The Beeb reports:

Two teenage girls have been murdered in a so-called “honour killing” in north-west Pakistan following a video circulated on the internet.

They are said to have been shot dead by a family member earlier this week in a village on the border of the North and South Waziristan tribal districts.

The killing occurred after a short mobile video of them with a young man surfaced on social media, police said.

Totally understandable. Female people are a commodity, whose value rests on the purity (as opposed to filth) of their genitals. They belond to the men in their family, and if their genitals are rendered impure, they become not just worthless but a liability. Their filth equals shame to the real people – the men – in their family. The only way to excise the shame is to excise the filthy females. Impurity is achieved via any interaction with unrelated men in the absence of a sufficient number of fathers brothers uncles male cousins to guard the genitals.

The incident is said to have taken place on Thursday afternoon at Shaam Plain Garyom, a border village of North and South Waziristan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to a police report quoted by Pakistani daily Dawn.

It said the reason behind the killings of the two girls, aged 16 and 18, was believed to be a video, provided to Dawn, which shows a young man recording himself with three young girls in a secluded area outdoors.

Two of the three filth-vectors have been eliminated. The third is still at large.

I have to return to this absurdity, because there’s just so much absurdity in it.

It’s the fact that he tweeted it that’s so grotesque – that it’s right there for all to see.

You know, a normal person wouldn’t see it as flattering in the first place. A normal person wouldn’t see a clip with her head perched awkwardly on someone else’s body as a compliment. It’s not a compliment, is it. It’s a statement that Trump’s body is not all that glorious, along with a statement that his general self-presentation is not all that great. The alternative body is relaxed, comfortable, cool – not herky-jerky and flailing like Trump’s body. The alternative body doesn’t flap its hands up and down and back and forth the way Trump flaps his. The alternative body doesn’t lean forward to hide its gut so that it looks like a teetering clown-doll the way Trump’s body does. The alternative body is an improvement on Trump’s in every way, and a normal person would notice the implied insult. Trump has apparently received it as an artistic and very welcome enhancement of his glory.

Amusingly, the alternative body is an improvement in much the way Obama’s would be. It’s the body of someone who gets some exercise and doesn’t eternally sit on his bum watching tv and screaming insults on Twitter. Trump moves awkwardly and slowly when he does move, and his body seems to hinder him. The guy in the bomber jacket not so much.

So it’s weird that he would tweet it as if it were a compliment as opposed to the other thing.

It’s also weird that he would tweet it without realizing that most people are going to think “Does he seriously think that represents him???”

And it’s weird that he would tweet it at all, even if it were unambiguously flattering. It’s weird for a president to spend time tweeting “he’s so hot and strong and manly” flattery of himself that way. It wouldn’t be weird if he were 5, maybe 6, but no older than that. He turns 74 next month.

This one is soooooooooooooo pathEtic…………………..

Maya Forstater notes how confused about human rights some core human rights organizations are:

Stonewall was set up to defend the rights of gay and lesbian (and later bisexual) people. Its charitable objects are to promote human rights as set out in the Human Rights Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the laws which protect everyone’s rights. But in 2015 it adopted the “trans rights” cause and since then has been enthusiastic about ignoring and undermining women’s rights.

Stonewall has called for ‘gender identity’ to replace ‘gender reassignment’ (the idea of transition) as a protected characteristic in equality law and to “remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces”. In other words it has argued for women to be denied female-only spaces to wash, change or use the toilet at work, in school, hospitals or public places (as well as female-only specialist services like women’s refuges, hostels and prisons).

It has surprised quite a few women how quickly and easily, in fact eagerly, much of the left has simply dumped women’s rights overboard, as if we and we alone were sinking the ship.

Stonewall has explicitly refused to acknowledge a conflict between trans rights and women’s rights.

Stonewall argued to do so “would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others.”

But that’s bullshit. The rights that trans activists demand are not the same rights as others, they’re new and peculiar versions of “rights” that require stomping other people’s rights into the mud. Trans “rights” are such items as the “right” to be validated as who you say you are, which of course can’t be a right because it would license fraud and theft and every kind of absurdity. Another claimed trans “right” is the right to force other people to treat you as what you are not, which again is a “right” that is in tension with the rights of other people to trust their own senses and judgement.

None of these human rights experts say what they mean by “trans rights”. And the weird thing about their responses is that conflicts of rights are commonplace. They are part of the human rights framework, and human rights experts all know this.

That makes sense, because trans activists seem to be experts in nothing but trans activism.

When there is a conflict of rights we don’t normally throw up our hands and say that no one must speak of it. It might have to go to courts to decide, but we can also talk in more general terms about what the rights are and how organisations can balance everyone’s rights. This is the role of human rights organisations and official bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

It used to be. Now it’s all decided by trans activists. That is their right.

When Stonewall first included transgender people in its mandate it talked about “trans equality”. Trans people have equal human rights with everyone else. I agree with Stonewall on this. But more recently the call mutated into a demand for “trans rights”. Stonewall, Amnesty and Liberty never quite spell out what “trans rights” are. But their idea seems to include:

The “right” to compel others to pretend to share your belief that you are a member of the opposite sex

The “right” to share intimate spaces with members of the opposite sex without their consent.

Of course these are not “rights”. They are demands.

Peremptory demands, backed up with threats and ostracism.

Late Friday night – oh hey Nancy by the way I’ve gotten rid of another one of those pesky General Inspector losers who kept getting in my way.

President Donald Trump has removed State Department Inspector General Steve Linick and replaced him with an ally of Vice President Mike Pence — the latest in a series of moves against independent government watchdogs in recent months.

Ah yes, one of those “independent” government watchdogs who are allies of the badmaddogs.

Trump informed Congress of his intent to oust Linick, a Justice Department veteran appointed to the role in 2013 by then President Barack Obama, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday night.

As one does. Not during the day, not during the day during the week, but at night on Friday, to maximize the number of hours that will elapse before officials can officially respond.

“The president’s late-night, weekend firing of the State Department inspector general has accelerated his dangerous pattern of retaliation against the patriotic public servants charged with conducting oversight on behalf of the American people,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Inspector General Linick was punished for honorably performing his duty to protect the Constitution and our national security, as required by the law and by his oath.”

Fuck all that, the point is to protect Trump. Pass the ice cream.

Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called Linick’s dismissal an “outrageous act of a president trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of State, from accountability.”

Engel claimed: “I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo. Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”

Oh no. No no. It’s not retaliation, it’s prevention.

Trump has removed a number of federal watchdogs in the last few months, including Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, who issued a report critical of the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; and the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

Housekeeping.

Trump is getting more and more tantrummy about the CDC.

As the coronavirus pandemic stretches past its ninth week, tensions are rising between the White House and the nation’s leading public health agency. In interviews with CNN, senior administration officials in Washington, as well as top officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta describe a growing sense of mistrust and animosity between the White House and CDC over how quickly the US should reopen and how the government tracks data on the virus.

Similarly, if Trump Tower had a fire raging on the tenth floor, Trump would be expressing mistrust and animosity toward the NYC fire department.

Except no he wouldn’t, of course, at least not until the fire was completely out, because Trump Tower is something Trump cares about. Us? Not so much.

Last week, Redfield was forced to apologize to administration officials after a draft of the CDC’s guidelines to reopening America were leaked to the media. The 68-page document outlined a detailed approach for how states, businesses and individuals could safely ease back into normalcy and were far more strict and detailed than the White House’s own road map toward a return to normal, a CNN review found.

On Thursday the CDC published just 6 pages of graphics labeled “decision trees” as updated guidance. After spending “innumerable hours” on the guidance draft of recommendations, which they say was asked for specifically by Dr. Birx, two senior CDC officials tell CNN that the White House decision to shelve it for now in favor of a 6-page outline has only added to mounting frustration toward Birx within the CDC.

It’s almost as if there’s a downside to letting politics trump medical expertise.

Birx is a Trump whisperer, and she remains in his good graces while Fauci is now way out of them.

In interviews with CNN over the past several weeks, CDC officials have expressed a disappointment that Birx has not done more to correct some of the misinformation that Trump has touted during many of the coronavirus press briefings. “As a scientist when you stand-up in front of all that, it doesn’t help your credibility,” said the same official in describing the prevailing view of officials within the CDC about Birx.

But it helps your credibility with Trump.

Brilliantly done.

Also today:

I’m reminded of Trump’s “we have nicer apartments than they do.”

Notice also the repeated shrugging as he tries to minimize the death toll. (Not to mention Fauci’s well-timed brow-swipe.)

Remember this guy?

He’d do a much better job.

Reuters reports:

Lying in rows of cots in a small hotel on the outskirts of Kiev, 51 babies born to surrogate mothers are stranded in Ukraine as the coronavirus lockdown is preventing parents from the United States, Europe and elsewhere from collecting them.

In other words the disgusting practice of renting human incubators (who just happen to be women, and not trans women at that) has resulted in 51 babies with no parents in the midst of a pandemic.

Interesting that exploiters of women choose Ukraine as their human incubator supplier. That couldn’t be because Ukraine is so desperate and vulnerable could it?

Ukraine imposed a ban on foreigners entering in March, and most parents have only seen their newborns through pictures and video calls with the clinic.

“Parents” my ass.

The Hotel Venice belongs to the clinic BioTexCom, which released video footage of the babies to raise public awareness and spur the government into acting more quickly.

Reaction from the authorities was swift.

Lyudmyla Denisova, the human rights ombudsman for the Ukrainian parliament, said the video showed the country had a “massive and systemic” surrogacy industry where babies were advertised as a “high quality product”.

Fuckin’ A.

The Hotel Venice is surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire. The building is usually where parents stay while picking up their babies. At BioTexCom, a surrogate mother receives about $15,000-$17,000.

For nine months of hard work and discomfort culminating in childbirth.

“The children are all provided with food, a sufficient number of employees look after them, but there is no substitute for parental care,” said Denis Herman, BioTexCom’s lawyer.

A bit late for that.

Them that’s got shall get…

When Congress set aside $30 billion for education institutions facing ruin because of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, it’s pretty clear this is not what they had in mind. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is reportedly throwing millions of federal dollars that were intended mainly for public schools and colleges at private and religious schools, according to a report from The New York Times. About $350 million of funding has reportedly been allocated to small colleges, many of which are private or religious, regardless of need. For example, the Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential in Wisconsin, which has a completely normal website that denies claims that it’s a cult, has reportedly received about $495,000. DeVos has reportedly also used $180 million of the relief to encourage states to create “microgrants” that parents can use to pay for educational services, including private-school tuition.

I’m sure that’s a much better use for the money than giving it to public schools in Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Atlanta, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore…

I saw this a couple of days ago but couldn’t find the video clip so waited to post it. It’s sickening.

Nice of them not to shoot him though.

Updating to add a fuller clip

and to note that these fuckers did this days after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in a situation EXACTLY like this.

Everywhere, around the world:

As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

But he said he would say all of them. That has to mean it’s true.

A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.

A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.

Surprisingly high.

But hey, at least he’s providing a useful distraction from the point of view of the bosses in China:

There is a palpable sense of relief among Chinese state commentators that the US president’s antics have diverted some of the anger that would otherwise have been aimed at Beijing.

“Only by making Americans hate China can they make sure that the public might overlook the fact that Trump’s team is stained with the blood of Americans,” said an English-language Global Times editorial late last month.

…

China’s failure to cooperate fully with the WHO and its heavy-handed diplomacy has won Beijing few friends, despite its dispatch of medical assistance around the world. But the German news weekly Der Spiegel argued that Trump had single-handedly managed to spare Beijing the worst of the global consequences for its failings.

You’re welcome.

If the numbers are bad, here’s what you do: lie about the numbers.

Top Trump officials, huddled in the White House, itself the subject of a coronavirus outbreak, have according to reports begun questioning the number of deaths – and the president is among the skeptics.

He has a lot of practice being a “skeptic” about numbers. When he’s selling a thing, the value goes way up. When he’s reporting that thing to the tax people, the value goes way down. It’s magic.

One common claim is that hospitals receive more money from Medicare if they are treating a patient with the coronavirus compared with other illnesses, and so are inflating their numbers. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota state senator and family physician, began hawking this theory in early April, leading to an appearance on [Laura] Ingraham’s show.

“Right now Medicare has determined that if you have a Covid-19 admission to the hospital, you’ll get paid $13,000,” Jensen said.

“If that Covid-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000, three times as much. Nobody can tell me after 35 years in the world of medicine that sometimes those kinds of things [don’t] impact on what we do.”

…

Factcheckers have found no evidence to support Jensen’s claims – in fact, some hospital revenues are expected to be down, due to the cancellation of elective procedures – but the idea of labeling illnesses as coronavirus for cash became a talking point on rightwing Facebook groups and beyond.

Worryingly, the disinformation push seems to be working. An Axios-Ipsos poll found that the death toll has become a political issue, 40% of Republicans believing fewer Americans are dying from coronavirus than the official toll says.

A separate study, published at the end of April, revealed the stark consequences of prominent figures underplaying the impact of Covid-19. A group of researchers tracked the spread of coronavirus among viewers of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, after Hannity spent weeks downplaying the threat.

So Sean Hannity’s lies are killing people. I bet he still sleeps well at night.

More from le jardin des roses:

“We’ll fight through it,” he says repeatedly, in his dopy clogged voice. Send me in, coach! We coulda beena contenda. Fight fight fight!

“Wheya hadda problem come in, iddl go away, it may flare up, it may not flare up, wll hafta see wut happens but if it does flare up wir gunna pudout the fire, and we’ll pudit out quickly and efficiently, we’ve learned a lot Steve you have a question.”

Trump is in the Rose Garden right now, taking his idiocy out for an airing.

He can mean “we wouldn’t have the stats” – which would suit him just fine. He’d love it if we had no clue how bad the pandemic is.

Of course he may also think that not having the stats is the same thing as not having the cases.

No stats no cases! It would make a nice sign for the MAGAs to carry.

That’s showbiz, folks!

The Lancet has an editorial on Trump and the CDC:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

Right-wing politics is how.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration resisted providing the sufficient budget that the CDC needed to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis. The George W Bush administration put restrictions on global and domestic HIV prevention and reproductive health programming.

The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge. In a press conference on Feb 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned US citizens to prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life. Messonnier subsequently no longer appeared at White House briefings on COVID-19. More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC’s leadership and its work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Call me crazy but I think public health shouldn’t be a political issue. Rich people can get sick too, plus they suffer torments when they can’t shop for gold-plated running shoes and platinum caviar.

The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort.

But a person like that would be a threat to Trump, at least in Trump’s eyes, so no dice.

Hold the phone – women can get periods!

Who knew?

Yes, we know, because “trans guys” are women, and “non-binary people” are people and some people are women.

Maybe this whole thing is just a movement of people who long to be teachers but don’t want the grind of teaching second grade, so they make shit up in order to “teach” us it.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Trump decided to try to demonstrate that he’s smarter than Anthony Fauci.

[I]t’s becoming clearer and clearer that reopening the country is Trump’s only plan for reviving the economy. The new stimulus package is, as Trump accurately declared, dead on arrival. The Federal Reserve is low on options. The White House has now essentially bet everything that states loosening restrictions will spur growth in time for November’s election. Fauci’s words of caution are an obstacle at a moment when the economic outlook is grim.

Has anyone bothered to tell Trump that rolling out the red carpet for a pandemic and waiting for the applause as tens of thousands more people die is not a winner either? Just saying “Fauci’s wrong Fauci’s wrong Fauci’s wrong” isn’t going to kneecap the virus. And you know what else? Causing another surge of the virus isn’t going to bring the economy back; rather the reverse.

Plus there’s that whole thing of risking thousands or tens of thousands of lives for the sake of his personal greed for attention. It’s not a great look.

Trump is frustrated that Fauci is eclipsing him in surveys on public trust, most recently the CNN/SSRS poll this week. Officials say Trump has long held out some resentment that Fauci is respected and liked by people he has struggled to convert.

Diddums. It’s so unfair that we trust Fauci more on issues to do with contagious diseases and how to manage them than we do Trump. Trump knows how to con people into buying crap condos! All Fauci knows is a lot of stuff about diseases and contagion and treatments. It should be no contest!

Trump’s irritation at being publicly undermined has been evident in conversations with his friends and aides, when he’s complained that Fauci doesn’t seem to be on his side.

Waaaah, my side, me me me me me me me, waaaaah, he should be kissing my ass, waaaaah, everything is about me.

The busy busy president who is working so hard found time to do a long interview with Fox News this morning, in which he told an exciting story about Obama something something something.

With such bad news on the human and economic fronts, perhaps it’s not surprising that Trump seemed to be most excited about pushing his new “Obamagate” conspiracy theory about his predecessor, Barack Obama. While Trump himself hasn’t been able to explain what exactly “Obamagate” is, the general idea is that Obama was part of a conspiracy to use an FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia to undermine his presidency before it even began.

…

“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would’ve been in jail a long time ago, and I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” Trump claimed. “People should be going to jail for this stuff … this was all Obama. This was all Biden.”

What stuff though? What stuff? He never says. This what? What this? He never says.

He also said Russia longed for Clinton and didn’t want Trump.

This claim is at odds with the consensus conclusion of the US intelligence community, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, and even the words of Vladimir Putin himself — all of them affirming that Russia wanted Trump to win. But if viewers were hoping that Bartiromo would push back by pointing out the obvious, they were disappointed.

Because Fox is allied with…Russia?

It doesn’t make any sense except as pure unsullied My Team versus Their Team.

No more talk? That’ll be the day.