Typical hypocrisy coupled with greedy self-indulgence.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is taking an unprecedented number if privately chartered flights to conduct official business, taking a substantial financial toll compared to traveling commercially.

Politico reported Monday that Price opted for private travel as many as five times last week, including a stop in Philadelphia on a private jet from Virginia’s Dulles airport, which is just a 135-mile trip.

The trips also included a privately chartered jet to New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and a resort in Maine.

A resort…hmm…well maybe he needed to inspect how healthy the resort is, or how good its services are, or both.

The cost of such travel can amount to tens of thousands of dollars above commercial traveling. For instance, booking a private flight from the Washington, DC area to Philadelphia can cost upwards of $25,000.

But it saves him upwards of twenty minutes, so it’s obviously money well spent.

“As part of the HHS mission to enhance and protect the health and well-being of the American people, Secretary Price travels on occasion outside Washington to meet face to face with the American people to hear their thoughts and concerns firsthand,” the HHS spokesperson said. “When commercial aircraft cannot reasonably accommodate travel requirements, charter aircraft can be used for official travel.”

Price, previously a Republican congressman from Georgia, often railed against government spending on frivolous perks, including private travel by members of Congress.

Yes but he’s not a member of Congress. Checkmate.

The Guardian last week:

A campaigner who forced the Bank of England to have female representation on banknotes has pledged to donate her first Jane Austen tenner to a women’s shelter as the new plastic currency enters circulation.

Caroline Criado-Perez threatened to take the Bank to court for discrimination when the former governor Mervyn King announced that it was phasing out paper fivers featuring the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, the only woman other than the Queen to feature on legal tender at that time.

They were replaced last year by the new £5 featuring Winston Churchill.

But on the new £10 note the bank backed down and on Thursday more than 1bn new tenners featuring Austen begin entering circulation. It ends a four-month period in which there has been no usable note featuring a woman other than the Queen.

Twitter today:

https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/status/910457977328537600

https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/status/910482470503686145

I hear we need some furry beasts again.

There’s a quirk in the white supremacist movement that I was unaware of: it likes to play Medieval.

White supremacists explicitly celebrate Europe in the Middle Ages because they imagine that it was a pure, white, Christian place organized wholesomely around military resistance to outside, non-white, non-Christian, forces. Marchers in Charlottesville held symbols of the medieval Holy Roman Empire and of the Knights Templar. The Portland murderer praised “Vinland,” a medieval Viking name for North America, in order to assert historical white ownership over the landmass: Vinlander racists like to claim that whites are “indigenous” here on the basis of medieval Scandinavian lore. Similarly, European anti-Islamic bigots dress up in medieval costumes and share the “crying Templar” meme. Someone sprayed “saracen go home” and “deus vult”—a Latin phrase meaning “God wills it” and associated with the history of the Crusades—on a Scottish mosque. The paramilitary “Knights Templar International” is preparing for a race war. In tweets since locked behind private accounts, University of Reno students reacted to seeing classmate Peter Cvjetanovic at the Virginia tiki-torch rally, saying they knew him as the guy who said racist things in their medieval history classes.

Mark Twain could have told us this would happen. He called it “Sir Walter disease” and he despised it.

I thought back to other, less explicit ways that I’ve observed white supremacists engaging with the Middle Ages. I’m not sure we’re as ready to handle the racism when it lurks in the subtext and context, rather than when a bigot picks up a Templar shield. It’s easy to overlook both the depths of white-supremacist celebration of the Middle Ages and the ease with which these groups pluck out appealing nuggets of white-supremacist ideology from any product that lacks an explicit rejection of same.

For example, before it was taken offline, I would regularly read the white-supremacist discussion boards at Stormfront, scanning for medieval history content so I could better understand this dynamic. The posters, predictably, spend time celebrating their understanding of the spirit of the Crusades (treating them as a heroic Lost Cause) and gleefully retelling narratives of Jewish expulsion while denying that there was ever a wholesale massacre.

It’s too bad they don’t all watch cooking shows instead.

Republicans are hoping to be able finally at long last to take health insurance away from millions of people. They’re wetting themselves with excitement, because it’s looking good!

Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress on Monday demanded that lawmakers wait to find out the budgetary and healthcare impacts of a new, last-ditch legislative effort by Republicans to repeal Obamacare before voting on it.

In their long-running war on former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, Senate Republicans are now proposing to replace it with a system that would give states money in block grants to run their own healthcare programs.

…

The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan fiscal analysis unit of Congress, said Monday it will make a preliminary assessment of the bill’s impact next week. But it said it won’t be able to estimate the impact on the deficit or changes in insurance coverage or premiums for several weeks.

Which you would think would be a reason not to pass it now, but that would be silly, because the point is to pass it, not to worry about what the consequences would be. That’s grown-up politics.

Past Republican proposals to dismantle Obamacare have been hampered, in part, by CBO estimates that showed the bills would have left millions more Americans without health insurance.

Obama’s healthcare reform provided health benefits to 20 million Americans. Since its passage, Republicans have sought to undermine it.

Because they want those 20 million Americans to lose those health benefits. That’s how they roll.

Oh, good, now we’re supposed to see Sean Spicer as a funny guy and his lying for Trump as just normal business.

When opponents of the president talk about “normalizing” an abnormal administration, they are talking about the sort of thing that took place onstage Sunday night at the Emmys: Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s first White House press secretary, showed up and made a joke about one of his false claims.

The night otherwise had been a showcase of Hollywood’s liberal leanings as applied to 2017. Stephen Colbert’s intro song and monologue sounded the alarm about global warming, Russian meddling in American politics, and police violence in cute but cutting fashion. “I’d like to vote for Selina Meyer, she’s pretty foxy,” he sang, referencing Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Veep character. “Imagine if your president was not beloved by Nazis.”

But soon after, Colbert posed the question of how many people were watching the Emmys. The answer came in the form of Spicer’s cameo. The Republican operative wheeled out a podium like the one Melissa McCarthy used in her SNL impression of him. In a mock-stern voice, he announced: “This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period, both in person and around the world!”

Isn’t that just adorable. Don’t worry, it’s all a comedy really, and in a few years everyone will look back and laugh.

CNN’s reporting also noted that the Spicer cameo was Colbert’s idea: “He and his producers knew there would be blowback. … But Colbert thought it would be funny and surprising, and that’s what mattered most.”

Well of course that’s what matters most if you see entertainment as the highest value, or the highest after money.

Last week, Spicer appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, leading my colleague David Frum to write, “As former Trump staff seek to integrate themselves into American civic and business life, it will be important to evaluate which of them can be rehabilitated—and which have compromised themselves in ways that cannot be redeemed.” Already, the short-lived White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci has landed gigs co-hosting The View and TMZ on TV, where he, no doubt, can be let in on the jokes about him.

Backstage after the Emmys, Alec Baldwin was asked about the propriety of Spicer’s appearance. “Spicer obviously was compelled to do certain things that we might not have respected, that we might not have admired, that we might have been super-critical of, in order to do his job,” Baldwin replied. “But I’ve done some jobs that are things that you shouldn’t admire or respect me for either. So he and I have that in common, I suppose.” The obvious truth about that comparison is that Baldwin is an entertainer and Spicer was a public servant, held to a different standard and capable of more significant lapses. Or maybe not, as it turns out.

Springtime for Hitler, eh?

Stewart at Gnu Atheism on Facebook:

If we wanted to have a white supremacy museum, where would we put it? Montgomery, Alabama would be a good choice.

It was at the statehouse in Montgomery that Jefferson Davis was first inaugurated as the president of the Confederacy in a bid to preserve the institution of slavery and in defense of the inferiority of the black race. It was here too, nearly a century later, that Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat, and a young Martin Luther King launched his first direct action campaign: The Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Indeed the official city seal tells some of this story in ironic juxtaposition, nesting its claim as “Cradle of the Confederacy” inside that of “Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement”.

That is truly bizarre.

Montgomery was also for a time the central hub of the domestic US slave trade, and that’s part of why writer and activist Bryan Stevenson thinks is a perfect place for a “new kind of museum” entitled From Slavery to Mass Incarceration that will that will trace the untoward history of racial capital through generations and simultaneously shine a light on the legacy of US racial terrorism.

“It all begins with enslavement and the ideology of white supremacy and what follows is lynching, segregation, and many of the issues that we’re dealing with today,” Stevenson told the Guardian.

The museum itself will be situated at the site of a building that once warehoused enslaved people before they could be sold auction in the town square. “They used it for livestock, cotton and enslaved people,” Stevenson said.

…

“By 1860, warehouses, slave depots, and slave pens had sprung up all over the city of Montgomery. We had more slave pens, depots, and warehouses than banks, hotels, or commercial establishments,” said Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative which is headquartered in Montgomery and is spearheading the project.

Places to store and sell human beings. This is our history, just a century and a half ago – and still, if you look at mass incarceration as an offshoot of slavery.

The museum space, beyond slavery and lynching will also cover the rise of lend-lease, the practice by which many formerly enslaved blacks were resubjugated. Many Southern municipalities adopted nuisance laws that could legally detain blacks for no crime at all, and sentence them to hard labor as punishment. This, EJI argues, draws a direct line to the explosive rise in the US prison population through the later part of the 20th century that has become known as Mass Incarceration, and how it has preyed on communities of color.

This arc, from slavery through these more modern iterations of racial inequality speaks to the museum’s core mission. Rather than a focus on historical artifacts, Stevenson said the project intends to walk visitors through a comprehensive narrative of US racism. Drawing inspiration from the Apartheid museum in South Africa, which is similarly conceived, Stevenson said that the museum starts with a point of view, and one that he believes is necessary to amplify if the nation is ever to push meaningfully past its foundational racist demons.

“I do think our nation is a nation that needs truth and reconciliation, and incidents like Charleston and Charlottesville just reinforce that,” Stevenson said, but added that truth and reconciliation is not simultaneous, it’s sequential.

“You have to tell the truth before you can get to reconciliation, and culturally we have done a terrible job of truth telling in this country about our history of racial inequality. I see these projects as an effort to respond to the absence of truth and the silence that has haunted us – black, white and other – for too long.”

Some documentaries on the subject would be an idea too.

Janice Turner was there when Maria Maclachlan was attacked by “activists.”

When is it OK to punch a woman? I’ve pondered this question since Wednesday evening when I watched a 60-year-old in specs and sensible shoes called Maria being smacked in the face. Yet I learn from her assailant’s defenders that it’s fine. Punch harder next time, guys! Because “acts of physical violence against those who are systemically violent are self-defence”.

I was at Speakers’ Corner waiting, along with about 80 others, to learn the secret location of a meeting entitled, “What is gender? The Gender Recognition Act [GRA] and beyond”. It was all very cloak and dagger because the original venue, a south London community centre, had cancelled the previous day on health and safety grounds. Which is one way of saying “trans rights activists harangued our staff and threatened, via various Facebook groups, to cause havoc if it went ahead”. Then, hearing of the Hyde Park rendezvous, they rang every conceivable venue within a mile radius to promise mayhem. Having failed to find it, about 15 of them arrived at Speakers’ Corner with placards saying “TERFs not welcome.”

Presumptuous, isn’t it. It’s not up to them who gets to gather at Speakers’ Corner. Granted, I might wave a placard like that if “TERFs” were replaced by “Fascists” and fascists were actually gathering, but this wasn’t that. We’ve been energetically coached to think a “TERF” is a very terrible person in some manner, but it’s applied to women who simply define “gender” in a way that some trans activists dislike. That’s really not a good reason to bully people, to prevent them from speaking, or to punch them in the face and steal their cameras and memory cards.

TERFs, according to trans activists, are evil. TERF is the new witch. Search on Twitter for “TERFs must die” or “burn in a fire, TERF” and behold a cauldron of violent vitriol. Before the meeting, a trans-woman posted: “Any idea where this is happening? I want to f*** some TERFs up, they are no better than fash [fascists].” Search “punch a TERF” and you will find crowing approval of what happened to Maria.

There’s still a strong delusion that this crap is somehow left-wing and progressive and good, but it’s not. It’s a mindless, venomous attack on women in general, cheered on by “allies” and thus making it clear yet again that women are always required to go to the back of the line.

So at Speakers’ Corner trans activists and feminists were chanting and taunting each other. Maria was taking photographs when an opponent grappled with her, snatched her camera and smashed it on the ground. Then a tall, male-bodied, hooded figure wearing make-up rushed over, hit her several times and as police arrived, ran away. I asked a young activist if she was OK with men smacking women: “It’s not a guy, you’re a piece of s*** and I’m happy they hit her”, came the reply.

Yes that’s the important thing – not “misgendering” the guy who hit a woman in the face because she thinks of gender in a way he dislikes.

I wouldn’t trouble Times readers, no doubt weary of reading daily about gender-fluidity and schoolboys in frocks, with this affair if it didn’t reveal such serious issues. Changes to the very definition of “man” and “woman” are being proposed, yet it is almost impossible to hold a public meeting to discuss them. Wednesday’s speakers were a lesbian academic and a trans woman. Two members of the LGBT group Stonewall initially agreed to take part in what was to be a debate, but dropped out. Winning arguments is far harder for the trans lobby than shutting them down.

Shutting them down and lying about them – Twitter is full of “activists” lying about the assault on Maria.

Maria held on to her camera when someone grabbed it – that’s the “violence” she perpetrated.

Miranda Yardley posted video of the assault:

“Intersectional” enough?

Hadley Freeman wonders, as so many of us do, why shops sell clothes with pink butterflies on them for Girls and blue spaceships for Boys.

Too often, discussions of gender today, rather than expanding boundaries, only contract them. When people say they’re “non-binary”, it sounds to me more like they swallowed the lie of the pink and blue onesies. Because the point is everyone, really, is non-binary – no one’s a wholly pink butterfly or blue car onesie. We are all, to varying degrees, purple spaceship onesies – and, yes, that is the scientific term.

Gender stereotypes are too often confused with biology, and you hear this mistake being made as much on the left as you do on the right. After all, it’s not that big a leap from saying boys wear car prints to Eddie Izzard saying he likes having manicures “because I’m trans”. Suggesting a man can’t possibly like having his nails done is a disappointingly reductive take on gender from Izzard, who was once so determined to tear down stereotypes about masculinity.

I don’t like having manicures (and have never had one); does that make me trans? I don’t like frills, but I do like colors, including raspberry and magenta and heather – does that make me so confusing I have to find a new label?

The Guardian shares a story of detransitioning.

Elan Anthony knows more than most about trans identity issues. Born a boy 42 years ago, he transitioned from male to female at 19 and then detransitioned to male three years ago. While his story is enlightening, it is also immensely challenging and it took him a long time and a lot of therapy to conclude that he had made a mistake.

He says – in the same paragraph – both that he believed he was female and that could never change, and that at times he wondered if he’d gotten it wrong and should actually be a man.

“I started to realise that I could have dealt with my own issues so much better without changing my body because that has brought so many more difficulties. Detransitioning isn’t as unusual as you might expect, but it is underground, for a number of reasons, and the trans community isn’t happy discussing this.”

He now thinks he was rushed into transitioning by well-intentioned but ultimately misguided people.

“I’m an only child and grew up in Ohio,” he says. “When I was young, I was bullied a lot, being very bright but physically weak, which singled me out as a super-nerd and resulted in a lot of violence. I started to fantasise about being a girl from about age six because that would make me safe and take me away from my place at the bottom of the male hierarchy.”

I at the same age spent a lot of time pretending to be a male character from one story or another, because the story spoke to me in some way and I wanted to play at being the protagonist. It’s not exactly the same as fantasizing being a boy, I think, because I didn’t do it all the time and because it was pretending, which requires less suspension of disbelief than fantasizing. But at any rate I think it’s an ordinary feature of childhood and not necessarily a symptom of gender dysphoria.

“As I reached puberty, these feelings became part of my sexuality and I experienced some gender dysphoria, but I was also attracted to women so it was confusing. When I was in high school I had several girlfriends and my gender dysphoria declined until I got to college. Initially, I didn’t meet any women so all my gender feelings came back. Looking back, I think that was because, as a freshman, I was back to being at the bottom of the heap, which affected my confidence.”

University counselling referred him to a gender clinic and it was then that he began to discover there were other people who felt the same way as him.

“It was a revelation – other people had these feelings too, and I could relate to them, so could be really happy.”

Yes – but what that also does is make one vulnerable to social contagion. Social contagion is not necessarily a bad thing; I wish more people were subject to for instance anti-racism via social contagion; it depends on the content. Having friends who think the rules of gender are bullshit is one thing, and having friends who think the rules of gender are awesome but they sometimes don’t match one’s personal body is another.

But he now sees that this is where things began to go wrong.

“I told the psychologist I wanted to be female but nothing about the other issues involved, such as being bullied. I wasn’t aware that bullying had anything to do with my gender issues, but he didn’t ask any deeper questions. So, I was just like, ‘This is who I am and this who I want to be’, and they were like, ‘That’s great!’, and after just two sessions I was given hormones, which was actually not good practice.”

Sometimes instant validation is not the right response.

Realising he had made a mistake was a gradual process. “I couldn’t bond with people and eventually started therapy to work on why I couldn’t have relationships and why my body was so tense. I eventually realised that a lot of this had to do with trying to present myself as female, which was unnatural for my body. I was holding my shoulders in and my butt out and doing all sorts of things that were outside the natural movement of my body. This was causing strain and stress on my body and that was when I realised that this whole transition was a problem. It was a long process and the big revelation was that the roots of my problem lay with the early bullying and feeling unsafe being a man. I stopped taking oestrogen and started on testosterone.”

And he lost some friends as a result.

Elan is studying psychology and aims to work towards a doctorate: “I’m interested in continuing to work on this subject, although I also do find it emotionally taxing, especially because there is a large movement towards promoting and supporting trans rights and trans issues in psychology right now. It sometimes can be difficult to be critical in any way of trans issues in that environment, but I am interested in helping people work with their dysphoria in whatever way possible.”

The tricky part of that is that “promoting and supporting trans rights” has evolved into meaning treating gender dysphoria as literally being the alternative sex, as opposed to meaning helping people work with their dysphoria in whatever way possible. The latter is obviously a more flexible and reasonable way of understanding GD.

He is very aware of the irony of his situation, transitioning originally at a time when there was minimal support and now detranstioning at a time when transitioning is totally acceptable, but detransitioning is less so.

“I don’t have much community around detransition and the overwhelming number of detransitioners are natal females who have their own community. I do know a few male detransitioners and have talked to them, and I think the next step for us is to have more of a community also.”

Detransitioning has brought its own pain, especially as he feels there is little leeway in offering any criticism about transitioning.

“Being critical about trans issues is definitely going against the grain right now in psychology. I have felt like I was fighting a constant battle for some time, but it feels like there are a lot more people speaking out about detransition, as well as more clinicians who are interested in looking at alternative ways to deal with dysphoria. In the beginning I felt like one of the very few people working on this but it feels different now.”

Being critical about trans issues is definitely going against the grain right now in politics, too, which is a very odd thing. It’s very odd to make a psychological state a matter of political loyalty, and so much so that it becomes a reason to beat up women who try to get together to talk about it.