The BBC tells us:

Victims of forced marriages overseas will no longer have to take out loans to pay for their return to the UK.

It emerged last week in an investigation by The Times that those unable to cover flights, food and shelter were made to take out an emergency loan.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the policy was changing as victims “may have endured particular suffering”.

Existing loans will be written off and the women’s passports returned.

The Foreign Office is going to try to get the money back from the people who arranged the forced marriage, which seems only fair.

Deutsche Welle reports that the Trump administration has downgraded the diplomatic status of the EU delegation to the US.

The unannounced move by the US State Department, which has not previously been reported, downgraded the EU delegation’s diplomatic status in Washington from member state to international organization.

“We don’t exactly know when they did it, because they conveniently forgot to notify us,” an EU official who is familiar with the matter told DW in an interview.

“I can confirm that this has not been well received in Brussels,” the person said, adding that the issue and an official EU response was still being discussed.

Welllll who needs Europe when we can have Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia? Europe is for what Trump calls elleetissts.

A Washington-based diplomat of an EU member state also confirmed the downgrade and denounced the move.

“This is clearly not simply a protocol issue, but this is something that has a very obvious political motive,” the person said. The diplomat added that the negative view of the EU mission downgrade was shared by the majority of member states.

After discovering the downgrade, EU diplomats in Washington reached out to the State Department, which is responsible for diplomatic affairs, for clarification. “They have told us that they forgot to notify us and that this is a decision they have taken because that is apparently what the chief of protocol thinks is the proper thing to do,” the person said.

Meaning, it’s what the Trumpies told them to do.

The diplomatic downgrade of the EU’s mission in Washington appears to be in line with what is widely being perceived as an anti-EU stance by the Trump administration.

Trump was an avid supporter of Britain’s exit from the European Union during his presidential campaign, and as president has repeatedly lashed out at the European Union on issues such as trade and defense.

Europe isn’t authoritarian enough for Trump’s tastes.

Russell Berman in the Atlantic:

Eric Young is the president of the union that represents the approximately 30,000 employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons who are working during the government shutdown.

Young’s members, scattered at 122 facilities located in largely rural areas across the country, aren’t being paid and don’t know when their next paycheck will come. Like the leaders of virtually every federal-employee union during the past three weeks, he has condemned the shutdown and its toll on innocent workers as “unconscionable.”

“My personal opinion,” Young told me over the phone from his office in Arkansas, “is that it constitutes involuntary servitude.”

Neither Young nor any of his partners in union leadership, however, will urge their members to do the one thing that would seem most natural for employees facing the same treatment in the private sector: If they don’t pay you, stay home.

“We can’t call or advocate for a strike,” Young said.

Why? Because of the highly regressive Taft-Hartley act of 1947, which made it illegal for federal employees to go on strike. As far as I know it’s also illegal to force people to work for no pay, but heads the bosses win, tails the workers lose.

The current shutdown is a partial one affecting roughly 800,000 federal employees. Roughly half of them are on furlough, while the other half, whose jobs are considered essential to public health and safety, must report to work even though Congress has not appropriated the funds to pay them. This category includes the Secret Service agents who protect the president and his family, the Transportation Security Agents, pilots, and air-traffic controllers who keep the aviation system running, the corrections officers who staff federal prisons, and, yes, the Border Patrol agents who guard the southern divide with Mexico along which Trump wants to build a wall.

If they don’t show up, “they’d be considered absent without leave,” said Jacque Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, by far the largest union representing federal employees. “When they’re told to come to work, they are required to come to work.” An awol designation could lead to disciplinary action, including termination. For longtime government employees, that could put in jeopardy a federal pension they’ve spent a career accruing, union leaders said.

Trump doesn’t care. He said last weekend that they will “make an adjustment,” which is meaningless, but he doesn’t care. He’s not having to do without, and neither is Princess Ivanka, and that’s all he cares about.

Meanwhile this vehicle we’re trapped in is racing toward the cliff.

President Trump slammed his hand on a table and stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders on Wednesday after Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said she would not fund a wall along the southern border, dramatically escalating the confrontation over the government shutdown.

Stunned Democrats emerged from the White House meeting declaring that Mr. Trump had thrown a “temper tantrum.” The president’s allies accused Democrats of refusing to negotiate. Then he tweeted that the meeting was “a total waste of time.”

As opposed to rage-tweeting, and withdrawing emergency aid to victims of wildfires, and watching Fox News for 8 hours a day? Those are valuable uses of time are they?

Moderate Republicans who entered the room confident that senators were coalescing around the idea that the government should be reopened while the border security debate continues left disappointed, convinced that for now, the party would follow Mr. Trump perilously further into a shutdown with an uncertain end.

A handful of them, including Cory Gardner of Colorado, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and James Lankford of Oklahoma, pressed Mr. Trump on the mounting impact on federal workers and related industries in their states. His response was consistent.

Of course it was, because he’s a selfish stubborn piece of crap who doesn’t care how much misery and desperation he is causing as long as he gets his own way.

But, in much better news –

Incredible news for Saudi teen @rahaf84427714.

The UN says she should be granted asylum in Australia as a refugee.
This the power of a Twitter campaign and the bravery of one young woman.#SaveRahaf #رهف_محمد_القنون pic.twitter.com/2x06dFYrRe

— Natasha Fatah (@NatashaFatah) January 9, 2019

https://twitter.com/rahaf84427714/status/1082961242979938304

Kudos to the Government of Australia !!! @Liam_Cochrane @australian @SkyNewsAust @westaustralian @PravitR #RahafMohamed #RahafMohammedalQunun #RahafMohammed #Rahaf #Saudi #SaudiWomen @veen_th @JeromeTaylor @RichardBarrow @leunigcartoons pic.twitter.com/JbisWws7GE

— stephff cartoonist (@stephffart) January 9, 2019

Make America demonic again.

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

I neither watched nor listened. I’m not a masochist.

Let us read.

My fellow Americans: Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.

Every day, Customs and Border Patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country.  We are out of space to hold them, and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country.

Big lie right there. Many or most of them are not “illegal immigrants” but asylum seekers. It is fully legal and a human right to seek asylum. Trump doesn’t like that, but Trump’s dislike doesn’t make something not true.

Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.

Big lie. The crime rate is lower among immigrants.

This is a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.

Wtf is that supposed to mean?

And if Trump really thought of it as a humanitarian crisis and a crisis of the heart, he would talk about asylum seekers with sympathy instead of loathing and contempt.

In places he improves on Steven Miller’s scrip with interpolations of his own, like the two in this paragraph:

My administration has presented Congress with a detailed proposal to secure the border and stop the criminal gangs, drug smugglers, and human traffickers.  It’s a tremendous problem.  Our proposal was developed by law enforcement professionals and border agents at the Department of Homeland Security.  These are the resources they have requested to properly perform their mission and keep America safe.  In fact, safer than ever before.

Trumpisms in red. I don’t know that for certain, but those sure look like Trumpy blurts breaking up the more normal officialese.

The border wall would very quickly pay for itself.   The cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion a year — vastly more than the $5.7 billion we have requested from Congress.  The wall will also be paid for, indirectly, by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico.

And yet, as we all know, that’s not what he said. He said, several million times, that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico said like hell it would, but that never slowed Trump down. He said Mexico would pay for the wall, over and over and over.

Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders.

And precious lives are cut short by those who were born here, but at a higher rate. Immigrants as a group commit less crime, not more.

Over the last several years, I’ve met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration.  I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers.  So sad.  So terrible.  I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, and the sadness gripping their souls.

How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?

To those who refuse to compromise in the name of border security, I would ask: Imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken?

He’s trying to emote people into thinking immigrants=murderers. It’s a variation on the blood libel, and it’s disgusting.

Ed Pilkington at the Guardian reports a very bad thing:

The Trump administration has stopped cooperating with UN investigators over potential human rights violations occurring inside America, in a move that delivers a major blow to vulnerable US communities and sends a dangerous signal to authoritarian regimes around the world.

Quietly and unnoticed, the state department has ceased to respond to official complaints from UN special rapporteurs, the network of independent experts who act as global watchdogs on fundamental issues such as poverty, migration, freedom of expression and justice. There has been no response to any such formal query since 7 May 2018, with at least 13 requests going unanswered.

Nor has the Trump administration extended any invitation to a UN monitor to visit the US to investigate human rights inside the country since the start of Donald Trump’s term two years ago in January 2017. Two UN experts have made official fact-finding visits under his watch – the special rapporteurs on extreme poverty and privacy – but both were invited initially by Barack Obama, who hosted 16 such visits during his presidency.

Two per year for Obama, zero in two years for Trump. Make America Great Again by not giving a damn about human rights? Is that the idea?

The timing of the break in relations with UN investigators coincides with the publication in June of the official findings of Philip Alston’s visit to the US to research poverty. As UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Alston castigated the Trump administration for aggravating levels of inequality that were already the most glaring in the western world.

Alston’s robust criticism was received badly by Nikki Haley, then US ambassador, who accused him of biased reporting. She hinted that the administration was minded to turn its back on international accountability by saying it was “patently ridiculous” that the UN should focus on America’s internal human rights standards when it could be looking into countries like Burundi.

Burundi. Why Burundi in particular? Could it be because…no, surely not.

It is not known whether the decision to sever cooperation with the UN monitors was directly related to the spat over Alston’s report. But emails seen by the Guardian involving top US state department officials in Geneva show that by July they were rebuffing contact with international agencies on grounds that they were “considering how best to engage with special procedures”, the blanket term for the network of UN special rapporteurs.

…

Paradoxically, the Trump administration’s decision to shun the UN’s independent watchdogs places the US among a tiny minority of uncooperative states. There are very few countries that resist international oversight from UN special rapporteurs – one of them is North Korea.

Individual UN experts expressed dismay at the US cold shoulder they are now receiving. Alston said the move would set “the most unfortunate precedent as the US has always tried to press other countries to be accountable. This sends a message that you can opt out of routine scrutiny if you don’t like what is being said about your record on human rights.”

Felipe González Morales, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, has twice approached the US government requesting a formal visit to inspect how the country is handling immigration including the crisis at the Mexican border – once in March and then in July. He has yet to receive a reply.

“In the absence of an official visit, we cannot publish a country report to be presented to the UN human rights council,” he said.

This is really appalling and disgusting.

A sobering thread:

https://twitter.com/amandadeibert/status/1081923493388677120

I am an attorney in the Division of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. I am currently NOT investigating violations of the securities laws (meaning they are not currently being enforced). I would really like to review the subpoenaed docs on my desk right now.

— Hocca McFendel (@HoccaMcFendel) January 6, 2019

We are a 2-fed household & both furloughed (going on 2+ wks now!). Our agencies protect clean air & water for Americans, and promote gender equality & women’s empowerment in developing countries around the world. We are sad to have our work caught up in this political stunt.

— Fauxhawk (@BonnieKRobinson) January 6, 2019

I'm not a government worker. I'm a healthcare recruiter and we can't verify I9 documents because EVerify is down. We're on the honor system for the validity of the documents that prove work eligibility–which is a key component of the crackdown on illegal immigration. Sigh.

— L Row (@LRow15) January 7, 2019

You don’t even have to be a federal worker, you can be affected if your work depends on some furloughed bit of the federal government or of course if some aspect of your life depends on some furloughed bit of the federal government.

My husband is not a federal employee but his work has been halted due to the shutdown. He is a scientist who specializes in the research & development of new cancer drugs. His latest submission to the FDA to begin a new clinical trial is in limbo because the shutdown. Sad.

— Mary Christensen (@MMChristensen) January 6, 2019

Like that. Oh well, it’s only cancer meds being delayed.

I'm an agricultural scientist working to feed nine billion people without destroying the environment. I am missing deadlines and important meetings, and losing experimental results.

— Sarah Goslee (@phiala) January 6, 2019

My husband works for FSA. They are the agency that distributes Farm loans and the farm subsidies that were signed into law after trump messed with soybean farmers. Now is when farmers start buying seed for the spring. They can’t if they can’t have access to their loans.

— ava marie george (@avamariegeorge2) January 6, 2019

Oh, so crop losses then. Oh well, it’s just food.

https://twitter.com/Nichole261/status/1082318167811055616

And so on. The thread is probably infinite.

James Gheerbrant wrote a profile of a trans woman, Sandra Forgues, which is getting some attention on Twitter, not all of it warmly complimentary.

Beneath the surface, she was fighting currents unseen. The face that periodically appeared in local newspaper articles, the name proudly emblazoned on lacquered clubhouse boards, were pieces of an identity that did not match the self she felt deep in her soul.

“At the core of my being, I have always felt like a woman,” she says. “I have a woman’s mind, but I did not have the body of a woman.”

I have to wonder if anyone would feel like that in a world where sex differences were not so exaggerated and value-laden and enforced. I have to wonder what the point would be. I have to wonder what anyone would think “I have a woman’s mind” could possibly mean.

More basically, I don’t believe there is any such thing as a self one feels deep in one’s soul. The self is almost as mystical a concept as the soul, and both are illusory.

Her voice, even by the standards of the female sex, is noticeably dainty and high-pitched. Later she explains that during male-to-female transition, the pitch of the voice is unaffected by hormone therapy — a woman’s voice has to be learnt and polished through hours of painstaking work with a speech therapist. Before, whenever she opened her mouth, the deep pitch of her speech did not match the feminine tenor of her thoughts and feelings. Now, a day of ordinary conversation consists of a thousand semi-conscious efforts to ensure that her innermost and outer selves are on the same wavelength.

So…in order to be the self she feels deep in her soul, she has to make the effort to talk in an artificial mannered way in any ordinary conversation. Is there perhaps a contradiction there?

Also…”dainty and high-pitched”? So, like, affected? That’s what women are? Thanks, guys.

“I could slip back into my old voice and you’d fall out of your chair!” She says with a high, trilling laugh.

As we gurlz do.

“To feel female deep inside, in all my characteristics, brings me peace,” Sandra says. “Often when we talk about transition, we talk about the look, but in hormone therapy what changes very quickly and very starkly are all the smells, the pheromones, the senses, the entire functioning of the brain: emotions, perceptions, fears.

“I now have fears that I never had before.”

Yes, that’s definitely one of the great joys of being a woman: the fears.

Sandra Forgues is the same person as Wilfrid Forgues: they share one Wikipedia page, one passport number, one consciousness. And yet she is also fundamentally, neurologically different. She is not simply a repackaged female version of her former self. Her character is altered, her reaction to things around her changed. In order to set up the interview, two armchairs need to be moved from the ground floor to an upstairs conference room. Before she would automatically have lent a hand; now she demurs bashfully as the photographer and I haul them up the staircase.

That’s the one that really got the Twitter attention.

If she could have another life, would she transition early? Would she trade a life of glory and anguish for a life of happy anonymity? Would she give away the years when she was somebody, to have more years as herself?

“The woman that I am today is much more accomplished than the woman that I would have been if I’d transitioned very early,” she says. “I would never have been Olympic champion, I would never have had that social status. Being Olympic champion brought me many other things. You learn about yourself. And that self-learning has made me the woman I always dreamt of.”

Well quite. Gather the rewards of being male for the first few decades and then “become” a woman.

Huh, guess who is “required” to work without pay during the government shutdown. (I put scare quotes on “required” because that’s slavery and as Katha Pollitt pointed out on Twitter the other day, slavery is a violation of the 13th Amendment.) The Secret Service, that’s who.

Secret Service agents are growing increasingly anxious and angry about the shutdown, according to several current and former agents. The Secret Service protects 42 people associated with the Trump White House, 11 more than were given details during the Obama administration. In August 2017, the agency’s new director, Randolph D. Alles, told an interviewer that the sprawling Trump entourage was putting unprecedented strains on his agents, in terms of staffing and budgeting.

Now add just plain not getting paid to that, and imagine how you would feel.

“They are asking you to put your life on the line and not paying you — it’s ridiculous,” said Donald Mihalek, 49, a 20-year Secret Service veteran whose own retirement paperwork has yet to be processed because of the shutdown.

The motivation to put your life on the line for Trump or his greedy children or his “I really don’t care” wife must get very feeble in those conditions.

“Morale is a serious issue,” said Mr. Mihalek, who served on the presidential detail during George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations. “This is an incredibly stressful job that requires your full attention, and if you are standing there thinking about your mortgage, or your credit card bills, or the fact that you are burning through your savings, you are distracted, you not able to give 100 percent.”

Plus you feel less like it anyway.

DOCTOR Rachel McKinnon wrote a piece explaining what people should do when they annoy DOCTOR Rachel McKinnon, with particular reference to Martina Navratilova.

Last month, tennis legend Martina Navratilova wrote some now-deleted, unfortunate tweets about trans-women athletes.

Her initial tweet was about trans women athletes competing as women while having a penis. It read:

Clearly that can’t be right. You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard…

Two days later, I weighed in by retweeting the offending tweet: “Welp, guess Navratilova is transphobic.” I also said, “No, you are not ‘pro- trans people’ if you say that trans women with a penis must not compete in women’s sport.” I made the points [sic] that her position is transphobic. Genitals do not play sports.

Saying her position is transphobic is not so much making a point as it is repeating a bit of stale jargon. What Navratilova said is not “transphobic” just because Rachel McKinnon says so. Saying that people with male bodies should not compete against women is not transphobic, it’s just an obviously reasonable claim about fairness in physical competition. Wear skirts, call yourself Jenny, giggle fetchingly all you like, but don’t force your way into women’s sport.

Many others confronted her, but Navratilova did not feel the need to back down from her position.

Imagine that! Some people disagreed with her, some people agreed with her, and she went ahead and felt entitled to think what she thought. She didn’t “feel the need to back down from her position” because no one had succeeded in convincing her her position was wrong. That happens sometimes.

What Navratilova failed to see was that her tweets, whether they were intentional or not, were doing harm to trans women. Her comments were immediately picked up by anti-trans publications and used as justification for their own positions.

What McKinnon fails to see is that much of the shit he talks is doing harm to women, to say nothing of the harm his competing against women in cycling does to those women.

The doc then gets to the instructions on what to do if you trip and say something transphobic. They’re predictable enough: cop to it, apologize, mean it, delete it all, listen to the abuse criticism and thank people for it, commit to doing better and do the work.

(Wouldn’t it be nice to see Rachel McKinnon do that? Ever? Isn’t it interesting that that apparently never happens? We have to nod in agreement at whatever “criticism” is flung, but Rachel can skip through life without being re-educated every five minutes.)

I still have hope for Navratilova.

Nobody is perfect. I’m not perfect. I don’t expect anyone to be perfect. But we should be held accountable for our actions, especially when we hurt people. When people say that something you said or did hurt them, believe them. Don’t try to minimize it or point to what you ‘intended.’

Again, this is a philosopher talking, making it a general and absolute rule that when people say that something you said or did hurt them, you have to believe them. No exceptions, no qualifications, no warnings – just believe them. But what if they are psychopaths, or narcissists, or whiny entitled brats, or con artists, or people who work for Trump, or people who want to do you harm?

Don’t try to minimize it or point to what you ‘intended.’

Here’s an analogy: suppose that you accidentally break my favorite coffee mug. Sure it’s worse if you intended to break it, but even if was an accident, you still broke my mug. You should acknowledge that you broke it, apologize, do something to fix the harm, and then promise to be more careful in the future.

And you should mean it.

Wow – don’t ever drop in at McKinnon’s place. But more to the point, don’t ever go near McKinnon at all. Guess what: that’s not how you treat people. If somebody breaks your favorite whatever, they already feel bad about it, and if you’re not an asshole you don’t want to make them feel even worse.

And I mean it.