Atheist groups tending more Breitbart all the time.

Another frightening portent – Trump’s national security advisor is a Jack D Ripper type.

Days after Islamist militants stormed the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn reached a conclusion that stunned some of his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency: Iran had a role in the attack, he told them.

Now, he added, it was their job to prove it — and, by implication, to show that the White House was wrong about what had led to the attack.

Mr. Flynn, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen to be his national security adviser, soon took to pushing analysts to find Iran’s hidden hand in the disaster, according to current and former officials familiar with the episode. But like many other investigations into Benghazi, theirs found no evidence of any links, and the general’s stubborn insistence reminded some officials at the agency of how the Bush administration had once relentlessly sought to connect Saddam Hussein and Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

He just decided Iran had a role, and it was his underlings’ job to find evidence – and when they couldn’t, that was because they were being disobedient.

Not what you want in a national security advisor.

Many of those who observed the general’s time at the agency described him as someone who alienated both superiors and subordinates with his sharp temperament, his refusal to brook dissent, and what his critics considered a conspiratorial worldview.

Those qualities could prove problematic for a national security adviser, especially one who will have to mediate the conflicting views of cabinet secretaries and agencies for a president with no experience in defense or foreign policy issues.

“could prove problematic”=will be extremely dangerous.

The new job will give Mr. Flynn, 57, nearly unfettered access to the Oval Office. Whether it is renewed bloodletting in Ukraine, a North Korean nuclear test or a hurricane swamping Haiti, he will often have the last word with Mr. Trump about how the United States should react.

When he got the job as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency he told his underlings the One Big Truth.

During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.

Well you can see why he and Trump have rapport. They’re both egomaniacal assholes who think they’re always right and act accordingly.

It’s a profoundly stupid way to think, though, especially for someone in a leadership job. Of course the boss is not always right. Nobody is always right, and bosses who block the unfettered advice and knowledge of subordinates are baaaaad bosses.

But it’s ok, because it’s only national security and foreign affairs and trivial shit like that.

Current and former employees said Mr. Flynn had trouble adjusting his style for an organization with a 16,500-person work force that was 80 percent civilian. He was used to a strict military chain of command, and was at times uncomfortable with the often-messy give-and-take that is common among intelligence analysts.

Yet Trump is hiring lots of former generals for his cabinet.

The Washington Post reports:

The Army said Sunday that it will not approve an easement necessary for the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe in North Dakota, marking a monumental victory for the Native American tribes and thousands of others who have flocked in recent months to protest the pipeline.

Officials in November had delayed the key decision, saying more discussion was necessary about the proposed crossing, given that it would pass very near the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose leaders have repeatedly expressed fears that a spill could threaten the water supplies of its people.

“Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it’s clear that there’s more work to do,” Jo-Ellen Darcy, the Army’s assistant secretary for civil works, said in a statement Sunday. “The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.”

Republicans are displeased.

U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) joined North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple in criticizing Sunday’s decision, saying it “sends a very chilling signal to others who want to build infrastructure in this country.”

“I’m encouraged we will restore law and order next month when we get a President who will not thumb his nose at the rule of law,” Cramer said in a statement. “I feel badly for the Corps of Engineers because of the diligent work it did on this project, only to have their Commander-in-Chief throw them under the bus.”

Donald Trump will not thumb his nose at the rule of law? Really? When he’s broken a good many laws, and will break a cascade more of them the minute he takes the oath of office?

Army officials said the consideration of alternative routes would be best accomplished through an environmental-impact statement with full public input and analysis, a process likely to take many months.

Will Trump be able to reverse the denial once he’s installed? I don’t know. If he can I expect he will.

The BBC has an annual series called 100 Women.

BBC 100 Women names 100 influential and inspirational women around the world every year. We create documentaries, features and interviews about their lives, giving more space for stories that put women at the centre.

One of this year’s influential and inspirational 100 is a woman who calls herself “a surrendered wife.”

Californian Kathy Murray says she saved her marriage by giving up trying to control her husband. Despite considering herself a feminist, she follows – and now teaches others – the approach of a controversial book called The Surrendered Wife, which tells women to stop nagging their partners and start treating them with more respect.

Gee, thanks, BBC. I’m sure that out of the 2 billion or so grown women on the planet, that was definitely one of the top 100 influential and inspirational women you needed to highlight.

Murray and her husband fought a lot. Then the lord spoke to her through a reactionary self-help book.

I was about to end my marriage when I picked up a book called The Surrendered Wife by Laura Doyle. I mean, they don’t teach us how to be successful in marriage in school and the women in my life didn’t share the secrets either.

It was incredibly humbling to recognise that I had something to do with why my marriage was failing and perhaps even why my first marriage failed. But it was also empowering.

I didn’t know I’d been disrespectful to my husband or even that I’d been controlling and critical.

I thought I was being helpful and logical. I just didn’t know that respect for men is like oxygen, so no wonder my husband was no longer interested in me sexually.

I’ll never forget the day I first apologised to my husband for being rude for correcting him in front of the children, or the day I said “whatever you think” when I’d previously been extremely opinionated about what he should do.

So what is the inspiration here? For women in general to surrender? The BBC finds that inspirational, does it?

Matt Taibibi on that windbag with one idea, Thomas Friedman.

“The folksiness will irk some critics … But criticizing Friedman for humanizing and boiling down big topics is like complaining that Mick Jagger used sex to sell songs: It is what he does well.” –John Micklethwait, review of Thank You for Being Late, in The New York Times

With apologies to Mr. Micklethwait, the hands that typed these lines implying Thomas Friedman is a Mick Jagger of letters should be chopped off and mailed to the singer’s doorstep in penance. Mick Jagger could excite the world in one note, while Thomas Friedman needs 461 pages to say, “Shit happens.”

It is what he does; it is not what he does well.

We will remember Friedman for interviewing 76 percent of the world’s taxi drivers, for predicting “the next six months will be critical” on 14 occasions over two and a half years (birthing the neologism, “the Friedman unit“), and for his unmatched, God-given ability to write nonsensical metaphors, like his classic “rule of holes”: “When you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

He tries too hard, and it’s incredibly grating. Friedman gets on my nerves so badly I can’t read him.

For nearly two decades now, Friedman has been telling us that something big is happening, technology is growing at a rate beyond the ability of humans to adapt (this is where the part about noticing everyone has a cell phone comes in), and that we have to stop doing things the old way and take a brave step into the future.

He wrote this column so many times that even four years ago – eight Friedman units – Hamilton Nolan wrote a piece in Gawker titled “Thomas Friedman writes his only column again” (Friedman’s “only column” has by now outlived hundreds of media outlets, Gawker and my own New York Press among them)…

A very conservative guess is that Friedman has written this column at least a hundred times. Maybe 200. Maybe more.

And he’s written all of them badly, I’ll wager.

Take the chapter about Mother Nature, which opens with a story about a day in July, 2015 when the heat index in southern Iran reached 163 degrees. That news item gives the author an opening to introduce the concept of a “black elephant,” an ominous (if you know Friedman) term apparently explained to him by environmentalist Adam Sweidan:

“[It is] a cross between a ‘black swan’ – a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications – and ‘the elephant in the room’: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

You would think he could just say, “The climate change problem is a cross between a black swan and the elephant in the room – or, as I like to call it, a Black Elephant.”

You would if you didn’t know he’s Thomas Friedman.

Read the whole thing.

Awkward. The Kennedy School of Government sponsored a chat session with people from the Clinton and Trump campaigns yesterday, and it was as collegial as you’d expect.

As Trump’s team basked in the glow of its victory and singled out for praise its campaign’s chief executive, Stephen K. Bannon, who was absent, the row of grim-faced Clinton aides who sat opposite them bristled.

Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri condemned Bannon, who previously ran Breitbart, a news site popular with the alt-right, a small movement known for espousing racist views.

“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” she said. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, fumed: “Do you think I ran a campaign where white supremacists had a platform?”

“You did, Kellyanne. You did,” interjected Palmieri, who choked up at various points of the session.

“Do you think you could have just had a decent message for white, working-class voters?” Conway asked. “How about, it’s Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t connect with people? How about, they have nothing in common with her? How about, she doesn’t have an economic message?”

How about, Kellyanne Conway is a lying sack of shit? What does Trump “have in common” with “white, working-class voters”? He has the white, of course, but so does Clinton. Does he have the working-class? No. His daddy was a prosperous real estate profiteer, and he himself is a worker-cheating builder of high-rises and golf courses.

The strangest criticism of the media, however, was by Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.

His complaint: Journalists accurately reported what Trump said.

“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

They understood that sometimes people get drunk and say what they really think about all those pesky Not Like Us people. But journalists aren’t supposed to report that!

Meghan Murphy points out what should be obvious: it’s misogyny to tell women to move over and shut up, but it’s the hip new thing to do.

Feminism! A movement by women, for women. Or is it something about… Equality…? For… People?

Depends on who you ask. According to a recent article at Bustle, it’s all pretty hard to pin down.

Suzannah Weiss writes, “A large part of feminism is obtaining equal treatment for women, so understandably, a lot of feminist efforts and rhetoric focus on women.”

You don’t say. Similarly, basketball players play basketball, and bankers work in banks, and bus drivers drive buses. Of course feminist efforts focus on women; what should they focus on, frogs?

Weiss goes on to explain that the way women talk about women’s subordination under patriarchy (also known as the reason feminism exists) can “unintentionally erase trans and non-binary people.” It’s a funny way of framing things… Similar to saying, for example, that Black Lives Matter “unintentionally erases” white people. Or that the labour movement’s focus on the working class “unintentionally erases” the upper class. Does the animal rights movement “unintentionally erase” non-animals? Do Indigenous rights activists “unintentionally erase” other groups marginalized by white supremacy and colonialism?

No. It’s only women. It’s only women who aren’t allowed to focus on their own issues in their own movements.

None of this is to say that the feelings and rights of people who identify as trans or “non-binary” don’t matter, it is only to say that the purpose of the women’s movement is to liberate the class of women, who are oppressed, as females, under patriarchy. (In other words, if you are female and you also identify as trans or “non-binary,” yes, this is still about you.) This should not be a controversial statement for anyone who claims interest in the feminist project, but nonetheless countless do-gooders have taken it upon themselves to condescendingly explain to women that they need to sit down and shut up about their own material reality, within their own movement.

Is that because everybody, deep down, secretly does think that women are stupid and feeble and really shouldn’t liberate themselves from oppression?

Your identity is your own choice, but that doesn’t change the fact that patriarchy exists as a means to legitimize male power over females (i.e. the class of people capable of giving birth). The notion that we should degender conversations about feminism suggests we pretend not to know who is oppressing whom, and why — a mindfuck if there ever was one. (Is it just folks vs. folks? Who are the folks? Why are some folks raping other folks?! It’s a mystery…)

Power to the folks.