This sucks.

Biologists in New Mexico have sounded the alarm after thousands of song birds were found dead in recent days.

New Mexico State University Professor Martha Desmond told local media that the reason for the mass die off is a mystery but could be tied to smoke from wildfires, or the recent cold weather.

She says the number could be in the millions.

Scientists have reported North American bird populations have declined massively in recent years.

I know that swallows used to be abundant around here and now I very rarely see them. Barn swallows and violet greens, both, have all but disappeared from Seattle.

Some birds – including migratory warblers, swallows and bluebirds – were seen acting strangely before their deaths, according to witnesses.

“It’s devastating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this horrible in my life,” Prof Desmond, who works for the university’s department of fish, wildlife, and conservation ecology, told KRQE-TV.

“When you’re there, you know, picking them up off the ground and seeing the extent of it and then looking at all these carcasses come in,” she continued.

Via Birding New Mexico:

New Mexico residents are finding dead birds throughout the state, both migrant and resident songbirds like these Western Bluebirds. Ben Bauer (Jemez WL technician) found 12 dead Western Bluebirds Soda Dam in Jemez springs (9/10/2020). He witnessed some that were still alive in a little cave (see the picture) huddled together. He also mentioned that some of the birds were actually in the warm water that is at Soda Dam.

US Forest Service personnel are surprised at the adult birds that have died. Some of these species are year round residents and are accustomed to such weather.

The recent storm was record breaking – the precipitation we received in Jemez was very wet -heavy snow (only like ½ inch above 7,500 ft.) and maybe their plumage had not yet developed for winter weather. Another theory is that the fires raging in other states may have released toxins.

Another day another lies conference:

Donald Trump started off the press conference by doubling down on his assertion that there will be “a hundred million vaccine doses by the end of 2020”. He said that vaccines should be ready by “mid-October”.

Trump criticized Joe Biden for spreading “anti-vaccine theories” by saying that Trump is trying to politicize a vaccine by rushing its development before the election. potentially foregoing safety precautions.

“They’re recklessly endangering lives,” Trump said, saying that if Democrats were in the same position, the would be saying how important vaccines are.

It’s not anti-vax to say Trump is making bullshit promises because he wants to win the election. Quite the contrary – a pretend vaccine is no use to anyone.

It’s of course important to remember that health experts have reiterated that a vaccine on Trump’s timeline is highly unlikely.

And that Trump lies more easily than he does almost anything else.

But no, other people are “confused” says the genius.

…a reporter asked the president why he said a vaccine would be available by mid-October when Redfield told a Senate panel today that a vaccine would likely be available in the “second or third quarter” of 2021 at the earliest.

“I think he made a mistake with that statement,” Trump said. “When he said it, I believe he was confused. I’m just telling you we’re ready to go.”

Aka he’s just lying.

He makes reckless claims – he’s not very good at thinking about how such claims could backfire on him.

Trump, continuing to contradict what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield said earlier today, just said at a press conference that “under no circumstance would [the vaccine] be as late as the doctor said.”

He can’t know that. Sensible people don’t make absolute claims like that, because they know it’s reckless.

Donnie Pinhead is also saying Redfield is wrong to say masks are important.

Trump again contradicted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield once again, saying that Redfield “made a mistake” when he said that masks are “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.”

“I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine,” Redfield told a Senate panel Wednesday.

Trump said that a vaccine will be more effective as masks have to be “handled very gently, very carefully”. Trump said that he has seen people at restaurants not being careful with their masks.

And that’s why he does campaign events where very few people wear masks at all. Ok.

In one bit of good news (a scarce item these days), Navalny is doing better.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Nalvany plans to return to Russia, according to his spokesperson. He was recently poisoned with a nerve agent and has been undergoing treatment at a German hospital for more than three weeks.

“It’s puzzling to me why anyone should think otherwise,” Navalny spokesperson Kira Yarmysh tweeted.

Fair point. Since Putin can poison him outside Russia as easily as inside, staying out of Russia would be futile.

Nalvany took to Instagram Tuesday to post a photo with his wife and children from his hospital bed — the first photo of him publicly released since he was admitted to the hospital.

“Hi, this is Nalvany. I miss you,” he wrote in his post, according a Bloomberg translation. “I still can’t do practically anything. But yesterday I breathed on my own for the whole day. All by myself. No outside help, even didn’t use this valve in my throat.”

The new Jesus and Mo:

And the ones who have to submit? Not the fantasists, but the people who retain their grip on reality. It’s only fair, right?

The J and M Patreon

It’s the herd mentality you see, it will save us.

President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday during a televised town hall that “herd mentality” could make the coronavirus “disappear” with or without a vaccine.

During a 90-minute town hall hosted by ABC News in the must win battleground of Pennsylvania, Trump defended his repeated assertion that the virus will eventually disappear even without a vaccine, citing what he called “herd mentality”…

Herd immunity, dipshit.

ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Trump whether the coronavirus “would go away without the vaccine?”

“Sure, over a period of time. Sure, with time it goes away –” Trump responded.

Stephanopoulos interjected: “–And many deaths.”

“And you’ll develop, you’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd developed – and that’s going to happen. That will all happen,” Trump said.

He knows more about it than anyone.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, who is the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, has said the “death toll would be enormous” if the country attempted herd immunity.

Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, but you get your herd mentality and then you can have football and crowds again.

Look at this brainless heap.

“It’s going to disappear, George, it’s going to disappear.” Why is it? How does he know? What makes him say that? Look around, this studio is almost empty – he wants people, he wants football games – therefore it’s going to disappear. Obviously. If Donald Trump wants something, the natural world has to arrange things so that he gets that something. COVID is going to disappear because Trump wants crowds and football.

Emily Kirkpatrick at Vanity Fair thinks JK Rowling has one hell of a nerve expressing her opinions right out in public.

No longer satisfied with simply repeatedly expressing her transphobic opinions on Twitter and in 3,600-word screeds on her personal website…

Aw, seriously, where does she get off writing things on her personal website? Who does that? And not just any old things but screeds. Ewwww doncha just hate screeds? Good people write essays or posts or entries, but evil people write screeeeeeeeeeeeeds. Doesn’t it sound witchy? Bitchy witchy writing her witchy bitchy screeeeeeeeeeeds. Let’s punish her.

Also, for the thousandth time, what she’s written isn’t transphobic. It’s not “I hate trans people” or “trans people are hateful,” it’s “we need to talk about women’s rights and how this new definition of ‘woman’ will affect them.”

To finish the sentence:

…J.K. Rowling now appears to be bringing her TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) logic to a bookshelf near you via her new fictional novel, Troubled Blood, out Tuesday.

Oops our writer hasn’t read the “fictional novel” but she’s making claims about it anyway.

According to an early review in The Telegraph…

Which misrepresented the Fictional Novel. How about not flinging shit at Rowling on the basis of one sloppy review?

Nah, that’s no fun.

Wow.

Wildfire smoke has drifted all the way to Pennsylvania.

Mind you, there’s a big difference between wildfire smoke and dense wildfire smoke. If the smoke here looked like the smoke over Pennsylvania I’d be out taking a two hour walk after all this being locked up inside.

Interesting marketing ploy.

People are weird.

Updating to add the whole message.

Alison Flood in the Guardian reviews Rowling’s new novel. (Oh does she have a new novel? I hadn’t heard.)

Before it had even come out, criticism of JK Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith thriller, Troubled Blood, was already wall-to-wall, after an early review in the Telegraph claimed that its “moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”.

In other words people who hadn’t read it were already tearing it to shreds because of a highly dishonest remark in the Telegraph.

As the pair look into the disappearance – and this is a spoiler – one of the avenues they investigate is the possibility Margot was murdered by Dennis Creed, a now-imprisoned and notorious serial killer who once tricked some of his female victims into his van by wearing a wig and a woman’s coat to appear unthreatening. This has now been cited across the internet as further proof of Rowling’s transphobia, after her earlier essay, tweets and decision to return a human rights award after the organisation behind it denounced her views. Amazon has now suspended reviews of the book due to “unusual reviewing activity”, while the hashtag #RIPJKRowling trends on Twitter.

The Telegraph review chose to go big on Creed, describing him as “a transvestite serial killer”, and asking “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues” would make of it. But Creed is just one of many suspects – and without giving too much away, he is not the main villain, nor is he portrayed as trans or even called a “transvestite” by Rowling.

…

Creed is described as a “genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from [his landlady] Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth”.

Perhaps some will still consider this depiction transphobic, given Rowling’s rightly widely criticised views on trans people.

Notice that nervous “rightly.” Nervous, placating, and wrong. Anyone would think Rowling wanted trans people punished or ostracized or otherwise harmed, but she doesn’t – basically she just wants them to stop doing that to women.

It is, at best, an utterly tone-deaf decision to include an evil man who cross-dresses after months of pain among trans people and their allies.

Pain shmain. It’s worked-up pain, manufactured pain, hyperbolic pain, deranged furious socially constructed and encouraged pseudo-pain.

And we should also be wary of how one review has been reproduced without question by countless newspapers and websites, by journalists who have shown no indication of having read the book themselves.

And by cowards who think they have to say Rowling was “rightly criticised” for not echoing every word of the Trans Catechism.

H/t Arnaud

In the more long-term bad news…

The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade, according to a devastating new report from the UN on the state of nature.

From tackling pollution to protecting coral reefs, the international community did not fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets agreed in Japan in 2010 to slow the loss of the natural world. It is the second consecutive decade that governments have failed to meet targets.

Well let’s look forward to 2030. Or 2050. Or maybe 2100.

The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, published before a key UN summit on the issue later this month, found that despite progress in some areas, natural habitats have continued to disappear, vast numbers of species remain threatened by extinction from human activities, and $500bn (£388bn) of environmentally damaging government subsidies have not been eliminated.

Meanwhile the left is throwing all its energy behind…forcing all women to take orders from their trans “sisters.”

The report is the third in a week to highlight the devastating state of the planet. The WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s Living Planet Report 2020 said global wildlife populations were in freefall, plunging by two-thirds, because of human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture. On Monday, the RSPB said the UK had failed to reach 17 of the Aichi targets and that the gap between rhetoric and reality had resulted in a “lost decade for nature”.

…

A leading target to halve the loss of natural habitats, including forests, has not been met. While global deforestation rates have decreased by about a third in the past five years compared with pre-2010 levels, the degradation and fragmentation of biodiversity-rich ecosystems in the tropics remains high. Wilderness areas and wetlands have continued to disappear and freshwater ecosystems remain critically threatened.

And fires are raging.

Nick Cohen tells us that in addition to being crappy the latest attack on Rowling is wrong on the facts. He knows this because he’s actually read the novel they’re screaming about, because he has a review copy. It hasn’t even been released yet.

The hideous hashtag #RIPJKRowling was trending as trolls and their easily manipulated followers poured out their hatred. Rowling was a rat and a racist. She should ‘Sit Down and Shut the Fuck Up For The Rest of Time You Transphobic Bitch’. She wants trans people ‘to die’.

The ‘evidence’ that provoked the malice was so flimsy, even Twitter should have been embarrassed to publish it. Pink News, which dominates the LGBTQ+ outrage market, gave the case for the prosecution. According to the first review, ‘JK Rowling’s latest book is about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims’, it announced. 

It is about nothing of the sort, I thought. And I could say that with authority because I had just finished a review copy of Troubled Blood, the fifth novel in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, as research for a long piece on her politics and art I’m working on for the Critic. No honest person who takes the trouble to read it can see the novel as transphobic. But then honest people are hard to find in a culture war.

But a reviewer for the Telegraph has read it and reviewed it, and that’s where the lunatic bullies are getting their fact-free facts.

The meat of the book, he declared is ‘the investigation into a cold case: the disappearance of GP Margot Bamborough in 1974, thought to have been a victim of Dennis Creed, a transvestite serial killer. One wonders what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress’.

That slippery ‘seems’ should have put readers on their guard. The moral of the book is not ‘never trust a man in a dress’. Transvestism barely features. When it does, nothing is made of the fact that the killer wears a wig and a woman’s coat (not a dress) as a disguise when approaching one of his victims. Maybe this tiny detail is enough for the wilfully ignorant to damn Rowling as a ‘witch’ – I’m not making it up, for this is how Everton goalkeeper turned Twitter celebrity Neville Southall described her. But no one else should be satisfied.

The guy in a wig and a “woman’s coat” is on one page of a 900 page novel; it’s a minor detail. It’s as if Kitty Scherbatsky put on a pair of man’s gloves on one page of Anna Karenina and some ingenious literary critic decided that means Tolstoy was trans and the whole novel is about being trans.

In contrast to her opposition to Scottish nationalism, which to my mind makes a clumsy appearance in the novel, Rowling makes no attempt to nudge the reader towards today’s arguments about women-only spaces and the safeguards or lack of them governing the clinics that offer hormone suppressing drugs or surgery. Nothing flows from Creed’s disguise. It leads to no wider conclusions.

In one respect, however, her critics are right to scream ‘witch’. Rowling’s writing is becoming ever-more feminist; ever-more conscious of women’s physical and emotional abuse. The novel’s descriptions of how men condescend to Robin Ellacott, how they send her lewd pictures, grab her, talk over her, and refuse to accept her opinions because they are from a woman form one of the novels most convincing themes. 

In this sense, if nothing else, Rowling’s latest work honestly mirrors her online life. She knows, as her characters know, that women who speak out of turn find themselves alone in a free-fire zone.

Well said, Nick.

Social media ACLU continues to make a fool of itself, no doubt because it lets Chase Strangio set policy on trans issues.

Trans women are murdered by men, usually in a context of “sex work.” Men are not inspired by feminists to commit violence against women who identify as men; that’s not how any of this works. Male violence is not the fault of women.

Also…quite a few women have been murdered in the US this year too. What about them?

Also, nice job of amplifying the bullying of Rowling yet again.

Also, there’s no such thing as “transmisogyny.” Misogyny is hatred of women, end of story. Men don’t get to appropriate the term to describe attitudes to them. Jessica Klug doesn’t get to complain of “transracism” and Caitlyn Jenner doesn’t get to complain of “transmisogyny.”

It’s clear why they want to do it: it means they get to square the oppression. Multiply misogyny by hostility to men who wear dresses and boom you have a much bigger number than mere Karens get to have. Neener neener we are too so more oppressed than you.

Within weeks – i.e. before the election. Definitely before the election.

Donald Trump has been on Fox & Friends this morning. Among the tidbits are that he said he had read Bob Woodward’s book Rage last night, and that it was “boring”. The book runs to some 400 pages.

Trump can barely read at all. People who can barely read read very slowly. They read one word at a time instead of a sentence or phrase at a time; it’s slow work. Being barely able to read rules out being able to skim effectively.

(By the way whatever happened to “speed reading”? Remember that? Claims of being able to read an entire page at a glance and thus read an average-length book in an hour? It never made any sense to me and still doesn’t.)

The president has promised there will be a coronavirus vaccine within “weeks”. “I’m not doing it for political reasons. I want the vaccine fast” he said.

News flash, pumpkin head: we all want the vaccine fast. You want it before the election.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, has said he is cautiously optimistic a vaccine will be approved by the end of the year or early next year. But Fauci has also emphasized the vaccine will likely not be widely distributed until well into 2021.

End of the year is too late. Has to be before the election. There will be announcements that a vaccine has been perfected before the election. Caputo and Alexander will issue them even if no one else will.

Why is this man laughing…

That’s Trump in California yesterday meeting with Gavin Newsom and other officials.

He’s not wearing a mask.

He’s not social distancing.

He’s sitting right next to them, breathing on them, laughing in their faces, and he’s not wearing a mask.

This is an annoying thing that Twitter does.

Who wrote that? Is there a person called Twitter who wrote it? Of course not, so who did? It looks like a diktat from god. That matters because it’s not neutral fact-reporting, it’s tendentious. The word “cisgender” is new jargon which is meaningless and redundant unless you buy into the nonsensical novel dogma that sex is not a matter of what body you have but of “identity.” Without that dogma there is no need for any “cisgender” in front of “man” or “woman” and it doesn’t mean anything when it is there. We might as well start talking about cis daffodils and cis squirrels and cis oak trees. A “cisgender male serial killer” is just a male serial killer. Male serial killers have featured in quite a few movies over the decades, and nobody ever felt any need to clarify that they were cis male serial killers as opposed to…um…that other kind, whatever that might be.

And who are all these reviewers who are saying what Twitter says they are saying? List them, link to them, don’t just anonymously announce them without any substantiation.

And what exactly is “an anti-trans plotline”?

And two uses of the word “community” in one sentence is overkill. The “cis” community says fuck off.

He did say it. And then laughed stupidly.

He also says all this shit, which is just…

There really aren’t.

President Dodo went to California and said the scientists are wrong about climate change – as he knows from his years of rigorous research on the subject.

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump said at a Monday briefing with officials in McClellan Park, California, with a laugh.

Haha, yes, it’s hilarious.

He told Wade Crowfoot, secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency: “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.”

Also the pandemic will go away, like a miracle. You just watch.

Also what is “it”? Much of the northern hemisphere will start getting cooler over the next few weeks, yes, because that’s the time of year it is. If “it” means the planet, one does wonder how he knows.

(Not really. He’s just bullshitting, as always.)

Trump was also directly confronted by the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who has been adamant about climate change’s role in the wildfires, bluntly telling the President: “Climate change is real.”

“We obviously feel very strongly the hots are getting hotter,” Newsom said. “The dries are getting drier. When we’re having heat domes, the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”

And who is Trump to bounce up and deny that, on the basis of absolutely nothing but his own contempt for people and knowledge and research and everything else that isn’t Donald Dodo?

News outlets need to stop adopting the language of trans ideology.

NBC News for instance:

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling was hit Monday with renewed criticism calling her views transphobic as she releases her latest book, a mystery novel about a serial killer who dresses as a woman to prey on his victims.

The novel, “Troubled Blood,” is to be published Tuesday as the fifth installment in the “Cormoran Strike” detective series, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Strike’s latest mystery revolves around a cisgender man who dresses as a woman, according to a review from The Telegraph.

There’s no such thing as “cisgender.” Referring to “a cisgender man” makes about as much sense as referring to “a man with a head.”

I also don’t much like that “Rowling was hit Monday” in the opening sentence; looks too much like wishful fantasy.

The theme is being called out by those who have highlighted Rowling’s history of sharing transphobic opinions online

Aaaaand by the third paragraph we’ve tipped our hand: Rowling is assumed guilty and the people bullying her are assumed stunning and brave.

Some tweeted that although Rowling is still alive, her career is most likely dead, while others imagined Rowling gone so they could enjoy the “Harry Potter” series without associating the novels and films with her.

“in memory of jk rowling,” one user tweeted. “she ain’t dead, but she killed her own career by proudly hating trans people & no one would really miss her that much anyway #ripjkrowling”

All this is fine, apparently.

Actress Cynthia Nixon spoke about the impact of Rowling’s comments on her transgender son, Samuel, in an interview with The Independent posted Monday. Nixon said the author’s comments were “really painful” for her 23-year-old, who has loved the “Harry Potter” series throughout his childhood.

So Cynthia Nixon is encouraging her offspring to live a delusion, and also expects the world to do the same. Not a very reasonable approach.

The rest of the piece is all the usual guff. It’s pathetic.