Give everyone a gun

Feb 22nd, 2018 12:24 pm | By

The stupid is breathtaking.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 13 comments


Another one

Feb 22nd, 2018 11:55 am | By
Another one

The BuzzFeed story is out at last.

Lawrence Krauss is a famous atheist and liberal crusader — and, in certain whisper networks, a well-known problem. With women coming forward alleging sexual harassment, will his “skeptic” fanbase believe the evidence?

Or will it just continue ranting about “SJWs” and “Cultural Marxism” and “witch hunts” and “going too far”?

The authors (Peter Aldhous, Azeen Ghorayshi, and Virginia Hughes) start with Melody Hensley’s story of Krauss’s Harvey Weinstein routine – moving a dinner invitation to his hotel room and then assaulting her.

Krauss told BuzzFeed News that what happened with Hensley in the hotel room was consensual. In that room, “we mutually decided, in a polite discussion in fact, that taking it any further would not be appropriate,” he told BuzzFeed News by email.

But Hensley said that is untrue. “It was definitely predatory,” she said. “I didn’t want that to happen. It wasn’t consensual.”

Later that night, Hensley told her boyfriend, now husband, that Krauss had made her feel uncomfortable, her husband confirmed to BuzzFeed News. Years later, she told him — as well as several employees at CFI — the full story.

I heard the story from her too.

BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

It’s like Weinstein – it was secret but many many many people knew about it. It was secret but it wasn’t secret. But even though it wasn’t really secret, Krauss was still invited everywhere. Time’s Up?

Many of his accusers have requested anonymity, fearing professional or legal retaliation from Krauss, or online abuse from men in the movement who have smeared women for speaking out about other skeptics. A few allegations about Krauss made their way onto skeptic blogs, but were quickly taken down in fear of legal action. So for years, these stories have stayed inside whisper networks in skepticism and physics.

And Krauss stayed inside the world of celebrity skeptoatheists, while that world lost woman after woman after woman because No Thank You.

In lengthy emails to BuzzFeed News, Krauss denied all of the accusations against him, calling them “false and misleading defamatory allegations.” When asked why multiple women, over more than a decade, have separately accused him of misconduct, he said the answer was “obvious”: It’s because his provocative ideas have made him famous.

Science!

Krauss offers the scientific method — constantly questioning, testing hypotheses, demanding evidence — as the basis of morality and the answer to societal injustices. Last year, at a Q&A event to promote his latest book, the conversation came around to the dearth of women and minorities in science. “Science itself overcomes misogyny and prejudice and bias,” Krauss said. “It’s built in.”

Pause for incredulous laughter. Take as long as you need.

Online, you can buy “Lawrence Krauss for President” T-shirts and find his quotes turned into inspirational memes. He writes essays for the New Yorker and New York Times, helps decide when to move the hand of the Doomsday Clock, and has almost half a million followers on Twitter. He made a provocative (if criticallypanned) documentary, The Unbelievers, with the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, another celebrated skeptic.

The skeptics draw heavily from traditionally male groups: scientists, philosophers, and libertarians, as well as geeky subcultures like gamers and sci-fi enthusiasts. The movement gained strength in the early 2000s, as the emerging blogosphere allowed like-minded “freethinkers” to connect and opened the community to more women like Hensley. It acquired a sharper political edge in the US culture wars, as skeptics, atheists, and scientists — including Krauss — joined forces to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools.

But today the movement is fracturing, with some of its most prominent members now attacking identity politics and “social justice warriors” in the name of free speech. Famous freethinkers have been criticized for anti-Muslim sentiment, for cheering the alt-right media personality Milo Yiannopoulos, and for lampooning feminism and gender theory. Several women, after sharing personal accounts of misogyny and harassment by men in the skeptic community, have been subjected to Gamergate-style online attacks, including rape and death threats. As a result, some commentators have accused parts of the movement of sliding into the alt-right.

And many of us have largely abandoned the movement as a result.

Nevertheless, Science.

Krauss’s reputation took a hit in April 2011, after he publicly defended Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier who was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl and spent 13 months in a Florida jail.

Epstein was one of the Origins Project’s major donors. But Krauss told the Daily Beast his support of the financier was based purely on the facts: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

Uh…what? I missed a step there. Where’s the empirical evidence part? Especially where’s the empirical evidence part that demonstrates Epstein’s non-solicitation of an underage girl? Is it supposed to be the “19” part? Are we supposed to understand that as “Krauss has abundant empirical evidence that Epstein never solicits underage girls, to wit, Krauss has never seen him with women under the age of 19”? That’s the science part? And then what about “as a scientist I always believe him and not anyone else”? I’m not seeing the science part in that claim.

On her Skepchick blog, Watson slammed Krauss for not acknowledging his obvious bias — and thus violating a core value of skepticism. “Krauss’ statement is extremely disturbing and makes scientists look like ignorant, biased fools who will twist data to suit their own needs,” she wrote.

“I remain skeptical, and I support a man whose character I believe I know,” Krauss responded in the post’s comments. “If you want to condemn me for that, so be it.”

The dust-up was part of a broader discussion among feminist skeptics about what they saw as the misogyny of some of the old guard. In June 2011, Watson posted a YouTube videomentioning her experiences with men in the movement.

In the resulting furor, Watson was publicly mocked by Dawkins and received a torrent of online abuse. Over the next couple of years, she posted a sample of the abusive comments she received on her blog.

With these issues dividing skeptics, Hensley, by then executive director of CFI’s Washington DC branch, organized a new conference called “Women in Secularism,” which debuted in May of 2012. It was a space to celebrate the history and accomplishments of secular women, Hensley said, “but also to give a platform so that we could talk about the issues and problems we were facing.” In now-deleted comments on CFI’s blog post announcing the event, some skeptics argued that the movement didn’t have a problem with women, and that the event would amount to “man bashing.”

On one panel, Jen McCreight, then a biology PhD student, spoke out about the whisper network. Before going to her first big atheist meeting, she said, “unsolicited I got many emails from different individuals basically warning me which male speakers not to interact with as a young woman.”

I remember that. I was about six inches away from Jen when she said it.

panel women in sec

Some of us asked her to name names later, so I knew Krauss was on the list.

A. was an undergraduate who had first met Krauss in 2008 at the annual American Atheists Convention through her work as a student atheist activist. Three years later, when she and other students walked into the bar at the same meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, A. recalled, Krauss pulled over a chair for her and started running his hand up her leg under the table.

“I kind of shifted away,” A. said. “He put his hand on again. I crossed my legs. He put his hand on again. And eventually I had to like physically turn my entire body.”

A. was shocked, but didn’t want to make a scene, she said. “The last thing I need to do is, you know, yell at Lawrence and then have to deal with any potential fallout.”

Krauss denied A.’s account, and said that it was A. who had come on to him, inviting him to join her in the hotel’s hot tub. Robin Elisabeth Cornwell, a friend of Krauss’s and then executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, was also there, and backed his account. A. denied mentioning the hot tub or flirting with Krauss. Benjamin Wurst, one of her student companions, told BuzzFeed News that, as they left the bar, A. told him Krauss had put his hand on her.

Friends stick up for each other, don’t they. Krauss sticks up for Epstein, and Cornwell sticks up for Krauss. Result? Women leave “the movement” in droves and it moves ever more briskly to the right (and the mostly male).

There’s a great deal more, but I need a break.

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Must be offensive

Feb 22nd, 2018 9:40 am | By

Oh god oh god oh god.

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Arm all the teachers

Feb 21st, 2018 3:42 pm | By

Trump held a “listening session” with survivors of school shootings, but judging by the reporting on Twitter, it was a sour joke – carefully packed with Trump fans, and no naughty rebels allowed.

https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status/966438137936384002

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Because he sinks so low, so often

Feb 21st, 2018 3:03 pm | By

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist at the Washington Post, is disgusted at the things the Twisted Right is saying about the surviving students from Stoneman Douglas high school.

Here is the often-appalling pundit Dinesh D’Souza, outright mocking the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, after they showed their disappointment in a state legislature vote on assault weapons on Tuesday: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”

Recall for a moment: These are teenagers whose friends were brutally murdered less than a week ago.

D’Souza, who has a huge social-media following precisely because he sinks so low, so often, also tweeted out his cynical scorekeeping: “Adults: 1. Kids: 0.” And he took a shot at what he called their “politically orchestrated grief.”

There was a backlash, and today he tried to say he was talking about the media, but no one believed him.

But there was far worse out there. Emma Gonzalez, the Douglas High student who made an impassioned speech last week, became the object of the worst kind of racism and sexism.

One Twitter user called her a “brown bald lesbian girl” — disparagement that got some approval from a state legislator’s aide, the same aide who was fired Tuesday for telling the Tampa Bay Times the students were paid and coached actors.

“Both kids in the picture are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis when they happen,” wrote the aide, Benjamin Kelly, speaking of Gonzalez and David Hogg (whom I interviewed last week). That was, of course, a lie.

I wonder how much of this is being fanned or even started by our new companions the Russian Troll Army.

D’Souza’s apology and the legislative aide’s swift firing suggest the wind is blowing in a new direction.

That’s encouraging.

It would also be encouraging to see news organizations who employ those who spread lies taking some remedial action, too.

CNN, for example, pays former Congressman Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) as a political commentator. Here is his point of view, as expressed in a tweet: “O really? ‘Students’ are planning a nationwide rally? Not left wing gun control activists using 17yr kids in the wake of a horrible tragedy? #Soros #Resistance #Antifa #DNC.”

Those hashtags. The trolls have gotten to him.

But also – what does he even mean? What does he think he means? “Left wing gun control activists using 17 year old kids in the wake of a horrible tragedy” for what sinister hidden purpose? What is the concealed motive supposed to be? Using them how? We want gun control in order to reduce the number of gun deaths. Why does Jack Kingston pretend that’s sinister? Why shouldn’t we want to reduce the number of gun deaths? What other bizarro motive could there be? Why does Soros have to be roped into it?

And yes, why the fuck does CNN pay him? There are conservatives who don’t talk stupid shit like that; why not pay them instead?

We have met the Troll Army and it is us.

Image result for pogo we have met the enemy and it is us

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Rapid response team

Feb 21st, 2018 11:26 am | By

I didn’t realize the Russian trolls had pounced on the Florida shooting that fast. The Times reported a couple of days ago:

One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

An hour.

So not only do we have a brain-fryingly stupid politics around issues such as gun control and abortion and women’s claim to be actual people, but also the brain-frying stupidity of our politics is like rotting meat to flies. We get the authentic stupid politics and then we get even more of it courtesy of Putin.

That is not fair.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

Almost?

Any news event — no matter how tragic — has become fodder to spread inflammatory messages in what is believed to be a far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter.

Those automated Twitter accounts have been closely tracked by researchers. Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

They find us stupid and they make us stupider. And Trump, of course, is gold for them.

Facebook, Google and Twitter have, to varying degrees, announced new measures to eliminate bot accounts, and have hired more moderators to help them weed out disinformation on their platforms.

But since the election, the Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag, which referred to a secret House Republican memorandum that suggested the F.B.I. and the Justice Department abused their authority to obtain a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. The debate over the memo widened a schism between the White House and its own law enforcement agencies.

…

Intelligence officials in the United States have warned that malicious actors will try to spread disinformation ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. In testimony to Congress last year and in private meetings with lawmakers, social media companies promised that they will do better in 2018 than they did in 2016.

But the Twitter campaign around the Parkland shooting is an example of how Russian operatives are still at it.

All so that oligarchs can get even more oligarchy.

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Which twin likes junk news the best?

Feb 21st, 2018 10:47 am | By

Twitter bot purge shock:

(It’s fun writing headlines that would have been gibberish 10 or 15 years ago.)

The hashtag #TwitterLockout has trended after an apparent purge of suspected malicious bots on the social network.

Dozens of users report having had their accounts suspended until they provided a telephone number which they then had to verify, to prove they were real.

Some members have raised concerns about their amount of lost followers, and claimed discrimination against right-wing political beliefs.

Is it the right-wing aspect or the deranged aspect? To put it another way, when so much right-wing pro-Trump discourse is batshit crazy and sounds like trolling whether it’s out of Russia or not, how can one tell whether it’s a bot or just some batshit crazy frothing Trump fan? How, I ask, how?

One researcher who has studied digital disinformation campaigns said a Twitter crackdown should come as no surprise.

“This is a company that’s under a lot of heat to clean up its act in terms of how its platform has been exploited to spread misinformation and junk news,” said Samantha Bradshaw from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project.

“It now needs to rebuild trust with users and legislators to show it is trying to take action against these threats against democracy.”

She too notes the overlap between Trump fans and troll-like bullshittery.

Ms Bradshaw suggested that any appearance of Twitter’s partisanship might be better explained by the different news sources that left and right-wingers prefer.

“Our work indicates a lot of the more conservative Americans were consuming more junk news,” she explained.

“Filter bubbles and echo chambers are more dominant on the right compared to on the left.

“So, I don’t necessarily think it’s an attack on the right, it’s just a reflection about the different ways different kinds of people consume information.”

Especially in the case of the pro-Trump right. Plenty of conservatives detest Trump – Richard Painter, David Frum, Bill Kristol to name just three – while remaining conservatives. Admiring and endorsing Trump is not consistent with being rational and informed.

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Hijacked and exploited

Feb 21st, 2018 9:56 am | By

Trump’s pet ex-sheriff (who still calls himself “Sheriff” even though he’s an EX-sheriff), back from his Twitter suspension:

https://twitter.com/SheriffClarke/status/965962123535966208

Really. Why would Florida students want gun control? What possible reason could they have to want fewer people wandering the landscape with an AR-15 and a backpack full of ammo? There surely is no such reason, therefore it must be Soros. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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Not glib at all

Feb 21st, 2018 9:39 am | By

How graceful our new royal family is. Don 1 goes to visit survivors of the school shooting and grins like a partying frat boy for the cameras. Don 2 goes to peddle Luxury Properties in India and rejoices at the smiling faces of The Poor.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, is in India this week to promote his family’s real estate empire and more than $1 billion worth of luxury Trump Tower projects in four cities, but he still had time to praise India’s poor for their smiles.

“I don’t mean to be glib about it, but you can see the poorest of the poor and there is still a smile on a face,” Trump said Tuesday in an interview with CNBC’s Indian affiliate.  “It’s a different spirit that you don’t see in other parts of the world … and I think there’s something unique about that.”

Let there be a smile on every face! The rich man in his gold-painted penthouse and the poor woman being raped on a bus – let both of them beam a happy smile out on the world. The corrupt fraudulent millionaire and the underpaid domestic worker each can make our lives a little brighter with a happy grin.

Trump arrived on his family’s private jet  Monday for a week of schmoozing and dinners with India’s top business leaders and to wine and dine buyers in the Trump Organization’s latest project. The Trumps have a licensing deal with two Indian developers for two towers outside the capital, New Delhi, where luxury apartments range in price from $780,000 to $1.6 million and have private elevators and concierge service.

Full-page glossy newspaper ads trumpeting Trump’s arrival also tempted buyers to reserve an apartment (paying a booking fee of about $38,000) by Thursday to “join Mr. Donald Trump Jr. for a conversation and dinner” on Friday. The buyers’ dinner has raised conflict of interest concerns and charges by watchdog  groups.

“These ads illustrate the importance of Trump divesting from his business and the danger brought by his failure to divest. Trump’s company is literally selling access to the president’s son overseas,” said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is frequently critical of the first family.

Never mind all that – just keep smiling.

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Florida to students: Nope, we don’t care

Feb 20th, 2018 5:37 pm | By

Florida legislators aren’t going to ban assault weapons just because a bunch of sissy kids think they should.

The Florida House rejects a motion to take up a bill banning assault rifles.

State Representative Kionne McGhee, a Democrat from Miami, asked for an unusual procedural move to consider his legislation, which had been filed earlier in the session but was never scheduled for a hearing.

“The shooting in Parkland demands extraordinary action,” Mr. McGhee said Tuesday on the House floor, as a group of Stoneman Douglas High students, who had previously arrived, peered down from the gallery.

The motion failed, 36 to 71, in a vote along party lines. At least one student burst into tears, Mr. McGhee said. One girl covered her mouth in despair, as a woman patted her arm to comfort her. The episode lasted 2 minutes and 38 seconds.

As the news began to spread aboard a bus of students headed to the capital, Anthony Lopez, 16, a junior, slammed his head back on the bus seat. He placed a hand on his forehead. “That’s infuriating,” he said. “They’re acting inhuman.”

“The one we fear we have is that nothing will change,” he added.

A similar proposal filed last year in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando also went nowhere.

The right to buy an assault weapon, or a hundred assault weapons, is our most sacred right of all. You can take our freedom of speech, our right to assemble, our freedom of association, but our right to amass enough firepower to kill everyone at the next town meeting, don’t even think about it.

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Really?

Feb 20th, 2018 5:16 pm | By

The tweet

The tweet in response

The NPR story:

Trump’s tweets come at a time when his interactions with women over the years are in sharp focus. Last Friday the New Yorker published a piece detailing how the National Enquirer bought exclusive rights to and then never published the story of a former Playboy Playmate, Karen McDougal, who says she had a consensual sexual relationship with Trump in 2006.

This followed a New York Times story a week ago where Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said that shortly before the election, he paid $130,000 to a porn actress named Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the professional name of Stormy Daniels. Cohen has released a statement for Clifford denying she had an affair with Trump in 2006. But in 2011 she detailed the alleged affair in an interview with In Touch magazine that wasn’t published at the time but was released earlier this year.

…

Crooks and two other women were featured on NBC’s Today and held a news conference in New York in December. At the time, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about it in the daily White House press briefing.

“Look, the president has addressed these accusations directly and denied all of these allegations,” said Sanders. “And this took place long before he was elected to be president. And the people of this country, at a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process.”

Now what I want to know is…

“Decisive”? A decisive election? One in which the popular vote differed from the electoral vote by 3 million votes? That’s “decisive”? What’s decisive about it? More than for instance one in which the winner has a majority of both kinds of vote? Especially a large majority of both? That’s normally what’s meant by a decisive vote in a US presidential election with its gruesomely unfair electoral college.

Just one of those puzzles.

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Survivors watch Florida lawmakers vote down a bill to ban assault weapons

Feb 20th, 2018 4:59 pm | By

I wondered why Rob mentioned Dinesh D’Souza…then I saw that the latter was trending on Twitter, so I looked. Oh, that’s why.

The tweet he shared with that startling gloss:

https://twitter.com/passantino/status/966072311534182401

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Soros did it

Feb 20th, 2018 4:32 pm | By

It turns out the whole thing is a left-wing plot to…um…to corrupt our precious bodily fluids? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely left-wing and a plot. And Soros.

Former GOP congressman Jack Kingston on Tuesday doubled-down on his inflammatory allegations that a group of school shooting survivors pushing for tougher gun laws are simply being used by left-wing political groups. Appearing on CNN, the Georgia Republican suggested that billionaire George Soros and other liberal activists had “hijacked” the “sorrow” of survivors of the Parkland, Florida, massacre, who in recent days have been helping organize a series of pro-gun-control protests.

“Do we really think, and I say this sincerely, that 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?” Kingston said on CNN Tuesday. “I would say to you very plainly that organized groups that are out there like George Soros are always ready to take up the charge, and it’s kind of like instant rally and instant protest.”

Do we really think that 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally? If they just saw some of their classmates and teachers blown apart by a guy with an AR-15? Yes, yes I do. In a heartbeat.

Bill O’Reilly also accused the media with applying “extreme peer pressure” on the teenage survivors to promote gun control.

Their remarks coincide with right-wing media stories attacking the credibility of the Florida students who have called for stronger gun laws in the wake of last week’s shooting that left 17 people dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

I will never understand why this is framed as a “left” thing versus a “right” thing. Do conservatives like to see schools shot up? Do they want angry hate-filled young dudes wandering around murdering people whenever they feel like it? Is that really a core conservative value? I don’t think so. I don’t think this is an inherently left v right thing. But contingently it is, so the right is defending their corner with all the irrational fanaticism and meanness they can summon up, which sadly is a lot.

(It’s going to take generations for the US to live down the stain of Trump, but as for the Republicans…centuries, at least.)

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The Migratory Bird Treaty Act

Feb 20th, 2018 12:04 pm | By

Trump and Co want to ditch a law that protects birds. Yeah, who needs birds anyway?

The bird protection law—known officially as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—is more important now than ever. It protects more than 1,000 species of birds by making it illegal to kill or harm any birds not covered by permits.

Stripping the nation’s longest-standing bird conservation law of its authority to protect birds contradicts decades of bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats. If the law is decapitated by the Interior Department and by legislative proposals authored by Wyoming GOP Representative Liz Cheney, millions of our most iconic and beloved birds will be at huge risk.

…

The penalties under the bird protection law are critical incentives for companies to take common sense precautions to help reduce bird kills, such as covering oil pits with nets and marking transmission lines so they are more visible to migrating birds. The penalties create just enough of an incentive that companies have to think twice about where and how they work.

They’re not onerous; they’ve proven to be a helpful incentive to remind companies to do the right thing for wildlife.

The law is good for both birds and industry innovation. A number of good actors— a coalition of power and utility companies —have come together to identify best practices for preventing bird deaths. That has led to the increased use of bird-safe, money-saving technologies.

Wind projects in the west are using video technology to scan the sky and identify eagles as they approach a wind turbine. If the eagle flies too close, the system temporarily shuts off only the turbines in the collision path. And for communications towers, low-tech solutions already in use can be as simple as changing lights on communications towers from steady red lights to flashing lights.

With so many solutions and partnerships between utilities and conservation groups already underway, it is a mystery why just days before Christmas—in the hopes that no one would notice—the Department of the Interior announced it would no longer hold industry responsible for bird deaths.

It’s even more curious that many of the same industries that have been working on these common-sense solutions for protecting birds were encouraging the department’s decision.

The Interior Department announcement followed Cheney’s legislative amendment in November that would eliminate all responsibility from companies for bird deaths.

The bill with her amendment is awaiting a floor vote in the House.

So long, birds.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 16 comments


Some were accompanied by rights campaigners

Feb 20th, 2018 11:34 am | By

Up for another Moral Quandary via Twitter session?

The BBC reported yesterday on the BAFTA awards and the MeToo Time’s Up campaigns.

Guests at the Bafta Film Awards showed their support for the Time’s Up and Me Too campaigns by wearing black and sending messages from the stage.

Virtually all the stars at the London ceremony were in black and some were accompanied by rights campaigners.

One of the few in a colourful dress was best actress winner Frances McDormand – but she told the ceremony: “I stand in full solidarity with my sisters.”

It’s all a bit knife-edge, isn’t it – movie stars all dressed up protesting and standing in solidarity with their sisters and stuff. A bit cringeworthy, a bit pseuds’ corner, a bit yeah yeah yeah but what about your sisters in the chicken plants and the strawberry fields? But at the same time, the movie industry is hell on the women who work in it and insultingly bad at representing women on the god damn screen, and yes, it does need to do better.

At any rate, Tom Holland tweeted about it.

To the surprise of no one, a lively discussion ensued.

I think the main problem with “why not the Yazidi women?” is the problem with all forms of Dear Muslima: it’s a way of telling us (women who aren’t Yazidi or Muslim or whatever the category is that day) that we can’t ever discuss issues local to us because there are always worse issues somewhere else. I don’t think that’s what Tom Holland meant by it, but what he said fits into a pattern that we’ve become unpleasantly familiar with.

But in addition to that, what I wonder is, what if someone had mentioned the Yazidi women? How would that have gone?

My guess is that it would have gone badly; that crowds of people would have rushed to tell the glam women off for associating their minor woes with the horrors the Yazidi women lived through.

I have written about the Yazidi women and girls, and about Boko Haram, and about women in India and Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, but I don’t do so at the same time as I write about Harvey Weinstein. I wouldn’t link them, and I wouldn’t add a “remember the women of Iraq and Pakistan and Iran” at the end of a post about Harvey Weinstein.

Anyway, that was yesterday; today Tom Holland tweeted this:

I look forward to it.

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New charge

Feb 20th, 2018 7:10 am | By

Bloomberg reports:

An attorney who worked for a prominent law firm was charged with making false statements to federal authorities as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.

Alex Van Der Zwaan was charged Feb. 16 in federal court in Washington with lying to investigators about conversations related to a report he helped prepare on the trial of a Ukrainian politician, Yulia Tymoshenko. Van Der Zwaan was charged with a criminal information, which typically precedes a guilty plea.

Van Der Zwaan, identified on his LinkedIn page as an associate in the London office of Skadden, Arps, Slate Meagher & Flom, was questioned regarding the firm’s work in 2012 on behalf of the Ukraine Ministry of Justice. He allegedly lied to investigators about his last communications with Richard Gates, who was indicted in October with ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort over their consulting work in Ukraine.

What Manafort and his assistants were doing in Ukraine was helping Putin and Yanukovych grab it back for Russia. Not a good thing to do.

The firm produced a report earlier in the decade for the pro-Russian government in Ukraine that largely defended the prosecution and conviction of Tymoshenko. The report defied the view held by the U.S. and the European Union that the case against her was politically motivated. The firm’s $12,000 fee was modest, just below the amount that required public bidding.

The following year, however, with no further work done, Ukraine sent Skadden $1 million. After the pro-Russian government was run out of town in 2014, the new authorities began investigating.

So it was “$12,000” for the sake of avoiding public bidding and then later when no one was looking, a little sweetener of $1,000,000 was added. Sounds legit.

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White House much relieved at mass shooting timeout

Feb 19th, 2018 4:24 pm | By

The slaughter of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school was a welcome relief to people at the White House, because it took the heat off them for a change. They’d been having a baaaaaad week until then. Whew! Thanks, 17 dead people!

One White House official said the shooting forced the White House to focus on critical and serious issues — like consoling the victims and trying to heal the nation — rather than getting bogged down in what they view as more trivial West Wing drama.

“For everyone, it was a distraction or a reprieve,” said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal conversations. “A lot of people here felt like it was a reprieve from seven or eight days of just getting pummeled.”

The official likened the brief political calm to the aftermath of the October shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 dead and hundreds more injured. That tragedy united White House aides and the country in their shared mourning for the victims and their families.

“But as we all know, sadly, when the coverage dies down a little bit, we’ll be back through the chaos,” the official said.

Awww. That is sad. Poor White House aides. If only there could be a mass shooting every other day.

The three-day Presidents’ Day weekend added to the hiatus, with Trump traveling to his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., with only a few aides and giving others on his beleaguered staff a chance to rest and recuperate.

Among those accompanying the president was Kelly, who earlier in the week appeared in serious jeopardy of losing his job. The chief of staff had lost the support of some senior aides, and last Tuesday evening rumors were rampant that his days — or even hours — were numbered because Trump had been sounding out friends and advisers about possible replacements.

Wednesday’s shooting, how­ever, effectively stabilized Kelly’s standing internally, officials said, shifting the media glare away from him and giving the retired four-star Marine general a chance to perform his job in helping to coordinate the federal response.

So that sure turned out well for Kelly, didn’t it! What a stroke of luck.

“The national tragedy in Florida has really, for now, turned the page on some of these crises,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist close to the White House. “They’re going to come back, but what it does do is give the White House a chance to collect itself and, if they can, organize a communications strategy and get their ducks in a row.”

Yay! Thanks, Nikolas Cruze. What a good citizen.

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And Donald Duck will be giving a speech on constitutional law

Feb 19th, 2018 3:50 pm | By

This again.

The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is making what has been dubbed an unofficial visit to India to promote his family’s real estate projects. But he’s also planning to deliver a foreign policy speech on Indo-Pacific relations at an event with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Princess Ivanka sat in on that meeting with Abe at Trump Tower in November 2016, and she “sat in” for Daddy at the G20. Prince Jared is working to solve the slight problem in Israel/Palestine. Now Crown Prince Don 2 is giving a foreign policy speech in company with the Indian PM. They might as well invite random people off the street to do it. These people have no relevant experience or knowledge and they are not intelligent enough to make up for that lack. Trump’s very average children and children’s-spouses have no more business making “foreign policy speeches” than John Kennedy Junior did when his father was president.

ndian newspapers have been running full-page, glossy advertisements hyping his arrival and the latest Trump Tower project under the headline: “Trump is here — Are You Invited?” The ads also solicited home buyers to plunk down a booking fee (about $38,000) to “join Mr. Donald Trump Jr. for a conversation and dinner.”

Corrupt enough?

News that the Trump Organization would be offering buyers in the Trump Tower the chance to meet the president’s son sparked criticism of potential conflicts of interest, and the fact that Trump Jr. will be giving a foreign policy speech while on a private business trip complicates the matter further, ethics experts said.

The senior Trump did not divest himself of his businesses when he was elected president. Rather, he turned the day-to-day operations over to his older sons, Don Jr. and Eric, to run. Eric Trump told The Washington Post last year that “the company and policy and government are completely separated. We have built an unbelievable wall in between the two.”

It’s “unbelievable” in the sense that it’s complete bullshit.

“Trump’s company is literally selling access to the president’s son overseas,” said Jordan Libowitz, the communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is frequently critical of the first family. “For many people wanting to impact American policy in the region, the cost of a condo is a small price to pay to lobby one of the people closest to the president, far away from watchful eyes.”

Critics have often complained of the high cost of Secret Service agents accompanying the Trump children on private business trips, straining the agency’s budget. The Trump Organization’s spokesman did not return requests for comment.

Of course not. They don’t care; they do what they want.

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Not just yours, Don

Feb 19th, 2018 3:32 pm | By

Zing.

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If not a Russian bot, might as well be

Feb 19th, 2018 12:17 pm | By

Three days ago Mary Beard mused aloud on Twitter.

And lo, there was a pile-on. (I read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed a couple of months ago. I recommend it.) There are currently 828 replies.

She attempted to clarify her point many times but most of the pilers weren’t listening.

It’s surely a genuine issue. In one reply she said: “I do not like the tone of some of the criticism here which suggests an overwhelming confidence that our own morality would survive through thick and thin.” Her point was about what happens to people in desperate situations, and about judging such people from a safe and comfortable distance. It’s the kind of issue Orwell liked to take on. But it was taken as something much cruder, something that could be summed up with lashings of “white feminist” and “colonialism.”

Later she tried again.

Ah yes, just as students asked about the Milgram experiment all confidently say they would have stopped pushing the button, when in fact only a minority did stop. The students can’t all be right.

The truth is we don’t know how we would behave in emergencies we’ve never had to deal with. Judging harshly from a very great distance is easy but not all that fair.

Some got it, which is reassuring.

But many simply put the boot in, and one of the bootiest was another (less well-known) Cambridge academic, Priyamvada Gopal. She created a pretty intense pile-on all by herself, with lashings of extra venom.

I’ve written a few posts about Gopal over the years, starting all the way back in 2007, when she was sticking the boot in Salman Rushdie, with equal venom and lack of accuracy. June 18th 2007:

Wrong.

Sir Salman, on the other hand, is partly the creation of the fatwa…The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.

No he isn’t, no he doesn’t, no they haven’t. That’s crap. What they’ve assented to (the liberal ones – if they haven’t they’re not liberal) is the opposite: that humane values, tolerance and freedom are universal ideas that have to be defended as such, and that claiming they are a monopoly of any one region or nation or ethnic group is highly illiberal as well as dangerous.

The next day:

Lisa Appignanesi gives Priyamvada Gopal one in the eye though.

During the dark years of the Fatwa, Rushdie lent his fame to help less well-known writers around the world who suffered similar fates or found themselves persecuted either by states or religious hierarchies for their work. As a vice-president of English Pen, the world association of writers, and for some years president of American Pen, he worked indefatigably for the cause of free expression, joining with us here to combat the worst excesses of the government’s “religious hatred” legislation. Perhaps in awarding him this honour, the government has also come to recognise the crucial importance of a freedom which underpins so many others. Rushdie’s “services to literature” also extend to a singular generosity in helping young, and particularly Asian, writers make their way in what is often a difficult literary marketplace.

Universal values, universal liberal values, not western, not European, not white. Universal. Think about it, Priyamvada Gopal.

Nearly 11 years later she’s still not thinking about it.

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