Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on How things actually are in the world.

Shannon @ #20:

Let’s tackle these in reverse order.

3) Multi-gender social orders do not entail what you think they do. Whether we examine the Navajo or the Indian “genders”, what we find is not a system of biological classification, but instead a patriarchal hierarchy of normative worth stinking with misogyny and homophobia. The function of these systems is to exalt the masculine and crush the feminine. In those systems where the additional gender or genders are categories of male people, those genders are for males whose masculinity is perceived as deficient or corrupt in some way. Masculine deficiency can be such things as physical weakness, small genitals, or pacifism. Masculine corruption could be interest in dolls, an effeminate manner, or homosexuality. The “third gender” hijra is not a category of liberation; it is a way for a patriarchal society to protect their honor from the shame of having to admit the existence in their families of gay boys and gentle boys. It’s a way for a father to deny that one of his sons is a failure, because it is preferable to mark a son as a hijra than as a filthy faggot.

This analysis has far more explanatory power than the epistemologically relativist notion that these multi-gender cultures had/have some special insight that the rest of the world failed to grasp. It explains why homosexuality is illegal in Iran while the nation performs the second most transsexual surgeries in the world. It explains why women who resist bear the brunt of the venom from activists. It explains why so much of the justification for knowledge claims about “gender identity” derives from gendered—i.e., sexed—stereotypes regarding acceptable behavior and interests. It explains everything.

2) Complex question hiding false assumption: sex is not defined by genitalia, nor is it defined by brains. Sex is defined by the reproductive functions involved in sexual reproduction. There are two such functions, represented by two types of gamete. A creature’s sex refers to which of those gametes its body is configured to produce. Because such configuration is temporally unstable, we also include in each category (A) those whose bodies are no longer so configured (e.g., due to age, hysterectomy, etc.) and (B) those whose bodies are not yet so configured but eventually will be (e.g., due to youth). We also include (C) those who at any point fit into (B); e.g., a boy castrated at five. Group (C) naturally gives rise to including those whose sexual development goes awry, and so we also include (D) those with DSDs.

The concept is neither uncommon nor controversial. The overwhelming majority of temporally unstable categories behave in the same manner. My hair is black, and I remain black-haired even if I shave my head. Humans are bipedal, and so I remain even if my leg be amputated.

If your brain were removed from your body and placed in a vat where your consciousness survived, we would have to stretch our language in order to describe the situation. Natural language develops to describe situations that speakers encounter. No one has ever encountered the brain-in-a-vat scenario in reality, so we don’t have a way to comfortably describe it. This lack forces us to default to analogy. By analogy, if all that remains of your body is your brain, then you have had your legs amputated, and you are still a bipedal creature. By analogy, if all that remains of your body is your brain, then you have had your gonads removed, and you are still either male or female.

1) A word’s dictionary definition is often—nay, usually—not its complete or technical definition. Dictionaries provide definitions that capture general usage. Crucially, definitions of words for things in the world tend to be satisficing. That is, they are true of the things described. For example, Merriam-Webster provides this as sense 8 for its definition of C: “a structured language for creating computer programs that is designed to be compact and efficient”. This is certainly true of the programming language C. It is a structured language for creating computer programs, and it was designed to be compact and efficient. However, there are many structured languages for creating computer programs that were designed to be compact and efficient. These other languages are not C.

Similarly, “a group of organisms that share a genetic heritage, are able to interbreed, and to create offspring that are also fertile” is true of species, but there are also groups that fit this description that do not qualify as species; e.g., the set of all tigers and lions. Further, by this definition, any infertile organism cannot be a member of a species, because an infertile organism cannot create offspring.

Does this mean this is a bad definition? No! It is a good definition for its purpose: general, non-technical distillation of a complex concept.

What it does mean is that we are dishonest if, knowing how dictionary definitions function, we conclude from their imprecision anything about the things they describe. The plurality programming languages relative to the dictionary definition of C does not entail that computer science categories are fungible or mysterious. Neither does the “messiness” of biology relative to the dictionary definition of species entail that biological categories are fungible or mysterious.

Pandemics are not good for mental health.

The coronavirus crisis poses the greatest threat to mental health since the second world war, with the impact to be felt for years after the virus has been brought under control, the country’s leading psychiatrist has said.

Dr Adrian James, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said a combination of the disease, its social consequences, and the economic fallout were having a profound effect on mental health that would continue long after the epidemic is reined in.

Bad things are happening and they’re making people anxious and sad.

Modelling by the Centre for Mental Health forecasts that as many as 10 million people will need new or additional mental health support as a direct result of the coronavirus epidemic. About 1.3 million people who have not had mental health problems before are expected to need treatment for moderate to severe anxiety, and 1.8 million treatment for moderate to severe depression, it found.

Even surviving the damn thing can mess you up.

The threat to mental health has been used as an argument against lockdowns, but James said the mental health grounds for controlling the virus should not be ignored. Beyond the fear of becoming infected or having vulnerable loves ones fall ill, suffering severe disease can trigger mental health problems. About a fifth of people who received mechanical ventilation during the spring developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’m surprised it’s not more.

Legal feminist gets to the core of it, as good legal minds are so skilled at doing.

The question I find interesting here isn’t really a legal question. It is this: what is it that’s special about treatment with puberty blockers that makes the Tavistock think that parental consent isn’t good enough? If a child needs a vaccination to reduce the risk of a potentially serious childhood disease, parental consent is good enough. If a child needs a filling to deal with tooth decay, or an extraction to deal with an overcrowded mouth, the same. If a child needs surgery to pin a broken bone, the same again. 

I remember strongly dissenting to treatments of that kind as a small child, and failing to get my way. (I was terrified of shots as a child, to a degree that baffles me now. The “pain” is so small and brief that my horror then seems just weird. My best guess is that knowing the little owie is going to happen magnifies it out of all proportion in an undeveloped brain.)

Parental consent is good enough for most medical treatment because its necessity or desirability can be established by objective evidence. Tooth decay and broken bones can be seen with an x-ray; the risks of mumps, measles etc. (and the benefits of vaccination) are well-established by epidemiology. But if a child with the body of a girl says she is so sure that she is really a boy that she wants to be treated with puberty blockers to ensure that she doesn’t mature physically as a woman, there [is] no blood test, no visible symptom, no scan, no x-ray that can confirm her condition. How are parents, teachers, therapists and doctors to know whether she is truly trans (assuming for the purposes of argument that there is such a thing – or if even if there isn’t, at least so intractably dysphoric that radical body modification offers her the best hope of a flourishing life); or temporarily caught up in a teenage craze; or expressing distress in response to childhood abuse, homophobic bullying at school, or a traumatic bereavement or abandonment, or the pervasive sexism and misogyny of the society in which she is growing up?

Emphasis mine.

The whole thing is in the realm of saying, thinking, feeling, saying one thinks or feels. It’s all notional – it’s notional twice over, or even more.

The issue isn’t that that realm doesn’t matter, or that it’s trivial; of course it matters and of course it’s extremely far from trivial. Without it we might as well be bots. But mattering is one thing and being reliable evidence of a material condition is another.

One might think that these were the kinds of difficult questions with which clinicians would grapple earnestly before agreeing to set children on a path to medical transition and lifelong patienthood. What’s going on here? What are the causes of this child’s dysphoria? What are her chances of growing out of it with natural puberty? If treated, what are the chances that she will later regret the treatment? 

Also what do we mean by gender dysphoria? Is there really such a thing? Is it an idea created by people and made popular by social contagion? Is this child confusing the political or sociological or psychological with the biological? Might political involvement (i.e. feminism) or psychological investigation work better than physical intervention? There are a lot of relevant questions.

Astonishingly, one would be wrong. Even more astonishingly, it seems that the clinicians who have guided the development of the GIDS would not even regard these as valid questions. Bernadette Wren, Consultant Clinical Psychologist at the GIDS until her retirement in 2020, posed herself these questions in a 2014 paper:   

Can ‘postmodern’ ideas about the non-fixity and instability of gender serve the perplexed clinician? Can we forego the grounding of our ideas in demonstrable certainties? Operating with a postmodern notion of gender, can the clinician justify irreversible physical intervention?

In other words is it copacetic to just make it all up? The answer of course is “Yeah pretty much.”

Alarming though this is, it does at least make perfect sense of the GIDS’ unwillingness to accept parental consent as a substitute for the young person’s consent when treating children or adolescents with puberty-blockers: to do so would be fundamentally at odds with the philosophical underpinnings of the service. Parental consent would be rendered acceptable by a firm evidence base for the treatment proposed. But puberty blockers are not provided because there is convincing clinical evidence that they are needed (or even likely) to alleviate distressing symptoms or effect a full or partial cure for a pathology: on the contrary, it is admitted that the evidence base for treatment is thin tending to non-existent. The conclusion to the 2014 article that “the meaning of trans rests on no demonstrable foundational truths” goes further, suggesting that even a search for such evidence would be misconceived.  Instead, treatment is provided because children and young people – who should be enabled to experience self-determining freedom, including the freedom to make their own mistakes – ask for it. 

Yes, including the freedom to ruin their own bodies at age 17, 16, 15.

It makes an alarming kind of sense of something else, too. The court in Bell repeatedly expressed surprise at the Tavistock’s inability to provide evidence about the effects and outcomes of treatment with puberty blockers, noting – in particular – at paragraphs 23 and 24 that it hadn’t been provided with the results of a research study started some nine years earlier at the Tavistock, which it had requested but been told was unavailable because one of its authors had yet to respond to issues raised in the peer review process. On the face of things, that was quite extraordinary: the study was centrally relevant to the matters discussed in the judicial review, and even if it was still going through the lengthy process of peer-review and hadn’t been finalised for publication, it undoubtedly existed in a near-final form which could have been provided to the court had the Tavistock chosen to provide it.  (It was finally published on the day the High Court’s judgment was handed down.)

But if the service was run by postmodernist-leaning clinicians who regarded “truth claims” with suspicion and saw their task not as relieving the suffering of patients with distressing pathologies, but instead as facilitating their young clients in the pursuit of identity projects, what use would they have for clinical evidence? 

That’s tragic in the obvious way (people left with ruined bodies) but also in a less obvious way, which is that “identity projects” are the last thing adolescents need. The best way to form an identity is to look away from the self and engage with the world instead. Dive into politics or science or the arts or engineering or conservation or climate issues or any of a thousand things. Don’t be like “Rachel” McKinnon/Veronica Ivy, be like Greta Thunberg or the young John Lewis.

Child poverty, we have it.

Even prior to the pandemic, the United States lagged other developed nations in child poverty levels. More than one out of every five American children lives in poverty, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data. As the pandemic continues to exacerbate the underlying crisis of American poverty, 45 percent of all children now live in households that have recently struggled with routine expenses, according to a report out this month from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP. Black and Latino households have been especially impacted by the economic starvation that the mishandling of this pandemic has wrought, and these populations were already disproportionately likely to grow up poor.

But we want it this way. It means people are forced to do whatever shit work we want done, for shit pay and no benefits. We get cheap chicken and they get evictions and hunger.

“We don’t want to be responsible for them. A very wise historian, Michael Katz, wrote that ‘poverty is the third rail of American politics.’ We don’t like to talk about poverty in America, and we don’t like to deal with it,” Jeff Madrick, a veteran journalist and author of Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Childhood Poverty, told me. 

“And I’m including the Democrats here,” Katz continued. “Democrats hardly ever talked about child poverty until recently. And I include Hillary Clinton, in that she didn’t mention child poverty very much in her 2016 electoral campaign. The reason is not merely that they are insensitive, but they think it’s bad for electoral politics, because people don’t want to hear about it.”

And because they think it means “socialism” and they think socialism will electrocute you from 100 miles away.

That’s also why the Democrats always talk about “the middle class” and never ever the working class or the poor. It’s as if the words are vile obscenities.

The solutions to child poverty are not mysterious. Socialists, liberals, and leftists have long advocated for more generous benefits to families that would alleviate some of the financial burden many parents currently shoulder alone. Last year, Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project released “The Family Fun Pack,” a comprehensive family welfare plan that would dramatically supplement the immense costs of raising a family in the United States: material supplies and paid parental leave are paired with free pre-K, childcare, health care, and a $300 monthly allowance. “The easiest solution to the problems posed by family life under capitalism is to levy broad-based taxes and then use the revenues from those taxes to fund a set of benefits that provide resources to families with children,” Bruenig wrote.

Even more moderate Democrats have backed proposals that could radically reduce child poverty. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden endorsed expanding Section 8 housing vouchers to cover all families who qualify, which would effectively cut child poverty by a third. Kamala Harris’s LIFT the Middle Class Act would replace the Trump-era tax cuts with large tax credits to low- and middle-income households who work. 

See? That’s what I mean. Why is the act called that? Why lift the middle class? What about the people below the middle? Surely the people in the middle don’t need lifting nearly as much as the people on the fucking bottom.

Poverty is not some abstraction or a phenomen[on] only relevant during the holidays but rather a material consequence of deliberate policy choices. It would be possible for the government to make a serious effort to alleviate childhood poverty, but it’s a task far too big for Santa. 

Yes but socialism.

Archaeologists in Pompeii have found an ancient fast food shop.

Known as a termopolium, Latin for hot drinks counter, the shop was discovered in the archaeological park’s Regio V site, which is not yet open the public, and unveiled on Saturday.

Traces of nearly 2,000-year-old food were found in some of the deep terra cotta jars containing hot food which the shop keeper lowered into a counter with circular holes.

Like the big metal pots you have on steam tables now.

The front of the counter was decorated with brightly coloured frescoes, some depicting animals that were part of the ingredients in the food sold, such as a chicken and two ducks hanging upside down.

The golden arches of their time, but much more attractive.

Archaeologists also found a decorated bronze drinking bowl known as a patera, ceramic jars used for cooking stews and soups, wine flasks and amphora.

We at least have some hope that the people who worked for Trump won’t be able to land the usual hotshot jobs.

Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state under President George W Bush, is now director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, which also gave safe harbour to Trump alumni Jim Mattis and HR McMaster.

White House press secretaries can prosper in the media or corporate world. Jay Carney, who was Barack Obama’s spokesman from 2011 to 2014, is a senior vice-president and head of public relations for Amazon. His successor, Josh Earnest, who had a spell as an NBC News and MSNBC analyst, is now senior vice-president and chief communications officer at United Airlines.

But Kayleigh McEnany, who currently occupies the podium, may find such work harder to come by.

Since she stood up there and brazenly lied to us week after week, yes she probably will. Wacko right-wing outlets might hire her, but ones that care at all about a reputation for honesty won’t.

There are some possible refuges in Washington. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank that has hosted speeches by Trump officials and endorsers, and the Federalist Society, hugely influential in the president’s appointment of more than 200 conservative judges, could look favourably on those who stayed loyal to the bitter end.

Possibly, but I think even they prefer people with decent reputations.

Los Angeles is being hammered the way New York was last spring.

LA county has faced an onslaught of terrifying Covid developments in recent days, including a surge in deaths, dire shortages of hospital resources, and fears that doctors will have to make agonizing choices to ration care.

…

Heading into the darkest holiday season some have ever endured, there were grim reminders across the LA region that the virus is spreading uncontrolled. The city’s mayor briefed the public while in quarantine after his daughter became infected. Hospitals were setting up triage tents. Residents waited in line for hours for Covid tests at Dodger stadium. The region recently ordered more body bags.

Outbreaks were afflicting grocery stores, restaurants, stores, shopping malls, Amazon warehouses, manufacturing plants, government buildings, police and fire departments, jails and prisons and film sets.

Officials in LA county estimated that one in 95 residents were currently infectious, and that two residents were dying of Covid every hour. More than 6,000 Covid patients are in the hospital, and intensive care units (ICU) are filled to capacity.

And it’s getting worse, not better.

LA is now reporting an average of more than 14,700 cases each day, a 78% increase from two weeks ago, according to LA Times data. Seven hundred people are hospitalized daily; in October there were fewer than 150 daily hospitalizations. By January, officials say it could be 1,400 admissions each day. More than 9,000 people have died.

…

With shortages of beds and staff growing, hospitals are starting to have previously unthinkable discussions about how they may ration care if there are too many patients. It could mean a decline in the quality of care for all people facing emergencies, and an increase in deaths.

…

LA’s affordable housing crisis, which forces many to live in crowded conditions, also makes the region vulnerable to spread, said Bibbins-Domingo. Her research found that early lockdowns did not protect Latinos or people without high school degrees, probably because they were forced to work.

Who could ever have guessed that severe wealth inequality could create conditions that would spread a deadly new virus? Who could possibly have imagined that crowded expensive housing and low wages and minimal or no healthcare would be fertile ground for a pandemic?

And justify the ways of God to men…

Ah yes, very excellent integration of science and faith. What a kind and careful and scientifically alert god it is, to wait to inflict a new virus on us until…um…there were plenty of ICUs to handle the cases? No. There were enough hospitals everywhere in the world to handle the cases? No. There were responsible governments everywhere in the world that knew how to protect their people from a new virus? No. People had become reasonable? No. No, apparently this god waited until it knew a vaccine would take a year to develop and many more months to distribute. REASON TO BELIEVE.

Unless of course you then ask yourself why unleash a new virus at all. Unless you wonder what the point is, when there are already plenty of causes of death and they operate quite well, with especially brutal efficiency in the poorer countries, and when death does the job 100% of the time anyway.

And unless you wonder how the nice man knows that this is how the timing and motivation went. I, for one, wonder how he knows the god didn’t time this for when the US and UK and Brazil have reckless clueless fools in charge, and for when the poorer countries can’t afford the infrastructure to provide hospitals and doctors and ventilators and medicines, and an infinite number of other specifics of that kind.

Hey about that whole pardons thing.

Funny how it’s always Republicans. Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich was disgusting, but it didn’t open all the doors to criminality the way Ford’s and Bush’s did, let alone the way Trump’s are.

Upon discovering this secret aid, Congress outlawed it, in amendments attached to annual defense appropriations bills and therefore known after their sponsor as the Boland Amendments.

So haha, Reagan wasn’t having that.

North was convicted of obstruction instead; an appeals court threw out the conviction 2-1 because the jury might have been influenced by North’s televised testimony to Congress. Walsh prosecuted former national security adviser John Poindexter for similar offenses next, obtaining a conviction that was thrown out for identical reasons.

Heads they win tails we lose.

Walsh found himself further frustrated by official refusals to acknowledge the existence of contemporaneous notes and claims never even to have received his requests for such notes. He got former defense secretary Caspar Weinberg’s notes only in late 1991, and Bush’s diary in November 1992—after the president had lost his reelection bid. Such delays helped ensure Walsh couldn’t indict Weinberger for obstruction until June 1992. Walsh filed a further charge in October using evidence from Weinberger’s notes showing that Bush knew about the arms-for-hostages portion of the deal. Weinberger’s trial would therefore surely have implicated Bush.

Buuuuut Bush pardoned him.

Bush also pardoned Robert MacFarlane, Elliott Abrams, and three CIA officers for their roles in Iran-Contra. Walsh—a lifelong Republican—said, “In light of President Bush’s own misconduct, we are gravely concerned about his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations.” “The Iran-Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed with the pardon of Caspar Weinberger,” Walsh noted.

But Bush prettied it up.

When pardoning the Iran-Contra criminals, President Bush said, “the common denominator of their motivation—whether their actions were right or wrong—was patriotism.”

Yeeeahhhh anybody can say that. The Nazis could and did say that. Trump says that constantly (in cruder words, of course). Patriotism excuses nothing.

And what Trump is doing now…you know how that sentence ends.

Interesting.

Donald Trump’s longtime banker at Deutsche Bank AG will be stepping down from the German lender, with the move coming as the bank looks for ways to cut its relations with the U.S. president.

Cut its relations and maybe get its money back? He’s stiffed them for millions.

Rosemary Vrablic, a managing director and senior banker in the lender’s wealth management division, recently handed in her resignation, which the bank accepted effective as of year-end, Deutsche Bank spokesman Dan Hunter said in an emailed statement.

According to the New York Times, which first reported Vrablic’s resignation, she arranged for the lender to grant hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to Trump’s company.

Well you can see why they’re not begging her to stay.

As of November, Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization, currently overseen by his two eldest sons.

All totally normal.

Maya makes an important point about all this.

I’ll just quote the rest (with Twitter shortcuts and formatting removed).

You could argue that the court got it wrong; that it is in the interests of these children to be put on PBs because of psychological benefits (suicide risk argument) or because their future self will have a better life if transition is more visually convincing (outcomes argument).

You could argue this, and show compelling medical evidence (but the Tavistock failed to do this). Then you would weigh those benefits with the risks & negative impacts on those children (to their adult sexual function, and ability to have children bone density & chance of regret etc).

But what you shouldn’t do. What it is absolutely immoral to do is weigh the risks and negative impacts on those children against the interests of “trans people everywhere” or “the LGBT community.”

Oh yes. So you shouldn’t; so it is. It’s that poison word “community” again, that poison word that excuses and encourages and makes virtuous so much filthy oppressive life-narrowing shit.

As a society we must not sacrifice children’s welfare – sterilising them, medicalising them for life and taking away adult sexual function – to satisfy the interests of a community of adults. That would be child abuse.

Choices like these have been made before: people put the perceived interests and cohesion of the Catholic community, the gay community, the Scouting community, the Muslim community or whoever ahead of protecting children from harm (or they said the children ‘consented’)

Yes. Yes times a thousand. People also put the perceived interests and cohesion of the Catholic community and the Muslim community and the Mormon community and the fundamentalist community etc etc etc ahead of protecting women from abuse, oppression, coercion, disappearance, death. It’s a pattern. I hadn’t quite noticed that it’s the same pattern with “the trans community”…although I definitely had noticed the way trans activism uses its annexation to “the LGB community” to browbeat everyone out of all proportion to their numbers. Membership in the LGB commewniteee equals an enormous megaphone.

A bit of good news.

The Times of India:

Dharavi slum colony in Mumbai did not report a single Covid-19 case in the last 24 hours.

This is the first time since April 1, when the first coronavirus case was reported in Dharavi, that Asia’s largest slum has reported no new case in a single day.

According to Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) data, so far Dharavi has reported 3,788 cases of which only 12 are active. 3,464 persons have recovered and been discharged from Covid centres.

That’s a lot of cases in one part of one city.

So far, 312 people have died due to Covid-19 in Dharavi, said the data released by Mumbai civic body.

On April 1, a 56-year-old man from Dharavi’s Baliga Nagar had tested positive creating panic and fear about the spread of the deadly virus in the dense slum pocket. This was the first Covid-19 case in the area.
Officials said that Dharavi had come full circle in its fight against Covid-19. From over a hundred cases a day in May and June, the number of new cases had reduced to single digits over recent months.

And didn’t rocket back up again the way they have in the US and UK.

“There has been a lot of community engagement and cooperation in Dharavi. It is because of that that we have been able to get to this zero-case milestone,” said Kiran Dighavkar, assistant municipal commissioner, G-North Ward.

“Our simple trace, track, test and treat formula has worked. Despite the dip in positive cases we will continue our rigorous screening and testing drives to ensure that there is no new spike in cases,” she said.

How sensible. We much prefer to throw big parties and show up maskless.

I see I’m not the only one.

There are a lot more like that. A lot more.

Remember: Pence thinks, and says, that it’s a bad thing that Democrats (or the left more broadly) “want to make poverty comfortable.”

Meanwhile…

Uncomfortable poverty for them, publicly funded flights to Vail for him. Lockdown for them, vacations in Vail for him.

The cops are waiting at the exit.

Come noon on 20 January 2021, Trump and his inner circle will be private citizens again. Devoid of legal immunity, stripped of the air of invincibility, they become fair game for federal and local law enforcement alike. The potential for prison hovers over them like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Cyrus Vance, Manhattan’s district attorney, is circling Trump and his business. Eric Trump has testified at a court-ordered deposition conducted by New York’s attorney general. As for federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York, they labeled Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in the case of Michael Cohen. The statute of limitations has not expired.

So the Trumps have to worry about New York the state along with New York the city. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District won’t be able to do anything if Trump pardons All The Trumps…unless it turns out that he can’t pardon himself, which many legal experts say he indeed can’t.

Giuliani is also on the list, and it pisses him off. Why? Did he think he had some kind of special dispensation?

Very soon now we’ll be able to stop thinking about Trump.

The justice department and the Federal Election Commission may soon want to talk to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about his role in the Trump re-election campaign.

Reportedly, Kushner was a driving force in establishing a shell company, American Made Media Consultants, which made shrouded payments to Trump family members and friends. Indeed, Kushner purportedly directed Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, John Pence, the vice-president’s nephew, and the campaign’s chief financial officer to serve on the shell company board.

…

In the end, AMMC spent nearly half of the campaign’s war chest, with payments going to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend, and Lara Trump, who is now contemplating a Senate run in North Carolina. Suffice to say, the legality of this opaque arrangement is unclear.

Three House Democrats have requested investigations by the Department of Justice and the FEC. Without a pardon, Jared’s fate will rest in the hands of a Biden DoJ. Said differently, Hunter Biden is not the only person with a troubled road ahead.

It would be funny if Prince Jared managed to annoy Trump enough between now and the last day that the pardon would not arrive.

The princess wants us to know that she really really cares about poor people.

Remember that story her friend from school told about her (cough) lack of interest in poor people?

In the most scathing passage, Ohrstrom claimed that in their mid-20s she recommended to her friend the book Empire Falls, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Richard Russo about working-class characters in a small town in Maine.

“‘Ly, why would you tell me to read a book about fucking poor people?’ I remember Ivanka saying,” she wrote. “‘What part of you thinks I would be interested in this?’”

Not that it isn’t obvious without the story. Her “business” was selling expensive tat, her “work” for Daddy’s business involved marketing expensive real estate, her presentation of self is entirely Disney Princess. She probably jingles when she walks.

The latest gotcha – ooooooh Obama pardoned lots more.

The issue isn’t quantity – although lots of a bad thing is worse than a little, so quantity is part of the issue in that sense. But in the rest of the senses it isn’t.

What a Maroon directed us to Politifact from last February.

The latest round of clemency grants from President Donald Trump sparked new criticism that he was abusing his expansive pardon powers by skirting the normal review process and favoring white-collar criminals who were prominent and well-connected.

But two days after the Feb. 18 announcements, a Facebook post implied that it was Barack Obama, not Trump, who had abused the largely unchecked pardon power.

The post said:

“Pardons — Obama: 1,927, Trump: 26. And Trump is abusing that power?” 

The raw numbers are not the only variable.

In his eight years in office, Obama issued 1,927 clemency actions. The vast majority of them — nearly 90% — were sentence commutations granted to ordinary individuals, based on a policy of criminal justice reform in drug cases, and specific recommendations from the U.S. Justice Department. Trump has acted outside the Justice Department process in granting clemency to a few well-known white-collar offenders.

It’s not a secret that criminal justice reform in drug cases is desperately needed. It’s not much more of a secret that Trump has zero interest in that kind of reform, and if you asked him about it he would shout that the sentences should be longer and harsher and imposed on more of Them.

It’s also not a secret that the US imprisons more people per capita than any other country on the planet. More than China, more than Russia, more than anyone. That’s not a proud statistic.

The prison system in the South functioned as a replacement for slavery for decades after Reconstruction was defeated by resurgent white supremacists (supremacist in the most literal sense). Prisoners did the work that slaves had done, in the cotton fields and the pine woods that yielded profitable turpentine. They did the work and they didn’t benefit from owners’ preference to keep them alive to protect the owners’ investment – they died like flies.

So, yes, Obama had good reasons to use the power of the pardon generously. Trump has different reasons, which are not so good.

“Obama acted in each case pursuant to a report and recommendation from the Justice Department, which came to him through an orderly and regular process that gave everyone a fair chance of success,” said Margaret Love, a lawyer specializing in executive clemency who was a Justice Department pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. “By contrast, Trump has almost totally ignored the established DOJ process, and acted pursuant to informal and unofficial recommendations from friends, celebrities, media personalities, business colleagues, etc.”

The Trump White House has noted the achievements and the prominent supporters of people whom Trump granted clemency.

In announcing Trump’s 11 most recent actions, the White House cited the election of Edward DeBartolo Jr. to the Pro Football Hall of Fame as an NFL team owner and his charitable contributions; called Michael Milken one of America’s greatest financiers and noted his philanthropic work; and praised former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for tutoring and mentoring fellow prisoners. 

DeBartolo, whose family controls the San Franscisco 49ers, was convicted in 1998 and sentenced to probation for failing to report a felony regarding an extortion attempt. Milken pleaded guilty to securities violations in 1989 and served two years in prison in the early 1990s. Both were pardoned.

Blagojevich received a commutation after spending eight years in prison for a scheme to sell an appointment to the U.S. Senate seat Obama vacated in 2008.

To sum up: saying “Obama pardoned MORE” as a gotcha is disgusting.

In today’s round of disgusting pardons –

President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening announced 26 new pardons, including ones for longtime ally Roger Stone, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s father, Charles.

The pardons extend Trump’s streak of wielding his clemency powers for criminals who are loyalists, well-connected or adjacent to his family. While all presidents issue controversial pardons at the end of their terms, Trump appears to be moving at a faster pace than his predecessors, demonstrating little inhibition at rewarding his friends and allies using one of the most unrestricted powers of his office.

Appears to be? He either is or isn’t. It’s a matter of fact, not speculation. He’s already pardoned a lot more than normal, hasn’t he? And he has 27 days left.

Also make that “no inhibition,” not “little.”

Business advice: don’t insure the Catholic church. Really, don’t do that.

The Catholic Church’s private insurer spent more than $58 million paying out the victims of sexual abuse last year and the company is being forced to raise fresh capital and liquidate investments to cover a future compensation bill worth at least another $238 million.

Not profitable.

Catholic Church Insurance (CCI) has posted nearly a $250 million loss as it struggles to meet a wave of new claims in the wake of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

More business advice: don’t invest in their stock.

CCI, which insures Catholic parishes, religious institutions, welfare groups, aged care facilities and schools across Australia for incidents of property damage, loss and injury, has also covered compensation and legal costs for sexual abuse committed in many church organisations since 1969.

Whoops.

The ballooning current and anticipated costs mean CCI is moving to liquidate investments, to raise capital to meet what it now expects to be at least $238 million in future sexual abuse payouts.

It also stopped paying dividends and distributions to the Catholic organisations that are shareholders in the non-profit, cutting off an important source of income for some of these entities.

Among its shareholders are the Australian Episcopal Conference of the Roman Catholic Church, archdioceses of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and the Jesuits, Marists, De La Salle Brothers and Sisters of Mercy.

It was a good racket for a long time but now that all the sexual abuse of children is out in the open…the money is going far far away.

And for the clincher? Most of that money isn’t going to the victims at all, but to…oh you know where it’s going.

The Age and the Herald have previously revealed that only 28 per cent of the $34.27 million the church spent on compensation under the Melbourne Response scheme from 1996 to 2014 went to victims, with the rest spent on legal fees and administrative expenses.

Ave Maria.