Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Cooking the prisoners

    Apparently labor laws and safety laws don’t apply to prisoners.

    Temperatures reached 97 degrees on June 21 at the French Robinson Unit prison the day Seth Donnelly collapsed. The Texas Observer reported Seth passed out during his prison job of training attack dogs — running around in a 75-pound ​“fight suit” while the dogs tried to bite him. Seth’s internal body temperature was 106 when he reached the hospital, where doctors eventually took him off life support. He died on June 23, and his preliminary autopsy lists multiorgan failure following severe hyperthermia.

    97 degrees. A padded suit weighing 75 pounds. It’s worthy of the tunnels at Camp Dora.

    Danielle, who asked for In These Times to withhold her last name to protect her family-run business from social stigma, says she woke up in her cell in Texas at Gatesville Prison one typical early morning in July 2015, drenched in sweat. Without time (or permission) to shower or brush her teeth, she reports she was corralled to the fields in a heavy uniform.

    “It didn’t feel safe,” says Danielle, who explains she picked tomatoes and jalapeño peppers without pay. Gatesville’s average high temperature that month was 98 degrees. ​“Texas in July, it’s like sitting on hell’s doorstep,” she says.

    A guard who Danielle says she was ​“deathly terrified of” patrolled the ​“state property” (the term guards used for incarcerated people) on a horse. Danielle says she was not provided gloves, which often left her hands exposed to thorns and caustic jalapeño juices.

    OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] rules do not apply to state prisons. Twenty-two states have adopted OSHA ​“state plans,” which cover state prisons with standards intended to be at least as effective as federal standards. Eight of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates have declined to adopt these plans.

    “The guards could literally do whatever they wanted to us,” says Danielle, who was incarcerated in Texas from August 2014 to September 2015..

    Danielle’s stated working conditions appear antithetical to OSHA’s guidelines. ​“There was a vehicle that would come by and bring some water, but if the vehicle broke down you were out of luck for water that day,” she says. ​“That happened numerous times. Even when we get water it was gone within a few minutes and they won’t refill it for you. There are 50-plus women and the women in the back don’t get any.”

    That causes death. It also causes misery of course, but it kills. Extreme heat is lethal, and hydration is essential.

    Nearly half of people imprisoned in the U.S. work while incarcerated, a population disproportionately likely to be Black. Penal labor became a more significant part of the American economy following the Civil War; police would conduct sweeps and make arrests of Black men when plantations needed additional labor for planting, cutting and harvesting crops. Today, a majority of incarcerated workers perform ​“institutional maintenance,” which includes tasks like mowing the compound lawn and mopping floors. A relatively small number of others work in ​“correctional industries,” manufacturing things like license plates, sewing American flags and — as in Danielle’s case — harvesting vegetables that are later sold for a profit. All seven states that don’t pay for non-industry labor are in the South, which can reach dangerously hot summer temperatures.

    And which are former slave states, and then Jim Crow states. Not a coincidence.

  • Many boxes

    Powell attempted the Sheer Volume defense.

    Powell insisted the volume of the suit they filed last November was testament to the extent of research and investigation the attorneys did.

    “We filed a massive and detailed complaint in federal court that doesn’t even require us to append affidavits to it,” Powell said. “The very fact we filed 960 pages of affidavits with the complaint shows due diligence on our part. 
 The only way to test that is in the crucible of a trial or an evidentiary hearing,” she added, noting that the judge had thus far denied such a hearing.

    Listen, it’s millions of words of bullshit, surely that counts for something.

    “Volume, certainly for this court, doesn’t equate with legitimacy or veracity,” Parker shot back.

    There oughta be an apothegm about that – A billion lies are as nothing compared to a single truth, or something like that. Attributed to Calvin Coolidge or Lucille Ball or whatever.

    In a motion last December urging punishment of Powell, Wood and others, the city’s legal team wrote: “If sanctions are not deserved in this case, it is hard to imagine a case where they would be.”

    “In a case involving the election of the President of the United States, the parties and their attorneys should be held to the highest standards of factual and legal due diligence; instead, they have raised false allegations and pursued unsupportable legal theories,” the city argued. “It is time for this Court to send a message back: lies and frivolous claims will not be tolerated. This abuse of our legal system deserves the strongest possible sanctions.”

    It’s so awful it’s funny, but really it’s not funny at all.

    [City attorney Herschel Fink said the misstatements in the court filings, like a claim that 139 percent of registered voters in Detroit cast ballots, had grave consequences. The correct turnout number reported by the city is just under 51 percent.

    “These lies were put out into the world, and when they were put out into the world they were adopted and received by” influential people such as Trump, Fink said. He said that when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to flip the election to favor Trump, the president brought up the Detroit numbers.

    “President Trump explicitly referenced the 139 percent voting statistic in Detroit as though it were fact,” Fink said. “These are the consequences. It’s the consequence of how they abused this system.”

    And by the way what is Detroit famous for besides cars? For being a destination city during the Great Migration, and for remaining a majority Black city. It’s not a coincidence that these sleazes chose Detroit for their big lie.

  • Fantastical

    In Trump lawyers news:

    A U.S. judge on Monday appeared likely to reprimand Sidney Powell, a former campaign lawyer for Donald Trump, and other attorneys over a lawsuit they filed in Michigan seeking to overturn Democratic President Joe Biden’s election victory.

    U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Detroit suggested the pro-Trump lawyers should have investigated the Republican former president’s voter fraud claims more carefully before suing.

    “Should an attorney be sanctioned for his or her failure to withdraw allegations the attorney came to know were untrue?,” Parker said during a court hearing via video conference. “Is that sanctionable behavior?”

    You’d hope so.

    Parker held the hearing to determine whether Powell, Lin Wood and other pro-Trump lawyers should be disciplined for a lawsuit they filed last November that made baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. presidential election in Michigan.

    They are not the only lawyers allied with Trump to land in hot water for supporting his false claims that his election defeat was the result of fraud. New York state and Washington, D.C., in recent weeks suspended former New York City Mayor and Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani’s law license after finding he lied in supporting Trump’s claims.

    Parker asked Powell and co a lot of disbelieving questions.

    “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an affidavit that makes so many leaps. This is really fantastical,” Parker said. “So my question to counsel here is: How could any of you as officers of the court present this affidavit?”

    How dare Parker question their faith.

  • 15 tons of rotting fish

    In further apocalypse:

    For nine straight days, waves of dead fish have washed ashore along downtown St. Petersburg and Coquina Key [Florida], plaguing residents with the intolerable stench. 

    City officials say over 100 miles of coastline have been impacted, with the worst areas being along the east and southeast coast of St. Pete — Tierra Verde to Gandy Blvd. 

    The city is working to clean up the mess and has collected over 25,000 dead fish in the past 10 days, along with 15,000 dead fish on July 9, alone. The number of dead fish amounts to over 15 tons.

    Much of Florida is doomed because of the rising seas. I don’t recommend moving there.

  • Apostles & prophets

    Stephanie McCrummen at the Washington Post reports on

    a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

    It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags.

    And this is why we can’t have nice things.

    This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.

    It’s an incredibly peculiar idea of “god” if you ask me.

    What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of [New Apostolic Reformation]-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.

    Ah yes Texas, home of so much right-wing lunacy.

  • Gesture politics

    It’s a bit late for the tut-tutting now.

    Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have been accused of hypocrisy over their stance on racism in football, after they condemned the abuse of three black England players but previously refused to criticise fans who booed the team for taking the knee.

    …

    Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former co-chairman, sent a public message to Patel, the home secretary, calling on her and all Conservatives to “think about our role in feeding this culture in our country”.

    “If we ‘whistle’ & the ‘dog’ reacts we can’t be shocked if it barks & bites,” she tweeted. “It’s time to stop the culture wars that are feeding division. Dog whistles win votes but destroy nations.”

    She added: “As a proud centre-right politician, as a proud part of a diverse vibrant nation that produced a football team that spoke to and represented England in all its modern diverse glory it shames me that in 2021 some in politics are still playing fast & loose with issues of race.”

    I wonder if she was expecting Boris Johnson to be a pillar of anti-racism.

    Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, was even more explicitly critical, saying Johnson and Patel “gave licence to the racists who booed the England players and are now racially abusing England players”. She said they were “like arsonists complaining about a fire they poured petrol on – total hypocrites”.

    Johnson and Patel reject the accusation.

    However, both have repeatedly stopped short of criticising fans who booed England players for taking the knee in a stand against racism. Patel has also said taking the knee represents “gesture politics” and whether to boo the England players was a “choice” for fans to make.

    Well lots of things are “gesture politics,” aren’t they. Racist abuse of the players is gesture politics, rebuking players who take the knee is gesture politics, rebuking fans who send racist abuse to the players is gesture politics. Gestures are not automatically trivial.

    As the players were subjected to a barrage of online abuse, a Tory MP had to apologise for suggesting Rashford should have concentrated on football rather than “playing politics” in an apparent reference to his campaign for free school meals.

    Natalie Elphicke, the Tory MP for Dover and Deal, made the comment in a WhatsApp message to fellow MPs, suggesting Rashford should not have spent time on his successful campaign for free school meals for low-income pupils in the school holidays.

    In comments first reported by GB News, Elphicke said: “They lost – would it be ungenerous to suggest Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics.”

    Why yes, it would; thank you for asking. And seeing as how his campaign was successful, it wasn’t really “playing,” was it. Children’s full bellies aren’t a gesture, they’re the real thing.

  • Character building

    The joys of sport.

    England manager Gareth Southgate said the racist abuse aimed at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after the Euro 2020 final defeat by Italy was “unforgivable”.

    Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Football Association also condemned it.

    All three players missed penalties in the 3-2 shootout loss and were targeted on social media after the game.

    Patriotism innit.

    Updating to add:

  • Ouchy

    The Death Party intensifies its push to kill more of us:

    The Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Dallas this weekend has been full of the usual moments from the Republican Party’s most outrageous figures trying to be the most performatively provocative. Notable, however, has been the drumbeat of anti-vaccine rhetoric that has pervaded CPAC’s annual gathering—even as the Delta variant of COVID-19 continues to build steam across unvaccinated parts of the country.

    Because what, half a million deaths isn’t enough for them?

    Fauci is, naturally, horrified.

    Fauci was reacting to a talk in which anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson was roundly cheered by a CPAC audience for saying the US government had failed to “sucker” 90 percent of Americans into getting vaccinated.

    “It’s horrifying, I mean, the cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people to not try and save their lives,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “If you just unpack that for a second
 it’s almost frightening to say ‘Guess what? We don’t want you to do something to save your life! Yay!’ I just don’t get that and I don’t think anybody who is thinking clearly can get that.”

    You can omit the “almost” from “it’s almost frightening.” Of course it’s frightening that people are happy to promote death for frivolous political or showbiz gratification.

    Others carrying the anti-vaccine torch at CPAC included Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who mocked Biden’s efforts to get more people vaccinated and provide economic relief to states where the economy is still struggling to restart after pandemic-related shutdowns. “We’re here to tell the government we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare,” Boebert declared, strutting across a stage as she spoke. “Don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ‘ouchy’—you leave us the hell alone.”

  • Mean tweets

    Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

    Rich Anderson, the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party[,] wrote to the president of the University of Virginia yesterday. Anderson begins by explaining, “I understand the commitment that public servants make to serving with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor in their taxpayer-funded roles.” The letter concerns Donald Trump, though not in a way that follows intuitively from the premise that public servants must act with integrity, dignity, respect, and honor.

    Anderson’s letter demands UVA open an ethics investigation into Larry Sabato, the director of the school’s Center for Politics. Sabato’s alleged ethics violation is a series of mean tweets from his personal account, concerning Donald Trump.

    “Not an ethics violation, Your Honour.”

    “Agreed. Dismissed.”

    Anderson pretends that tweets harshly critical of Trump violate the UV Mission Statement’s elevated values.

    Exactly how Sabato violated any of these guidelines by pointing out that the former president was a deranged narcissist, Anderson does not say. Indeed, if you’re going to take these mission statement nostrums seriously, a line like “Everything we do must fulfill our goal of instilling citizens with an appreciation for the core values of American freedom, justice, equality, civility, and service” would seem to require the University’s staff to oppose Trump.

    On account of how Trump opposes and acts against all those core values, you see.

    Of course the legal merits of Anderson’s demand are not the point. It is an exercise in harassment and intimidation. Republicans are flexing their political muscle as a threat to employees of public universities.

    Republicans are flexing their cancel muscles.

    The occasional Republican pose as defenders of free speech, or mockers of snowflakes, was always a transparent ploy; no abuse by the illiberal left can hold a candle to the illiberalism of a political party pledged to the whims of an authoritarian.

    And not just any authoritarian, but one with a florid array of bad qualities and a total lack of the other kind.

  • Patriarchy and people

    Milli Hill’s I will not be silenced is also relevant to that “mind your own fucking business” tweet of Christa Peterson’s. It is our fucking business; of course it is.

    [T]oo many women have been silenced, and I don’t want to join them. There are conversations about women’s rights, women’s bodies, and the words we use to talk about women’s issues, which need to be had, but which have been made taboo in our current culture. And this is not healthy. Worse still, women like me have been used as an example to others of what happens to you if you raise questions. And others have seen these public draggings, and decided to keep quiet themselves. This kind of behaviour, in which dissidents are made a public example of in order to ensure compliance to dogma, does not have very good historical precedents. And yet it currently describes itself as ‘the right side of history’.

    She’d been having misgivings about language like “assigned at birth” but had kept them to herself, because she didn’t want the monstering that would greet any questions.

    However, on 25th November 2020 I was tagged in comment on an Instagram post about obstetric violence. This is a topic I’ve written extensively about, and that features heavily in my book Give Birth like a Feminist. 25th November was also International Day to End Violence Against Women, so I’d been reading a lot about violence against women that day and thinking about how obstetric violence sits within that and is often overlooked. There were several slides to this post, but this one jarred for me.

    Wait. Notice anything odd about that besides the usual absurdity of “birthing person”?

    The words “patriarchy” and “patriarchal” are allowed, but “woman” isn’t.

    Why is that? Do they not realize that “patriarchy” is just as sex-specific as “woman” is?

    Is it really only women who have to be erased and bullied?

    Back to Hill:

    My work and thinking around obstetric violence had led me to the view that it is ‘sex based violence’. Please note my use of the word sex here, not gender. Sex as in biological sex, not gender as in the social constructs around roles, clothing, behaviour etc. Like other forms of violence against women, obstetric violence happens to women because they are female. What I saw happening in this slide was a genuine mix up between the absolutely correct idea that the problem here is patriarchy, a system that oppresses and damages women on the basis of their sex, and obfuscating terminology that is unable to name the oppressed people.

    It’s ok to name the oppressor but not the oppressed. Weird system.

    So, as we know, she responded, and all hell broke loose. She provides a few screenshots of the many venomous attacks.

    The situation seemed to be spiralling out of control, but what then made it worse was the organisation Birthrights joined in – and not to defend me. On the 26th November, right in the eye of the storm, they posted on Instagram, not naming me directly, but stating that they were ‘proud to be an inclusive organisation’, that they would use the terms, ‘women and birthing people’, and that they would, ‘not work with individuals and organisations who do not share these values and will always challenge, either privately or publicly if appropriate, those in the maternity and birth rights movement who speak or act in a discriminatory way.’. It didn’t take long for people to work out who and what they were referring to.

    “You will erase women from your language, or you will be hounded out.”

    Read the whole thing.

  • Then what is any of anyone’s business?

    No, that’s not right.

    There are a lot of reasons it’s not right, but to take just one central one – that amounts to telling women that “gender” is none of our business, that the social rules and constraints imposed on women are none of our business, that the perceived inferiority and subordinate nature of women is none of our business, that feminism is none of our business. That claim is obviously absurd, and also obviously insulting. She might as well tell workers that unions are none of their business.

    It’s especially repellent because she is a graduate student in philosophy. If gender is none of women’s business then everything is none of philosophy’s business – so what is she doing getting a PhD in philosophy?

    She specializes in this kind of curt, smart-ass quippery instead of actual thought or argument, and it’s one of the more annoying things about her.

  • Left red-faced

    This is RT, Putin’s rag, so take that into account, but I can’t find other news sources reporting on it yet:

    London borough apologises for having actor in bare-bottomed monkey costume with mock genitalia encourage kids to read more books

    Long but compelling headline, do admit. If that doesn’t encourage kids to read more books I don’t know what will.

    Officials in London’s Redbridge borough were left red-faced after a library event designed to promote reading among kids featured a monkey character in a costume that included dangling fake genitalia and exposed buttocks.

    The costume and the actor wearing it came from Mandinga Arts, a troupe of street performers based in Clapham South that has “a distinctive style bringing together live music, carnival, street costume, puppetry and dance, drawing on diverse influences from Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa,” according to its website. The well-endowed monkey was part of one of the group’s walkabout acts.

    “bringing together live music, carnival, street costume, puppetry and dance“…and dildos and bare bums. Why so shy about the star attraction?

    Redbridge Libraries acknowledged the lapse in judgement and apologized for hosting the performance, but shifted the blame onto the charity Vision. It was they, rather than the borough council, who were responsible for organizing the event, the statement said.

    The mischievous rainbow-coloured creature was promoting the Summer Reading Challenge, a campaign encouraging literacy and reading during the summer holidays among children aged between four and 11 years.

    The mischievous rainbow-coloured creature with the flapping dildo and naked bum. “Mischief” is one word for it I guess.

  • A shock when monkey turned round

    This is an odd thing that happened.

    What do they mean “inappropriate”? It’s mostly about the dildo, but apparently also the bare bum. What they carefully don’t mention is that the event was for children. It wasn’t Kink Hour for Adults, it was a reading promotion event for children. What a dildo has to do with it is anyone’s guess.

    Onlookers are not entirely convinced.

    I guess libraries identify as kink outreach centres now.

  • The fragile sex

    I’m so sick of these commissars.

    A childbirth campaigner says she was “cancelled” for suggesting violence in childbirth was committed against women rather than against “birthing people”.

    It’s women. The violence is done to women. If we can’t name them we can’t do anything about the violence.

    The flare-up began in November when [Milli Hill] was “tagged”, or name-checked, by a stranger in a post on Instagram. The person wrote: “Birthing people are seen as ‘the fragile sex’ who need to be kept under patriarchal authority by doctors.”

    Hill replied: “I would challenge the term ‘birthing person’ in this context though … It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence [medical interventions performed during childbirth without a woman’s consent] is violence against women.”

    Result: instant campaign to pound her into oblivion.

    Hill, who has three children, was then contacted by Amy Gibbs, the chief executive of Birthrights, a charity that campaigns for human rights during childbirth, an organisation she has worked alongside for years.

    Gibbs wrote: “I was really concerned to see public comments you made today on Instagram about obstetric violence. Particularly the comment that “obstetric violence is violence against women” and challenging/disputing that it could happen to non-binary or trans people who give birth.

    “As you know, obstetric violence is violence perpetuated in the maternity context, which means it can happen to birthing people who don’t identify as women … I’m afraid that Birthrights isn’t able to work with people who don’t share our inclusive values.”

    Telling women to stop talking about women when talking about obstetric violence.

    In response to the criticism, she has decided to close the Positive Birth network, which had 400 groups internationally.

    Birthrights said: “Equality and inclusion is core to our ethos, and our services are available to everyone who is pregnant … We regularly review all our partnerships to ensure they reflect our values.’

    Another win for kicking women out of childbirth organizations.

  • Disturbingly nicknamed

    So Wayne Couzens’s colleagues in the police called him “The Rapist.” Hawhaw, boys will be boys eh? Nicknames are enough, no need to do anything about him.

    The Met Police hired Sarah Everard‘s killer despite him being disturbingly nicknamed ‘The Rapist’ and the claim that he drove around naked in 2015 – three years before he was hired in London, it has emerged.

    Wayne Couzens’ ex-colleagues at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), where the 48-year-old joined in March 2011, reportedly gave him the nickname because he made some female officers feel uncomfortable.

    And by “uncomfortable” they mean “afraid.”

    The Met is under pressure to investigate how Couzens, who pleaded guilty to murdering 33-year-old Ms Everard after snatching her off the street, was able to continue serving as an officer despite suspicions being raised about his behaviour.

    Well they’re busy not prosecuting rape, you see.

    Harriet Wistrich, director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, is among those calling for a full public inquiry into ‘police failures and misconduct and the wider culture of misogyny’ following Couzens’ guilty plea.

    Ms Everard’s murder sparked protests by women fearing for their own safety earlier this year.

    Ms Wistrich said: ‘As protesters made clear, women do not feel safe and it is incumbent on the Government and all criminal justice agencies to now take action over the epidemic of male violence which is the other public health crisis of our day.’

    If Couzens has any sense he will immediately identify as a woman.

  • Always wanting to be liked

    Janice Turner on the difficulties of being young and female:

    The young woman’s burden is always wanting to be liked. Not caring what others, especially men, think about you is the secret bonus of age. But girls crave approval. For my generation the bar was low: be pleasant and pretty. Now the arenas in which perfection must be achieved are manifold: school, career, looks, sexual allure, often of an extreme pornified type. 

    It’s kind of a tricky combination, if you ask me.

    This week The Crown actress Emma Corrin posted pictures of her body, thin to the verge of skeletal, her breasts bound flat with tape. This was “very new, very cool”, she wrote. “It’s all a journey right.” Immediately famous people like Paloma Faith plus the official Netflix account rushed to say how much they loved these photos and Corrin’s statement that she was now non-binary: “pronouns she/they”.

    How does “she/they” work? Is either one ok? Are you expected to alternate? Follow an arcane but undisclosed formula? What?

    You could strap me to a ducking stool and I would still deny that breast-binding is progressive. Because I have lived through too many other ways women’s bodies have been scarred by fashion and mental illness. I remember heroin-chic models fainting backstage because designers craved sharper lines. I’ve seen self-harm, through razor blades or surgeons’ knives. I know anorexics — friends and daughters of friends — always the clever, perfectionist girls, attaining control by existing on a single cube of cheese. And breast-binding screws up female organs, can damage your ribs, limits activity and the very oxygen women breathe.

    Breast-binding is very like anorexia, when you think about it. Creepily like it.

    I’ve seen true androgyny too: young, butch lesbians, Bowie in a dress, loathed by everyone’s dad. If only being “non-binary” was equally cost-free.

    Well, it is for men: explore your fabulous side, like Sam Smith, in nail polish and heels. But a gender clinician tells me the non-binary girls she sees, who bind their breasts often as a prequel to surgical amputation, are quiet, subdued, full of angst and discomfort: “They’re just sick of being the awkward ones at family parties. They just want to disappear.”

    “The world gets harder and harder,” Hilary Mantel wrote of female saints who starved and self-abased. “There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out.” Eyes burn into prominent young women, in bodies they so rarely wear with ease. We should not ignore their distress signals, let alone cheer them on.

    But the magic words change everything.

  • $2.5 million

    What was that about ethics?

    Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., charged the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for guest rooms used by his protective detail during Trump’s first month at the club this summer, newly released spending records show.

    He could of course charge them nothing, or charge them a nominal rate, but…no.

    The Washington Post reported previously that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club — where he lived from January, when he left the White House, to early May — charged the Secret Service more than $40,000 so that agents could use a room near Trump.

    He could have chosen to do it differently, but he didn’t.

    Legal experts have said there are no laws to prohibit Trump’s company from charging the Secret Service rent at his properties, either during or after his presidency. The rate is effectively up to him: By law, the Secret Service can pay whatever it must to rent rooms near its protectees for use as command posts and meeting rooms.

    But there are also no laws requiring him to extort as much money as he can.

    In recent history, The Post could find only one other protected person who had charged the Secret Service rent: Joe Biden. As vice president, Biden charged the Secret Service $2,200 per month to use a cottage on his property in Delaware. In total, Biden received $171,600 between 2011 and 2017.

    …

    The charges from Trump’s company exceeded Biden’s lifetime total by March 2017, Trump’s third month in office, according to records obtained by The Post. Trump’s company charged the State Department to host summits with foreign leaders, the Secret Service for rooms while protecting Trump and his children, and the Defense Department for aides accompanying the president to Mar-a-Lago and to his Irish golf club.

    Every chance he got, in other words.

    In all, Trump’s company charged the government more than $2.5 million during his presidency, according to a Post analysis of federal spending records.

    Not bad! Of course it’s not all pure profit. Some of that went to pay the cleaning staff.

    It is unclear how the Trump Organization set the rates that it charges the Secret Service at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. Before The Post revealed the extent of the charges, Trump’s son Eric said in 2019 that the rate was “like 50 bucks” per night.

    How are we defining “like” here?

    Jordan Libowitz, of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that — in light of Trump’s other assets and income — he should consider allowing the Secret Service to stay at his properties free.

    Maybe he did consider it.

  • Promoting death

    Speaking of ethics…

    It’s a clip of Fox News hacks telling people to refuse to get the vaccination – in other words telling people to keep spreading a killer virus and to get it themselves, in other words killing people. For money and fame and whatever other frivolous rewards they get from this activity, what they’re doing is making a pandemic worse than it would be without their propaganda. They’re knowingly causing disease and death.

    We live in a strange world.

  • Ethics

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1413848743871397891
    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1413852939479916546
    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1413846720446967813

  • A steal at half a million

    They’re doing this again! I guess because it worked out so well last time?

    White House officials have helped craft an agreement under which purchases of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which could be listed at prices as high as $500,000 — will be kept confidential from even the artist himself, in an attempt to avoid ethical issues that could arise as a presidential family member tries to sell a product with a highly subjective value.

    For fuck’s sake! Could it be any more blatant? Hunter Biden is not an artist any more than he was a legitimate qualified board member of Burisma. He exploited his daddy’s name to make the big bucks in that laughable “job” with Burisma and now he’s doing it all over again to sell his “art.” It’s corrupt when the disgusting Trumps do it and it’s corrupt when Hunter Biden does it. What is wrong with them?

    Under an arrangement negotiated in recent months, a New York gallery owner is planning to set prices for the art and will withhold all records, including potential bidders and final buyers. The owner, Georges BergĂšs, has also agreed to reject any offer that he deems suspicious or that comes in over the asking price, according to people familiar with the agreement.

    Oh shut up. Trying to manage the particulars is absurd: don’t do it at all.

    What other beginning amateur “artist” gets to sell art for 500k a pop?

    Biden’s art sale, expected to take place this fall, comes with potential challenges. Not only has Biden previously been accused of trading in on his father’s name, but his latest vocation is in a field where works do not have a tangible fixed value and where concerns have arisen about secretive buyers and undisclosed sums.

    Plus the whole “his latest vocation” thing kind of reeks. He’s not 22, he’s 51. What conceivable reason is there to think his art is any good or worth anything at all? It looks like jumping up and down in front of an outraged world shouting “I’m doing it because I can nyah nyah nyah!”

    Officials close to President Biden, who have helped craft the agreement along with Hunter Biden’s attorney, have attempted to do so in a way that allows the president’s son to pursue a new career while also adhering to the elder Biden’s pledge to reverse his predecessor’s ethical laxity, especially regarding family members.

    Bullshit. Absolute flagrant bullshit. Hunter B isn’t “pursuing a new career” he is cashing in. What other 51-year-old gets to “pursue a new career” in art and sell the brand new works for inflated prices? Hunter might as well sell his underpants for 500k a pair.

    But the arrangement is drawing detractors, including ethics experts as well as art critics who suggest that Hunter Biden’s art would never be priced so high if he had a different last name. Bergùs has said that prices for the paintings would range from $75,000 to $500,000.

    Ya think???

    “The whole thing is a really bad idea,” said Richard Painter, who was chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007. “The initial reaction a lot of people are going to have is that he’s capitalizing on being the son of a president and wants people to give him a lot of money. I mean, those are awfully high prices.”

    The initial reaction, and the interim reaction, and the final reaction. We’re going to have that reaction because that is what’s happening.

    Hunter Biden, through his attorney Chris Clark, did not respond to an interview request for this article. When asked about the artwork — including terms of sale and potential ethics concerns — Clark referred questions to the White House.

    To the White House. Which is supposed to have nothing to do with any of this, because Hunter Biden is simply selling his own art, nothing to do with Daddy at all. Fucking hell this is broken.

    Andrew Bates, the deputy White House press secretary, suggested that the buyers’ confidentiality would ensure the process is ethical. “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history, and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example,” Bates said.

    No. It is not.

    But the officials who helped craft the agreement said that if buyers were publicly disclosed it would restrict interest, because the identities of most art purchasers are not automatically made public.

    Oh it would “restrict interest” – so the officials are working for Hunter Biden. Interesting.

    In Hunter Biden’s case, if a buyer’s identity does become public, White House officials probably would be warned against giving that person any preferential treatment, and could be discouraged from working with them at all, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

    And they think that’s good enough? Is this a joke?

    Marc Straus, who for the past decade has owned a gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, said that among high-end art dealers, “nobody would ever start at these prices” for someone who has no professional training and has never sold art on the commercial market.

    “There has to be a rĂ©sumĂ© that reasonably supports when you get that high,” Straus said. “To me, it’s pure ‘how good is it and what’s this artist’s potential, what’s the rĂ©sumĂ©?’ On that basis, it would be an entirely different price. But you give it a name like Hunter Biden, maybe they’ll get the price.”

    He added, “My take was [the paintings] weren’t bad at all. But there’s a yawning gap between not bad and something fabulous.”

    Others are not as kind.

    Scott Indrisek, a former editor in chief of Modern Painters magazine and a former deputy editor at Artsy, said: “I would call it very much a hotel art aesthetic. It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine. It’s somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”

    Indrisek added, “If he wanted to be judged on his work alone, he’d show them under the name Hunter Wilson or something.”

    What I’m saying. He might as well be selling the contents of his wastebasket.