I’m reading Frederick Crews’s Freud, and plan to share observations from it over the coming weeks. Laura Miller reviews it in Slate.

Crews goes gunning for two distinct Freuds: the doctor/scientist and the man. The former, as Crews acknowledges, has suffered a steep fall in reputation over the past 45 years. The biological model on which psychoanalysis was based has been superseded by newer discoveries, particularly in neurochemistry. Freud published the works that would establish his reputation as a savant of humanity’s unacknowledged inner life in the early 1900s; over the subsequent century, it has become ever harder to ignore the lack of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as a therapy. Our growing understanding of the complexity of consciousness and the dizzying variety of human experience makes Freud’s rigidly universal model of the unconscious and its drives—from the Oedipus complex to penis envy—seem laughable, blinkered by his background as a patriarchal, bourgeois 19^th-century Viennese.

With emphasis on the 19th century part, because there’s so much psychology and brain science for the non-specialist reader available now that it makes Freud’s stories seem like a parlor game.

But to Crews’ annoyance, these erosions haven’t done enough to wear down Freud’s reputation as a bold, original thinker who revolutionized our understanding of the human mind. He knows that nearly all his readers, “believing that Freud, whatever his failings, initiated our tradition of empathetic psychotherapy,” will “judge this book to have unjustly withheld credit for his most benign and enduring achievement.” But Crews will have none of that. Instead, he aims to prove that Freud not only had “predecessors and rivals in one-on-one mental treatment” but that he also “failed to match their standard of responsiveness to each patient’s unique situation.”

He was an egomaniac. That’s what jumps off the pages for me: Freud’s relentless, Trump-level self-obsession.

Without a doubt, Freud was a terrible doctor. Anyone who reads his case histories or has more than a passing familiarity with the real events on which they were based can only pity those individuals unfortunate enough to come under his “care.” As Crews painstakingly documents, using Freud’s own letters and clinical notes (many of which were, until recently, published only in bowdlerized form by his acolytes), Freud disliked medicine, was revolted by sick people, and held his patients in contempt. “I could throttle every one of them,” he once told a shocked colleague. Although he often claimed to have cured people of hysteria, neuroses, or other ailments, those claims were almost entirely false. He helped very few—quite possibly none—of his patients, and spectacularly harmed several.

Apart from that, he was awesome.

Crews’ Freud is first and foremost dishonest, misrepresenting his past, his data (when he bothered to collect it), his results, his patient’s life stories, the contributions to his theories by friends and colleagues. Animated by “a temperament and self-conception” that “demanded that he achieve fame at any cost,” Freud concocted theories about the human psyche based on his own idiosyncratic past and personality and attempted to force his patients to corroborate them. He pressed them to confirm the often preposterous suppressed “memories” he claimed to have deduced from their symptoms and, when they stood firm, interpreted their very resistance as confirmation.

Notice anything about that? That’s right: it’s unfalsifiable! If patients accept his theories, good, and if they reject them, even better. Freud is either right, or righter. It saves trouble all around.

Facebook. Russia. Ad buys. Bot accounts. Business Insider:

Facebook on Wednesday said it has found evidence that fake accounts “likely operated out of Russia” bought thousands of ads during the US presidential election that were designed to amplify divisive political messages.

Facebook said the ads were part of elaborate “information operations” in which “organized actors,” including governments, use social media to deceive the public and distort political sentiment.

The social network discovered roughly $100,000 in ad buys between June 2015 and May 2017 “associated with roughly 3,000 ads” and connected to nearly 500 affiliated fake accounts.

“Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia,” Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos wrote in a post published on Facebook’s company blog, which also noted that the company has shared its findings with US authorities investigating Russia’s interference in the election.

The “vast majority” of ads related to the fake Russian accounts didn’t target a political candidate and instead focused on “amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum,” according to Stamos.

Meaning…what, Breitbart types on the one hand and Black bloc types on the other? Probably something like that.

Wednesday’s announcement by Facebook, titled “An update on Information Operations on Facebook,” represents a sharp turnaround from the company’s previous remarks on its role in the spread of fake news during the election.

For example, Facebook said in July that it had found “no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook in connection with the election.”

The social network was widely criticized in the wake of the election for its role in the proliferation of so-called fake news, which many believe helped Donald Trump win the election. CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially called that notion “pretty crazy,” but Facebook has since made significant strides to eradicate fake news stories from its platform.

In a research published earlier this year, Facebook detailed its attempts to thwart organized “information operations” that are increasingly used to sway political leanings through the spread of fake news and propaganda on its platform.

You know, when you think about it, Trump is kind of a bot. He doesn’t really give a shit about anything except himself; all his blathering is just for effect, just in aid of winning. He doesn’t care what or how he wins as long as he wins. Very bot.

Grady Judd, Florida’s Joe Arpaio.

Florida sheriff is telling certain members of the population in Polk County that they won’t be welcome at shelters in the area, and his statement has spurred controversy as Hurricane Irma barrels towards the state.

The Polk County Sheriff Twitter account tweeted Wednesday that law enforcement officers would be checking IDs at every shelter in the county. The purpose, the account said, was to turn away sexual predators.

The sheriff of Polk County, whose photo is on the Twitter account, is Grady Judd.

Of course sexual predators aren’t the only people who will be scared off by that announcement.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida spoke out against his language, saying Judd was “exploiting a natural disaster and endangering lives.”

Our response to the dangerous #HurricaneIrma tweets of @PolkCoSheriff Grady Judd, threatening arrests for people seeking shelter. pic.twitter.com/V4MKC9nfTw

— ACLU of Florida (@ACLUFL) September 6, 2017

With this series of tweets, @PolkCoSheriff Grady Judd is exploiting a natural disaster and endangering lives. https://t.co/OXVVuifFPu

— ACLU of Florida (@ACLUFL) September 6, 2017

.@PolkCoSheriff: please focus on preparing for Irma, not burnishing your Joe Arpaio-style 'tough cop' credentials with irresponsible tweets.

— ACLU of Florida (@ACLUFL) September 6, 2017

Be safe, Floridians.

Rush Limbaugh is telling his listeners that Irma is fake news, faked in a plot to get people to go out and stock up on batteries.

“These storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they’re reported,” Limbaugh claimed on his syndicated radio show. He added that “the graphics have been created to make it look like the ocean’s having an exorcism, just getting rid of the devil here in the form of this hurricane, this bright red stuff.”

Why would the media exaggerate the threat of a hurricane? Here’s Limbaugh’s theory:

There is symbiotic relationship between retailers and local media, and it’s related to money. It revolves around money. You have major, major industries and businesses which prosper during times of crisis and panic, such as a hurricane, which could destroy or greatly damage people’s homes, and it could interrupt the flow of water and electricity. So what happens?

Well, the TV stations begin reporting this and the panic begins to increase. And then people end up going to various stores to stock up on water and whatever they might need for home repairs and batteries and all this that they’re advised to get, and a vicious circle is created. You have these various retail outlets who spend a lot of advertising dollars with the local media.

The local media, in turn, reports in such a way as to create the panic way far out, which sends people into these stores to fill up with water and to fill up with batteries, and it becomes a never-ending repeated cycle. And the two coexist. So the media benefits with the panic with increased eyeballs, and the retailers benefit from the panic with increased sales, and the TV companies benefit because they’re getting advertising dollars from the businesses that are seeing all this attention from customers.

Water and batteries. Who knew the water people and the batteries people had enough influence to get the news media to fake up reporting on hurricanes?

To state the obvious, these are potentially dangerous comments from Limbaugh, who is based in Palm Beach, Fla. He is encouraging listeners who might be in Irma’s path not to take seriously the official guidance disseminated through the media.

“I wish that not everything that involved news had become corrupted and politicized, but it just has,” he said.

More broadly, Limbaugh’s bad advice reveals the metastasizing nature of “fake news” attacks on the press, which have been led by President Trump. How did we get from Trump’s claim that he has “never seen more dishonest media than, frankly, the political media” to the idea that weather reports are phony, too?

Alex Jones might have something to do with it. The Infowars founder — who has an “amazing” reputation, according to Trump — has for years promoted the notion that the U.S. government possesses the power to conjure and control weather events. Just last week, as Hurricane Harvey battered Texas, Jones devoted part of his show to questioning why the government didn’t “use the technologies to kill [the storm] out in the gulf.”

But surely he knew why: it’s because of the overweening power of the water people and the batteries people.

Limbaugh, a fellow Trump booster, didn’t say the deep state causes storms, but he did say “you have people in all of these government areas who believe man is causing climate change, and they’re hellbent on proving it, they’re hellbent on demonstrating it, they’re hellbent on persuading people of it.”

So we create hurricanes, and then we guide them to places like Houston, and then we make them sit there for days. We’re just that powerful. Hellbent and powerful.

Thus we have two of the president’s biggest promoters in the media telling people that news about a storm — or perhaps even the storm itself — is fake. There could be serious consequences to Trump’s ceaseless effort to lower trust in institutions such as the government and the press — consequences that the president and his team might not have fully considered.

Well that’s just silly – Trump doesn’t fully consider anything.

On the morning before Harvey hit Texas, CNN’s Jim Acosta tweeted that a moment when “millions will be relying on national and local news outlets to stay safe during hurricane” is “not a good time to take shots at ‘fake news.’”

Brad Parscale, the digital media director of Trump’s campaign, scoffed at Acosta’s warning, tweeting that “nobody said the weather is fake.”

And yet…somebody did, and does.

Lindy West on the feminist awesomeness of Ivanka Trump:

Ivanka Trump, first daughter, strode into Washington back in January with big promises: She was passionate about helping “working women,” she said, and she was going to close the gender wage gap even if it killed her.

Well, not if it killed her, not literally, but even if it mildly inconvenienced her, she was on it 110 percent, for the women. Well, not if it mildly inconvenienced her, she’s very busy, but definitely if there was a wage transparency policy already in place, she would not openly and glowingly support overturning it.

Well, unless her dad wanted to overturn it because doing so satisfied two of his top 10 vindictive fixations (constraining women’s independence and destroying the legacy of America’s first black president), but Ms. Trump would absolutely offer a better replacement solution, such as saying the words “child care credit” and “female entrepreneurs” repeatedly near a camera while wearing a blush-pink toggle coat. That, ladies, is the Ivanka Guarantee. Enjoy your money!

Or, at least, enjoy watching Ivanka Trump enjoy her money.

Ms. Trump’s self-professed commitment to corporate gender parity (about as milquetoast as feminism gets, but in Trump’s America, radicalism is relative) was trotted out incessantly during the campaign, especially as an antidote to her father’s self-professed commitment to nonconsensually sticking his hands on women’s genitals.

Yet, in a statement last week, Ms. Trump endorsed the decision to abandon an Obama-era initiative, set to go into effect next spring, requiring federal contractors and companies above a certain size to report salary data. “Ultimately,” Ms. Trump explained, “while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results.”

And she knows this because something something something bureaucrats something data something something something.

You’ve probably seen the video of the Salt Lake City cop losing his temper when a burn unit nurse explained why she couldn’t give him a blood sample from an unconscious patient. You’ve probably seen how he arrested her with considerable violence because she was doing her job.

Salt Lake City cops now have to stay out of patient contact areas and away from nurses at that hospital.

Gordon Crabtree, interim chief executive of the hospital, said at a Monday news conference that he was “deeply troubled” by the arrest and manhandling of burn unit nurse Alex Wubbels on July 26. In accord with hospital policy and the law, she had refused to allow a Salt Lake City police officer to take a blood sample from an unconscious patient. Wubbels obtained a copy of the body cam video of the confrontation and, after consulting her lawyer, the hospital and police officials, released it last week.

“This will not happen again,” Crabtree said, praising Wubbels for “putting her own safety at risk” to “protect the rights of patients.”

Margaret Pearce, chief nursing officer for the University of Utah hospital system, said she was “appalled” by the officer’s actions and has already implemented changes in hospital protocol to avoid any repetition.

The “officer”‘s actions were pretty amazing. There was no arrest, there was no calm “if you don’t comply I will be forced to arrest you”; there was only a shouty “We’re done here!” and an assault.

The incident, which has attracted nationwide attention in part because of the dramatic video, involved Detective Jeff Payne, who persisted in demanding a blood sample from an unconscious truck driver at the hospital who had earlier been involved in an accident stemming from police pursuit of a suspect.

The hospital and the law in Utah and nationwide require police to have a warrant or permission from the patient to draw a blood sample in such circumstances. Payne had neither.

After Wubbels politely and repeatedly read hospital policy to him and had a supervisor back her up on a speakerphone connection, Payne snapped. He seized hold of the nurse, shoved her out of the building and cuffed her hands behind her back. A bewildered Wubbels screamed “help me” and “you’re assaulting me” as the detective forced her into an unmarked car and accused her of interfering with an investigation.

It has occurred to me to wonder if Payne would have done that if Hubbels had been male and a doctor. I can’t know, of course, but I bet he wouldn’t. I bet he saw her as doubly an underling and someone who should do what she’s told when a cop does the telling, no matter what the law says. I bet he’s that kind of bully.

He also, of course, saw her as someone he could overpower easily. We can see and hear that he’s that kind of bully.

The Guardian has more on the murder of Gauri Lankesh.

Gauri Lankesh was the editor of a Kannada-language tabloid that has frequently been critical of Hindu extremists.

Police said Lankesh, who was in her 50s, was shot by three assailants as she was entering the property on Tuesday evening and died shortly after. Officers said it was too early to speculate on the motive.

A small group of protesters formed outside her home as news of the killing spread.

Lankesh was known as a fierce critic of Hindu nationalist organisations in her state and was convicted of defamation last year for a piece accusing members of the Bharatiya Janata party of theft. She was appealing against the decision.

She told the Indian website Newslaundry last year that the “rabid hate” directed at her online had made her fear for the state of free expression in India.

“Unfortunately, today anybody talking in support of human rights and against fake encounters [extrajudicial killings] is branded a Maoist supporter,” she said.

“Along with that, my criticism of Hindutva politics and the caste system … makes my critics brand me as a Hindu hater. But I consider it my constitutional duty to continue – in my own little way – the struggle of Basavanna and [social reformer] Dr [Bhimrao Ramji] Ambedkar towards establishing an egalitarian society,” she said.

Always a reason to kill people.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said in a report last year that 27 journalists had been killed “with complete impunity” in India since 1992. It listed another 25 murders it was investigating to ascertain a connection to the journalist’s work.

Two years ago in the same state, Karnataka, an outspoken scholar and critic of religious groups, MM Kalburgi, was also shot dead by unidentified assailants.

Without journalists, we don’t know what they’re doing to us. We need to know.

Trump went ahead with ending DACA, of course – because if there’s a mean thing to do and Trump has the choice, he’ll do it.

President Trump on Tuesday ordered an end to the Obama-era executive action that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, calling the program an “amnesty-first approach” and urging Congress to replace it with legislation before it begins phasing out on March 5, 2018.

“I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents,” Mr. Trump said in a written statement. “But we must also recognize that we are nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.”

The statement was released shortly after Mr. Trump, who had called the issue a personal dilemma, dispatched Attorney General Jeff Sessions to announce that the government will no longer accept new applications from undocumented immigrants to shield them from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.

Administration officials said the roughly 800,000 current beneficiaries of the program — brought to the United States illegally as children — will not be immediately affected by what they called an “orderly wind-down” of former President Barack Obama’s policy.

Did any dogs hear whistling? Oh yes.

Mr. Sessions called the Obama-era policy an “open-ended circumvention of immigration laws” and an unconstitutional use of executive authority. “The executive branch through DACA deliberately sought to achieve what the legislative branch specifically refused to authorize on multiple occasions,” he said.

He also used the aggrieved language of anti-immigrant activists who argue that undocumented people are lawbreakers who hurt native-born Americans by usurping their jobs and pushing down wages.

“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border with humanitarian consequences,” Mr. Sessions said. “It denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.”

Those sought-after jobs picking strawberries or gutting chickens.

An Economist writer tells us the historiography of Gettysburg the site has changed.

When war memories were still fresh, that Pennsylvania town was a shrine to Union suffering. Confederate troops under Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania to bring terror to Union territory. They seized farmers’ property and—in a monstrous touch—kidnapped free blacks and escaped slaves, sending scores southward into captivity. The war was still raging when Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address to dedicate a Union cemetery there, months after the pivotal battle outside town. So eager were locals for martyrs that Virginia “Jennie” Wade, a young seamstress shot by a stray bullet while baking for Union soldiers and the only civilian casualty of the battle, was pressed into service. The Senate granted her mother a war pension, and in 1900 an elaborate monument to her was erected, largely funded by the Women’s Relief Corps of Iowa, a Union state not represented at the battle.

Yet today, gazing at tourist shops full of Confederate battle flags, replica guns and souvenir T-shirts with slogans like “If At First You Don’t Secede, Try, Try, Again”, visitors to Gettysburg might suppose that the Confederates won. The same shops are piled high with Donald Trump hats and shirts, while Trump-stickered pick-up trucks and Harley-Davidsons rumble along the town’s narrow streets. The Jennie Wade House and gift shop flog Confederate knick-knacks, and—in an attempt at neutrality—tour guides stress the young woman’s friendship with Wesley Culp, a local youth who moved to Virginia and fought for the South.

Well that’s disgusting. I had no idea.

Merchants are following the market: in Trump-voting bits of white America, such as rural Pennsylvania, affection for the Confederacy has floated free of ancestral loyalties. Today the rebel cause stands for a chin-jutting, screw-you sort of conservatism. This extends to modern-day Iowa, home to a Republican congressman and anti-immigrant zealot, Steve King, who for a while kept a Confederate flag on his desk (later removed after a Confederate flag-waver shot two Iowa cops). The rebel flag means different things to different people, says a historian with the National Park Service in Gettysburg, tactfully. For all that, he understands, and quietly worries, if it makes black visitors uncomfortable.

No, sorry, that’s bullshit. A historian with the National Park Service should not be that kind of “tactful.” The “rebel flag” is what it is: the flag of an organized attempt to secede from the US in order to preserve slavery. Slavery. People don’t get to have their own special meaning for it that ignores the massive systematic rights-violation at the core.

It’s again popular on the left to say forget all this identity politics, focus on class instead, so that the battle can be over economic justice instead of all this touchy-feely identity stuff.

Yet the past offers a further lesson, one worrying for those on the left who are sure that the way back to power is to compete with Mr Trump’s fiery economic populism, while shunning his taste for racial controversies. For American history teaches that, once stoked, racial, ethnic and economic grievances are perilously hard to keep apart. In his fine history of the civil war, “Battle Cry of Freedom”, James McPherson records that many whites in Union states like Ohio, Illinois or Indiana were hostile to elites, bankers and blacks in roughly equal measure. Lots of unskilled workers, notably Irish and German Catholics, resented New England grandees for asking them to fight to free the slaves, and suspected that wealthy Yankees saw emancipation as a source of cheap black labour. Populists hated highfalutin newspapers as much as Mr Trump claims to today. In 1863 the New York Times borrowed three Gatling guns from the army to guard its head office as rioters protested against a military draft, yelling “Down with the rich!” and looking to lynch blacks.

Mr Trump, a man with a hazy, self-regarding sense of history, grasps that Them-against-Us rage has deep American roots. Opponents are free to hope that his ploys backfire. But for non-bigots, meeting him in any sort of populist anger contest is a trap.

Ditch the baseball caps.

Outlook India reports:

Senior journalist Gauri Lankesh has been shot dead at her residence in Bengaluru.

NDTV reports that unidentified men shot at her seven times from close range and that three bullets hit her on the neck and chest, following which she collapsed on the spot.

“There has been a shootout at  Gauri Lankesh’s house this evening; she is no more. Her body was found in her veranda,” said M.N. Anucheth, DCP, West Bengaluru according to ANI.

…

Lankesh was the editor of the weekly ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrike’ and had been under attack for her views on communalism. She had been convicted in two defamation cases for articles critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party written in January 2008. She had been out on bail in the case. Her article had alleged that BJP MP Prahalad Joshi from Dharwad was directly involved in corruption.

In an interview to Newslaundry, in November last year, she had said that “Modi Bhakts” celebrate the deaths of rationalists and that they would rather have her in jail.

Another item for the bulging file of journalists killed on duty.

Shermer is trolling again.

Which is worse, Alt-Right or Alt-Left, Neo-Nazis or Antifa? Wrong question. Is violence a practical or moral means of social change? No.

Wrong question according to whom, bub? In what conversation? In order to discuss what issue?

Of course it’s not the wrong question. It’s a goddam urgent question right now, with Mr “on many sides, on many sides” in the White House. Racism is worse than anti-racism, even when some anti-racists get violent. Resistance to racism and fascism is better than racism and fascism even though many of the resisters are bullies and egotists. You can’t have a large political movement with no assholes in it, that’s just not an option, but you can still know the difference between decent goals and horrific ones.

The EPA press release attacking the AP reporters is also, in addition to the authoritarian aspect and the lying aspect, strikingly amateurish. It does not read like something you would expect to see from a federal agency staffed by grownups.

I mean really –

Good afternoon –

Yesterday, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker wrote an incredibly misleading story about toxic land sites that are under water.

That sounds like a couple of teenagers gossiping, not a civil servant informing the public about emergency pollution management.

Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area.

Says the deeply political appointee in charge of a federal agency that should be all about the science but was hijacked by political fanatics.

Unfortunately, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story. Earlier this summer, he made-up a meeting that Administrator Pruitt had, and then deliberately discarded information that refuted his inaccurate story – ultimately prompting a nation-wide correction. Additionally, the Oklahoman took him to task for sensationalized reporting.

Where are the adults??

More authoritarian excess:

President Donald Trump’s habit of singling out reporters for attacks is being adopted by his federal agencies, with the Environmental Protection Agency excoriating an Associated Press reporter in unusually personal terms on Sunday after the reporter wrote a story that cast the agency in an unfavorable light.

“Yesterday, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker wrote an incredibly misleading story about toxic land sites that are under water,” the statement began. “Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area.”

The audacity? That’s a frightening word for a government agency to use about a news story. It implies a violation, a trespassing over boundaries, of a kind that a strong leader might decide to suppress. In short it resembles a threat.

Also? The reporter was not in Washington, or in comfort.

The article in question, which was written by Biesecker and his AP colleague, Jason Dearen, noted that seven toxic Superfund sites around Houston had been flooded during Hurricane Harvey. The Saturday report also noted that the “EPA had not yet been able to physically visit the Houston-area sites,” which the EPA confirmed, arguing the sites were not accessible.

Dearen appears to have reported from on the ground in Texas, and he was not singled out by the EPA statement.

The statement went on to say that “state agencies worked with responsible parties to secure Superfund sites before the hurricane hit.”

It then continued the attacks on Biesecker, saying he “has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story” and noting that a July story he wrote inaccurately characterized an interaction between EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris. Biesecker’s story, based on EPA schedules, initially said the two met for half an hour at a Houston hotel.

The meeting was canceled, the two met only for a few minutes, the AP issued a correction.

The bulk of Sunday’s EPA statement was unsigned. It did, however, include one portion attributable to associate administrator Liz Bowman.

“Once again, in an attempt to mislead Americans, the Associated Press is cherry-picking facts, as EPA is monitoring Superfund sites around Houston and we have a team of experts on the ground working with our state and local counterparts responding to Hurricane Harvey,” Bowman’s statement said. “Anything to the contrary is yellow journalism.”

The statement did not point to any specific factual inaccuracies in Saturday’s story, besides accusing Biesecker of leaving out information about the EPA’s other efforts to monitor the toxic land sites, and the AP has not offered any corrections on the piece.

Well it’s great that while Houston pickles in a stew of acids the EPA has plenty of time to issue press releases attacking journalists.

Bowman later followed up with an additional email to POLITICO.

“We understand you are very focused on our press release; we hope you will apply the same focus to the facts, which include that a national reporter from a wire service publishing [sic] inaccurate and misleading stories about the agency and it’s [sic] staff on the ground,” Bowman wrote. “We think that is more important than who drafted a press release.”

The Associated Press on Sunday evening pushed back on the EPA’s claims.

“AP’s exclusive story was the result of on-the-ground reporting at Superfund sites in and around Houston, as well as AP’s strong knowledge of these sites and EPA practices,” it said in a statement. “We object to the EPA’s attempts to discredit that reporting by suggesting it was completed solely from ‘the comforts of Washington’ and stand by the work of both journalists who jointly reported and wrote the story.”

Any bets on how soon the EPA will be tweeting about FAKE NEWS?

Houston’s always been soggy. It probably wasn’t a very good place to build an enormous city, when you get right down to it.

No city could have withstood Harvey without serious harm, but Houston made itself more vulnerable than necessary. Paving over the saw-grass prairie reduced the ground’s capacity to absorb rainfall. Flood-control reservoirs were too small. Building codes were inadequate. Roads became rivers, so while hospitals were open, it was almost impossible to reach them by car.

…

Harvey is a humanitarian disaster. Ordinary Texans were defenseless against rising waters contaminated by sewage and dotted with floating colonies of fire ants. The confirmed death toll, 20 as of Aug. 30, is expected to rise as rescuers discover more bodies. Residents will return to damaged homes vulnerable to the spread of mold. Much of the damage, which could run to $100 billion or more by one estimate, is uninsured. “This will be the worst natural disaster in American history” in financial terms, Joel Myers, founder and president of AccuWeather, predicted in an Aug. 29 statement.

Sprawling Houston is a can-do city whose attitude is grow first, ask questions later. It’s the only major U.S. city without a zoning code saying what types of buildings can go where, so skyscrapers sometimes sprout next to split-levels. Voters have repeatedly opposed enacting a zoning law.

No to zoning law, but yes to public money after a disaster.

Houston is suffering now from the lack of an effective plan to deal with chronic flooding.

Attitude is partly to blame. Michael Talbott spent 35 years with the Harris County Flood Control District trying to protect Houston, mainly by seeking funds for widening drainage channels and bayous. But he resisted the notion that more drastic measures such as preserving green space and managing growth were required. Shortly before retiring as executive director in 2016, Talbott gave an interview to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in which he disputed the effect of global warming and said conservationists were antidevelopment. “They have an agenda … their agenda to protect the environment overrides common sense,” he said.

Wait. Protecting the environment – the one we all depend on for survival – is “an agenda” but unrestricted building with no thought for the environment that we all depend on for survival is not? How does that work exactly?

Why do people insist on portraying “the environment” as some kind of whimsical luxury dreamed up by latte-sipping Gwyneth Paltrows? Without “the environment” we have no food, no water, no breathable air, no survivable temperature, no anything. There’s no such thing as doing without “the environment,” but there is such a thing as environmental degradation so extreme that only insects can survive. If city and state and federal officials don’t have “an agenda” of preserving a livable environment then we’re all in big big trouble.

The fight in Texas is a microcosm of a national battle. The International Code Council, a Washington nonprofit made up of government officials and industry representatives, updates its model codes every three years, inviting state and local governments to adopt them. Last year the National Association of Home Builders boasted of its prowess at stopping codes for 2018 that it didn’t like. “Only 6 percent of the proposals that NAHB opposed made it through the committee hearings intact,” the association wrote on its blog. The homebuilders demonstrated their power again this year, when President Donald Trump reversed an Obama initiative restricting federally funded building projects in flood plains. “This is a huge victory for NAHB and its members,” the association blogged.

Not all homebuilders are OK with the organization’s antiregulatory bent. Ron Jones, a member of the NAHB board who builds houses in Colorado, says that while the first priority now is helping the victims, he hopes the storm will force new thinking. “There’s no sort of national leadership involved,” he says. “For them it’s just, ‘Hell, we’ll rebuild these houses as many times as you’ll pay us to do it.’ ”

Let’s not do it that way. That’s a bad way.