We’ve hit 5 million cases in the US, which is more than any other country. Aren’t we clever. The midwest is going to be swamped.

Health specialists predict a sharp increase in deaths across the region in the coming weeks that will be made significantly worse in some states by the politicians who followed Donald Trump’s lead in undermining medical advice and in questioning the value of masks.

Anthony Fauci, the president’s lead coronavirus expert, recently warned the midwest’s political leaders to follow the science.

“Some states are not doing that,” he said. “We would hope that they all now rethink what happens when you don’t adhere to that. We’ve seen it in plain sight in the southern states that surged.”

Don’t be cute. Don’t be a rebel. Don’t be a trumpy. Just listen to the medical people and wear the damn mask.

Alarmed by rising infections, Wisconsin’s governor last week declared a public health emergency and required masks to be worn indoors. But that immediately fell victim to the politics of coronavirus as at least 16 county sheriffs said they would not enforce the order.

The Florence County Sheriff’s Office told residents: “Wear a mask if you want, if you don’t want to, that is fine also”. In Oneida county, the sheriff said the governor’s order “is in violation of the constitution” while the sheriff of Racine county called the order “government overreach”.

Freedomfreedomfreedomfreedom.

The University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has warned that the refusal of Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds, to require masks in public spaces will cost 700 additional lives over the next three months. It predicted the number of coronavirus deaths at about 13 a day in Iowa by the end of October with the present policy compared to fewer than two if 95% of people used face coverings.

A small price to pay for freedomfreedomfreedomfreedomfreedomfreedom freedomfreedomfreedom.

A first! A milestone! A barrier broken down! Eyes on the prize!

Ooooooooooooh the first openly non-binary person. Think of all the trembling non-binary persons in their closets, feeling newly empowered.

Only…what is it that’s “openly,” exactly? What is it about Tom Pashby that makes him “non-binary”? Is that supposed to mean neither female nor male but a pleasing mix of both? If so, how can we confirm? How do we know? What does he mean? What does Pink News mean?

In other words…what we’ve been presented with here is a man, who is claiming to have done something significant and Firstish, by calling himself not a man but instead non-binary, yet there is no detectable difference between this man and any other man, of a kind that would prompt us to put him in the “Neither” column. In short he looks like a man, a common or garden man, nothing to see here folks. Why are we being told to gape in amazement at his groundbreaking First?

It seems like a good wheeze if you’re brazen enough. Can rich people do it? Can a billionaire claim to be non-binary, neither rich nor poor but a mix of both? Can white people do it? Neither white nor brown but non-binary and thus more special than either brown or white? Can anti-immigrationists do it? Neither native nor foreign-born but non-binary? Can bosses do it? Neither a boss nor a worker but non-binary?

It’s all so…deep.

Too easy.

People. That’s all. Just people, Chase. We want you to call women women and men men. That’s all. It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s routine.

You’re creating a problem where there is no problem. No one needs a special label to distinguish between women and men who say they are women. Women are just women; men who say they are women are just men.

The whole ideology pretty much rests on Word Magic, doesn’t it. If we say “trans woman” often enough people will come to believe that trans women literally are women? That’s how the trick is done, right? If we pitch huge fits about “misgendering” until people are terrorized into saying “she” when they mean “he” then we’ve gone a long way toward conditioning everyone into believing the switch, right?

And so with this tweet. Pretend complete bewilderment about what one can possibly call people who are not trans if the word “cis” is rejected, as if there were some actual need to add an adjective to “women” and “men” to indicate that they are…women and men. There is no such need; it’s just more of the coercive Word Magic to fool people into believing the upside down dogma.

The trumpies have a lot of nerve.

France and Germany have quit talks on reforming the World Health Organization in frustration at attempts by the United States to lead the negotiations, despite its decision to leave the WHO, three officials told Reuters.

“We quit but we still get to boss you.”

That’s not how that works.

European governments have also criticised the WHO but do not go as far as the United States in their criticism, and the decision by Paris and Berlin to leave the talks follows tensions over what they say are Washington’s attempts to dominate the negotiations.

“Nobody wants to be dragged into a reform process and getting an outline for it from a country which itself just left the WHO,” a senior European official involved in the talks said.

More precisely, from people who have bought or crimed their way into a job under the criminal who stole the election, and want to boss the WHO and abandon it simultaneously.

This is so sad (and scary and unfair and unreasonable). A school superintendent in Arizona tells a Washington Post reporter what that’s like now:

The governor has told us we have to open our schools to students on August 17th, or else we miss out on five percent of our funding. I run a high-needs district in middle-of-nowhere Arizona. We’re 90 percent Hispanic and more than 90 percent free-and-reduced lunch. These kids need every dollar we can get. But covid is spreading all over this area and hitting my staff, and now it feels like there’s a gun to my head. I already lost one teacher to this virus. Do I risk opening back up even if it’s going to cost us more lives? Or do we run school remotely and end up depriving these kids?

This is your classic one-horse town. Picture John Wayne riding through cactuses and all that. I’m superintendent, high school principal and sometimes the basketball referee during recess. This is a skeleton staff, and we pay an average salary of about 40,000 a year. I’ve got nothing to cut. We’re buying new programs for virtual learning and trying to get hotspots and iPads for all our kids. Five percent of our budget is hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where’s that going to come from? I might lose teaching positions or basic curriculum unless we somehow get up and running.

I’ve been in the building every day, sanitizing doors and measuring out space in classrooms. We still haven’t received our order of Plexiglas barriers, so we’re cutting up shower curtains and trying to make do with that. It’s one obstacle after the next. Just last week I found out we had another staff member who tested positive, so I went through the guidance from OSHA and the CDC and tried to figure out the protocols. I’m not an expert at any of this, but I did my best with the contact tracing. I called 10 people on staff and told them they’d had a possible exposure. I arranged separate cars and got us all to the testing site. Some of my staff members were crying. They’ve seen what can happen, and they’re coming to me with questions I can’t always answer. “Does my whole family need to get tested?” “How long do I have to quarantine?” “What if this virus hits me like it did Mrs. Byrd?”

Mrs. Byrd is the teacher who died of it.

We got back two of those tests already — both positive. We’re still waiting on eight more. That makes 11 percent of my staff that’s gotten covid, and we haven’t had a single student in our buildings since March. Part of our facility is closed down for decontamination, but we don’t have anyone left to decontaminate it unless I want to put on my hazmat suit and go in there. We’ve seen the impacts of this virus on our maintenance department, on transportation, on food service, on faculty. It’s like this district is shutting down case by case. I don’t understand how anyone could expect us to reopen the building this month in a way that feels safe.

He knows the kids need the school; he knows that better than anyone.

These kids are hurting right now. I don’t need a politician to tell me that. We only have 300 students in this district, and they’re like family. My wife is a teacher here, and we had four kids go through these schools. I know whose parents are laid off from the copper mine and who doesn’t have enough to eat. We delivered breakfast and lunches this summer, and we gave out more meals each day than we have students. I get phone calls from families dealing with poverty issues, depression, loneliness, boredom. Some of these kids are out in the wilderness right now, and school is the best place for them. We all agree on that. But every time I start to play out what that looks like on August 17th, I get sick to my stomach. More than a quarter of our students live with grandparents. These kids could very easily catch this virus, spread it and bring it back home. It’s not safe. There’s no way it can be safe.

He knows from experience.

Mrs. Byrd did everything right. She followed all the protocols. If there’s such a thing as a safe, controlled environment inside a classroom during a pandemic, that was it. We had three teachers sharing a room so they could teach a virtual summer school. They were so careful. This was back in June, when cases here were starting to spike. The kids were at home, but the teachers wanted to be together in the classroom so they could team up on the new technology. I thought that was a good idea. It’s a big room. They could watch and learn from each other. Mrs. Byrd was a master teacher. She’d been here since 1982, and she was always coming up with creative ideas. They delivered care packages to the elementary students so they could sprout beans for something hands-on at home, and then the teachers all took turns in front of the camera. All three of them wore masks. They checked their temperatures. They taught on their own devices and didn’t share anything, not even a pencil.

But she caught it anyway.

I’ve gone over it in my head a thousand times. What precautions did we miss? What more could I have done? I don’t have an answer. These were three responsible adults in an otherwise empty classroom, and they worked hard to protect each other. We still couldn’t control it. That’s what scares me.

But the authorities are telling him he has to open the school.

It’s a nightmare.

Trump is systematically and openly trying to rig the election by destroying voting rights…the rights that so many civil rights activists faced violence and death for demanding.

Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have taken to the courts dozens of times as part of a $20 million effort to challenge voting rules, including filing their own lawsuits in several battleground states, including Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Nevada. And around the time Trump started musing about delaying the election last week, aides and outside advisers began scrambling to ponder possible executive actions he could take to curb mail-in voting — everything from directing the postal service to not deliver certain ballots to stopping local officials from counting them after Election Day.

So that he can steal another election and continue his campaign to smash everything.

“All Americans deserve an election system that is secure and President Trump is highlighting that Democrats’ plan for universal mail-in voting would lead to fraud,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews. “While Democrats continue to call for a radical overhaul of our nation’s voting system, President Trump will continue to work to ensure the security and integrity of our elections.”

That’s a lie though. Mail-in voting does not lead to fraud.

It’s interesting to learn that there’s turmoil at Facebook over how to deal with Trump’s election frauds.

“I do think we’re headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a way that has never been possible in history,” one Facebook employee wrote in a group on Workplace, the company’s internal communication platform, earlier this week.

For the past week, this scenario has been a topic of heated discussion inside Facebook and was a top question for its leader. Some 2,900 employees asked Zuckerberg to address it publicly during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, which he partly did, calling it “an unprecedented position.”

Zuckerberg’s remarks came amid growing internal concerns about the company’s competence in handling misinformation, and the precautions it is taking to ensure its platform isn’t used to disrupt or mislead ahead of the US presidential election. Though Facebook says it has committed more money and resources to avoid repeating its failures during the 2016 election, some employees believe it isn’t enough.

Interesting, because lots of us who don’t work for Facebook think the same thing.

While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules — as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19 — there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.

So that’s not encouraging.

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

Zuckerberg “danced around the question,” BuzzFeed says. That’s not encouraging either.

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

Let’s hope they won’t all be fired.

The internal evidence gathered by the engineer aligns with the experience of a journalist who works for one of Facebook’s US fact-checking partners. They told BuzzFeed News that conservative pages often complain directly to the company.

“Of the publishers that don’t follow the procedure, it seems to be mostly ones on the right. Instead of appealing to the fact-checker they immediately call their rep at Facebook,” said the journalist, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “They jump straight up and say ‘censorship, First Amendment, freedom.’”

Normal procedure is to talk to the low-ranking fact checker, but conservatives (mostly) instead go to a friendly executive – they pull strings instead of arguing the merits.

Facebook typically assigns dedicated partner managers to pages with large followings or big ad budgets. They help their clients maximize their use of the platform. But in the cases identified in the engineer’s post, partner reps appear to have sought preferential treatment for right-wing publishers. This resulted in phone calls to fact-checking partners from people at Facebook, and instances where misinformation strikes appear to have been removed from content without a fact-checker’s knowledge or involvement.

The right to lie to the public is sacred, yeah?

It’s worrisome stuff.

Here’s a surprise – guess what show biz celebrity guy is terfing up a storm on Twitter? Not one I would have guessed in a million tries.

Laurie Penny. Good grief.

The stupidity takes my breath away. Not LP’s personal stupidity, necessarily, but the stupidity of this whole new Pronoun Doctrine, and weird baroque rationalizations of it like this.

No, she/they is not comparable to tu/vous. Referring to women as “she/her” is not formal or stiff – and it’s not familiar or forward, either. It’s just humdrum ordinary usage in languages that do that.

How did she get there? I suppose by thinking that the closer friends are to her, the more familiar they are with the fact that she has Special Bespoke ideas about her exciting fluid indeterminate interesting GenDer, and so they know they’re expected to create opportunities to refer to her (them) in the third person a lot so that she can be called Them a lot. Not the same as the tu/vous distinction at all.

But this idea that being referred to as she/her is something women have to earn with a lot of hard work…while at the same time thinking it’s something women are forbidden to think of as naming female people only…yep it takes my breath away.

Swamp.

Meanwhile…

Tasteful.

The New Zealand Herald reports:

The US Government has warned its citizens to be very cautious about travelling to New Zealand because of our “23 active cases” of Covid-19.

Um. Yes. Be VERY VERY CAREFUL about leaving a country where there have been 4,858,596 cases so far, with 56,105 new cases today, and traveling to one where there are…23. WATCH OUT. MIND HOW YOU GO.MAYBE INJECT SOME BLEACH.

Hahahahachokehahahahahahaha

Jerry Falwell Junior taketh an indefinite leave of absence:

The move comes days after Falwell received criticism for posting a photo to social media that showed him with his pants unzipped alongside a woman who is not his wife.

I saw that earlier this week and was so traumatized I wiped it from my memory.

Falwell is the son of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the evangelical Christian Liberty University and the conservative Moral Majority movement that rose to prominence in the Reagan era.

Falwell Jr. was among the first prominent evangelicals to endorse Donald Trump during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Donald Trump being such a paragon of morality and all.

Family values, my friend, family values.

Also…

We know Trump doesn’t read much. He’s apparently never seen the name “Yosemite” in writing before.

It’s also worth noticing that little spasm of exuberance or whatever it is when he gets to say “Old Faithful” – he perks up and bounces his head back and forth when he says it. He loves stupid nicknames for some reason. “Honest Abe” “Old Faithful” – these are his happy places.

But Yo Semite – yeah. That’s one for the ages.

Speaking of the US’s love affair with long prison sentences – what should the penalty be for stealing hedge clippers?

A black man in Louisiana will continue to serve a life sentence in prison for trying to steal hedge clippers after the state supreme court denied a request to review his sentence.

Fair Wayne Bryant was convicted in 1997 of attempted simple burglary.

So he’s already been locked up for 23 years for trying to steal hedge clippers.

This really is a terrible country in a lot of ways.

The five justices who rejected his appeal – all white men – did not explain the reasoning for their decision, which was first reported by the Lens, a non-profit news site in New Orleans.

Maybe there was no reasoning? Maybe it was just “Nah, let the nigger rot”?

The supreme court’s lone dissent came from the only black or female member of the court, Chief Justice Bernette Johnson. She wrote the sentencing was a “modern manifestation” of the extreme punishments meted out to newly emancipated black men in the post-civil war era.

Exactly. Those extreme punishments weren’t random or just a matter of local bad moods. They were a replacement for slavery. Former slave states sold the labor of those newly emancipated black men locked up for things like “vagrancy” and asking for higher wages. None of this shit is random.

Before Bryant’s 1997 arrest, he was convicted for attempted armed robbery in 1979, his only violent conviction. He was sentenced to 10 years hard labor for the crime. His other previous charges were for possession of stolen things in 1987, attempted check forgery in 1989 and simple burglary in 1992.

…

In Johnson’s dissent, the justice wrote that all of Bryant’s crimes were for stealing something. “It is cruel and unusual to impose a sentence of life in prison at hard labor for the criminal behavior which is most often caused by poverty or addiction,” she wrote.

…

Her dissent then explained that after the era of Reconstruction, which followed the civil war, southern states implemented laws which gave newly emancipated African American citizens extreme punishment for petty crimes. In some places, these were known as “pig laws”, and they were “largely designed to re-enslave African Americans”, Johnson wrote.

And here we still are.

Life in prison for vandalism?

Some Black Lives Matter protesters in Salt Lake City could face up to life in prison if they are convicted of splashing red paint and smashing windows during a protest.

…

The felony criminal mischief charges are more serious because they carry a gang enhancement. Prosecutors said on Wednesday that was justified because the protesters worked together to cause thousands of dollars in damage, but watchdogs called the use of the 1990s-era law troubling, especially in the context of criminal justice reform and minority communities.

A gang enhancement for violent crimes might make sense; for vandalism it makes no kind of sense.

I looked for photos of the damage – it’s a big mess of red paint at the entrance to the building. It’s a big mess, for sure; it will cost money to clean it up, for sure; that in no way makes it worth life in prison.

The charges have Democratic leaders at odds in Salt Lake City, the liberal-leaning capital of conservative Utah, with the top county prosecutor arguing vandalism crossed a line and the mayor calling the charges too extreme.

I’d say life in prison is too extreme, yes.

The Utah demonstrators are unlikely to serve prison time, said the Salt Lake county district attorney, Sim Gill. Though they would get at least five years if convicted as charged, criminal cases often end with a plea to lesser counts.

“I don’t think anyone is going to be going to prison on this,” he said. Gill is a generally reform-minded Democrat who said he had participated in Black Lives Matter protests himself and declined to charge dozens of protesters accused of curfew violations.

Still, he argued “there’s some people who want to engage in protest, but they want to be absolved of any behavior,” he said. “This is not about protest, this is about people who are engaging in criminal conduct.”

But the criminal conduct is simply vandalism. It’s an expense and inconvenience for Salt Lake City government, but that’s all it is.

“We have to have some agreement of what constitutes protected first amendment speech,” Gill said. “When you cross that threshold, should you be held accountable or not?”

But it’s possible to hold the accused to account without threatening them with a life sentence. There’s a lot of ground between “nothing” and “life in prison.”

Deutsche Bank has handed over the records.

New York prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s finances previously issued a subpoena to Deutsche Bank, one of the foremost lenders to the president’s business, as part of their inquiry – and the bank complied, according to the New York Times.

The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, is seeking eight years of the president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted the prosecutor and his team to request the records beyond payoffs to women to silence them about alleged affairs with Trump in the past.

Patience. He’ll tell us when Donnie is dragged away screaming.

Lawyers for Vance told a judge in New York on Monday that he was justified in demanding the records from Trump, citing public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization”.

There you go – that’s what prompted him. Let’s hope he does better than he seems to have done with Harvey Weinstein.

On Wednesday, the New York Times further reported that the subpoena to Deutsche Bank sought any materials that might point to possible fraud and that Deutsche’s cooperation contrasted with numerous other attempts to access Trump’s financial records over the years that have been blocked by successful legal challenges.

Remember that whole thing about the Princes and Princess lying about the value of their condos in the west Village? It seems to be Trump’s standard way of doing things.

Tick tock.

Dictionary.com’s “definition” of “TERF” is not a definition at all but a misogynist jeremiad crossed with a political rant.

TERF is used to describe cisgender women who self-identify as feminist but who are opposed to including transgender women in spaces they reserve for people who were assigned female at birth.

As if real dictionaries refer to “cisgender” women as opposed to women, and as if they go on to talk about “people who were assigned female at birth” when they mean women.

This is because they believe trans women are men and since men cannot coexist with their feminist ideologies, they exclude them from their beliefs and support.

That’s just gibberish. “since men cannot coexist with their feminist ideologies”?? What does that even mean? And a real dictionary wouldn’t say “they exclude them from their beliefs and support” because that’s two different kinds of excluding, it’s too sloppy for a real dictionary – as well as being tendentious, inaccurate, and abusive.

In fact, they often believe they should be denied rights and sometimes advocate for harm against trans people.

Who believe who? You can’t use two “they”s close together like that to refer to different “they”s.

But, well-known feminists who have been labeled TERF on the internet have come out to call the term a slur, because it is associated with violence and hatred.

What’s that comma doing there after the first word? And, “come out to call” – what does that mean? This definition was written by some spoiled child. Don’t consult Dictionary.com for real definitions.

You have got to be kidding.

Updating to add: they changed the image; when I posted it was this.