COLUMBUS, Ohio – On Thursday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced that he has tested positive for COVID-19. DeWine took a coronavirus test as part of the standard protocol to greet President Donald Trump on the tarmac at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland.
So, no greetings for him. It is what it is.
No, such luxuries are not for the mere peasants. It is what it is.
Isabel Wilkerson has a new book out about the caste system in the US. She talked about it on Fresh Air:
TERRY GROSS: When my guest Isabel Wilkerson was writing her book “The Warmth Of Other Suns” about the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North looking to escape the lynchings, the cross burnings, the terrorism and the lack of opportunity in the South, she says she realized she wasn’t writing about geography and relocation; she was writing about the American caste system.
Now she’s written a new book called “Caste” that explains why she thinks America can be described as having a caste system and how if we use that expression, it deepens our understanding of what Black people have been up against in America. She compares America with the caste system in India and writes about how the Nazi leadership borrowed from American racist laws and the American eugenics movement.
It makes sense. The issue here isn’t just racism; it’s slavery. It’s the way that slavery has gone on keeping a caste as a caste even after slavery formally ended. As a nation we’ve conceptualized the criminals as the superior caste and their victims as the slave caste…which is a very fucked-up way to conceptualize anything.
GROSS: Ten years ago, when you wrote “The Warmth Of Other Suns,” you used the word caste system to refer to the segregated South. And you wrote, (reading) in the decades between Reconstruction and the enforcement of civil rights laws, nearly every Black family in the American South had a decision to make. The decision was to stay in the South’s segregated caste system or make the pilgrimage North or West in the hope of escaping racism and having more access to jobs, housing and other opportunities.
What made you think of using the word caste system to describe America as a whole? In that paragraph, you used it to describe the American South.
ISABEL WILKERSON: Well, I found that the word racism, which is often applied to discussions of interactions among and between African Americans and other groups in this country – I found that term to be insufficient to capture the rigid social hierarchy and the repression that they were born into and that, in fact, everyone in that regime had to live under. And so I turned to the word caste, which is a word that had been used by anthropologists and social scientists who went in to study the Jim Crow era in the 1930s in particular. And they emerged from their ethnography, they emerged from their time there with the term caste as the language to use to describe what they found when they went there.
And so I came to that word as had they. That is the term that is more precise. It is more comprehensive, and it gets at the underlying infrastructure that often we cannot see but that is there undergirding much of the inequality and injustices and disparities that we live with in this country.
I think that’s right. I hope the usage catches on. Gross asked her to explain the difference.
WILKERSON: Well, it’s a difference in some ways between what one would consider caste versus race to begin with. I think of caste as the bones and race as the skin. And that allows us to see that race is a tool of the underlying structure that we live with, that race is merely the signal and cue to where one fits in the caste system. And caste system is actually an artificial hierarchy. It’s a graded ranking of human value in a society that determines the standing and respect, the benefit of the doubt and access to resources, assumptions of competence and even of beauty through no fault or action of one’s own. You’re just born to it. And so caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that’s used to determine one’s place in that or one’s assignment in that caste system.
It’s the older term, that long predates “race,” which is only a few hundred years old.
It was waiting for them when they moved north.
WILKERSON: Oh, exactly. In fact, they left one hierarchy – rigid formal hierarchy known as Jim Crow, in which it was against the law for a Black person and a white person to merely play checkers together, with all of the restrictions that attended that and also the enforcement that was often brutal, but then they migrated away from that and found and discovered that, actually, caste shadowed them wherever they went and that the response to their arrival was, in fact, the methods that became known, as Northern people at the time called it, James Crow, in which there were restrictive covenants that meant that white homeowners, even if they wanted to sell to Black people, Black potential buyers, were prevented by the restrictions that were embedded in their deeds and, also, of course, redlining, which meant that the government would not back mortgages in neighborhoods where there were – where African Americans lived, which meant that it was exceedingly difficult for African Americans, until the 1960s, to merely get a mortgage to buy a home, which is, of course, one of the most prominent and relied-upon methods of building wealth in America, which means that there have been continuing generations-long disparity in access to the most basic American dream.
All that was racist but it was even more fundamentally a caste system. I think that’s one big reason the “But I’m not racist” interjection is generally so beside the point. It’s not about personal attitudes or whether one is nice or not, it’s about systems with roots that go down to the center of the earth. We can’t fix them just by being Not Racist.
Jack Holmes on Trump’s galactic narcissism:
It’s not just that the president knows nothing about anything and cares less. This was an astounding showcase for his malignant narcissism, his inability to process anything except as it directly relates to him. The whole world of observable reality is filtered through how it affects him, and him only. You and everyone you know and love are not relevant. The task of thinking about himself is all-consuming. When Swan pressed him on his decision to hold an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June—the culmination of a prolonged spasm of happy talk on the pandemic—he went immediately to how big the crowd was, and how Fox News got its best ratings ever for his speech.
“I’m asking about the public health,” Swan said.
And Trump is answering about Trump.
That’s always the case.
But by all indications, the president may not be capable of caring about these people’s lives. It is not within him. It takes a particular kind of damaged psyche to turn a question about the public-health risks of holding a stadium rally in a pandemic into a diatribe about how great the ratings were. This person is not well. It goes far beyond the fact that he doesn’t know anything, a bare fact that rose again in an exchange on testing. (Trump suggested many people are saying you can test too much. Swan wisely asked who says that. “Read the manuals, read the books,” the American president said.) It goes beyond his preposterous claims he’s done more for African-Americans than anybody, “with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.” It was a generous caveat in an exchange where Swan ultimately led the president to demonstrate he has no idea what the Civil Rights Act is.
Which is interesting because he ignored it (and the Fair Housing Act) when he refused to rent to black people.
But the crowning spasm of narcissism came at the end, when Swan asked about the passing of John Lewis, civil-rights icon and genuine hero of the American experiment, who at the time of the interview was lying in state at the United States Capitol. “How do you think history will remember John Lewis?” Swan asked, offering up a softball for any reasonably well-adjusted politician to knock out of the park. Here was the American president’s answer:
TRUMP: I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration. He chose—I never met John Lewis, actually, I don’t believe.
SWAN: Do you find him impressive?
TRUMP: Uh, I can’t say one way or another. I find a lot of people impressive, I find a lot of people not impressive…He didn’t come to my inauguration, he didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches, and that’s OK, that’s his right. And again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have. He should have come. I think he made a big mistake—
…
In fairness, the president did offer he has “no objection” to renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge after Lewis. But this is an astounding demonstration of his inability to consider anything except as it relates to him. John Lewis, towering figure of American history who fought for his entire life to make this a full democracy that lived up to its founding values, is reduced to his Trump Event Attendance Record. After prodding, Trump grants that Lewis may have done things in the world that did not directly involve Trump, though he of course cannot name a single one. Why would he know about that? It’s got nothing to do with him.
Pinned like a butterfly.
Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates defended a sensitive Justice Department investigation into onetime Trump aide Michael Flynn on Wednesday, telling lawmakers Flynn was essentially “neutering” American sanctions and undercutting the Obama administration by “making nice” with a foreign adversary after Russia’s unprecedented attack on the 2016 election.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yates said Flynn’s lies to the FBI were “absolutely material to a legitimate investigation” — contradicting the rationale the Justice Department has now offered in seeking to dismiss the case.
Yates, who was a prosecutor for nearly 30 years, said the effort to drop a prosecution against a defendant who twice pleaded guilty was “highly irregular.”
It’s so bizarre having a Justice Department that is trying to shield Flynn and Trump and Putin as opposed to…you know…not doing that.
Flynn told Vice President Pence and then FBI investigators he hadn’t asked Kislyak to press his government not to escalate its retaliation against punitive steps the outgoing administration of President Barack Obama was taking. Actually, documents later proved, Flynn had.
But hey let’s beat up on Obama and Yates.
Oh and by the way…
Democrats on the panel worried about ongoing efforts by Russia and other countries to tamper with the 2020 election, calling Republicans’ backward-looking Senate probe a distraction.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said lawmakers had received “absolutely chilling” classified briefings about current threats, ones he says they’re forbidden to discuss, with just three months to go until election day.
No biggy. It is what it is.
There was this tweet.
I wondered if I could find the source, and behold, I could. The first-named author is, of course, Chase Strangio, their star purveyor of fairy tales.
The title is Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked.
Upholding trans athletes’ rights requires rooting out the inaccurate beliefs underlying harmful policies sweeping through state legislatures.
They’re not inaccurate though. The nonsense Strangio talks is inaccurate.
The item in the tweet is “FACT” number 3.
FACT: Trans girls are girls.
MYTH: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics.
Girls who are trans are told repeatedly that they are not “real” girls and boys who are trans are told they are not “real” boys. Non-binary people are told that their gender is not real and that they must be either boys or girls. None of these statements are true. Trans people are exactly who we say we are.
There is no one way for women’s bodies to be. Women, including women who are transgender, intersex, or disabled, have a range of different physical characteristics.
Note the sly “or disabled” there – as if anyone anywhere claimed disabled women are not women. What we say is that men are not women. That’s a different thing. Saying a cat with only a stump for a tail is not a cat is quite different from saying a turtle is not a cat.
Trying to force other people to echo lies is not a civil liberty. The ACLU is drunk.
Oh whew, Trump says Obama is completely wrong about racism, the US doesn’t have any and Obama is a dirty rotten scoundrel for saying it does. Obviously Trump would know way more about that than Obama does.
The Republican president, in an interview on Fox News, criticized President Barack Obama’s speech last week, in which the Democrat urged Americans to protect democracy and outlined a list of needed reforms such as making election day a national holiday, expanding early voting and increasing polling sites.
“There is an attack on our democratic freedoms and we should treat it as such,” Obama said in a eulogy for the late U.S. Representative John Lewis, a Black civil rights icon.
…
Trump, who did not attend Lewis’ memorials, called Obama’s speech “a terrible, terrible representation of what our country is all about.”
As he knows very well, being a pasty white son of a rich slumlord who inherited his father’s money and slums and refusal to rent to black people.
Uh oh, Don is pissed off again.
Nah, he’s not. So let’s see what his source told him.
President Donald Trump was still struggling to fully grasp the severity of the coronavirus pandemic during a task force meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday, a source familiar with the meeting told CNN.
“He still doesn’t get it,” the source said. “He does not get it.”
No, we know. We saw that interview with Jonathan Swan yesterday. We know anyway – he doesn’t get much of anything.
Trump’s meeting with the task force in the Oval Office was his first in-depth meeting with the panel of his top health experts since April.
Since April. Well I guess he has a lot of Fox to watch, tweets to tweet, golf to play.
During the meeting, officials on the task force continued to have trouble convincing Trump to take the pandemic more seriously, the source said.
As some members of the task force tried to stress the dire nature of the situation to the President, the source said Trump repeatedly attempted to change the subject.
It’s what he does. He did it in the interview with Swan. He does it with everything.
He was in a bad mood though. In previous meeting he’s been jocular (why?) but yesterday he was glum. Not about us though, we can be confident of that. He’s not worried about all these people dying and all these people getting horribly ill and all these people losing their jobs and being evicted. Whatever it is he’s glum about it’s to do with himself, not anyone else.
On “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning, Trump highlighted the US’ economic return and once again claimed that the virus was going to “go away.”
…
He added: “My view is the schools should open. This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away.”
Except when they don’t, so not like that.
Now we know why Trump is mad at Jim Acosta.
Benjamin Wittes says this collecting intel on journalists caper is stupid.
… contemplating the Washington Post’s revelation that the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis (DHS I&A) issued two intelligence reports about tweets I had written, I can’t help but think that this is what J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses of power might have looked like had Twitter existed in Hoover’s time—and had Hoover been a total idiot.
On the one hand, DHS I&A was preparing intelligence reports on American journalists—on me and on Mike Baker of the New York Times—based on activity indisputably protected by the First Amendment: reporting unclassified information about the conduct of government. That’s toxic stuff. And DHS knows it. No sooner had the redoubtable Shane Harris published the story in the Post than DHS declared that Acting Secretary Chad Wolf was stopping the activity in question and initiating an investigation…
Because shocked shocked.
On the other hand, the collection and reporting on me is so trivial—and so dumb—that it can be hard to stop giggling and see the menace. Consider, DHS issued two intelligence reports, noting the shocking fact that I had tweeted things, a fact evident to all of my Twitter followers. The reports added no analysis of any kind. They didn’t mention what this had to do with anything a law enforcement or intelligence officer might find important. If this is Big Brother, he’s not all that impressive.
Ok but it’s hard to see everything relevant on Twitter so the intelligence reports were just to help the busy people at DHS who might have missed those particular tweets. Those tweets which must have been very sinister or why bother to collect and share them? Right?
Wittes says if they’d just passed them around then sure.
… had the author of these reports merely sent around an email to colleagues saying, “Hey look, @benjaminwittes just posted an internal document”—which is really all these reports say—I would not be remotely concerned about it. Indeed, the first of the two tweets reports on a document that more or less does exactly that in noting that I had published leaked information. Similarly, had someone written to the DHS inspector general asking for a leak investigation based on the tweets, that would have seemed entirely sensible too. Had people shared the tweets socially or professionally within the government, that also would have been fine.
But the idea that this is useful open source intelligence is just goofy, and the gussying up of a tweet available to hundreds of thousands of people into an intelligence “source” is like an intelligence agency playing dress-up.
Well everybody needs a hobby.
In the wake of Harris’s story, I received any number of communications from intelligence professionals—many of them indignant on my behalf, but all of them befuddled by what kind of clown show DHS I&A was running for someone to think such an intelligence report would be useful.
Well it’s…you know…background. Isn’t that useful? Kind of?
But if the details of the incidents all render them trivial, even laughable, there is a serious side here too. The government isn’t supposed to be gathering, reporting, and disseminating intelligence on U.S. persons without some clear factual predicate for doing so. It particularly isn’t supposed to be doing this solely based on a subject’s First Amendment protected activities. And DHS is only supposed to be collecting intelligence at all on the basis of a limited set of homeland security missions.
It’s not clear to me that DHS I&A was following any of these rules when it reported on Mike Baker and me. And that fact makes me worried about what other First Amendment protected activity might be the subject of intelligence reporting by DHS. I’m worried here less about journalism than about the equally constitutionally protected activity of protesting, to which the DHS has shifted considerable attention and energy. To put my basic question a little differently, if DHS could issue these reports about my Twitter activity, what else must it be reporting on vis a vis protestors?
But Trump says protesters are attacking our beautiful federal courthouses that cost eleventy trillion dollars apiece.
But for serious: Wittes goes on to explain why this clownish behavior is also very damn dangerous.
Oh hey, look at that, the Trump security people have been investigating journalists.
The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.
“Alarming” is putting it very mildly.
Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for theNew York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents about DHS operations in Portland. The intelligence reports, obtained by The Washington Post, include written descriptions and images of the tweets and the number of times they had been liked or retweeted by others.
Guess what happened next!
After The Post published a story online Thursday evening detailing the department’s practices, the acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, ordered the intelligence office to stop collecting information on journalists and announced an investigation into the matter.
I suppose the intelligence office had Gone Rogue? They did this all on their own? Chad Wolf is shocked shocked to hear it?
Some of the leaked DHS documents the journalists posted and wrote about revealed shortcomings in the department’s understanding of the nature of the protests in Portland, as well as techniques that intelligence analysts have used. A memo by the department’s top intelligence official, which was tweeted by the editor of Lawfare, says personnel relied on “FINTEL,” an acronym for financial intelligence, as well as finished intelligence “Baseball cards” of arrested protesters to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.
So in other words DHS was thinking of protesters as comparable to suspected terrorists. That’s healthy and normal.
The DHS intelligence reports, which are unclassified, are traditionally used for sharing the department’s analysis with federal law enforcement agencies, state and local officials, and some foreign governments. They are not intended to disseminate information about American citizens who have no connection to terrorists or other violent actors and who are engaged in activity protected by the First Amendment, current and former officials said.
It fits with Trump’s way of thinking though. He sees protesters on the left as terrorists and violent actors.
Officials who are familiar with the reports, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss them, said they are consistent with the department’s aggressive tactics in Portland, and in particular the work of the Intelligence and Analysis Office, which they worried is exceeding the boundaries of its authority in an effort to crack down on “antifa” protesters to please President Trump. He and other senior administration officials have used that “anti-fascist” label to describe people in Portland and other cities who are protesting police violence, as well as others who have vandalized statues and memorials to Confederate officers that they consider racist.
What I’m saying. This is Trump-school thinking.
The Intelligence and Analysis Office has for years been the butt of jokes among larger, more established agencies like the CIA and the FBI, who liken it to a team of junior-varsity athletes. The DHS office produces reports that are largely based on unclassified, often public sources of information that current and former officials have said are of limited use.
So they’re looking at people’s tweets and then reporting on them. Very investigate, much sleuthy.
Little bit, seeing as how reporting is that it was a warehouse full of explosives rather than an attack, so let’s not go to war.
The thing is…if you take New York out then the US hasn’t done quite so badly.
Daniel Dale lists some of Trump’s lies in the Axios interview – some because they’re still reviewing it at CNN and there could be more, because, you know, Trump.
Many of Trump’s interviewers are right-wing sycophants who have no interest in challenging him. But Trump has defeated even his other interviewers by employing a strategy we can call the hit-and-run — saying dishonest stuff, then darting ahead to other dishonest stuff before the interviewer reacts.
Aka not letting other people get a word in. I just watched a 15 minute clip of the Swan interview, coronavirus section, and it’s maybe Trump’s one actual talent – the ability to keep the flow going no matter what nonsense he has to talk. He just keeps talking. It’s not a talent in the ordinary sense because it’s so infuriating and repulsive, but it does take a kind of skill. Can you imagine what a nightmare it must be to be around him all the time?
Swan had similar success when Trump returned to his laughably inaccurate claim that the virus is “under control,” which he has now been making for more than six months.
Trump: “Right now, I think it’s under control. I’ll tell you what –“
Swan: “How? 1,000 Americans are dying a day.”
Trump: “They are dying. That’s true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”
Again, Trump didn’t explicitly surrender. But Swan’s basic follow-up — a “how?” and a single key statistic — forced Trump into a de facto surrender (“It’s under control as much as you can control it”) and another revealing remark, “It is what it is.”
Trump made at least 17 additional false claims in the 35-minute interview. (We’re still reviewing the transcript, so the final total might be higher.)
An incident in Portland: When Swan mentioned “disturbing footage of people in fatigues beating the Navy veteran” in Portland, Trump said “no” repeatedly and then said, “Fake news.” (There was nothing fake about what Swan said. As Swan noted, the beating of protester Chris David was captured on video.)
… The Portland courthouse: Trump claimed that the federal courthouse in Portland, which has endured damage from some of the protesters in the city, is a “$600 million building.” (The courthouse cost a reported $129 million to build in the 1990s; even with inflation, that is roughly $200 million in today’s dollars. Trump claimed last week that it was a “billion-dollar building.”)
…
South Korea’s death toll: Trump cast doubt on Swan’s correct statement that South Korea has 300 deaths from the coronavirus, saying, “You don’t know that.” When Swan pressed him on whether he thinks South Korea is faking its statistics, Trump said, “I won’t get into that because I have a very good relationship with the country. But you don’t know that.” (South Korea had precisely 301 confirmed deaths as of Tuesday; there is no basis to claim the country is faking its data. Many countries, including South Korea and the US, likely have more actual coronavirus deaths than have been confirmed to date, but Swan was correctly using the available numbers.)
…
Mail-in voting and fraud: Trump claimed, “There is no way you can go through a mail-in vote without massive cheating.” (There is no evidence of massive cheating with mail-in voting — and five states, including conservative Utah, have previously conducted fair elections almost entirely by mail.)
…
Black Americans: Trump claimed that he has done “more for the Black community than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, whether you like it or not.” When Swan asked him specifically if he thinks he did “more than Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act,” Trump said yes. (We give Trump wide latitude to express opinions, but this one is ridiculous. Lincoln, who emancipated the slaves and won the Civil War, is a certain exception, not a possible exception; Johnson’s monumental Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act clearly dwarfed the impact of any of Trump’s policies.)
That’s just some of them.
He’s bumpity-bumping down the stairs.
Donald Trump stumbled through his second damaging interview in as many weeks, floundering in a conversation with the news website Axios over key issues he is tasked with responding to as president.
…
In a lengthy discussion about the US’s poor response to coronavirus, Trump described the pandemic as “under control”.
Swan responded: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
“They are dying. That’s true. And you – it is what it is,” Trump said. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”
Ohhhhhhhhhh I see, “under control” means “as under control as we can get it, which is zero, because we’re not trying, and in fact we’re trying to make it worse.” That explains a lot.
The president then appeared unable to distinguish between different measurements of coronavirus deaths.
Trump brandished several pieces of paper with graphs and charts.
“United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world. Lower than Europe.”
“In what?” Swan asked. As it becomes apparent that Trump is talking about the number of deaths as a proportion of confirmed Covid-19 cases, Swan said: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than Germany, South Korea.”
Trump responded: “You can’t do that.”
We can and we have to.
More on the apparent “tragic death of non-existent person” hoax from Ed Cara at Gizmodo:
A bizarre saga of events played out on social media over the weekend, embroiling much of the close-knit world of scientists, academics, and researchers on Twitter. It started with accusations that Arizona State University’s actions had exposed one of their faculty members, an Indigenous woman and anthropologist, to an ultimately fatal case of covid-19. But it ended with allegations that the death was a hoax, carried out by someone who also faked the supposed professor’s entire existence.
Given that many colleges and schools are debating if and how it’s possible to reopen physically this fall in the midst of the pandemic, the accusations of negligence on the part of Arizona State University carry a heavy weight. But many members of the science Twitter community now suspect that the academic who was the first to report the woman’s death, Tennessee-based neuroscientist BethAnn McLaughlin, has pulled off a catfishing scam for years, citing inconsistencies in the woman’s accounts of events in her now-gone tweets.
Wally’s fakery was very obvious. It still mystifies me that so many intelligent people were snookered by it. A fakery carried out entirely on Twitter would be a different thing, because it’s too much trouble to keep track of Person X’s tweets, so you might not notice fakery right away.
The case for McLaughlin being @sciencing_bi is largely circumstantial for the time being. Accounts on Twitter and Reddit have highlighted now-unverifiable tweets where it appears that @sciencing_bi used stock images to describe events that were supposedly happening in real life. One user I reached out to over Twitter mentioned an experience where they had contacted @sciencing_bi to volunteer her help in securing McLaughlin tenure at Vanderbilt University where she was then employed. Soon after, she received an invite to a Google Docs group, not from @sciencing_bi, but McLaughlin herself. Another user told me of a time when @sciencing_bi appeared to be in financial trouble and was soliciting donations over Venmo. However, the Venmo account they were asked to donate to belonged to McLaughlin. No one besides McLaughlin seems to have reported ever seeing @sciencing_bi in person.
She’s still standing by her story, it seems.
I asked what McLaughlin would say to the people who now believe that @sciencing_bi is an elaborate hoax, including those who had positive experiences with both of them. “I’m really sorry, for all the pain they’re feeling now,” she said.
Just the pain they’re feeling – not the causing of it.
Interviewer: John Lewis is lying in state in the US Capitol, how do you think history will remember John Lewis?
Trump: I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration. He chose, uh – I never met John Lewis, actually, I don’t believe.
Interviewer: Do you find him impressive?
Trump: [pause with mouth open and disdainful “tsk” sound] Uhhh…I can’t say one way or the other. I find a lot of people impressive. I find many people not impressive – but – [shrug] no – but I didn’t uh – [hands come up in accordion gesture; meanwhile interviewer is asking “Do you find his story impressive?”] – he didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. [accordion gesture gets wider] And that’s OK. [pause] That’s his right. [pause] And, again, [more accordion gestures] nobody has done more [voice is an indignant whine now] for Black Americans than I have. [interviewer saying “I understand, I understand that”] He should have come. [still indignant whine] I think he made a big mistake.
That’s it. That’s this disgusting criminal pinhead’s response to the life and significance of John Lewis – He diDn’t coMe to MY inauGurAshun. That’s all that can find room in his horrible shrunken spite-riddled brain. No, he didn’t find John Lewis impressive; John Lewis didn’t come to his inauguration; he, Trump, has done more for Black Americans than anyone, obviously including John Lewis. Who, by the way, didn’t come to his inauguration.
This pampered soft greedy pig of a man who was at Fordham getting bone spurs deferments when John Lewis was getting his head split on the Edmund Pettus bridge has the fucking gall to say he’s done more for John Lewis’s cause than John Lewis ever did. This evil greedy lying pig of a man who systematically refused to rent apartments to Black Americans has the fucking gall to say he’s done more for Black Americans than John Lewis has.
It makes me angry.
An ego that blots out the sun and an empathy that can’t be found with any tool of human inquiry.
Trump has been shouting at us again.
Donald Trump used his White House coronavirus press conference on Monday to repeat his opposition to lockdowns as a means of bringing the contagion under control, claiming falsely that under his leadership the US has done “as well as any nation”.
If by “as well as” he means “worse than” he’s right on the money.
On a day that the US had surpassed 4.7m confirmed cases of infection – more than a quarter of the global total – Trump tried to deflect criticism of his administration’s handling of the pandemic on to other countries.
Finland! Blame Finland! Also Senegal – why not? And how about Peru? Blame Peru!
He cited Spain, Germany, France, Australia and Japan as countries experiencing “significant flare ups” as the virus surges again. In fact, while Australia and Japan are experiencing renewed surges, their total incidence of disease remains a fraction of the catastrophe now sweeping across the US.
Ok but we invented Kentucky Fried Chicken, so it’s a tie.
Meanwhile he also turned on Birx, because of course he did.
While Trump has been in an ongoing public back-and-forth with Fauci, this is the first time he has singled out Birx, who has worked especially closely with the president, for a public shaming.
There’s always a first time. He’ll publicly shame anyone at any time; that’s who he is.
Sir about those tax returns sir.
A New York City prosecutor fighting to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns told a judge Monday he was justified in demanding them because of public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”
In other words we have a hardened criminal as president of the US. Ain’t life grand.
Manhattan District Attorney District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. is seeking eight years of the Republican president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation related to payoffs to two women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.
Probably a thousand newspaper articles about Trump’s criminal practices also had something to do with it.
In a court filing Monday, attorneys for Vance said the president wasn’t entitled to know the exact nature of the grand jury investigation.
They noted, though, that at the time the subpoena for the tax filings was issued to Trump’s accountants, “there were public allegations of possible criminal activity” at the president’s company “dating back over a decade.”
They cited several newspaper articles, including one in which the Washington Post examined allegations that Trump had a practice of sending financial statements to potential business partners and banks that inflated the worth of his projects by claiming they were bigger or more potentially lucrative than they were.
Which bears an uncanny resemblance to what he’s doing to all of us now. The economy is roaring back! The virus is going away! The US is awesome! Black lives don’t matter!
Vance’s lawyers urged U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero to swiftly reject Trump’s further arguments that the subpoenas were improper, saying the baseless claims were threatening the investigation.
“Every day that goes by is another day Plaintiff effectively achieves the ‘temporary absolute immunity’ that was rejected by this Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court,” Vance’s lawyers said.
And it’s another day a criminal squats in the Oval Office and tells us lies at press conferences.
Weird occurrences on social media.
There’s an advocacy person called BethAnn McLaughlin who founded MeTooSTEM.
MeTooSTEM has accomplished much since it was founded in 2018 to fight sexual harassment in academic science. Since November alone, according to the group’s accounting, it has engaged with more than 750 individuals requesting assistance, filed hundreds of open-records requests about harassment cases and made dozens of complaints to funding agencies regarding researchers’ conduct.
The group has visited some 20 campuses to discuss federal laws governing gender-based discrimination and sexual misconduct in education, put on webinars and awarded $12,000 to advocates for women in science. Its founder BethAnn McLaughlin, also received the Disobedience Award from Massachusetts Institute of Techonolgy’s Media Lab last year, alongside Me Too movement found Tarana Burke and consultant and activist Sherry Marts.
But there have been complaints and criticisms. The Inside Higher Ed piece goes into some of them.
That sounds sad; tell us more about Sciencing_Bi.
For several years, academics and activists around the country interacted with the Twitter account @Sciencing_Bi, which was supposedly run by an LGBTQ Native American Anthropology professor at Arizona State University. They reacted with tributes and grief when a controversial former professor and anti-sexual harassment #metoo crusader named BethAnn McLaughlin announced on Twitter that @Sciencing_Bi had died of COVID-19, blaming the university where @Sciencing_Bi supposedly worked for making people teach on campus during the pandemic.
But there were some snags, one of them being that ASU said what? No professors have died here. Professors at ASU said what???? Why weren’t we told? Professors in Anthropology at ASU asked around and found all their colleagues not dead.
However, what unfolded next is a complex and bizarre tale of accusations and confusion, as academics and others on social media are now accusing McLaughlin herself of possibly being @Sciencing_Bi and masquerading as a fake Native American professor online, ASU is saying it can’t come up with a death of any professor from COVID-19 recently, and Twitter has suspended both the accounts of McLaughlin and the now mysterious @Sciencing_Bi (as of the early morning hours of August 3).
People who had been friendly with @Sciencing_Bi (Twitter friendly) were upset about the tragic news and are now upset in a different way.
“Sad to report @Sciencing_Bi died from COVID this evening,” McLaughlin wrote on July 31, 2020. “She was a fierce protector of people. She let me take my shoulders away from my ears knowing she was meaner and more loving than everyone else. No one has ever had my back like that. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” In a eulogy on Twitter, she spun an elaborate narrative, saying that @Sciencing_Bi wanted them to get matching tattoos in an indigenous language and texted her daily. “Please read her timeline. She was forced by her university to teach in person until April,” McLaughlin tweeted. “Campus closed and she was in the hospital a week later. Be mad about COVID but be more mad that BIPOC community is most vulnerable and underrepresented on campus. We are killing them.”
@Sciencing_Bi wrote about her supposed battle with COVID-19 in dramatic terms. “ASU kept teachers, staff and students on campus until April. That’s well after we knew this was a killer disease. Many got covid. Including me,” read a May 23 tweet by @Sciencing_Bi, whose name on Twitter was given as only “Alepo” next to a rainbow flag.
It’s just weird.
It reminds me of Wally Smith all those years ago.
Transwoman Dawn Ennis summons allies to bully the women who don’t want to include men in women’s sports:
Outsports has obtained the names of more than 300 women athletes who signed a letter sent to the Board of Governors of the National College Athletic Association last week, expressing their opposition to transgender inclusion.
No, not to “transgender inclusion”; to the inclusion of men in women’s sports. Include trans women by all means, but not competing against women.
The anti-trans group, Save Women’s Sports, collected the 309 names in the interest of pressuring the NCAA leadership ahead of its meeting this week.
The group is not anti-trans. It’s in the name – the group is pro-women’s sports.
In June, the NCAA announced it would consider what to do about that state’s new law, HB500, which bans trans student athletes from competing according to their authentic gender.
Because the issue is authentic sex, not “authentic gender,” which is meaningless. No doubt they do authentically think they think they think they feel like women, but their bodies remain the bodies of men, because thinking is not magic.
With hundreds of women supporting its effort, Save Women’s Sports sent its letter asking the NCAA for a “fair and level playing field” for women’s sports — coded language which means the group opposes trans women being allowed to compete with women who are cisgender…
Well now who is really using “coded language” here? Yes, the group does oppose trans women being allowed to compete against women, because trans women have male bodies. That’s not “coded,” it’s just the reality. It’s men who identify as women calling us “women who are cisgender” who are really using coded language, and reversing reality in the process. They’re appropriating the word “women” and then accusing us of being fakes. That takes a lot of gall…the kind of gall male people are encouraged to develop when it’s time to bully women.
Save Our Women’s Sports told Outsports in a tweet, “We don’t have anything to prove to you. The NCAA has the names and that is all that matters.”
And now we do, too, and it’s up to the athletes who signed the letter to answer for it.
Openly bullying. Your bristles are showing, Dawn!
Despite what some may say, this is not a witch-hunt. We oppose all violence, especially the significantly greater incidents of violent attacks on trans people, and murders. compared to the number of threats that cisgender opponents of trans inclusion have claimed and reported.
How about: compared to women? I think you’ll find that women are more the targets of male violence than men are the targets of female violence.
Ennis updated the post to add a tweet from Linda Blade, apparently thinking it makes Blade look bad. Delusion is a dangerous drug.
Originally a comment by Claire on Losing sight of women’s rights.
If you have not witnessed these kind of shenanigans, then you are lucky. I am aware of several, including stories about the infamous Wakefield autism paper that should have gotten the editor fired, although in this case it was the other way around.
Two people I know were reviewers, who roundly rejected the paper citing grave concerns about methodology, result and conclusions. One said to me that they didn’t even think the introduction was good, failing to cite some seminal work that would have rather undermined his central premise. Two bad reviews from respected authors in the field should have been enough to kill it. Instead the editor (or more likely the associate editor) reviewer shopped until they got the number of reviews they needed to proceed to publication.
It was outrageously unethical behavior and it’s always been disappointing to me that the Lancet did not thoroughly audit their processes afterwards. Nor was the internal audit at the Royal Free any more than window dressing. Dismissing it as one bad apple, no attempt was made to discover how a bad apple was able to operate with impunity without ethics approval. Despite the fact they supported him long after it was clear something fishy was going on.
I’m an associate editor for a journal and I can tell you it’s hard getting reviewers. To collect as many as this one did, is very unusual, not to mention a lot of work. It still staggers me that every step of the peer review process, which is meant to prevent this kind of thing failed.
The same is true in this instance. If a paper has been accepted and does not contain lies or inaccuracies, how does someone biased get into the process?
Claire adds: I would state that I am not a first-hand witness to these events. I am relating to you only what I was told, although I have no reason to doubt its veracity.
