill out to ask for medical help and made up vital signs for reports after not seeing patients, she alleged.

Well look at it from their point of view: they have to make a profit.

This sucks.

Biologists in New Mexico have sounded the alarm after thousands of song birds were found dead in recent days.

New Mexico State University Professor Martha Desmond told local media that the reason for the mass die off is a mystery but could be tied to smoke from wildfires, or the recent cold weather.

She says the number could be in the millions.

Scientists have reported North American bird populations have declined massively in recent years.

I know that swallows used to be abundant around here and now I very rarely see them. Barn swallows and violet greens, both, have all but disappeared from Seattle.

Some birds – including migratory warblers, swallows and bluebirds – were seen acting strangely before their deaths, according to witnesses.

“It’s devastating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this horrible in my life,” Prof Desmond, who works for the university’s department of fish, wildlife, and conservation ecology, told KRQE-TV.

“When you’re there, you know, picking them up off the ground and seeing the extent of it and then looking at all these carcasses come in,” she continued.

Via Birding New Mexico:

New Mexico residents are finding dead birds throughout the state, both migrant and resident songbirds like these Western Bluebirds. Ben Bauer (Jemez WL technician) found 12 dead Western Bluebirds Soda Dam in Jemez springs (9/10/2020). He witnessed some that were still alive in a little cave (see the picture) huddled together. He also mentioned that some of the birds were actually in the warm water that is at Soda Dam.

US Forest Service personnel are surprised at the adult birds that have died. Some of these species are year round residents and are accustomed to such weather.

The recent storm was record breaking – the precipitation we received in Jemez was very wet -heavy snow (only like ½ inch above 7,500 ft.) and maybe their plumage had not yet developed for winter weather. Another theory is that the fires raging in other states may have released toxins.

Another day another lies conference:

Donald Trump started off the press conference by doubling down on his assertion that there will be “a hundred million vaccine doses by the end of 2020”. He said that vaccines should be ready by “mid-October”.

Trump criticized Joe Biden for spreading “anti-vaccine theories” by saying that Trump is trying to politicize a vaccine by rushing its development before the election. potentially foregoing safety precautions.

“They’re recklessly endangering lives,” Trump said, saying that if Democrats were in the same position, the would be saying how important vaccines are.

It’s not anti-vax to say Trump is making bullshit promises because he wants to win the election. Quite the contrary – a pretend vaccine is no use to anyone.

It’s of course important to remember that health experts have reiterated that a vaccine on Trump’s timeline is highly unlikely.

And that Trump lies more easily than he does almost anything else.

But no, other people are “confused” says the genius.

…a reporter asked the president why he said a vaccine would be available by mid-October when Redfield told a Senate panel today that a vaccine would likely be available in the “second or third quarter” of 2021 at the earliest.

“I think he made a mistake with that statement,” Trump said. “When he said it, I believe he was confused. I’m just telling you we’re ready to go.”

Aka he’s just lying.

He makes reckless claims – he’s not very good at thinking about how such claims could backfire on him.

Trump, continuing to contradict what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield said earlier today, just said at a press conference that “under no circumstance would [the vaccine] be as late as the doctor said.”

He can’t know that. Sensible people don’t make absolute claims like that, because they know it’s reckless.

Donnie Pinhead is also saying Redfield is wrong to say masks are important.

Trump again contradicted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield once again, saying that Redfield “made a mistake” when he said that masks are “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.”

“I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine,” Redfield told a Senate panel Wednesday.

Trump said that a vaccine will be more effective as masks have to be “handled very gently, very carefully”. Trump said that he has seen people at restaurants not being careful with their masks.

And that’s why he does campaign events where very few people wear masks at all. Ok.

In one bit of good news (a scarce item these days), Navalny is doing better.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Nalvany plans to return to Russia, according to his spokesperson. He was recently poisoned with a nerve agent and has been undergoing treatment at a German hospital for more than three weeks.

“It’s puzzling to me why anyone should think otherwise,” Navalny spokesperson Kira Yarmysh tweeted.

Fair point. Since Putin can poison him outside Russia as easily as inside, staying out of Russia would be futile.

Nalvany took to Instagram Tuesday to post a photo with his wife and children from his hospital bed — the first photo of him publicly released since he was admitted to the hospital.

“Hi, this is Nalvany. I miss you,” he wrote in his post, according a Bloomberg translation. “I still can’t do practically anything. But yesterday I breathed on my own for the whole day. All by myself. No outside help, even didn’t use this valve in my throat.”

The new Jesus and Mo:

And the ones who have to submit? Not the fantasists, but the people who retain their grip on reality. It’s only fair, right?

The J and M Patreon

It’s the herd mentality you see, it will save us.

President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday during a televised town hall that “herd mentality” could make the coronavirus “disappear” with or without a vaccine.

During a 90-minute town hall hosted by ABC News in the must win battleground of Pennsylvania, Trump defended his repeated assertion that the virus will eventually disappear even without a vaccine, citing what he called “herd mentality”…

Herd immunity, dipshit.

ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Trump whether the coronavirus “would go away without the vaccine?”

“Sure, over a period of time. Sure, with time it goes away –” Trump responded.

Stephanopoulos interjected: “–And many deaths.”

“And you’ll develop, you’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd developed – and that’s going to happen. That will all happen,” Trump said.

He knows more about it than anyone.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, who is the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, has said the “death toll would be enormous” if the country attempted herd immunity.

Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, but you get your herd mentality and then you can have football and crowds again.

Look at this brainless heap.

“It’s going to disappear, George, it’s going to disappear.” Why is it? How does he know? What makes him say that? Look around, this studio is almost empty – he wants people, he wants football games – therefore it’s going to disappear. Obviously. If Donald Trump wants something, the natural world has to arrange things so that he gets that something. COVID is going to disappear because Trump wants crowds and football.

Emily Kirkpatrick at Vanity Fair thinks JK Rowling has one hell of a nerve expressing her opinions right out in public.

No longer satisfied with simply repeatedly expressing her transphobic opinions on Twitter and in 3,600-word screeds on her personal website…

Aw, seriously, where does she get off writing things on her personal website? Who does that? And not just any old things but screeds. Ewwww doncha just hate screeds? Good people write essays or posts or entries, but evil people write screeeeeeeeeeeeeds. Doesn’t it sound witchy? Bitchy witchy writing her witchy bitchy screeeeeeeeeeeds. Let’s punish her.

Also, for the thousandth time, what she’s written isn’t transphobic. It’s not “I hate trans people” or “trans people are hateful,” it’s “we need to talk about women’s rights and how this new definition of ‘woman’ will affect them.”

To finish the sentence:

…J.K. Rowling now appears to be bringing her TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) logic to a bookshelf near you via her new fictional novel, Troubled Blood, out Tuesday.

Oops our writer hasn’t read the “fictional novel” but she’s making claims about it anyway.

According to an early review in The Telegraph…

Which misrepresented the Fictional Novel. How about not flinging shit at Rowling on the basis of one sloppy review?

Nah, that’s no fun.

Wow.

Wildfire smoke has drifted all the way to Pennsylvania.

Mind you, there’s a big difference between wildfire smoke and dense wildfire smoke. If the smoke here looked like the smoke over Pennsylvania I’d be out taking a two hour walk after all this being locked up inside.

Interesting marketing ploy.

People are weird.

Updating to add the whole message.

Alison Flood in the Guardian reviews Rowling’s new novel. (Oh does she have a new novel? I hadn’t heard.)

Before it had even come out, criticism of JK Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith thriller, Troubled Blood, was already wall-to-wall, after an early review in the Telegraph claimed that its “moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”.

In other words people who hadn’t read it were already tearing it to shreds because of a highly dishonest remark in the Telegraph.

As the pair look into the disappearance – and this is a spoiler – one of the avenues they investigate is the possibility Margot was murdered by Dennis Creed, a now-imprisoned and notorious serial killer who once tricked some of his female victims into his van by wearing a wig and a woman’s coat to appear unthreatening. This has now been cited across the internet as further proof of Rowling’s transphobia, after her earlier essay, tweets and decision to return a human rights award after the organisation behind it denounced her views. Amazon has now suspended reviews of the book due to “unusual reviewing activity”, while the hashtag #RIPJKRowling trends on Twitter.

The Telegraph review chose to go big on Creed, describing him as “a transvestite serial killer”, and asking “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues” would make of it. But Creed is just one of many suspects – and without giving too much away, he is not the main villain, nor is he portrayed as trans or even called a “transvestite” by Rowling.

…

Creed is described as a “genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from [his landlady] Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth”.

Perhaps some will still consider this depiction transphobic, given Rowling’s rightly widely criticised views on trans people.

Notice that nervous “rightly.” Nervous, placating, and wrong. Anyone would think Rowling wanted trans people punished or ostracized or otherwise harmed, but she doesn’t – basically she just wants them to stop doing that to women.

It is, at best, an utterly tone-deaf decision to include an evil man who cross-dresses after months of pain among trans people and their allies.

Pain shmain. It’s worked-up pain, manufactured pain, hyperbolic pain, deranged furious socially constructed and encouraged pseudo-pain.

And we should also be wary of how one review has been reproduced without question by countless newspapers and websites, by journalists who have shown no indication of having read the book themselves.

And by cowards who think they have to say Rowling was “rightly criticised” for not echoing every word of the Trans Catechism.

H/t Arnaud