Bill O’Neill – that Ohio judge who told us all what a large number of extremely attractive women he’s had sex with – has apologized.

Kidding; he hasn’t really.

If I offended anyone, particularly the wonderful women in my life, I apologize. But if I have helped elevate the discussion on the serious issues of sexual assault, as opposed to personal indiscretions, to a new level…I make no apologies. Suggesting the admitted conduct of Senator Al Franken and the alleged conduct of Judge Roy Moore are on the same level trivializes the serious subject at hand.

There are Democrats out there who are saying neither one of them pass the purity test to sit in the United States Senate. And that is sad.

And telling us what a large number of extremely attractive women he’s had sex with is exactly the way to fix it.

The Tampa Bay Times:

If you are an evildoer wishing to bring harm to the members of River at Tampa Bay Church, don’t expect congregants to turn the other cheek.

They’ll blast you.

So says a sign at the church, at 3738 River International Drive in Tampa, that delivers a stark warning to anyone thinking of wreaking havoc.

“PLEASE KNOW THIS IS NOT A GUN FREE ZONE,” it reads. “WE ARE HEAVILY ARMED — ANY ATTEMPT WILL BE DEALT WITH DEADLY FORCE — YES WE ARE A CHURCH AND WE WILL PROTECT OUR PEOPLE.”

The message is signed “THE PASTORS.”

The sign at the 21-year-old church was put up about a year ago, said Associate Pastor Allen Hawes.

If I were a churchy person that sign would make me turn around and find another church.

Super-right-on dude Owen Jones tweeted a classic of mindless phrase-mongering a couple of days ago.

Imagine being an opponent of trans rights and believing this was the one exception of history looking kindly on opponents of a struggle for minority rights. It is not going to happen. You are a) going to lose and b) be damned by history forever.

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) November 16, 2017

Imagine being an opponent of trans rights and believing this was the one exception of history looking kindly on opponents of a struggle for minority rights. It is not going to happen. You are a) going to lose and b) be damned by history forever.

Why is that mindless?

One, because he is talking, of course, not about people who actually are “opponents of trans rights” but people who disagree that “identify as” is a magic phrase when it comes to sex but not when it comes to anything else. Two, because he is assuming that all “struggles for minority rights” are progressive and awesome and to be cheered on. It’s all formula and no thought.

On the first: I don’t know of anyone who thinks trans people should not have rights. The disagreement is over what is in fact a right. The core contested “right” in this dispute is the “right” to have one’s self-description accepted instantly and without question no matter what…in the case of trans people but not other people. Gender-critical types are not convinced that this is a genuine right.

How could it be a genuine right? If you try to apply it to other possible “identities” and self-descriptions its absurdity becomes immediately obvious. We’ve heard the strenuous efforts to explain why it works for sex but not for race or nationality or ethnicity or profession, but we don’t find them convincing. There is no such “right” as the right to compel the rest of the world to accept your personal conception of yourself. Would we even like it if there were? Hardly. It’s that basic morality issue: it might be great fun for you but how would it work if everyone did it? Badly, therefore you don’t get to be the one exception.

On the second: it’s just laughable that Owen Jones assumes all “struggles for minority rights” are good things. How difficult is it to think of minorities that are ruthless and power-hungry and cruel? White supremacists are a minority, Nazis are a minority, mass murderers are a minority, Ponzi schemers are a minority. Members of those groups as individuals have human rights, but do we want their groups to have rights particular to them? Nope. Jones didn’t actually mean “struggles for minority rights” – he meant something more like “struggles for approved-minority rights,”  but then that just begs the question. If the minority “right” in question is “Accept my claim about my sex no matter what” then we don’t agree that it’s a genuine right, and the word “minority” doesn’t change that.

There’s so much bad, impoverished, sloppy thinking behind this whole thing, and so much bullying substituted for actual thought, that it’s a tragedy. I think that’s what history is going to damn.

A student newspaper published by the School of Humanities of the Catholic St. Edward’s University proudly reports that St. Edward’s joined the list of right-on silencers who invite Julie Bindel to talk and then later call her back and say no we changed our minds. Who knew that Catholic universities were that “intersectional”?

Universities across the country have been facing backlash over their decisions to host or cancel speakers. Last week, St. Edward’s University joined the national conversation by cancelling a talk by British feminist and political activist, Julie Bindel, based on views she had expressed about the transgender community.

Jesus – it sounds as if they’re excited about being invited to join the cool kids’ table. “Hey everybody’s talking about all this no-platforming and now we’re one of the no-platformers!”

Bindel was scheduled by the Social Justice LLC to speak about her book, “The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Worker Myth” on Nov. 8. Bindel, a self-described radical feminist, is co-founder of the law reform group, Justice for Women. The group opposes violence against women and helps women who have been prosecuted for killing violent male partners.

So you can see why the Vatican wouldn’t like her…but it wasn’t the Vatican who called her up to say we don’t want you after all. It was people who fancy themselves lefty and social justicey and right on.

Early on the scheduled day of her talk, Bindel said she received a call rescinding the invitation. Kris Sloan, associate professor of education and director of the Social Justice LLC, confirmed that it was ultimately his decision to cancel Bindel’s appearance. She spoke at the University of Texas-Austin on Nov. 9.

On the day of her talk. That is so fucking rude and mean. And it’s nothing to do with social justice.

“This was my decision, I made this call,” Sloan said. “Was it right? I hope so. At the heart of my decision was the link to the living and learning, not just to the 96 students in that room, but the larger community and wanting to be good allies to the trans community and the gender non-conforming community on this campus.”

Oh shut the fuck up. Julie was there to talk about pimping, and she was invited, and she was no threat to “the trans community and the gender non-conforming community.” There was no shadow of a need to tell her hours before her talk “we don’t want you after all so nyah.” It’s display and nothing else, and what it displays is stupid and narrow and of no use to anyone.

Doing US book tour. Invited to a college by dept. head to talk about harms of sex trade. Queer ISIS trans cabal and allies bullied college into cancelling. This is not about *MY* free speech, just McCarthyite silencing of feminists who expose male violence and abuse.

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) November 8, 2017

It’s disgusting.

Concern from transgender student Marcus Kearns sparked the conversation about whether to host Bindel. Kearns Googled Bindel after Professor Laurie Heffron, who teaches the class Kearns is taking in the LLC,  announced the upcoming  lecture. He discovered articles Bindel had published that he considered to be transphobic, including a 2004 article in The Guardian entitled, “Gender benders, beware.”

Thirteen years ago. She’s apologized for the way she worded that article. She doesn’t word things that way now. She does outstanding important work. This whole thing is revolting and outrageous.

Bindel told Hilltop Views that the decision to cancel her talk was made by “cowards”  whom she called “morally bankrupt.”

“Everybody knows that I am no threat to trans people,” Bindel said. “There is absolutely no way that this group of people, the bullies, have read anything that I’ve written or said that has warranted this response. This is merely a tactic to shut down the voice of feminists that protest against male violence.”

Kearns was glad that the event was cancelled.

“Am I happy it did get cancelled?” Kearns said of the talk. “Yes, but it wasn’t my intention going in.”

“That can have really bad effects on people when you trust a school to bring in voices that are going to help you grow but they instead bring someone who tears you down,” he added. “If you’re going to have controversy, it has to be grounded in mutual respect.”

But she was going there to talk about her book, which is about pimping.

After considering feedback from the class, Pride, linked faculty, and a number of transgender individuals, Sloan made the final decision to cancel the event early Wednesday morning.

Citing Bindel’s confrontational tendencies and the risk to the community as major reasons, Sloan said that there was “no real value” to come of hosting her and that it wouldn’t “be a productive use of our time.”

But she had already been invited. They told her they’d changed her minds the day of her talk. It’s way too late to decide oh well there’s no real value to this and it wouldn’t be a productive use of our time so we’re going to call her up hours before her talk when she’s thousands of miles from home to tell her we’ve changed our tiny flea-bitten little minds.

Oh wait wait wait everybody, it turns out everything’s ok after all. This one judge in Ohio had lots of awesome sex with 50 very attractive females (his words) so there’s nothing to worry about. Whew!

Now that the dogs of war are calling for the head of Senator Al Franken I believe it is time to speak up on behalf of all heterosexual males. As a candidate for Governor let me save my opponents some research time. In the last fifty years I was sexually intimate with approximately 50 very attractive females. It ranged from a gorgeous blonde who was my first true love and we made passionate love in the hayloft of her parents [sic] barn and ended with a drop dead gorgeous red head from Cleveland.

Now can we get back to discussing legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis. I am sooooo disappointed by this national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago.

Peace.

What a relief, right? Imagine if they hadn’t all been very attractive? Imagine if there had been only forty of them, or [shudder] thirty?

Yeah but for real – dude missed the point, didn’t he. The issue isn’t having sex. The issue certainly isn’t how attractive Male Candidate X’s sex partners were or were not. The issue is harassment and assault and rape. I think the distinction is pretty obvious. You’d hope it was one that judges were well aware of.

That item about Jordan Peterson’s plan to create a List of courses he considers “neo-Marxist”  blah blah got my attention. As It Happens reported last week:

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson’s stated plan to build a website aimed at reducing enrolment in university classes he calls “indoctrination cults” has drawn the ire of his University of Toronto colleagues, who say it will make them the target of harassment.

“As a science professor, I’m not specifically targeted, but I still believe this website is morally wrong,” U of T physics professor A.W. Peet told As It Happens host Carol Off. “A number of students and faculty members who I’m in correspondence with are concerned about his plans.”

Peterson, who rose to fame in right-wing circles after his outspoken refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns, says he wants to use artificial intelligence to scour university curriculums for what he “calls post-modern neo-Marxist course content.”

“We’re going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be designed to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them,” he told CTV’s Your Morning in August.

“I’m hoping that over about a five-year period a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West. So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.”

Grandiose much?

In a speech posted to his YouTube page on July 9, Peterson elaborates on what type of courses he aims to target with the website.

“Women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go and the faster they go the better,” he said. “It would have been better if they had never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell.”

“Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worse offenders are the faculties of education.”

That’s not scholarship or dissent (or dissenting scholarship), it’s bullying.

The Globe and Mail:

Dr. Peterson has gained a high profile over the past 18 months for his criticism of what he believes is the dominance of Marxism, socialism and postmodernist ideas among university professors and students.

In the United States, a political advocacy group runs a website called Professor Watchlist that seeks to advance right-wing and libertarian ideas on college campuses. A professor in California who was identified on Professor Watchlist as having a “radical agenda” went into hiding after she received death threats, according to media reports.

Right-wing and libertarian ideas can be extremely “radical.” Radicalism is not confined to the left.

Dr. Peterson seems to suggest universities should teach a limited set of disciplines. Social sciences, law and humanities have all been infected by postmodernism, he says, as well as women’s studies and ethnic and racial studies.

Just a little bit sweeping?

Jordan Peterson has the solution to all this sexual harassment everywhere.

With all the accusations of sex assault emerging (eg Louis CK) we are going to soon remember why sex was traditionally enshrined in marriage…

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 10, 2017

Ho yus, that will fix it. Women were never sexually harassed until…what year was it again? 1964? If only women could be permanently imprisoned by marriage, all would be well.

Rachel Giese is not quite convinced.

[C]onsider his recent conversation with fellow provocateur Camille Paglia. Expressing his frustrations with women who disagreed with him, Peterson said that men can’t control “crazy women” because men aren’t allowed to physically fight women. “I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassed against me,” he said. “The parameters for my resistance are quite well-defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.”

It’s like Peterson has been cribbing talking points from Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. He adds that men unwilling to throw a punch are contemptible. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.”

So does that also mean if you [“you” are obviously a man here] are talking to a woman then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect? I think it can be safely assumed of most women that they won’t voluntarily “fight with” a man in the sense of throwing punches, so in Peterson’s world that must mean they’re contemptible, yes?

Peterson has said elsewhere that socialization has a role to play in addressing aggression among boys and men. But talking to [Camille] Paglia, he laments that his own socialization prevents him from taking a swing at a lady. Referring to a woman who accused him of being a Nazi, he said, “I’m defenceless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me.” It’s hard to decide which is creepier: Is it the suggestion, in Peterson’s rueful tone, that he’s kind of bummed out about the fact that he can’t hit women? Or is it the implication, if you were to follow his argument to its conclusion, that because women can’t be hit, they shouldn’t be allowed to participate in civil discourse with men at all?

But there’s also the creepiness of his casual assumption that it’s just normal to throw punches at men who accuse you of being a Nazi. People are supposed to grow out of that assumption in the course of childhood and adolescence. Peterson is an adult academic and he apparently clings to it.

But maybe it’s just something he says. Maybe he doesn’t mean it.

Just a few weeks after he posted his conversation with Paglia, however, there was a surprise retreat from his latest attention-grabbing escapade. Over the weekend, Peterson announced he was shelving his plans to create a website warning university students away from “corrupt” courses in programs like ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, English literature and women’s studies. After a group of University of Toronto faculty released a statement saying that Peterson’s proposed site “created a climate of fear and intimidation,” he capitulated, tweeting the project was on hiatus: “I talked it over with others and decided it might add excessively to current polarization.”

Why didn’t he just punch them all instead?

Grim:

A North Korean soldier who was shot while fleeing across the border has an extremely high level of parasites in his intestines, his doctors say.

The defector crossed the demilitarised zone on Monday, but was shot several times by North Korean border guards.

Doctors say the patient is stable – but “an enormous number” of worms in his body are contaminating his wounds and making his situation worse.

His condition is thought to give a rare insight into life in North Korea.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician,” South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient’s intestines was 27cm (11in) long.

How did he get them? Probably via food grown with untreated human intestinal output.

Humans can get parasites through eating contaminated food, by being bitten by an insect or by the parasite entering through the skin.

In the case of the North Korean defector, the first case is most likely. Parasites which enter the body via contaminated food are often worms.

The soldier’s food may have been contaminated because the North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as “night soil”.

Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters: “Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead.”

If these faeces are untreated and fertilise vegetables that are later eaten uncooked, the parasites get into the mouth and the intestines of the person.

Night soil is a good idea if it’s treated, but ya gotta treat it.

While some don’t cause any severe symptoms, others can be life-threatening, explains Prof Peter Preiser from the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“What they all do is take nutrients away from your body,” he told the BBC. “So [even] if most of them might go unnoticed, they all indicate a poor health status. To put it simply: people who have parasites are not healthy.”

And they don’t feel all that wonderful.

It’s pretty tragic.

I saw this in the Sun last week.

GENITOOL 
Doctor dumped boyfriend because he criticised the smell of her vagina – and wants other women to follow suit

I saw that some typical goons had talked about it on their podcast hur hur hur. I read Jen Gunter’s blog post on it. Now it’s in the Times, as is only fair.

For 25 years she’s been listening to women tell her they’ve been told how Wrong and Gross their genitals are.

These women all shared something: They were told these things by men. While I admit this is anecdotal data, my years of listening to secret shame about healthy vaginas and vulvas seems to suggest it is largely, if not entirely, male partners who exploit vaginal and vulvar insecurities as a weapon of emotional abuse and control.

But it was the Vicks VapoRub that put me over the edge.

Around the internet I am known as the gynecologist who debunks unnecessary and often harmful vaginal trends. Vaginal steaming, douches, glitter, tightening sticks — these are all born from the same need to tame the normal female genital tract. Whether these products are sold by big companies or a lone purveyor on Etsy, whether sold as medicinal in drugstores or marketed under the guise of “natural” and artisanal by brands like Goop, the intent is the same: to monetize intimate fears about intimate places. The idea is to profit from our society’s inability to have public, non-sophomoric discussions about the vagina and vulva. These products and their messages are no different from the Lysol ads of the 1950s telling women they could be like the “the girl he married” again.

Now, apparently, folks were suggesting that it was a good idea to put a mentholated petroleum product in one’s vagina. (It is not.)

Fed up, I wrote the story of how a man had tried to shame me about my healthy vagina. Once, I had dated a man who told me I would be desirable, if only my hair were straight, or if only I lost the weight, or if only I dressed differently. The metric for my supposed perfection kept changing, so it was a herculean task to keep up with my failings, which I now gather was the point.

But while I may not have complete confidence in my appearance, I have professional confidence in spades. There are few people, if any, who know more about the lower genital tract than I do. So when this man began to tell me how my healthy vagina could be better, I dumped him.

She talks about vaginas all day long. It’s the idea that that’s gross that is behind all this experimentation with Vicks VapoRub. (Are you KIDDING me?) So naturally along came a gutter tabloid to say EW GROSS.

What happened next was an article showed up in the The New York Post with the incorrect headline “My boyfriend dumped me because of my vagina smell,” accompanied with a big picture of me. The article itself was accurate — easy enough, since it was essentially quotations from my blog.

And then the men came. They came to share their opinions regarding my vagina, writing on my blog and at me on Twitter. They flocked to my Instagram and my Facebook. One group of gentlemen, in at least their 40s, even decided that this story of me being dumped supposedly because of my vagina was worthy of a laugh on their podcast.

This rash bombarded me in both public and private comments. Men wondered if I had washed “that thang yet?” One man wrote that I “must be INTO smelly ones! How nice for you — we prefer FRESH as a daisy ones!” Another man warned me that “We men had a meeting, all 3.5 billion of us.” At the meeting they had apparently decided to “double down on calling out” my smelly vagina.

A man said I should call my ex and thank him “for alerting me to my smelly vagina.” There was also the #notallmen contingent, who felt it was impossible that my personal experience and 25 years as a gynecologist could offer any evidence that men ever try to control women by preying on insecurities. Obviously it was just my vagina that stank.

Isn’t it nice to know what so many men really think? Isn’t it?

The state of my healthy vagina brought more scorn from men than anything I have ever written about — and I write about second trimester abortions, so that is saying something.

To the women who have been told they were too wet, too dry, too messy, too smelly, too gross, too saggy or too bloody, I have heard you. I know you stand in drugstores wondering why there are all these hygiene products if they are unnecessary. I know you stare into the internet and wonder, if celebrities say they steam their vaginas, or have 10-step vaginal prep regimens, then maybe vaginal neglect really is a flaw that ruins relationships.

All I can say is, if you have a medical concern, see a doctor. And: If someone speaks to you about your body with anything but kindness and concern, it is he who has a problem. And: The vagina is like a self-cleaning oven.

To the rash of mansplainers and The New York Post, thank you. This experience proves that shaming women about physiologically normal and functioning vaginas is epidemic. The cure for this rash is information. You can either listen and learn or you can take a seat in the back of class and shut up. The era in which men can shame women for their perfectly healthy vaginas is now coming to an end.

The other day Bjarte recommended Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. The library found it quickly so I’m reading it. There’s a bit on page 28 in a chapter on willful blindness in love:

“Success confers its own blindness,” says Brown. “Successful people believe they can get away with it. I talked once to a group of men who’d all become millionaires before the age of forty and who’d had affairs. They don’t even see the danger! It isn’t a love of risk. They think the wives will never know, so where’s the harm? Everything else in their lives has worked out, so they think they have some kind of magic, that their success has meant that they can have everything they want and they’re invulnerable. And they were completely blind to the harm that they had done.”

It sounded kind of familiar.

In annals of Things I Neglected in the Hail of All the Other Things, there is the move by Republicans and Trump to halt a rule requiring big companies to collect data on how they pay their employees. The ACLU in September:

Last night, 223 members of the House of Representatives voted against equal pay for our nation’s workers.

If asked, these members of Congress would almost certainly say that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work and that pay discrimination based on gender and race is a scourge that should be eliminated. Yet when the opportunity arose to support an equal pay initiative that is critical in achieving these goals, they voted no.

Believe what they do, not what they say.

The DeLauro-Frankel-Scott amendment that came to the House floor yesterday for a vote would have preserved federal funding for a new equal pay data collection initiative by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces our nation’s antidiscrimination laws. This initiative was developed during the Obama administration and updated an existing survey, called the EEO-1 report.

The original survey, which has been around for 50 years, requires large employers to provide the EEOC and other federal entities with information about the race, gender, and ethnicity of their workforce by job category. The updated EEO-1 report would have required these employers to also provide information about what they pay their employees.

The EEOC equal pay data collection was developed after years of study and two rounds of public comments, and it would have taken effect in March 2018. It is an essential tool in our fight against pay discrimination because it would have lifted the cloak of secrecy that shrouds pay decisions in this country.

But but but then it would be harder for companies to go on paying people less on the grounds that they’re not white men.

While women’s rights and civil rights advocates have found their arguments to be wholly self-serving and unconvincing, members of Congress and senior officials in the White House were, unfortunately, more easily swayed.

Indeed, in July, House Republicans adopted an amendment that cut off federal funding to implement the program. In August, the Trump administration halted the data collection altogether. Although the administration ordered an ill-defined “review” of the program and suggested that the EEOC should resubmit a revised data collection package, there are deep suspicions about the administration’s true commitment to working with the EEOC to ensure the implementation of a similar initiative.

Danielle Paquette at the Post in October:

A coalition of more than 90 civil rights groups is preparing to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to halt an Obama-era initiative aimed at fighting employer discrimination against women and minorities.

Emily Martin, general counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said she and attorneys at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have requested copies of emails, voice mails and other communications among the federal officials who opted in August to freeze a rule that would have required companies to file data broken down by race, ethnicity and gender on what they pay workers.

The rule compelling companies to submit additional information about employees and wages to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was finalized in September 2016 and would have taken effect next year.

Would have, had a reasonable adult human won the presidential election last year, but alas it was not to be.

After Trump launched his deregulation agenda, Neomi Rao, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, stayed the rule, saying in an Aug. 29 letter to the new acting head of the EEOC that the requirement was unnecessarily burdensome and lacked “practical utility.”

Victoria Lipnic, whom Trump appointed in January as acting chair of the EEOC, publicly expressed concerns in April about the burden the rule could put on businesses. (Neither Rao nor Lipnic responded to requests for comment.)

Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, supported the administration’s decision to halt the rule. The first daughter and adviser to the president has positioned herself a champion for women, advocating policies that support female breadwinners.

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” she said in an August statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, OMB, Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”

I did comment on Princess Ivanka’s ludicrous self-serving “statement” at the time:

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” said the first daughter, who recently published a book called ‘Women Who Work’ and markets a clothing and accessories line to working women.

How the hell does she know? Who is she to make that claim? What is the source of her expertise?

Activists who focus on pay equality have blasted this decision, with the executive director of Make It Work, a nonprofit aimed at improving women’s economic lives, calling it “a blatant attack on women.”

“To suspend a crucial Obama-era initiative aimed at increasing pay transparency and reducing the gender and racial pay gap is an unacceptable and deliberate attack on women in the workplace, especially black and Hispanic women who are currently paid only 63 cents and 54 cents to the dollar white men are paid, respectively,” said Tracy Sturdivant, who cofounded the Make It Work campaign.

But Ivanka Trump knows better because…what?

Oh wait, I know – it’s because she’s an employer and a purchaser. She doesn’t want to pay her employees more and she doesn’t want to pay more for the merch she sells. It’s not that she actually thinks it wouldn’t work; she’s lying just like Daddy about that – it’s that she thinks it will cost her money.

So far I don’t see any reason to change my mind about that.

Speaking of narrow authoritarian impoverished versions of “morality,” there’s this sheriff in Texas who is all worked up about…the word “fuck” on someone’s personal vehicle.

A sheriff in Texas is looking for a truck bearing a profanity-laced anti-Trump sticker and said authorities are considering charging its owner with disorderly conduct — a threat that immediately raised alarm among free speech advocates.

I wouldn’t call it “profanity-laced” – it’s too succinct for that. It says simply: Fuck Trump and fuck you for voting for him.

Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy E. Nehls posted a photo of the truck Wednesday on Facebook after, he said, he’d received several complaints about the display from unhappy people in the Houston-area county.

The photo is no longer on Facebook, but it’s easy to find lots of photos of the type via Google images. Here’s one:

Not really an enhancement of the public landscape, but not a police matter, either.

“If you know who owns this truck or it is yours, I would like to discuss it with you,” the sheriff wrote. “Our Prosecutor has informed us she would accept Disorderly Conduct charges regarding it, but I feel we could come to an agreement regarding a modification.”

The Houston Chronicle said the truck’s owners have no plans to remove the custom graphic, which they ordered after Trump’s election.

“It’s not to cause hate or animosity,” Karen Fonseca told the Chronicle. “It’s just our freedom of speech and we’re exercising it.”

Wellll it’s a little bit to cause animosity – the “fuck you for voting for him” part.

At a news conference Wednesday, after his Facebook post went viral, Nehls said he supports freedom of speech, according to the Associated Press.

“We have not threatened anybody with arrest; we have not written any citations,” Nehls said. “But I think now it would be a good time to have meaningful dialogue with that person and express the concerns out there regarding the language on the truck.”

A meaningful dialogue with the police…which is rather different from meaningful dialogue with random fellow citizens.

There’s another good bit of that interview with the Los Angeles priest who works with kids in gangs that I overlooked yesterday. It’s another place where he offers a version of religion that is understandable even to secular types – understandable and worth doing.

You know how you were saying earlier that, like, when you were a child, your prayers were petitional? You know, God help me pass my math test. And now your prayers are more meditative. You have, you know, mantras that you say. Do you ever do petitional prayer anymore?

BOYLE: I don’t.

GROSS: Is there a place for that in your…

BOYLE: Well, I mean, it’s in the liturgy. You know, we’re people – you know, let’s pray for, you know, this guy who died, and let’s pray for unity in our country. And all those things are good because it’s – people are articulating kind of what’s on their mind, and it’s a way for people to stand with each other.

You know, I may not be able to carry what you’re carrying, but we can carry you. And that’s kind of what prayer in the petitionary sense means. But I never do it personally ’cause I don’t – you know, when people say, I believe in the power of prayer or, as speaker Ryan said the other day, prayer works, I go, well, now talk about that, you know? It helps me find God at the center of my life. So yes, it does work. But if – you know prayer, is not going to fix our health care system. Stop it, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

BOYLE: Don’t think that. You actually have to do something about guns. You can’t just pray, and you can’t just, again, extend thoughts and prayers. And so the power of prayer – I don’t think people got that – people haven’t graduated from the third grade. They’re stuck there. They’re still praying for the math test, you know, when there are things that are in our control and that we’re supposed to do and that God doesn’t protect us from Hurricane Maria but will sustain us as we lock arms with each other in its aftermath. I believe in that.

In a way I can believe in that too, or at least see what he’s getting at and not be repulsed by it. People locking arms with each other is a good thing, and if that’s what you mean by “God” then go for it.

GROSS: So if you’re not doing petitional prayer when you have someone who you deeply care about, who’s gone through Homeboy Industries, who’s trying to change their life and they’re sick or they’ve been hurt and they’re in the hospital and they’re hanging on maybe by a thread, when you pray for them, what are you doing? Like, are you asking for them to be healed? Is that too petitional for you to do? Do you know what I’m saying?

BOYLE: Yeah, you know, ’cause yesterday, you know, one of our homies who’s worked for us for a long time – and I buried his brother, and his father was dying. So I went over to the hospital. We all gathered around. You know, I’m a priest, so I do the anointing of the sick. I anoint his forehead, and I invite everybody in the room. There were probably 10 of us. And each one kind of, you know, anointed him very tenderly. And we all touched him, and I said a blessing. Clearly he, you know, had a major stroke, and clearly he was leaving us. And 10 minutes later, he did.

I was so glad I got there not because this was some magical, you know, thing but that it meant a lot to this homie who works for me. And it meant a lot to just sort of gather together. But you’re not praying for some outcome, you know? You’re trying to, you know, step into this – into the wideness of God, you know, this amazing, merciful, spacious and expanse of God. And then all of a sudden, because you’re praying, because you’re bringing this consciousness to the group, everybody is experiencing the tender glance of God in that moment. And then you feel animated to leave each other’s presence and to be that tender glance in the world. That’s how it works.

But the magical thinking of pray that – you know, that this person get healed – and it’s not even pray for God’s will because people die, and people get sick. And there’s nobody who’s not going to have that happen to them. But in the process, we can lock arms with each other, and the prayer is just a way of, you know, putting first things first.

If only more priests were like Greg Boyle.

Last night Trump tweeted his deep concern and fellow feeling toward the people of Tehama County, California Sutherland Springs, Texas over that terrible mass shooting thing they had there wherever it was.

On Tuesday night, Trump posted this message:

Oh gosh, Don, that was ten days ago.

May God be w/ the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI & law enforcement are on the scene. I am monitoring the situation from Japan.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2017

At least he left off the part about monitoring from Japan.

1. We have too many mass shootings. ONE is too many.
2. That's no excuse for a POTUS confusing them. Carelessness is callousness.
3. Trump's done nothing to address root causes. His presence exacerbates the crisis.

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) November 15, 2017

He sent out a generic tweet. What more do you want him to do?

Surprise surprise: there’s a lot of sexual predation in Alcoholics Anonymous. You don’t say! Who would ever think that a quasi-sacred secretive all-anonymous “program” to rescue alcoholics with a success rate of around 6% would foster predators?

“AA has absolutely saved my life,” says Amy Dresner, who has been in and out of AA for 20 years, and recently published a memoir about her addiction and recovery called My Fair Junkie. “I was never sexually harassed per se,” Dresner says. “What I did feel happened to me was that I was preyed upon when I was very vulnerable. When I came in and I was new, no girls pulled me aside and said ‘Hey, these are the guys who usually wait for the fresh meat to come in. These are the guys that fuck the newcomers.’ I was fucked multiple times by guys with who had double digit [years of] sobriety while I was still counting days. I was 13th stepped.”

“13th stepping” is a phrase all of the women I spoke to were familiar with. It is not an actual step in the program, but rather an expression commonly used within the fellowship to refer to the practice in which elder members with more years of sobriety sexually pursue newcomers because they’re in a vulnerable state and more open to manipulation. A 2003 study in the Journal of Addictions Nursing showed that 50 percent of the female AA members surveyed had experienced the 13th stepping phenomenon.

In spite of this, Dresner says it’s the responsibility of those entering the program to go in with their eyes open. “If you’re expecting it to be a room full of saints, you’re an idiot. It’s a place where sick people go to get better. It’s a looney bin. Wherever there’s a power hierarchy there’s going to be sexual abuse. AA is no different. There is a power hierarchy,” she tells me.

Hmmmm yes it’s a place where sick alcoholic people go to get better that fails around 94% of the time and is all anonymous. There’s going to be sexual abuse, you can’t do anything about the abuse because anonymous, and it won’t help you – but it’s awesome all the same.

Monica Richardson was a member of AA for 36 years before she walked away and embarked on a personal mission to expose abusive practices in the 12 step community. She produced a documentary about sexual and financial exploitation in 12 step groups called “The 13th Step,”and states that since starting her blog LeavingAA in 2010, she has received “thousands” of emails from current and former members who have experienced sexual harassment, assault and abuse from other members of “the fellowship.”

One of Richardson’s major points of contention with AA is their refusal to warn newcomers to the program that they may be sitting next to someone who has been court ordered to attend meetings as a condition of probation or parole. AA’s own 2014 membership survey states that 12 percent of members were referred to the organization by the criminal justice system.

They’re not there by choice, and they’re protected by anonymity, and for all you know they’re rapists. Cozy.

“AA needs to warn its members that there could be a sex offender or violent offender who’s been sent there, so be careful who you trust,” Richardson says. She also thinks that the group should tell the court system to stop requiring attendance for violent offenders, that the program should institute a hotline for members to call if they’ve been sexually assaulted by another program member, and that safety guidelines stating that sexual harassment, assault, and exploitation within the group are “not okay” should be read and posted at all meetings. Meeting leaders and sponsors are not required to go through any sort of training.

And there’s no question of evidence or comparing outcomes. It’s just a thing, and you go to it and take what you get. There are actually medical treatments for addiction, and AA is not that.

She also rejects AA’s assertion that the program is a “microcosm of society” where sexual harassment and assault are no more likely to happen than they would anywhere else. “It’s not a microcosm,” she says. “You’re pulling together a group of people who are malfunctioning. They’re addicted to drugs and alcohol. They may have issues with self-esteem and being assertive. And they’re all reading a book from the 1930s.”

It doesn’t work, and there are a lot of risks – yet AA is widely seen as an unquestionable good. It’s nuts.

The United States is a country founded on idealism. We have principles and values and sacred beliefs here, and the holiest of them all is that the rich must always be rewarded many times more generously than everyone else. If the worker makes $10 an hour then by god the CEO had better make at least $1000. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington died on the battlefield to defend that glorious truth.

Like plucky little Whitefish Energy Holdings, for instance.

The small energy outfit from Montana that won a $300 million contract to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s tattered power grid had few employees of its own, so it did what the Puerto Rican authorities could have done: It turned to Florida for workers.

For their trouble, the six electrical workers from Kissimmee are earning $42 an hour, plus overtime. The senior power linemen from Lakeland are earning $63 an hour working in Puerto Rico, the Florida utility said. Their 40 co-workers from Jacksonville, also linemen, are making up to $100 earning double time, public records show.

But the Montana company that hired the workers, Whitefish Energy Holdings, had a contract that allowed it to bill the Puerto Rican public power company, known as Prepa, $319 an hour for linemen, a rate that industry experts said was far above the norm even for emergency work — and almost 17 times the average salary of their counterparts in Puerto Rico.

Hey! They had to line their own pockets didn’t they?! They had to pay themselves first and most didn’t they?! This is AMERICA. Well ok it’s Puerto Rico which is obviously not AMERICA at all but hopelessly foreign, but Whitefish is AMERICA, so those rules apply.

Two weeks after Prepa abruptly withdrew the contract from Whitefish following strong criticism by federal and congressional officials of the company’s expected ability to perform the work needed, more questions are being raised about the deal, including how much it will actually cost. Whitefish will keep repairing power lines until Nov. 30.

Plenty of time for the bosses to make themselves a nice chunk of change.

At least four congressional committees are investigating. The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security has also begun a review of the Whitefish contract, as has the F.B.I., according to media reports.

Whitefish’s chief executive, Andy Techmanski, has called the investigations a “witch hunt.” The company said on Saturday that it had completed repair of more than 150 miles of transmission and distribution power lines.

Ah the old witch hunt ploy. It’s funny how corrupt greedy men keep grabbing that metaphor of the persecution of women.

Jeffrey Bartel, a former senior executive at Florida Power & Light, the third-largest utility in the United States, said markups were routine in subcontracted work, as was charging double time for emergency work.

But “even at double time, the labor cost figures are empirically questionable,” Mr. Bartel said after reviewing the contract at the request of The New York Times. “Possibly most egregious is that this all takes place with a dire and desperate circumstance where people’s lives are at immediate danger without power, and, therefore, there is unequal bargaining position by Puerto Rico, which allows for the possibility of price gouging.”

Price gouging in emergencies is another one of those beautiful American ideals.