The BBC is live-updating news on the virus.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US’s top public health agency, has warned Americans to brace themselves for a spread of coronavirus within the country.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen,” Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), said.

And it will be bad.

In Iran however they’re saying don’t worry, it’s all good.

Amid fears around Iran’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, President Hassan Rouhani has appealed for calm, saying he expects the situation to be “normal” by this Saturday.

He

The CDC says look out, it will be bad. Trump says he’s got everything totally under control.

The CDC says:

New outbreaks in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are renewing fears of a coming global pandemic, even as the spread in China appears to be slowing.

RIGHT NOW “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad,” a C.D.C. official said.

Trump:

The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2020

He … Read the rest

Now Trump is pretending to think the sane Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves.

President Trump criticized remarks by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as “inappropriate” and said the Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves from cases involving the president.

“I just don’t know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything Trump or Trump related,” Trump said Tuesday in a wide-ranging news conference in New Delhi.

It seems very rude to prattle about something so parochial when he’s in India. But…theory of mind again. He’s not capable of stopping to think that people in New Delhi have other concerns.

He then had the gall to say Sotomayor said something “highly inappropriate.” Dude.

The remarks are an apparent reference

Meanwhile in another (yet related) part of the forest, Mhairi Black MP is defending her decision to take a drag queen to one of those children’s story time gigs we hear so much about. The thing is, the drag queen is on Twitter, with photos, and…well I’ll let a reporter tell the story:

Renfrewshire MP Mhairi Black has defended a decision to invite a drag queen into a primary school to read to pupils, despite an outcry from parents over sexually-explicit social media posts.

Drag queen FlowJob was invited into Glencoats Primary, in Paisley, last week to speak to pupils about the notorious Section 28 Act, which was later repealed.

Flowjob. Erm…is that really a necessary part of the … Read the rest

This is a sinister plot cooked up by people who understand how things work better than Trump but are no less deranged in their paranoia and anti-democracy leanings. Unlike Trump, they get that personnel IS policy. Like Trump, they are paranoid weirdos. /1 https://t.co/j76jSfdoHT

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) February 24, 2020

This group's "deep state" fear is fever swamp nonsense. There's no "deep state" out to get Trump. There are, however, millions of career Feds who have sworn an oath to uphold the rule of law and defend the Constitution. And that, my friends, is a threat to a would-be dictator. /3

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) February 24, 2020

The Russians are interfering in our democracy again and the president

This again. Again. Rewire News:

Across the country, the anti-abortion movement continues to shame, pressure, and punish people who understand that abortion is a human right.

No, it doesn’t. It continues to shame, pressure, and punish women. The anti-abortion movement is about as far from being gender-neutral as it’s possible to be.

For nearly two decades, nearly three million people have ended their pregnancy with medication abortion.

Nope. Not people. Women. It’s not people who end their pregnancies, it’s women.

Self-managing an abortion consists of two sets of pills to be taken at or under ten weeks after the first day of a person’s last period: The first, mifepristone, blocks the hormone essential to advancing pregnancy. In

I’ve never understood the point of Chris Matthews anyway: he seems to me to be just what you don’t want in a tv pundit – a loud unmodulated screamy voice saying stupid things without pausing for breath. Now people are saying he should go away because too ignorant for primetime.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is facing calls to resign after he compared Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucus to the Nazi invasion of France. Sanders won the Nevada Democratic caucuses with 47 percent of the vote, the Associated Press reported.

As the results came in and Sanders took an early lead on Saturday night, Hardball host Matthews claimed Republicans would release opposition research on Sanders that would “kill him”

Actual photo of service dogs watching Billy Elliot The Musical as part of their behaving in a theater training.

My heart can’t take it pic.twitter.com/d7Gi6g246V

— TODD SPENCE (@Todd_Spence) February 21, 2020

… Read the rest

Oh it gave her pause. Well that’s all right then.

Lisa Nandy has said she was given “pause for thought” about signing a pledge card from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights.

The one about expelling feminists who don’t lie down so that trans women can walk on them.

The pledge calls on candidates in the Labour leadership race to back the expulsion of party members who hold “bigoted, transphobic views”.

It also describes Woman’s Place UK, a group that backs biological sex to be acknowledged as part of maintaining women’s rights, as a “trans-exclusionist hate group”.

Nandy was on a tv chat show today, and that’s where she admitted to the pause.

“I have to say, that was

Sarah Chayes points out that Trump’s corruption is very public for a reason.

In Kabul, Western officials scratched their heads as to why Karzai would want to confess, in an interview with ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, to meddling in judicial affairs. The U.S. and other donor nations on which he depended for his very survival would certainly be displeased. So he must have a very good reason, I thought at the time. And then I realized that he was broadcasting a message to his network: Don’t worry. I stand by the deal.

Even a cursory look at the list of Trump’s February 19 beneficiaries suggests that his aim was not to right the wrong of prosecutorial overreach, but to send

The jokes write themselves.

Advice For Women: How To Land a Great Guy:

1/ Be in shape
2/ Grow your hair long
3/ Be sweet
4/ Learn to cook
5/ Don't be annoying

Angry feminists and simps will try to sabotage you in the comments.

Don't listen to them.

Listen to me.

— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) February 21, 2020

Presumably “land a great guy” means “capture the affections of a man for purposes of marriage or commitment or a rewarding temporary relationship”…but isn’t the list kind of bare bones? Even putting feminism aside for a moment, is that really what Great Guys want? Someone sweet and not annoying? That’s it?

On the upside, I guess women in the market for a … Read the rest

A Labour Party aide explains that women over 39 are just stupid and clueless:

One senior campaign aide said that the issue was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and could do long-term damage to the party in an area where it has traditionally been strong.

“I think we are all in a bit of a bind,” the aide said. “We want to be the party of equality but there is a risk that we are seen to be obsessed by this and are tearing ourselves apart. The tone on both sides has been blown out of all proportion.”

Be the party of equality by all means, but you have to be clear that “equality” doesn’t mean “everything I like.”

The

News from Sweden:

For several days this week the veteran Swedish journalist Malou von Sivers will cover the same topic in every episode of her nightly TV chat show: the extraordinary rise in diagnoses of gender dysphoria among teenage girls.

…

The immediate trigger for Von Sivers’s themed week is a report from Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare which confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.

But it also reflects a rapid change in public opinion. Just a year ago, there seemed few official obstacles left in the way of young people who wanted gender reassignment treatment.

Which is to say, puberty blockers, aka an uncontrolled … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Papito on The child deals with life by wearing pink and flowers.

The kids with dysphoria or gender confusion almost always grew up to be homosexual adults, not transsexual adults. Transsexual adult males usually weren’t dysphoric when they were kids….

I think they were all gender dysphoric as kids in a retrospective sense. You know, like all of a sudden, as adults, they discovered that they were always gender dysphoric and that’s what their problem was. But you’re right. All of the guys I know who transitioned were nebbishes who weren’t the least bit feminine before transition. Meanwhile, I knew other guys who were seriously swishy as kids and they mostly turned out gay. The … Read the rest

Hey kids, gather ’round, it’s time to play Invent Your Own Reality!

For example, I can have a non-binary identity, desire male-typical features and be comfortable with female-typical ones. Likewise, a desire to consolidate and embody a male typical set of characteristics need not reify a binary and definitional notion of a male body.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 21, 2020

Fun fact: lots of things do not mean there is a coherent binary thing called “biological sex,” in fact pretty much all things do not mean that except the nine words “there is a coherent binary thing called ‘biological sex.'” BUT – and this is important – that fun fact in turn does not mean that Chase Strangio has … Read the rest