House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican, pretends not to understand what corruption is, what conflicts of interest are, what the emoluments clause means.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday defended military expenditures at President Donald Trump’s properties, arguing that hotels owned by the president are “just like any other hotel.”

“The president’s resorts are hotels that he owns. People are traveling. It’s just like any other hotel. I know people will look at it, I don’t know if that’s different than anything else,” he said at a press conference.

No, it’s not just like any other hotel, because the president can use his office to promote his hotel, and that’s just what we don’t want. That right there is the very thing we do not want, because it’s a conflict of interest, aka corrupt. “People will look at it” because it’s corrupt and shady and self-dealing, and people in government are not supposed to do that.

Ethics officials and lawmakers have raised concerns about foreign officials staying at Trump hotels, noting that Trump supporters and industry groups regularly hold events at Trump-owned locations. An analysis conducted by The Washington Post earlier this summer found that Trump’s properties had brought in $1.6 million in revenue from federal officials and Republicans who paid to be near the president.

McCarthy asserted Tuesday that shouldn’t be looked down upon either. “Is it different than if I go to eat or stay at a Marriott here or eat at the Trump?” he asked, adding: “The president isn’t asking me to, he’s competing in a private enterprise. It’s nothing he controls in that process, so if it’s in the process, they can stay there, yes.”

That’s not the rule. That’s never been the rule. The House minority leader is just brazenly lying to us.

If you want to watch and hear McCarthy say it, it’s in this tweet.

Now Bolton is twitter-bombing reporters with his version. He wasn’t fired, he quit!

Peter Baker:

Bolton differs from Trump version of his resignation. “Offered last night without his asking,” he texts me. “Slept on it and gave it to him this morning.”

Robert Costa:

Ambassador Bolton sends me a text message just now: “Let’s be clear, I resigned, having offered to do so last night.”

Brian Stelter:

Quite a moment on Fox –> Host @Kilmeade said “John Bolton just texted me. Just now. He’s watching. And he said, ‘Let’s be clear. I resigned.'”

Other news boffins are pointing out that Bolton, loathsome and wrong though he is, has intellectual and rhetorical powers that Trump does not, so the fight could get interesting.

The Guardian says it’s all a bit abrupt because Bolton was on the schedule for a briefing to be held in an hour or so.

This tweet is likely shocking news to both Bolton and the White House, who just announced that the national security adviser would appear alongside Mike Pompeo and Steven Mnuchin at a press briefing at 1:30 p.m. E.T.

The Post reported at the end of August that Bolton opposed Trump’s approach to Afghanistan.

Bolton, who has long advocated an expansive military presence around the world, has become a staunch internal foe of an emerging peace deal aimed at ending America’s longest war, the officials said.

His opposition to the diplomatic effort in Afghanistan has irritated President Trump, these officials said, and led aides to leave the National Security Council out of sensitive discussions about the agreement.

The sidelining of Bolton has raised questions about his influence in an administration that is seeking a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as an ambitious nuclear deal with North Korea and potential engagement with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Bolton, U.S. officials said, stands in opposition to those efforts, but he does so increasingly from the periphery.

Meanwhile Bolton has just informed us that Trump lied in that tweet. Of course he did.

I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

So Trump. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” meaning, “Nah, I’d rather fire you abruptly in a tweet but I’m too chickenshit to say so to your face.”

They deserve each other, all of them.

The count is now up to four times military personnel have stayed at Trump’s golf dump 50 miles south of Prestwick Airport.

The four trips — uncovered through interviews with people present, records of expenditures and social media postings — date back to at least September 2018 and continued through at least this past June. They include at least one instance in which a crew member said a nearby airport arranged for rides and lunches to and from the luxury waterside retreat. All the flights were shuttling crews between the United States and the Middle East, and at least three of them of them were divisions of the Air National Guard. In total, over 60 service members stayed at the posh property on these stopovers.

Democrats are trying to get a bill passed to prevent any more of this corruption. A normal president wouldn’t need a law forcing him to stop making the military stay at his hotels so that he can pocket more cash, but Child Trump isn’t a normal anything, let alone president.

The push to outlaw the practice will join a growing list of conflict-of-interest concerns that Democrats want to highlight in the coming months as House leaders decide whether to begin formal impeachment proceedings against the president. The overnight stops at Turnberry have already sparked a broader House Oversight Committee investigation of military spending at and around Trump properties. The Air Force over the weekend also launched a worldwide review of how it chooses lodging on overnight layovers. A legislative battle could be next.

There shouldn’t be any battle. Nobody should be defending this bullshit.

Yes, criminals always have a cunning plan to be in the path of a hurricane so that they can enter the US to kill and devour all the inhabitants.

Jen Gunter is in London chatting with reporters.

Though she became famous for her sharp criticisms of Paltrow (the jade egg scandal led to a lawsuit against Goop’s marketing), she has branched out from bodies and blogging, with two columns in the New York Times, a web series that unpicks health myths, and a new book, The Vagina Bible.

The book is already a bestseller, a sign there is a need for her expertise; last month a 62-year-old woman was hospitalised with second-degree burns after steaming her vagina.

What?

The BBC August 8:

Gynaecologists are warning of the potential risks of vaginal steaming after it emerged a Canadian woman burned herself attempting one.

A case study, involving a 62-year-old, was published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada.

The woman had been suffering from a prolapsed vagina and believed the treatment could help avoid surgery.

Vaginal steaming, which involves sitting over a hot water and herb mix, has seen a growth in popularity.

Sitting over a hot water and herb mix to do what? Besides causing burns? Steam is good for coughs, because it loosens up the crap in the lungs so that you can cough it out and thus breathe more easily. It doesn’t follow that steam is just generally Good. We don’t need to steam our eyeballs, or our armpits, or our kneecaps. Same with the vagina but more so.

What about this unfortunate woman?

Dr Magali Robert, who authored the article, said the injured woman attempted to steam her vagina on the advice of a traditional Chinese doctor.

The woman, who gave permission for her case to be shared, sat over the boiling water for 20 minutes on two consecutive days before presenting at an emergency department with injuries.

Boiling water?? Dear god. I accidentally let my hand stray into the plume of steam from a kettle just for a fraction of a second a few weeks back and that hurt. Just a fraction of a second so there was no damage, but still, the pain was fierce. You do the math.

Back to the Graun on Gunter and Goop.

Gunter argues that the wellness industry and the anti-abortion industry are, if not exactly dancing together, certainly at the same disco. The former manipulates that confusion to take women’s money, the latter to take their power. “I even started to notice overlap between the language,” she says with a shudder. “The anti-science views of wellness and the anti-science of the religious right. Themes like ‘purity’ and ‘cleanliness’ with their similar rituals. It’s predatory. It’s the patriarchy by another name. And it keeps women back by telling them lies about their body. They might be different lies, but the effect is the same.” It is her responsibility, she says, with something like a sigh, to “step up”.

Women are basically seen as filthy. We know this. The taboos on menstruation, the disgust for women who have sex with more than 1 (one) man, the desperate efforts to scour out that demonic thing between their legs – it’s all the same phobic terror.

Gunter’s skill is in her rawness, her frankness about her own experiences and the way she takes celebrity trends apart like oranges, spitting out pips.

“When I realised that people were believing Goop’s fairy tales, I thought: ‘I’ll take them on.’” The first anti-Goop post she wrote, on vaginal steaming, centred around the idea that women have long been believed to be unclean. “It’s one of the core beliefs of the patriarchy. That women are dirty inside. And yet Goop presents this as female empowerment? In Hippocrates’s time they used to think that the womb wandered the body, causing mayhem, and you would coax it back into place by putting fragrant herbs between the legs. This is the same thing. It’s in so many cultures, this belief that the uterus is toxic. I couldn’t believe it was now being presented as female empowerment. It’s bad feminism. And it’s bad science.”

But it makes $$$$.

She was stunned, and yes, angry. “Paltrow is able to call up any magazine in the world and get on the cover. And this is what she’s doing with her privilege. Grifting off desperate women.”

…

Would she like to sit down with Paltrow one day, have a conversation about, say, weaponising women’s fears about femininity? “No, I don’t think I’d ever get an answer that would be satisfying. People have had to spend money, just to prove her breast cancer bra thing was false, money that could have been used to study something important. Many of the medical experts she publishes are part of the anti-vaccine world and post a lot of conspiracy theories. So, either it’s a grift, or she’s a true believer. As a ‘feminist businesswoman’ she’s claimed the right to ‘try out’ being a reporter, and then, ‘try out’ being a doctor. It doesn’t work like that.”

It doesn’t except that it does. It’s working for Trump and his litter, and it works for Paltrow.

The Air Force says oh hmmm you may have a point, we’ll look into it further.

The U.S. Air Force has ordered a world-wide review of how it chooses overnight accommodations on long flights following revelations that air crews had occasionally stayed at President Donald Trump’s Scotland resort while refueling at a small commercial airport nearby.

“Occasionally” – when it should be never. Never never never.

The review comes as additional instances of military personnel staying at Trump properties have been uncovered. The C-17 crew’s overnight stay at Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland earlier this year, first reported by POLITICO on Friday, was not an isolated incident.

In September 2018, on its way back to the U.S. from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, a unit of the Maine Air National Guard landed at Prestwick Airport, the airport closest to Trump’s luxury waterfront resort. The crew and their passengers then spent the night at his hotel, according to one person who was present, an Instagram post and a voucher detailing the crew’s itinerary reviewed by POLITICO.

…

The Air Force also said the the decision to stay at the Trump resort would have been the result of “a multitude of factors,” including the lack of suitable lodging closer to the civil airport or at a nearby military base. It did not provide evidence that nearby hotels were cheaper or unavailable at the time of the crews’ stays, however.

I’m sorry but that is just not credible.

Funny thing, if you look at Google maps, there are two golf clubs right next to Prestwick, one north and one south. By “right next” I mean they’re the first things you come to. Trump’s club is much farther away. The Marine Hotel, Troon is 400 feet from the Royal Troon golf club just north of Prestwick. $109 per night. Is it likely that Trump’s hotel is cheaper than that? The South Beach hotel, half a mile away, is $113.

How about hotels near Prestwick St Cuthbert Golf Club on the south. Huh, the Premier Inn in Ayr, 1.1 mile away, is a mere $63. Adamton Country House hotel, which looks charming, is $43.

Come on now, Air Force. Be serious.

Interesting. Shorts for girls are more than twice as expensive as shorts for boys:

No. It’s worse this year : girls’ shorts one pair £9-£14. Boys’ 2 pair £8-12

I guess the images explain it. Boys get to move and act like ordinary reasonable human beings while wearing shorts, but girls have to wear their hair up prettily and look down bashfully and fiddle with their earlobes seductively and point one foot inward awkwardly while wearing shorts. All those extras require extra engineering, and that doesn’t come cheap.

I’m joking but I’m also dead fucking serious, because this kind of messaging to girls makes me absolutely livid. Why are the two children posed so very differently? Why is the girl made to do some kind of Ivanka Trump performance? Why does everybody have to push girls into this stupid deforming crushing mold at every turn? Is it because putting the girl in a not-skirt caused everybody at the agency to panic so hard that they threw every “feminine” trope in the book at her? What the hell is wrong with everyone?

Do we believe this? I think not. Air Force says it was all on the up and up:

The crew of a US Air Force C-17 stayed at President Donald Trump’s golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, during a March refueling stop en route to Kuwait, the Air Force acknowledged, again raising ethics questions about government use of the President’s private entities.

The Air Force, which said in a statement it was reviewing the trip records, said the stop was “not unusual.” But it’s another example of Trump’s company earning money from taxpayer dollars, which has led some government watchdogs to argue the arrangement breaches ethical norms and potentially violates a clause of the US Constitution.

Not unusual? For a military crew on the job to go to the president’s golf club for the night? Give me a break.

“As our air crews serve on these international airlift missions, they follow strict guidelines on contracting for hotel accommodations and all expenditures of taxpayer dollars,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Ed Thomas said in a statement. “In this case, they made reservations through the Defense Travel System and used the closest available and least expensive accommodations to the airfield within the crews’ allowable hotel rates.

Uh huh, and Donald Trump is a compassionate justice-loving man with only our best interests at heart.

Walter Shaub doesn’t believe them either.

To believe USAF’s claim that stays at Turnberry were normal, you’d have to believe: it’s a coincidence Trump owns it, emoluments are ok, no hotels under $166 were within 30 miles of the airport, the cost of meals + incidentals is irrelevant and an appearance of corruption is fine.

To believe that news of air crews staying at Turnberry isn’t a big deal, you’d have to ignore the damage the Air Force’s actions are doing to the government ethics program by sending a message to civilian and uniformed personnel that the appearance of impropriety is unimportant.

To believe news of air crews staying at Turnberry isn’t a big deal, you’d also have to ignore the message it sends the world about our government’s integrity, as well as the detrimental impact it has on anti-corruption assistance our State Department provides developing nations.

Other than that, no problem.

Charlie Evans gave this speech at the Lesbian Strength Rally in Leeds yesterday:

A decade ago, I was 17 years old. I was tightly binding my chest, and had shaved my hair, adamant that I was not a girl. I knew I was a boy, because I hated the way my chest attracted attention, I hated my period, I hated attention from boys.

I knew I was a boy, because I loved cars, and trucks, and mud, and boxing, and girls. I knew I was a boy, because I didn’t ‘act’ like a girl – nothing about my character ‘felt’ girly, and trans ideology says everyone feels their gender. I didn’t feel like a girl.

I knew I was a boy because I meet the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria – a strong rejection of typically feminine toys and typically feminine clothes, mostly male friends, a sense that my feelings and reactions were typical of boys, the desire to be treated as a boy.

When I spoke about these experiences to older friends, or in online chat rooms, the message was affirming. Nobody encouraged the idea that it’s okay to be gender non conforming, Instead, friends and healthcare practitioners alike ‘affirmed’ my gender. Yes, you are a boy.

By now I had been indoctrinated into the belief that boys and girls must act and feel certain ways, and if they don’t, they might be the opposite sex trapped in the wrong body.

She says there are thousands like her, but their voices are stifled because the queer community doesn’t want to hear.

Many – maybe most – are gender non conforming lesbians, who were raised in gendered homes where the roles of girls and boys were strictly defined. No wonder they felt like boys. Most desisted at the same age as me – around age 25. This is not a coincidence.

This is the age your brain becomes fully developed.

Again, there are no real scientific studies on this, but here’s my theory, as a biologist.

During adolescence, your brain is almost completely remoulded. Your prefrontal cortex, this part at the front of your head, is the last bit to develop. It is responsible for some really important stuff – controlling impulses, solving problems, making decisions, seeing what impact your choices have on your future.

Not cutting off your tits or your dick.

It’s the part that makes us responsible adults, and why teenagers can sometimes seem erratic.

The maturation of the brain in this way is caused by sex hormones, which are specifically increased during puberty for the purpose of developing the brains ability to learn, remember, cope with emotions, and process social interactions. As far as we know, these changes are permanent. The brain’s development will continue until you are about 25.

Is it possible that the reason most women desist in their twenties is because that is when their brain has fully developed?

If we know the vital role that sex hormones have in the development of the brain, why are we give pre-teens hormone blockers that are preventing this?

Why are we giving teenagers the choice to have cross sex hormones almost ten years before the part of the brain responsible for decision making and understanding consequences has even developed?

Hmmm well when you put it that way it doesn’t seem like such a good idea, does it.

It is also concerning that once a teenager has started taking hormone blockers, they are much more likely to transition. And as far as I can see, this is because hormone blocking makes desisting difficult – it almost completely destroys any chance of their brains maturing properly, and working out their issues with their bodies.

This should be a huge concern for scientists, doctors, and other medical practitioners, but the research on the subject and conversations around this are almost entirely absent.

Where there should be research, there is silence.

Instead, we hear time and time again that hormone blockers are safe, despite the science suggesting they’re dangerous and we continue to commit children into a path of painful surgeries and lifelong hormone replacement treatment.

Lesbian youth are exceptionally vulnerable to this type of ideology, particulaly as many will be gender non conforming. Coupled with the oppression of the female sex more generally, many young lesbians will match the criteria needed for them to start hormone blockers from as young as ten years old.

It’s almost as if trans activists and their fans want to get rid of lesbians – not by killing them off but by encouraging them to think they’re “in the wrong body.”

When the ideology is that Behavior Should Match Body, then where do lesbians fit? Sexual attraction, coupling, marriage, all that: they’re part of behavior, aren’t they. The ideology can’t make sense of lesbians, so hey, might as well pretend puberty-blockers and transition are a bed of roses.

I could not have predicted that ten years into the future, I wouldn’t have the same feelings of self loathing as I did as a teen. I could not have predicted that by allowing my brain to mature, I would grow out of the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘boy’ brain or a ‘girl’ brain and I had been born with the wrong one.

…

Let your brain mature before making any life changing decisions.

Being a woman is not a feeling. It is not an emotion. It is just our biology. It has no bearing on our interests, our hobbies, our clothes. Rejecting traditional ideas of what it means to be a woman, does not make you a man.

I did not go on hormone blockers.

If I had, I have no doubt that I would not have been standing here today comfortable in my sex. I don’t know if I would have regretted the decision or else lived half a life, not knowing what true liberation meant.

Liberation is not changing your body to fit society. Liberation is changing society to fit you.

Let’s do that instead.

I’m not a big fan of Quillette, but there’s a section of this piece by Spencer Case on philosophy and pressure to shut up about trans issues that I want to share.

He asks whether or not there is any such pressure, and quotes people who say there is not.

A more even-tempered response, another open letter, appeared at the American Philosophical Association blog August 7, 2019. The 33 signatories deny that a climate of fear surrounds the topic of gender identity. They write:

As feminist philosophers who have, variously, argued for, researched, engaged with, and taught these views, we are well-positioned to claim that there is no established orthodoxy about gender in academic philosophy. There continues to be much lively disagreement on matters of gender without accusations of transphobia.

We might fairly ask if feminist philosophers are really in the best position to authoritatively declare that there are no orthodoxies about gender in philosophy. If orthodoxies about gender beset feminist philosophy in particular, then they might be the last to know. What the signatories say next, at the letter’s conclusion, qualifies their commitment to open inquiry almost to the point of nullifying it:

We do, however, think it is important, when exercising our academic freedom, that we consider how our views may impact others. Academic responsibility requires us to consider differences of power and vulnerability in speaking of and to others and the effects of our words in reinforcing structures of oppression. There are many diverse, contentious views about gender and gender identity that can be–and are–engaged with in ways that do not call into question the integrity and sincerity of trans people nor the validity of their own understanding of who they are.  We should conduct our research freely and responsibly, without treating other people’s lives as though they are abstract thought experiments. [emphasis added]

The italicized portion gives the game away. The signatories know that the acceptability of views contrary to the self-understandings of trans people is the sole issue that motivated the letter to which they are responding. It’s as if someone said, in response to concerns that Copernican views about the solar system were being suppressed, that there is no orthodoxy in astronomy—after all, you’re free to defend any view consistent with geocentric cosmology.

Any color you want as long as it’s black, as Henry Ford is reputed to have said.

(Case doesn’t address this part, and I think I probably did when the APA letter was published, but I’ll just mention it again: there is no broad rule that we have to accept “the validity of people’s own understanding of who they are.” There can’t be. These days we even have a one-word explanation for why. That word is: Trump. People’s own understandings of who they are can be wildly wrong.)

But this is the bit for which I wanted to share the post:

Mormon Sunday school teachers used to encourage obedience with a parable. Allegedly, a tethered goat will move as far away from the post as it can, so that the rope remains taut and never touches the ground. If only the goat would relax, the story goes, it could be content in the space it was given, which contains all the grass it needs. The moral is supposed to be that you can be happy within the church’s strictures, but the analogy backfires—who wants to be a goat on a rope in the first place?

Or a Mormon. Or a trans-centric feminist-philosopher.

These feminist philosophers are a good deal more like Mormon Sunday school teachers than they realize. They seem to be saying: “We’ve given you enough intellectual space in which to dwell, and plenty of grass to munch on (in the form of trans-inclusive feminist views to consider). Now be a good goat and don’t strain at the end of the rope.”

And we say fuck your rope, we’re off to the brook and the woods and the wild blue yonder.

Another fine skewering by Daniel Kaufman at The Electric Agora, saying that what Philosophy’s Woke Brigade have been up to now is beyond a joke.

What they are doing now seriously threatens the professional credibility and public standing of our discipline, and anyone and everyone who cares about academic philosophy needs to oppose them in the strongest possible terms.

It’s about that Institute of Arts and Ideas symposium on sex and gender.

It was a useful, interesting clash of perspectives, civil in tone and offering a good overview of some of the major points of contention in the ongoing debate.

Today, you can only read the original symposium as a download. (1) This is because after being published, Dembroff, Stryker, and Kukla demanded that their contributions be retracted, to which the IAI acceded.  If one goes to the website now, only the gender critical portions of the symposium remain – the pieces by Stock, Lawford-Smith, and Bindel – while the original offerings from Dembroff, Stryker, and Kukla have been replaced with a joint statement, appearing on a separate page, in which they attempt to explain themselves. (2)

Kaufman points out how absurd of Dembroff, Stryker, and Kukla it is to claim IAI should have asked their permission to include the heretics.

…there is no such standard in our discipline, according to which when asked to contribute to something, one’s consent to appear alongside all the other contributors must be solicited, which in some cases may actually be impossible (e.g. where the contributor list is still being put together when the invitation is made or where a contributor may have to be replaced, mid-project, because another has dropped out).

And then there’s the despicable part.

Beyond this appeal to a wholly imaginary professional standard, the rest of the statement is standard PWB fare; the usual, foul mixture of: (a) garden variety misrepresentations and lies, such as when Kukla and Co. accuse the three gender critical contributors of “questioning transgender people’s fundamental legitimacy as people” and presupposing that “transgender people are by definition mentally ill or delusional” (a quick inspection of the three essays demonstrates that they do no such thing); (b) vile slanders, such as when Kukla and Co. suggest that platforming gender critical philosophers is akin to giving a platform to Holocaust deniers and compare Stock, Lawford-Smith, and Bindel, all of whom are lesbians, to those advocating “corrective rape to cure lesbianism”; and (c) the by now routine, cynical, disingenuous, obvious-to-anyone-over-six-years-old abuse of the harm principle, as in when Kukla and Co. claim that being featured on the same page as gender critical feminists puts their “basic safety at risk.”  (Somewhat incongruously, Kukla elsewhere has professed to being a competitive weight lifter and boxer, with photos of her flexing her muscles and kicking ass to back it up. (3))

It’s coin of the realm though. It’s the “blood on their hands” ploy. That’s his point: these are established academic philosophers and they shouldn’t be carrying on this way.

In a healthy institution or discipline, contemptible behavior like this would quickly turn you into a pariah, but academic philosophy today is not a healthy institution or discipline. It’s not just the ideologically captured APA, whose President co-authored the recent “Just Ideas? The Status and Future of Publication Ethics in Philosophy: A White Paper,” a transparent, cringeworthy effort to institutionalize the despicable conduct of the PWB in professional journals. Or Justin Weinberg’s seemingly inexhaustible commitment to use his philosophy news website, the Daily Nous, to shill on behalf of the PWB and perform hits on gender critical philosophers, by way of a selective posting of articles and links. (One can only admire the providential timing of his latest linking to a hit piece on gender critical thinkers and activists, over at Vox. (4)) It’s Sally Haslanger, one of philosophy’s most notable, venerable scholars using her position and prestige to pressure the highly respected Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews to “revisit their standards,” because they published a review written by Kathleen Stock, on a book about feminist ethics. It’s a herd of scholars, writing and signing a petition to get Rebecca Tuvel’s paper on transgenderism and transracialism removed from the journal, Hypatia, after it already had passed peer review and been published. It’s the PWB piling on 3AM Magazine for having dared to publish Richard Marshall’s interview with Holly Lawford-Smith and thereby driving him from platform. (He’s had to re-open shop solo.) It’s Rachel McKinnon, of the College of Charleston, publicly celebrating the imminent death of a young, lesbian activist YouTuber from brain cancer and then doubling down when called on it. (5) And it’s the PWB’s next generation graduate students cyberstalking Kathleen Stock to compile a database of her tweets (for what purpose, one can only imagine) and being cheered on by one of the current PWB’s B-List members, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa. (6)

It is indeed.

Deep.