CFI on the Trump administration’s new rule letting godbothering employers refuse to include birth control in their employees’ health insurance:

The Center for Inquiry condemned the new rules announced by the Department of Health and Human Services, dramatically curtailing the effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act’s Contraceptive Mandate.

Under the new rules, any employer may claim an exemption to the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage without co-payment, whether the employer’s objection is based on religious grounds or any other moral reasoning. This fundamentally undercuts the purpose and operation of the Contraceptive Mandate, a rule that was effective in ensuring broad access to reproductive health care for women.

The Contraceptive Mandate, a key part of the Obama administration’s signature health care reform, required health insurance to cover FDA-approved methods of contraception without co-payment by the insured party. In doing so, it significantly increased availability of critical reproductive health insurance to women across America, who, previously, had often been compelled to pay significant out-of-pocket costs to access such essential care.

Out-of-pocket costs in addition to their insurance premiums. The birth control coverage isn’t free, it’s included in the insurance – except, now, when the godbotherers say no it isn’t.

Limiting contraception coverage has long been the objective of religious right groups. The religious right provided President Trump with a significant part of his support in the election. “This represents a shocking step backwards in American health care,” said Nick Little, Vice President and General Counsel of the Center for Inquiry. “At the behest of their allies in the religious right, the President and this Administration have determined that a woman’s access to affordable, essential health care must be subordinated to the religious whims of her employer.”

The Center for Inquiry submitted amicus briefs in both the Hobby Lobby and Zubik cases, and will continue to seek to defend broad, affordable access to contraception and other reproductive health care.

Robyn Blumner, President and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, added, “On these grounds what’s to stop the Trump Administration allowing employers to exclude blood transfusions from insurance coverage because Jehovah’s Witnesses object? Medical insurance is a benefit of employment. Giving employers the ability to dictate those benefits on religious grounds draws employees into their employer’s religion as a condition of employment. This is bad for women and a pluralistic society.”

The thing about the blood transfusions is that it would have an impact on men as well as women. The birth control thing hits women. They like that.

CFI is explaining to public school administrators about the First Amendment. It’s kind of pathetic that such administrators have to have it explained to them.

The Center for Inquiry challenged two high schools in Louisiana, as well as the administrators of public schools and public school athletics, to cease recent policies that fringe on the First Amendment rights of students.

In a joint letter from a broad swath of the secular movement, CFI told Waylon Bates, principal of Parkway High School, as well as others in charge of school policies in Louisiana, that threatening to discipline student athletes for protesting during the National Anthem is unconstitutional. CFI demanded retraction of the threat as well as a commitment that organized prayer would no longer be permitted at high school football games.

Bates, with the support of Scott Smith, the superintendent of Bossier Parish Schools, had informed his student athletes they would be disciplined if they were to follow the lead of so many professional athletes who recently protested during the National Anthem.

The Supreme Court has long held that schools may not compel student participation in patriotic displays against their will. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, the highest court invalidated a law requiring public school students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or face discipline.

“Students don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate,” said Nick Little, CFI’s Vice President and General Counsel, and one of the signatories to the letter. “Nor do they abandon those rights by putting on a football helmet. Students may not be compelled to be patriotic, and our courts have long recognized that.”

A better way to get students to be patriotic would be for the nation to be a better nation. Right now it’s a horror of a nation.

That time they threw a feminist conference and forgot just one little thing.

When a pink flyer promoting a feminism conference at Mexico’s biggest university was posted on social media this week, it did not take long before people noticed something was amiss.

The lineup featured two panels with 11 participants – and all of them were male.

Well…men know more about it, and they’re better at speaking, and they have more free time…it all makes sense.

The pink flyer though – that’s just stupid. We like other colors and pink doesn’t=women.

Organised by the humanities department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico(Unam), the 11 October conference appears to be intended as a homage to the feminist scholar Marta Lamas, who will host the event and debate the 11 men. The university did not immediately respond to queries about the event.

Sure. Definitely. An homage. For an homage you want to invite the best quality people, and that’s obviously not women.

Ricky Gervais again.

"I now pronounce you cunt & wife" pic.twitter.com/BVSaSFAkeH

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) September 30, 2017

I would like to apologise to anyone offended by me using the 'C' word. I will change my ways. You stupid over sensitive kunts.

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) October 3, 2017

Now the idiot in the White House wants a fight with Iran. Yes that should work out well.

President Trump plans to announce next week that he will “decertify” the international nuclear deal with Iran, saying it is not in the national interest of the United States and kicking the issue to a reluctant Congress, people briefed on an emerging White House strategy for Iran said Thursday.

The move would mark the first step in a process that could eventually result in the resumption of U.S. sanctions against Iran, which would blow up a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear activities that the country reached in 2015 with the U.S. and five other nations.

Of course the five other nations will have something to say about that. By the time Trump is through the US will have all the influence of Liechstenstein.

Under what is described as a tougher and more comprehensive approach, Trump would open the door to modifying the landmark 2015 agreement he has repeatedly bashed as a raw deal for the United States.

Translation: Trump plans to throw all his toys out of the pram, hopes for three scoops of ice cream as his reward.

The Times editorial collective on the Trump sleazery.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., acknowledged that he dropped the case after a visit from President Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz, who has contributed to Mr. Vance’s political campaign, but said he did so because it was the right thing to do.

Perhaps it was, and perhaps the president’s son and daughter did nothing criminal. But the deceptive behavior at the heart of the case would be familiar to anyone who’s observed Mr. Trump’s business career. The hustler is in the White House now, and the young members of the Trump family, with the cloud of suspicion that now constantly surrounds them, are top advisers.

They’re crooks, grifters, cheats, hucksters, shills – they’re marketers, to use the much too polite term. That’s all there is to them. They flog stuff. They lie and conceal and cheat in order to sell stuff for an inflated price so that they can buy lots of shoes and condos and elections.

It’s recently come to light that Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both top administration officials, have been using at least three different personal email accounts for some government business, in potential violation of federal records acts.

I missed this item yesterday:

Mr. Kushner didn’t revealhis use of private email in a lengthy interview with Senate investigators who are looking into the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in undermining the 2016 election. USA Today revealed on Wednesday that shortly after Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating those possible ties, asked for related White House records, the couple rerouted personal email accounts to Trump Organization servers.

Oh did they. Did they really.

Mr. Kushner has repeatedly botched legally required disclosures of his business assets, and omitted Russian contacts on his security clearance form, asserting that despite the assistance of a cadre of experienced lawyers, he just can’t seem to get the paperwork right. Some national security experts have said that if he weren’t the president’s son-in-law, Mr. Kushner would have been denied clearance under such circumstances.

Since Ms. Trump entered the White House, her apparel brand has benefited or sought to benefit from trademark decisions in China, Japan, Kuwait, Qatar, Panama, Brazil and elsewhere.

Sleaze sleaze sleaze.

Kazuo Ishiguro has himself a Nobel prize.

Mr. Ishiguro, 62, is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. In his seven novels, he has obsessively returned to the same themes, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time.

That description of Never Let Me Go is very incomplete, I guess because spoilers? But surely bans on spoilers can’t last forever, and anyway you couldn’t review the book properly if you avoided saying what it’s about. The “dystopian” part [spoiler alert] is that the “students” in that “boarding school” were bred by the state for their parts; they die after their 5th or 6th removal.

In a career that spans some 35 years, Mr. Ishiguro has gained wide recognition for his idiosyncratic, emotionally restrained prose style. His novels are often narrated in the first person, by unreliable narrators who are in denial about truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. The resonance in his novels often comes from the rich subtext — the things left unsaid, and gaps between the narrator’s perception and reality.

I do love an unreliable narrator. I’m like Emily Bronte that way.

He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills, about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in post-World War II Japan.

…

When he wrote “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Ishiguro worried that he was repeating himself by writing another first person novel with an unreliable narrator, but critics saw the book as an extreme departure.

“I was afraid that people would say, ‘Oh, it’s the same book again, about an old guy looking back over his life with regret when it’s too late to change thing,’ ” he said in a 2015 interview with The Times. “Instead, they were saying, ‘Your books are always set in Japan; this is a giant leap for you.’ I get this with almost every book.”

And the Nobel.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad, but now it seems of some interest to know what kind of prize package the Milwaukee people invited to their event.

I am one of the people who were trying to warn the Mythcon organizers as to the nature of their speakers, particularly Sargon of Akkad, a fellow I have unfortunately known for some time. When it became clear that the Mythcon people were not interested, my peers and I just tried to warn as many others in the community as possible. If they want to platform people like this, at the very least we would make sure they had to own their decision, and we were not going to let them say they weren’t warned.

Let me introduce you to the Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon) that I know.

Carl came to prominence on Youtube as the most public mouthpiece of the movement called GamerGate.

The most public? I always thought that was Milo.

Carl’s first video was regarding frequent GG target Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic of video games who received death and rape threats regularly. Carl made over 30 videos about her specifically and a great many others that discussed her.

When I say “discussed” that is somewhat euphemistic. Carl has referred to her over the years as a con artist (implying she either instigated or perhaps even fabricated her years of well-documented abuse), a cult leader, a bitch, an authoritarian bigot against white men, and many other interesting charges. The master of the mixed message, he would tell his followers not to harass her- as that would be ‘money in her pocket’, but also that her harassment was an inevitable consequence of her bigotry. He has stated numerous times that he and other “anti-sjw’s” are in a culture war against “regressives” and “cultural Marxists”.

Familiar stuff – familiar, wearying, depressing stuff.

Let’s review some highlights:

~ After mass shooter Elliot Rogers’ deadly rampage, Carl responded to feminist Laci Green’s video on the subject by – ever so rationally- blaming the event on her in particular and the “fucking feminist SYSTEM!!” in general. This was delivered in a histrionic rant that has to be heard to be properly appreciated.

~ Carl holds a grudge against my friend, atheist Youtuber Steve Shives, for his progressivism. Carl has tried some interesting (ok, fraudulent) tactics to get Steve to debate him but has been refused. So, of course, he called upon his rationality and wit to…attack Steve’s wife. He took a two-minute video she appeared in where Steve asks her if she finds his TV show preferences sexist and she admitted she did, and from that deduced that she was a vicious harpy, forcing her feminist ideas upon poor, emotionally abused Steve. This has caused her to be attacked and maligned by many online trolls for years.

And then an item that’s kind of breathtaking:

~ One day when Carl was out shopping, he encountered a retail worker who was wearing (gasp) a “Feminist” t-shirt. He took her picture without her permission and posted it online, along with the name of the shop and the location. After this doxing, she was so badly harassed at work and frightened for her safety the police had to be involved.

He told his fans exactly where to find her, and they did. Because she wore a feminist T shirt.

And that’s the guy the Milwaukee people thought it was worth importing all the way from Swindon to their conference.

Dave Silverman has spoken out about the mess at Mythcon in Milwaukee last weekend.

I saw the video of the Mythcon event. I heard people laugh and cheer at a victim of sexual assault being taunted via Twitter with a shameful shitty tweet.

My blood boiled. My adrenaline flowed. My bile bubbled. If you’re one of the people who cheer when victims get taunted, you’re an asshole. And I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I want nothing to do with you until you figure out how to have some empathy.

When you’re organizing an event, the most important thing you can do is make sure that people feel welcomed. Celebrating the diversity of our community also means recognizing that we have work to do to make our events reflect the larger community of atheists. It’s something I strive for every time I sit down with my team to work on our events.

We can’t tolerate intolerance. We can’t abide elevating those who spend their time trolling, and harassing, and alienating the very people who we’re in this fight to help. We have serious work to do and we need serious conversations about how to do that. I don’t have time to waste on people whose only interest seems to be provocation for provocation’s sake and not on making the lives of our fellow atheists better.

Our convention next year is March 29 to April 1 in Oklahoma City. Like every year, we’re going to have new people you’ve never heard from. We’re going to talk about tough subjects. But we’re going to do it without making people feel unsafe at our event. We’re going to have a great time celebrating our community and the people in it. And we’re going to do it while working to help people.

I do what I do to make a positive change in this country. I’m 51 years old and I don’t have the time or patience to put up with assholes.

There are a lot of comments thanking him, and a few defending the harassers and complaining about “SJWs” blah blah blah. Like:

All the sanctimonious lecturing and white-knighting and rape hysteria and identity politics is why people like Sargon have an audience.

No, people like Sargon (Carl Benjamin) have an audience because there are a lot of mean assholes in the world.

Dave was speaking out four years ago, and I’m glad he still is.

Right? RIGHT?

If male writers were marketed in the same way as female writers. Via Christopher Hamilton-Emery. pic.twitter.com/1IwN8MfckZ

— Jane Harris (@blablafishcakes) October 4, 2017