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 … Read the rest

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, … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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

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

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

… Read the rest

Polanski is in the news again.

Renate Langer, a 61-year-old former German actress, has reported to the Swiss police that the film director Roman Polanski raped her at a house in Gstaad in February 1972, when she was 15.

Ms. Langer is the fourth woman to publicly accuse Mr. Polanski of sexual assaulting her when she was a teenager.

You might say it’s a pattern with this guy. You might say he seems to have had a taste for sexually assaulting barely pubescent girls.

Ms. Langer said in the interview that she had not previously reported anything to the police — and did not confide in friends and family at the time — largely out of concern for her

CBS is doing live updates of Trump’s jaunt to Puerto Rico. The most recent item is that he’s throwing paper towels to a crowd of people. Yes really: paper towels. “Here, Puerto Rico people, mop up the hurricane.”

The president — in what the White House press pooler described as a Stephen Curry impersonation — softly shot paper towels into the crowd. He also held up canned chicken breast for the crowd to see.

Reuters got a snap:

Score!… Read the rest

Yet another iteration of the “now right after a mass shooting is not the time to talk about gun control” bromide – the one that makes absolutely no sense. Why isn’t right after yet another mass shooting very much the time to talk about gun control? It’s like saying “now right after a horrific multi-car crash caused by a driver texting is not the time to talk about not texting while driving.” Yes it is, it’s exactly the time to talk about it, when the dire consequences are right on the front page.

This one of course is the strikingly out of her depth Huckabee Junior.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday repeatedly deflected reporters’