Again. Clothes, advertising, children. This time it’s Gap UK.

Thanks, Gap UK.

(Also, note the spelling on the boy’s shirt.)… Read the rest

Hey, did you know that women actually don’t want to climb the ladder, they’d rather be happy? Did you know women have more sense than those silly men with their higher salaries, and prefer to go around in a circle rather than up? It’s true: the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi said so.

The chairman of advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi has been put on leave for saying the debate on gender bias in the industry is “all over”.

British-born Kevin Roberts told Business Insider he did not think the lack of women in leadership roles “is a problem” in the advertising industry.

The reason it’s not a problem is because women like it. They like it, I tell … Read the rest

Meanwhile Boko Haram, as always.

Suspected Islamist Boko Haram militants have ambushed a UN humanitarian aid convoy in north-eastern Nigeria which had a military escort, officials say.

The military said three civilians, including UN staff, and two soldiers were wounded in the attack.

It has prompted the UN to temporarily suspend aid deliveries in Borno state, where more than two million people have been displaced by the insurgency.

The UN says thousands of children are severely malnourished in the region.

Emphasis added. Boko Haram wants thousands of children to starve to death.

Doubtless thousands of adults are also malnourished and in danger of starving to death.

Earlier this month the UN’s children agency warned that tens of thousands

Nick Cohen calls the Trump-supporting Republicans – which is most of them – collaborators.

Anglo-Saxon democracies, which were never invaded in the 20th century, have produced a rich series of alternative histories of resistance. When the Nazis win the Second World War, audiences can flatter themselves that they would never have collaborated with Robert Harris’s Fatherland or Amazon’s Man in the High Castle.

No one is more prone to imagining how well they would have behaved in conflicts that they never experienced than American conservatives. The cult of Churchill in the US would embarrass even his most devoted British admirers.

Do they? That’s bizarre. I do the opposite – I always suspect I would be cowardly and selfish. … Read the rest

Ari Berman on the North Carolina ruling:

This is a huge victory for voting rights—the most significant in the country since the Shelby County v. Holder decision—that will make it easier for hundreds of thousands of voters to cast a ballot this November. It comes just a week before the 51st anniversary of the VRA on August 6, and is especially welcome because there were widespread voting problems during North Carolina’s presidential primary in March that offered a disturbing preview of what to expect in the general election—students waited in three-hour lines, foreign-born US citizens were asked to spell their names to poll workers for no reason in an apparent literacy test, and elderly voters born during Jim Crow

Ari Berman in the Nation on William Barber’s speech at the DNC on Thursday:

Nation readers are well acquainted with Dr. Rev. William Barber II, this magazine’s civil-rights correspondent, but most Americans have never heard of him. Last night was his coming-out party, when he brought down the house with an incredible speech at the DNC just an hour before Hillary Clinton took the stage.

So I watched it. It’s a stem-winder all right.

As the leader of the North Carolina NAACP and the Moral Monday movement, Barber is leading a multi-racial and multi-issue struggle for racial and social justice that the South hasn’t seen since the 1960s. He’s been traveling the nation in recent months calling for a

An entry in the Nightmare Food Illustrations game that I just can’t not share. Via Jeffrey on Facebook:

Salmon with lemon jello.

SALMON WITH LEMON JELLO.

Not to mention the mouthwatering bowl of whole anchovies, and the side dish of sweet potato balls in raspberry jello with oysters on a bed of arugula.… Read the rest

Speaking of the rage and threats and violence that have become the new normal – Oregon’s governor has extra security these days, thanks to the worked-up rage of the gangsters who tried to steal Malheur.

After a series of hostile threats this year — beginning with the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation and continuing after Brown called for tighter gun rules in Oregon — the governor’s security detail has quietly taken steps to increase protection levels.

Some measures remain unidentified. But others are visible.

They don’t always say where she’s going, for instance.

And while threats against Oregon governors aren’t new, Brown’s staff said it’s taking the increasingly aggressive tone of recent threats seriously enough to keep in regular

So you type “angry trump hitler” into Google and pop, Google knows what you mean.

Not what you want. Hot rage is not what you want in a head of state. Chronic hot rage is really not what you want in a head of state. Trump is unmistakably a horrible human being, a bully of the worst kind. His candidacy makes me ashamed to be a Yank.

… Read the rest

Helen Pidd and Jon Boone at the Guardian have more details on the apparent murder of Samia Shahid.

Such crimes are often triggered by women defying centuries-old patriarchal codes and daring to make their own choice about who they marry, or how they live their lives. Shahid not only married a man of her choice, she also divorced her first husband, her cousin Shakeel, a man Kazam says she was pressured to marry in a lavish wedding in Pakistan in 2012.

The marriage had been arranged when she was young and it is believed Shahid was expected to apply for a visa for Shakeel so he could join her in the UK. “The nearer [the wedding] day came, the

Originally a comment by Steamshovelmama on An extended discussion with their homeopath.

This is one of the appealing things about most “alternative therapies”. You’re paying through the nose for the “therapist”‘s time so you get a nice comfy sit down with a cup of tea and have a long chat with someone who is basically there to listen to you talk about your problems. There’s no rush, there’s time to talk about all those neurotic little issues – which we all have but which medical doctors don’t want to hear about because theres’s nothing they can do about them. Then you go home with (or having had) the equivalent of a sugar pill which, yes, probably does do … Read the rest

Ah yes, Ann Coulter exists. I’d forgotten.

You know what this convention really needed? An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 29, 2016

Those pesky immigrants with their foreign accents – Lafayette, Einstein, Wiesel, Rushdie – how much richer and wiser we’d be if we’d kept them all out.

Also I wonder how many languages Ann Coulter speaks fluently. My informed guess is that the number is precisely one. She’s contemptuous of Khizr Khan for speaking a second language with an accent, and apparently indifferent to the soldiers who went on being alive after Khan’s son told them to step back while he went forward to check out a vehicle…which exploded, … Read the rest

Ok here’s some good news though.

(Mind you, it’s the kind of “good” news that’s just the undoing of some bad news, as so much of what passes for “good” news is these days. Or maybe it’s always like that.)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has struck down North Carolina’s horrible voter ID law.

A federal appeals court on Friday struck down North Carolina’s requirement that voters show identification before casting ballots and reinstated an additional week of early voting.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit was an overwhelming victory for the Justice Department and civil rights groups that argued the voting law was designed

I’m glad I was never tempted by Jill Stein. The Washington Post reports (uncritically) her woo-based ideas:

Did she think vaccines were harmful?

“I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases — smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication,” Stein said. “Like any medication, they also should be — what shall we say? — approved by a regulatory board that people can trust. And I think right now, that is the problem. That people do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.”

But a lot of people … Read the rest

The Indian writer and activist Mahasweta Devi has died.

Devi was an outspoken proponent of equal rights.

She famously made a speech at India’s prestigious Jaipur literary festival where she said all humans had the fundamental “right to dream”.

“I would remember her as one of the most important writers in India because of the subjects she chose and remained faithful to them,” publisher Urvashi Bhutalia told the BBC.

“Her writing was a political battle for the downtrodden and she never compromised on her ideas. She was a very kind human being.”

A number of her works, including the best-selling Breast Stories, have been translated into English from Bengali, and are also studied in universities across India.

She was … Read the rest