Looka my thumb

Jul 19th, 2017 9:44 am | By

Honestly. Just look at that.

Photo published for Dearth of a Salesman: Trump Failed to Persuade on GOP Health Bill



Donnie and Vlad

Jul 18th, 2017 5:34 pm | By

Trump had a second, secret conversation with Putin at the G20 meeting.

The hourlong conversation in Hamburg, Germany, took place at a private dinner among world leaders at a concert hall on the banks of the Elbe River during the Group of 20 economic summit meeting, with only a Kremlin interpreter present to listen to the exchange. It followed a formal meeting between the two presidents that lasted more than two hours earlier in the day, and included their foreign ministers for a fraught discussion about Moscow’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 American elections.

Only a Kremlin interpreter – so it’s like when Trump had the private meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov in the Oval Office…only more so, because this is Putin, and there was no one else there except the Kremlin interpreter.

This guy. I swear.

But the intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official United States government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart.

“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he heard directly from attendees. “They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”

I wonder what he gave away. Did he tell Putin to help himself to the Baltics? Say the US really doesn’t care what he does to his own people? Offer him a few spare nukes?

In a statement, a White House official on Tuesday described the meeting as routine and brief, and explained the lack of an American translator by noting that the president was accompanied by a Japanese interpreter who did not speak Russian. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that any insinuation that the White House has tried to hide the encounter was false.

A second White House official confirmed that the meeting had occurred but did not offer any details, and insisted on anonymity because the discussion was private.

Private?? What do they mean private? He doesn’t get to go having “private” secret just-him meetings with Putin. They’re not lovers, they’re heads of rival states.

Russia specialists said such an encounter — even on an informal basis at a social event — raised red flags because of its length, which suggests a substantive exchange, and the fact that there was no American interpreter, note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present.

“We’re all going to be wondering what was said, and that’s where it’s unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened,” Stephen Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes Russia and nuclear arms control.

“If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” added Mr. Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Because Trump is that stupid…or treasonous.



But it’s empowering and healing

Jul 18th, 2017 10:52 am | By

Goop fights back, aka A Word from Our Doctors responding to evidence-based criticisms of the woo peddled by Paltrow and the goop team.

As goop has grown, so has the attention we receive. We consistently find ourselves to be of interest to many—and for that, we are grateful—but we also find that there are third parties who critique goop to leverage that interest and bring attention to themselves. Encouraging discussion of new ideas is certainly one of our goals, but indiscriminate attacks that question the motivation and integrity of the doctors who contribute to the site is not.* This is the first in a series of posts revisiting these topics and offering our contributing M.D.’s a chance to articulate theirs, in a respectful and substantive manner.

We always welcome conversation. That’s at the core of what we’re trying to do. What we don’t welcome is the idea that questions are not okay. Being dismissive—of discourse, of questions from patients, of practices that women might find empowering or healing, of daring to poke at a long-held belief—seems like the most dangerous practice of all. Where would we be if we all still believed in female hysteria instead of orgasm equality? That smoking didn’t cause lung cancer? If every nutritionist today saw the original food pyramid as gospel?

Uh huh, and they laughed when Beethoven sat down at the piano, but that doesn’t mean that all people who sit down at the piano are geniuses as long as somebody laughed. Some innovators are dismissed at the start; it does not follow that all innovators are right.

Plus describing evidence-based medicine as “a long-held belief” in contrast to the rational innovations of goop is not altogether honest. They’re framing EBM as the Ancient Superstion and woo as the Brave New Rational Discovery.

And then lumping together “empowering” and “healing” is a cheat. Anyone can find anything “empowering,” because that word doesn’t mean much and is infinitely adaptable, but “healing” is another matter. Sometimes healing can just mean feeling better, and psychology can play a big part in that, and some kinds of woo can be useful. In general, though, healing is a matter of technical knowledge, such as how to reduce inflammation or how to deal with bacterial infections or a bunch of other things that take several years to learn to professional standard.

Last January, we published a Q&A with Shiva Rose about her jade egg practice, which has helped her (and legions of other women who wrote to us in response) feel more in touch with her sexuality, and more empowered.

There. Like that. What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? And what does it have to do with medicine?

A San Francisco-based OB-GYN/blogger posted a mocking response on her site, which has the tagline: “Wielding the Lasso of Truth.” (We also love Wonder Woman, though we’re pretty sure she’s into women taking ownership of female sexual pleasure.)

There was a tremendous amount of press pick-up on the doctor’s post, which was partially based on her own strangely confident assertion that putting a crystal in your vagina for pelvic-floor strengthening exercises would put you in danger of getting Toxic Shock Syndrome—even though there is no study/case/report which links the two—and also stating with 100 percent certainty that conventional tampons laden with glyphosate (classified by the WHO as probably carcinogenic) are no cause for concern. Since her first post, she has been taking advantage of the attention and issuing attacks to build her personal platform—ridiculing the women who might read our site in the process.

And that’s just garbage – the doctor they’re talking about so slyly is Jen Gunter, and she was well known long before that post, and she doesn’t do this to “build her personal platform” – she does it to warn people about dangerous nonsense.

Gwyneth Paltrow should be ashamed of this.

*Note the contradiction.

Updating to add Jen Gunter’s response.



Ding ding ding

Jul 18th, 2017 10:02 am | By

This time it’s a fire truck. A made in America fire truck. Boop boop.

Image result for trump fire truck



Investigating

Jul 18th, 2017 9:50 am | By

Oh no, it’s the end of the world, a woman went out in public wearing clothes.

The authorities in Saudi Arabia are investigating a young woman who posted a video of herself wearing a miniskirt and crop-top in public.

The woman, a model called “Khulood”, shared the clip of her walking around a historic fort in Ushayqir.

No wonder the authorities are investigating.

On Monday, the Okaz newspaper reported that officials in Ushayqir had called on the provincial governor and police to take action against the woman.

The religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, meanwhile wrote on Twitter that it had been made aware of the video and was in contact with the relevant authorities.

Trump’s dear friends.



Saucy

Jul 18th, 2017 8:46 am | By

Ah yes, of course. Naturally if a woman is cast to play the Doctor in Doctor Who, it is necessary to report that she has at some point been naked in front of a camera. That’s the important thing. GETCHER TITS OUT.

The Sun and Mail Online have been accused of being “reductive and irresponsible” after publishing nude photographs of Jodie Whittaker in articles covering the announcement that she is the new star of Doctor Who.

Reporting the BBC’s announcement on Sunday that Whittaker would be the first female Doctor, both publications ran articles about Whittaker appearing naked or topless in previous acting work, illustrating the stories with stills.

Stills of TITS. Because TITS. Because look, if you’re going to get a woman involved, then you have to let us ogle her TITS. It’s only fair.

The Sun published the photographs under the headline “Dalektable” – a reference to the Daleks, an enemy of the Doctor. The article covered pages four and five of the newspaper and described Whittaker’s “saucy screen past”. Mail Online’s article was headlined “Doctor Nude!” and also featured naked and topless photos of previous male Doctors, including Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith.

TITS. Tits tits TITS. Naked booty bum tits naked sex naked tits phwoar.



Whatever short-term political damage this might cause

Jul 18th, 2017 8:32 am | By

The Wall Street Journal has stern advice for Don and Fam: spill everything.

Mr. Trump seems to realize he has a problem because the White House has announced the hiring of white-collar Washington lawyer Ty Cobb to manage its Russia defense. He’ll presumably supersede the White House counsel, whom Mr. Trump ignores, and New York outside counsel Marc Kasowitz, who is out of his political depth.

Mr. Cobb has an opening to change the Trump strategy to one with the best chance of saving his Presidency: radical transparency. Release everything to the public ahead of the inevitable leaks. Mr. Cobb and his team should tell every Trump family member, campaign operative and White House aide to disclose every detail that might be relevant to the Russian investigations.

That means every meeting with any Russian or any American with Russian business ties. Every phone call or email. And every Trump business relationship with Russians going back years. This should include every relevant part of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which the President will resist but Mr. Mueller is sure to seek anyway.

That’s the best chance of saving his presidency? I’m not seeing it. If he released everything, that would probably end his presidency. The WSJ seems to be assuming he hasn’t actually done anything criminal or incompatible with being president, but that’s a huge and rather perverse assumption. I think the reason Trump is hiding as much as he can is because the truth would discredit him. The bits of truth that have been leaked have certainly done a lot to discredit him, and the full truth would do that more thoroughly. The likelihood of some miraculous Innocent Explanation is…slight.

Then release it all to the public. Whatever short-term political damage this might cause couldn’t be worse than the death by a thousand cuts of selective leaks, often out of context, from political opponents in Congress or the special counsel’s office. If there really is nothing to the Russia collusion allegations, transparency will prove it. Americans will give Mr. Trump credit for trusting their ability to make a fair judgment. Pre-emptive disclosure is the only chance to contain the political harm from future revelations.

But that’s true only if this release of all of it shows him to be not a liar, thief, fraud, cheat, and corrupt operator.

Mr. Trump somehow seems to believe that his outsize personality and social-media following make him larger than the Presidency. He’s wrong. He and his family seem oblivious to the brutal realities of Washington politics. Those realities will destroy Mr. Trump, his family and their business reputation unless they change their strategy toward the Russia probe. They don’t have much more time to do it.

But it’s not the brutal realities of Washington politics that caused Trump to be a fraud, cheat, thief, liar, bully, and sleaze – he did that himself years ago. I don’t see how admitting it all is going to save his presidency.



In order to fight an ongoing cast of ridiculous kitchen appliances

Jul 17th, 2017 5:07 pm | By

Jim Wright on the Doctor Who scandal.

So, the new Doctor is … <horrified gasp!> … a WOMAN

A woman.

Can you believe it?

The New Doctor can’t be … <horrified gasp> … a WOMAN!

No no no! The Doctor, a time traveling non human alien from a distance planet in a fictional universe who has regenerated, what? ten? eleven? times now from the dead into a different body in order to fight an ongoing cast of ridiculous kitchen appliances using really, really shitty special effects over, I dunno, 30 years or more, yeah THAT guy, has to be a white dude.

Has. To. Be. A. White. Dude.

Because that’s why you watch this dopey British science fiction show, right?

Sure, you watch it to see the same shit over and over — with British accents, which makes it totally cool despite the goofy story lines and discount special effects. Same shit, over and over. And over. And over. Same guy, just in different skin. Same villains. Same themes. Same episodes. Same shit. Exterminate! Exterminate!

It’s like Star Trek, same five characters, same five episodes, recycled over and over. And over. And over. It’s the plucky Captain, the robot/alien guy with no emotions, the comic relief guy with the funny accent, the ranty emotional guy, and The Knockers. Time travel saves the day. Logic saves the day. Emotion saves the day. The computer goes berserk! And the Ongoing Alien Menace! Repackaged, recycled, over and over. Oh look, it’s the time loop episode again, why doesn’t anybody believe Ranty Emotion Guy!

First the women came for the Ghost Busters, then Star Wars, then the Marvel Universe, now the Doctor is a chick.

Goddamn. WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO NOW? WE’RE IN SOME REAL PRETTY SHIT NOW, AREN’T WE! WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO NOW?

Because, yeah, wouldn’t want to TRY ANYTHING NEW IN OUR OUTER SPACE TIME TRAVELING ADVENTURE. Nope nope nope. Need a white dude. Just an old white British dude. Because that’s why we go time traveling in outer space, right? To see the same stuff we have RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW…



Made in America or China or Bangladesh

Jul 17th, 2017 5:04 pm | By

It’s Made in America Week at the White House.

Hahahahahaha I know. What about all those Made in China labels on Ivanka’s merchandise? I think we’re not supposed to ask.

President Donald Trump celebrated U.S.-made products on Monday, and in doing so he brought renewed attention to his own family’s production and sale of goods made overseas.

“We want to build, create and grow more products in our country using American labor, American goods, and American grit,” Trump said at a White House event touting products made in all 50 states, kicking off the administration’s “Made in America”-themed week.

“We are going to put that brand on our product because it means that it’s the best,” Trump added. He then signed an executive order aimed at better supporting American companies and protecting U.S. workers.

So if it’s the best why doesn’t Ivanka get her merchandise right here at home?

But White House aides have struggled to answer questions about the Trump Organization’s and Ivanka Trump’s decision to manufacture a number of products overseas in places like China and Mexico.

Ahead of the event, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said it would be “inappropriate” to comment on how the president’s actions could impact affect Trump’s or his daughter’s business, but indicated the administration is working to bring more manufacturing back to the United States.

Inappropriate? Says who? I think it would be highly appropriate. If I were there I would ask why Trump thinks it’s appropriate to talk hot air about Made in America when he and his gene-carriers go elsewhere to buy Stuff.

The Washington Post reported last week that Ivanka Trump relies “exclusively on foreign factories” to manufacture her products. A spokeswoman for her told reporters Sunday she would get back to them about whether the week’s theme would encourage the first daughter to move her clothing line to the United States.

Yeah they’ll get back to them in ten or twenty years, they promise.



“That’s politics!”

Jul 17th, 2017 11:55 am | By

Maggie Haberman reports that Trump is again confiding in us about just how sleazy and morally empty he really is.

“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent,” Mr. Trump posted on his Twitter account just after 10 a.m. “That’s politics!”

Of course. That’s what sleazy morally empty people do – they say everybody does it, they say you would do it in a heartbeat if you had the chance, they say everybody is as sleazy and morally empty as they are. It’s a lie – a sleazy and morally empty lie. Donald Trump is a moral vacuum, but that does not mean that everyone else is. Even in the US, where that brand of “character” is cheered on, it’s not universal.

The president has insisted he learned of the meeting only a few days before The Times article. His aides helped write his son’s initial statement describing the meeting as they flew back with the president from the Group of 20 summit meeting in Europe.

His son’s initial statement that was a lie and had to be revised as soon as the Times reported again.

The US government is a moral sewer at present. All we can do for now is try to keep track.



Justice denied

Jul 17th, 2017 10:55 am | By

A few of Ann Coulter’s many many furious outraged tweets at an airline that changed her reserved aisle seat to a window seat:

There’s one that says “.@Delta didn’t give my extra room seat to an air marshall or tall person. Here’s the woman given my PRE-BOOKED seat:” with a photo of a row of people looking up at her. It’s not very nice to photograph fellow passengers and then tweet the photo to thousands of people. That’s why I’m not including the one with the photo.

Etc etc etc in the same vein, tweet after tweet after tweet.

So the woman who was assigned to the aisle seat had actual literal dachshund legs? Really?

Oh yes, an airline inconveniencing Ann Coulter is the real fascism.

I guess there’s a sort of logic in hard-right people being this self-obsessed and Me First Always. They cultivate a showy callousness toward people damaged or abandoned by systems, and showy callousness tends to become more real and more pervasive over time. You start by sneering at workers and immigrants, and you end by thinking you yourself are the only person in the world who really matters.



An advocate for mistreated passengers

Jul 17th, 2017 10:15 am | By

Both funny and disgusting, like so much about the US these days – Ann Coulter goes on a Twitter Justice Denied campaign because Delta Airlines robbed her of her chosen seat. HER CHOSEN SEAT I tell you.

Shortly after landing in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Saturday, she launched a full scale Twitter assault against Delta Air Lines — which had apparently bumped her from an aisle seat to a window seat in the same row.

It wasn’t the most obvious moral outrage. There were no lost teeth or passengers dragged by the wrists down the aisle. In fact, the whole dispute concerned a $30 seat upgrade, according to Delta, which has promised to refund Coulter for her inconvenience.

That hasn’t stopped her war. Digressing from her usual commentary on liberals and immigrants, Coulter kept tweeting about the incident all weekend, eventually comparing Delta to dictators and claiming the booking process cost $10,000 of her time.

Ten grand; golly. I’ve booked seats. You go to the airline’s site, you find the right page, you look at the available seats, you decide which one you want, you type in the number and click, you click on confirm. It takes maybe five minutes if you’re really slow? Probably more like two or three, but let’s be generous and allow her five. So she makes $2000 a minute? She makes $2k a minute on the clock, that she doesn’t make while doing other things? So that has to be separate from her royalties on all those best-sellers, because obviously those still roll in whether she’s futzing around on Delta’s booking page or not. So who pays her $2k a minute, for what?

Some time after her flight from New York landed Friday, Coulter began to publicly expose the indignities she had documented on board.

“Why are you taking me out of the extra room seat I specifically booked, Delta?” she wrote beneath a photo of a flight attendant staring at her with some evident concern.

Coulter had, she wrote, been “kicked out of a CAREFULLY PRE-BOOKED seat to a less desirable seat” before takeoff. A flight attendant had “snatch[ed] my ticket out of my hand,” explaining only that an “emergency” necessitated the change, she said.

So where’d they put her? Middle seat in the last row?

No. Window seat as opposed to aisle seat in the same row, the exit row.

Coulter, who did not reply to questions from The Washington Post, has not disputed Delta’s account of her seating arrangements.

But she has continued to complain that she was “ordered” to move, retweeted a fan who called her treatment “abuse,” and compared the flight crew to Nurse Ratchet and Stasi police.

Ah yes, the Stasi. Being moved from an aisle seat to a window seat is very like the Stasi.

We don’t know how long Coulter spent to “investigate” the seating layout on her plane. Nor can we pretend to know the objective value of Ann Coulter.

But there’s little doubt that she’s made a lucrative career in the book and cable news worlds — if one largely built around outrage.

Outraged by Bill Clinton. By the godless “Church of Liberalism.” Lately by immigrants, again and again and again.

And now – airline seat assignment practices!

While Coulter has yet to write a book about her flight, she had tweeted about it nearly 50 times by Sunday morning.

Some fans already consider her an advocate for mistreated passengers, and Coulter appears to have embraced that portrayal — threatening to interrogate Delta’s CEO on-air.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!



Maryam Mirzakhani

Jul 16th, 2017 4:38 pm | By

I saw this everywhere yesterday but didn’t blog it because I don’t know why because it was too sad I guess. Maryam Mirzakhani died at age 40.

Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician who was the only woman ever to win a Fields Medal, the most prestigious honor in mathematics, died on Saturday. She was 40.

The cause was breast cancer, said Stanford University, where she was a professor. The university did not say where she died.

Her death is “a big loss and shock to the mathematical community worldwide,” said Peter C. Sarnak, a mathematician at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.

The Fields Medal, established in 1936, is often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. But unlike the Nobels, the Fields are bestowed only on people aged 40 or younger, not just to honor their accomplishments but also to predict future mathematical triumphs. The Fields are awarded every four years, with up to four mathematicians chosen at a time.

“She was in the midst of doing fantastic work,” Dr. Sarnak said. “Not only did she solve many problems; in solving problems, she developed tools that are now the bread and butter of people working in the field.”

Dr. Mirzakhani was one of four Fields winners in 2014, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in South Korea. Until then, all 52 recipients had been men. She was also the only Iranian ever to win the award.

What a goddam waste.

Dr. Mirzakhani’s mathematics looked at the interplay of dynamics and geometry, in some ways a more complicated version of billiards, with balls bouncing from one side to another of a rectangular billiards table eternally.

A ball’s path can sometimes be a repeating pattern. A simple example is a ball that hits a side at a right angle. It would then bounce back and forth in a line forever, never moving to any other part of the table.

But if a ball bounced at an angle, its trajectory would be more intricate, often covering the entire table.

“You want to see the trajectory of the ball,” Dr. Mirzakhani explained in a video produced by the Simons Foundation and the International Mathematical Union to profile the 2014 Fields winners. “Would it cover all your billiard table? Can you find closed billiards paths? And interestingly enough, this is an open question in general.”

The Times has more.



We read these books all the time where women are in the kitchen

Jul 16th, 2017 12:42 pm | By

Being outspoken, honest, independent-minded is one thing; being a bitch, a nag, a fanatic is another. The Atlantic on a study of teenage girls:

A number of girls from different middle and high schools reported similar experiences. One girl, Rory, 13, told them, “I was trying out for basketball and I got up to sign the sheet and everyone was like, ‘Oh get back in the kitchen!’” Rory’s initial response was anger—but then it turned to acceptance. “Guys are like that, and you get over it. It doesn’t bother me, it’s stereotypical. We read these books all the time where women are in the kitchen,” she said. (Pomerantz and Raby used pseudonyms to protect the girls’ identities.)

Pomerantz and Raby have both written various books on girl culture and knew that girls’ lives didn’t just amount to the beautiful, perfectly crafted sound bites portrayed in the media. While the authors heard plenty of alpha-girl stories—a girl who was the only female player on a boys’ hockey team, a girl who worried about balancing her popularity and her academics, a girl who stayed up until 1 a.m. checking her schoolwork—the articles made it sound as if society had transitioned into a post-feminism climate. But while they expected to hear about uncomfortable dynamics between boys and girls, they weren’t necessarily anticipating overly sexist commands reminiscent of the 1950s. Both Pomerantz and Raby gasped when they heard the “Go make me a sandwich” comment.

A few girls surveyed pushed back against the sexist statements and were able to clearly delineate what is and isn’t a joke. But more of the girls were reluctant to call out boys for their sexist behavior. They didn’t want to appear bitchy or outspoken or unsexy. It would make them look like a feminist, and feminism was a potentially damaging label. It had too many implications: that you were a prude, that you couldn’t take a joke, that you were a “man-hater” or a “bitch.” It was much cooler to say nothing. To laugh it off.

That. It’s fine to be a rebel, an activist, a fist-waver…but you can’t make other people see you that way. They can decide to see you as a prude and a bitch instead. It’s never easy.



Hint: it’s north of South Korea

Jul 16th, 2017 12:31 pm | By

The Times reports that Americans who know where North Korea is on a map are more likely to favor diplomacy over military responses. Makes sense. If you don’t know where North Korea is on a map you probably don’t know much of anything, and if you don’t know much of anything, violence can seem like a good solution to problems and also an awesome afternoon out.

An experiment led by Kyle Dropp of Morning Consult from April 27-29, conducted at the request of The New York Times, shows that respondents who could correctly identify North Korea tended to view diplomatic and nonmilitary strategies more favorably than those who could not. These strategies included imposing further economic sanctions, increasing pressure on China to influence North Korea and conducting cyberattacks against military targets in North Korea.

They also viewed direct military engagement – in particular, sending ground troops – much less favorably than those who failed to locate North Korea.

If you know where it is you might have some idea of how bad it would be to send troops there.

Geographic knowledge itself may contribute to an increased appreciation of the complexity of geopolitical events. This finding is consistent with – though not identical to – a similar experiment Mr. Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff conducted in 2014. They asked Americans to identify Ukraine on a map and asked them whether they supported military intervention. The farther a respondent’s guess was from Ukraine, the researchers found, the more likely he or she was to favor military intervention.

Then again there is such a thing as rational ignorance.

In “Why Geography Matters,” Harm de Blij wrote that geography is “a superb antidote to isolationism and provincialism,” and argued that “the American public is the geographically most illiterate society of consequence on the planet, at a time when United States power can affect countries and peoples around the world.”

This spatial illiteracy, geographers say, can leave citizens without a framework to think about foreign policy questions more substantively. “The paucity of geographical knowledge means there is no check on misleading public representations about international matters,” said Alec Murphy, a professor of geography at the University of Oregon.

While Americans could be better at geography, they cannot be expected to follow every twist and turn of foreign policy. “People don’t invest in policy information, but that’s rational,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies foreign policy and international relations. Instead of exhaustively researching foreign policy options for a host of nations, Americans are “rationally ignorant,” effectively outsourcing their foreign policy views to elites and the news media.

That system breaks down when you have a complete fool and ignoramus running the show.



Best known for representing mobsters

Jul 15th, 2017 5:20 pm | By

Trump’s re-election campaign has been paying Junior’s legal bills.

About two weeks before the release of emails showing Donald Trump Jr. seeking opposition research from attorneys representing the Russian government, his father’s reelection campaign began paying the law firm now representing Trump Jr. in the ensuing political and legal fallout.

new filing with the Federal Election Commission shows that President Trump’s reelection campaign paid $50,000 to the law offices of Alan Futerfas on June 26. That was around the time, Yahoo News reports, that the president’s legal team learned of a June 2016 email exchange in which Trump Jr., through an associate, solicited damaging information about 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton.

Isn’t that…illegal? Isn’t it illegal to use campaign money for personal expenses? Isn’t it also kind of obviously fraudulent?

When the New York Times revealed the email, and the meeting it set up, last week, Trump Jr. hired Futerfas, who is best known for representing four of New York’s major Italian mob families. The announcement of the hire came not from the Trump campaign but from the president’s company, where Trump Jr. remains a trustee.

So they do realize they’re basically mobsters.

It was not immediately clear whether the campaign expenditure was renumeration for Futerfas’s representation of Trump’s son, on Russia-related or other matters. But the payment sticks out on a presidential campaign’s expenditure list: Futerfas’s expertise is in white collar criminal defense, not political and election law.

The Trump campaign’s FEC filing shows significant expenditures on legal representation as it wades through scrutiny involving alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election. As part of that investigation, the FBI is examining whether the Trump campaign guided Russian disinformation efforts aimed at key voting precincts.

The consulting firm owned by Brad Parscale, the former Trump campaign digital director at the center of that controversy, received more than $2 million in payments from the campaign in the second quarter.

According to the FEC filing, which was released on Saturday, 15% of the more than $4.3 million spent by the Trump campaign from April through June went towards legal representation.

And here was me thinking they had to spend it on campaign expenses, not just whatever expenses they happen to have on the same planet where they also have a campaign.

That included the payment to Futerfas’s firm and more than half a million dollars to the powerhouse Washington law firm Jones Day, which has represented the Trump campaign since early in the 2016 election cycle.

But the campaign also settled on a new vendor for legal consulting services: the Trump Corporation itself. The FEC filing shows that the campaign paid the company nearly $90,000 three days after its payment to Futerfas.

The campaign has steered millions of dollars to Trump companies since 2015, but that appears to be the first time it paid a Trump entity for legal services.

Oh perfect. They’re not only using campaign money to pay their legal bills, they’re also using campaign money to pay themselves for legal services.

Classy, classy, classy.



The end of “women”

Jul 15th, 2017 4:41 pm | By

There’s a piece by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha about emotional labor. The title is

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR A FAIR TRADE EMOTIONAL LABOR ECONOMY
(CENTERED BY DISABLED, FEMME OF COLOR, WORKING CLASS/POOR GENIUS)

I have no idea what the second line, the one in parentheses, is supposed to mean.

Whatever it’s supposed to mean, I’m staggered before the piece even begins, by a throat-clearing that prefaces it:

Editor’s note: In this piece you may notice some departures from Bitch’s house style. This piece was edited according to the author’s specifications.

Femme: A person who has one of a million kinds of queer femme or feminine genders. Part of a multiverse of femme gendered people who have histories and communities in every culture since the dawn of time. A queer gender that often breaks away from white, able bodied, upper middle class, cis ideas of femininity, remixing it to harken to fat or working class or Black or brown or trans or non-binary or disabled or sex worker or other genders of femme to grant strength, vulnerability and power to the person embodying them. A revolutionary gender universe.

In other words…a person who for some reason thinks the word “woman” is some kind of obscenity or blasphemy or admission of guilt, and is therefore to be shunned…in favor of the word “woman” in another language. That’ll fix it.

But French – my dear, isn’t that terribly elitist? It’s only snobby people who sip their lattes in coastal bubbles who know French. Surely it should be mujer.

But more to the point – fuck that.

I’m so sick of this constant drip-drip-drip insistence that actually women have to be kicked out of feminism now because women are not oppressed at all but rather the source of oppression, because they’re such white cis able-bodied upper middle class bitches. There’s no such thing as “femme gendered people” who are a category apart from women, and being fat or working class or black or brown does not make you not a woman. I’m so sick of this stupid malevolent woman-hating bullshit. There is no “revolutionary gender universe” that excludes women – that right there is just plain old vanilla patriarchy, and I say the hell with it.

But she goes with it. Everything is femme.

The thing about being a working class or poor and/or disabled and/or parenting and/or Black, Indigenous or brown femme is that people are going to ask you to do stuff for them. Oh, are they ever…And because: your life as a working class or poor and/or sex working and/or disabled and/or Black or brown femme person has taught you that the only damn way you or anybody survives is by helping each other…It’s maybe what hippies mean when they talk about the gift economy, it’s just a million times more working class, femme, Black and brown, and sick in bed.

Do not say women; never say women; women are the enemy.

We live in a white capitalist colonialist cissexist ableist patriarchy that oppresses in many ways, including by reviling all that is femme. In the queer communities I’ve been part of since the ’90s, I’ve witnessed how femmephobia, sexism, and transmisogyny act together to view femininity and femmeness as weak, less than, not as smart or competent, “hysterical,” “too much,” not worthy of praise or respect, enforcing rape culture and political, economic and social disenfranchisement of femmes. Forget femme invisibility; the thing most femmes I know are impacted by is lack of femme respect. Femmephobia and transmisogyny infuse queer and mainstream cultures in a million ways, from the ways in which femme genders are seen as inherently less radical (i.e., assuming money spent on makeup or femme clothing is somehow more capitalist than that spent on bowties and butch wax) to the ways in which, as writer Morgan M. Page notes, “Any minor slip of language or politics and [trans women] are labeled “crazy trans women,” resulting in trans women being expelled from queer communities.

Yeah. It’s all femmephobia and transmisogyny; no sexism or misogyny at all. Women are shit; it’s only femmes that are any good.

Generations of femmes have written and organized about misogyny and transmisogyny in queer and trans communities, and I’m alive because of this work. But I remain, with many other femme/feminine people, harmed by misogynist ideas about care labor, where endless free emotional labor is simply the role our communities have for femme and feminine people. As a newly physically disabled, working class femme of color in the ’90s, I often felt how the queer and prison justice communities I was part of looked down on my gender, especially when I was sick and broke and surviving abuse and needing support. Then I really sucked—I was just another needy, weak girl, huh? The one place femme people could receive respect in those communities was if we were tough, invulnerable, always “on,” and never needing a thing.

And if they carefully said “femme” instead of “women” because…no, I still don’t know why. To be better than those bitches, clearly, but why she sees that as somehow an advance on feminism I do not know.



Even a woman could do it

Jul 15th, 2017 11:09 am | By

Updating to add: it’s now being reported that there are rumors this is a falsehood, originating perhaps with Boris Johnson.

Some more banal sexism:

Philip Hammond has provoked bewilderment and anger with his suggestion that driving a train is so easy that “even a woman could do it”. Theresa May has done little for women’s rights but even she was shocked, slapping down her Chancellor with a curt remark.

Yet egregious as these ministerial reflections were – and we’ve had a few, in these grim Brexit times – they are not as out of tune with the age as we like to think.

[T]ake Wimbledon. Female players have complained that men are more likely to be put on show courts, while Andy Murray had to correct a reporter who said that an American had not reached a Grand Slam semi-final since 2009 – overlooking the dozen major trophies placed on the mantelpiece since then by a certain Serena Williams.

Oh but he said “an American.” Serena Williams is an American woman – whole different category. There are Americans, and there are American women. Let’s not get confused here.

It is, of course, easy to dismiss this as trivial. Certainly anyone who complains of sexism is marked down as humourless. But the Conservatives can sometimes resemble the lower sixth of a 1950s public school. David Cameron told a female MP to “calm down, dear”, while Tory MPs have been accused of cupping their hands and mouthing the word “melons” when female MPs rise to speak. Nicholas Soames even described the “woof woof” noises he felt moved to make at a female MP as a “friendly canine salute”.

In part this is offensive because no one in 2017 should have to work in an environment where sexism is apparently tolerated. But more importantly, politicians making these remarks are also making the rules for how the entire female population is treated.

Because women are too stupid to do it, plus melons, phwoarrrr.



Embedded in the routines and language of everyday life

Jul 15th, 2017 9:50 am | By

Deborah Cameron suggests a category of “banal sexism” for the background noise of stale jokes and insults about women that most people don’t even notice.

Sexism also has ‘hot’ forms, and those are the ones mainstream discourse finds it easiest to recognise and condemn. The western media have no difficulty in recognising the sexism of the Taliban and Boko Haram; the more liberal parts of the western media have no difficulty in recognising the sexism of Gamergaters and Donald Trump.  But what you might call ‘banal sexism’—ordinary, unremarkable, embedded in the routines and the language of everyday life—is a different story. It does often go unnoticed, and when feminists draw attention to it they’re accused of taking offence where none was intended or embracing ‘victim culture’. These knee-jerk defences are often delivered with an air of surprise—as if the people responsible hadn’t realised until that moment that anyone could possibly dissent.

Dear Muslima innit – except it’s not irritable celebrity science dude on Twitter but nearly everybody all the time.

Banal sexism doesn’t provoke outrage. It occupies the part of the spectrum that runs from ‘seen but unnoticed’ (like the ‘default male’ convention which I discussed in an earlier post) through to ‘annoying but not worth getting all fired up about’. You might shake your head, roll your eyes, post a photo with a scathing comment on Facebook, but most people wouldn’t bother to make a formal complaint.

But we can also collect the photos with scathing comments on Facebook – and on blogs – and that’s a little more effective than just shouting at the tv. On the other hand there are also anti-feminists collecting their photos with scathing comments on Facebook and blogs, and at the moment they seem to be winning.



Where’s your sense of humor?

Jul 15th, 2017 9:14 am | By

Today in everyday misogyny:

Ahaha. Haha. So funny.

Woman 1: How can I get my stalker to lose interest in me?

Woman 2: Marry him.

Ahaha. Funny. Marriage=boredom; so funny, so fresh, so worth making a joke of stalking and its attendant terrorizing and violence.