China disappears the head of Interpol:

The detained Chinese head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, is being investigated for alleged bribe-taking, Chinese authorities have announced.

Mr Meng was first reported missing in late September after travelling from Interpol HQ in France to China.

His wife has revealed that he sent her a text message with a knife emoji on the day he went missing.

Mr Meng is the latest high-profile target to be ensnared in China’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign.

Actual corruption case, or China being China?

In a statement on Twitter on Sunday, [Interpol] said it had received Mr Meng’s resignation with immediate effect. Under its terms it has appointed senior vice-president Kim Jong-yang of South Korea as acting president.

A new president will be elected for the remaining two years of Mr Meng’s mandate at the general assembly in Dubai next month.

On Saturday, the international police agency urged China to clarify Mr Meng’s status, saying it was concerned about the well-being of its president. There has been no word from him on the charges he faces.

His wife is worried.

Grace Meng, speaking shortly before China’s confirmation of the detention, had told journalists she thought he was in danger.

She issued an emotional plea for international help to find her husband.

On the day he went missing, she said he had sent her a social media message telling her to “wait for my call”, before sending a knife emoji, signifying danger.

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

The Times yesterday:

Turkish investigators believe a well-known Saudi dissident was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, five people involved in the investigation, or briefed on it, said on Saturday.

The critic of the Saudi government, Jamal Khashoggi, entered the consulate on Tuesday to obtain a document he needed to get married and never emerged, according to his fiancée, who had stayed outside.

Waiting for him inside the consulate, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation, were Saudi agents who had recently arrived in Turkey with the intent to silence Mr. Khashoggi. It was not clear if the plan had been to bring him back to Saudi Arabia alive, and something went wrong, or if the intention was to kill him there.

Well it’s not as if “bringing him back to Saudi Arabia” would have been okay either. People should be free to criticize their governments – especially when they suck as hard as the Saudi dictatorship (aka “monarchy”) does. People should be free to do that and to travel abroad and to decide for themselves when and if they go back, as opposed to being trapped and grabbed and abducted by thugs working for Mohammed bin Salman.

If confirmed, the killing could lead to an international scandal for Saudi Arabia and pose a daunting problem for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s 33-year-old day-to-day ruler, who has billed himself as a reformer committed to modernizing the kingdom.

Which is a joke. He’s no more of a reformer than Trump is, which is no doubt why Trump loves him and Saudi Arabia so much.

Mr. Khashoggi, 59, had worked as an adviser to senior government officials and was one of Saudi Arabia’s best known journalists. But since going into voluntary exile last year, he has written articles critical of Crown Prince Mohammed, who, since his father became king in 2015, has accumulated tremendous power inside the kingdom.

Despite orchestrating the kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister, waging a brutal war in Yemen and locking up hundreds of prominent Saudis in a luxury hotel on accusations of corruption, the prince has won Western supporters, including the government of the United States, that have embraced his economic policies and limited social reforms.

…

Turan Kislakci, the head of Turkish Arab Media Association and a friend of Mr. Khashoggi’s, told The Times that Turkish officials had called him and confirmed the death.

“They confirmed two things: He was killed and his body was dismembered,” Mr. Kislakci said.

The Arab government official also described Mr. Khashoggi’s body as having been dismembered.

I do not like the Saudi ruling family.

More from NPR on the Missouri one-abortion-clinic situation:

In 2008, Missouri had five abortion clinics, according to Planned Parenthood. The Columbia Health Center in central Missouri on Wednesday became the latest to stop providing abortions.

I don’t even understand this. Don’t big hospitals do abortions? If not, why not? Abortions should be a normal part of health care, not a rare bespoke luxury that only a few can have. As I mentioned, Missouri is not a small state, and five clinics is ludicrously inadequate.

Under the new requirements, abortion providers must secure admitting privileges at hospitals located within about 15 minutes from their health centers.

“The idea behind that restriction is that it somehow makes patients safer if they experience complications from the abortion,” Planned Parenthood Great Plains spokeswoman Emily Miller tells NPR. “But in reality, abortion is already incredibly safe, and a patient’s ability to access help at the hospital is the same, whether or not the provider has admitting privileges.”

Miller says that Columbia Health Center’s physician had her privileges revoked in 2015 by University Hospital and has been denied privileges by the other surrounding hospitals. “They won’t offer her admitting privileges because she’s an abortion provider,” Miller says.

So hospitals in the Columbia area do refuse to do abortions, and not satisfied with that, they prevent other doctors from doing them. Some of that will be because they are Catholic hospitals (and that should be illegal), but what about the others?

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that similar restrictions imposed in Texas were medically unnecessary.

And a ruling like that will not happen again for generations.

Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit against Missouri’s requirements in November 2016 and a legal battle has ensued. A federal appeals court ruled in September that Missouri could enforce state laws. The judges issued a mandate for the requirements to take effect Monday.

“No abortions for you, bitches. Hold still while I pin you to this bed and nearly suffocate you.”

Missouri is not the only state where a single facility provides abortions to women. Other states include Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Mississippi, according to a 2014 report by the Guttmacher Institute. Nor is 2018 the first time that Missouri fell into this category.

…

Samuel Lee, a lobbyist who has spent years campaigning for abortion restrictions in Missouri, said he thinks “when the district court looks at it again, they will uphold the law because it protects the health and safety of women who are seeking abortions in Missouri without imposing an undue burden on them,” according to The Kansas City Star.

Planned Parenthood said Wednesday that 20 states are “poised to ban abortion” if Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court — and that 13 abortion cases are “one step away” from the country’s highest court.

Forced childbearing for all.

There will be more of this, until they are all shut down and women will have to go to Canada or self-abort (which is often fatal). Missouri now has one (1) abortion clinic.

Missouri is down to one clinic providing abortions Wednesday, after the only other clinic in the state that performs the procedure failed to adhere to new state requirements.

Federal appeals court judges ruled last month that Missouri can enforce a requirement that doctors must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals before they can perform abortions. The judges issued a mandate Monday for that rule to officially take effect.

The Columbia Planned Parenthood clinic was unable to secure physician privileges to comply with the requirement, so it cancelled abortions scheduled for Wednesday, which would have been the first since the mandate was issued, Planned Parenthood Great Plains spokeswoman Emily Miller said.

Columbia is where the University of Missouri is.

Women seeking abortions can go to Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic — which is now the only facility in Missouri where abortions can be performed — or travel to neighboring states, she said.

St. Louis is all the way on the eastern edge of the state, and Missouri is an average-large state – it’s not massive like Montana or Texas but it’s not Delaware, either. Women in Missouri (and other states too) are in the situation Irish women were in before the referendum – having to make a long expensive trip to get an abortion. Worse, in fact, because Missouri is more than twice as large as Ireland: 69,715 square miles versus 32,595 square miles (but you have to add the Irish Sea). Early abortions are simple procedures which should be available in all general medical facilities, but they’re not, because so many people cannot abide seeing women in charge of their own bodies.

This day is the saddest & angriest of my time in the Senate. The Republicans have succeeded in confirming a dangerous & deeply flawed nominee only by breaking all the rules & norms. The damage done today will be enduring—to the United States Supreme Court & to our country.

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) October 6, 2018

We’ve got men who sexually assault women enshrined in the White House and the Supreme Court.

So, basically, contempt for women has now become official government policy.

It’s just a tad alienating if you have the bad taste to be a woman.

Oh, fucking hell. Sums it up.

Trump on AF1 was asked about women angry about Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

“I don’t think they are,” he said. Women are “extremely happy," he said, “because they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking of their husbands and their brothers, their uncles, and others.”

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 6, 2018

Of course. Women simply don’t care about their own well-being, even in the sense of not wanting to be assaulted and nearly suffocated by men who pounce on them when the mood strikes. Women care only about the well-being of men. This works out very nicely because men too care only about the well-being of men, so everybody’s happy.

Actually they don’t, lots of men do care about the well-being of women and girls, including their wives, their sisters, their aunts. But men like that don’t count because they’re wimps, they’re losers, they’re politically correct, they’re SJWs. Real men, men who matter, like Trump and Kavanaugh and McConnell and Graham, don’t give a rat’s ass about the well-being of women. If a nice Catholic school boy like Brett Kavanaugh wants to assault some slutty girl at a gathering with older boys drinking beer then he has every right to do that, and she should be thanking him for not smothering her.

So by god don’t come whining to us about any sexual assaults ever again, because we don’t have to pay any attention and we’re not fucking going to.

Welcome to the new reality.

Pig Kavanaugh is in, abortion rights and separation of church and state are on the way out.

Meanwhile…

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has received more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints in recent weeks against Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice Saturday, but has chosen for the time being not to refer them to a judicial panel for investigation.

A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — the court on which Kavanaugh serves — passed on to Roberts a string of complaints the court received starting three weeks ago, said four people familiar with the matter.

That probably happens with every nominee, right? There are always soreheads.

The situation is highly unusual, said legal experts and several people familiar with the matter. Never before has a Supreme Court nominee been poised to join the court while a fellow judge recommends that misconduct claims against that nominee warrant review.

Oh.

Roberts’s decision not to immediately refer the cases to another appeals court has caused some concern in the legal community. Now that he has been confirmed, the details of the complaints may not become public and instead may be dismissed, legal experts say. Supreme Court justices are not subject to the misconduct rules governing these claims.

“If Justice Roberts sits on the complaints, then they will reside in a kind of purgatory and will never be adjudicated,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School and an expert on Supreme Court ethics. “This is not how the rules anticipated the process would work.”

Yes but we’re in Trumpworld now, and the rules are whatever he chooses to do.

Henderson, whom President George H.W. Bush nominated to the bench, stepped in to review the complaints against Kavanaugh because Chief Judge Merrick Garland — whose nomination to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama was blocked by Senate Republicans — recused himself from the matter.

When they go low, we go high, and how’s that working out for us?

Another thing – small, but so typical.

A comment on that post of PZ’s:

Silentbob

2 October 2018 at 12:11 am

@ 94 John Morales

(I did withdraw from her blog because I was contentious there, and annoying her, but still, it was not because I was banned there. Like this blog, to which I have returned, thanks to PZ’s (hopefully juditious) sufferance, mainly because I’m not insincere)

I was also contentious and annoying but lacked your circumspection and first got placed in perpetual moderation (for quoting Gloria Steinem) and then apparently banned (silently, sometime in the past couple of years) despite also being sincere (if sarcastic). So I suppose your obsequiousness with respect to anti-trans attitudes paid off.

The historian Christopher Browning in the NYRB discusses the Trumpists’ similarities to and differences from Nazis and other fascists.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Lies, Putin, Fox News, bots – it all adds up.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

We’re there now. He’s not talking about the potential future there, he’s talking about how bad it already is.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of TheWashington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

But in the end climate change will override all that.

Have a nice weekend.

Oh look, it’s Melania really not caring again.

Melania Trump has prompted consternation, some anger and much derision by choosing a pith helmet – a symbol of colonial rule across Africa – as headwear for a brief safari in Kenya.

On the penultimate day of her tour of the continent – her first solo trip overseas – the first lady visited an orphanage in Nairobi before heading to a national park near the city.

Dressed in riding pants, boots and a spotless white pith helmet, the former model climbed into an open-air vehicle for the safari, taking photos on her iPhone of zebras, giraffes, impalas, rhinos and hippos.

They’re not making it up.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

What the hell is she wearing jodhpurs and riding boots for? Let alone the ridiculous hat.

Pith helmets – so-called because they are made of the material sholapith – were worn by European explorers and imperial administrators in Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East in the 19th century before being adopted by military officers, rapidly becoming a symbol of status – and oppression.

Soldiers, guides and wildlife specialists replaced the pith helmet long ago with more practical and less controversial headgear, but they are still in ceremonial use in a handful of countries – and by tourists in Africa who have limited experience of local conditions and sensibilities.

“That pith helmet you have carried was used by colonialists during the dark days. Doesn’t sit well with us Africans. Who advised you?” wrote Pauleen Mwalo, of Nairobi, on Twitter.

Stephen Miller?

This is nuts.

The Vancouver Sun reports:

A new policy allowing Canadian transgender student-athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity and without hormone therapy is a welcome change, but more can still be done to make athletics inclusive of gender diversity, says a Vancouver trans athlete and consultant.

U Sports, which governs university athletics in Canada, put its new policy into effect Thursday and says it affects student-athletes at all 56 of its member institutions. Athletes can only compete on teams of one gender during a given academic year, and the policy doesn’t require them to undertake hormone therapy. They must also comply with the Canadian Anti-Doping Program.

In other words people with male bodies can compete on women’s teams.

Ok, but then what will they do when the women’s teams become entirely filled up with people whose “gender identity” doesn’t match their sex? They’ll have to start all over, but with what team? Maybe they could try children’s teams?

In other words: people with male bodies have a huge advantage over people with female bodies in athletic competitions. The Sun article never even bothers to spell that out, all it can manage is mention of testosterone here and there.

“For me, it’s a step in the right direction,” said Kai Scott, a principal partner at TransFocus Consulting, which works with organizations addressing gender inclusion issues.

“I think these kinds of policies are really important. This one, in particular, is great for certain transgender student-athletes in that they can select the team or division that aligns with their gender identity. These kinds of policies are important declarations of support and assurance of inclusivity.”

They may be important declarations of support and assurance of inclusivity, but they’re also declarations of total indifference to women’s ability to compete on teams with people who don’t have the male body’s advantages over the female body. “Inclusivity” is not invariably and in all circumstances a good thing. There are many situations in which we need to be able to choose our company, and that need overrides any need to be “inclusive.” Women’s sport is definitely one of them.

Levels of testosterone, linked to muscle mass and increased strength, have been a key issue in debate over allowing trans athletes to compete in events consistent with their gender identity.

That’s the closest the article gets to admitting the difficulty, but look how careful it is not to spell it out – that this will mean a big advantage for male-bodied people and a big disadvantage for women, and that that seems pretty weird and unfair and anti-feminist given the fact that men are already dominant over women and we’ve been trying to level that out for quite a few decades now.

U Sports member institutions in B.C. include the University of B.C., University of Victoria, University of the Fraser Valley, Thompson Rivers University, University of Northern British Columbia, and Trinity Western University.

UBC released a statement saying it supports the policy.

“We are aware of other institutions where transgender athletes have wanted to play on the team that aligned with their gender identity, and we recognize that the situation could arise here,” said Gord Hopper, director of performance and team support for UBC Athletics.

“UBC supports inclusive and safe environments along with equal opportunities for all student-athletes.”

Well, then UBC has a problem, because this new policy is obviously in tension with equal opportunities for all student-athletes.

News from India Today:

An 18-year-old Muslim girl in Nawada district, Bihar was tied to a tree and caned by her family members for loving a Hindu boy. Her punishment was allegedly a result of the village panchayat’s diktat.

The incident happened on Wednesday (October 3) in Jogiya Maran village falling under Rajauli police station in Nawada. She remained tied to the tree for around five hours.

When she was being thrashed, no one came to her rescue.

Or while she stayed there tied to the tree for five hours either, apparently.

The two wanted to marry but her family was against it, so she ran away to his village.

The girl’s family came to know that she was with Kumar and soon went to his place to bring her back.

Thereafter, the panchayat was convened which directed the girl’s family to punish her for dishonouring the village. The girl was then tied to a tree and caned.

That will teach her to love the village and the people in it.

The president of the United States.

The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2018

Anti-Semitic trope and personal targeting, from the president of the United States. Just another Friday.

Jack Holmes at Esquire:

Good Lord. He’s gone Full InfoWars. This appears to be first time the President of the United States has mentioned George Soros in a tweet, Soros being the legendary boogeyman for the right wing who supposedly funds any and every liberal protest, advertisement, campaign, and potluck. (Just this week, a writer with the National Review—considered a Very Serious right-wing publication—tried to link Kavanaugh accuser Deborah Ramirez to Soros. It turned out he was completely wrong and he had to apologize.) Soros does have some remarkable reach—he’s known for “breaking” the British pound and making $1 billion in a month off the deal—but this is just nonsense.

(Meanwhile, the Twitterati have already pointed out the bone-crushing hypocrisy here: that way back in 2015, Donald Trump’s campaign launch event—the one where he announced Mexico was sending criminals and “rapists” to our country, at least a year before most Beltway Pundits acknowledged he was a demagogue running on racial resentment—was full of actors he’d paid to be there. The anatomy of a scam.)

Meanwhile today’s vote is a yes on Kavanaugh.

https://twitter.com/B_Ehrenreich/status/1048234640434233348