Trump says he never heard a word about it.

President Trump is denying a New York Times report that he was briefed on an alleged Russian effort to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill Western forces — including U.S. troops — in Afghanistan.

Please. He was briefed. Maybe he didn’t read it, maybe he didn’t listen, maybe he was too busy tweeting, maybe he instantly forgot it because he doesn’t give a shit – but he was briefed.

Citing unnamed officials, the Times report, published Friday, details how U.S. intelligence officials reached the conclusion about the secret payments and then briefed the president in March. The White House National Security Council conferred an interagency meeting that same month to discuss the matter, according to the report. The finding was also included in the President’s Daily Brief, according to the Times.

According to the Times, U.S. officials have concluded that the bounty operation was orchestrated by the GRU, an arm of Russian military intelligence that has been linked to assassination attempts and other cloak-and-dagger operations, including the 2018 nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England.

The GRU is the same unit that U.S. intelligence has implicated in efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election.

Trump doesn’t care. Trump has tweets to send and golf balls to move when no one’s looking and pussies to grab and lies to tell.

That’s better.

What’s one of the very best ways to spread COVID-19? Singing in a choir. Great! Let’s have a great big choir sing today when Pence is giving a speech. That will put us on the map!

A choir of more than 100 people performed without masks at a robustly attended event in Texas at the First Baptist Church on Sunday that featured a speech by Vice President Mike Pence.

Nearly 2,200 people attended the “Celebrate Freedom Rally,” in the Lone Star State, according to rally organizers, which has seen a severe surge in coronavirus cases since easing restrictions. The venue capacity for the indoor event was close to 3,000 attendees, organizers say.

Throughout the service, the members of the choir sang at full volume, behind an orchestra. Between songs, the choir members put their masks back on when they sat down, according to pool reports from the event. The members of the choir had space between them, but it was not clear if it was the recommended six feet.

Singing at full volume while packed close together – that’s several of the very worst things you can do. I read a thing about it a couple of days ago. Talking loudly is bad, singing is worse.

Face masks at the event were “strongly encouraged,” with signs posted around the venue signaling the suggestion. According to pool reports from the event, at least half of the crowd was wearing a face covering, an act which experts say can reduce the transmission of Covid-19 by as much as 50%.

But the members of the choir are doomed, and they will infect others.

Choir rehearsals and performances became a focal point early in the course of the coronavirus pandemic, with an outbreak within a 122-member choir in Washington state becoming the subject of a in-depth report out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the report, 87% of singers that attended rehearsal contracted the deadly virus.

It was in Snohomish County, the next county north of here. Two people died.

I wrote a column for The Freethinker about this confusion over contagion and FreeDom.

About that Stephen King retweet…never mind.

About this whole issue of men just not seeing women as a class of people who face systematic unequal treatment, a class of people who are dismissed and ignored and ridiculed because they are that class of people. There really are a lot of men who just don’t see that, who don’t believe it’s true, who don’t think it matters. Who see us as “Karens” or potential “Karens” and who feel no embarrassment about dismissing women as “Karens.” Harvey Jeni points out that Lloyd Russell-Moyle is one such man.

Russell-Moyle has since apologised, but it is worth noting he is not alone in his point of view. The idea that women are cynically using their experiences of domestic and sexual abuse as justification for the supposedly unspeakable belief that sex based exemptions currently contained within the Equality Act ought to be upheld, is gathering apace. The Guardian columnist Owen Jones made a similar accusation when he tweeted a thread in condemnation of JK Rowling, attacking her apparent portrayal of herself as a “martyr”.

How have Jones and Russell-Moyle and so many other men (and women) managed to convince themselves that a man’s desire to role-play being a woman is the real subordination and martyrdom while merely being a woman is just the precondition for being a Karen?

… according to men such as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Owen Jones, women best not dare imagine that being traumatised by male violence is any kind of excuse for rejecting mixed sex spaces. We are to accept them without murmur, and if we don’t we are oppressive bigots. They couldn’t give a shit what we’ve been through, nor do they want to hear any more of our manipulative whining about it. So there, shut up.

They couldn’t give a shit about it and quite frankly they don’t believe it.

Still many women have taken the brave step of speaking out in an effort to explain why an end to single sex spaces will curtail their freedom further. We want others to understand why we might be reluctant to access support services if we cannot be guaranteed a female service provider. We are trying to explain why we might feel too frightened to use a public toilet situated down the end of a dark deserted corridor if any male person claiming a female gender identity (and with no gatekeeping literally any male person can claim one) has a right to be there. We are trying to show why it is not unreasonable for us to ask that the person performing our cervical smear, or any other type of intimate care, be female.

But rather than listening, we instead have men in positions of power accuse us of deliberately and calculatingly using these experiences to hurt and oppress others. Of course. Women are scheming like that. Ha! We are not really upset, we’re just pretending — and anyway, the crime of recognising trans women as biologically male is far greater than any triviality we might have endured.

Women are privileged at best and oppressors at worst. It’s only men who say they feel like women who are truly oppressed and disprivileged.

How did we get here? I don’t know. Massive bullying is certainly part of it, but how did the belief get so entrenched that the massive bullying happened? I don’t know. I don’t understand it. The belief is so silly and so counter to reality that I just don’t get how it dug itself in so fast.

Noteworthy.

When JK Rowling quotes Andrea Dworkin and Stephen King retweets her doing so…we may be seeing some fissures widening.

Rowling has thoughts on Lloyd Russell-Moyle.

She can multiply those 3k emails by a large number, I should think, on the grounds that most of us refrained from emailing her because we figured she would be buried in the avalanche.

If he does dig deeper he’ll find there’s nothing there – slogans are all there is. Bad, stupid, meaningless slogans are all there is.

Of course he did.

A video shared by President Trump on Twitter Sunday includes a man who appears to be a Trump supporter saying “white power” in response to protesters.

In the video, apparently taken at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, people wearing Trump shirts and with Trump signs on their golf carts drive by protesters yelling insults at them and about the president.

In one exchange — eight seconds into the two-minute video — a white man holding a sign that says “Make America Sane Again,” a reference to Trump’s campaign slogan, yells: “Where’s your white hood?” In response, a white man driving a golf cart with signs reading “Trump 2020” and “America First” yells back “white power.”

And male power! And rich white male power! All power to the rich white men; everyone else eat shit!

Trump retweeted the video before 8 a.m. ET Sunday and deleted his tweet around 11 a.m.

In a statement, Judd Deere, the White House deputy press secretary, did not apologize for the tweet or condemn the racist term but said instead: “President Trump is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”

He didn’t hear “the one statement.” What one statement? You know. I don’t know; what “one”? The one.

Apart from anything else it’s illiterate, especially from a press secretary.

Jake Tapper asks a black senator if he finds it offensive, adding “I find it offensive and I’m white” – which I think he added so as not to seem to be pushing Scott to say it while he (Tapper) gets to stay neutral.

Scott says, oddly, “We can play politics, I’m not going to” – as if it’s possible not to “play politics” in this context. What the hell else can anyone play? It is political, it’s classic Trump filthy-political. It’s no good abstaining when Trump is playing all day every day.

Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Tribune:

Recently, of course, we saw people like JK Rowling using her own sexual assault as justification for discriminating against a group of people who were not responsible for it. Trans people are no more likely to be rapists; in fact, they are more likely to be victims of sexual assault themselves. That’s why, despite JK Rowling’s hate towards them, hundreds of trans people wrote to complain to The Sun when it trivialised her domestic abuse on a recent front page.

Of course Rowling isn’t advocating “discriminating against” trans people. It isn’t “discriminating against” people to say they are not a thing that they are not. It isn’t “discriminating against” people to say they are not horses or shovels or Canada or Mars or a bucket of gold coins.

Rowling expressed no “hate towards” trans people.

They can’t do any of this without lying, it seems, because the truth isn’t on their side.

We’re doing it wrong.

The number of confirmed new coronavirus cases per day in the US hit an all-time high of 40,000 according to figures released by Johns Hopkins on Friday, eclipsing the mark first set during one of the deadliest stretches in late April. It’s a resurgence that has led some governors to backtrack or at least pause the reopening of their states.

Wrong direction. Goal is down, not up.

… the Florida department of health reported that the state confirmed 8,942 new cases of coronavirus yesterday, breaking a record set earlier this week.

The Florida health department also reported a frightening rise in the rate of positive test results. On Thursday, 13.1% of test results come back positive, compared to 8.9% on Wednesday, confounding Donald Trump’s recent assertions, repeated on Thursday, that “if you did not do testing, you would not have cases”.

So…maybe…wearing masks would be a good idea?

On Friday, Texas governor Greg Abbott ordered a sharp reversal on reopening. He had pursued one of the most aggressive reopening schedules of any state and had not only resisted calls to order the wearing of masks but had refused until last week to let local governments take such measures.

Mandatory libertarianism.

And on Friday, just before the first White House coronavirus taskforce briefing in two months, the White House confirmed reports that Trump canceled his weekend trip his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Oh no, not his weekend golf trip!

He was severely criticized last month, when he went golfing over Memorial Day weekend as the US coronavirus death toll neared 100,000.

And there had been questions raised about whether Trump would have to self-quarantine in New Jersey because the state is currently requiring those who travel from states with high levels of community spread of coronavirus to do so for 14 days.

Earlier this week, Trump traveled to Arizona, which was included on New Jersey’s list of affected states.

Quarantine the shithead. Quarantine him forever.

Behold: an advertisement:

I find it interesting because it’s so in your face, so perverse (not perverted, mind, perverse), so nyah nyah. Saying “we mean every” about a conspicuously male male, with beard and hirsute chest and legs, decked out in dainty catch me-fuck me laydeez underwear. They’re not saying it about a man seriously trying to “dress as” a woman or to look like a woman or to convince anyone he’s a woman, they’re saying it about an unmistakable man with a “Fuck you, bitch” look on his face, dressed and posed like a prostitute.

It’s hard to unpick all the levels here. There’s the “you WILL agree that this is a woman” level, but there’s also the “haha obviously this is not a woman but we get to force you to say it is” level and the “if you don’t agree that he’s a woman he’ll kick you in the cunt, you cunt” level. There’s the “I will cut you” face coupled with the passivity of the clothes – it jars and it’s meant to jar and the whole point of the jarring is to taunt and threaten and insult and bully women.

And it is, apparently, from a company that makes “lingerie” – i.e. sexualized underwear for women.

There is also the level of “this is what makes someone a woman: wearing chase me-fuck me underwear and adopting a fuck me pose.” That’s all there is to being a woman: sexy underwear and passivity. It’s so determinative of being a woman that the hostile threatening male stare is overruled by the stockings.

There’s also the level of “women can’t possibly do this, women can’t not shave and not pluck and not paint and then pose in sexy underwear with hairy legs and a ‘fuck you’ stare, but men can” level. Women have to scrape their bodies clean of every trace of hair, even between their legs, and then draw lines where their eyebrows used to be, but men can just pull the stockings up over the wiry black hairs and then dare us to say a word.

“Pride Weeks” forsooth.

Dipshit lets us know what his priorities are.

As if.

He can’t just write new laws – he can’t write new laws at all. Congress is the legislative branch; he is not.

He’s so eager to see other people executed or given “long prison terms” for crimes they didn’t commit or for actions that are political acts as opposed to crimes. If it’s a crime to push down a statue of a Confederate (aka treasonous) general, what about the crime of putting up such a statue in the first place? And what about the crime of slavery? Eh?

I can’t wait to see this poisonous toad of a man disappear into his “tower” again.

Interesting…

In a new bombshell report, the New York Times says the US intelligence community has concluded Russia offered Afghan militants bounties to kill US troops.

What? Trump’s darling sweetheart Putin did that?

From the Times:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

Trump apparently doesn’t care.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

I guess he’s been too busy fuming about monuments and…uh…monuments.

The bosses still being irresponsible and reckless with the health of the population. “Do what seems best to you, it’s your choice, we wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do, freedom freedom freedom, we couldn’t possibly comment.”

Vice President Mike Pence was asked what message he wanted to offer on wearing masks, as evidence suggests face coverings can limit the spread of coronavirus.

“Well, we think that the first principle is that people ought to listen to their state and local authorities,” the vice president said, declining to offer a federal endorsement on wearing masks.

What kind of stupid “first principle” is that? It’s geographic, it’s not a principle. The virus is the virus, it doesn’t care about state and local and national. How about just giving the best medical advice and never mind whether it’s local or national?

Assholes.

I’ve just seen a 5-word tweet that makes my blood run cold.

“Work is introducing pronoun pins.”

I think “is introducing” here means “wearing them is not optional.”

Why stop at pronouns? Why not pins to point out all the obvious? How about species? Nationality? Height and weight? Age? Address? Politics? Voting record? Grades? Tax history? Religion? Favorite foods?

Grown up people don’t want to walk around wearing labels telling the world what brand we are. I wouldn’t want to wear a pin saying “woman,” either, because duh. Plus…it’s work. It’s not home, it’s not the coffee shop, it’s not a clubhouse. It’s work. It’s already a place where people get to tell you what to do (unless you’re the owner or CEO), because that’s the nature of work, so adding creepy “pins” to the mix is not appropriate.

What’s Trump doing while Pence tells us everything is awesome on the pandemic front? Trump is raging about white supremacist statues again.

Moments ago, Trump sent a tweet sharing an FBI notice seeking information about those suspected of defacing the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette Square near the White House.

It’s interesting that the FBI thinks vandalization of a statue is a matter for the Violent Crimes Task Force. Don’t we consider violent crimes to be crimes against sentient beings? As opposed to statues?

But of course it’s even more interesting that Trump is so energized about vandalism against a statue of the man who committed a major genocide against the original inhabitants of the southern US, and so indifferent to a spreading pandemic that has killed over 120 thousand people in the US already.

Pence is holding the first coronavirus briefing in two months.

The vice president opened the briefing by heralding the progress made in hard-hit states like New York and New Jersey.

“We have made truly remarkable progress in moving our nation forward,” Pence said.

However, Pence then shifted to noting the high level of new cases in many parts of the country, which the president has sought to downplay in recent days.

…

Echoing the president, Mike Pence blamed the rising number of new coronavirus cases on increased testing.

…

However, public health experts have said the rising number of cases is more attributable to states reopening and Americans relaxing social distancing practices.

It’s also important to note that coronavirus hospitalizations are rising in many states, indicating the crisis is worsening.

Not just “more testing.”

Also, Pence says there is plenty of hospital capacity, which is also not true.

Striking a notably different tone than Vice President Mike Pence, Dr Anthony Fauci warned some parts of the country are facing a “serious problem” in terms of the spread of coronavirus.

The infectious disease expert applauded the states that have safely reopened their economies in a “prudent way that’s been effective.”

But Fauci ominously added, “We are facing a serious problem in certain areas.”

And it’s not just More Testing.

So, Trump says to himself, there’s a novel virus cutting a swathe through the country, what should I do? Take away people’s health insurance, that’s what.

In a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump administration has reaffirmed its position that the Affordable Care Act in its entirety is illegal because Congress eliminated the individual tax penalty for failing to purchase medical insurance.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco, the government’s chief advocate before the Supreme Court, said in a brief that the other provisions of Obamacare are impossible to separate from the individual mandate and that “it necessarily follows that the rest of the ACA must also fall.”

Shortly after the brief appeared on the court’s docket late Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement: “President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.”

In a speech on the lawsuit Thursday, Vice President Pence said he was proud of the ACA and denounced the administration’s position. “It’s cruel, it’s heartless, and it’s callous,” he said.

Wait, what? Pence said that? What’s happening? I literally had to read that paragraph three times to be sure I wasn’t misreading it. Since when does Pence denounce an administration position? Since when does he care that an administration position is cruel, heartless, and callous?

Eliminating the ACA would end medical insurance for more than 20 million Americans. It would also end widely popular provisions of the law, such as extending parents’ coverage to children up to the age of 26 and prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.

Normal prosperous democracies want their people to have health insurance, and make laws accordingly. The US is not that kind of democracy.

Yes but how do they know? How do they ever know? It’s never ever explained. If we don’t know how we know, and we can’t figure out how we can know because the rules don’t add up, then…how do we know what we’re supposed to do, and not do? If the rules contradict each other, how do we avoid thoughtcrime? Where is the island we can stand on, safe from sharks and strong currents?

The Women’s Institute is not the Women’s Institute now, it’s the Women’s and Men Who Say They Are Women’s Institute.

But let’s not go crazy here. There are rules. It’s just that they make no sense.

That bonkers instruction is in this two-page Transgender WI membership policy statement.

This policy has been written to provide guidance for members who have questions relating to transgender WI members. Transgender is an inclusive, umbrella term used to describe the diversity of gender identity and expression for all people who do not conform to common ideas of gender roles. Anyone who is living as a woman is welcome to join the WI and to participate in any WI activities in the same way as any other woman.

That’s all you need: Living Azza Woman. But what does that mean? Shut up.

What does gender reassignment involve?

It might involve surgery, hormone treatment or simply a permanent decision to live and dress as a member of the opposite sex.

Live and dress as – that’s quite funny. The airy unexplained vastness of “live as” coupled with the absurd tiny literalness of “dress as.” “Live as” could mean anything or nothing, so I guess for safety they added “and dress as”…but does that mean a man in jeans and a frilly blouse will be asked to explain himself at the door to the WI?

Is there a legal difference regarding whether someone has had gender reassignment surgery?

No and it is very unhelpful to think about anyone in those terms. Some transgender people may never have any kind of gender reassignment surgery but everyone is entitled to be treated in the same way, in the gender in which they identify.

Why? Why is everyone entitled to that? And why did “live as” get changed to “in which they identify”? They’re not the same thing, after all.

Can male to female transgender people join a WI and attend WI events?

Yes – anyone living as a woman is welcome to join the WI and take part in all WI activities. They should be treated in exactly the same way as all women who are part of your WI.

What about anyone identifying as a woman?

And then it ends with the bit Maya quoted.

Can crossdressers join the WI?

No – only those living as women can join the WI and take part in all WI activities.

And how in hell do you know which is which?

Can we ask for written evidence to prove that someone is a transgendered individual?

No – this could be very offensive and hurtful.

So then how do you know? How do you know who is a crossdresser and thus not entitled to join the WI and take part in all WI activities? How do you know anything about any of this?

It’s such an insult, not just to our intelligence, but to our ability to think, to reason, to question, to try to figure out where we are and who these people are and how we should behave around them. It orders us, with menaces, to stop knowing what we have known from earliest childhood, and to enter a world of arbitrary assertions and self-contradicting rules. I won’t fucking do it.

Excuse me?

They deserve more recognition, do they? Ok here’s step one: don’t call them not-men, as if they were a weird mutant failure.

Updating to add:

Not a very philosophical response.