Muslims in iran teach us all how to spread a disease with greatest efficiency: Links 2, March 1, 2020

Full solidarity with Greece and Bulgaria, France stands ready to contribute to European efforts to provide them with rapid assistance and protect borders. We must act together to avoid a humanitarian and migration crisis.

2. WATCH: Iranian pilgrims taunt coronavirus with ‘communal licking’ of religious shrines despite outbreak

(“Never interfere with an enemy when they are making a mistake” -W. Churchill I think.)

Pilgrims to religious shrines in Iran have reportedly attempted to defy fears about the novel coronavirus by licking religious shrines to prove that they will not get sick.

 

A video posted to twitter shows three people, including one who appears to be a child, licking the glass coverings and metal grilles at religious shrines in Qom and Mashhad.

Qom, which is a prominent centre of religious pilgrimage for Shia Muslims, is also the epicentre of the virus in Iran.
“Stop playing with people’s beliefs, coronavirus is nothing in the Shia shrines,” one man is recorded saying at the Fatima Masumeh shrine in Qom, in response to calls for authorities to close pilgrimage sites amid the outbreak.

 

“Im licking this and I don’t care what happens,” another man is shown saying, before licking a metal grille housing a prominent grave site.

The man’s actions prompted those around him to recite prayers loudly.

(Someone needs to tell them that they are not protected unless they all huddle together in a mosque that can just barely contain them all. Oh and for the rest of us, don’t order a taxi or send out for food)

3. Woman who claims she was rushed into taking ‘experimental’ puberty-blocking drugs at 16 wins right to take NHS gender clinic to court in landmark case

(Today is just the day of people fed up and fighting back, in’t it?)

A woman who claims she was given ‘experimental’ puberty-blocking drugs at 16 without being warned of the consequences is set to lead as a witness in a landmark case. 

 

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which runs the UK’s first gender clinic in London, is being sued over concerns it gave powerful drugs to children as young as 12 without proper consent. 

Keira Bell, 23, started gender reassignment at the clinic when she was a teenager after she felt suicidal and asked to be called by a boy’s name at school. 

She was prescribed hormone blockers to halt the development of her female body after just three one-hour appointments. 

 

But Ms Bell has now stopped transitioning and argues staff did not challenge her want to become a teenage boy.  

Ms Bell is now waiting to see if she has fertility issues following the drugs and claims she should not have been rushed into treatment because children cannot given adequate consent.

 

The judge in the landmark case, Mr Justice Supperstone, told The Sunday Times it was ‘plainly arguable’ the clinic was acting unlawfully and has given permission for the high-profile trial in the divisional by July.

(This is alchemy. Turning healthy people into sterile homunculi)

4. Austria says it will stop any migrants trying to rush its border

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria will stop any migrants attempting to rush its border if measures to halt them in Greece and through the Balkans fail, conservative Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said on Sunday.

 

Greek police fired tear gas to repel hundreds of stone-throwing migrants who tried to force their way across the border from Turkey on Sunday, with thousands more behind them after Ankara relaxed curbs on their movement. It was the second straight day of clashes.

 

The rush echoes Europe’s migration crisis in 2015-2016, when Austria served as a corridor into Germany for hundreds of thousands of migrants who traveled through Greece and the Balkans. Austria also took in more than 1% of its population in asylum seekers in the process.

 

“Hungary has assured us that it will protect its borders as best it can, like Croatia’s,” Nehammer told broadcaster ORF, referring to two of Austria’s neighbors. Migrants coming up through the Balkans would almost certainly have to pass through either of those countries before reaching Austria.

5. Terrorist whines that the police removed his mask so they could see his face. And it gets worse from there.

6. Ottawa: Midway killer charged with aggravated assault in Murray st. stabbing

He seems like a nice fellow

7. Applying essential oil to anus ‘cures coronavirus’: Iranian cleric

A local cleric from the Iranian city of Qom has suggested a novel cure for the new coronavirus – the pre-bedtime rectal administration of violet leaf oil.

Users on Twitter describe how the Ayatollah Tabrizian has publicly denounced Western medicine as “un-Islamic”.

In a post to over 120,000 followers on the social messaging service Telegram, Tabrizian, a purveyor of traditional Islam medicine, listed several alternative techniques for fighting the spread of the contagious disease, known as Covid-19.According to an Iranian news site, which obtained a screenshot of the message, Tabrizian recommends consuming copious amounts of brown sugar, burning wild rue, as well as inhaling snuff. 

His eighth tip is the most striking: “Before bedtime, drench some cotton in violet oil and apply onto your anus” 

(Another reason not to oder take out or call a cab. See item 2)

8. Peaceful migrants just hoping to have a better life in Europe thug their way across barbed wire with masked faces.

9. Who is in the truck? Migrants being brought into Greece? Or soldiers to defend the border

10. Father of trans B.C. teen continues to give interview despite court ban

The father had also been ordered to address their child using the proper pronouns and descriptors in private

The father of a transgender B.C. teen appears again to have broken a court ban that ordered him not to speak publicly about the case or identify himself or his child in further media interviews.

 

This time, the father appears to have given an interview to a freelance writer with the Federalist, an American conservative online outlet.

 

In January, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that allowed the B.C. teen to receive testosterone treatments to transition to being a boy. The boy’s mother supported the medical treatments while the boy’s father did not and had tried to halt the treatments.

(This article could have been written by Goebbels. “Proper pronouns”?)

Thank you M., Xanthippa, Wrath of Khan, Yucki, Johnny U., Richard, EB., Malca, C., and all who contributed this weekend in any way at all.