Now, we get why people prefer to have male children rather than female. It’s totally understandable. Girls are floppy and worthless, and they’re likely to turn out to be whores, and they’re a terrible drain on the wallet without giving anything back. If only humans could figure out a way to have male children exclusively.

A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.

Yay! Now to get to no women at all.

Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the

So, Scott Pruitt spent thousands of government dollars on a junket to Morocco during which he promoted the export of natural gas…an activity which has nothing to do with the agency he heads. Funnily enough the agency to protect the environment does not lobby for natural gas export.

He’s also doing his best to conceal nearly everything about it.

Newly released calendars for one of the most controversial trips of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s tenure were largely blacked out before being shared with ABC News.

The 47-hour journey in Morocco was already drawing congressional scrutiny and criticism from outside groups because of the lack transparency over why Pruitt was in the country and what he was

Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court today for being such a vote-suppressing asshole.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court Wednesday afternoon by a federal judge for failing to follow a court order to register voters in Kansas. Kobach, who led President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission and is the country’s most prominent advocate for restrictions on voting, “willfully failed to comply with the preliminary injunction” against the state’s law requiring proof of citizenship law for voter registration, Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled.

In 2013, Kobach pushed Kansas to enact a law requiring people to provide certain forms of documentation, such as a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers,

From the same piece, Wittes’s thoughts on Trump and Comey.

For a lot of readers, the easy part of the book will be Comey’s discussion of his interactions with Trump. There is no moral complexity here. There are no serious questions of whether Comey should have behaved differently—not in the macro sense, at least. There is only the question of whether one believes Comey or Trump about the nature of their interactions. And to pose that question is also to answer it. One of them is a man who, whatever his flaws, is not a liar and who has numerous contemporaneous corroborating witnesses and documents. The other is Donald Trump. I suppose another question is whether one believes the

Benjamin Wittes has a long piece on Comey and his book and the emailselectioninvestigationfuss. It’s not a review; he says it would be wrong of him to do a review because he’s not distant enough. It’s reflections on the book rather than a review of it. It includes anecdotes like having lunch with Comey at the FBI cafeteria shortly after Comey became director, and what happened there, and how that fits into the general story of how Comey shifted the culture of the FBI and what people there think of him.

He also takes on this whole question I was talking about yesterday: about having no good options and having the luxury of hindsight that participants don’t have.

My

An interesting story on what the pilot had to deal with to land that crippled plane safely yesterday.

Just how masterfully Tammy Jo Shults, the pilot of the badly crippled Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, handled the problem of an engine exploding at 30,000 feet is winning admiration from thousands of her fellow pilots—and should finally help to temper the hubris of what has been a notoriously testosterone-charged profession.

Consider this: the Boeing 737’s left engine suffered a catastrophic failure when one of its fan blades—a part that looks like a pirate’s scimitar and is just as lethal when let loose—broke away, ripped through the engine casing that was supposed to contain it, and then, along with other pieces of

Jennifer Rubin at the Post on McConnell & Co’s reluctance to “poke the bear”:

Let’s cut through all this: Republicans are petrified of provoking Trump (“the bear”), whom they treat as their supervisor and not as an equal branch of government. The notion that Congress should not take out an insurance policy to head off a potential constitutional crisis when the president has repeatedly considered firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein defies logic. By speaking up in such fashion, McConnell is effectively tempting Trump to fire one or both of them. That will set off a firestorm and bring calls for the president’s impeachment.

Or. McConnell must be hoping, it will … Read the rest

What a disgusting bunch of sexist philistines we are.

Professor Mary Beard has accused a US broadcaster of editing her own episodes of Civilisations to make them more anodyne, saying her on-screen appearances as a “slightly creaky old lady with long grey hair” had been cut.

Prof Beard, who hosts two episodes of Civilisations for the BBC in Britain, said the American edits of the show had seen her central arguments erased, her on-screen contributions reduced, and an episode on religion re-edited to focus more closely on Christianity.

This isn’t Fox, either, it’s goddam PBS.

Prof Beard said: “Really hope that friends in USA realise that my Civilisations episodes on PBS are very different from original BBC versions, have

Comey does an interview with NPR, in which he points out that it’s not normal for a president to be ranting in public that private citizens should be in jail.

“This is not some tin-pot dictatorship where the leader of the country gets to say, ‘The people I don’t like go to jail,’” Comey told NPR in the latest in a series of interviews to promote his new book.

In tweets Sunday and Monday, Trump alleged, without citing evidence, that Comey had committed “many crimes” and deserves to be jailed for leaking classified information and lying to Congress — allegations Comey denies.

Also, allegations that are ironic coming from Trump, who is not the most law-abiding president we’ve ever … Read the rest

Nice little free verse poem here:

Sean Hannity reminds you:
Michael Cohen wasn't his lawyer
But he still expects attorney-client privilege.
And he has nothing to hide
But he ordered MC not to reveal him.
And He defended MC all week
But now MC's a liar.
And that's why Hillary Clinton must be stopped.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) April 17, 2018

Sean Hannity reminds you:
Michael Cohen wasn’t his lawyer
But he still expects attorney-client privilege.
And he has nothing to hide
But he ordered MC not to reveal him.
And He defended MC all week
But now MC’s a liar.
And that’s why Hillary Clinton must be stopped.

QED.… Read the rest

Glosswitch looks askance at the breeding stock view of women.

Pregnancy and childbirth – where would we be without them? Essential to the continuation of our very species, everyday phenomena don’t get more miraculous. It’s a pity they’re entrusted to such unworthy vessels.

It works out ok if you think of it as a purely mechanical process, which can be easily replicated by any decent engineer. Of course if you do that you may have trouble tracking down that decent engineer and finding any women willing to perform the purely mechanical process. It’s been a human tragedy all along, that women are such garbage yet nobody can have any babies without them.

Just look at the evidence: if the

I’m sure this is not at all sinister. Haley says there will be sanctions on Russia and Trump says nope there won’t.

Preparations to punish Russia anew for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria caused consternation at the White House. Haley had said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that sanctions on Russian companies behind the equipment related to Assad’s alleged chemical weapons attack would be announced Monday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

But Trump conferred with his national security advisers later Sunday and told them he was upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them, according to several people familiar

Erik Wemple at the Post says yes, it is sleazy for Hannity to be entangled with Cohen and Trump.

To understand from whom Hannity seeks legal advice, consider what Cohen once told a reporter who was preparing a hard-hitting story during the campaign on Trump and ex-wife Ivana Trump:

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very f[–––]ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f[–––]ing disgusting. You understand