My friend Nouri Karim has just published his translation of The God Delusion into Kurdish. He published a translation of Does God Hate Women? in 2012.

He sent me some photos on the occasion.

Grattis, Karim!

In a surprise move, Obama said at a press conference today that he intended to do his job as the Constitution spelled it out. Pundits who had expected him to say “Ok then let’s just wait until next year” were left wondering what signs they had missed.

President Obama on Tuesday challenged Republicans to offer any plausible rationale for refusing to consider a Supreme Court candidate to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last weekend, and he pledged to nominate someone with an “outstanding legal mind” who cares about democracy and the rule of law.

That’s just shockingly irresponsible and inflammatory.

“The Constitution is pretty clear about what is supposed to happen now,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference after a meeting in California with leaders of Southeast Asia. He said the Constitution demands that a president nominate someone for the court and the Senate either confirms or rejects.

“There’s no unwritten law that says that it can only be done on off years,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not in the Constitutional text.”

Yes but Republicans don’t want to, because they want to wait until Donald Trump can do it. That’s more important than some stupid constitution. Obama’s an elitist who refuses to listen to the people.

Bill Cosby gets a nope.

Bill Cosby’s criminal sexual-assault case appears to be headed toward an evidence hearing after a judge denied his latest effort to throw the charges out.

In a ruling Tuesday, the judge who refused to dismiss the case earlier this month denied Cosby’s appeal of that decision.

The 78-year-old TV star is accused of drugging and violating an ex-Temple University employee at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004 and could get 10 years in prison if convicted. The defense insists Cosby had a promise from a previous district attorney that he would never be charged over the 2004 encounter.

Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill, though, found the evidence of such an agreement lacking after hearing from the ex-prosecutor and others at a two-day hearing.

But hey – he got away with it until he was 78. That’s quite a long run.

Good.

Oregon Public Broadcasting:

A federal judge in Portland denied Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy bail at a hearing Tuesday.

Not very surprising, is it. The guy doesn’t even recognize the jurisdiction, so how could he possibly not be a flight risk? He’s a fella who considers himself entitled to resist law enforcement with guns, so how could it be safe to let him out on bail?

Magistrate Judge Janice Stewart agreed with prosecutors that Bundy posed a flight risk and a danger to the community, and should be held in jail while awaiting trial.

If he’s not, nobody is.

Before Bundy’s Tuesday hearing, a family member said he isn’t dangerous or a criminal and should have been released from jail because he isn’t a flight risk.

Hahaha sure, and that thing where he’s been hiding on his ranch to avoid arrest for two years? That was just a prank. He’s a prankster.

Prosecutors called Cliven Bundy “lawless and violent” and told the judge not to free him because he doesn’t recognize federal authority.

There’s a limit even for white guys.

California Lawyer published an interview with Scalia in January 2011.

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don’t think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we’ve gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?
Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. … But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don’t like the death penalty anymore, that’s fine. You want a right to abortion? There’s nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn’t mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

Lenora M. Lapidus at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project said he was wrong.

His comments fly in the face of 40 years of Supreme Court precedent. Since the 1971 case, Reed v. Reed, it has been clearly understood that the 14th Amendment prohibits discrimination based on sex. In decision after decision, many authored by conservative Supreme Court justices, this principle has been reaffirmed.

Indeed, the text of the Constitution simply states that the government shall not deny “any person” the equal protection of the laws. The 14th Amendment does not specifically mention race and the language is intentionally broad. Clearly women fall within the category of “any person.”

Scalia’s views are extreme and out of step with the mainstream. He says that nothing in the Constitution prohibits discrimination against women; rather, it is up to legislatures to ban discrimination if they so choose. However, the Constitution provides a safety net to protect against the will of the majority when fundamental rights — such as the right to equal treatment — are at stake.

If the Constitution did not prohibit discrimination against women, the government could treat women like second class citizens in a wide range of areas. States could legally bar women from serving on juries, women could be prohibited from owning property, the government could pay women less, and women could be excluded from public schools — all things that happened in the past, before women’s rights to equal protection were enforced.

The equal protection clause is a big deal, and if it doesn’t cover you, you’re screwed. Scalia’s eccentricity on this is a little shocking.

MSNBC offers a predicted candidate for Scalia’s seat:

A leading Supreme Court analyst thinks Attorney General Loretta Lynch is the “most likely candidate” to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

Tom Goldstein, who runs the influential SCOTUSblog, had earlier predicted Ninth Circuit Judge Paul Watford would make the top of President Obama’s short list. But in a revised blog post, Goldstein said he now believes Lynch is the leading contender.

Here’s the thing: she’s a career prosecutor, so the Republicans will look silly claiming she’s too squishy-liberal.

Lynch would be the first black woman ever nominated to the nation’s highest court — and the GOP would have a political problem during an election year if the Republicans refused to even consider her nomination, Goldstein wrote.

“I think the administration would relish the prospect of Republicans either refusing to give Lynch a vote or seeming to treat her unfairly in the confirmation process,” Goldstein wrote. “Either eventuality would motivate both black and women voters.”

I find this far more interesting than the election – no doubt because Obama is picking the candidates, so we don’t have to pay attention to people like Trump.

It’s everywhere. Stephen Fry has quit Twitter because he’s fed up with the rage-storms.

Bafta show host Stephen Fry has confirmed he has left Twitter declaring “the fun is over”.

He faced criticism online after comparing costume designer Jenny Beavan to a “bag lady” when she picked up her Bafta for Mad Max: Fury Road.

The Beeb includes the clip in which Jenny Beavan accepted the award and the one in which Fry made his joke. It would be mean if they were strangers and if he weren’t there to make jokes like that about everyone – but they’re not and he was. They’re friends, and he was there to tease all the people.

Fry has been presenting the Bafta film awards for 11 years and audiences have become used to his cutting wit, often involving quips about many of the stars involved.

Beavan, who won the Bafta for Best Costume Design for Mad Max: Fury Road, came onto the stage at London’s Royal Opera House wearing a black leather jacket, white t-shirt and dark trousers.

Following her acceptance speech and once she had left the stage, Fry said: “Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady.”

But he posted a picture of the pair at a party later in the night to show his comment had not been taken badly, captioning it: “Jenny Baglady Beavan and Stephen Outrageous Misogynist Swine Fry at the after party.”

But he got one of those pile-ons we’re all so familiar with.

Fry followed that up by saying in an expletive-ridden tweet that his critics were “tragic people”.

His latest comment continued: “A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know.

“It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn’t matter whether they think they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists … the ghastliness is absolutely the same.”

That’s not necessarily true. Sometimes people are defending people who can use the help. It depends on the particulars.

But it can be horrible.

This sample of the New York Times reporting on the Supreme Court vacancy is quite bizarre.

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — The death of Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday set off an immediate partisan battle over a vacancy that could reshape the Supreme Court for years to come, as President Obama vowed to nominate a successor and Senate Republicans called on him to let the next president fill the seat.

Why say Obama “vowed”? Why couldn’t he just have said? Of course he’s going to nominate a successor; the remarkable thing would be if he’d said he’s not going to. It’s his job, and he’s going to do his job. Why is that in any way remarkable? Why is his saying so framed as “vowing”?

Speaking to reporters from Rancho Mirage, where he is golfing this weekend with friends, Mr. Obama paid tribute to Justice Scalia, who died earlier in the day in Texas. He described him as “one of the towering legal figures of our time,” a jurist who dedicated his life “to the cornerstone of our democracy: the rule of law.”

But Mr. Obama also said, “I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time.”

What do they mean “but”? Why put a “but” there? There’s no contradiction or swerve in direction. Scalia is gone and that means there’s a vacancy and such a vacancy is supposed to be filled so that the Court can do its job. Why on earth make it sound as if Obama is being combative by doing exactly what he’s required to do?

“There will be plenty of time for me to do so and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote,” the president said. “These are responsibilities that I take seriously, as should everyone. They are bigger than any one party, they are about our democracy.”

The president’s tone left little doubt that he intends to use the full power of his office to try to leave a final imprint on the Supreme Court. His choice has the potential to be more decisive for the court’s makeup than his previous two — Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — given Justice Scalia’s longtime status as the court’s most outspoken conservative.

What does that mean? Scalia hasn’t left some kind of ghostly presence that will somehow make his replacement more decisive than Sotomayor and Kagan. Maybe what they were trying to say was that Scalia’s departure makes a bigger difference because of his status as the honcho reactionary, but that’s a different thing.

It seems as if they can’t think about it except in terms of a horse race. It’s warped and misleading and uninformative.

I haven’t said anything here about the stroke Richard Dawkins suffered last weekend, because I figured any sympathy I expressed would sound fake. The reality is that I never wished illness or disability on him, and I’m sorry that it’s happened to him. It’s much the same with Scalia – I was and am ecstatic that he’s not on the court any more, but I would have been fine with retirement as opposed to death. I would have been ecstatic if Dawkins had decided to stop jeering at feminism and Muslim schoolboys on Twitter, and to be a better person instead. I would much have preferred that. But that’s not what happened.

Matthew Facciani at Patheos quotes from a recording Dawkins made yesterday to tell people how he’s doing.

The doctors asked if I had been suffering from stress, and I had to say yes I had, and they keep advising me not to get involved in…controversy. And I had to tell then that not getting involved in controversy, that controvery is not one of those things I can. I told them I had been distressed, that on the 28th of January, I was disinvited from conference to which I had previously been asked, this upset me very much. I’m used to getting hate from religionists, from creationists, but when I get hate from my own people, from left, liberal feminists and so on, that actually hurt me.

So he’s sort of kind of blaming us for his stroke.*

Well, I understand how he feels. It certainly occurred to me often last summer that my (cough) irritation with various people who say harsh things about me could make my brain explode. I’ve also seen plenty of people hoping exactly that would happen, and predicting it would. (Thus I have a duty to breathe deeply and think beautiful thoughts, so that I can thwart them.) But it has also often occurred to me that my irritation at a vast range of other things could make my brain explode. I’m a highly irritable person. Dying of fury seems very likely to be my fate. I think sometimes about deciding to stop being that kind of person, and dismiss the thought almost before it forms. Can’t do it. The irritability is all tangled up with caring about things, and I have no interest in ceasing to care about things.

And the same applies to Dawkins, doesn’t it. Temperamentally I could be his twin. He cares about things, and the caring often leads to irritation. It’s no good pretending he’s not irritable. I was going to say he must realize that about himself just as I realize it about myself, but then I remembered that in his Twitter profile he says he pokes “good-humoured fun” at believers…so maybe he doesn’t.

These days one of the things he gets the most irritable about is his own warped idea of what feminists are like. The result is that he tweets to his 1.36 million followers that particular feminists should be mocked, “the more the merrier.” That’s a bad, unkind thing for him to do. That’s what I said here a week or two ago, thus perhaps being one of the feminists he had in mind when he sort of blamed feminists for upsetting him into a stroke.

I’m sorry the stroke happened, but I don’t think the blame rests with feminists.

In other news, the NECSS executive committee put out a statement this afternoon:

We wish to apologize to Professor Dawkins for our handling of his disinvitation to NECSS 2016. Our actions were not professional, and we should have contacted him directly to express our concerns before acting unilaterally. We have sent Professor Dawkins a private communication expressing this as well. This apology also extends to all NECSS speakers, our attendees, and to the broader skeptical movement.

We wish to use this incident as an opportunity to have a frank and open discussion of the deeper issues implicated here, which are causing conflict both within the skeptical community and within society as a whole. NECSS 2016 will therefore feature a panel discussion addressing these topics. There is room for a range of reasonable opinions on these issues and our conversation will reflect that diversity. We have asked Professor Dawkins to participate in this discussion at NECSS 2016 in addition to his prior scheduled talk, and we hope he will accept our invitation.

This statement and our discussions with Professor Dawkins were initiated prior to learning of his recent illness. All of NECSS wishes Professor Dawkins a speedy and full recovery.

So that’s women thrown under the bus again.

I too wish Dawkins a speedy and full recovery, but I also want him to stop trashing feminism and feminists. That hasn’t changed.

*Updating to add: Richard strongly objects to this accusation, pointing out that I didn’t quote the next part, where he says it was not that upset that preceded his stroke, but rather the good news that NECSS had apologized and reinvited him to their conference.

John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

Around 4:30 P.M. Eastern time on Saturday, the San Antonio Express-News broke the news of the death of Antonin Scalia, the conservative Supreme Court Justice. Within a few hours, the Republican Party had placed itself on a trajectory that, if isn’t reversed, could throw the Presidential election to the Democrats.

In apparent contravention of precedent and the U.S. Constitution, the leader of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, said that President Obama shouldn’t be allowed to name a replacement for Scalia. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement posted on his Facebook page. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

It’s a little reminiscent of the open-air theft of Malheur, in a way – the flagrant contempt for the rule of law. But it’s also different, because Mitch McConnell isn’t a Nevada rancher with a stupid grudge, he’s a United States Senator. You’d think and hope he would agree with the basic rules and laws that apply to his job – his job which is making the laws for the rest of us.

He doesn’t get to refuse to do a part of his job. This isn’t Saturday at home with the kids, this is the god damn government.

A United Nations Population Fund report finds that more than half of teenage girls in Pakistan think men get to beat up women if they’re married to them. The Independent reports:

Refusing sex was just one of the reasons girls aged between 15 and 19 believed a husband would be justified in beating his wife, while more than 30 per cent of girls of the same age had already experienced physical or sexual violence in Pakistan.

The web of beliefs that must underlie that one is so depressing – that men own women, that marriage is the ownership of a woman (or women) by a man, that women are passive objects meant to be owned by men, that women have no right to a will of their own, that women have no right to say no to men, that women are essentially slaves, that girls and women deserve to be beaten for attempting to have a will of their own.

The report, entitled  ‘Sexual and Reproductive Health of Young People in Asia and the Pacific’, also included data from Cambodia, India, Bangladesh and Nepal which revealed similar attitudes about violence against women among teenage boys, the Express Tribune reported.

Between 25 and 51 per cent said that wife beating was justified.

It isn’t really surprising, I suppose…except that when it’s put into stark words like that, as opposed to just being how life is, it does seem surprising that the underlings say yes, we deserve to be subject to violence by our oppressors.

The Republicans have been stonewalling lower court judges. Politico last July:

The GOP-controlled Senate is on track this year to confirm the fewest judges since 1969, a dramatic escalation of the long-running partisan feud over the ideological makeup of federal courts.

The standoff, if it continues through the 2016 elections as expected, could diminish the stamp that President Barack Obama leaves on the judiciary — a less conspicuous but critical part of his legacy. Practically, the makeup of lower-level courts could directly affect a number of Obama’s policies expected to face legal challenges from conservatives.

They’ve been breaking the government, in short.

Republicans appear willing to absorb criticism that they’re interfering with the prerogative of a president to pick his nominees in the hope that the GOP can get its own judges installed in 2017, with one of their own in the White House. In the meantime, federal courts could be left with dozens of unfilled vacancies. More than two dozen federal courts have declared “ judicial emergencies” because of excessive caseloads caused by vacancies.

But hey, who cares about the law and the courts and getting the work done when there are political points to be scored.

Republicans say there’s little reason to shift gears with a lame-duck president in office and hopes running high that they will win the White House.

Wtf? So they get to stop doing what they’re supposed to be doing just because a president has only a couple of years left in office? That’s how that’s supposed to work? I don’t think so!

I guess it’s an illusion to think there are any grownups anywhere.

Already.

Republicans Vow to Block Obama Replacing Scalia on High Court

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to block President Barack Obama in his remaining months in office from replacing Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, a direct challenge to the White House that is certain to roil the 2016 presidential campaign.

“The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement shortly after Scalia’s death was made public. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

That’s a ludicrous thing to say. We don’t have a direct voice, we have the indirect voice of voting for a presidential candidate. We did that, and there is a duly elected president. There’s no rule that says once the endless presidential campaign has officially begun we have to wait until after the election. On the contrary, court vacancies are supposed to be filled reasonably promptly.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, quickly countered with a warning against trying to run out the clock on Obama’s presidency by holding up a replacement for Scalia, who was found dead Saturday at a resort in West Texas. He urged Obama to send a nomination to the Senate “right away.”

“It would be unprecedented in recent history for the Supreme Court to go a year with a vacant seat,” Reid said. “Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate’s most essential Constitutional responsibilities.”

Nothing new there then.

Democrats have sought to use the potential for court vacancies as an election-year issue to encourage voter turnout, saying the next president likely will replace three justices on the aging court. They have warned that a Republican president could tip the court more heavily against women’s reproductive rights and campaign finance reforms they favor and in support of corporations.

Not so much could as inevitably will.

Within minutes of the reports of Scalia’s death, conservatives began mobilizing to argue that President Barack Obama should not be allowed to appoint a successor.

“It would be wise for everybody to wait until the next president is chosen,” Hatch said Saturday on Fox News. “Seeing the type of judges that the president has appointed, there aren’t many Republicans who are going to differ with Majority Leader McConnell.”

If you know what’s good for you.

Good teachers? We don’t need no stinkin’ good teachers.

Tom Porton is used to drama: Since arriving at James Monroe High School as an English teacher 45 years ago, he has taught and staged plays. Outside, in the Bronx River neighborhood where the school is, there was plenty of drama in the 1980s, when AIDS and crack ravaged the area. His response then was to establish a group of peer educators who worked with Montefiore Medical Center to teach teenagers about H.I.V. prevention. His efforts earned him awards, including recognition from the City Council and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and led to his induction into the National Teachers Hall of Fame.

So therefore the new principal decided to hassle him into quitting.

Last month he clashed with Brendan Lyons, the school’s principal, who disapproved of his distributing H.I.V./AIDS education fliers that listed nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a book together”). This month, he said the principal eliminated his early-morning civic leadership class, which engaged students in activities such as feeding the homeless, saying it was not part of the Common Core curriculum. Mr. Porton was already skeptical of that curriculum, saying it shortchanged students by focusing on chapters of novels and nonfiction essays rather than entire works of literature.

So he’s leaving.

Mr. Porton has been teaching and coordinating student activities long enough to see Monroe go from a large urban high school to one housing several smaller schools, including his, the Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design. Mr. Lyons — who repeatedly replied “no comment” to questions during a telephone conversation — arrived at the school at the start of the academic year. A previous tenure at a Manhattan high school was marked by his replacing paper hall passes with toilet plungers, which students used to wreak havoc on property and one another.

Um…what? Was that a move to shame students for having to pee? Captain Queeg in the Bronx?

H.I.V. and AIDS may have faded from the public mind, but they remain a danger in places like the South Bronx, especially among young blacks and Latinos. Mr. Porton said the school has failed to meet Department of Education mandates to educate students about the diseases, making his work all the more necessary.

Mr. Lyons, who would not say if the school met the mandates, never explained his objections to Mr. Porton. At the start of this semester, Mr. Porton said, the principal eliminated the 40-student leadership class because he said it was not part of the standard curriculum, even though the class met before the formal start of the school day. Because of that, combined with Mr. Porton’s disappointment over the standardized test frenzy that rules in many schools, he chose to leave.

“School is not pleasant, the way it was when I started,” he said. “They pay lip service to the social and emotional well-being of the child. My generation of teachers had a mind-set about how to teach a child. Today, many young teachers see teaching as a way to kill time on the way to something else.”

Selling real estate, probably.

So the students lose and toilet plunger guy wins.