Trump decides the way to make people stay home is to make their lives at home even worse.

US opposition politicians and aid agencies have questioned a decision by President Donald Trump to cut off aid to three Central American states.

Mr Trump ordered the suspension of aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to push their governments to stop migration into the US.

To stop it how? A Berlin Wall type of thing? Just tell them they can’t leave, end of story? We tend to see that as tyrannical and unjust, those of us in the “no you’re not supposed to bully and torment people” community.

In 2017, Guatemala received over $248m while Honduras received $175m and El Salvador $115m.

“I’ve ended payments to Guatemala, to Honduras and El Salvador,” Mr Trump told reporters on Friday.

“No money goes there anymore… We were paying them tremendous amounts of money and we’re not paying them any more because they haven’t done a thing for us.”

Those are actually not tremendous sums of money, and as for not doing a thing for us…why should they do a thing for us? We’ve done quite a few things to them in the past, not-good things, so I don’t really think they owe us a few million dollars’ worth of whatever it is he wants from them.

It would be funny/tragic if it turned out that cheating at golf is what did him in.

Shortly after he became president, Trump played with Tiger Woods, the current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson and the veteran PGA Tour pro Brad Faxon. Given the quality and profile of his companions, you might have thought Trump would have been on his best behavior. Not so.

On one hole, Trump dunked a shot into the lake, but as his opponents weren’t looking he simply dropped another ball — and then hit that into the water, too.

“So he drives up and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green,” recalls Faxon.

Apparently someone was looking.

During a game with Mike Tirico before Trump was elected, the former ESPN football announcer hit the shot of his life, a 230-yard 3-wood towards an elevated green he couldn’t see. But he knew it was close.

When he got to the putting green, however, Tirico’s ball was nowhere to be seen. Instead, it was 50 feet left of the hole in a bunker.

It made no sense — until Trump’s caddy caught up with him after the round.

“Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5?’” Tirico says. “‘It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it.’”

Well the caddy is probably Adam Schiff’s cousin or something.

One judge says No.

Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed bans on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic, a judge said in a ruling that restored the Obama-era restrictions.

In a decision late on Friday, US district court judge Sharon Gleason threw out Trump’s executive order that overturned the bans that comprised a key part of Obama’s environmental legacy.

Presidents have the power under a federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, Gleason said.

“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” said Gleason, who was nominated by Obama.

And Trump isn’t Congress.

Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice, welcomed the ruling, saying it “shows that the president cannot just trample on the constitution to do the bidding of his cronies in the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our oceans, wildlife and climate”.

Earthjustice represented numerous environmental groups that sued the Trump administration over the April 2017 executive order reversing the drilling bans. At issue in the case was the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

One is better than none.

Whoa.

Paleontologists have found a fossil site in North Dakota that contains animals and plants killed and buried within an hour of the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. This is the richest K-T boundary site ever found, incorporating insects, fish, mammals, dinosaurs and plants living at the end of the Cretaceous, mixed with tektites and rock created and scattered by the impact. The find shows that dinosaurs survived until the impact.

The beginning of the end started with violent shaking that raised giant waves in the waters of an inland sea in what is now North Dakota.

Then, tiny glass beads began to fall like birdshot from the heavens. The rain of glass was so heavy it may have set fire to much of the vegetation on land. In the water, fish struggled to breathe as the beads clogged their gills.

The heaving sea turned into a 30-foot wall of water when it reached the mouth of a river, tossing hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh-water fish — sturgeon and paddlefish — onto a sand bar and temporarily reversing the flow of the river. Stranded by the receding water, the fish were pelted by glass beads up to 5 millimeters in diameter, some burying themselves inches deep in the mud. The torrent of rocks, like fine sand, and small glass beads continued for another 10 to 20 minutes before a second large wave inundated the shore and covered the fish with gravel, sand and fine sediment, sealing them from the world for 66 million years.

This unique, fossilized graveyard — fish stacked one atop another and mixed in with burned tree trunks, conifer branches, dead mammals, mosasaur bones, insects, the partial carcass of a Triceratops, marine microorganisms called dinoflagellates and snail-like marine cephalopods called ammonites — was unearthed by paleontologist Robert DePalma over the past six years in the Hell Creek Formation, not far from Bowman, North Dakota. The evidence confirms a suspicion that nagged at DePalma in his first digging season during the summer of 2013 — that this was a killing field laid down soon after the asteroid impact that eventually led to the extinction of all ground-dwelling dinosaurs. The impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period, the so-called K-T boundary, exterminated 75 percent of life on Earth.

Down we continue to go.

Trump’s presidential campaign has started selling $28 “Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff” T-shirts that feature a drawing of Rep. Adam Schiff with a pencil for a neck and a clown nose.

It really has.

Little Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff

He spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking. He should be forced to resign from Congress!

Everyone should buy a Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff shirt today!

BUY Now: https://t.co/5SMsrJC8nU pic.twitter.com/v3Vvmma0e6

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) March 29, 2019

While we’re here, let’s pay a visit to Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign.

By promoting values such as healthy living, encouragement, kindness, and respect, parents, teachers, and other adults can help prepare children for their futures.

Mmm, encouragement, kindness, and respect – that would be nice.

When children learn positive online behaviors early-on, social media can be used in productive ways and can effect positive change. Mrs. Trump believes that children should be both seen and heard, and it is our responsibility as adults to educate and reinforce to them that when they are using their voices—whether verbally or online—they must choose their words wisely and speak with respect and compassion.

That too would be nice.

No wonder Trump chose him.

Stephen Moore, the economics commentator chosen by Donald Trump for a seat on the Federal Reserve board, was found in contempt of court after failing to pay his ex-wife hundreds of thousands of dollars in alimony, child support and other debts.

Trump loves to refuse to pay people what he owes them, so no doubt he likes people who do the same as long as they don’t do it to him. Kindred spirits type of thing.

In a divorce filing in August 2010, Moore was accused of inflicting “emotional and psychological abuse” on his ex-wife during their 20-year marriage. Allison Moore said in the filing she had been forced to flee their home to protect herself. She was granted a divorce in May 2011.

Moore said in a court filing signed in April 2011 he admitted all the allegations in Allison Moore’s divorce complaint. He declined to comment for this article.

Same thing. Trump is abusive, and he feels kinship with other abusers, provided he’s not the one they’re abusing.

A former economics writer for the Wall Street Journal who has held positions at several conservative thinktanks, Moore was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign and has championed the president on cable television.

Unlike all current members of the Federal Reserve board of governors, Moore does not hold a doctoral degree. Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University who was a senior economic adviser to former president George W Bush, has said Moore “does not have the intellectual gravitas” for the job and urged senators to reject him.

Yet another thing he has in common with Trump.

Not a misogynist dude at all.

Sorry if you’re sick of McKinnon, but the combination of sports cheat and philosophy instructor and pugnaciously misogynist trans activist is just too special.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1111590043108421632

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1111590859903041536

“You are CIS even though you reject that label; also, too, you are trying to control us.”

Currently he’s bragging about picking a fight with Paula Radcliffe.

So we’ve got philosophy instructors publicly fantasizing about women dying in grease fires and we’ve got presidents calling Congressional representatives “pencil neck.”

“Little pencil neck Adam Schiff,” he says, to cheers and applause.

TRUMP: "Little pencil neck Adam Schiff. He has the smallest, thinnest neck I have ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter." #BeBest pic.twitter.com/NW7oU3z4Il

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

He goes on to say Schiff has the “smallest, thinnest neck” he’s ever seen. Are we supposed to assume “neck” is a euphemism for “dick”? No doubt we are. But keeping it above the waist…is a wide neck better than a thin one? Really?

Trump has plenty of neck, for sure. Trump’s neck is as wide as his head, so you get a solid block down to the shoulders. But…is that a good thing? I’m not seeing it, particularly. Is it supposed to bespeak manliness? I’m not seeing that either.

Looks like an ok neck to me.

Meanwhile McKinnon – who teaches philosophy, let’s not forget – is still defending the “die in a fire” brand of rhetoric.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1111596918449278977

Haw haw. Yes, so funny, so wry, so sophisticated. Of course it’s also true that mouthy feminist women tend to be targets of a great deal of “voicing of violent revenge fantasies” of that kind on Twitter and other social media, and it has been known to drive some of them off social media altogether, which means they are silenced in that particular medium…but let’s giggle about it amongst ourselves anyway, because we know better than those stupid cis women who are too uncool to pretend to be the other sex.

Finally.

It is great to see straightforward, non ideological, answers to common questions that have respect for established science and the paucity of evidence around gender incongruity. pic.twitter.com/uWyDZVITcf

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) March 29, 2019

“It is not possible to change biological sex.”

It takes only eight words.

“There is no agreed scientific basis for someone having the mind of someone from the opposite sex or being born in the wrong body.”

Bam.

The corrupt self-dealing sleazy treasonous shits on the Trumpian side of Congress are whining that Adam Schiff should resign as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The hell he should.

The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority demanded Thursday that Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel’s Democratic chairman, resign from that role over his handling of Russia investigations involving President Donald Trump.

Schiff, who has been one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s leading advocates, laid out what called the “evidence of collusion” in a fiery response.

The call for Schiff to step down, submitted during a hearing in a letter signed by all nine of the committee’s Republican members, came hours after Trump tweeted Thursday morning that Schiff “should be forced to resign from Congress!”

Trump should be forced to resign from the presidency and then locked up in a damp oozing smelly cell with corn cobs to sleep on and lutefisk to eat for the rest of his life.

“Your actions both past and present are incompatible with your duty as Chairman of this committee,” the Republicans tell Schiff in the letter. “As such we have no faith in your ability to discharge your duties in a manner consistent with your Constitutional responsibility and urge your immediate resignation as Chairman of this Committee.”

What a pack of loathsome compromised hacks.

Sports editor dude at not-NY Times explains to women athletes why it doesn’t matter if trans women shove them aside:

I’m writing this knowing that most of the people reading it will disagree, knowing that the responses will likely be aggressive. But I’m writing it because I feel the other side deserves a voice. This does not make me right. This does not make me wrong. But in the debate over transgender athletes there has been one dominant narrative, so this is an attempt to try to change a few minds.

He means the women. You know, the historically dominant sex, historically in charge of all the narratives. He’s hoping to be able to be heard over the domineering roar of all these powerful women who’ve had it their own way for so long.

Sharron Davies explained in an interview with The Times about why she wants the IOC to take a stance over transgender women competing alongside people who were born women. She is not alone in feeling strongly about this, concerned that women’s sport is under threat and that there will no longer be a level playing field.

She and Martina Navratilova are important, influential voices who speak for many women on this topic. They, like most of us, are not experts though.

All right then.

We @IndexCensorship are seriously concerned about apparent rise in police intervention on issues of legal speech in UK, particularly apparent confusion between speech that social media platforms might choose to outlaw under their terms of service and legally permissible speech. https://t.co/PdoFyQm5ta

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) March 28, 2019

We are discussing this with @Twitter and have raised with @Law_Commission as it reviews hate crime law, and with @HumanRightsCtte. We will also raise with @PoliceChiefs.

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) March 28, 2019

Good. Carry on.

McKinnon promoting the cause again:

Originally a comment by latsot on A much-debated topic in Menlo Park.

In defense of we socially clueless techy fools, the problems Facebook has with this kind of thing are mostly due to three things:

1. A disconnect between policy makers and technical people.

This can cause any number of problems and I’ve seen them all a hundred times. A classic one (and Facebook does this a lot) is when policy makers ask the tech people whether they can do X and the tech people say “no, X is either practically or fundamentally impossible” and the policy people say the tech people are just being negative or not trying hard enough or that some technology that eats poorly-defined policies and shits out magic will probably happen at some point in the future and we should plan for that. Providing the people who have already told them it’s impossible will just try hard enough, of course. What’s wrong with those socially clueless techy fools, anyway? It’s not as though we pay them to think, what else have they got to do but even more impossible things than we’re already demanding?

Another is the aforementioned poorly-defined policies and protocols. When they are put to the software people we say “yeah but…. look at all these holes. Look at the instances when it won’t work. Look at the fact that we can’t measure the things you want us to measure” and so on. Policies are one thing, protocols and engineering are quite another. I’ve been in dozens and dozens of meetings about this sort of thing. The policy makers think they can just say “make it do this sort of thing” and everything will work out fine. From their point of view, they’re absolutely right because we techies get the blame when the software behaves in exactly the poorly-specified way that was asked for. But we are really good at turning policies into protocols when there’s mutual respect. There never is.

There are lots and lots of other examples, but the problem isn’t either camp, it’s the failure of the camps to work together. These days this is rarely (in practice) the fault of the people trying to build the architecture and write the software so much as it is the way the organisation is structured. Even today there’s a widespread attitude that the tech groups ought to be subservient to everyone else and should just “GET IT THE FUCK DONE” regardless of reality or budget, which brings me to:

2. Inability to let software and architecture experts do their jobs

Give we socially clueless techy fools a set of requirements and enough time and money to do it and we’ll turn them into something that actually constitutes a set of requirements. Tell us to build a bridge to the moon (and some of what the non-tech divisions of Facebook regularly ask is genuinely about as ambitious) and we’ll do what we do and eventually say “but what you really want is this” and often “but we can’t do that, we can do this” or “we can do that but it will cost all the money in the world and won’t work anyway”.

Most of the time in big companies some enormous sum of money will be signed off to make that happen (yay!) but within a fortnight large amounts of that budget will be pulled, but we’re still supposed to deliver the same thing on the same timescale. We say that we can deliver less or deliver later but not both….. and hear nothing. We’re supposed to make that decision so that the policy people don’t get the blame when it all goes wrong.

Inevitably (seriously, on every software project anyone has ever done ever) we’re told that we can take the budget and time we need out of the testing budget. We all knows what happens then: the software doesn’t get finished and it doesn’t get tested properly, either. Besides, someone will long ago have seen this big, lovely testing budget sitting around not being used yet and plundered it. Every. Single. Time.

3. They’re lying

What Facebook has become is exactly what it wanted to be. The ‘problems’ are its business plans. The things it’s claiming to fix are what it wanted to happen in the first place, not the accidental consequences of a platform that somehow got away from itself. It was the business types and the policy types who made that happen, not the techy types. I’m damn sure they asked the software people about it and they told them what the consequences would likely be and were ignored. Again and again, I’d stake my life on it.

Oh and I should throw in a 4. Don’t ever consider that Zuckerberg is anything like a veteran of software and architecture developmet. He demonstrates his technical idiocy on a daily basis. He couldn’t write “hello world” on his own cock.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve said several times here that software developers are often idiots about… well, most things, especially women, equality and not being a dick.

But what’s happening with Facebook is deception. It’s a company built on deception by people concerned with money more than technology. And the difficulties they are facing with being a terrible company and treating everyone including their users, people who are not their users and entire fucking democracies as subservient to their requirements are not due to we socially clueless techies or the technically clueless policy makers but to the capitally rapacious business types and their failure to learn about how technology – and the businesses that rely on it – scale.

In other words, the main problem is that our governments blithely allowed companies like Facebook to become de facto and then actual monopolies and pretended not to know what would happen.

Alex Miller at Rolling Stone talked to Cecile Richards, former head of Planned Parenthood. One subject was the Princess and Prince.

I want to talk about your meeting with Ivanka and Jared, because that was an extraordinary episode [in your book].Can you talk a little bit about that meeting? They invited you to a Trump golf course?
Yes.

You must have had some hope that the meeting could go well, or you wouldn’t have taken it.
Well, let’s be honest: We didn’t have a lot of options. And that was actually kind of what Jared Kushner said. He said, “Look, we control everything. We control Congress, we control the White House. So I’m kind of your only avenue.” I felt like if there was an avenue to talk to two of the most influential people in this administration about the work that Planned Parenthood does and how devastating it would be for millions of people if they were in fact to defund us, then I’ll go talk to anyone.

And they basically were like, “Your hands are tied. Stop doing abortions or else.”
It was clear that it was not actually a meeting about, “OK, how can we solve this problem? How can we actually protect the ability of people, and particularly women in this country, to get access to health care?” It was, “How can we, Jared Kushner and the administration, score a political win?”

And that, to me, seems to be their entire mode of operating since they’ve been elected — the lack of empathy or care for people that their policies are impacting, from family separation to putting children in cages. There seems to be zero interest in that. There wasn’t anything about like, “Wow, well, this is going to be really hard on women.”

In other words, they’re not just every bit as bad as you always thought, they’re even worse than that.

We were all holding out hope that Ivanka was going to be a messenger of empathy and reason. I think we’ve all been disabused of that opinion.
I mean, her concern was that I had not been appropriately thankful to her father, because he had said nice things about Planned Parenthood in his campaign.

While also saying he was going to shut down Planned Parenthood.
Yeah, exactly. I said, “Well, I’m not sure where I was going to get that ‘thank you’ in.”

“Before I was out of a job.”
Yeah. I felt like, for her it was all personal. It was all about her father. And that seems to be the way they operate. It’s not about what’s good for this country or what’s good for the people that they’re, frankly, supposed to be representing.

That is of course exactly why governments aren’t supposed to be family affairs, and why Trump never should have given his daughter and her husband jobs in his administration, and why they should have been prevented from taking those jobs, and why they should be thrown out now. They’re not supposed to be there to enrich and aggrandize themselves.

It also shows and underlines what awful shits they are.

Do you think the administration is trying to force the hand of organizations like Planned Parenthood in the hope that, in order to continue to get funding, they’ll just stop doing abortions? Or did they just want to shut them down?
You know, in a strange way, I wish that I thought someone was actually thinking about it that carefully. But yes, in that meeting, I think the most chilling thing was when Jared Kushner said, “I just want to read a headline that says, ‘Planned Parenthood Quits Providing Abortion Services.’” As if that was going to be the political victory that he was looking for, with absolutely zero regard for what that would mean for the health care of women.

Royalty doesn’t have to worry about things like that.