We had a hell of a sunset here last night. This fella captured it (the second one).

NPR tells us:

The Justice Department’s door is open if President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, wants to pass along information from Ukraine connected with Joe Biden and his family, Attorney General William Barr said Monday.

Why? Why is the door open?

“As I did say to Senator Graham, we have to be very careful with respect to any information from the Ukraine,” Barr said. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of cross currents, and we can’t take anything we receive from Ukraine at face value.”

Seeing as how it might be coming not from Ukraine but from Putin’s bag of tricks. Good call.

Hilarity ensued.

If it is not up to him to determine who is or who is not part of his/their/our/your LGBTQ community does that mean he can’t say TERFs are not part of it? Or no?

The US is a major human rights violator.

Migrants, for instance, face extreme brutality here.

In the early morning of June 12, 2017, a group of eight Central American migrants decided to go on a hunger strike to protest conditions at the immigration detention center where they were being held in California.

When detainees arrive at the facility, they’re given a handbook that states explicitly, “Detention is NOT prison.” Immigration detention is where the government holds people while deciding whether to deport them, and most detainees have no criminal record. But this group said the conditions felt like those of a penitentiary.

And that would be a penitentiary that itself violates human rights.

The group complained that

The guards were discriminating against them, they lacked access to clean water, the bonds for their immigration cases were too expensive and they were receiving information only in English.

When detention officers ordered them to return to their beds for a routine population “count,” the eight men refused to move from tables in the facility’s day room until they could speak to a supervisor or an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Surveillance footage shows what happened next.

Detention officers spent several minutes speaking to the detainees, telling them to return to their bunks. They waived a canister of pepper spray in front of them, then attempted to physically move the detainees.

The video shows the detainees trying to remain seated with their arms linked. But detention officers would later claim they were inciting a “rebellion” and “assaulting” staff.

Detention officers then sprayed pepper spray at the men at least three times and forcibly removed them from the tables.

As they visibly recoiled from the spray, some of the detainees were pushed into walls, pulled to the ground or dragged on the floor by guards.

Some were then put in hot showers, which made the effects of the pepper spray worse. (It’s not clear whether that was deliberate or a bungled attempt to wash it away.)

All eight detainees were then sent to “segregation” — ICE’s term for solitary confinement — for 10 days for “engaging in or inciting a group demonstration.”

It’s a for-profit company that runs the prison that isn’t supposed to be a prison.

As NPR reported in January, a previously confidential government inspection found that the facility was failing to meet many of the government’s own standards for solitary confinement, mental health treatment and medical care. The report also found that staff at Adelanto had retaliated against detainees.

Immigration attorneys and advocates say the conditions at Adelanto are emblematic of problems throughout an immigration detention system that has come to increasingly rely on firms like GEO to help enforce the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy.

Major human rights violator, at the behest of our monstrous dictator.

Kenan Malik considers the “cultural appropriation” question.

“What insults my soul,” Zadie Smith has written, “is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.”

Both as novelist and essayist, Smith is one of the most subtle guides to the fraught terrain of culture and identity. The problem of “cultural appropriation” – writers and artists being called out for having stepped beyond their permitted cultural boundaries to explore themes about people who are not “fundamentally ‘like’ us” – is an issue that particularly troubles her. Too often these days, on opening a book or on viewing a painting, we are as likely to ask: “Did the author or painter have the cultural right to engage with that subject?” or: “Does he or she possess the right identity?” as: “Is it any good?”

There’s maybe a third track though, to do not with a cultural right or the right identity but sufficiency of knowledge. “Write what you know” has long been a commandment of writing schools and the like (along with “show don’t tell” which is also a questionable rule), and while it’s simplistic or just wrong in many ways (it rules out all fantasy and magic realism for a start), it’s not completely wrong.

It’s far from completely right though. “Literary” fiction now is far too full of people chatting over coffee plus descriptions of clothes and living rooms and too empty of most of life. Writing only about what you know [personally, from experience] equals writing about not much.

Back to Kenan.

So it is with the latest cultural firestorm over Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, which tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, forced to flee their home in Acapulco and join the migrant trail to America after their family is slaughtered by a drugs cartel. Cummins wants Americans to stop seeing migrants as a “faceless brown mass” and to bear witness to the “tragedy of our making on our southern border”.

The novel’s supporters have hailed it as a Great American Novel, even the new The Grapes of Wrath. Its detractors point to the fact that Cummins is non-Mexican and that this wasn’t a story that was hers to tell, which is why she gets it all wrong.

The thing is though, The Grapes of Wrath isn’t all that good. It’s powerful, and gripping, and of interest historically, but as a piece of writing it’s not great. I’ve never felt particularly confident about Steinbeck’s imagination of his Dust Bowl farmers.

But was it wrong for him to write it? Was he taking up space that could have been filled by a novel written by an actual Dust Bowl farmer? If so, were there any such novels written by Dust Bowl farmers? I have a feeling they were all too busy trying to survive to write a novel about their efforts to survive. Wasn’t it possibly a good thing that a novelist who had the time and resources to write a novel about those efforts did so?

Kenan says Cummins’s novel is pretty bad as a novel, but that’s not really the issue.

Most of the anger about the novel has been generated, though, not by how Cummins writes but by who she is. Not Mexican. Not migrant. White.

Cummins herself sets up her critics’ argument in an author’s note: “I worried that as a non-migrant and non-Mexican I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set almost entirely among migrants.” She “wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”.

But in the meantime is it actually wrong for her to write it?

What both sides seem to have forgotten is what fiction is for. Fiction, as Smith observed in the inaugural Philip Roth lecture in 2016, “is a way of asking… what if I was different than I am?” Today, though, she notes elsewhere: “The old – and never especially helpful – adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: stay in your lane.” To do so, Smith insists, is to deny the very possibility of fiction.

There you go. Zadie Smith and I are of one mind on this subject. “Write what you know” is hideously parochial at best, and “stay in your lane” is even more so.

… the context of the debate is a literary and artistic culture that increasingly does insist that people should stay in their lanes. “Where did the new orthodoxy arise that writers must only set stories within their own country of origin or nationality?” the writer Aminatta Forna has asked. In trying to constrain the imagination by identity, she points out, it’s not the privileged but those on the margins who most lose out. The “white male writer” is called simply “writer”; all other others have to be “hyphenated”, writing, in Nesrine Malik’s words, “as a”: as a woman, as a Muslim, as an immigrant.

Certainly, puncture the absurd hype around American Dirt as a novel that reveals the truth about the treatment of immigrants. Certainly, celebrate the Mexican and Latinx writers, from Luis Alberto Urrea to Valeria Luiselli (whose poetic, haunting Lost Children Archive has just been published in paperback), who have long explored the stories of migration with subtlety and power.

But let us not create gated cultures in which only those of the right identity have permission to use their imaginations. For, as novelist Kamila Shamsie tweeted (in response to another controversy over cultural appropriation): “ ‘You – other – are unimaginable’ is a far more problematic attitude than ‘You are imaginable’.” She might have added, “even if imagined badly”.

One exchange of views:

But was “woke people police boundaries” a fair précis of Kenan’s point? Hardly.

Aw, sad, Trump and Johnson aren’t besties any more.

Donald Trump’s previously close relationship with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks close to collapse, following new revelations that the president slammed down the phone on him.

Trump’s behaviour during last week’s call was described by officials as “apoplectic,” and Johnson has now reportedly shelved plans for an imminent visit to Washington.

So I guess there’s a downside to having an unstable bad-tempered moronic self-dealing hack as president?

[R]elations broke down following a series of high-profile threats from Trump and a series of pointed interventions against Trump by Johnson and senior members of his government.

What, because of a few threats? Losers.

Why did Trump get mad?

The call, which one source described to the Financial Times as “very difficult,” came after Johnson defied Trump and allowed Chinese telecoms company Huawei the rights to develop the UK’s 5G network.

Trump’s fury was triggered by Johnson backing Huawei despite multiple threats by Trump and his allies that the United States would withdraw security co-operation with the UK if the deal went ahead.

Hm. Trump’s fury was triggered by a failure to do his bidding. That sounds like him.

That’s remarkable.

How cozy.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he spoke to Attorney General Bill Barr on Sunday and that the Department of Justice has “created a process” to receive and verify information that Rudy Giuliani gathered about the Bidens in Ukraine.

He did, yes.

“Rudy,” he says, chummily, as if we’re all playing nicely in the sandbox together.

GRAHAM: “We’re going to make sure Hunter Biden’s conflict of interest is explored because this is legitimate. How could Joe Biden really fight corruption when his son’s sitting on the Burisma board?

MARGARET BRENNAN: “Can you clarify, you said you talked to Attorney General Barr this morning. Has the Department of Justice been ordered to investigate the Bidens?”

GRAHAM: “No, the Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from Rudy. He told me that they’ve created a process that Rudy could give information, and they would see if it’s verified. Rudy Giuliani is a well-known man. He’s a crime fighter. He’s loyal to the president. He’s a good lawyer.”

The fact that he’s “loyal to the president” is not a recommendation! Loyalty to the pretend-president is why this country is falling off a cliff right now.

Starbucks in the UK is selling a new “cookie”:

Starbucks have come up with this particular tooth-rotter in the name of something they present sweetly. Purchase a “mermaids cookie” and a full 50p will be given by Starbucks to the charity Mermaids. So sweet. So innocent. Or sickening. Depending what you know.

Also on what you wonder. I wonder if Starbucks has ever given 50p per cookie to a feminist group.

Personally I view Mermaids as one of the most sinister charitable organisations in the UK. Starbucks simply says that the group supports “young transgender and gender diverse people and their families”. The undrinkable coffee chain claims that all those 50 pences will pay to support a helpline for such people. In fact everything that Mermaids pushes is deeply controversial and with implications which need to be properly interrogated.

Like wtf “gender diverse” is supposed to mean, for a start, and why people who are it need a helpline.

People do not question the new orthodoxy. If someone says that certain children should be given puberty blockers so that they can transition into approximations of the opposite sex who are we to question it?

So it is fitting that this week the news emerged of a 13-year-old girl applying for a judicial review against Oxfordshire County Council. The cause is the council’s ‘Trans Inclusion Toolkit for Schools 2019’ which Oxfordshire County Council has given to more than 300 schools in the area.

Its advice says – among other things – that girls like the girl known only as ‘Miss A’ should share changing rooms, lavatories and even residential dormitories on school trips with any boy who identifies as a girl.

And it’s not so much “should” as “should/will be required to.” The idea is not that it should be optional. Pretend the boy in the next bunk is a girl or stay home.

The fact that multinationals like Starbucks can so easily jump on board with the agenda that Mermaids is pushing is just the latest demonstration of how fast this new orthodoxy is being accepted.

Accepted and pushed on everyone else. Accepted and protected via the demonization of all dissenters. Accepted and cheered, accepted and glorified, accepted and treated as sacred.

Meanwhile parents and others who object to this agenda are wrongly portrayed as backwards and bigoted: people who are trying either to make people murder trans people or make trans people kill themselves. Thus with the language of catastrophism is an actual catastrophe mainstreamed into society.

I disagree with Douglas Murray on most things, but not on this one.

The BBC’s New York correspondent asks if US politics is permanently down the crapper.

(My answer without reading further would be hell yes.)

Trump’s victory rally in the East Room of the White House the morning after his acquittal, where Republican jurors stood to applaud, may well come to be seen as a definitive moment – when the party of Reagan truly became the party of Trump.

But the party of Reagan was nothing to brag of. (Neither was the party of Clinton; it just wasn’t as bad as t’other one.) Reagan was elected because he was once a Hollywood B-actor. Not a good reason. He lacked Trump’s venom so in that way he was miles ahead, but the cheery lack of relevant knowledge and mental capacity was very trump.

Striking, too, was how the Attorney General, William Barr, got up from his seat at the event to clap and salute Trump’s legal team, suggesting the wall that should exist between prosecutors at the Justice Department and political operatives at the White House has been flattened.

Ick. I missed that.

So the East Room revelry felt like the crowning moment in the fifth wave of Republican radicalisation. After Goldwaterism in the mid-Sixties, Reaganism in the Eighties, Gingrichism in the Nineties and the Tea Party in Noughties, this was the triumph of Trumpism. His first tweet after his acquittal drove home this point – an animation of election placards reading Trump 2020, Trump 2024, Trump 2028, etc, etc, an age of Trump stretching endlessly into the future.

In other words he’s promising a totalitarian future ruled by him (when burgers made from the fresh brains of infants have made him immortal). No escape.

For me, though, the moment that encapsulated the era came when Trump awarded the presidential medal of freedom to the conservative radio host, Rush Limbaugh. The right-wing talk show host is a high priest of polarisation. Few conservatives have done more to pave the way for Donald Trump. With that primetime ceremonial, the president revealed the chronic state of America’s disunion.

The problem with Limbaugh isn’t just “polarisation,” it’s more the venom and hatred and contempt: the trumpism.

Nick Bryant ends with a question: ” Is the United States beyond the point of repair?” We know it’s not really a question though.

Also this.

Woman or non-binary.

Women aren’t allowed to have anything for ourselves any more.

Gee, how impressive: a few Republican senators tried to talk Trump out of firing Sondland. Not Vindman, mind you, oh no no, just Sondland.

A handful of Republican senators attempted to stop President Donald Trump from firing the US Ambassador to the European Union, who was a key impeachment witness, the New York Times reported Saturday.

People briefed on the discussion told the Times that the Republican senators were concerned it would look bad for Trump to fire Gordon Sondland, and told White House officials that Sondland should be allowed to leave on his own terms.

Look bad? Pffff, how silly, he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants. He says so himself.

An adviser to Trump said the firings of the major impeachment witnesses was meant to send a message that siding against the President will not be tolerated.

We know that.

We also know that that’s not a legitimate message to send, and that the Republicans are criminally allowing this criminal pretend-president to commit crime after crime and get away with it. The firings of the major impeachment witnesses were meant to send the same message any gang murder is meant to send: leave us alone to do whatever we want or we will kill you and everyone you know in the most painful and degrading way we can think of.

Sondland’s ties to the White House and Trump had deteriorated since his impeachment testimony. Sondland once had Trump effectively on speed-dial, or the presidential equivalent of it, but since his appearance before Congress he hadn’t spoken with Trump, according to a person familiar with the situation. He was also pulled from overseeing the Ukraine portfolio, which wasn’t directly related to his position as EU ambassador.

My sympathy dial is at zero. He bought the ambassador post, he had no qualifications for it, he never should have been allowed anywhere near it, and he helped Trump and Giuliani extort Ukraine. He’s just another Trump stooge.

We’re at the mercy of a criminal for at least the next 11 months.

We’re a hamburger republic.

Who knew they wanted to ruin the built environment too?

We should have known, I suppose, given Trump’s notorious bad taste. Mr Tacky Versailles is just the type to think we must have just the one style of architecture and it should be that old marbley dignified kind like banks and public toilets.

In 1962, future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan outlined the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which prioritized contextual, human-centered buildings and argued that “an official style must be avoided.”

I wonder if he did that in reaction to the Stalinist horrors that loom over Pennsylvania Avenue.

These directives have informed policy at the U.S. General Services Administration for over 50 years—however that could soon change.

Because Evil Don has a better idea.

According to a report by Architectural Record, an executive order drafted by President Trump’s White House—titled Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again—would reverse that standard. The reported document states that “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for any new or upgraded federal buildings nationwide.

It’s the white people style of architecture, god damn it, and it should be everywhere forever amen.

The draft argues that the capital’s early buildings were built in the classical architectural style because it symbolized the nation’s “self-governing ideals.” It criticizes contemporary architecture, citing that, among others, San Francisco’s Federal Building by Morphosis—a feat of sustainable architecture—fails to express “national values.

Oh yes? What national values are those? Corruption, nepotism, self-enrichment via government funding, theft, election fraud, extortion, blackmail, rape, sadism, bullying, lying, revenge firings, ignorance, incompetence, vulgarity, rudeness, self-dealing…my god it’s a long list. Those are the national values are they? Because if they’re not, what makes Donald Trump think he can tell us anything about national values?

Under the order, brutalism, deconstructivism, and anything characterized as “modern,” will not be tolerated, as these styles have “little aesthetic appeal.”

What does Donald Trump know about aesthetic appeal?

That’s his living room.

This is insane.

According to an exclusive report from Fox News, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is threatening to take action against Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson over his handling of the whistleblower’s complaint, giving him until February 14 to comply with congressional requests for documents.

“I will be referring this matter for investigation by the Department of Justice if you once again refuse to comply,” Nunes wrote in a letter.

It’s my understanding that we have laws governing this – laws that protect whistleblowers so that they won’t be too afraid to blow the whistle. Nunes appears to be breaking laws.

The monster this morning:

One wonders why he puts scare quotes on “perfect” right after putting them on “Lt. Col.” We know the call was not perfect, but he claims it was.

But one also marvels that he put them on “Lt. Col.” at all, the jealous tiny-minded flabby sack of shit.

The destruction of everything is well underway.

The Interior Department on Wednesday adopted final management plans that allow for mining, drilling and other development on lands that the administration recently removed from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah.

Because it’s always better to destroy irreplaceable landscapes to make short-term money than it is to preserve them.

The resource management plans “mark an important moment in Utah’s history by providing certainty to local communities, business owners, permittees and the recreating public,” Casey Hammond, Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, said in a call with reporters. 

Yes, certainty that much of the two monuments will be permanently destroyed.

The Trump administration has said that shrinking the monuments was about reversing federal overreach and not aimed at boosting energy and mineral development, but reporting by The New York Times and other outlets found otherwise. The boundary of Bears Ears National Monument, a 1.35 million-acre landscape named after a pair of buttes and home to thousands of Native American archeological and cultural sites, was shrunk roughly 85%. The 1.87 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the largest land national monument in the country, was cut roughly in half.

…

Conservation groups, including those currently suing the administration over the monument rollbacks, slammed Wednesday’s announcement.

“It’s the height of arrogance for Trump to rush through final decisions on what’s left of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante while we’re fighting his illegal evisceration of these national monuments in court,” Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Trump is eroding vital protections for these spectacular landscapes. We won’t rest until all of these public lands are safeguarded for future generations.” 

Trump has never seen a spectacular landscape he didn’t want to cover with Trump towers.

When things get bad, women get punished.

Climate-related crises in poorer countries increases violence and exploitation of women, says a recent report, and current attempts to address climate change fail to tackle this issue. This was the conclusion reached by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)…

“We found gender-based violence to be pervasive,” said Cate Owren, lead author of the report, to the publication, “and there is enough clear evidence to suggest that climate change is increasing gender-based violence.”

Naturally. When the situation worsens, the strong oppress the weak more than ever. Men are stronger than women.

The study found evidence that poorer countries struggle the most with handling events influenced by climate change — such as droughts, extreme natural disasters, and ecological changes that create food or water scarcity — and that the stress or struggle to manage these pressures can result in an increased rate of “gender-based violence.”

For the purposes of the study, “gender-based violence” included “domestic violence, sexual assault and rape, forced prostitution, forced marriage and child marriage, as well as other forms of exploitation of women.” These countries aren’t typically the largest contributors of carbon emissions in the world, but they face a disproportionate amount of harm from the climate crisis.

The rich countries do it to the poor countries, and the men in the poor countries do it to the women. Misery goes downward until the bottom is saturated.

Climate change can increase the frequency of disasters or make them more destructive, which hurts a community’s ability to bounce back. When this happens in a country where women already lack rights, the struggle to recover can lead to their exploitation. According to the study, nearly 12 million additional young girls are believed to be married off after natural disasters. And previous research by anti-slavery organizations have found that sex trafficking increases by 20-30 percent after a climate-related disaster.

It makes a kind of sense. Young girls get married off because that’s one less mouth to feed. Sex trafficking increases because it’s profitable and profit=more of the scarce resources.

Illegal activities, such as poaching and illegal resource extraction, also increase after climate-related devastation. These illegal activities, Owren found, are closely linked with the exploitation of women and young girls. In one example, the study detailed instances of fishermen in eastern and southern Africa who wouldn’t sell fish to women unless they paid with sex. Similar examples were found with illegal logging and charcoal industries in Congo as well as illegal mines in Colombia and Peru.

Never waste a woman, right?

Lookin’ good.

In other news –

Today, February 4, 2020, one of Africa’s most outstanding performers, the exceptional kora player from Mali, Ballaké Sissoko has just had his cherished, custom-made kora completely destroyed by USA Customs, without any justification.

Ballaké is a highly acclaimed, distinguished performer who travels around the world with his kora for concerts at top venues. His reputation is impeccable as both artist and human being. He has no criminal record. He is just a brilliant musician, a pacifist, a kind and gentle person, a magnificent and creative performer who manages to give African tradition a contemporary voice with total integrity.

The kora is a fragile, hand-crafted instrument, and Ballaké’s kora is tailor- made to his own specifications. It is an intrinsic part of his very special sound. Would US customs have dared to dismantle a Stradivarius? In its own way that is what has just happened to Ballaké. The neck of the kora has been removed. The strings, bridge and entire, delicate and complex sound system of amplification have been taken apart. The kora is in pieces. Even if all the components that have been dissembled were intact, it takes weeks before a kora of this calibre can return to its previous state of resonance. These kinds of custom-made koras are simply impossible to replace. They are certainly not available in shops.

Ballaké had just finished a two-week successful tour of the USA (LA, Berkeley, Miami, Chicago and NY) with his group 3MA, an innovative and unique trio that brings together string instruments from Mali, Morocco and Madagascar. Ballaké boarded his Air France plane to Paris on his way home from their final concert in New York. He checked in his kora, in its hard case, with its state-of-the-art amplification system, specially designed by sound engineer Julian Cooper.

It was a night flight arriving in Paris the next morning – today, Feb 4. At the airport, Ballaké picked up his kora case, went back to his flat and slept. But when he woke up and opened the kora case, he was shocked and dismayed to find his kora in many pieces, with only a note from US customs – in Spanish, with the unfortunate motto: “Intelligent security saves time”.

–Lucy Durán

The TSA said they didn’t do it. The Guardian reports:

The TSA denied opening the instrument case. “It is most unfortunate that Mr Sissoko’s instrument was damaged in transport. However, after a thorough review of the claim, it was determined that TSA did not open the instrument case because it did not trigger an alarm when it was screened for possible explosives,” a TSA spokesperson told the Guardian in an email.

I don’t think I believe them.

CNN has more:

Vindman, a decorated veteran who was born in Ukraine, was escorted out of the White House by security and told his services were no longer needed, according to Vindman’s lawyer, David Pressman.

His twin brother Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, a National Security Council attorney, was also fired and walked off the White House grounds alongside him.

Because Donald Trump is a crook and a thug.

Trump foreshadowed Vindman’s dismissal earlier Friday.

“Well, I’m not happy with him,” Trump said. “You think I’m supposed to be happy with him? I’m not.”

We don’t care whether you’re happy with him or not, asshole. You’re a lying crook and you’re committing more crimes by punishing witnesses. We don’t give a good god damn about your egomaniacal feefees.

Remember when Obama said he thought we were going to be all right?

He was wrong.