Robert Reich in a rally the troops screed on Facebook:
[Trump] is targeting universities that he believes haven’t adequately eliminated DEI, or have allowed transgender athletes to compete, or failed to stop demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza. Last week, his regime forced a major university president to resign.
It doesn’t help the cause of resisting Trump to lie about the trans issue. The issue is not “allowing trans athletes to compete.” The issue is letting men compete against women.
Huh. After all these years, Frances Coppola (not the movie guy) is still being horrible.
I bet you thought tariffs were something to do with international trade. Silly you; no, they’re to force naughty countries to do what Trump tells them to do.
Trump sent his Brazilian counterpart a stunning letter Wednesday, informing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that his country would face a new 50% tariff “due in part to…the way Brazil has treated” former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump political ally.
Also Brazil hasn’t made its bed or put away its toys.
Trump blamed the massive spike in tariffs partly on “Brazil’s insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans.” The first reference is related to the trial of Bolsonaro, a one-time frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago, on charges of attempting to illegally overturn his country’s presidential election results in 2022. “This trial should not be taking place,” Trump wrote. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”
Trump really does not like it when a guy who merely tries to overturn his country’s election results is charged with the crime of trying to overturn his country’s election results.
But Trump also attempted to frame the decision as one grounded in legitimate economic and trade issues. “In addition, we have had years to discuss our Trading Relationship with Brazil, and have concluded that we must move away from the longstanding, and very unfair trade relationship engendered by Brazil’s Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers. Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal,” he wrote. Contrary to Trump’s claims, though, the United States holds a $7 billion trade surplus with Brazil.
So??? It should be 70 billion, no make that 700 billion. It should be so huge it can be seen from the moon.
So much for emergency management.
More cabins and buildings at Camp Mystic — the tragic site of more than two dozen deaths in the Texas flood — were at risk of flooding than what the federal government had previously reported, according to new analysis from NPR, PBS’s FRONTLINE and data scientists.
Maps by First Street, a climate risk modeling company in New York City, show at least 17 structures in the path of flood waters, compared to maps produced by FEMA, highlighting a longstanding risk facing many Americans. The analysis also shows at least four cabins for young campers were in an area designated by FEMA as an extreme flood hazard, where water moves at its highest velocity and depth.
For decades, FEMA’s maps have failed to take rainfall and flash flooding into account, relying instead on data from coastal storm surges and large river flooding, even as climate change is supercharging rainfall intensity. Nationwide, First Street found more than twice as many Americans live in dangerous flood-prone areas than FEMA’s maps suggest, leaving many homeowners and even local officials unaware of the risk.
You’d kind of hope the federal agency would do better.
But in recent years, many properties affected by disasters are turning up outside FEMA’s floodplains. When Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina last year, 98 percent of the damaged homes were not included in FEMA’s maps. This meant that not only were most homeowners unable to claim flood insurance, most of them had not been obligated to build in a way that could have helped them better survive the storm.
FEMA has known about this problem for years, but the agency lacks the mandate and funding from Congress to address it, according to Porter.
So we’re on our own.
Even when FEMA does mark the most dangerous flood areas, though, those warnings are not always heeded. At Camp Mystic, NPR found at least eight buildings, including four cabins used to house younger campers, are located inside what FEMA designates a floodway, the most dangerous area of the floodplain where water is expected to move rapidly during a storm.
Yes but they’re beside the river, where it’s pretty.
Even better is that they sat there whispering to each other like two kids who haven’t done their homework and are arguing over whose dog ate it.
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are facing ridicule after a reporter’s question seemed to catch both off guard, prompting the two to exchange whispers before passing the question off on another official.
“Psst, the what?”
“I don’t know, I couldn’t hear.”
“Did you finish yours?”
“I didn’t start it, did you?”
During the presidential cabinet meeting on Tuesday, a journalist asked about Russia’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Ukraine. Trump leaned toward Hegseth and whispered, “What do you know about this?” Hegseth responded quietly, “John might know,” prompting Trump to say aloud, “Well, I’d ask John to discuss it.”
Sir sir sir sir sir you’re supposed to be the big boss here, you went out of your way to get to be the big boss, so newflash, you’re at the top of the chain, you’re supposed to know. You’re not supposed to run around asking your flunkies or whisper like a child who’s wet his pants. This is your responsibility, not anyone else’s.
This is normal, everything is fine, they know exactly what they’re doing.
President Donald Trump’s decision to send more defensive weapons to Ukraine came after he privately expressed frustration with Pentagon officials for announcing a pause in some deliveries last week — a move that he felt wasn’t properly coordinated with the White House, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The Pentagon, which announced last week that it would hold back some air defense missiles, precision-guided artillery and other weapons pledged to Ukraine because of what U.S. officials said were concerns that American stockpiles were in short supply. Trump said Monday that the U.S. will have to send more weapons to Ukraine, effectively reversing the move.
Do they talk to each other? Do all parties make sure all other parties know what is being done? Or is it all just free-form, everyone acting on divine inspiration and nobody communicating?
Trump makes sure to tell everyone he never knew anything about any of it, which is a good look for a top boss.
But in a series of public comments that seemed to only cause further confusion about who exactly is in charge of the administration’s foreign policy, Trump pleaded ignorance about the halted delivery, telling Volodymyr Zelenskyy last Friday that he, as commander-in-chief, was not responsible. Asked by a reporter during a televised Cabinet meeting on Tuesday who had ordered the pause, Trump shot back, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
Uhhh because I’m the reporter and you’re the top boss, it’s not my job to know, it’s your job to know. It’s your job to know.
The White House declined to confirm that Hegseth made the call to stop the shipment to Ukraine, perhaps aware that having a rogue Defense secretary is just as alarming as having a president who’s oblivious to major foreign-policy decisions.
It’s all just as alarming as everything else.
Labour’s LGBT+ group has sparked outrage after nominating a transgender woman to become their next Women’s Officer.
Delivering his verdict on GB News, commentator Alex Armstrong declared that a “man cannot understand women’s issues”.
That, but even more basically, the very act of accepting such a nomination is a massive insult to women. Men who do that to women are misogynists to their core, so what the hell business does a Labour group have making a misogynist man their Women’s Officer?
This is useful, as an illustration of the broken thinking that got us here.
Hello? Anybody home? Children age 3 say a lot of things that are not purely factual/accurate. Children age 3 are not the first people we turn to when evaluating truth claims. Children age 3 are not aware of a sharp distinction between fantasy and reality. Children age 3 enjoy pretending to be a range of things: animals, toys, shrubbery, monsters, dragons, adventurers, cartoon characters and the like.
If your boy age 15 tells you he’s a girl there’s an issue. If your boy age 3 tells you he’s a girl you nod absent-mindedly and get on with your day.
Trans rights activists have put forward a biological man to be the women’s officer for Labour’s LGBT+ group.
That is insult for the sake of insult. They know it’s an insult and that’s why they’re doing it. Insulting women is now a core principle of “LGBT+” groups.
The Labour Party has agreed to scrap its annual women’s conference, warning of a “significant risk of a legal challenge” if self-identified women are allowed to attend.
Excuse me? They’ve “agreed” to get rid of the women’s conference to make things easier for themselves at the expense of mere women?
The Trans Rights Alliance has put forward Steph Richards, a transgender woman in possession of a gender recognition certificate, as its candidate for women’s officer.
In a post on X, Labour LGB said: “Many people say that trans ideology is a men’s rights movement.
“The ‘Trans Alliance’ (seeking to take over the once-great LGBT+ Labour) has set out to prove this. Also breaking party rules by putting a man forward to be women’s officer.”
Breaking party rules and deliberately taunting women.
Richards told website LabourList: “I am legally female, other than in regards to the Equality Act and the Act does not apply to the position within LGBT+ Labour so I am thoroughly within my legal right and my moral right to be able to stand for this position.”
Like hell he is. There is no “moral right” for a man to stand for a position that’s explicitly for a woman. Talk of a man being “legally female” is just gibberish.
The question facing Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas at a news conference on Tuesday was whether he would call for an investigation into possible failures surrounding the deadly floods, which include a lack of state and local spending on flood control measures and warning systems.
To answer, Mr. Abbott said asking about blame was “the word choice of losers,” and then invoked a beloved Texas tradition — football — as he deflected questions about accountability for a disaster that has left at least 111 people dead and more than 170 missing.
“Every square inch of our state cares about football,” Mr. Abbott said, referring to the Friday night lights of high school fields and the state’s college and pro teams. “Every football team makes mistakes,” he added.
Extending the metaphor further, the governor said losing teams assigned blame while championship teams responded to mistakes by saying: “We got this. We’re going to make sure that we go score again, that we win this game.”
Fucking hell. Lethal flooding is not a football game. It’s not like a football game. If you’re strolling in a national park and a bear comes rushing toward you you’re not facing an exciting sports challenge, you’re about the be the bear’s next meal. Distinctions of this type are really quite important.
Disaster preparedness is not like coaching football nor is it like playing football.
Mr. Abbott, a Republican, said the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature would be investigating the flash floods in Central Texas and discussing how to prevent their recurrence when state lawmakers meet for a special session later this month.
But he and other prominent Republicans have pushed back against critics who have called for investigations into unfilled staff positions at National Weather Service offices in Texas, or a lack of emergency warning systems along the Guadalupe River.
Well fine, let’s all just throw our hands in the air and trust in “God” to save us from fires and earthquakes and droughts and tornadoes. With all the money we save we can buy Trump another big airplane.
Brendan O’Neill mocks Owen “Babyface” Jones for trying to scold JK Rowling.
Jones is hopping mad. He’s even written a 1,300-word screed on what a rotter Rowling is, which I’m sure we can all agree is a perfectly normal response to a woman making a joke. His line of attack is that Rowling has been shamefully silent on the suffering of Palestinians. She claims to stand up for women, he says, yet she’s schtum on what is happening to women in Gaza.
His Rowlingphobic diatribe drips with haughty sexism. He bemoans her “useless obsessions”, by which he presumably means her valiant defence of the reality of sex and her financial backing of women and homosexuals who have been persecuted for their beliefs by either their bosses or the state. Sounds pretty useful to me, Owen.
He commands her: “End your silence.” Maybe he didn’t get the memo – men don’t get to tell women what to do anymore. Women are free to think and say whatever they please. Radical, I know!
Well, maybe men in general don’t get to tell women what to do, but of course OJ is an exception. Why? Because he’s so brilliant, so charismatic, so passionate yet wise.
Rowling’s bold defiance of the gender cult is a strike for the autonomy of all women. In contrast, the myopic Israelophobia of the whackjob Left fashions a ruthless hierarchy in which the pain of Palestinians counts for more than the pain of anyone else on earth.
What’s more, these faux-feminists zip their lips when women are being oppressed by Islamists. They cosplay as feminists at home, holding forth on the gender pay gap and whatnot. Yet they fall silent in the face of the Iranian regime’s mass murder of women who want more rights or the Taliban’s medieval subjugation of its female population.
Not to mention in the face of the Saudi regime, the Afghan regime, the Pakistani regime, and on and on. Fear of being labeled “Islamophobic” trumps solidarity with women every time.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday seemingly contradicted President Trump’s recent pledge to let immigrant farmworkers remain in the United States if their employers vouch for them. Instead, she put forth an insane scheme in which Medicaid recipients will replace deported farm laborers.
“There will be no amnesty,” Rollins said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation, which, again, with 34 million … able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”
That’s the ticket. Take away their health insurance and then drive them into the cotton fields. We should get some good songs out of it.
Ah yes, because everything three-year-olds say is true and accurate and not at all shaped by lack of information.
Paul Krugman on machismo and climate change:
There is, it turns out, a strong link between the manosphere — the online movement promoting “masculinity,” misogyny and opposition to feminism — and anti-environmentalism. For example, in 2023 Jordan Peterson convened a high-profile conference to declare that concerns about climate change are a “conspiracy run by narcissistic poseurs.”
If you think about it, this makes sense — not intellectually but emotionally. Don’t concern about the environment and advocacy of “clean energy” sound kind of, well, feminine? Real men burn stuff and don’t worry if the process is dirty.
The very word “clean” is horribly girly. Who wants to be clean when you can be dirty instead?
And manosphere-type attitudes are clearly widespread in MAGA. One of the main arguments Trump officials and supporters have made for tariffs is that they will bring back “manly” jobs in manufacturing. (They won’t, but that’s another story.) The same notion underlies the doomed attempt to revive the coal industry.
But here’s the thing: MAGA and the manosphere may hate clean energy, but they won’t be able to stop the rise of renewables. All they can do, possibly, is stop the rise of renewables in the United States. Other nations, China in particular, are making huge investments in wind and solar power, because they understand what Trump and his allies refuse to acknowledge — that this is the only way forward.
Whatever. China itself is girly. Look at the name! All those prissy flowered tea cups and pink soup bowls! Yuck! Real men stick an axe into something and chew their way around it.
Does transitioning actually help? Does banning puberty blockers actually harm? Helen Lewis asks some questions.
Advocates of the open-science movement often talk about “zombie facts”—popular sound bites that persist in public debate, even when they have been repeatedly discredited. Many common political claims made in defense of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-dysphoric minors meet this definition. These zombie facts have been flatly contradicted not just by conservatives but also by prominent advocates and practitioners of the treatment—at least when they’re speaking candidly. Many liberals are unaware of this, however, because they are stuck in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine—claims from which its elite advocates have long since retreated.
And also because deviating from the Approved View is such a straight road to pariahdom.
Many of the most fervent advocates of youth transition are also on record disparaging the idea that it should be debated at all. Strangio—who works for the country’s best-known free-speech organization—once tweeted that he would like to scuttle Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, a skeptical treatment of youth gender medicine. Strangio declared, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial.
And it’s not just a matter of dying on hills, it’s also shooting at everyone who gets anywhere near your hill. Trans dogma is fiercely guarded by raging zealots who punish dissenters with every weapon they can find.
After England restricted the use of puberty blockers in 2020, the government asked an expert psychologist, Louis Appleby, to investigate whether the suicide rate for patients at the country’s youth gender clinic rose dramatically as a result. It did not: In fact, he did not find any increase in suicides at all, despite the lurid claims made online. “The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide,” Appleby reported. “One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers.”
Yes, it is, and that’s quite the risk.
In 2022, Alabama passed a law criminalizing the prescription of hormones and blockers to patients under 19. After the Biden administration sued to block the law, the state’s Republican attorney general subpoenaed documents showing that WPATH has known for some time that the evidence base for adolescent transition is thin. “All of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in research to back up our recommendations,” Eli Coleman, the psychologist who chaired the team revising the standards of care, wrote to his colleagues in 2023. Yet the organization did not make this clear in public. Laura Edwards-Leeper—who helped bring the Dutch protocol to the U.S. but has since criticized in a Washington Post op-ed the unquestioningly gender-affirmative model—has said that the specter of red-state bans made her and her op-ed co-author reluctant to break ranks.
Brilliant. “Oh no, the evidence for our drastic recommendations is weak, therefore we must hide that evidence so that we can carry out our drastic recommendations.”
The Alabama litigation also confirmed that WPATH had commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence for the Dutch protocol. However, close to publication, the Johns Hopkins University researcher involved was told that her findings needed to be “scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care.” This is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. You don’t start with a treatment and then ensure that only studies that support that treatment are published.
And especially you don’t do that when the “treatment” is as drastic and life-altering as trying to swap puberties.
The Alabama disclosures are not the only example of this reluctance to acknowledge contrary evidence. Last year, Olson-Kennedy said that she had not published her own broad study on mental-health outcomes for youth with gender dysphoria, because she worried about its results being “weaponized.”
Arrgghh!! We mustn’t publish anything that casts doubt on the safety of “trans health care” because people might stop using dangerous forms of bogus “health care”! Any findings that our treatments are harmful must be buried so that we can continue to do harm.
Not how this is supposed to work!
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Speaking of self-discipline and judegement.
Per this 1966 Statement, professors are obligated to “exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge” and to “practice intellectual honesty”. We take this to mean that as academics, we also have a responsibility to the public to not misconstrue the scope of our expertise, nor comment in our capacity as academics on issues where we lack the requisite expertise.
Would that not also apply to supporting and promoting trans ideology? Is it possible to be an expert in lies and bullshit, in “care” that harms, and has no basis in reality? Do the signers of this letter themselves possess the knowledge base to know that this stuff actually works? And how could they know when the “practioners” themselves are in the dark? (See below.)
Given your lack of the requisite expertise, we believe it is inappropriate for you to engage in the shaping of national medical policy on gender-affirming care for trans youth.
Then exactly the same charge should be levelled at those who instituted the current policies on “gender-affirming care for trans youth” in the first place. Hello; the existence of desistance, of detransitioners, the untreated comorbidities, the lifelong “gender journeys”, and the basic fact that nobody is “born into the wrong body,” should make any unbiased observer question if “gender affirming care” is on as solid a footing as it imagines itself to be.
If the phenomenon you’re claiming to be addressing is somewhere between “undefinable” and “nonexistent”, then how can you begin to treat it? Any success you might have is going to be purely accidental. Your patient’s suffering is real, but if you’re approaching it through a false framework or hypothesis, then you might as well join the astrologers and exorcists for all the “expertise” you might think you possess. But then astrologers don’t go around drugging, mutilating, and sterilizing children, which is what “gender affirming care for youth” results in. Gender medicine is more like exorcism. It too is centered on the unscientific, religiously motivated torture of mentally troubled people, supposedly possessed by entities that do not exist, whose actual ailments cannot be “cured” by the “experts” treating them. Undoing a harmful practice that has no sound theoretical footing or clear etiology doesn’t require any expertise in the bogus rationale used to prop it up. Just stopping it is a useful, valuable first step, because it ends further harm.
Your concern at someone contributing to a “report” is touching, but comes at the wrong end of all of this. How much of this train wreck was ever governed by anything “appropriate”, and why did you wait until now to become so goddamn self-righteous? Where was all that supposed knowledge when these “procedures” first started taking hold? Where is the definition of “gender identity” upon which any such treatment must be founded? Where were the studies? Where was the follow up? Where was the screening? Where was the caution and critical examination you would expect to see when such totalizing medical procedures are proposed? Where was the honesty in relaying what was possible – and what was not? What was being promised, and was it even possible? (Hint:, nobody in history has been the recipient of a functioning neo “vagina” or neo “penis”.) Where was the evidence of efficacy beyond hand-waving and wishful thinking?
And what of the abominable treatment meted out to anyone from outside the self-reinforcing bubble of the gender-industrial complex who dared to address any of these shockingly huge knowledge gaps, or address the laxity in standards and practices of “gender medicine”? They got more than strongly-worded open letters. Some people lost their jobs, just as you’re gunning for Byrne’s job.
It’s only dissenters who have no right to utter a peep on the subject.
Exactly. Critics are evil people who want to hurt and kill “trans kids.” Case closed, no appeals.
Originally a comment by maddog on Speaking of self-discipline and judgement.
[S]ince 1966, the AAUP has also agreed on a Statement on Professional Ethics. [5] Per this 1966 Statement, professors are obligated to “exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge” and to “practice intellectual honesty”. We take this to mean that as academics, we also have a responsibility to the public to not misconstrue the scope of our expertise, nor comment in our capacity as academics on issues where we lack the requisite expertise. to not tell lies
FIFY
If you want to model the principles of academic ethics, the first principle is: be honest. Don’t lie. Without that first principle, none of the other precepts matter.
You don’t need any expertise, academic or otherwise, to know that there are two sexes, and that males are not female.
You hide behind the empty phrase “gender affirming care.” You really should be required — you know, to comply with your own code of ethics, i.e., to “exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge” and to “practice intellectual honesty” — to lay out exactly what “gender affirming care” for minors consists of. It’s off-label use of drugs to halt the normal development of a child into an adult. That can have permanent consequences, depriving the patient of their one and only opportunity to achieve full maturation of body and brain It’s the pipeline into other medicalization of children with wrong sex hormones. For adolescent girls, it’s elective and unnecessary double mastectomy, removing healthy tissues for purely cosmetic reasons. For some, it means experimental surgery to mimic (poorly) the external genital organs of the opposite sex. The creation of neogenitalia through surgery often has complications, requiring further surgeries, further pain, further recovery time, all futile in effect. None of these measures will ever succeed in changing the sex of the patient.
Exercise a little honesty and integrity yourselves.
Ok then I’ll make my own party, and it will be much better than yours!!
Yeah but bro you’re not even from here. You can’t even vote here.
Musk dreams the impossible dream.
Shares in Tesla tanked by as much as 7.6% in premarket trading Monday after its CEO Elon Musk said he is forming a new American political party, provoking an irate response from US President Donald Trump.
If only we could chain them to each other for life.
“I’m saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform late Sunday
Clear symptom of someone who never reads anything, not even headlines. We don’t use scare quotes for commonplace figures of speech. We say “I don’t give a rat’s ass,” not “I don’t give ‘a rat’s ass'”. We all already know that “rat’s ass” is a figure of speech. Bonus: if you say it aloud to a person, don’t make air quotes with your pudgy fingers, either. Superfluous. Not needed. Excess to requirements. Maek you look dumm.
Jerry Coyne says what I say. Everyone should be saying it.
As of yesterday, the letter was signed by (according to my count) 211 people, 31 of whom who refused to give their names and appear as “anonymous”, 65 who say they are graduate students, and 57 who say they are undergraduates. (See the signers by clicking on this link.) While there is some overlap between these groups, it’s fair to say that about half the signers lack either the courage or the expertise to call out Byrne for “lack of expertise”. What kind of person would refuse to give their names when engaging in such a dogpile?
And note that the “expertise” of those judging Byrne’s expertise (probably without having read his book or the rest of his work) include students or professors in mathematics, mechanical engineering, women’s history, urban studies and planning, aerospace engineering, computer science, chemical engineering, bioengineering and a even “Anonymous (Staff)”. (I didn’t bother to look up some of the others whose fields weren’t specified.)
Emphasis added. “You got no expertise to say men are not women,” shouted the furious sophomore in Drama.
From Alex Byrne’s Opinion piece in the Washington Post on June 26:
The hostile response to the review by medical groups and practitioners underscores why it was necessary. Medicalized treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria needs to be dispassionately scrutinized like any other area of medicine, no matter which side of the aisle is cheering it on. But in the United States, it has not been.
I was familiar with the other authors — there are nine of us in all — and I was confident that we could produce a rigorous, well-argued document that could do some good. Collectively, we had all the bases covered, with experts in endocrinology, the methodology of evidence-based medicine, medical ethics, psychiatry, health policy and social science, and general medicine. I am a philosopher, not a physician. Philosophy overlaps with medical ethics and, when properly applied, increases understanding across the board. Philosophers prize clear language and love unravelling muddled arguments, and the writings of pediatric gender specialists serve up plenty of obscurity and confusion.
That. Exactly what I was saying about the dopy anonymous Open Letter that included the absurd “you’re not a real doctor so you don’t get to say anything” objection. The trans issue is very very far from being a technical medical matter to the exclusion of everything else. Its preferred language is muddy rather than clear and it’s arguments are so muddled they ferment the instant they appear.
