Filthier and filthier:

A senior Justice Department ethics official concluded acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker should recuse from overseeing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe examining President Trump, but advisers to Whitaker recommended the opposite and he has no plans to step aside, people familiar with the matter said.

Earlier Thursday, a different official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said ethics officials had advised Whitaker need not step aside, only to retract that description of events hours later.

They know we can see them, right?

Within days of the president’s announcement in early November that he had put Whitaker in the role on a temporary basis, Whitaker tapped a veteran U.S. attorney to become part of a four-person team of advisers on his new job, according to a senior Justice Department official. Their guidance included the question of whether Whitaker should recuse himself from Mueller’s investigation because of his past statements regarding that probe and because of his friendship with one of its witnesses, the official said.

Whitaker never asked Justice Department ethics officials for a formal recommendation, nor did he receive one, this official said.

Well sure, that’s how you do that – you pick your own advisers so that they’ll tell you what you want to hear, and you ignore the actual ethics officials because they will tell you not to do the unethical thing you want to do.

All this is aid of keeping a criminal authoritarian monster in power and above the law.

However, after Whitaker met repeatedly with Justice Department ethics officials to discuss the facts and the issues under consideration, a senior ethics official told the group of advisers on Tuesday that it was a “close call” but that Whitaker should recuse himself to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, the official said. Whitaker was not present at that meeting, they said.

Those four advisers, however, disagreed with the ethics determination and recommended to Whitaker the next day not to recuse, saying there was no precedent for that, and doing so now could create a bad precedent for future attorneys general.

As opposed to the awesome precedent set by this move?

This is turning into an enormous scandal. Ethics officials told Whitaker they would recommend recusal, so he set up a different group of officials (probably political appointees, but unclear) to make a different recommendation. What in the hell is going on at DOJ? https://t.co/gYBeY3RoGP

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) December 20, 2018

Indeed —@waltshaub @RWPUSA & I have just teamed up to write a cri de coeur. This is one of the two most heinous days in the history of the government ethics program. (Any guesses what the other one was?) I will post the link here when we publish. https://t.co/cnXA19f9aw

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) December 21, 2018

Memo to GOP senators: What you are doing now will go in your obituaries.

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 21, 2018

H/t Screechy Monkey

Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed wrote an open letter in response to Grace Lavery’s “Grad School As Conversion Therapy” which in turn was a response to a thing Reed wrote. I wouldn’t bother you with that labyrinth except that the Reed-Castiglia one is a fine read.

The reciprocity and collectivity of language seems like a good place to start in a debate about speech and censorship. For, although trans-theorizing and trans-activism have the potential to open onto many interesting and important issues, far too often on today’s campuses they are reduced to exercises in language-policing in which attitudes of outraged victimhood are used to coerce certain forms of speech and to justify aggressive forms of censorship.

Emphasis mine, because I like it.

[W]hat we too often face today in the academy is something that looks less like activism or scholarship and more like adolescent acting-out. Now that scientists have decided that adolescence — itself a recently invented identity closely linked to advanced capitalism — persists into the third decade of human life, perhaps we should not be surprised to find behaviors associated with adolescents proliferating, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged within educational institutions. To be specific, we identify as adolescent the furious response to the discovery that others do not perceive you exactly the way you’d like to imagine to yourself. Those who justify aggression as a response to the “violence” of being misrecognized fail to notice that everyone shares this experience on various registers of gender, race, age, class, professional status, nationality, religion, disability, attractiveness — the list goes on.

This is one of the things I keep saying (and saying and saying). Nobody sees us the way we see ourselves, and by the same token, we ourselves share that universal failure to see all other humans the way they see themselves. Duh. That’s one of the things you learn as part of growing up…unless you’re a narcissist. Don’t be a narcissist; it’s a bad thing to be.

Look at Donnie Two-scoops for the most glaring example most of us have ever seen. Don’t be like Donnie Two-scoops. Accept the fact that the you in your head is not the person other people see; accept the fact that the interior is different from the exterior; grasp that that applies to everyone and is not some insult special to you. Move on.

[T]he broader point is that we are all constantly perceived as someone other than who we think we are. Like (or as) language, social roles are systems bigger than any of us, and what we experience as misrecognitions are registers of other people’s perspectives. To try to shut down, rather than understand, those perspectives; to refuse to engage others as people who also have opinions (not to mention feelings) that might not be all about you; to arrogantly dismiss the past and the perspectives of those who have lived through more of it than you; to summon authorities to impose your will rather than trying to work out conflicts in a mutually respectful way — these are adolescent behaviors.

And adults should not be engaging in adolescent behaviors.

Apparently it has come to this: furtive acts of solidarity and melancholy retreats from teaching by gay, lesbian, and feminist faculty in the face of a vocal constituency that, enthralled by the spectacle of its own outrage, has substituted a “call-out culture” of buzzwords around sex and gender for any semblance of dialogue. Announcing itself as coalitional, this cohort seems eager to alienate those of us informed by years of feminist and queer scholarship and activism. Claiming to speak for diversity, this cohort rushes to intimidate and silence anyone who does not toe its ideological line. Imagining itself as standing up to authority, this cohort falls eagerly into quasi-medical discourses of diagnosis and cure and rushes to invoke juridical structures of rules and punishment. Calling itself progressive, this cohort presents an uncanny mirror image of rightwing politics with its exaggerated outrage, divisive us-and-them rhetorics, and attacks staged as self-defense.

Doesn’t it though.

There’s a lot more. I may return to it later.

Meanwhile the drones are taking over.

Tens of thousands of passengers have been disrupted by drones flying over one of the UK’s busiest airports.

Gatwick’s runway has been shut since Wednesday night, as devices have been repeatedly flying over the airfield.

Sussex Police said it was not terror-related but a “deliberate act” of disruption, using “industrial specification” drones.

About 110,000 passengers on 760 flights were due to fly on Thursday. Disruption could last “several days”.

There’s no end in sight.

Uh oh. Bad news.

Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker has consulted with ethics officials at the Justice Department and they have advised him he does not need to recuse himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, a source familiar with the process told CNN Thursday.

…

Whitaker is expected to inform senators, many of whom have raised ethics concerns given his past criticism of Mueller’s investigation, about this development later Thursday, the source said.

Walter Shaub is disgusted.

The government ethics program has now failed the final test of its reason for existing. Born in the wake of the Saturday Night Massacre, it has now blessed a slow motion repeat. With this decision, the ethics program has opted suicide. Burn its carcass to ashes and start over. https://t.co/pSiXp18ii3

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) December 20, 2018

The ethics decision to bless the slow motion Saturday Night Massacre — and to hold announcement of that decision until just before the holiday — will stand as a monument to cowardice in government.https://t.co/wcHuCHNjLX

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) December 20, 2018

So, that’s not disturbing at all.

2/ “… hand a strategic victory to our Syrian, Iranian, and Russian adversaries. It’s a mistake of colossal proportions and the President fails to see how it will endanger our country.”

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) December 20, 2018

Russian. Hmm. Why would Trump be handing anything to Russia…

Hypothetically, if you were simultaneously the President and compromised by Russia, what more would you have done today to please the Kremlin?

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) December 20, 2018

Katie Herzog at The Stranger reports on a medication for alcohol addiction that – unlike 12-step programs – works.

Alcohol addiction is often thought of in recovery circles like AA as a moral failing, something that can be treated if you just try, and believe, hard enough. This, however, is contrary to what most research tells us about how alcohol works on human beings. Morality, if you ask scientists, has nothing to do with it.

Rather, alcohol is primed to be addictive. After it is absorbed into the bloodstream, it soon moves to the brain, where it impacts several chemicals, or neurotransmitters, including gamma-aminobutyric acid (or GABA), glutamate, and dopamine (the so-called “pleasure molecule”). The combined effect of these chemicals is that you let go of inhibitions, feel euphoric, and become relaxed but energized at the same time. It feels good in both your mind and body—at least in the beginning.

(Subjective aside – it doesn’t for me. A glass of wine is ok, but more than that is unpleasant, and euphoria is never really in the picture. I’m profoundly content with this situation, because alcohol addiction cut a wide swathe through my family.)

After repeated exposure to alcohol, things start to change: The brain starts to produce less dopamine and GABA and more glutamate. This tends to make people anxious, irritable, and depressed. You get sick and go through withdrawal. In time, you don’t drink because it feels good, you drink because not drinking starts to feel awful.

The physical effects of ongoing drinking are serious. Besides damaging major organs from the heart to the liver, long-term heavy alcohol use can do terrifying things to the mind.

Like destroying the ability to form new memories. Oh goody, artificial dementia!

Enter Naltrexone, which blocks endorphins from the brain.

The Sinclair Method, as the protocol is known, is simple: You take Naltrexone one hour before you start drinking, each and every time you drink (and preferably not on an empty stomach). Instead of feeling that familiar euphoric buzz, drinking just makes you feel kind of sloppy and muddy-headed.

…

With Naltrexone, “alcohol becomes non-reinforcing,” said Brian Noonan, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and the owner of Ballard Psychiatric Services. “With repeated trials of drinking without reward, the association of drinking with reward begins to extinguish.” The patient starts drinking less and less often. Some eventually stop altogether.

But AA still has a death grip on alcoholism treatment in the US, despite the fact that its success rate is abysmal.

AA and abstinence are still the only models most doctors in the US are taught, despite a lack of empirical evidence that 12-step programs work. Perhaps more would be interested in medicines like Naltrexone, but most have never even heard of the Sinclair Method—which, as far as I’ve been able to find, isn’t taught in any American medical schools. More than one Naltrexone patient told me they get their drugs through an online pharmacy based in India because their doctors just don’t know anything about it.

That’s millions of lives made worse that don’t need to be.

I can still be shocked.

This is the person who has been harassing #MeghanMurphy, admitting at a city council meeting to being responsible for her Twitter ban, and asking that she be prosecuted for hate crimes: pic.twitter.com/A9n7UG1UJw

— Benjamin Boyce (@BenjaminABoyce) December 18, 2018

The person said:

However Meghan Murphy, a Vancouver resident, still has not been prosecuted for her hate crimes. In the meantime she has booked a hate rally at the VPL…

Meghan has booked a talk at the Vancouver Public Library. She has committed no hate crimes. The guy who told those lies about her at a city council meeting however is Jonathan Yaniv, who sued women who declined to wax his genitalia.

Updating to add:

Source tweet

Alistair Magowan at the BBC asks

Transgender women in sport: Are they really a ‘threat’ to female sport?

Helpful of them to put the scare-quotes right in the headline, so that we’ll be primed to answer the question correctly.

The unburied lede:

Rachel McKinnon estimates she has received more than 100,000 hate messages on Twitter since she won her UCI Masters Track World Championship title in October.

Bolding theirs; they always bold the lede. We’re being carefully guided what to think. Wow, more than a hundred thousand hate messages; she she her. It’s all priming.

Magowan says the victory “was controversial in some quarters,” which primes us to think of a minority of angry wackos.

Others have said further examples may “threaten” the participation of women in sport – a view described as “sensationalist” by transgender racing driver Charlie Martin, and as “transphobic” by McKinnon.

More scare quotes. Mind you they may also, or instead, be accurate attribution quotes…but they come across as scare quotes either way, don’t they.

It is a sensitive topic, which poses some difficult questions about how gender is seen in sport, and some “dangerous” ones – according to transgender handball player Hannah Mouncey – about the fundamental right of athletes to participate in sport.

A scare quote for “Hannah” Mouncey…but after a stream of them for the people who think huge men shouldn’t steal prizes from women.

Critics say it is unfair to have a trans woman competing in female sport with a biologically male body, though McKinnon says that view goes against point four of the International Olympic Committee charter, which says: “The practice of sport is a human right.”

And yet that doesn’t say “the practice of sport as a male-bodied woman is a human right.” Lots of charters and constitutions say free speech is a human right; that doesn’t mean we all have a human right to interrupt speeches or shout into people’s windows or threaten people etc etc. Nobody is saying McKinnon must not practice a sport; many people are saying McKinnon should not compete with women in that sport because of the unfair advantage a male body bestows.

Then we get to Hannah Mouncey, who is given many paragraphs to explain how it’s actually women who have the advantage. Then McKinnon and trans racing driver Charlie Martin get many many many paragraphs to explain why they are right. Critics get a name check and that’s about it.

I guess we can tell what we are expected to conclude.

Well this is a nauseating display – the White House press secretary echoing the mob boss language of Donald Trump to accuse the FBI of “ambushing” Michael Flynn and saying “Look, we know Michael Cohen to be a liar…”

Judge Sullivan just made Mike Flynn take back, under oath, the core of his last court filing — which argued maybe he’s not that guilty because the FBI was mean to him. https://t.co/FfmtaqnYlb

— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) December 18, 2018

Good. I found that “But the FBI agents TRICKED me into lying to them” dreck from Flynn intensely annoying, especially in light of “LOCK HER UP.”

The judge is the same judge who said “Turn that plane around,” I learned via Twitter.

Also, Flynn.

Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, got a harsh warning from a federal judge on Tuesday that he could face prison for lying to federal investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition and his role lobbying for Turkey.

At Mr. Flynn’s sentencing hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called Mr. Flynn’s crimes “a very serious offense” and said he was not hiding his “disgust” at what Mr. Flynn had done.

“All along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser,” the judge told Mr. Flynn. “Arguably that undermines everything that this flag over here stands for. Arguably you sold your country out.”

And not even arguably, he doesn’t get to pretend he just had no idea what the rules are.

During the sentencing hearing, Judge Sullivan questioned Mr. Flynn and his lawyer about their earlier suggestion that F.B.I. agents might have tricked Mr. Flynn by failing to inform him before they interviewed him nearly two years ago that lying to them would constitute a federal crime.

Mr. Flynn told the court that he was not challenging the circumstances of the interview and that he knew lying to the F.B.I. was a crime.

If someone in his job with his job history doesn’t know that…something is very fishy.

Prosecutors dismissed the claims that Mr. Flynn had been tricked as a poor excuse, saying that as a high-ranking White House official and the former director of an intelligence agency, he was well aware that misleading federal authorities was a felony offense.

This is what I’m saying. It’s a bad excuse and it’s absurd.