Filthier and filthier:

A senior Justice Department ethics official concluded acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker should recuse from overseeing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe examining President Trump, but advisers to Whitaker recommended the opposite and he has no plans to step aside, people familiar with the matter said.

Earlier Thursday, a different official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said ethics officials had advised Whitaker need not step aside, only to retract that description of events hours later.

They know we can see them, right?

Within days of the president’s announcement in early November that he had put Whitaker in the role on a temporary basis, Whitaker tapped a veteran U.S. attorney to become part

Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed wrote an open letter in response to Grace Lavery’s “Grad School As Conversion Therapy” which in turn was a response to a thing Reed wrote. I wouldn’t bother you with that labyrinth except that the Reed-Castiglia one is a fine read.

The reciprocity and collectivity of language seems like a good place to start in a debate about speech and censorship. For, although trans-theorizing and trans-activism have the potential to open onto many interesting and important issues, far too often on today’s campuses they are reduced to exercises in language-policing in which attitudes of outraged victimhood are used to coerce certain forms of speech and to justify aggressive forms of censorship.

Emphasis mine, because … Read the rest

Meanwhile the drones are taking over.

Tens of thousands of passengers have been disrupted by drones flying over one of the UK’s busiest airports.

Gatwick’s runway has been shut since Wednesday night, as devices have been repeatedly flying over the airfield.

Sussex Police said it was not terror-related but a “deliberate act” of disruption, using “industrial specification” drones.

About 110,000 passengers on 760 flights were due to fly on Thursday. Disruption could last “several days”.

There’s no end in sight.… Read the rest

Uh oh. Bad news.

Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker has consulted with ethics officials at the Justice Department and they have advised him he does not need to recuse himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, a source familiar with the process told CNN Thursday.

…

Whitaker is expected to inform senators, many of whom have raised ethics concerns given his past criticism of Mueller’s investigation, about this development later Thursday, the source said.

Walter Shaub is disgusted.

The government ethics program has now failed the final test of its reason for existing. Born in the wake of the Saturday Night Massacre, it has now blessed a slow motion repeat. With this decision, the ethics program has

So, that’s not disturbing at all.

2/ “… hand a strategic victory to our Syrian, Iranian, and Russian adversaries. It’s a mistake of colossal proportions and the President fails to see how it will endanger our country.”

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) December 20, 2018

Russian. Hmm. Why would Trump be handing anything to Russia…

Hypothetically, if you were simultaneously the President and compromised by Russia, what more would you have done today to please the Kremlin?

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) December 20, 2018

… Read the rest

Katie Herzog at The Stranger reports on a medication for alcohol addiction that – unlike 12-step programs – works.

Alcohol addiction is often thought of in recovery circles like AA as a moral failing, something that can be treated if you just try, and believe, hard enough. This, however, is contrary to what most research tells us about how alcohol works on human beings. Morality, if you ask scientists, has nothing to do with it.

Rather, alcohol is primed to be addictive. After it is absorbed into the bloodstream, it soon moves to the brain, where it impacts several chemicals, or neurotransmitters, including gamma-aminobutyric acid (or GABA), glutamate, and dopamine (the so-called “pleasure molecule”). The combined effect of these

I can still be shocked.

This is the person who has been harassing #MeghanMurphy, admitting at a city council meeting to being responsible for her Twitter ban, and asking that she be prosecuted for hate crimes: pic.twitter.com/A9n7UG1UJw

— Benjamin Boyce (@BenjaminABoyce) December 18, 2018

The person said:

However Meghan Murphy, a Vancouver resident, still has not been prosecuted for her hate crimes. In the meantime she has booked a hate rally at the VPL…

Meghan has booked a talk at the Vancouver Public Library. She has committed no hate crimes. The guy who told those lies about her at a city council meeting however is Jonathan Yaniv, who sued women who declined to wax his genitalia.

Updating to add:… Read the rest

Alistair Magowan at the BBC asks

Transgender women in sport: Are they really a ‘threat’ to female sport?

Helpful of them to put the scare-quotes right in the headline, so that we’ll be primed to answer the question correctly.

The unburied lede:

Rachel McKinnon estimates she has received more than 100,000 hate messages on Twitter since she won her UCI Masters Track World Championship title in October.

Bolding theirs; they always bold the lede. We’re being carefully guided what to think. Wow, more than a hundred thousand hate messages; she she her. It’s all priming.

Magowan says the victory “was controversial in some quarters,” which primes us to think of a minority of angry wackos.

Others have said further examples

Well this is a nauseating display – the White House press secretary echoing the mob boss language of Donald Trump to accuse the FBI of “ambushing” Michael Flynn and saying “Look, we know Michael Cohen to be a liar…”

… Read the rest

Judge Sullivan just made Mike Flynn take back, under oath, the core of his last court filing — which argued maybe he’s not that guilty because the FBI was mean to him. https://t.co/FfmtaqnYlb

— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) December 18, 2018

Good. I found that “But the FBI agents TRICKED me into lying to them” dreck from Flynn intensely annoying, especially in light of “LOCK HER UP.”

The judge is the same judge who said “Turn that plane around,” I learned via Twitter.… Read the rest

Also, Flynn.

Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, got a harsh warning from a federal judge on Tuesday that he could face prison for lying to federal investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition and his role lobbying for Turkey.

At Mr. Flynn’s sentencing hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called Mr. Flynn’s crimes “a very serious offense” and said he was not hiding his “disgust” at what Mr. Flynn had done.

“All along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser,” the judge told Mr. Flynn. “Arguably that undermines everything that this flag over here stands for.