Another last minute tune-changer:

An anti-vaccine right-wing radio host in West Palm Beach, Florida died Wednesday from COVID-19 complications.

Dick Farrel, 65, used his local talk show and social media to rail against Dr. Anthony Fauci, who he called a “power tripping lying freak,” and say that no one should get the coronavirus vaccine. When COVID-19 sent him to the hospital for three weeks, though, he changed his tune, urging friends to get vaccinated, friends told local station WPTV.

Of the two, which is more of a power-tripping lying freak? The medical expert with decades of experience with lethal viruses and how to prevent and treat them? Or the bloviating radio host who took it all back once the virus bit him in the ass?

I’m fed up with this shit. I’m fed up to the back teeth with lying grifting shouting screaming know-nothing murderous MEDIA HACKS busily undoing the work of people like Fauci. I’m all the more fed up because I’ve just been reading the Twitter rants of a former friend, someone who used to comment here, someone who used to be sane, who has now joined the campaign to persuade people that Fauci is evil, that vaccination is evil, that people who urge vaccination are evil. In the choice between urging people not to get COVID and urging people to get COVID, he’s chosen the second. It’s gruesome.

Back to dead radio host:

Farrel wrote in early July, “Vaccine Bogus Bull Shid!, Two peeps I know, got vaxed, now have Corona, hospitalized critical. Thank you Moderna, FOR NOTHING!” He erroneously told his followers they would not need the vaccine if they had already survived COVID-19. The CDC has advised former coronavirus patients to get vaccinated.

Two days later, he wrote, “Why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks.” He called Fauci “FOOT-chee” and said that the infectious disease expert and “power trip libb loons” Democrats were conspiring to make it seem like the pandemic was ongoing so they could grab more power.

In late June, he wrote, “So, u think it wasn’t a SCAM DEMIC? NOT ONE ELECTED DEMOCRAT ever tested positive.” He called masks “face diapers” and “face pantys.”

…

Farrel is one among several recent deaths of anti-vaccine advocates who have succumbed to COVID-19. Just this week, a Republican city councilman in Texas fought rapid and fatal bout with the virus that saw him hospitalized and dead within three days. He had used his position to advocate against vaccines and face masks.

People should stop doing that. They should stop using any position (including a Twitter account) to advocate against vaccines and masks. Doing that is evil and people should stop it.

Speaking of no it’s not a matter of if, it’s already happening, Mendocino is running out of water.

For the past century, misty, forested Mendocino – despite being nestled along a number of major rivers, creeks and springs – has relied on shallow wells for water. But amid a historic drought dessicating the US west, the aquifers beneath the town’s damp fog layer have rapidly declined, threatening to sink the region’s tourism industry and the residents who rely on it.

Café Beaujolais, which normally draws all its water for cooking and cleaning from two small wells on its property, has already been shelling out thousands of dollars to have water trucked in from nearby towns and cities.

Restaurants trucking in water: not sustainable. (Also, of course, simply adds its bit to the problem.)

A few minutes from Lopez’s restaurant, the Good Life Café and Bakery recently closed its restrooms. The throngs of tourists who line up down the block to sample the café’s quiches, cappuccinos and organic salads are directed instead to the portable toilets set up in the back parking lot. The owners of the local Harvest grocery market have brought in portable toilets as well.

Few things enhance the tourist experience quite like a visit to one of those smelly tin cans.

When marketing discovers trans rhetoric and cannot believe its luck.

If you were marketing baby formula wouldn’t you be hugging yourself with glee? You get to talk about “putting breastfeeding on a pedestal”!! Without shame! In fact with a glow of righteous fervor, because you’re on the side of the downtrodden! Those selfish arrogant bitches, I mean cows, who can nurse their babies have lorded it over the men who identify as women for too long, so buy our formula and strike a blow for justice. #ShakeTheStigma

Remember the Nestlé scandal? Mike Muller in The Guardian in 2013:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, I gave Nestlé chair Peter Brabeck, a present – an original, signed copy of The Baby Killer, the 1974 report that I wrote for War on Want.

The Baby Killer explained how multinational milk companies like his were causing infant illness and death in poor communities by promoting bottle feeding and discouraging breast feeding.

Our Swiss associates were less subtle. They titled the report “Nestlé Toten Babies” (or Nestlé Kills Babies), which a Swiss court found was libelous. On the substance of the argument, however, the judge warned Nestlé that if the company did not want to face accusations of causing death and illness through sales practices such as using sales reps dressed in nurses’ uniforms, they should change the way that they did business.

No more need for that, now they can just burble about supporting every kind of Feeding Journey.

A new report on climate change will say (no surprise ahead) that the trend is not good. Not good at all.

The planet is odds-on to hit 1.5C of global warming within 20 years, the world’s leading climate scientists will warn in a milestone report tomorrow.

…

A 1.5C rise in average global temperatures on pre-industrial levels is widely considered to be the point beyond which climate change will become increasingly dangerous. 

Eh? It’s already becoming increasingly dangerous – it’s been doing that for decades, or ever since we started burning coal and oil at steadily escalating rates.

The cabinet minister Alok Sharma, president of Cop26, said countries must work harder to reduce emissions and ensure the threshold is not breached. “This report will be a big wake-up call for countries to do even more,” he said.

Even more than what? Countries aren’t really doing anything, are they? Other than talking? Cars, planes, container ships, cruise ships – they’re all still out there doing their thing.

Professor Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at Reading University and a lead author of the report, declined to discuss the content of the paper, but said: “Every fraction of the degree matters. There’s no cliff edge where impacts suddenly go from being fine to being disastrous. It’s a gradual worsening of the impacts as global temperatures rise.”

What I’m saying. It’s not as if everything’s ok now, because we haven’t hit the 1.5 mark yet. Greece and California are in flames; everything’s not ok.

Nick Cohen on Tucker Carlson:

Carlson is the dependable voice of the dominant force on the right that will destroy democracy in the name of “the people”.

Last week, Carlson’s Fox News beamed an admiring show from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, even though there is every indication that Orbán will make it Europe’s first rightwing dictatorship since the fall of Franco’s Spain in 1975.

Or rather because Orban is the next Franco. Fox News doesn’t have any scruples about such things.

Like the unforgivably overrated Roger Scruton, Trump’s mentor Steve Bannon, that part-time defender of free speech Jordan Peterson, and until recently the leaders of Europe’s nominally anti-dictatorial Christian Democrat parties, Carlson was comfortable with his own hypocrisy. The right he represents says it believes in freedom of speech when liberals threaten it. Yet in Hungary, freedom of the press is in its death agonies.

If Fox and Carlson really believed in a free press they wouldn’t tell so many lies. A press that mostly lies isn’t really a free press, it’s more like a tool press.

So the UK has its own Tucker Carlson, in the shape of Toby Young. Last January he got caught telling a whopper about the virus.

The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over a “significantly misleading” column written by Toby Young, press regulator Ipso has ruled.

The July 2020 article claimed the common cold could provide “natural immunity” to Covid-19 and London was “probably approaching herd immunity”.

But on Thursday Ipso found the paper had “failed to take care not to publish inaccurate and misleading information”.

About a pandemic that kills.

I still find it hard to believe that people happily spout off on medical issues in ways that encourage people to catch a lethal virus, for the sake of politics or attention or laughs or all three.

He’s still doing it.

In our next episode of The War on Feminist Women, we have Index on Censorship publishing an article by a Gender-Special person saying that oh yes Maya Forstater is too so twanzphobic.

I guess Index on Censorship has decided “Let’s just censor her a little bit. To be on the safe side.”

Owen Jones wrote a long “I never did!!” post in response to Douglas Murray in The Spectator. He took pains to accuse Suzanne Moore of lying.

Hadley Freeman was in the room and she says it did happen, as Suzanne says it did.

That’s why we’re interested in it.

Rebecca Solnit addresses this constant puzzle of the politicization of death-avoidance in a pandemic:

Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.

It’s true and I never really will understand why. It just doesn’t seem worth it. The political payoff, if any, is so remote and conjectural while the deaths are so prompt and real that it doesn’t seem worth it by any earth-based standard.

Call Jared Kushner the spiritual heir of the army besieging the city of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, which, according to a contemporaneous account, catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls. This is sometimes said to be how the Black Death came to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions of people – a third of the European population – over the next 15 years.

Except not, though, because this isn’t sending infection to an enemy in wartime, this is sending infection to your own supporters as a matter of political rivalry.

Solnit’s explanation is that they thought it was going to hit cities that vote Democratic much harder than the other kind. Maybe so, but now they know they’re telling their own fans to expose themselves to the virus – in many cases (or most or all?) when they’ve been vaccinated themselves. “I’m vaxxed but you patriots out there, don’t you get that nasty antifa vaccination.”

The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”

Where’s the payoff in that? I’m not seeing it. I think maybe it’s just that they’re so wedded to the habit of playing Opposite Everything that they can’t stop even when they know they’re telling their own voters to die in order to stick it to the libtards.

Call Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham the spiritual heirs of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British military commander who in 1763 wrote to an underling, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?”

…

It’s safe to assume that the Republican leadership knows better, and that some of their followers do and some don’t. Some have chosen to engage in biological warfare; some are merely tools being used in that warfare. That is, some of them are unwitting corpses being catapulted over the walls, unconscious smallpox blankets; some of them are Amherst in spirit. A friend of a friend of mine, a masseuse, had a client who laughed at the end of their session and revealed that her vaccination card was fake: definitely an Amherst.

I’ll never understand people.

Marjorie Taylor Greene urges her fans to murder more federal workers.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., suggested at a recent Republican fundraiser in Alabama that Southerners could threaten President Joe Biden’s “police state friends” with guns if they show up at their homes asking about their coronavirus vaccination status.

The late-July event in Dothan was closed to the media, but a video clip of some of her comments leaked, according to the Alabama Political Reporter.

What’s the world coming to when a pro-fascist member of the House can’t foment insurrection in private?

“You lucky people here in Alabama might get a knock on your door, because I hear Alabama might be one of the most unvaccinated states,” Greene told the crowd, prompting cheers and applause over the state’s low vaccination rate. “Well, Joe Biden wants to come talk to you guys. He’s going to be sending one of his police state friends to your front door to knock on the door, take down your name, your address, your family members’ names, your phone numbers, your cellphone numbers, probably ask for your Social Security number and whether you’ve taken the vaccine or not.”

She continued: “What they don’t know is in the South, we all love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not real big on strangers showing up on our front door, are we? They might not like the welcome they get.”

The feds don’t know the South has a lot of gun nuts? Of course they know that. They’d have to be remarkably oblivious not to know it in the light of recent events, not to mention people like Greene shouting about it constantly.

In remarks last month, Greene made another Nazi-era comparison regarding the coronavirus response, saying people who knock on doors encouraging vaccinations are “medical brown shirts,” referring to the paramilitary organization that helped facilitate the rise of the Nazis and Hitler.

No the Nazis and Hitler are on her team, not ours. She’s basically trying to spark another Kristalnacht every time she opens her mouth.

The guy dressed as a baby at the “trans rights” protest is very indignant that people noticed he was dressed as a baby.

Is it?

I don’t know; maybe. For a day at the beach or a pool party it may be. For other purposes? I would think not. Mostly, adults don’t want to be seen as pretending to be children, or dressing up to look like children, for a whole host of reasons. Maybe that’s unfair, maybe we should be more relaxed about the self-presentation of adults just as we should be more relaxed about men who say they are women…but I don’t think that case has been made yet.

Meanwhile he says no you’re the pedophiles.

Me? I didn’t rape him. I’ll cop to boring, for sure, but raping Pastel Rompers Guy, no.

Anyway, never mind all that, the important thing is he looked FABulous.

Oops.

Oh how special: Fox News rodent Tucker Carlson is on a jaunt to Hungary to hang out with good ol’ boy Viktor Orban.

US guest of honour and Fox News host Tucker Carlson was granted a lightning visit by military helicopter to Hungary’s 175km (109-mile) high-tech, high-cost razor-wire border fence with Serbia this week.

Border wall! To keep the Untermenschen out! Makes a proud boy proud!

He liked what he saw. After praising the fence for being so “clean and orderly”, in contrast to the “chaos” on the US-Mexican border, he told his viewers: “It doesn’t require a GDP the size of the US, it doesn’t require high-tech walls, guns, or surveillance equipment. All it requires is the will to do it.”

Triumph of the will, baby.

“Because the lessons are so obvious, and such a clear refutation to the policies we currently have, and the people who instituted those policies, Hungary and its government have been ruthlessly attacked and unfairly attacked: ‘It’s authoritarian, they’re fascists…’ There are many lies being told right now, that may be the greatest of all.”

I’m definitely going to take Tucker Carlson’s word on that.

Sorry to cite Andy Ngô but sometimes it can’t be helped.

The recital of the creed:

I think the guy in the pastel play clothes identifies as a baby. For real.

There’s the trans baby again. I wonder what his demands are.

Oh the irony when even Woman’s Hour avoids the word.

WOMAN’S HOUR FFS.

Douglas Murray does an OJ-tease:

Does male privilege really exist? I did not used to think so. But in recent years, I’ve come to realise that not only might it exist, but that, at least in one respect, I may also benefit from it. That is, I have the privilege of being able to write about certain contentious issues without being singled out and demonised for doing so.

Quite.

On gender, for instance, as he goes on to say. He can be critical, women not so much.

After all, countless female authors have written articles expressing scepticism towards the transgender movement — many of them more moderate than my own. Yet almost every time, I have watched in horror as online and offline mobs are stirred up against them and not me. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Selina Todd, JK Rowling, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce — some of these women have been subjected to physical assault; the rest threatened with it.

Some women get hauled off to jail, some get summoned by the police, some lose their jobs, some get bullied by major institutions, and all who speak up get shunned and ostracized.

Another of the things that all these attempted witch-hunts have in common is that they are orchestrated by a small number of highly motivated activists who behave as they do precisely because they are so deliriously certain that they are on the right side. And no one is more certain in this regard than the YouTuber Owen Jones.

There is much laughter at “the YouTuber” because of course that’s not how OJ would describe himself.

[S]o high on certainty is Jones that he consistently uses his considerable social media platform to denounce “transphobes”, who invariably end up being women.

He doesn’t actually mean “invariably,” because in the next paragraph he admits that OJ does also go after the occasional man, including Murray himself.

But none of this bothers me. What does bother me is that he was one of the people — along with the very weird gays at a pseudo-publication Pink News — who has repeatedly tried to destroy JK Rowling’s reputation after the country’s most successful author had the temerity to say that women exist. Jones, Pink News and others consistently suggested that Rowling had said things she had not said, deploying one of the nastiest tactics of this inquisition. They pretended that rather than expressing a view they disagreed with — and that Rowling had every right to hold — she was, in fact, attacking trans people.

It’s what they do. They translate “men can’t become women” to “transphobia.” Period, end of discussion. Simple well-understood facts become a form of hatred, and everything proceeds from there. It’s not a useful or intelligent way to navigate disagreement.

Jones did it to Suzanne Moore last year, and now…

There is now a pattern. This week, Jones targeted another exceptionally talented female writer, Sarah Ditum, for the same reason: she disagreed with him about trans issues.

But this time, people started to notice the trend. As the Left-wing journalist Helen Lewis — formerly of the New Statesman — observed, it is becoming increasingly clear that Jones only seems to go for female journalists. She pointed out that a male journalist recently wrote something similar to Ditum, and did so in the low-circulation New Statesman to boot, yet Jones did not organise a pile-on against him.

There’s just not the same frisson in doing it to a man.

According to Helen Lewis, a number of her mutual friends with Jones no longer speak to him because they believe he has become a bully. She also observed that Jones has spoken publicly about feeling like an outsider, and about the times he’s been the victim of abuse in the past.

If that’s true, one might expect Jones to act with more compassion. But self-reflection has never been his forte — as countless women are starting to discover.

Jones’s supply of compassion is reserved for trans women – who have the massive advantage of not actually being women, which women don’t have and thus are not deserving of Jones’s limited compassion.

Anyway don’t worry, OJ is working on his reply as we speak.

What can these crazy evil feminist women possibly mean?

So this is a thing, is it? People feeling that they “don’t fit” within some category or other, and thus needing to move to a different one, and thus having a right to order the rest of the world to “validate” them as being in that category as opposed to the one they were “assigned” to at birth? It works across all categories, does it?

Well, no, it doesn’t. We know that. Some categories can be exchanged for different ones, but others can’t. People can join some categories via choice or work or both, and others they can’t. People can become builders or doctors or poets or engineers; people can’t become rabbits or gods or Shakespeare or motorcycles.

This isn’t some evil conspiracy by feminists. We’re not big meanies who just won’t let men become women. It’s not our doing, it’s not our fault, any more than it’s our doing or fault that we are women.

I think Laurie Penny is the one who needs to explain. I think she needs to explain why she thinks sex can simply be swapped the way one might swap jackets with a friend.

Ron DeSantis seems to want to kill off most of the people who vote for him.

With the highly contagious Delta variant spreading, a state comprising little more than 6% of the US population was accounting for one in five of the country’s new cases, recording 50,997 in the three days to Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

DeSantis says the spike is “seasonal” and opposes lockdowns or new restrictions. The Republican governor followed up his executive order banning mask mandates in schools by dismissed the burgeoning crisis in Florida’s hospitals as “media hysteria”.

So it’s hysteria to report the stats?

“Our hospitals are open for business. We’re not shutting down. We’re gonna have schools open. We’re protecting every Floridian’s job in this state, we are protecting people’s small businesses. These interventions have failed time and time again throughout this pandemic,” he said, referring to mask mandates.

Protecting jobs and small businesses won’t do anyone much good if most of the workers and business owners and customers and consumers die of Covid.

This is scary: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

That won’t be good at all.

It’s one of the main potential tipping points.

The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

In other words most people (and animals) won’t survive. Global famine won’t be pretty.

Scientists are increasingly concerned about tipping points – large, fast and irreversible changes to the climate. Boers and his colleagues reported in May that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink, threatening a big rise in global sea level. Others have shown recently that the Amazon rainforest is nowemitting more CO2 than it absorbs, and that the 2020 Siberian heatwave led to worrying releases of methane.

The world may already have crossed a series of tipping points, according to a 2019 analysis, resulting in “an existential threat to civilisation”. A major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due on Monday, is expected to set out the worsening state of the climate crisis.

And we still won’t do anything about it.

H/t Brian M.

Open Democracy wrings its open democratic hands over the tragedy of a man who identifies as a woman being deselected as a candidate for office.

Kathryn Bristow was named on 8 March as a Green Party candidate for the UK’s 2021 local government elections – the first openly trans woman to be put forward by a political party in Bristol City. But less than two weeks later the party formally suspended her and selected another candidate, who was not trans, to run in her place.

Here’s the thing: political parties should not be putting trans women forward for political office, because trans women are simply men (who call themselves women), and its women who need more representation, not men, no matter what they call themselves. Naming yet another man as a candidate for office is not a progressive milestone just because he “identifies as” a woman.

Bristow said she repeatedly asked the party to review its suspension decision in time for her to run in the local government elections, but it failed to do so.

“Having the chance to be a councillor meant so much to me, and it being taken away was a lot,” she told openDemocracy. “I got into politics to help people, that’s why I wanted to be a councillor […] to help local residents.”

But the same applies to women. If Bristow were really a woman he would understand that.

She described worsening mental health symptoms and “feelings of helplessness” since her suspension: “Things have been getting better lately, but it’s still a massive hit to my sense of well-being.”

See: women, passim.

“Being the first openly trans woman to be selected as a candidate by a political party for Bristol City elections had great importance not only to me, but also to the trans community,” Bristow explained in her court claim.

But also to the women’s community, who are seeing our few gains disappearing into the pockets of men who claim to be women.

A member of the LGBTIQA+ Greens, who spoke to openDemocracy on condition of anonymity, said the regional council “have huge questions to answer about their decision-making and whether or not they’re unfairly targeting inclusive people”.

Wut? What does “targeting inclusive people” mean?

In December 2020, Bristow was elected co-chair of Green Party Women (a party subgroup that represents the priorities of women party members), prompting what the LGBTIQ news website PinkNews described as a “transphobic backlash“ including from “a very small number of people” in the party. In an official statement at the time, the Green Party said its support for trans rights was “unequivocal”.

Yes those oh so unreasonable people who think chairs of Green Party Women should be women. Why is it that these stupid bitches don’t want men taking everything women have? Are they demon-possessed, or what?

A Green Party spokesperson told openDemocracy that they “do not comment on individual disciplinary matters”, but added: “The Green Party recognises that trans men are men, trans women are women, and that non-binary identities exist and are valid.”

That’s sad, because trans women are men, trans men are women, and “non-binary identities” mean nothing at all.