A horribly sad series of events a little north of here:

With the coronavirus quickly spreading in Washington state in early March, leaders of the Skagit Valley Chorale debated whether to go ahead with weekly rehearsal.

The virus was already killing people in the Seattle area, about an hour’s drive to the south.

But Skagit County hadn’t reported any cases, schools and business remained open, and prohibitions on large gatherings had yet to be announced.

So they went ahead with it.

Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.

Yes but…it’s singing. It involves a lot of deep breathing and projecting. I’ve been finding myself holding my breath when people get too close when I’m out for a socially distanced walk.

They rehearsed for 2 1/2 hours.

Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.

45 out of 60. This thing is scary.

Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer.

I’ve been wondering about that. I’ve been wondering how long the aerosols that come out of runners hang around in the air.

[A] study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours — though researchers have said that time period would probably be no more than a half-hour in real-world conditions.

Half an hour is a long time.

Amnesty UK decides the important thing to talk about right now is gender identity.

That’s not how their how-to guide starts though. How does it start? With a pack of lies.

THE BASICS

Your anatomy doesn’t determine your gender identity and neither does the “gender binary”.

Scare quotes on “gender binary” but none on gender identity. What is “gender identity”? The fatuous idea that sex is not determined by the body but by thoughts in the head. Translated into non-nonsense that sentence would read “Your anatomy doesn’t determine your sex and neither does the fact that humans are sexually dimorphic”…which is far more recognizable as an absurdity. Your anatomy does determine your sex, and the fact that humans are sexually dimorphic is just that – a fact.

But Amnesty wants us to ignore all this in order to “be kind.” How about getting Amnesty to “be kind” to us by ceasing to tell us to lie about sex and anatomy?

What is the gender binary? The gender binary is the idea that there are only two genders – male and female.

Two sexes, and it’s not an idea, it’s material reality.

In reality, gender is much more like a spectrum – it isn’t set in stone and some people have fluid or fluctuating gender identities.

Notice the unmarked jump from gender to gender identities. It’s all so sneaky, this shit – they pretend gender is the same as sex, and then in the next breath they pretend gender is the same as gender identity. Thus endless bales of bullshit get stacked mile-high.

Sex is not a spectrum. Stone has nothing to do with it. People have “fluid or fluctuating” personalities, but their sex remains their sex.

And on and on it goes. We know all this, but it’s just so exasperating to see adults keep insisting on all this trump-level bullshit…especially during a pandemic. Are our last words going to be “men are not womennnnnnnnnnn”?

Even in a pandemic – we must always put the boss first and everyone else after. Hospitals are firing medical workers who talk about shortages.

Ming Lin, an emergency room physician in Washington state, said he was told Friday he was out of a job because he’d given an interview to a newspaper about a Facebook post detailing what he believed to be inadequate protective equipment and testing. In Chicago, a nurse was fired after emailing colleagues that she wanted to wear a more protective mask while on duty. In New York, the NYU Langone Health system has warned employees they could be terminated if they talk to the media without authorization.

This is America, where health care is a for-profit business, not a public service.

“Hospitals are muzzling nurses and other health-care workers in an attempt to preserve their image,” said Ruth Schubert, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Nurses Association. “It is outrageous.”

Hospitals have traditionally had strict media guidelines to protect patient privacy, urging staff to talk with journalists only through official public relations offices. But the pandemic has ushered in a new era, Schubert said.

Health-care workers “must have the ability to tell the public what is really going on inside the facilities where they are caring for Covid-19 patients,” she said.

…

“It is good and appropriate for health-care workers to be able to express their own fears and concerns, especially when expressing that might get them better protection,” said Glenn Cohen, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s bioethics center. It’s likely hospitals are trying to limit reputational damage because “when health-care workers say they are not being protected, the public gets very upset at the hospital system.”

We’re funny that way.

Florida godbotherer busted for flouting quarantine:

An arrest warrant for a Tampa Bay pastor was issued Monday, and the pastor was taken into custody after the sheriff said the church violated a countywide “safer-at-home” order.

Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said the River at Tampa Bay Church violated the county’s order related to large gatherings and social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic. A live stream from the church on Sunday showed the building packed with worshippers.

Worshippers who would go on to infect thousands of others.

Chronister saw photos of the crowd and he was pissed.

“We received an anonymous tip that Dr. Rodney Howard-Browne refused a request to temporarily stop holding large gatherings at his church,” he said. “And instead, he was encouraging his large congregation to meet at his church.”

…

Chronister said Howard-Browne refused requests to stop gatherings at the church and even encouraged people to meet at the church. Chronister said the pastor “put hundreds of people in his congregation at risk,” and in turn thousands of Tampa Bay residents in danger.

He was booked into the county jail. Mugshot:

I did a column for The Freethinker on similar reckless endangerment at “Liberty” “University.”

The Guardian lays out with excruciating clarity just how thoroughly Trump made sure that hundreds of thousands – or millions – of people would die of the virus.

January 20 – the first COVID-19 case was diagnosed in the US, and in South Korea.

In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.

One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.

South Korea shut it down. The US watched stupidly while it flourished.

Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.

We could have done that. There was no reason not to do it apart from the stupidity and narcissism of one poisonous man.

A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic. Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb laid out a menu of what had to be done instantly to avert a massive health disaster.

Top of their to-do list: work with private industry to develop an “easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic test” – in other words, just what South Korea was doing.

It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.

What were they busy with during those six weeks? Cleaning out the broom closet?

It’s a long and informative read.

You don’t say. The CBC notes that running may be healthy for the people doing it but not so much for the people they race up to and pass with a couple of inches to spare.

As the arrival of spring has brought warmer and sunnier weather to Vancouver, runners have once again taken to the seawall, but experts warn the narrow path could be the perfect transmission zone for COVID-19.

Hey guess what that applies to any narrow path so get off it. I’m finding it more maddening every day the way runners seize the middle of the sidewalk and refuse to deviate, so that we inferior walkers are forced to hustle into the street, or if there are moving cars in the way, just be infected by the selfish shits. That’s if we’re facing them – when they run up from behind we get spattered no matter what.

Doctors say that while running is a great way to stay healthy and prevent illness, the activity itself can increase the chances of producing micro-droplets that can transmit the virus from person to person, if they’re too close.

Yes but that’s other people, and who cares about them.

Oh that certain group of people.

I guess he’s never heard of women? I guess he has no idea that women have felt, and been, unsafe and unwelcome in society? I guess he has no idea that one of the many reasons women feel that way is that some men take advantage of isolated spaces to assault women? And that men are stronger than women, which means that women as a group are at a disadvantage compared to men as a group? And that’s why it’s not safe for women to share multi-user toilets with men?

You have to hand it to the “activists,” they have done a hell of a job convincing clueless men that men who say they are women are the most oppressed people in the universe and women are their oppressors.

The latest scandal is much scandal, very shock, many outrage.

Elton John referred to the boring show biz “personality” Sam Smith as “him” and “he” and the world lurched out of orbit and crashed into the sun.

Sam Smith is the one with the beard.

How are people supposed to remember to call him “them” when he looks so exactly what we’ve all grown up calling “a man”?

He looks like a man, and he has always been a man until just recently when he decided he “identifies as” non-binary, which doesn’t mean anything. I could “identify as” four-legged, but that wouldn’t make it true. He looks like a man so Elton John referred to him as such. So what? Who cares? What does it matter? Especially now?

Imagine.

Jonathan Chait notes that it’s been difficult to get Trump to take the virus seriously. He’s not the only one; Republicans elsewhere are brushing it off as a mere case of the sniffles.

Republican governors in several states have downplayed the virus, either refusing to enforce social-distancing measures or even overruling local officials who attempt to do so. A new study finds that the single factor that best explains the speed of state-level reaction is its governor’s partisan identity. “States with Republican governors and Republican electorates delayed each social distancing measure by an average of 2.70 days,” the authors find, “a far larger effect than any other factor, including state income per capita, the percentage of neighboring states with mandates, or even confirmed cases in state.”

So medical science is a libbrul conspiracy?

Having a television-addled president with the memory and long-term planning capabilities of a fruit fly is deeply unhelpful. But there is more behind Trump’s intermittent disregard for the virus’s danger than simple Trumpiness. As is often the case when analyzing any of the horrors of the Trump era, Trump’s coronavirus response combines his idiosyncratic personality disorders with ingrained pathologies of the conservative movement.

Two weeks ago, Richard Epstein, one of the movement’s most prestigious intellectuals, wrote a contrarian analysis of the pandemic. Epstein argued that conventional models were dramatically overstating the pandemic risk, and predicted the coronavirus would ultimately claim a mere 500 American lives…

It was obvious almost immediately that Epstein horribly botched his projection. (The American death toll is already several times higher than he forecast, and the Trump administration’s current, most optimistic prediction forecasts some 400 times as many deaths.) In an interview with Isaac Chotiner, Epstein reveals himself as hopelessly out of his depth. He repeatedly claims the coronavirus is bound to weaken as it spreads, a claim he does not substantiate, and which is contradicted by all (real) experts. He confidently asserts that Bill Gates has endorsed his bottom-line conclusion, which is the opposite of the truth. Epstein’s model turns out to have been essentially made up out of thin air.

Maybe that’s what attracts Republicans – the freedom to just make shit up.

The skepticism has run up and down the food chain of right-wing discourse. The National Enquirer has hawked fake coronavirus cures. The Federalist published a column by a retired dermatologist urging readers to hold coronavirus parties to contract the disease intentionally, because it worked on chicken pox.

Now they’re arguing that the success of steps taken to contain the virus shows that there’s no need to contain the virus.

It is literally as if your mo[ther] warned you you’d get wet if you didn’t carry an umbrella, made you carry an umbrella, and then you claimed that the fact that you stayed dry under it disproved her prediction.

For anybody who has closely followed the world of conservative ideas for the last few decades, it would come as little surprise to see such simple errors undergirding the conclusions of even the most esteemed minds the movement has to offer. Conservatism has built an alternative-fact universe, in which pseudo-experts can confidently explain why tax cuts will increase revenue, Obamacare will fail to increase health-insurance coverage, greenhouse-gas emissions will not warm the planet, and on and on.

It’s libertarianism. Science is not the boss of me! Too bad the left is just as bad. “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman!”

Of course he did.

Originally a comment by latsot on Put out that light!

The one guy should have just visited his dad without posting about it on social media

Should? Why? He did nothing wrong.

While no harm was arguably done in this case, this kind of oppressive, bullying security theatre should concern us greatly. Panopticon-based policing is always open to abuses of the worst kind and to institutionalised inhumanity.

We tread a fine line with surveillance, particularly when it’s technologically-enabled. Having CCTV cameras everywhere is one thing when they are only used to forensically examine crime scenes (even when they radically expand the notion and boundaries of crime scenes) but CCTV linked to face-recognition software and used for pre-emptive police action is quite another. But the latter inevitably flows from the former unless we’re really, really careful and history shows that we’re not. Hell, that tweet shows that we’re not.

Surveillance inevitably becomes mass surveillance because it’s really useful to governments and because we can achieve it in small, easily defended steps. But it’s on a ratchet, of course, and once we’ve taken such a step, it’s almost impossible to step back again.

Just in case you don’t already think I’m being overly dramatic, here’s the obligatory Orwell reference:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Boxing instruction:

World champion Billy Joe Saunders has had his boxing licence suspended by the British Boxing Board of Control after he released a video advising men how to hit their female partners.

In the video, Saunders uses a punch bag to explain how to react if “your old woman is giving you mouth” and showing how to “hit her on the chin”.

Woman talks, man beats her up. Fair?

He later apologised, saying he would “never condone domestic violence”.

Well that’s just silly. Telling men to hit women who talk is more than condoning domestic violence aka male violence against women, it’s giving men instructions in violence against women.

Speaking to Talksport on Monday, he said it was a “silly mistake” and he “obviously wasn’t thinking”.

Saunders added: “I didn’t mean for anyone to get upset about it. There are people dying all around the world with coronavirus and I was just trying to take the heat off that a little bit.

By telling men to beat up women who talk.

Maybe he thought he was being funny? But…you know…it’s a bit like white people “being funny” about lynching or enslaving black people. It’s a bit like German gentiles “being funny” about sending Jews to the showers.

“It clearly hasn’t done, my sense of humour is not everyone’s cup of tea.”

It’s not really about cups of tea though. Men beating up women isn’t really a rich source of humor, because it’s a thing that happens a lot and all the time. It’s not some weird thing men did back in the 13th century, it’s an evil thing way too many men do now.

This is the kind of labyrinth of circular reasoning people get themselves into when they decide reality is all in the mind.

Women are all totally different, there is no one thing that defines them, they can be anything, everything, nothing, they can be dandelion fluff or the scent of grilled mushrooms or a dream someone had but doesn’t remember – you can’t pin them down, you can’t say what they are, they are infinite – except for just this one magically exempt item: they all have an affinity with being members of the category woman.

A member of the audience asks: But if you can’t define woman, if they are all different, then what does “the category woman” mean?

Patiently, our sage replies – Women are all totally different, there is no one thing that defines them, they can be anything, everything, nothing, they can be dandelion fluff or the scent of grilled mushrooms or a dream someone had but doesn’t remember – you can’t pin them down, you can’t say what they are, they are infinite – except for just this one magically exempt item: they all have an affinity with being members of the category woman.

We may be here some time.

He’s confirmed that the “press briefings” are not about the pandemic but about his “ratings” and the beautiful music he makes with that fiddle.

See you at 5 pm for more showboating and lying and display of ignorance and psychotic attacks on journalists! Ratings, baby! Woohoo!

Big cop is watching YOU.

But it was essential.

Wales Online has more details:

South Wales Police has told off Aberavon MP Stephen Kinnock for celebrating his former Labour leader dad Neil Kinnock’s birthday as “non-essential” travel in the coronavirus crisis.

Remember Neil Kinnock? He wrote the speech that Joe Biden plagiarized that time.

Mr Kinnock posted a picture of himself with his parents two metres apart as they marked the occasion with his wife, former Prime Minister of Denmark Helen Thorning-Schmidt.

No doubt that’s why the cops scolded them. A former UK PM leader of the opposition, a former Danish PM, and an MP, all in one go – who could resist?!

Seriously? Now?

“Boosting the immune system” into a cytokine storm maybe?

Spot the problem.

Meanwhile fans of “the boss” succeed in getting a woman fired for being critical of Trump in public.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center [in Buffalo] has terminated a top executive for Facebook posts that bashed President Trump’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

Laura Krolczyk, Roswell Park’s vice president for external affairs, was initially placed on administrative leave from her position but was fired following the conclusion of an investigation into her remarks, spokeswoman Annie Deck-Miller confirmed Saturday.

I did a search on Facebook and found a slew of posts demanding her firing. I wonder how many of them are Russian influencers.

Laura Krolczyk, Roswell Park’s vice president for external affairs, was initially placed on administrative leave from her position but was fired following the conclusion of an investigation into her remarks, spokeswoman Annie Deck-Miller confirmed Saturday.

Hauptman Woodward Medical Research Institute has placed Lisa LaTrovato, its director of development, on leave for her comments in the Facebook exchange with Krolczyk, the institute told The Buffalo News.

Is flattery of Trump a condition of employment now?

The institutions acted after the exchange between the two drew criticism once Republican operative Michael Caputo shared it widely through his Twitter account on Friday.

Also Facebook. He has post after post stirring up the trumpists.

The exchange – according to screen grabs posted by Caputo – began when Krolczyk posted a link to an article by the Hill news site about the Trump administration’s reluctance to pay $1 billion to General Motors and Ventec for ventilator production.

In other words, about the fact that Trump is obstructing efforts to contain the virus and save those who have it.

Krolczyk replied: “Trump supporters need to pledge to give up their ventilators for someone else … and not go to the hospital.”

LaTrovato responded: “I think they should be the only ones in packed churches on Sunday.”

Krolczyk then said: “They should barricade themselves in there and ride this out.”

…

Caputo shared the exchanges and urged his 37,000 Twitter followers to raise their concerns directly with the two institutions.

“Is it your public health policy to assure Trump voters are infected with COVID?” Caputo asked of the two organizations.

It’s not clear to me that the posts were public or that Krolczyk’s employer was public – that is, that random people looking at her Facebook could either see those posts or tell that she worked for a health care facility. It’s therefore not clear if it’s anyone’s business what she says to friends on Facebook. But Caputo succeeded in getting her fired.

Roswell Park responded a short time later with a statement saying the remarks by Krolczyk, who was not named, were “inappropriate.”

“They do not reflect the opinions of Roswell Park or its senior leadership,” CEO Candace S. Johnson said in the statement, adding that the institution supports the Covid-19 response of Trump and his administration.

Well then the institution supports negligent mass homicide, so I wouldn’t want to go there for health care.