Get those damn scientists out of here

Nov 1st, 2017 10:35 am | By

Scott Pruitt cut the EPA off at the knees yesterday.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, stripped a half-dozen scientists and academics of advisory positions Tuesday and issued new rules barring anyone who receives E.P.A. grant money from serving on panels that counsel the agency on scientific decisions.

The move will effectively bar a large number of academic researchers, many of them experts in fields ranging from toxicology to epidemiology, from advising the E.P.A. on scientific matters, since the agency is one of the largest funders of environmental research.

They get the grants because they know the subject – so Pruitt throws them out. Let’s not have any experts on environmental science in the EPA, because who needs the environment, right? It’s there to be used until it’s worn out and useless, and then we’ll

uh

What is it we’ll do then? I forget.

Mr. Pruitt was expected to appoint several industry representatives to the panels. He did not impose any new restrictions to prevent them from offering advice on environmental regulations that may affect their businesses.

Industry reps have the right kind of vested interest – profit. The wrong kind is evidence about harm to the environment that we all depend on for survival.

In an announcement at agency headquarters surrounded by conservative activists and Republican lawmakers who have long called for an overhaul of the advisory boards, Mr. Pruitt said he made the decision to ensure the agency would receive data and advice free from conflicts of interest or any appearance of a conflict. He said that people currently serving on E.P.A. advisory boards had received $77 million in grant money over the past three years as they were issuing advice on policy.

The industry people on the other hand have no conflict of interest, or appearance of same. Also, chocolate makes you immortal.

Mr. Pruitt is expected to ask about two dozen people to replace advisers whose terms have ended or were removed under the new rules, according to a list provided by several people close to the process. Among the expected appointees, several are state regulators and private consultants; one is a senior director at the American Chemistry Council, a trade association; another is the chief environmental officer for Southern Company, an electric utility; and one is the vice president of technology for Phillips 66 Research Center in Oklahoma, and previously worked for ConocoPhillips.

The E.P.A. did not confirm the full list of new appointees, but did announce that Michael E. Honeycutt, the top toxicologist at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, would chair the E.P.A.’s Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Honeycutt has sparred with the E.P.A. over ozone standards, and was a co-author of a study in an air and waste management magazine arguing that the agency has inflated the health benefits of more stringent air quality standards.

Yeah, pollution is good for you.



There is no such filter

Nov 1st, 2017 9:27 am | By

Trump’s fun game for today is pretending that Saipov’s slaughter and maiming yesterday are the fault of Chuck Schumer because IMMIGRATION.

As details emerged about the incident, prominent right-wing commentators and news outlets seized on an ABC7 story reporting that alleged attacker Sayfullo Saipov had come to the United States from Uzbekistan under a State Department program known as the Diversity Visa Lottery.

That story is unconfirmed, but Trump appeared off base in his criticism of Schumer. The program originated in part in a bill introduced by the New York Democrat in 1990; but Schumer was also among a group of lawmakers who later sought to drop the visa protocols assailed by Trump.

Still, Schumer was singled out as the brains behind the program and therefore, critics said, bears responsibility for the attack.

In news interviews, blog posts and tweets, critics tried to pin blame on the leading Democrat, saying he was “responsible” for allowing the 29-year-old suspect’s entry into the country.

Who was responsible for Stephen Paddock’s entry into Las Vegas then? Who was responsible for his presence in The Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino? Who was responsible for his possession of all those guns and his ability to take them to his room and his ability to fire them out his window? Who was responsible for his ability to add a bump stock to one of the 17 assault rifles he had in the room?

Trump wants “merit based.” Because what? That would filter out anyone who might want to kill a bunch of people while yelling “Allahu akbar”?

Yes, no doubt that’s exactly what he’s thinking, because he’s just that dumb. But it wouldn’t. Reminder for Trump: most of the bangers behind 9/11 had high levels of technical education. They were engineers and similar. They were full of Merit.

There isn’t any kind of immigration filter that can prevent people from deciding they like ISIS and want to give it a helping hand, just as there isn’t any kind of hotel guest filter that can screen out guys who long to shoot into a concert crowd from a high window.



Women never get any backlash

Oct 31st, 2017 4:34 pm | By

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: women dressing up in exaggeratedly “feminine” clothes is appropriation.

Across the globe, men, women and non-binary individuals practice cross-dressing and drag as a form of expression. The encyclopedia Britannica identifies individuals in drag as performers dressing as the opposite sex or rather, outside of their assigned gender. It is a way of experimenting with the aspect of “the other” in terms of identity.

This practice can be seen in a myriad of settings, including the television show, Ru Paul’s drag race. Individuals who practice drag and cross-dressing have often been persecuted throughout history, resulting in violent discrimination that can even lead to death. Although it has become more socially acceptable over the years, the stigma against it persists. Drag performers have been associated with the LGBTQA community, as it gives individuals the freedom to explore gender identities outside of the norm.

That’s a sloppy (and wrong) generalization, actually. Cross-dressing was a carnivalesque thing to do for centuries before it was called drag or “associated with the LGBTQA community.” It did not result in violent discrimination. There was also of course the tradition in the theatre of having boys play women’s roles; that too did not result in violent discrimination, although it did get up the Puritans’ noses, as did everything else.

One recent event I found out about was that of cis women dressing in “drag” by wearing dresses and excessive makeup while identifying as drag queens.

They sum it up as a form of experimenting with “extreme femininity”. I was confused as to why cis women would choose to identify as drag queens when all they are doing is putting on dresses and makeup, which is something within their gender norm. I discussed this odd occurrence with some non-binary individuals and one of them quickly pointed out that this can even be considered homophobic.

Sure it can, if you work really hard. That’s the great thing about women – you can accuse them of everything, even “appropriating” that which they’ve been bullied into doing since forever. You can call women femmephobic if they refuse to wear skirts and appropriators if they wear skirts – they’re wrong no matter what they do, it’s awesome! And women are so stupid and weak they put up with it. Or else they don’t and then you can call them TERFs and kick the shit out of them while saying it’s all their fault.

When cis women perform as drag queens, they are dipping their feet into the performance of it, this being the positive experience, without receiving any of the backlash of stepping out of their gender norms and being discriminated against for it.

Bitches! Women can do any damn thing they want to and never receive any backlash. No domestic violence, no harassment or abuse, no public mockery and trolling, no rape, no wage or hiring discrimination, no pay gap, no insults, no questioning of their intelligence or stamina or courage or ambition or determination – none of that. They should be locked up.

In addition, cis women are justifying this action by claiming they do it out of admiration for drag performers. So again, why is this act to be considered homophobic?

Because appropriation is a form of discrimination. Essentially, individuals outside of that culture, conveniently steal certain aspects of it, for their own use, without receiving the prejudice and discrimination individuals from that culture are faced with

How dare women steal skirts and makeup from other cultures. They should be executed.



A lack of appreciation of history

Oct 31st, 2017 3:41 pm | By

NPR on John Kelly’s twisted understanding of the Civil War:

During an interview Monday night on Fox News, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said that “the lack of the ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

His comment was swiftly countered by confounded observers, who pointed out that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that compromising on slavery would be morally unconscionable — and that the country did strike such compromises for decades and they did not, in fact, prevent war.

They did prevent war for several decades. Lots of people died in time to miss the war, so from that point of view, the compromises were a big success…except of course for the people who were slaves who died in time to miss the war.

Kelly said he thought applying contemporary standards of ethics to the past is “very very dangerous” and demonstrates “a lack of appreciation of history.” He praised the “men and women of good faith on both sides” of the Civil War who followed their “conscience” in their fight.

That really is an incredibly stupid thing to say. We should apply contemporary standards of ethics if we have reason to think they’re better standards. We can still understand that people are stuck with what’s available to them, but that doesn’t mean we have to say oh well slavery was seen as a fine thing by people who owned slaves so mustn’t judge.

After Kelly’s remarks, scores of commentators responded with rebuttals, their tone ranging from bafflement to shock to weary repetition.

John Podhoretz, the conservative editor of Commentary magazine, wrote on Twitter, “80 years leading up to the Civil War were a history of efforts to compromise with the South. And then the war came. Started by the South.”

As Vann Newkirk, a writer at theAtlanticput it succinctly, “the entire fabric of American law was a compromise with slavery.”

The idea that the Civil War was caused by a failure to compromise was expressed by historian Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary The Civil War. Foote, who once wrote that he “would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar,” was criticized by fellow historians for, as The New York Times put it, playing down “the economic, intellectual and political causes of the Civil War.”

“Compromise on what?” asked Joshua Zeitz, a historian and the author of Lincoln’s Boys, asked on Twitter. “Extending chattel slavery throughout the western territories?”

“The only compromise on the table in 1861 would have given slavery explicit constitutional protection,” writes Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent at Slate.

“Focus on compromise only makes sense if you view slavery as bad but not *that* bad,” Bouie later wrote.

The way the Magdalene laundries were not that bad…if you were a male Catholic apologist at no risk of being held captive in one.

[Ta-Nehisi] Coates also directly rebutted Kelly’s assertion that “we make a mistake … when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more … and apply it back then.”

The “notion that we are putting today’s standards on the past is, in itself, racist — implies only white, slave-holding, opinions matter,” Coates writes. “Majority of people living in South Carolina in 1860 were black — they did not need modern white wokeness to tell them slavery was wrong. Majority of people living in Mississippi in 1860 were black. They knew, in their own time, that enslavement was wrong.”

Oh but that’s some of those terrible contemporary standards of ethics, thinking that the people enslaved or held captive or exploited or tortured should be heeded at least as much as the people who did the enslaving or torturing. We should stick with the Eternal Truth that only people like John Kelly and Brendan O’Neill get to have standards of ethics that count.



Their supposed “brother”

Oct 31st, 2017 3:23 pm | By

The crying with laughter emojis are nice.



As Stuyvesant High School was letting out for the day

Oct 31st, 2017 2:56 pm | By

The Times reports:

Eight people were killed when a man drove 20 blocks down a bike path beside the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon before he crashed his pickup truck, jumped out with fake guns and was shot by police officers, the authorities said.

Federal authorities were treating the incident as a terrorist attack and were taking the lead in the investigation, a senior law enforcement official said. Two law enforcement officials said that after the attacker got out of the truck, he was heard yelling, “Allahu Akbar.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference: “Based on information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”

Two law enforcement officials said the driver of the truck, a 29-year-old man who came to the United States in 2010, was in grave condition. One official said he had rented the truck in New Jersey.

He’s dead now.*

The motorist, driving south down the path in a Home Depot rental truck, hit numerous people as nearby Stuyvesant High School was letting out for the day, officials said. At least 15 people were injured, but officials were still working to assess the extent of the casualties.

So I suppose Allah is sitting up there on his couch smiling happily about the eight people sprawled on the bike path near their smashed bikes? “Good, good, this will force everyone to submit to me and my little buddy Mohammed. Any tea left?”

*Update: Obviously he’s not. The reporting was that he was when I wrote the post. Soz.



Sarah, is slavery wrong?

Oct 31st, 2017 12:55 pm | By

Sarah Sanders wants us to stop saying slavery was wrong.

During a White House news briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Chief of Staff John Kelly’s praise of Robert E. Lee and remarks about how “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” not the Confederacy’s refusal to abolish slavery.

“Look, all of our leaders have flaws — Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy — that doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country, and it certainly can’t erase them from our history,” she said. “And General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.”

No, he was not. He said what he said and not some other thing. He did not say “Just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.”

“And to try to create something and push a narrative that simple doesn’t exist is just frankly outrageous and absurd,” Sanders continued. “I think the fact that we keep trying to drive, the media continues to want to make this and push that this is some sort of a racially charged and divided White House — frankly the only people I see stoking political racism right now are the people in the groups that are running ads like the one you saw take place in Virginia earlier this week. That’s the type of thing that I think really is a problem, and I think it is absurd and disgraceful to keep trying to make comments and take them out of context and mean something they simply don’t.”

Well…she’s not the smartest person in the world. Maybe she really doesn’t grasp that saying the confederacy was acting in good faith and according to its conscience is a gross sanitization of why the South seceded. Maybe she really doesn’t, but then she shouldn’t be in that job.

The latest Civil War-related controversy to envelope the White House was not, however, a media invention. Kelly went out of his way to praise Lee and the Confederacy during an interview on the debut edition of Laura Ingraham’s new Fox News show Monday night. Kelly was responding to a question about the removal of Confederate plaques.

Lee “was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days,” Kelly said. “But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

At no point did Kelly mention the role that the South’s determination to preserve the institution of slavery play in sparking the Civil War. Nor did Sanders mention it on Tuesday. As she left the podium, a reporter repeatedly tried to ask her, “Does this administration believe slavery was wrong?” Sanders didn’t answer.

The reporter in question is April Ryan, of “are they friends of yours?” fame. She’s tweeting about it now…saying she’s still waiting for an answer.



While you’re bragging about what a toughy you are

Oct 31st, 2017 12:33 pm | By

This again.

Oh please. It’s not always that easy, to put it mildly.

Plus people shouldn’t have to “have a way” to deal with various forms of personal interference. We don’t expect to be pushed and slapped and jostled in the street if we happen not to look ferocious for a second. We expect ordinary everyday respect for boundaries. It’s not everyone’s responsibility to scare off attackers, it’s everyone’s responsibility not to be an attacker.

It’s fine to be tough and strong and not a pushover but it’s also fine not to be any of those things. The onus is on the aggressor, not the person aggressed.

Not very complicated, is it.



There’s no doubt the laundries were unpleasant

Oct 31st, 2017 11:55 am | By

Speaking of Brendan O’Neill, a friend pointed out to me that he’d done a piece belittling the horrors of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. It’s a disgusting read.

The Australian, 22 February 2013

THIS week, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny apologised to women who had been institutionalised in Magdalene laundries. He described these Catholic, nun-run institutions, in which 10,000 girls and women did unpaid labour between 1922 and 1996, as “a dark part of our history”.

There’s no doubt the laundries were unpleasant, filled with “fallen women” or petty criminals, who were made to wash sheets and do other laborious tasks for local businesses. But – and here’s the rub – it seems the laundries were not quite as unpleasant as we’d been led to believe.

“Unpleasant” – easy for him to say, since he was never locked up in one and never at risk of being locked up in one.

The Irish government’s report into the laundries, which prompted Kenny’s apology, discovered a disconnect between the public perception of the laundries and the lived reality in them.

Ah yes, and similarly, Donald Trump keeps discovering a disconnect between news reports of his administration and his lived reality of them. I wonder why that might be.

Many people’s view of the laundries was cemented by the 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters, where nuns were shown shaving girls’ heads, forcing them to strip and perving over them in the showers, among other horrors.

But the government report found not one case of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry.

One, the government report was the government report – it had an interest. Two – yes, and? Is that the standard? The nuns didn’t sexually abuse their captives?

It also found that in most cases where girls were beaten, it was in the same way as was commonplace in schools across Europe in the 1950s and 60s: they were rapped on the knuckles or caned on the legs.

Oh that’s fine then. Let’s all go back to sleep.

The “girls” shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Having sex isn’t a crime, and it’s likely that not all of them even had that sex voluntarily. Women shouldn’t be imprisoned for having sex and so they shouldn’t be physically abused while wrongfully imprisoned. We don’t need smug men dismissing the whole thing later because they’re callous sneering toads.

Where once there was much talk of the Magdalene girls being slaves, the report found 35 per cent of women stayed in the laundries for less than three months and 60 per cent stayed less than a year. Many entered voluntarily.

So 40 percent stayed more than a year and many did not enter voluntarily. Also how “voluntarily” was it really? How many women entered “voluntarily” because their families were making their lives hell, because they didn’t have the money to go elsewhere and couldn’t get work because they were pregnant, because neighbors were tormenting them?

This was priest-ridden Ireland, which treated girls and women as well as you would expect a priest-ridden country to. It was bad: it was repressive and punitive and theocratic, and the laundries were part of the infrastructure of all that. Saying it wasn’t that bad for pregnant women to have to do hard labor in a laundry that raked in profits for the church is just smug and callous.



Truth does matter

Oct 31st, 2017 10:21 am | By

So the White House chief of staff is a fan of the Southern secessionist defenders of slavery.

Kelly was interviewed on Fox last night and delivered this pile of crap.

Kelly was asked about the decision of a church in Alexandria to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Men and women of good faith; their conscience.

It’s just rhetoric to put the label “good faith” on a military defense of the custom of holding people captive and forcing them to do hard labor for life. Sure, no doubt many of them had persuaded themselves there was nothing morally wrong with that at all, and in that very limited sense they were acting in “good faith,” but so what? People can convince themselves of anything.

And it’s a perversion to say their “conscience” had them violently defend slavery. Slavery is not morally defensible, so violently defending it is not a matter of “conscience.”

“That statement could have been given by [former Confederate general] Jubal Early in 1880,” said Stephanie McCurry, professor of history at Columbia University and author of “Confederate Reckoning: Politics and Power in the Civil War South.”

“What’s so strange about this statement is how closely it tracks or resembles the view of the Civil War that the South had finally got the nation to embrace by the early 20th century,” she said. “It’s the Jim Crow version of the causes of the Civil War. I mean, it tracks all of the major talking points of this pro-Confederate view of the Civil War.”

And he’s a general and the president’s chief of staff – he should have a much better grasp of US history than that.

Kelly makes several points. That Lee was honorable. That fighting for state was more important than fighting for country. That a lack of compromise led to the war. That good people on both sides were fighting for conscientious reasons. Both McCurry and David Blight, professor of history at Yale University and author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” broadly reject all of these arguments.

“This is profound ignorance, that’s what one has to say first, at least of pretty basic things about the American historical narrative,” Blight said. “I mean, it’s one thing to hear it from Trump who, let’s be honest, just really doesn’t know any history and has demonstrated it over and over and over. But Gen. Kelly has a long history in the American military.”

Exactly. In his jobs, he should know better.

Blight described Kelly’s argument in similar terms as McCurry — an “old reconciliationist narrative” about the Civil War that, in the last half-century or so has “just been exploded” by historical research since.

The idea that compromise might have been possible was rejected out of hand by both McCurry and Blight.

“It was not about slavery, it was about honorable men fighting for honorable causes?” McCurry said. “Well, what was the cause? . . . In 1861, they were very clear on what the causes of the war were. The reason there was no compromise possible was that people in the country could not agree over the wisdom of the continued and expanding enslavement of millions of African Americans.”

There’s also a sickening pseudo-Romantic story in the background.

Kelly’s framework is “also rooted, frankly, in a Lost Cause mentality that swept over American culture in the wake of the war, swept over Northerners,” Blight said, “this idea that good and honorable men of the South were pushed aside and exploited by the ‘fanatical’ — ironically — first Republican Party.”

You can see that dopy story in the way Gone With the Wind was filmed, in 19fucking39.

Both historians, though, held particular disdain for the idea that putting state over nation was the essence of the fight.

“My God, where does he get that from?” Blight asked. “That denies the very reason to be, the essential reason for the existence of the original Republican Party, which formed in the 1850s to stop the expansion of slavery and ended up developing a political ideology that threatened the South because they really were going to cordon off slavery.”

“It’s just so absurd,” Blight said. “It’s just so sad. It’s just so disappointing that generations of history have been written to explode all of this and yet millions of people — serious people; experienced, serious people and now people with tremendous power — have grown up believing all this.”

Absurd and sad and worse, because of the tremendous power. Kelly repeated his absolute refusal to apologize for his vicious lies about Representative Wilson.

There was, however, a small silver lining.

“This Trump-era ignorance and misuse of history is forcing historians — and I think this is a good thing — to use words like ‘truth’ and ‘right or wrong,’ ” Blight said. “In the academy we get very caught up in relativism and whether we can be objective and so on, and that’s a real argument.”

“But there are some things that are just not true,” he said. “And we’ve got to point that out.”

Ahahaha…why truth matters. Yes indeed.



Planning a coup

Oct 31st, 2017 8:58 am | By

Greg Sargent at the Post says Trump and his enforcers are attempting to put together another “Saturday Night massacre,” i.e. another case of a criminal president firing the people who are investigating his crimes.

Let’s be clear on what’s happening in our politics right now. President Trump and his media allies are currently creating a vast, multi-tentacled, largely-fictional alternate media reality that casts large swaths of our government as irredeemably corrupt — with the explicitly declared purpose of laying the rationale for Trump to pardon his close associates or close down the Russia probe, should he deem either necessary.

We often hear that Trump and his allies are trying to “distract” from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s intensifying investigation. That’s true, but this characterization inadequately casts this in terms ordinarily applied to conventional politics. Instead, Trump’s trafficking in this stuff should be seen as another sign of his fundamental unfitness to serve as president. Similar efforts by his media allies should be labeled as a deliberate effort to goad Trump into sliding into full-blown authoritarianism, and to provide the air cover for him if he does do so.

That is to say, Fox. Fox is trying to goad Trump into sliding into full-blown authoritarianism, and it will shield him if he does. There was no Fox when Nixon attempted his coup.

Monday night, Sean Hannity delivered perhaps the most perfect expression yet of efforts to create the rationale for such moves. Hannity dismissed the news of major allegationsagainst Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and the cooperation adviser George Papadopoulos as big nothingburgers. He also hit all the high points of the new Trump/media campaign. Those include reviving the made-up scandal that Hillary Clinton approved a deal for a Russian nuclear agency to gain access to U.S. uranium extraction rights in exchange for kickbacks, and the absurdly exaggerated claim that the Clinton campaign, having paid through various intermediaries for research that ultimately led to the “Steele Dossier,” actually colluded with Russia to interfere in the election. These have been extensively fact checked and debunked.

But Fox is Fox. It trades in lies. It has no qualms about it.

[I]t’s important to reckon with the scope of what Trump and his allies are alleging. The idea is that Mueller — who was originally appointed to head the FBI by George W. Bush, and who became special counsel because of Trump’s own firing of his FBI director over the Russia probe — originally participated in a hallucinatory conspiracy to cover up Clinton collusion with Russia. Now Mueller is using the current investigation to distract from it. In this alternate universe, all of that is the crisis (Hannity’s word) we face, and the only way to address it is for Trump to close all of it down. Dem strategist Simon Rosenberg is right to point out that Trump’s trafficking in all of this — his endorsement of the idea of preposterous levels of corruption and conspiracy theories unfurling at many levels throughout the government — itself raises questions about Trump’s fitness to serve. We need to confront the insanity and depravity of all this forthrightly, and convey it accurately.

It’s Reichstag fire stuff. Fox is Goebbels. There are no guarantees Trump will fail.



Guest post: People becoming too rich is a symptom of a sick economy

Oct 30th, 2017 4:43 pm | By

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds.

You can in fact have both a growing economy and good environmental standards.

The thing about the economy that a lot of people miss is that a strong economy is basically everyone, not just the richest chunk of it. If you have to pay people to properly maintain your factory – that money isn’t vanishing into a void, it is going into their pockets where it will then be spent on the stuff that they need.

Not only that but regulation creates those jobs, and creates sub-industries which otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example, with mining, what happens when the mine runs out? Well in a well regulated country the mine has to fund land recovery – which requires people to do it.

Which means that in an area where a mine has run out of whatever was being mined environmental regulation provides for at least some continued employment – generally at a cost to people who would otherwise not spend the money as effectively.

The main motive for investment is to turn a profit. If you have a situation where there is no redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, over time the demand for goods will drop as the money pools in the hands of the rich (Because there is only a certain amount of stuff one person can want), which means you will get a corporate emphasis on cost cutting rather than growth because there is no room for that growth.

Which in turn means that there will be even less demand for goods as people lose their jobs and supply is constrained to cut those costs further, which in turn means that all of the investment the American right talks about isn’t going to happen because there is no demand, and thus the best potential for growth is – sticking your money in a bank account.

The net cost to the economy for regulation is pretty much nothing, and generally it works out at a profit. The net cost for de-regulation however?

That is when you end up with money going stagnant, essentially taken out of the system. Not only that, but a lot of regulation is basically designed to reduce cross contagion from bad business practices.

One business going under can have a domino effect where multiple industries collapse, bankruptcies screw the supplied and the supplier, and what causes bankruptcies in America?

Health issues mostly – and those are made much worse by poor environmental regulations. Hurricanes and fires are also not good.

The very basis of Republican economic thought is a complete clusterfuck which undermines economic growth, in favour of growing the bank accounts of the rich. Having people becoming too rich is a symptom of a sick economy, because that means money is going stagnant.

Money needs to constantly change hands for the economy to grow, at least if what you care about is the actual economy rather than the bank accounts of like eight people. Regulation is thus largely a good thing on a macro-economic level.



Opening move

Oct 30th, 2017 4:06 pm | By

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes do a quick summing up:

The first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.

President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had “nothing to do with Russia.”

It looks bad, doesn’t it. Shady.

Mueller’s opening bid is a remarkable show of strength. He has a cooperating witness from inside the campaign’s interactions with the Russians. And he is alleging not mere technical infractions of law but astonishing criminality on the part of Trump’s campaign manager, a man who also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

Any hope the White House may have had that the Mueller investigation might be fading away vanished Monday morning. Things are only going to get worse from here.

Which could mean that larger things will eventually get better.



Recantation

Oct 30th, 2017 12:01 pm | By

But now that we’re talking about Emmett Till…I missed the news last January that Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted that most of what she testified about Till was false. It was a week after Trump’s inauguration and I was a little preoccupied.

The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor — possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode — who has written a book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” to be published next week.

In it, he wrote that she said of her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her, “that part is not true.”

Emmett, who lived in Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, a tiny hamlet in the Mississippi Delta region when, on Aug. 24, 1955, he went into a store owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, a married couple, and had his fateful encounter with Ms. Bryant, then 21.

Four days later, he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten and tortured beyond recognition, and shot in the head. His body was tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, were arrested and charged with murder.

What happened in that store is unclear, but it has usually been portrayed as an example of a black boy from up North unwittingly defying the strict racial mores of the South at the time. Witnesses said that Emmett wolf-whistled at Ms. Bryant, though even that has been called into doubt.

Days after the arrest, Ms. Bryant told her husband’s lawyer that Emmett had insulted her, but said nothing about physical contact, Dr. Tyson said. Five decades later, she told the F.B.I. that he had touched her hand.

But at the trial, she testified — without the jury present — that Emmett had grabbed her hand, she pulled away, and he followed her behind the counter, clasped her waist, and, using vulgar language, told her that he had been with white women before.

“She said that wasn’t true, but that she honestly doesn’t remember exactly what did happen,” Dr. Tyson said in an interview on Friday.

Now here’s a surprise – she told Dyson that Roy Bryant abused her. Who would have thought that a guy who could torture and murder a teenage boy would also abuse his wife?

Dr. Tyson said that in 2008, he got a call from Ms. Donham’s daughter-in-law, who said they had liked another book of his, and wanted to meet him.

It was in that meeting that she spoke to him about the Till case, saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

Dr. Tyson said that motivated him to write about the case.

Ms. Donham told him that soon after the killing, her husband’s family hid her away, moving her from place to place for days, to keep her from talking to law enforcement.

She has said that Roy Bryant, whom she later divorced, was physically abusive to her.

“The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” Dr. Tyson said. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow.”

A nightmare all around.



What we are meant to do

Oct 30th, 2017 11:02 am | By

Brendan O’Neill announces that we must never believe accusations of sexual assault unless and until they’re established in court.

Why does everyone believe Kevin Spacey’s accuser rather than Kevin Spacey himself? In a civilised society, it would be the other way round. In a civilised society we would doubt the accuser and maintain the innocence of the accused.

Is that so? Why? How? According to whom? Who is “we”?

In short, it’s not that simple, is it. What about Harvey Weinstein for instance? It turns out that all Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein, and a lot of women told similar stories about their experiences with Harvey Weinstein, so why in a civilized society would we be maintaining Weinstein’s innocence while calling his victims liars? What’s civilized about that?

There’s nothing civilized about it, but it’s nicer for the bros, and Brendan O’Neill is a bro.

How do we know Spacey did this thing? Because one person said he did. If we had any kind of attachment to the ideals of reason and justice, the building blocks of civilisation, this wouldn’t be enough. It would be so far from being enough.

Is that right? Is it that simple?

Of course it’s not. It depends. Justice isn’t all one way – it isn’t all for Spacey and none for the one person who said. Often one person saying is all there is, and often that means the powerful get away with doing harm to the less powerful. That’s not exactly justice.

Spacey says he doesn’t remember the assault. ‘I honestly do not remember the encounter’, he said in a statement, before going on to say that if it did happen, then he’s sorry. (Who’s advising these people? Do not apologise for something you do not remember doing.) Spacey, in his own lame way, is calling into question the veracity of Rapp’s accusation. And you know what? We should all be doing that. For three reasons.

No we should not all be doing that. It’s fair to say that one person saying is just one person saying; that’s not the same as calling into question the person’s accusation.

O’Neill says we should because 1. it was 30 years ago, 2. it’s part of #metoo. And 3 –

And thirdly because this is what we are meant to do. We are meant to believe in the innocence of everyone accused of a crime or misdemeanour, until such a time as a jury of their peers has been convinced beyond reasonable doubt that this is ‘what he did’.

Meant? Meant by whom? According to what rule? What a fatuous claim for such a showy libertarian to make. It’s also complete bullshit. The state is forbidden to assume guilt before it’s demonstrated, but that doesn’t mean every human on earth is required to “to believe in the innocence of everyone accused of a crime” until a jury [or a judge, he neglects to say] determines.

O’Neill’s sloppiness is reliably annoying.

Updating to add: I missed the last three paragraphs because I thought an ad break was the end of the piece.

‘I believe’ has become the ultimate virtue-signal. But it is utterly lacking in virtue to say this. Sixty-two years ago a woman called Carolyn Bryant Donham accused a young man of sexual harassment. He grabbed her by the wrist and said ‘How about it baby?’, she said. He wolf-whistled at her, she claimed. Everyone in her local community believed her, uncritically, and instantly. ‘I believe.’ They went after her harasser, tied him to the back of a truck, and then beat him to death in a barn. His name was Emmet Till. He was a victim of uncritical belief in people who make accusations of sexual harassment. Crying ‘I believe’ in response to every accusation of a sexual crime isn’t progressive; it’s a species of savagery.

Evil piece of shit.

Yes, we know accusations of rape were a pretext for lynching. That’s why I said “it’s not that simple” and “it depends” rather than “we have to believe all accusations no matter what.” But Harvey Weinstein was and is in no way comparable to Emmett Till, and Kevin Spacey’s accuser is not comparable to the white population of Money, Mississippi in 1955. I’m a good deal more agnostic about Spacey than I am about Weinstein, because as O’Neill says there is only one accuser – but that does not mean I’m required to “maintain his innocence.”



Hamburger emoji

Oct 30th, 2017 9:56 am | By

Times headline:

Trump, Responding to Manafort Indictment, Says Democrats Should Be Focus of Inquiry

A few tweets:

https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/925030233811668993

Oh, it’s Princess Ivanka’s birthday? Sad.



The flight to Moscow

Oct 30th, 2017 9:20 am | By

Read the charges, the Times invites us. Ok.

Page one. For at least nine years Manafort and Gates acted as unregistered agents for Ukraine and Yanukovich. They made tens of millions doing this. They laundered the money in order to hide it from the Feds.

Page two. They were required by law to report their foreign lobbying to the Feds. They didn’t. They concealed it instead. When the DoJ asked them about it in 2016 they lied.

Manafort spent the laundered money on all the expensive things. He paid no taxes on it. He defrauded banks that loaned him money.

Page 4. Manafort worked for the pro-Russia party in Ukraine. In 2010 that party’s candidate, Yanukovich, was elected President of Ukraine. In 2014 Yanukovich fled to Moscow in the wake of protests over corruption.

There are 27 more pages.

I hope they sing like canaries.



Indicted

Oct 30th, 2017 8:29 am | By

Now. Manafort has been indicted.

President Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was indicted Monday on charges that he funneled millions of dollars through overseas shell companies and used the money to buy luxury cars, real estate, antiques and expensive suits.

The charges against Mr. Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office.

Separately, one of the early foreign policy advisers to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about a contact with a Russian professor with ties to Kremlin officials, prosecutors said on Monday.

Separately. Separate investigation? We’re going to have our work cut out keeping track of all this, aren’t we.

The indictment of Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates makes no mention of Mr. Trump or election meddling. Instead, it describes in granular detail Mr. Manafort’s lobbying work in Ukraine and what prosecutors said was a scheme to hide that money from tax collectors and the public. The authorities said Mr. Manafort laundered more than $18 million.

“Manafort used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States without paying taxes on that income,” the indictment reads.

Mr. Gates is accused of transferring more than $3 million from offshore accounts. The two are also charged with making false statements.

So Mueller is starting at the far outside edge and working his way in?

American intelligence agencies have concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia launched a stealth campaign of hacking and propaganda to try to damage Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win the election. The Justice Department appointed Mr. Mueller III as special counsel in May to lead the investigation into the Russian operations and to determine whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved.

Mr. Trump has denied any such collusion, and no evidence has surfaced publicly to contradict him. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his advisers this year repeatedly denied any contacts with Russians during the campaign, only to have journalists uncover one undisclosed meeting after another.

Not to mention the fact that Trump is a flagrant, determined, repetitive liar. Birtherism anyone? His denials are worthless.



Innocent by reason of all caps

Oct 30th, 2017 8:07 am | By

Half an hour ago.

The second one just cracks me up. Oh, ok then; why didn’t you tell us?



No other bids, no audit, no claims

Oct 29th, 2017 4:33 pm | By

Those terms though.

The $300 million contract that was awarded to a tiny electrical firm in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s small Montana hometown to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s power grid was revealed on Friday.

And it contained some startling terms.

First reported by Daily Beast contributor Ken Klippenstein, the contractawarded to Whitefish Energy seems to heavily favor the company.

Like:

  • $79.82 per person for food each day
  • $332.41 per person for accommodations each day
  • More than $40,000 for helicopter-related services
  • It states that, “In no event shall [government bodies] have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements.”
  • And that the Puerto Rican government “waives any claim against contractor related to delayed completion of work.”

Why would anyone anywhere sign a contract stipulating no audit or review and no claims?

The contract was awarded without a competitive bidding process, Reuters reported, which drew criticism from lawmakers who are now looking into the deal.

No competitive bidding, and ridiculous terms. Nothing suspicious about that, right?