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

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 … Read the rest

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

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 … Read the rest

Jesus and Mo:

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

Jesus and Mo on Patreon.… Read the rest

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 … Read the rest

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

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

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

Nine non-threatening leadership strategies for women, by Sarah Cooper.

If a male coworker steals your idea in a meeting, thank him for it. Give him kudos for how he explained your idea so clearly. And let’s face it, no one might’ve ever heard it if he hadn’t repeated it.

There are eight more. They’re great.

 … Read the rest

It could be too late already.

Scientist and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said Sunday that, in the wake of devastating floods and damage caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, climate change had become so severe that the country “might not be able to recover.”

In an interview on CNN’s “GPS,” Tyson got emotional when Fareed Zakaria asked what he made of Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert’s refusal to say whether climate change had been a factor in Hurricanes Harvey or Irma’s strength — despite scientific evidence pointing to the fact that it had made the storms more destructive.

“Fifty inches of rain in Houston!” Tyson exclaimed, adding, “This is a shot across our bow, a hurricane the width of

Typical hypocrisy coupled with greedy self-indulgence.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is taking an unprecedented number if privately chartered flights to conduct official business, taking a substantial financial toll compared to traveling commercially.

Politico reported Monday that Price opted for private travel as many as five times last week, including a stop in Philadelphia on a private jet from Virginia’s Dulles airport, which is just a 135-mile trip.

The trips also included a privately chartered jet to New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and a resort in Maine.

A resort…hmm…well maybe he needed to inspect how healthy the resort is, or how good its services are, or both.

The cost of such travel can amount to tens of thousands

The Guardian last week:

A campaigner who forced the Bank of England to have female representation on banknotes has pledged to donate her first Jane Austen tenner to a women’s shelter as the new plastic currency enters circulation.

Caroline Criado-Perez threatened to take the Bank to court for discrimination when the former governor Mervyn King announced that it was phasing out paper fivers featuring the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, the only woman other than the Queen to feature on legal tender at that time.

They were replaced last year by the new £5 featuring Winston Churchill.

But on the new £10 note the bank backed down and on Thursday more than 1bn new tenners featuring Austen begin entering

I hear we need some furry beasts again.

… Read the rest

There’s a quirk in the white supremacist movement that I was unaware of: it likes to play Medieval.

White supremacists explicitly celebrate Europe in the Middle Ages because they imagine that it was a pure, white, Christian place organized wholesomely around military resistance to outside, non-white, non-Christian, forces. Marchers in Charlottesville held symbols of the medieval Holy Roman Empire and of the Knights Templar. The Portland murderer praised “Vinland,” a medieval Viking name for North America, in order to assert historical white ownership over the landmass: Vinlander racists like to claim that whites are “indigenous” here on the basis of medieval Scandinavian lore. Similarly, European anti-Islamic bigots dress up in medieval costumes and share the “crying