There’s this billionaire guy called Robert Mercer, who gave a lot of cash to Trump as well as other Republicans and right-wing causes.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center,

Originally a comment by iknklast on Blatant and rampant discrimination against women directors.

Same thing on stage. Women directors, women playwrights, women actors. Studies have shown that scripts with women’s names are less likely to get read – by a large margin.

Women who write plays are told that the reason they get less attention is that they write plays about women and no one wants to see them. But the majority of theatre ticket buyers are…women. And plays by women often do better at the box office, sell more tickets…and run for a much shorter time. So it isn’t economics driving it.

Meanwhile, men who write plays about women (and there are many) are able to get those … Read the rest

US immigration authorities in Houston nearly deported a well-known French historian who had arrived to deliver a lecture. He’s a historian of the Vichy regime, so that’s deeply ironic. It’s also, of course, disgusting.

Henry Rousso is one of France’s most preeminent scholars and public intellectuals. Last week, as the historian attempted to enter the United States to attend an academic symposium, he was detained for more than 10 hours — for no clear reason.

On Wednesday, Rousso arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after an 11-hour flight from Paris, en route to Texas A&M University in College Station. There, he was to speak Friday afternoon at the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study.

But things did not go

Bill O’Reilly needed a hotshot Swedish Security Expert for a tv conversation the other day, so he found one that no actual Swedish security experts have ever heard of. Forgive me if I find this funny.

Sweden became a hot topic in the US last week after Trump warbled randomly about “last night in Sweden” at that fascist rally he threw in Florida. “Last night in Sweden?!” many people said. “What is this buffoon talking about?” So O’Reilly decided to help out.

Following Trump’s comments, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly convened an on-air discussion on Thursday over Swedish immigration and crime between a Swedish newspaper reporter and a man identified on screen and verbally as a “Swedish defence and

Republicans are excited about the project to Make America Great at long last, and one of their ways of doing that is to clamp down on all this god damn protesting. No Great nation allows all this god damn protesting! A Great nation has rapidly flowing traffic, and peaceful sidewalks on which people can sit sipping expensive coffee and talking about mergers.

Since the election of President Trump, Republican lawmakers in at least 18 states have introduced or voted on legislation to curb mass protests in what civil liberties experts are calling “an attack on protest rights throughout the states.”

From Virginia to Washington state, legislators have introduced bills that would increase punishments for blocking highways, ban the

This looks like a ray of hope: a group of lawyers who helped Obama with the ethics part of the job has formed a group to resist the wannabe dictator.

Top lawyers who helped the Obama White House craft and hold to rules of conduct believe President Donald Trump and his staff will break ethics norms meant to guard against politicization of the government — and they’ve formed a new group to prepare, and fight.

United to Protect Democracy, which draws its name from a line in President Barack Obama’s farewell address that urged his supporters to pick up where he was leaving off, has already raised a $1.5 million operating budget, hired five staffers and has plans to

You know…Obama made statements on incidents like the one in Olathe, Kansas. He made statements on mass shootings and on hate crimes; the Olathe shooting wasn’t a mass one (although I don’t know what the cutoff number is – maybe three should be enough) but it seems likely it was a hate crime. Maybe not; maybe there’s some story we don’t know of a quarrel between the shooter and the two Indian men he shot, and maybe the witness who said the shooter yelled “Get out of my country!” is lying or wrong. The crime is under investigation. But the reality is that whether it is or not, it at present certainly reeks of a hate crime, and people subject … Read the rest

Thursday night in Olathe, Kansas a guy in a bar shot three men, killing one of them.

According to witness accounts, the gunman reportedly told two of the people who were shot — both Indian men who work for Garmin, the technology firm — to “get out of my country” before opening fire and had also used racial slurs during the Wednesday evening shooting.

Multiple law enforcement agents launched an investigation into the deadly shooting inside Austin’s Bar and Grill in Olathe, a city about 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. Even as authorities said they had not yet identified a motive for the attack, relatives of the Indian men said they feared the shooting was connected to a climate

Ok I’m wrong – I said in a comment “you don’t see Virginia Woolf dolls, Frances Perkins dolls, Janet Reno dolls” and I’m wrong, you do see Virginia Woolf dolls. She’s pretty damn cool, too.

On the other hand, the doll as a doll is a good illustration of my point. The doll is well supplied with indications that she is Virginia Woolf, while the putative transgender doll is supplied with zero indications that she is transgender.

By “indications” I of course don’t mean “anyone would know that’s Virginia Woolf” – I just mean the doll doesn’t look like your ordinary generic nobody in particular doll.

None of this will make any sense to anyone who hasn’t read the … Read the rest