Tilting

Apr 24th, 2017 4:44 pm | By

It could all just end you know.

It seems eternal because it’s what we know…which is to say, it’s an illusion that it’s eternal, or even all that stable.

Rachel Nuwer wrote a long read on the subject for the BBC.

Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change.

That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own, on the other hand, came as more of a surprise to Motesharrei and his colleagues. Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day.

Not to mention a lot of stuff we’re already familiar with, like the way poor people keep getting priced out of cities. I’m always wondering why that doesn’t lead to breakdown in the form of labor shortages.

“If we make rational choices to reduce factors such as inequality, explosive population growth, the rate at which we deplete natural resources and the rate of pollution – all perfectly doable things – then we can avoid collapse and stabilise onto a sustainable trajectory,” Motesharrei said. “But we cannot wait forever to make those decisions.”

But instead of making rational choices we do things like electing Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, some experts believe such tough decisions exceed our political and psychological capabilities. “The world will not rise to the occasion of solving the climate problem during this century, simply because it is more expensive in the short term to solve the problem than it is to just keep acting as usual,” says Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and author of 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. “The climate problem will get worse and worse and worse because we won’t be able to live up to what we’ve promised to do in the Paris Agreement and elsewhere.”

Because we’ll vote for people like Trump, who will make sure we don’t.

Complexity is expensive; it eats up a lot of resources. One explanation for the collapse of ancient Rome is that it got so complex it couldn’t keep up with the expense.

So far, modern Western societies have largely been able to postpone similar precipitators of collapse through fossil fuels and industrial technologies – think hydraulic fracturing coming along in 2008, just in time to offset soaring oil prices. Tainter suspects this will not always be the case, however. “Imagine the costs if we have to build a seawall around Manhattan, just to protect against storms and rising tides,” he says. Eventually, investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns, leading to fiscal weakness and vulnerability to collapse. That is, he says “unless we find a way to pay for the complexity, as our ancestors did when they increasingly ran societies on fossil fuels.”

There will be refugees, and resistance to refugees – like now only more so.

Meanwhile, a widening gap between rich and poor within those already vulnerable Western nations will push society toward further instability from the inside. “By 2050, the US and UK will have evolved into two-class societies where a small elite lives a good life and there is declining well-being for the majority,” Randers says. “What will collapse is equity.”

By 2050? How about now? How about 1985 or so?

I don’t have anything cheerful to say about all this.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »


All stories matter

Apr 24th, 2017 11:54 am | By

The Times writes up the making of a tv serial based on The Handmaid’s Tale.

Before the series even debuts on Wednesday, April 26, references to “The Handmaid’s Tale” — shorthand for repressive patriarchy — seem ubiquitous. A photo of a group of male Republicans at the White House debating maternity services with nary a woman in sight earned the social media hashtag #Gilead. Last month, women in Handmaids’ red dresses and bonnets sat side-by-side in the Texas State Capitol to protest anti-abortion measures under consideration.

In short the dystopian premise is horrifyingly more plausible than it was a year ago.

It was still the Obama era when Hulu pursued the property two years ago, as part of a strategy to broaden its identity from a glorified video recorder to a producer of original programming. The showrunner Bruce Miller threw his hat in the ring when Ilene Chaiken, who had been developing the adaptation at MGM, departed for “Empire.” A veteran writer-producer on shows including “E.R.” and “Eureka,” Mr. Miller had been obsessed with the novel since reading it as an undergraduate at Brown, even having his agent continually check to see if the film or TV rights were available.

“Offred spoke to me,” Mr. Miller said. “She’s in this nightmarish situation but she keeps her funny cynicism and sarcasm. She finds really interesting ways to pull levers of power and express herself.”

But Mr. Miller wasn’t a shoo-in for showrunner because producers were looking for a woman, he recalled. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been a seminal rite-of-passage novel for many young women for over three decades; a feminist sacred text.

“It’s sacred to me, too,” Mr. Miller said. “But I don’t feel like it’s a male or female story; it’s a survival story.”

Uhhhhhhhh…well that’s why the producers should have gone on looking for a woman until they found one. Here’s the thing: it is a “female” story. So much so. It’s about what life is like for actual women right now in some parts of the planet, like Saudi Arabia for instance. It’s not about what life is like for people in general in a theocracy, it’s about how theocracy grinds women into the dirt. It is a female story.

However.

“I was incredibly, and am still incredibly mindful, of the fact that I’m a boy,” Mr. Miller said. “You always try to find people who support your deficits.”

To that end, when Mr. Miller finished writing the first two episodes, he sent them to Ms. Atwood; she approved. He made sure his writing staff was almost entirely female, and hired women to direct all but two of the 10 episodes.

I hope they’re all clear that it’s a patriarchal theocracy, not that other kind of theocracy. (That’s a joke, because all theocracies are patriarchal. That’s the point of them. The first thing Islamists do when they take over is shove all the women into hijab or worse.)

Gilead is not technically a futuristic society, but a backward (or sideways) glance. Ms. Atwood is something of a scholar of Puritanism, and she said every horrific episode in the story happened somewhere in history already, whether stonings or enslavement, reproductive restrictions or forbidding women to read.

“The theory being that if human beings have done it once they can do it again,” said Ms. Atwood, who recently received the National Book Critics Circle lifetime achievement award, and at 77, seems more current than ever.

Yeah those second-wavers, man.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 7 comments


The first step towards embracing femaleness

Apr 24th, 2017 10:36 am | By

I read this thing on a self-described trans dating site yesterday, and found it puzzling in several ways. It’s a “Femininity Guide For Trans Women.”

Trans Women are unapologetically fashion conscious; they have an insatiable desire to look more feminine.

That seems insulting. Surely trans women are like people in general: various. Surely they don’t all have an insatiable desire to look more feminine.

Also what is “feminine”? But more on that later.

Just like cisgender women, they always want to look younger and prettier.

That’s insulting to both. It’s not true that “cisgender” women always want to look younger and prettier. That’s a sexist and belittling stereotype about women.

However, after the sex reassignment surgery, many transgender women find themselves at the end of their wits on how to look more feminine. It is important for transsexual women to understand that clothes, cosmetics, and accessories are not the only aspects of femininity, as femininity encompasses more than physical appearance.

Yes, it also includes being weak and submissive. Welcome to the party, ladies!

Unfortunately, even though transsexual women have a womanly gender inclination, they were not brought up as women. As a result, when they are “reborn” after the sex reassignment surgery, they can face some challenges as they learn to embrace their femininity. The first step towards embracing femaleness should be having a firm grasp on what it means to be female. This involves reading and researching about femininity and, if needed, hiring a femininity coach.

What?

How can that even make sense? The first rule is that “Trans women are women.” The second rule is that they were too so brought up as women, no matter how hard their parents and teachers denied it. They never had male privilege, they never received male socialization, and they were always female. Having to take lessons in being female makes no sense in that context.

Being female is as much mental as it is physical. The way you think, therefore, is the cornerstone of being feminine. If you think you are sexy, then you should walk and talk as though you are the goddess of femininity. Understanding that femaleness is both a state of mind and a physical state is a key factor in unlocking your feminine nature.

And that’s what “being female” is, from soup to nuts: it’s thinking you’re sexy. That’s all there is to it. Women are The Things That Are Sexy.

Some of the main areas that transgender woman should concentrate on improving are how they move and talk. First, it is important to analyze your current movements and identify any areas that are overtly manly and abrupt. A woman is supposed to be gentle in her movements; she should be polished, graceful, and decorous. All of these traits should be readily apparent to everyone the moment you walk into a room. How you sit down and carry yourself should be in line with your feminine side. When seated, for example, your legs should never be apart; they should be neatly closed together and tucked under you.

In other words you should look and act and sit like Doris Day circa 1955.

Your voice should be girly, and then, of course, you must

SMILE

Just like the old song says, “You’re never fully dressed without a smile.” To be more feminine, you need to know how to smile like a woman. A smile not only brightens up your face, but it also makes you look friendlier and more welcoming, traits both associated with femininity and womanly charm.

Trans Women

So, when the man interrupts you every time you speak, smile. When the man catcalls you on the street, smile. When the man gropes you on the bus, smile.

And carry a purse.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 19 comments


The President told the astronauts they need to speed up

Apr 24th, 2017 9:35 am | By

Bahahahaha Trump is telling astronauts to hurry up and get to Mars in the next three years.

At a push, he wants people on the planet by the end of his second term, which would come in 2025 if he were to be elected again. The President told the astronauts that they need to speed up to meet his target.

Does Trump think the astronauts do the engineering? Does he think astronauts are the only people there are at NASA?

Nasa’s plan of a mission to Mars by the 2030s was already highly ambitious. It has been funded through a bill that Mr Trump just recently signed into law – which the astronauts had to remind him of during the video.

It wasn’t clear whether or not Mr Trump was joking about the new, highly ambitious target. Putting people on Mars will require technical and specialist equipment far beyond any space mission so far, which astronauts pointed out during the call was only now being invented and built.

It was a huge feat to get the Rover to Mars. But when you add humans you’re on a whole different level of difficulty and expense. I think the ambition to put humans on Mars is bonkers, frankly. Send more Rovers, instead.

The President has actively supported exploration of other planets like Mars, even taking funding away from Nasa’s earth science work to focus instead on missions into our own solar system. And he is being supported by Elon Musk, who also wants humans to move to Mars and is invested in doing so through his SpaceX private spaceflight company.

Sigh. All about the flash and the cowboyism, at the expense of exploration and new knowledge.

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Chemistry, ratings, cable news

Apr 24th, 2017 9:12 am | By

Donnie from Queens filled us in on the French election today.

You get the feeling he’s not sure where France is? And knows nothing whatever about it?

The AP interviewed him on Friday. The transcript is scary.

I think I’ve established amazing relationships that will be used the four or eight years, whatever period of time I’m here. I think for that I would be getting very high marks because I’ve established great relationships with countries, as President el-Sissi has shown and others have shown. Well, if you look at the president of China, people said they’ve never seen anything like what’s going on right now. I really liked him a lot. I think he liked me. We have a great chemistry together.

No, he didn’t “like” you, Donnie. That’s not what this is about. It’s not about chemistry. It’s not about gazing into his eyes. It’s not about any of that. You need to grow up now.

I’ve developed great relationships with all of these leaders. Nobody’s written that. In fact, they said, “Oh, well, he’s not treating them nicely,” because on NATO, I want them to pay up. But I still get along with them great, and they will pay up. In fact, with the Italian prime minister yesterday, you saw, we were joking, “Come on, you have to pay up, you have to pay up.” He’ll pay.

It’s not about personal relationships. Good ones can make discussions easier, yes, but normal sane adult heads of state don’t make decisions for their countries based on their personal relationships with heads of state.

AP: Did he say that? In your meeting? Your private meeting?

TRUMP: He’s going to end up paying. But you know, nobody ever asked the question. Nobody asked. Nobody ever asked him to pay up. So it’s a different kind of a presidency.

And not in a good way.

TRUMP: But things change. There has to be flexibility. Let me give you an example. President Xi, we have a, like, a really great relationship. For me to call him a currency manipulator and then say, “By the way, I’d like you to solve the North Korean problem,” doesn’t work. So you have to have a certain flexibility, Number One. Number Two, from the time I took office till now, you know, it’s a very exact thing. It’s not like generalities. Do you want a Coke or anything?

AP: I’m OK, thank you. No. …

TRUMP: But President Xi, from the time I took office, he has not, they have not been currency manipulators. Because there’s a certain respect because he knew I would do something or whatever. But more importantly than him not being a currency manipulator the bigger picture, bigger than even currency manipulation, if he’s helping us with North Korea, with nuclear and all of the things that go along with it, who would call, what am I going to do, say, “By the way, would you help us with North Korea? And also, you’re a currency manipulator.” It doesn’t work that way.

Ah. It’s nice to have him explaining these things to us clueless mortals. Very sadly, very very sadly, the media don’t all see it that way. They’re stupid.

And the media, some of them get it, in all fairness. But you know some of them either don’t get it, in which case they’re very stupid people, or they just don’t want to say it. You know because of a couple of them said, “He didn’t call them a currency manipulator.” Well, for two reasons. Number One, he’s not, since my time. You know, very specific formula. You would think it’s like generalities, it’s not. They have — they’ve actually — their currency’s gone up. So it’s a very, very specific formula. And I said, “How badly have they been,” [recording inaudible] … they said, “Since you got to office they have not manipulated their currency.” That’s Number One, but much more important, they are working with us on North Korea. Now maybe that’ll work out or maybe it won’t. Can you imagine?

He sure showed them.

He’s surprised it turns out that being president is a big job. I guess he thought it was mostly just waving hello.

AP: Can I ask you, over your first 100 days — you’re not quite there yet — how do you feel like the office has changed you?

TRUMP: Well the one thing I would say — and I say this to people — I never realized how big it was. Everything’s so (unintelligible) like, you know the orders are so massive. I was talking to —

AP: You mean the responsibility of it, or do you mean —

TRUMP: Number One, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area — you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away — and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet …. every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. (unintelligible) … This is involving death and life and so many things. … So it’s far more responsibility. (unintelligible) ….The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world. The second-largest company in the world is the Defense Department. The third-largest company in the world is Social Security. The fourth-largest — you know, you go down the list.

AP: Right.

TRUMP. It’s massive. And every agency is, like, bigger than any company. So you know, I really just see the bigness of it all, but also the responsibility. And the human responsibility. You know, the human life that’s involved in some of the decisions.

Apparently he hadn’t realized that before.

It’s mind-numbing. He hadn’t realized that before. He’s so stupid and out of it that he’s telling a reporter that he hadn’t realized before that for instance dropping bombs means “people could have been killed.” I guess he thought they just got a headache or something. He’s telling a reporter he’s surprised that the US is bigger than a company.

He’s always worse than you think possible. Every, every time.

I’ll tell you the other thing is (unintelligible). I used to get great press. I get the worst press. I get such dishonest reporting with the media. That’s another thing that really has — I’ve never had anything like it before. It happened during the primaries, and I said, you know, when I won, I said, “Well the one thing good is now I’ll get good press.” And it got worse. (unintelligible) So that was one thing that a little bit of a surprise to me. I thought the press would become better, and it actually, in my opinion, got more nasty.

There’s a reason for that, Donald Trump. It’s because you’re terrible. It’s because you’re the worst president any of us have ever seen. That’s the reason. You’re bad at this thing you feel entitled to do, and we don’t like that, and the press are part of the “we” who don’t like it.

They talk about his address to Congress.

TRUMP: A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.

AP: You seem like you enjoyed it.

TRUMP: I did. I did. I believed in it and I enjoyed it. It was a great feeling to introduce the wife of a great young soldier who died getting us very valuable information.

Oh, jesus. He said that. He said it was a great feeling to introduce the wife of a great young soldier who died. He said it was a great feeling.

Then he talks about his chemistry with Xi some more. Then he talks about the election yet again.

AP: … is do you think you have the right team in place for your next 100 days?

TRUMP: Yes. I think my team has been, well, I have different teams. I think my military team has been treated with great respect. As they should be. I think my other team hasn’t been treated with the respect that they should get. We have some very talented people, and very diverse people.

AP: Do you mean your White House team when you say that?

TRUMP: Yeah, my White House team. I think Reince (Priebus) has been doing an excellent job. I think that, you know, this is a very tough environment not caused necessarily by me. Although the election has, you know, look, the Democrats had a tremendous opportunity because the electoral college, as I said, is so skewed to them. You start off by losing in New York and California, no matter who it is. If, if Abe Lincoln came back to life, he would lose New York and he would lose California…

And he’s off on yet another rant about getting to 270 blah blah blah. Clinton spent more, Democrats don’t like him, Elijah Cummings is critical of him, blah blah blah. And then he gets back to the important stuff.

AP: And that’s one of the difficulties I think presidents have had is that you can have these personal relationships with people from the other party, but then it’s hard to actually change how people vote or change how people —

TRUMP: No I have, it’s interesting, I have, seem to get very high ratings. I definitely. You know Chris Wallace had 9.2 million people, it’s the highest in the history of the show. I have all the ratings for all those morning shows. When I go, they go double, triple. Chris Wallace, look back during the Army-Navy football game, I did his show that morning.

AP: I remember, right.

TRUMP: It had 9.2 million people. It’s the highest they’ve ever had. On any, on air, (CBS “Face the Nation” host John) Dickerson had 5.2 million people. It’s the highest for “Face the Nation” or as I call it, “Deface the Nation.” It’s the highest for “Deface the Nation” since the World Trade Center. Since the World Trade Center came down. It’s a tremendous advantage.

I have learned one thing, because I get treated very unfairly, that’s what I call it, the fake media. And the fake media is not all of the media. You know they tried to say that the fake media was all the, no. The fake media is some of you. I could tell you who it is, 100 percent. Sometimes you’re fake, but — but the fake media is some of the media. It bears no relationship to the truth. It’s not that Fox treats me well, it’s that Fox is the most accurate.

And the whole rest of the conversation, a few hundred more words, is about tv. He’s all about the tv.

It’s breathtaking. It’s as if he were literally about 8 years old, but without the curiosity children have at that age.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 9 comments
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Pants ablaze

Apr 23rd, 2017 12:32 pm | By

Trump put out a statement on Earth Day yesterday.

“My Administration is committed to keeping our air and water clean, to preserving our forests, lakes, and open spaces, and to protecting endangered species,” the statement read.

What a shameless liar. He just repealed a regulation protecting streams and other waterways a couple of weeks ago.

Here are some of the actions the Trump administration has taken on environmental issues so far:

There’s more.

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Let’s ask a kid to do it

Apr 23rd, 2017 11:59 am | By

It turns out that Trump didn’t know much about how to be president when he started.

Trump’s ascension to the presidency is an unlikely story. The flashy New York billionaire and former reality TV star cuts a very different image than any American president before him. He’s the first with no government, military or political experience. In an age of frustration with the political establishment on both sides of the aisle, that background had a certain appeal.

Only to people who don’t think.

No one would say that about any other job that relies on skills and knowledge. Why does anyone say it about as skill-heavy a job as being president? Why does anyone encourage this ridiculous idea? Pig-ignorance is not a good qualification for being president. I’m frustrated with the way airlines treat people; that doesn’t mean I want random bypassers assigned to fly the planes.

Trump’s unique background has also brought with it some problems. He’s faced setbacks and turnabouts, from immigration executive orders hung up in the courts and a failed health care overhaul attempt to changing his mind on his approach to Syria, Russia, China and NATO. All of it points to on-the-job training for Trump, who had a resume before taking office that could be considered, for a president, entry-level, experts say.

“This man is without experience, and it’s showing,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian and author of multiple books on presidents, from Roosevelt and Truman to Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. “Particularly in his dealings with Congress, he’s been an utter failure in the sense that he’s gotten nothing passed. He’s issuing all sorts of executive orders, like immigration limits; they’re failing. The attempt to get health care reform failed. I’d give him failing marks for his 100 days.”

Also there’s the little matter of making us an international pariah within a week of taking office.

Here’s the thing: experience is not the same thing as corruption, and the first does not entail the second. The way to deal with corruption is to deal with corruption, not to put incompetent novices in the top job…especially when they’re more corrupt than anyone who has ever sat in that chair before.

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Where’s your sense of humor?

Apr 23rd, 2017 11:30 am | By

Ah the joys of having an unregenerate racist as Attorney General.

Jeff Sessions on Sunday declined to apologize for his controversial remarks about Hawaii this week, which the attorney general dismissed as “an island in the Pacific” while criticising a judge’s decision to block Donald Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority nations.

“Nobody has a sense of humour any more,” Jeff Sessions said in an interview with ABC’s This Week, two days after he told CNN: “I wasn’t criticising the judge or the island.”

Speaking to CNN, Sessions added: “I think it’s a fabulous place and had a granddaughter born there. But I got to tell you, it’s a point worth making that a single sitting judge out of 600, 700 district judges can issue an order stopping a presidential executive order that I believe is fully constitutional, designed to protect the United States of America from terrorist attacks.”

He believes it’s fully constitutional – oh well then. The guy with the long ardent history of trying to undermine voting rights for non-white people believes Trump’s racist EO is fully constitutional; what more do we need?

Trump’s travel ban order was his second attempt to impose drastic limits on travellers and refugees from six Muslim-majority countries. In March Derrick Kahala Watson, the only Hawaiian-born federal judge now serving on a bench, issued a nationwide stay against it.

Watson found grounds for a violation of the constitutional prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion. His ruling, like those by other judges that stayed Trump’s first attempted travel ban in January, prompted furious complaint from the administration about supposed judicial overreach.

“This order is lawful,” Sessions said on Sunday, “it’s within [the president’s] authority constitutionally and [his] explicit statutory authority. We’re going to defend that order all the way up and so you do have a situation in which one judge out of 700 in America has stopped this order.”

Plus he’s a judge on an island in the Pacific, if you get my drift. I’d better spell it out for you, just in case you don’t. People from islands in the Pacific are brown. They’re not white, you see. They shouldn’t be able to tell white people not to exclude brown people from these great United States. Also, please have a sense of humor about it.

The controversy over Sessions’ description of Hawaii erupted on Tuesday. In an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin, the attorney general said: “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”

Attorneys and legal experts reacted with alarm that the country’s top prosecutor would question the authority of the judiciary, as the third independent branch of government to the president and Congress. Trump has repeatedly questioned the motives of judges who have ruled against, raising fears that he might undermine the legitimacy of courts.

Demoralizing, isn’t it. But never mind – just look on the funny side.

Hawaiians, including the state’s two US senators, both Democrats, reacted angrily to Sessions’ remarks. Senator Mazie Hirono said the remark was “dangerous, ignorant and prejudiced” and an attack “against the very tenets of our constitution and democracy”.

Well not all the tenets of our constitution. There’s the 3/5ths clause for instance. Sessions’s comments are in the spirit of that.

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That headline tho

Apr 22nd, 2017 11:44 am | By

The Times has a long-read article on the FBI and emails and Trump and yadda. One of the four reporters on the story tweeted it, and replies to the tweet are raking the Times over the coals for its previous reporting on the subject.

https://twitter.com/omearan/status/855832697368956929

The Times did that, and now we have an ignorant impulsive rage-prone narcissist as head of state.

https://twitter.com/nickosborne101/status/855812822529228800

https://twitter.com/twpolk/status/855780112792473601

https://twitter.com/tronburger/status/855806950717698048

https://twitter.com/TaylorDesloge/status/855816071936430080

It’s funny how ungrateful Trump is to the “failing” New York Times.

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BIG rally

Apr 22nd, 2017 10:51 am | By

Our orange Nazi will be holding another rally next weekend. How many rallies is that now? Four since he took office? Five?

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he is holding a rally the same night as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Next Saturday night I will be holding a BIG rally in Pennsylvania. Look forward to it,” the president tweeted.

A rally why? He never explains that. Why does he keep throwing rallies?

Well we know the main reason. He’s a narcissist with an unslakable ravenous hunger for attention and applause. It’s the best fun he knows of, standing facing a big crowd of people who all think he’s the coolest Nazi ever. But that’s not a genuine reason for doing it. A genuine reason would be one to do with the public welfare, or national security, or something related to being president. Just saying “I have a bottomless appetite for frenzied public adulation” doesn’t cut the mustard.

Trump tweeted in February that he would not be attending the annual dinner. The business mogul turned politician has had a rocky relationship with the media throughout the presidential campaign and during his presidency, often times calling some organizations, such as the New York Times and CNN, “fake news.”

The correspondents’ dinner benefits a journalism scholarship and recognizes reporters for their coverage of the president and is traditionally attended by major media outlets, celebrity guests and the president.

It is, frankly, a rather creepy and sycophantic institution. On the other hand, when the alternative is a president who calls the press “the enemy of the people,” it’s not so bad.

Updating to add: this will be the fourth rally since he took office…unless I’ve missed one. Google is being cautious about answering my question. The three I turned up were

  • Melbourne, Florida February 20
  • Nashville March 15
  • Louisville March 20

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So now the Feds are telling us lies

Apr 21st, 2017 3:40 pm | By

So apparently the Justice Department is now in the business of telling big American cities how horrible they are.

Today, the Department of Justice sent the attached letters to nine jurisdictions which were identified in a May 2016 report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General as having laws that potentially violate 8 U.S.C. § 1373.

Additionally, many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime. The number of murders in Chicago has skyrocketed, rising more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels. New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s “soft on crime” stance.

That sounds more like Trump on Twitter than like a normal DOJ.

Maggie Haberman of the Times tweeted a statement by the New York Police Commissioner:

The Commissioner tweeted 23 minutes ago:

Crime is down, murders are down, but the DOJ sees fit to put out a press release saying they’re up, and implying that it’s because IMMIGRANTS.

That’s both ugly and alarming.

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Forty-nine of their pimps were charged

Apr 21st, 2017 3:05 pm | By

Lots of “sex positive” guys here.

York Regional Police say an undercover operation has resulted in the arrests of dozens of men who sought to buy sex with children over the internet.

“We stopped 104 men from purchasing 104 children,” Det. Sgt. Thai Truong told a news conference Friday.

The four-year operation, dubbed Project Raphael, zeroed in on men who sought sex with girls they believed were between 13 and 16 years old.

How prudish and judgmental to think men shouldn’t be trying to fuck girls of 13.

The men, who ranged in age from 21 to 71, offered to pay between $80 and $300 for encounters of between 30 and 60 minutes with the children.

The children have agency you know. They could buy some really nice clothes with that money.

Officers posing as underage sex workers chatted online with the men, who were then charged with offences including communicating for the purposes of obtaining sexual services of a person under 18, and internet luring.

“When they arrived to essentially complete the transaction, they were arrested,” Truong said.

No tight little child pussies for them. Sad.

Truong said the investigation also brought police into contact with 85 girls who were involved in the sex trade online. Many of them showed signs of physical abuse.

“The world of human trafficking is an ugly world,” he said. “We see a lot of lives destroyed.”

Forty-nine of their pimps were charged, Truong said.

Ahem. We call pimps “sex worker assistants” now. Check your privilege.

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After listening for 10 minutes

Apr 21st, 2017 11:47 am | By

From Vox last week:

President Donald Trump recounted an absolutely astounding detail about one of his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping in comments published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday afternoon. Apparently, Trump came into his first meeting with the Chinese leader, in early April, convinced that China could simply eliminate the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear program. Xi then patiently explained Chinese-Korean history to Trump — who then promptly changed his mind.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” the president told the Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. … But it’s not what you would think.”

Typical, innit.

He was telling us the same thing about health insurance. “It turns out to be complicated,” he said wonderingly. Yes we know, Donnie, and since it was your idea to go after this job, you should have known too.

He finds that out about everything. People brief him and he runs around full of astonishment, telling everyone what he just learned and bragging that he’s the only person who knows it.

It’s simply staggering that the US head of state is so abjectly stupid that he feels no need to become informed about the issues he has to deal with. It’s staggering that he has no qualms about admitting that the Chinese president had to tell him some basic facts about China and North Korea – subjects he’d been babbling about on Twitter and in campaign speeches for months or years – and that those facts instantly changed his mind. It’s staggering that he doesn’t realize he should have learned those facts a long time ago.

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Out of place

Apr 21st, 2017 10:47 am | By

There were jokes flying around yesterday because Trump did another “Frederick Douglass is” thing yesterday, this time talking about Pavarotti in the present tense. I watched the scrap of video where he said it, but I was more struck by something else, or a group of other things – his awkwardness and stiffness as he read what his people had written for him to say in praise of Italy. It’s embarrassing.

First of all his reading itself is so awkward. People at that level usually have enough skill to deliver such remarks without staring down at the script quite so obviously. Then there’s that awful way he grimaces on certain words so that they come out sideways and he looks as if he’s stifling gas. (For example: “link together” at 7:40.) But most of all there’s his obvious lack of connection to the material he’s reading out. He knows nothing about Italy and doesn’t care.

He pronounces Verdi as “vurdee.”

He’s Donnie from Queens.

https://youtu.be/ST6z7nqUGxU

He starts talking at 7:10.

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The Sisters of “Charity”

Apr 21st, 2017 10:07 am | By

The Irish government, for some fuck-unknown reason, is giving ownership of an expensive new maternity hospital to…wait for it…the “Sisters of Charity” – you know, the order that tortured all those generations of children in industrial “schools” for the crime of being poor and / or born to unmarried parents. Emer O’Toole tells the story.

In 2009 the Ryan report into child sexual abuse in state-funded, church-run institutions was published, costing the Irish taxpayer €82m. It uncovered decades of abuse endured by children in the ostensible care of Catholic organisations including the Sisters of Charity. This is the order of nuns that will be given ownership of the €300m state-of-the-art new National Maternity Hospital by the Irish government, They will be the “sole owners” of the taxpayer-funded facility.

The Sisters of Charity were once involved in the operation of five residential schools. I will tell you some of what happened at just one of them.

At St Joseph’s Industrial school in Kilkenny, little girls as young as eight who complained of molestation by male lay staff were ignored, disbelieved or blamed for their abuse. Children were told their mothers were prostitutes. Children were fostered out to paedophiles. On three occasions the nuns hired paedophile lay workers, then failed to act when informed by children and sometimes by concerned adults about what was happening. Children were subject to severe corporal punishment right up until the 1990s.

I read quite a lot of the Ryan report when it came out. It’s enough to give you nightmares.

The Sisters of Charity also ran Magdalene Laundries, where unmarried mothers were incarcerated and forced to atone for their sins by working in punitive industrial conditions without pay. The McAleese report, published in 2013, aimed to determine the level of Irish state involvement in the Laundries. It found plenty. The inquiry cost the Irish taxpayer €11,000, and the government’s redress scheme up to €58m. The Sisters of Charity have refused to contribute anything to survivors.

Which is especially interesting because those laundries made money. The orders kept the money but refuse to pay any restitution to women who were kept in slave labor for years, and in some cases decades.

Just to recap: the state spends €82m on a report that uncovers heinous abuses perpetrated by Catholic orders against the children it paid them to care for; it pays out over €1bn to the victims, while the godly shirk financial and moral responsibility. It spends €11,000 on a report into state involvement in the Magdalene Laundries, and finds itself culpable. It commits another €58m compensating women, while the cassocked again decree themselves blameless.

And it learns what? That Ireland needs further integration of church and state? That Catholic nuns are simply stellar candidates to whom to entrust women and children? Sure, why not gift them the National Maternity Hospital?

One reason why not? Savita Halappanavar.

The minister for health, Simon Harris, has insisted that Catholic ownership of the hospital will not influence the care it provides.

We can consider another hospital run by the Sisters of Charity to see how much credence to give that. At St Vincent’s, nuns sit on the board of directors and doctors must sign contracts promising adherence to the ethos of the hospital. The ethos stated on the hospital’s website is “to bring the healing love of Christ to all we serve.” The first stated core value is “respecting the sacredness of human life and the dignity and uniqueness of each person”, which, anyone fighting for reproductive rights in Ireland can tell you, is code for “every zygote has a soul”. If and when Irish women finally win abortion rights, will the National Maternity Hospital implement them?

No. Many Catholic hospitals in the US refuse to perform abortions. Is it likely that Catholic hospitals in Ireland would do better?

Barrister Claire Hogan points out that in Ireland, where gruesome medical histories of symphysiotomy and “compassionate hysterectomy” stem from Catholic mores, religious ethos has historically affected women’s medical treatment. The Institute of Obstetricians has expressed concern that even Ireland’s extremely restrictive abortion law, which allows for termination only in the case of threat to the life of the mother, will be compromised in a Catholic-controlled institution.

As it was in the case of Savita Halappanavar. She needed an abortion following an incomplete miscarriage but the hospital refused to perform it, so she died of the massive infection that resulted from PRM (premature rupture of membrane).

It seems the Irish government wants to see more of that.

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Nostalgia moment

Apr 21st, 2017 9:39 am | By

This became famous among the infidels because of BillO’s absurd “the tide comes in, the tide goes out, you can’t explain that,” but it’s interesting from the first few seconds because of the way he won’t let Dave utter even one complete sentence even though Dave’s the invited guest and he’s answering BillO’s question. This is why I’ve always loathed O’Reilly: the bullying.

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A paragraph you have to read twice

Apr 20th, 2017 6:03 pm | By

Bradd Jaffy tweets:

Payouts related to sexual harassment allegations at Fox News now total more than 85 million dollars. The vast majority of it – up to $65 million – is going to the accused men.

The millions go to the men who did the harassing.

Jaffe is right: it’s hard to wrap your head around.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 9 comments


A Russian journalist known for his criticism of Putin

Apr 20th, 2017 5:53 pm | By

This happened:

A Russian journalist known for his criticism of President Vladimir Putin has died after being beaten by unknown attackers, it has been reported.

Nikolai Andrushchenko, 73, who co-founded the Novy Peterburg newspaper, was attacked six weeks ago and had been in a coma since then.

He died on Wednesday in St Petersburg.

His attackers have not been identified but Novy Peterburg editor Denis Usov linked the assault to articles in the newspaper about corruption in the city.

Mr Andrushchenko was a member of the St Petersburg city council from 1990 until 1993. He made his name writing about human rights issues and crime.

Our new best friend Russia.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog


More bangs

Apr 20th, 2017 4:42 pm | By

Paris:

One policeman has been shot dead and two others wounded in central Paris, French police say, with their suspected attacker killed by security forces.

A lone gunman opened fire before being killed as he fled the scene, police say. The Champs-Elysees was sealed off.

President Francois Hollande said that he was convinced the attack was “terrorist-related”.

So-called Islamic State (IS) said that one of its “fighters” had carried out the attack.

Islamist militancy is a major issue in the polls after recent mass attacks claimed by IS, with 238 people killed in jihadist attacks in France since 2015, according to data from AFP news agency.

I suppose this will increase votes for Marine Le Pen, and I also suppose this is what IS wants.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Talking to Dolezal in Spokane

Apr 20th, 2017 1:56 pm | By

Ijeoma Oluo talked to Rachel Dolezal for The Stranger.

Dolezal has argued many times that her insistence on black identity will not only allow her to live in the culture that she says matches her true self, but will also help free visibly black people from racial oppression by helping to destroy the social construct of race.

I am more than a little skeptical that Dolezal’s identity as the revolutionary strike against the myth of race is anything more than impractical white saviorism—at least when it comes to the ways in which race oppresses black people. Even if there were thousands of Rachel Dolezals in the country, would their claims of blackness do anything to open up the definition of whiteness to those with darker skin, coarser hair, or racialized features? The degree to which you are excluded from white privilege is largely dependent on the degree to which your appearance deviates from whiteness. You can be extremely light-skinned and still be black, but you cannot be extremely or even moderately dark-skinned and be treated as white—ever.

By turning herself into a very, very, very, very light-skinned black woman, Dolezal opens herself up to be treated as black by white society only to the extent that they can visually identify her as such, and no amount of visual change would provide Dolezal with the inherited trauma and socioeconomic disadvantage of racial oppression in this country.

Because it’s not exactly the same, is it. Adopting (some of) the outward appearances is not the same as living the experience from birth, is it.

When we have been together for three hours, I feel it’s time to ask The Question.

It’s the same question that other black interviewers have asked her. A question she seems to deeply dislike—so much so that she complains about the question in her book. But even in the book, it’s not a question she actually answers: How is her racial fluidity anything more than a function of her privilege as a white person?

If Dolezal’s identity only helps other people born white become black while still shielding them from the majority of the oppression of visible blackness, and does nothing to help those born black become white—how is this not just more white privilege?

Mind you, it could be just more white privilege without being harmful in and of itself…but that would depend on how Dolezal put it into practice, and especially on how she talked about it and explained it.

I try one more time to get an answer to this question, but from a different angle: “Where does the function of privilege of still appearing to the world as a white person play into this and into your identity as affiliating with black culture?”

Dolezal seems to struggle for a moment before answering: “I don’t know. I guess I do have light skin, but I don’t know that I necessarily appear to the world as a white person. I think that since the white parents did their TV tour on every national network, some people will forever see me as my birth category, as a white woman. But people who see me as that don’t see me really for who I am and probably are not seeing me as a white woman in some kind of a privileged sense. If that makes sense.”

It doesn’t.

It’s familiar though.

Maybe in a dusty Eastern Washington town like Spokane, where only 2 percent of the people are black, something as “exotic” as box braids might be enough to convince the locals that you are not white, but I cannot imagine this working elsewhere. I’m looking right at her. I know what white people look like. I decide to say so.

“Really? Like if you don’t say, ‘I’m black…’ because I’ve read a lot of interviews with other people who said when they first encountered you, people who’ve worked with you, that they automatically assumed you were white until you had asserted otherwise, vocally. I personally… like if I were to run across you in the street, I would assume that you were white.”

Dolezal sighs and looks at me as if I am truly all that is wrong with America. “Well, I guess it’s like in the eye of the beholder.”

It is obvious by then that Dolezal does not like me, but I don’t appear to be alone in that feeling. Throughout our conversation, I get the increasing impression that, for someone who claims to love blackness, Rachel Dolezal has little more than contempt for many black people and their own black identities.

The dismissive and condescending attitude toward any black people who see blackness differently than she does is woven throughout her comments in our conversation. It is not just our pettiness, it is also our lack of education that is preventing us from getting on Dolezal’s level of racial understanding. She informs me multiple times that black people have rejected her because they simply haven’t learned yet that race is a social construct created by white supremacists, they simply don’t know any better and don’t want to: “I’ve done my research, I think a lot of people, though, haven’t probably read those books and maybe never will.”

Ah yes, I recognize that too.

I point out that I am a black woman with a political-science degree who writes about race and culture for a living, who has indeed read “those books.” I find her blanket justification of “race is a social construct” overly simplistic. “Race is just a social construct” is a retort I get quite often from white people who don’t want to talk about black issues anymore. A lot of things in our society are social constructs—money, for example—but the impact they have on our lives, and the rules by which they operate, are very real. I cannot undo the evils of capitalism simply by pretending to be a millionaire.

No. No you can’t.

or a white woman who had grown up with only a few magazines of stylized images of blackness to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it’s the ultimate “you can be anything” success story of white America. Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn’t get enough of the Dolezal story.

Perhaps it really was that simple. I couldn’t escape Rachel Dolezal because I can’t escape white supremacy. And it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes—even this interview.

And with that, the anger that I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn’t center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort.

That too is familiar.

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