Oh guess what, the cladding on Grenfell Tower that went up like a torch wasn’t supposed to be there.

The cladding used on Grenfell Tower, which has been widely blamed for spreading the blaze, is banned in the UK on buildings of that height, Philip Hammond has said.

The chancellor told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: “My understanding is the cladding in question, this flammable cladding which is banned in Europe and the US, is also banned here.

“So there are two separate questions. One: are our regulations correct, do they permit the right kind of materials and ban the wrong kind of materials? The second question is: were they correctly complied with?

“That will be a subject that the inquiry will look at. It will also be a subject that the criminal investigation will be looking at.”

Regulations are there for a reason…

What qualities does one need to be a good leader? Prudence Gourguechon discovered that it’s not easy to find definitive answers to that question.

Although there are volumes devoted to outlining criteria for psychiatric disorders, there is surprisingly little psychiatric literature defining mental capacity, even less on the particular abilities required for serving in positions of great responsibility. Despite the thousands of articles and books written on leadership, primarily in the business arena, I have found only one source where the capacities necessary for strategic leadership are clearly and comprehensively laid out: the U.S. Army’s “Field Manual 6-22 Leader Development.”

That makes sense. They really need to know.

The Army’s field manual on leadership is an extraordinarily sophisticated document, founded in sound psychological research and psychiatric theory, as well as military practice. It articulates the core faculties that officers, including commanders, need in order to fulfill their jobs. From the manual’s 135 dense pages, I have distilled five crucial qualities:

Trust

According to the Army, trust is fundamental to the functioning of a team or alliance in any setting: “Leaders shape the ethical climate of their organization while developing the trust and relationships that enable proper leadership.” A leader who is deficient in the capacity for trust makes little effort to support others, may be isolated and aloof, may be apathetic about discrimination, allows distrustful behaviors to persist among team members, makes unrealistic promises and focuses on self-promotion.

I assumed before I read the paragraph that “trust” meant the trust of others in the leader, but no, it means the leader’s ability to trust other people. That’s very interesting.

Discipline and self-control

…The disciplined leader does not have emotional outbursts or act impulsively, and he maintains composure in stressful or adverse situations.

…In psychiatry, we talk about “filters” — neurologic braking systems that enable us to appropriately inhibit our speech and actions even when disturbing thoughts or powerful emotions are present. Discipline and self-control require that an individual has a robust working filter, so that he doesn’t say or do everything that comes to mind.

Aka impulse control aka self-inhibition. It’s that prefrontal thing that takes so long to develop.

Judgment and critical thinking

These are complex, high-level mental functions that include the abilities to discriminate, assess, plan, decide, anticipate, prioritize and compare. A leader with the capacity for critical thinking “seeks to obtain the most thorough and accurate understanding possible,” the manual says, and he anticipates “first, second and third consequences of multiple courses of action.” A leader deficient in judgment and strategic thinking demonstrates rigid and inflexible thinking.

The fourth is self-awareness, aka knowing one’s own faults.

Empathy

Perhaps surprisingly, the field manual repeatedly stresses the importance of empathy as an essential attribute for Army leadership. A good leader “demonstrates an understanding of another person’s point of view” and “identifies with others’ feelings and emotions.” The manual’s description of inadequacy in this area: “Shows a lack of concern for others’ emotional distress” and “displays an inability to take another’s perspective.”

It’s not all that surprising, really, since a leader by definition has to interact with people. An engineer can do without empathy, but a leader not so much.

People are walking away.

Six members of the group that advises the White House on HIV and Aids have quit their posts – claiming that the Trump administration does not care about the issue.

In a letter of resignation that was published on a US news site, the experts claimed the government had no meaningful policy on tackling Aids, failed to listen to advice from those working in the field, and actually promoted legislation that harmed individuals living with the disease.

Other than that, everything’s great.

“We have dedicated our lives to combating this disease and no longer feel we can do so effectively within the confines of an advisory body to a president who simply does not care,” wrote Scott Schoettes, project director at Lambda Legal, a New York-based LGBTQ-rights group and a member of the advisory panel.

The council members said that Mr Trump took down the Office of National Aids Policy website when he took office and had failed to appoint anyone to lead the White House Office of National Aids Policy.

“We will be more effective from the outside, advocating for change and protesting policies that will hurt the health of the communities we serve and the country as a whole if this administration continues down the current path,” the letter said.

Don’t worry, he’s making Murica great again.

Inside Higher Ed reports:

The Department of Education last week outlined changes to civil rights investigations that advocates fear will mean less consistent findings of systemic discrimination at colleges.

Under the Obama administration, certain types of civil rights complaints would trigger broader investigations of whether a pattern of discrimination existed at a school or college.

But Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, told regional directors for the Office for Civil Rights in a memo that the Department of Education would no longer follow those guidelines. In detailing the latest civil rights shift under Secretary Betsy DeVos, Jackson wrote that the department was setting aside existing rules and empowering investigators with more discretion to clear case backlogs and address complaints in a timely manner.

Ah yes. Treating everything as a one off does indeed speed things up. Consider Grenfell Tower for instance. If there’s no need to see it as part of a pattern of saving money by not getting the fire retardant building material, then it becomes just a matter of tidying up and moving on.

The shift is significant because many of the violations OCR has found in recent years have involved systemic issues that go beyond the original complaint that prompted investigators to look into a college or school.

Former department officials and advocates for victims of discrimination say it’s critical to examine individual cases in the context of wider practices at an institution — and to apply that standard consistently across various OCR offices.

That’s critical unless you’re a libertarian. If you’re a libertarian, there’s no such thing as a “wider practice.” All is random and uncaused, a matter of free people freely choosing, and there’s no need to look for patterns and explanations.

Let’s look back at a little history: the FBI and the Kennedy brothers versus Martin Luther King.

Beveryl Gage starts with a typed anonymous letter sent to King in late 1964.

The unnamed author suggests intimate knowledge of his correspondent’s sex life, identifying one possible lover by name and claiming to have specific evidence about others. Another passage hints of an audiotape accompanying the letter, apparently a recording of “immoral conduct” in action. “Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure,” the letter demands. It concludes with a deadline of 34 days “before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

“There is only one thing left for you to do,” the author warns vaguely in the final paragraph. “You know what it is.”

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter, nearly 50 years ago, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him to kill himself — and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite its half-baked prose, self-conscious amateurism and other attempts at misdirection, King was certain the letter had come from the F.B.I. Its infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to see King discredited. A little more than a decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King’s suspicion.

Why? Because Communists.

The F.B.I.’s entanglement with King began not as an inquiry into his sex life but as a “national security” matter, one step removed from King himself. In 1961, the bureau learned that a former Communist Party insider named Stanley Levison had become King’s closest white adviser, serving him as a ghostwriter and fund-raiser. The following year, Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison’s home and office, and the White House advised King to drop his Communist friend.

Or, according to John Meroney in The Atlantic in 2011, they told him to.

In the summer of 1963, Hoover wasn’t the only one preoccupied with King. So was the Kennedy White House. That was because one of King’s closest advisers, Stanley David Levison, and another man who ran one of King’s offices, Jack O’Dell, were secret Communist Party operatives. For at least a year, the president and his attorney general brother had been receiving classified data, transcripts of wiretapped telephone calls (which they sanctioned), and intelligence reports confirming the men’s affiliation with the Soviet-controlled Party. This information also chronicled the work they were then doing for King.

President Kennedy didn’t worry about an espionage leak, or that the men would necessarily insert propaganda into King’s speeches—although some King advisers apparently did see to it that King’s plans to criticize communism (“that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us,” is how King said he intended to describe it) were scrapped. Rather, the president feared the political fall-out that would come if it were revealed that the nation’s foremost civil rights leader had advisers with ties to the Soviet Union. In May, President Kennedy told his brother he didn’t want the minister anywhere near him. “King is so hot that it’s like Marx coming to the White House,” he says on a White House tape.

But by June, the president had grown weary of the risks King was causing him and decided to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with the minister in Washington. In the Rose Garden, he exhorted King that Levison, was, as Kennedy described him, a “Kremlin agent.” Get rid of him, demanded the president.

Newt Gingrich spelled out the core issue while chatting at the National Press Club:

By the way, technically, the president of the United States cannot obstruct justice. President of the United States is the chief executive officer of the United States: if he wants to fire the FBI director, all he’s gotta do’s fire him.

https://youtu.be/tztFP8e0UFU

And yet, as many many people rushed to point out, that’s sure as hell not what Gingrich was saying when it was Bill Clinton in the cross-hairs. At that time he said the opposite.

So, is it bullshit, or is it true?

Clearly as a matter of outcome, it depends on who has the votes. As a matter of brute fact, it depends on power, not law and not morality.

But as a matter of moral fact? Yes of course the president can obstruct justice, and obviously Trump is trying hard to do just that.

Absurdly, Gingrich goes on to give what he calls a “very good test”:

If John F Kennedy had fired J Edgar Hoover over investigating and wiretapping Martin Luther King Junior, would people have thought it was obstruction. [smug nod]

John F Kennedy wasn’t the same person as Martin Luther King, so no, that is not a “very good test”; it’s a ridiculous test. Trump is trying to obstruct an investigation of himself.

Mueller and the FBI aren’t the only ones investigating Trump.

Not only did he allude through a tweet on Friday that he is the subject of an internal investigation by special counsel, but on the same day, an independent federal agency commissioned under Congress also said “grave concerns” were prompting an investigation into federal civil rights enforcement within his administration.

The United States Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan agency charged with advising the president and Congress on civil rights matters, unanimously approved a comprehensive two-year probe into the “degree to which current budgets and staffing levels allow civil rights offices to perform” their functions within the administration, said the agency in a statement.

The federal watchdog group became concerned about the Trump administration after several agencies announced budget and personnel cuts in departments that oversee civil rights. The “proposed cuts would result in a dangerous reduction of civil rights enforcement across the country, leaving communities of color, LGBT people, older people, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups exposed to greater risk of discrimination,” said the statement.

Huh. You mean Trump doesn’t have Absolute Power to defund all that and thus make it die and go away and get in the sea?

The commission, created under the Civil Rights Act and funded by Congress, expressed specific worry in seven agencies under the president, including the Department of Education and the Department of Justice.

The “repeated refusal” of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to commit to enforcing federal civil rights during Congressional testimony coupled with deep budget cuts within the agency’s Office of Civil Rights is “particularly troubling,” the agency added in the statement.

Well Trump could slash their budget some more and then there’d be no one left to issue statements.

The commission also wants to look into the Department of Justice, which it says has completely changed its priorities.

“Actions by the Department indicate it is minimizing its civil rights efforts,” the statement said. “For example, a majority of the Commission criticized DOJ’s decision to site Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in courthouses as a dangerous impediment to access to justice for all Americans,” the statement said.

The investigation will also look into the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Environmental Protection Agency and the Legal Services Corporation — which are all expected to slash budget and personnel that monitor civil rights.

But what about the civil rights of corporations? Those come first, surely.

While the commission does not have the ability to enforce the findings of its investigation, it will present the final report to Congress at the end of 2019. After that, it’s up to legislators to act.

Ah. Well we know where that will go then – straight into the bin. The trash bin; there won’t be any recycle bins by that time.

Via Women’s Liberation Front on Facebook:

Sometimes a pregnancy half fails. The membranes rupture before viability and an infection sets up shop in the uterus. Medically, the pregnancy has to end; whether the fetus is still alive or not does not matter. If an infected uterus is left unevacuated, the bacteria will eventually spread to the blood stream and it will be fatal. This is fact.

At times the body offers a consolation and goes into labor. It doesn’t seem like it at the time but it is more than a small mercy. When the uterus does not start contracting the patient has to choose: drugs to induce labor or a surgical procedure called dilation and evacuation (D&E). It is like starring in a horror movie where you choose the weapon.

Labor is labor. It hurts and can take days. A premature uterus, especially an infected one, often does not cooperate. Days of both grieving and waiting to grieve break even the strongest. No one has assigned fault, in fact everyone has said the opposite, but the pathways of sadness and self-doubt and blame cut deeper and deeper with each taunting contraction. A brain fuddled by lack of sleep, medication side effects, days without fresh air, and the stench of sweat from the bed sheets cannot possibly reframe this experience. When women tell me they “can’t even get this right” I want to cry.

he other medical option is a D&E, a surgical procedure to remove the pregnancy through the cervix. It requires more skill, medically speaking, than the labor. You only come by this skill if you have done a lot of second trimester abortions because that is exactly what it is, but harder because an infected uterus has the consistency of soft butter. Your instruments are like a hot knife. You are using a hot knife to remove sharp fragments from a bed of soft butter. Do it incorrectly and you damage the uterus, puncture the bowel, or cause catastrophic blood loss. The fact that your patient is already ill with infection makes every potential sequelae worse.

A D&E bypasses all of the emotional trauma of the labor and the decisions that come afterward about holding the body. The patient gets an anesthetic and afterward the physical part of the nightmare is over. Sometimes, if the infection is advanced, the medical team may recommend a D&E up front. The risks of a D&E performed by a well-trained individual are very low.

Some women chose labor but after a day or so it is clear their body has a different idea. An infected uterus can’t always be whipped into shape with oxytocin and prostaglandins. A few even refuse a D&E even when they are very ill if there is still a fetal heartbeat. As they wait for the uterus to labor correctly they get sicker and sicker. Bacteria is showering the blood stream. Their heart rate is unbelievably fast. Their blood work is ominous. The staff all look at each other in that way medical people do when we know we are on the precipice of something very bad. Eventually, the patient agrees to the D&E and the relief is palpable.

When you are the person who will do the D&E the patient is always relieved to see you. She either knows she doesn’t want to labor, can’t handle any more labor, or she knows she is very sick. Sepsis makes you feel as if you are dying, which you are.

Sometimes her partner glares. “There is still a heartbeat,” he might say or if there is not, “How come we need someone special for this?” He knows the answer, but he wants me to say it. If I don’t, I can’t save the life of the person dying in the bed, so I tell him that you can’t do a D&E’s without abortions. This irritates many because their narrative is that abortions are never needed and yet here they are needing one or needing help from someone who can only help because of abortion training.

Without abortion training there will soon be no one with the skill to do a D&E and the option will be induction of labor or a hysterectomy or a hysterotomy (a C-section, but this early it often wrecks the uterus for future childbearing). Both a hysterectomy and a hysterotomy are major surgeries and much more likely to have serious and even fatal consequences than a D&E, especially for pregnant women with infections.

D&E’s are now illegal in Texas (because of Senate Bill 8, passed last week) unless the pregnant person is very ill. How ill? I’m a gynecologist and I don’t know.

Christine Berry on “deregulation” and Grenfell Tower:

In the wake of the horrifying Grenfell Tower disaster, people are starting to ask questions about why reports on housing safety were sat on and ignored. And the finger is being pointed towards the government’s ‘war on red tape’ – more specifically, towards a little-known policy called ‘one-in, three-out regulation’.

Oh that – the Republicans and Trump have been promoting that here, too. For every new “regulation” aka protection, you have to remove three. Wham, just like that – no questions asked about whether the three removed are actually a life or death necessity or not.

[H]ere’s a quick primer on what people are talking about when they talk about things like ‘one in, three out’. The architecture the government has put in place has three main pillars, each of which are systematically designed to prevent new laws being passed and to privilege the interests of big business over ordinary people:

• ‘One in, three out’ (OITO). This means that no government department can introduce a new law that imposes a cost to business unless it can find another law to repeal that cuts costs to business by at least three times that amount. With the policy having been steadily ratcheting up for 7 years now, this basically means that new laws are nigh on impossible to introduce, because there is precious little left to cut.
• Impact assessments. This is the way civil servants have to assess proposed new laws to comply with OITO. All potential impacts have to have a price put on them, which immediately undervalues things that are hard to put a price on – like the benefits of clean air or safe homes. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because as far as OITO is concerned, the only number that matters is the cost to business: the benefits to society are literally irrelevant.
• The Regulatory Policy Committee. This is a quango with the power to give the green or red light to impact assessments, effectively vetoing new laws if they don’t think the OITO figures are good enough. It might sound like a bunch of technocrats, but it’s actually stuffed with corporate lobbyists. Stephen and I found that from 2013-2015 they met almost exclusively with other lobbyists, and boasted about being an “effective brake” on government’s ability to pass laws. Yes, we are putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

It just assumes that laws and regulations / protections are a bad, toxic thing, all of them, by definition.

The key thing to understand about this regime is that it applies to any law that costs businesses money. That includes the cost of paying the minimum wage, the cost of building diesel engines that don’t emit poisonous fumes – and, yes, the cost of making our homes safe to live in.

You know, laws that have made things slightly less shit over the past century or so, and could do more along those lines if it weren’t for these people who think laws are of the devil.

The appalling fate of the Grenfell residents has laid bare the human consequences of this inhuman policy. And they are not the first casualties in this war on protections. Scientists have found that handing control of plans to cut salt and sugar in food to the likes of McDonalds and Mars may have contributed to 6,000 deaths a year. The government raised the speed limit for lorries on single carriageways in order to cut costs for haulage companies, despite acknowledging it would likely cause a 14% increase in accidents.

As long as someone somewhere is making some money, that’s all that matters. Your health and safety? Pffft – not their problem, Snowflake.

Rod Rosenstein issued a strange statement last night.

“Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories attributed to anonymous ‘officials,’ particularly when they do not identify the country — let alone the branch or agency of government — with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated,” Mr. Rosenstein said in the statement.

He did not cite specific reports. The Justice Department released Mr. Rosenstein’s statement after 9 p.m., a few hours after The Washington Post reported that the special counsel was investigating the business dealings of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser. That report was attributed to unnamed American officials.

Asked about the impetus for the statement, a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. Mr. Rosenstein did not respond to an email seeking comment on Thursday night.

So maybe it had nothing to do with the Post story or Trump or Russia or in fact any specific thing at all, maybe it was just a piece of Good Advice he felt moved to share with us late one Thursday for no particular reason. Maybe he’s just a funny guy.

Preet Bharara seems not to think so.

Americans should also exercise caution before accepting as true lies about firing of FBI Director & defamation of a war hero special counsel pic.twitter.com/KQUPpppcAI

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) June 16, 2017

I just saw on the BBC that three victims have been named, and one of them is Khadija Saye. The artist Khadija Saye.

It’s been a real journey, tears shed, highs and lows, but mama, I’m an artist exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and the blessings are abundant!

Her Facebook cover photo is also unbearably poignant:

Perhaps the view from the flat she shared with her mother on the 20th floor.

Isaac Shawo age 5:

Syrian refugee Mohammed Alhajali