Another one of those customs we’re so used to we forget to ask why they’re customs – why is it the custom to sing “the national anthem” at sporting events? It’s not a universal custom, so why is it ours?

Oh well that’s easy – because we’re vainglorious and boastful and we love violence, basically.

Back in 2011 ESPN reminded us the US “national anthem” is a war song, taunting the enemy (flag still there, nyah nyah).

That’s why, in a country that loudly lauds actions on the battlefield and the playing field, “The Star-Spangled Banner” and American athletics have a nearly indissoluble marriage. Hatched during one war, institutionalized during another, this song has become so entrenched in our sports identity that it’s almost impossible to think of one without the other.

Our nation honors war. Our nation loves sports. Our nation glorifies winning. Our national anthem strikes all three chords at the same time.

…

Of course, in American sports, the flag — and the anthem — is always there. At the biggest events, pregame festivities surrounding the song provide as much spectacle as the games themselves. The anthem is a show, and a show of force. Every year, the Pentagon approves several hundred requests for military flyovers (even if that means five F-18s buzzing the closed roof of Cowboys Stadium, as was the case at this year’s Super Bowl). At lesser events, even at the high school level, a color guard is often on hand with the flag as the anthem is played.

So we see sports as an arm of the military.

And then there’s the fact that a university is afraid of being called a TERF on social media.

A researcher has been refused permission to study cases of people who have surgery to reverse gender reassignment by a university that said it risked generating controversy on social media sites.

The proposal was rejected with an explanation noting that it was a potentially “politically incorrect” piece of research and could lead to material being posted online that “may be detrimental to the reputation of the institution”.

Many subjects are potentially “politically incorrect”; it seems like an excess of caution for a university to squeal “Ewww!” and refuse permission to research them.

James Caspian, a psychotherapist, who wanted to conduct the research for a master’s degree in counselling and psychotherapy at Bath Spa University, accused it of failing to follow “the most basic tenets of academic and intellectual freedom of enquiry”.

Mr Caspian, 58, a counsellor who specialises in therapy for transgender people, embarked on the research after speaking to a surgeon who had carried out operations to reverse gender reassignment surgery, as people came to regret their decision.

Why wouldn’t that be of interest? If being trans is of interest, if becoming trans is of interest, if coming out as trans is of interest, why isn’t changing the mind also of interest?

Are we deciding now that being trans is the only really worthwhile thing to be? That people who aren’t trans, or at least enby, are kind of missing the zeitgeist boat? Is “cis” really what it has always seemed to be, just another word for conservative and old and boring?

Caspian got permission on his first try but then had trouble finding willing subjects so he asked to change his proposal to seek women who had transitioned to men and reverted to living as women, but without reversing their surgery. At that point Bath Spa said no.

On the sub-committee’s rejection form, it said: “Engaging in a potentially ‘politically incorrect’ piece of research carries a risk to the university.

“Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university.”

Under a section on ethical issues needing further consideration, it added: “The posting of unpleasant material on blogs or social media may be detrimental to the reputation of the university.”

So Twitter trolls are now making universities’ decisions for them. Awesome.

Oh darn, I must have been out.

Miranda Green in the Financial Times points out a disquieting statistic.

[N]ews this week that one in four 14-year-old girls (and one in 10 boys of the same age) are experiencing the symptoms of depression should detain us.

I think the fact that far more 14-year-old girls than boys are experiencing the symptoms of depression should detain us a good deal longer.

It may be tempting to dismiss today’s adolescent moods, blithely, as something we have all endured. But the sources of young people’s anxiety seem to have changed quite fundamentally as growing up migrates online. The worst cases have serious real-world consequences. One MP told me of a visit from a family who wanted help to move not just out of the local school, but out of London completely. Images of their daughter, aged 13, engaged in what used to be called heavy petting, had been shared so widely that the neighbourhood had become a hostile environment.

Ah there it is. Images of a boy engaged in sexual activity don’t trash his life the way such images do a girl’s. It’s almost as if the double standard is not one bit less double than it ever was, decades of feminism notwithstanding.

“Teenagers live their life more in public,” ponders Justine Brian, director of schools at the education support network Civitas: “They are always one Snapchat picture or Facebook post away from someone slagging them off.” She and I shared the peculiar frustration of judging a debating competition for secondary schools, supposedly on a motion about fake news. It instead unleashed a torrent of anxiety from the teenagers about managing their online personas. Our attempts to steer the sixth formers back on to the topic failed — they were possessed, as Ms Brian puts it, by “the idea that something terrible might happen online at age 16 and the rest of your life is ruined”.

And they’re not wrong – it might and it could be.

This week’s report, part of government-funded longitudinal studies, shows that parents are no good at working out what is going on: they overestimate how depressed and anxious their sons feel, and seriously underestimate their daughters’ distress.

Decades of feminism, and still we don’t get it.

Planned Parenthood does sex ed. It has a section on “how pregnancy happens.” It’s a little…odd.

Pregnancy is actually a pretty complicated process that has several steps. It all starts with sperm cells and an egg.

Sperm are microscopic cells that are made in testicles. Sperm mixes with other fluids to make semen (cum), which comes out of the penis during ejaculation. Millions and millions of sperm come out every time you ejaculate — but it only takes 1 sperm cell to meet with an egg for pregnancy to happen.

Eggs live in ovaries, and the hormones that control your menstrual cycle cause a few eggs to mature every month.

Wait what? Millions of sperm come out every time you ejaculate and at the same time you have a menstrual cycle? That’s a novel kind of sex ed.

When a sperm cell joins with an egg, it’s called fertilization. Fertilization doesn’t happen right away. Since sperm can hang out in your uterus and fallopian tube for up to 6 days after sex, there’s up to 6 days between sex and fertilization.

If a sperm cell does join up with your egg, the fertilized egg moves down the fallopian tube toward the uterus. It begins to divide into more and more cells, forming a ball as it grows. The ball of cells (called a blastocyst) gets to the uterus about 3–4 days after fertilization.

…

When a fertilized egg implants in the uterus, it releases pregnancy hormones that prevent the lining of your uterus from shedding — that’s why people don’t get periods when they’re pregnant. If your egg doesn’t meet up with sperm, or a fertilized egg doesn’t implant in your uterus, the thick lining of your uterus isn’t needed and it leaves your body during your period. Up to half of all fertilized eggs naturally don’t implant in the uterus — they pass out of your body during your period.

What are early pregnancy symptoms?

Many people notice symptoms early in their pregnancy, but others may not have any symptoms at all.

So people impregnate themselves nowadays, is that it? What an exciting time we live in.

Hmmm. There’s the left, and then there’s…this other thing. I don’t know what to call it. The fight-picking left, the eat-your-own left, the thought-police left, the bully left.

FRESHMEN crowded the lecture hall at 9am for Humanities 110, the first class of their college careers. Elizabeth Drumm, the head of the programme, made some introductory remarks, her voice quavering. As some faculty members moved to take their places at a panel discussion, three demonstrators emerged from the wings of the auditorium. “We’re protesting Hum 110 because it’s Eurocentric,” one began. “I’m sorry, this is a classroom space and this is not appropriate,” Ms Drumm said, immediately cancelling the lecture. Thus began another academic year at Reed College, a liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon.

Last academic year, a dozen or so students continuously occupied the three-day-a-week lecture series by sitting in front of the auditorium with cardboard signs, sometimes taping their mouths in protest at the absence of non-white voices in the syllabus. One even took to lecturing the freshman class on the podium from an alternate curriculum before the start of each session.

This year the president said no we’re not doing that again.

The protesters argue that the Humanities programme is racist because it ignores many of the world’s great civilisations and because its authors are overwhelmingly male and white.

And cis, don’t forget cis.

Assistant professor Lucia Martinez Valdivia, who describes herself as mixed-race and queer, asked protesters not to demonstrate during her lecture on Sappho last November. Ms Valdivia said she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and doubted her ability to deliver the lecture in the face of their opposition. At first, demonstrators announced they would change tactics and sit quietly in the audience, wearing black. After her speech, a number of them berated her, bringing her to tears.

Demonstrators said Ms Valdivia was guilty of a variety of offences: she was a “race traitor” who upheld white supremacist principles by failing to oppose the Humanities syllabus. She was “anti-black” because she appropriated black slang by wearing a T-shirt that said, “Poetry is Lit”. She was an “ableist” because she believes trigger warnings sometimes diminish sexual trauma. She was also called a “gaslighter” for making disadvantaged students doubt their own feelings of oppression.

It sounds like a complete festival of stupid, if that really is how it went.

A few weeks later, the college invited Kimberly Peirce, the gender-fluid director of “Boys Don’t Cry”, which was widely praised as the first sympathetic portrayal of trans people in cinema. Protesters ripped down posters promoting the event and put up their own posters that said: “Fuck this cis white bitch”…

Remember that? I wrote about it last year. “Fuck this cis white bitch” – it says it all, doesn’t it.

Many students have said privately that the campus has become a place where they are afraid to express dissenting opinions. Students who disagree with the protesters’ views, on social media, have been denounced as racists by activist leaders. A newly accepted international student was mocked when she asked her future classmates if there were any libertarian groups on campus. White students have complained that they have been told by other students that they are unjustified in speaking about race and identity in class. When one student voiced a dissenting opinion on social media, his classmate threatened to get him fired from his job at the college bookstore. “It’s an environment with limited representation of opinion, and it can be hostile to students who hold other views,” says Yuta Kato, a sophomore.

It’s as if they think they’re in receipt of Holy Writ, and everyone else is a Sinner.

Puerto Rico is in trouble.

A dam in northwestern Puerto Rico suffered structural damage on Friday, the governor said at a news conference, prompting evacuationsof areas nearby in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

“Close to 70,000 is the estimate of people that could be affected in the case of a collapse,” the governor, Ricardo Rosselló, said about the Guajataca Dam, which is operated by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. “We don’t know the details. It’s time to get people out.”

A flash flood warning was previously issued by the National Weather Service for the municipalities of Isabela and Quebradillas. “This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation,” the service said in an advisory.

We’ve been hearing for decades that global warming was going to hit poor people in coastal areas very hard. Now we get to watch those predictions played out before our eyes.

Gee it’s almost as if Trump’s people see a job in his administration as an opportunity to milk taxpayers for those sweet luxuries that corrupt rich people enjoy so much.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price will face an inspector general’s investigation into his reported use of chartered jets for at least two dozen flights in recent months at taxpayer expense.

A spokeswoman for HHS Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson told The Washington Post on Friday that the agency will request records of Price’s travel and review the justification made by Price and his staff for the trips, which reportedly cost taxpayers a combined $300,000.

House Democrats wrote to Levinson, an appointee of President George W. Bush, on Wednesday requesting the investigation. They said the flights appeared to violate federal law designed to make sure executive branch officials use the most economical travel available.

There’s a federal law about that? I guess nobody remembered to give Price the pamphlet.

Price’s office this week sought to justify his use of chartered jets, saying that the secretary’s office evaluates the most effective way for him to travel and finds that it is sometimes necessary to charter planes to allow Price to both manage one of the largest executive branch agencies and stay grounded with voters.

“This is Secretary Price, getting outside of D.C., making sure he is connected with the real American people,” said Charmaine Yoest, his assistant secretary for public affairs.

The real American people are accessible only via chartered jet? Why is that exactly?

On Friday, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform panel called on House Republicans to hold a hearing into Price’s travel and asked Price for details on the number of non-commercial flights that he or other agency officials took, how much they cost and any documents justifying the private-jet travel.

“If these recent reports are accurate, this would be a stunning and hypocritical breach of trust, given that the Trump Administration at the same time is trying to take away healthcare from millions of Americans and is proposing to slash funding at HHS — negatively affecting critical programs to provide early-childhood education, fund Medicare for seniors, and conduct medical research and development,” wrote Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) in his letter to HHS.

Maybe they aren’t the real American people.

Just a small point.

I’m seeing an amazing flood of headlines exclaiming that Kim called Trump this weird insult, “dotard.” Like, at the top of the Washington Post’s list of Most Read right now is “A short history of ‘dotard,’ the arcane insult Kim Jong Un used in his threat against Trump.”

But that’s absurd, because of course he didn’t. Are all these headline writers forgetting that Kim didn’t say what he said in English? Someone translated what Kim said as “dotard” – and that’s just not a very interesting fact, is it.

From what I’ve seen the literal translation of what Kim said is just crazy old guy or the like – pejorative but not “arcane.” And also not “dotard.”

Kim did not literally call Trump a dotard on account of how that’s an English word and Kim is Korean and spoke Korean.

Lordy, people, get a grip.

Jesus and Mo:

Only bad reasons, and some excuses – sums it up, doesn’t it.

Jesus and Mo on Patreon.

So this is going well.

Kim Jong-un’s personal statement released on Friday, and his foreign minister’s threat to test a nuclear weapon over the Pacific Ocean, represent a new level of brinkmanship by the government.

Speaking in the first person in his statement, Mr. Kim called Mr. Trump a “frightened dog” and a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Saying he was personally insulted by Mr. Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea, Mr. Kim vowed to take the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”

In other word’s Trump’s idiotic verbal abuse of Kim at the UN the other day did what sensible observers said it would: it pushed us closer to this nuclear war they both seem to want.

Trump needs to be removed from office immediately, but no one who can do it will do it.

Shortly after the North’s state-run news agency KCNA carried Mr. Kim’s statement, his foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, delivered prepared remarks to reporters outside his hotel in New York, saying it was up to Mr. Kim to decide what to do, but that North Korea might conduct the “biggest ever hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific.”

Mr. Ri could not have made such an alarming comment without approval from Mr. Kim, although analysts doubt whether North Korea has the technology or political daring to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test, which the world has not seen for decades.

Oh well that’s reassuring. If analysts doubt, I’m sure we can all rest easy.

Koh Yu-hwan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul, said that Mr. Kim, faced with Mr. Trump’s threat of annihilation, could respond only with equal force.

“When Trump stood before the United Nations General Assembly and threatened to totally destroy his country, Kim Jong-un had to take that as the United States telling the world of its intention for possible military action,” Mr. Koh said. “He had to respond in kind, launching the same kind of verbal bombs.”

Analysts said that by putting his reputation on the line with his statement, Mr. Kim was now far more unlikely to stand down. Instead, his government would use the escalating standoff as an excuse to conduct more nuclear and missile tests, they said.

And Trump, being the incompetent uncontrollable idiot and egomaniac that he is, will do the same thing – shout back even louder, and so on until we’re destroying the planet.

But hey, emails.

Katha Pollitt on the Special rules that apply to Hillary Clinton but not Bernie Sanders or John Kerry or Franklin Roosevelt.

Hillary Clinton can’t catch a break. “Flawed” is attached to her name like a Homeric epithet. Never mind that she won almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump: She lost in three swing states by 80,000, proof that she’s a horrible person who ran the worst campaign ever. But what could you expect? She’s a bitch and a cunt (men), or can’t-put-my-finger-on-it-but-just-not-likable (women). She’s got a shrill voice and thinks she’s oh-so-special. She voted for the war in Iraq—true, so did John Kerry and Joe Biden and that momentary darling of the left, John Edwards, but her vote was just… different. She supported the 1994 crime bill, which Bernie Sanders voted for, but that was different too. She gave those speeches to Goldman Sachs. She’s too feminist, or not feminist enough, too liberal, too conservative, too tame, too outspoken, too known a quantity—but also, who is she really? And she’s too privileged—not at all like Kerry, who married into millions, or, for that matter, FDR. She was too hawkish for the left but too female to be commander in chief for the right—and why did she want to be president anyway, a question asked of no man ever but which she faced a thousand times. Whatevs! Lock her up—if not in prison, in a retirement home. Because have I mentioned that she is old? Just Google “creepy grandma grin.”

Fortunately the other candidate was youthful and at the height of his intellectual powers.

Now she’s written a book, and how dare she?

After all, Hillary writing a book about world-historical events on which she has a unique perspective is nothing like Bernie Sanders publishing a book one week after Election Day, or Barack and Michelle Obama getting a reported $65 million advance for their memoirs, or any of the many other political figures who have told their side of the story while people still remember their names. Some actual headlines: “Hillary, I love you. But please go away”; “Hillary, time to exit the stage”; “Hillary Clinton Is Not Sorry”; “no twinge of remorse.”

Funny how hardly anyone says that to John McCain, who is older than she is.

But she is saying she wasn’t the only factor in Trump’s electoral college win – how dare she?

The left focuses on her rather mild jabs at Sanders, but her other critiques are far more serious—and dead-on, too. The media was at its worst: There was endless coverage of the e-mail non-scandal (Chris Cillizza alone wrote at least 50 columns!) and almost none of her actual positions. While both candidates received largely negative coverage, a curiously neglected Harvard study shows that Trump’s platform got more attention than his scandals, while for Hillary it was the reverse. Comey’s interventions—especially his letter to Congress, just 11 days before the election, stating that he was reopening his investigation into whether she had mishandled classified documents—were disastrous. Without that announcement, Nate Silver strongly suggests, Clinton would have won. (I just hope I live long enough to learn why Comey kept quiet about the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Russia ties.) The steady drip of hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and the campaign itself, the dissemination of false stories on Facebook through Russian bots and trolls—what Obama called “this dust cloud of nonsense”—it adds up. An RT video called “How 100% of the Clintons’ 2015 ‘charity’ went to…themselves” was viewed 10 million times.

It turns out it’s not such a good idea to get our information from Putin propaganda sites. Who could possibly have known that?!

Thomas Frank at Comment is Free in June 2016:

It felt so right, this Democratic infatuation with the triumphant young global professional. So right, and for a certain class of successful Americans, so very, very obvious. What you do with winners like these is you celebrate them. Winners need to win. Winners need to have their loan payments deferred, to have venture capital directed their way by a former president. That all these gestures might actually represent self-serving behavior by an insular elite does not appear to have crossed our leaders’ minds in those complacent days of June 2016.

But by the time of Hillary Clinton’s speech the happy, complacent mood was already beginning to crumble. Just a few days before her salute to tech winners came Brexit, a blunt and ugly rejection of some of her cohort’s most cherished ideas. A short while later came the FBI’s pronouncement on Hillary Clinton’s email practices, removing the threat of prosecution but not the aura of outrageous misbehavior. And then, like a drumbeat of horror, came a series of police shootings of black men, followed quickly by the murder of five policemen in Dallas. Over it all hung the fear that these events might somehow propel this unthinkable man, Donald Trump, into the White House.

Even David Brook was perturbed, and wrote a perturbed column saying he was perturbed.

Brooks-in-despair is a pitiful sight, and one can’t help but sympathize. But what’s really remarkable about the response to these shocks of people like him has been their inability to acknowledge that their own satisfied white-collar class might be part of the problem. On this they are utterly in denial and whatever the disaster, the answer they give is always … more of the same. More “innovation”. More venture capital. More sharp young global Stanford entrepreneurs. There is no problem that more people like they themselves can’t solve.

Consider the New York Times think-piece on the Brexit that ran on 7 July. It mocked the British government for being dominated by a tiny, incestuous circle of friends, but then reassured readers that things simply aren’t like that here in the USA: “It’s as if President Obama’s inner circle consisted almost entirely of his friends, neighbors and fellow Harvard graduates,” supposedly an impossibility. I had to read that passage over again and again to understand it, so great was the cognitive dissonance. President Obama’s inner circle does consist of his fellow Harvard graduates; encouraging Obama to appoint such people and documenting their adventures in government has been a pundit obsession for years. Applauding Bill Clinton for doing the same with his Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law friends was also once a standard journalistic trope.

It’s the best and the brightest all over again.

I wouldn’t argue that presidents shouldn’t hire lots of people from Harvard and Yale…but I would argue that they should also hire lots of people with other forms of credentials, such as for instance union experience.

It’s easy to see the problems presented by a cliquish elite when they happen elsewhere. In the countries of Old Europe, maybe, powerful politicians sell out grotesquely to Goldman Sachs; but when an idealistic American president announces that he wants to seek a career in venture capital, we have trouble saying much of anything. In Britain, maybe, they have an “establishment”; but what we have in America, we think, are talented people who deserve to be on top. One wonders what kind of a shock it will take to shake us out of this meritocratic complacency once and for all.

On the other hand now we have Trump who might as well be heeding Frank’s question, because he carefully does not hire talented people who deserve to be on top, but instead talentless stooges and cronies who share his “everything for the rich” ideology. It’s not an improvement.

I’m reading Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. The Times ran a review in April 2016, while liberals were cheerfully watching the Republicans destroy themselves…

At the same time, many liberals have expressed a grim satisfaction in watching the Republican Party tear itself apart. Whatever terrible fate might soon befall the nation, the thinking goes, it’s their fault, not ours. They are the ones stirring up the base prejudices and epic resentments of America’s disaffected white working class, and they must now reap the whirlwind.

In his new book, the social critic Thomas Frank ­poses another possibility: that liberals in general — and the Democratic Party in particular — should look inward to understand the sorry state of American politics. Too busy attending TED talks and ­vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, Frank argues, the Democratic elite has abandoned the party’s traditional commitments to the working class.

He’s not wrong about that.

Frank’s most famous book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (2004), argued that Republicans had duped the white working class by pounding the table on social issues while delivering tax cuts for the rich. He focused on Kansas as the reddest of red states (and, not incidentally, the place of his birth). This time Frank is coming for the Ivy League blue-state liberals, that “tight little network of enlightened strivers” who have allegedly been running the country into the ground. Think of it as “What’s the Matter With Massachusetts?”

Frank’s book is an unabashed polemic, not a studious examination of policy or polling trends. In Frank’s view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day. To Frank, that question hasn’t changed much over the last few centuries. “It is the eternal conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor — only with one side pinned to the ground and the other leisurely pounding away at its adversary’s face,” he writes.

The book is an unabashed polemic but it is one with citations. He doesn’t just spin his “view” out of nothing; he makes an argument and he cites sources.

And he’s not wrong. There’s a very interesting (and persuasive) chapter about professionals as the new ruling class, and meritocracy as the unquestioned ideology of that class, and both political parties, and basically everyone except…of course…the working class.

Frank argues that the Democratic Party — once “the Party of the People” — now caters to the interests of a “professional-managerial class” consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers. These affluent city dwellers and suburbanites believe firmly in meritocracy and individual opportunity, but shun the kind of social policies that once gave a real leg up to the working class. In the book, Frank points to the Democrats’ neglect of organized labor and support for Nafta as examples of this sensibility, in which “you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.”

Which wouldn’t be so terrible, maybe, if it went along with strong support for unions, a national health service, health and safety regulations, good public schools…you know, all that. But it doesn’t.

The problem, in Frank’s view, is not simply that mainstream Democrats have failed to address growing inequality. Instead, he suggests something more sinister: Today’s leading Democrats actually don’t want to reduce inequality because they believe that inequality is the normal and righteous order of things.

I don’t know if I think it’s that or if it’s that they think touching inequality will electrocute them.

Frank’s book ends on a pessimistic note. After two decades of pleading with liberals to think seriously about inequality, to honor what was best about the New Deal, Frank has concluded that things will probably continue to get worse. “The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way,” he writes. “There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor.”

But this conclusion, too, may rest on a faulty analogy with the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt did not suddenly decide on his own to enact Social Security or grant union rights. Those ideas came up from below, through decades of frustration and struggle and conflict. If Americans want something different from their politicians, there is no alternative to this kind of exhausting and uncertain hard work. In the end, it is the only way that liberals — or conservatives — will listen.

Right now they seem to be too busy cheering on white supremacists.