So…… Read the rest

Oh I see, China is selling Uighur body parts. That’s sinister enough I think…

Federal authorities in New York on Wednesday seized a shipment of weaves and other beauty accessories suspected to be made out of human hair taken from people locked inside a Chinese internment camp.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials told The Associated Press that 13 tons (11.8 metric tonnes) of hair products worth an estimated $800,000 were in the shipment.

Daaaaaaaaaaamn that’s a lot of women being shorn in concentration camps.

They’re also subject to forced labor (aka slavery), but who knows, maybe the people who run the camps are careful not to force any women to process their own hair into weaves.… Read the rest

Cast your minds back to last week, if you will, to Damian Barr’s energetic campaign to push the Booker Foundation to monster Emma Nicholson.

The Guardian reported then:

Damian Barr is leading a charge of writers, including one former Booker prize winner, who are calling on the Booker Foundation to remove the allegedly “homophobic” peer Emma Nicholson from her position as vice-president.

Lady Nicholson of Winterbourne, who voted against the same-sex marriage bill in 2013, is the widow of the late former chairman of Booker, Sir Michael Caine, who helped establish the prize. She is currently a vice-president of the Booker Foundation, and a former trustee of the prize.

Barr, a novelist, memoirist and host of the Literary

I didn’t know about these guys before. I love them.

After that one I watched the Pavarotti Nessun dorma one and had to stop watching any for awhile, it was so emo.

Now I’m going to see what they think of Johnny Cash.… Read the rest

Well you see it’s like this – Trump gets really mad when the intel people tell him mean things about Russia, so they stopped telling him them and just put it all in the written-down briefing…but of course Trump can’t read, so that’s why he doesn’t know any of this stuff about Russia. All totally honest and aboveboard.

Early in his term, Trump’s briefers discovered that when his oral briefing included intelligence related to Russia’s malign activities against the United States, including evidence of its interference in US politics, Trump would often blow up at them, demanding to know why they kept focusing on Russia and often questioning the intelligence itself, multiple former administration officials said.

So that’s great. … Read the rest

In all seriousness the racist loathing is coming out into the open now.

The Guardian notes:

Donald Trump is criticizing New York City’s plan to paint “Black Lives Matter” on 5th Avenue outside Trump Tower — calling it a “symbol of hate.”

Earlier New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city would “take this moment in history and amplify it by taking the ‘Black Lives Matter’ symbolism and putting it all over this city, including right in front of Trump Tower.”

The move comes as the president stepped up his defense of actual symbols of hate: Confederate flags and monuments. Using a racist slur against Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, Trump threatened to veto defense spending bills that

Look, if your house is on fire, the best thing to do is to tell the fire department it doesn’t know what it’s talking about and you don’t need its advice any more.

As coronavirus cases surge across the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, who lead’s the CDC’s pandemic response, is facing growing backlash from conservative leaders fed up with his warnings about states’ reopening efforts.

Very sensible. The problem is not the coronavirus or the surge in cases, the problem is some pesky expert in infectious diseases telling us how to avoid being infected. What the hell does he know about it?

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t need his advice anymore,” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick

On the one hand pretend the pandemic isn’t happening, on the other hand buy up all the remdesivir.

The US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of one of the two drugs proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world.

Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The Trump administration has already shown that it is prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries to secure the medical supplies it needs for the US.

In other words to be as ruthlessly piggy … Read the rest

It’s kind of like saying “the house is not on fire” while standing in front of the house as the flames consume it. Trump says it’s a hoax.

President Trump said Wednesday that reports of Russia paying bounties to Taliban-linked fighters to kill U.S. troops and coalition forces in Afghanistan is a hoax, even as his administration continues to brief members of Congress on the matter.

His administration is briefing members of Congress on the hoaxitude of the hoax. They need to be thorough about it.

The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party. The secret source probably does not even exist, just

This would be funny if it weren’t so sickening – lately Trump has been complaining that Prince Jared is too much of a lefty and he Trump isn’t going to take his lefty advice any more.

President Trump has told people in recent days that he regrets following some of son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner’s political advice — including supporting criminal justice reform — and will stick closer to his own instincts, three people with direct knowledge of the president’s thinking tell Axios.

Behind the scenes: One person who spoke with the president interpreted his thinking this way: “No more of Jared’s woke shit.” Another said Trump has indicated that following Kushner’s advice has harmed him politically.

Aw yeah, … Read the rest

Badness alert. There will be badness. It will be bad. Prepare for bad. It will definitely be bad, repeat, definitely bad.

Top disease researcher Dr Anthony Fauci has told the US Senate that he “would not be surprised” if new virus cases in the country reach 100,000 per day.

“Clearly we are not in control right now,” he testified, warning that not enough Americans are wearing masks or social distancing.

And that’s not because we can’t, it’s because we stupidly stubbornly won’t. In large part it’s because of our stupid reckless infantile “president.”

Testifying to a Senate committee on the effort to reopen schools and businesses, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

We don’t always even notice the racist symbols, and that’s kind of the point.

Aspirational depictions of a city upon a hill and liberty and justice for all lose their luster when they’re juxtaposed against the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples, or an intricate slave-based economy rubber-stamped by revolutionaries fighting for their own freedom. But more dated history textbooks rarely provide that level of insight around how minority communities were treated during the country’s early years, and slavery gets all but erased – “there’s no discussion of what life was like in the United States prior to 1860, or if it is, it’s just African Americans were enslaved in this country, and the civil war freed them,” said Berry.

Rand Paul says don’t pay attention to experts on technical subjects like viral contagion.

Rand Paul is the genius who tested positive for the virus back in March, to the fury of colleagues who had been up close and personal with him in recent days. Mind you they still seem to be ok so maybe that means Rand Paul knows better than Anthony Fauci?… Read the rest

Wow.

I know, I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.

Jeff Sessions had a chat with the Times and…

Former Attorney General and current US Senate candidate Jeff Sessions referred to Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., one the nation’s most famous Black scholars, as “some criminal” in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. 

He was bragging about bigging up the police when he was Attorney General.

“Back to the men and women in blue,” Sessions told The Times’ Elaina Plott of his guiding principle on policing while leading the DOJ. “The police had been demoralized. There was all the Obama — there’s a riot, and he has a beer at the White House with some criminal, to

So we screwed that up completely.

The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.

The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S. 

But that peak wasn’t bad enough, so we decided to make it much worse.

“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore

Household work? Children? Oh that’s for other people to do.

The fact is, though, Covid-19 has taken women’s roles back to the 50s. Women are home schooling, working and doing huge amounts of domestic work. The answer to 50s-style problems may be some 70s-style consciousness raising about gender roles.

It’s really quite simple. There is nothing about being female that equates to special skill at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers, and there is nothing about being male that equates to special ineptitude at scrubbing sinks or changing diapers. People who live in households should share the work equitably and fairly.

But, instead of discussing how gender roles are regressing; how the virus has derailed women’s careers; how childcare

CNN says it’s really that bad:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

Oh. Well, … Read the rest

Reddit shut down the gender critical group today.

According to Reddit, a group of predominantly straight, white middle-class and upper-middle-class males can become a vulnerable minority group by changing their pronouns, and women are hateful oppressors for pointing out that this is a sexist trick. https://t.co/X3gywp3Hd7

— MortyArty (@artymortyarty) June 29, 2020

Let’s look at that page:

Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability

Interesting choice of words. We are told often and relentlessly that trans women are “vulnerable,” including (or indeed especially) vulnerable to women. If trans women are vulnerable to women…well naturally feminist women can’t be permitted to dispute the claims of trans women to one, be women, and two, be vulnerable to women. That would be … Read the rest

There’s a penalty for insisting on being actively stupid and uninformed. Unfortunately the penalty is paid by everyone, not just the people insisting on being actively stupid and uninformed.

The US is “unlikely” to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus even with a vaccine, according to the country’s leading public health expert, who warned that a “general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling” is likely to thwart vaccination efforts.

In an interview with CNN, Dr Anthony Fauci also said people not wearing masks was “a recipe for disaster” and said of the Trump administration’s attempts at contact tracing: “I don’t think we’re doing very well.”

Oh well, it’s just a lethal pandemic.… Read the rest

One bullet dodged in the war on abortion rights.

Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal justices on the Supreme Court on Monday to block a controversial Louisiana abortion law that critics said would have closed nearly every clinic in the state.

The 5-4 ruling is a win for supporters of abortion rights who argued that the law was not medically necessary and amounted to a veiled attempt to restrict abortion. The law barred doctors from performing the procedure unless they had admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Not really veiled, is it – everyone knows it’s about killing abortion rights.… Read the rest