Priss Choss met a woman in a receiving line and royally asked her where she’s from.

I met Prince Charles this week at the Commonwealth People’s Forum at which I was a speaker (on a day whose itinerary was entitled Politics of Hope: Taking on Injustice in the Commonwealth). It was part of the buildup to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, the summit of leaders of 53 countries representing more than 2 billion people.

I shook the prince’s hand with my right hand. In my other, I was holding a copy of an anthology, We Mark Your Memory: Writing from the Descendants of Indenture, in which I have an essay published. I told him that my mother was born in Guyana and that the anthology had collected hidden histories of indenture.

“And where are you from?” asked the prince.

“Manchester, UK,” I said.

“Well, you don’t look like it!” he said, and laughed. He was then ushered on to the next person.

Hahaha; so funny. Doesn’t look like it how? Because Mancunians all have five eyes, or three arms, or solid gold hair? No, because I’ve been there, and that was not the case. So…?

Prince Charles was endorsed by the Queen, in her opening speech to the heads of government, to be the future head of the Commonwealth: it’s her “sincere wish” that he become so. That the mooted next leader of an organisation that represents one-third of the people on the planet commented that I, a brown woman, did not look as if I was from a city in the UK is shocking.

Well, you see, it’s like this: we want the cheap labor and the resources, but we don’t want the people. That’s fair enough isn’t it?!

So what does a British person look like? A British person can look like me. A British person can have black or brown, not only white, skin and still be just as British (this shouldn’t need to be spelled out in black and white). I could have proven that I was born in Manchester and that I am British, as I had my passport in my handbag – I’d needed it to get through the venue’s security.

Yet I can’t tell Prince Charles exactly where I am from originally – that old chestnut. Why? Because the British destroyed much of the evidence that my ancestors were shipped over from India in the 19th century to toil for the empire as indentured labourers on sugar colonies in the Caribbean.

I have been to the National Archives in Georgetown, Guyana, to search for my ancestral history and stared down a gaping hole where records of lives should have been. The British destroyed so much that could properly explain and evidence our identities.

Have a nice cup of tea.

Now, we get why people prefer to have male children rather than female. It’s totally understandable. Girls are floppy and worthless, and they’re likely to turn out to be whores, and they’re a terrible drain on the wallet without giving anything back. If only humans could figure out a way to have male children exclusively.

A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.

Yay! Now to get to no women at all.

Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.

India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution.

Well not really “brides” as normally understood. If they’re trafficked then they’re slaves, even if there is a “marriage” of sorts.

In short? It’s a problem. The devaluation of women and girls has consequences.

So, Scott Pruitt spent thousands of government dollars on a junket to Morocco during which he promoted the export of natural gas…an activity which has nothing to do with the agency he heads. Funnily enough the agency to protect the environment does not lobby for natural gas export.

He’s also doing his best to conceal nearly everything about it.

Newly released calendars for one of the most controversial trips of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s tenure were largely blacked out before being shared with ABC News.

The 47-hour journey in Morocco was already drawing congressional scrutiny and criticism from outside groups because of the lack transparency over why Pruitt was in the country and what he was doing while he was there.

In Morocco, he spent at least a portion of his time promoting exports for U.S. energy firms. Conservative congressional estimates put the cost of the trip at more than $40,000, and because of travel snags, Pruitt and his aides spent two days in Paris at high-end hotels.

Or because of “travel snags.” Oh, oh, the plane is dusty, we have to stay in Paris for a couple of days, what a shame.

Pruitt did not publicly announce he was going ahead of time, did not bring reporters along, and when he finally released copies of his itinerary in response to Freedom of Information requests from ABC News and other news organizations, the bulk of the schedule was blacked out.

The bulk of the schedule was blacked out. How does he even justify that? The EPA is not the CIA; where does he get off refusing to tell us what he did in Morocco? Why would it be secret?

“The substantial redaction of calendars from his trip to Morocco, in which he apparently spent substantial taxpayer money to work on an issue that could benefit donors and those with ties to him, seems like just the latest example of the inappropriate secrecy he has brought to every aspect of his job,” Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of the nonpartisan watchdog Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, said in a statement.

It’s not a secret agency. It’s not an agency that is supposed to keep secrets*.

What is known about Pruitt’s trip to Morocco last December comes from a press statement he released as he departed to fly back to D.C. According to the EPA press release, he discussed U.S. environmental priorities and the U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement with Moroccan leaders and, to the surprise of some, promoted benefit of liquid natural gas imports in Morocco.

At the time of the trip, the only U.S. company that exported liquid natural gas was represented by a top Washington lobbyist who arranged $50-a-night housing for Pruitt when he first moved to town. The company, Cheniere, and the lobbyist, Steven Hart, both told ABC News they did not ask Pruitt to promote the exports in Morocco.

Oh, thank god, that’s all right then.

Sleaze piled on sleaze.

The massive redactions were justified according to team Pruitt by the “deliberative process privilege” allowed under the Freedom of Information Act.

Typically, that’s an exception used to avoid releasing the details of internal policy discussions before they are finalized, so as to prevent confusing the public, according to the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press website.

The EPA cites the exemption repeatedly to justify deletions throughout the 350 pages of schedules the EPA released this week, including his activities on New Year’s Day.

Whitehouse wrote in a letter earlier this month that he has reviewed copies of Pruitt’s schedule that show he traveled with his family to the Rose Bowl and Disneyland during that time.

Deliberating, were they? Engaging in the deliberative process while they watched the football? The whole family deliberating on EPA matters at Disneyland?

Adam Marshall, an attorney with the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said the use of the Deliberative Process Privilege is problematic in this case because previous court cases have said it can’t be used to redact purely factual information like the date, time, or who attended a meeting.

Marshall called it the “withhold it because you want to” exemption because agencies routinely overuse it.

“We know from past experiences that [the exemption is] used to withhold embarrassing and politically inconvenient information from the public,” he said in an interview with ABC News.

Which covers pretty much everything Scott Pruitt does.

*Correction, courtesy of iknklast: “I learned during my tenure with Oklahoma Department of Envrionmental Quality, which works closely with the EPA, that trade secrets are to be protected. If a company wishes to poison us with something, they declare it a trade secret, and it won’t show up in the files by name…”

Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court today for being such a vote-suppressing asshole.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was held in contempt of court Wednesday afternoon by a federal judge for failing to follow a court order to register voters in Kansas. Kobach, who led President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission and is the country’s most prominent advocate for restrictions on voting, “willfully failed to comply with the preliminary injunction” against the state’s law requiring proof of citizenship law for voter registration, Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled.

In 2013, Kobach pushed Kansas to enact a law requiring people to provide certain forms of documentation, such as a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers, to register to vote. The law prevented 35,000 Kansans from registering between 2013 and 2016. The ACLU filed suit and won a preliminary injunction in May 2016 blocking the law for the November 2016 election.

Not everybody has a birth certificate or passport, let alone naturalization papers. It’s difficult to get them if you don’t have them. Making voting difficult=voter suppression.

As part of the settlement, Kobach was supposed to mail a postcard to voters who were blocked from registering letting them now that they were now eligible to vote. He was also instructed by the court to update the state’s election manual, which Robinson called “the policy and training Bible for the 105 county election officials,” to let local officials know that the proof of citizenship law would not be in effect. But Kobach did neither.

Because he’s an evil toad who wants to throw the lower classes off the voting rolls. It’s that simple.

Kobach was repeatedly humiliated in court when he defended the law from a challenge by the ACLU in a March trial. Robinson scolded him for not following her earlier order, telling Kobach, “I made it clear they’re fully registered voters,” and pounding on her desk for emphasis. Despite Kobach’s assertion that “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive,” his own hand-picked witnesses could not cite a single instance where votes by non-citizens decided an election, nor did they support his debunked claim that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 because of illegal votes. The judge repeatedly lectured Kobach on “Evidence 101” when he tried to present evidence that was not properly submitted to the court.

Evil but incompetent.

From the same piece, Wittes’s thoughts on Trump and Comey.

For a lot of readers, the easy part of the book will be Comey’s discussion of his interactions with Trump. There is no moral complexity here. There are no serious questions of whether Comey should have behaved differently—not in the macro sense, at least. There is only the question of whether one believes Comey or Trump about the nature of their interactions. And to pose that question is also to answer it. One of them is a man who, whatever his flaws, is not a liar and who has numerous contemporaneous corroborating witnesses and documents. The other is Donald Trump. I suppose another question is whether one believes the president’s behavior as described by Comey is acceptable. But to ask that question is to answer it too. Of course Comey is telling the truth. And of course the president’s conduct is not acceptable.

Why “of course”? Because we see Trump. We see him every day. He tells us what he thinks, and how he thinks. Of course he carried on the way Comey says he did. It’s utterly characteristic of him. We recognize it.

Wittes thought all along that Trump would fire Comey – before the election he thought it.

I believed that Trump would fire Comey because it was clear who Trump is, and I knew who Comey is. I had a feeling they could not coexist. A tyranny cannot have independent law enforcement and remain an effective tyranny. A would-be tyrant thus must purge government of law enforcement that would be independent. He simply must get the law enforcement apparatus under his control—that is, protecting his friends and himself and arrayed against his enemies. I did not know who would be the Trump administration’s attorney general or deputy attorney general. But I knew that Trump would not be able to get law enforcement under his control with Comey in office—so I worried that he would remove Comey sooner or later. That this came to pass, and quickly, is not a reflection of my prescience. It is a reflection of what Comey, in his testimony to the Senate intelligence committee, called “the nature of the person.”

A tyranny cannot have independent law enforcement and remain an effective tyranny.

So we’d better make damn sure we go on having independent law enforcement. Mitch McConnell is doing his best to stop us; that has to change.

This is the story line on which the public should focus—on which, indeed, focus is democratically imperative. This story line continues to this day in the president’s threats to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Bob Mueller, in the possibility of pardons for major witnesses, and in the vicious smears of career law enforcement officials and the sliming of the attorney general for the supposedly iniquitous crime of recusing himself from an investigation in which his conflicts were both manifest and manifold.

Yet the public discussion of Comey, his book and his public presence does not manage to focus on this story line. And this is one of the great tragedies of the Clinton email investigation.

…

At the end of the day, I don’t know what I think of how Comey handled the Clinton email investigation. I go back and forth about whether the best of bad options worked out badly or whether this was a string of bad moves and unforced errors. My concern is that an inability to see whatever errors Comey made as the good-faith failings of a decent man trying his best under extraordinary circumstances affects the ability to process his interactions with Trump. Inevitably, your view of the Comey-Clinton story affects your ability to focus on the Comey-Trump story. It’s hard to focus on the Comey-Trump story if you believe the Comey-Clinton story is one of—at the extreme—partisan intervention by the FBI on Trump’s behalf. It’s hard if you believe it was a story of ego-driven showboating and moral vanity on the part of a man who loves the spotlight. It’s hard if you convince yourself that Comey’s action affected the outcome of the election. It’s really hard if you’ve persuaded yourself to ignore the many other factors that contributed to Clinton’s loss and Trump’s win—and all the other factors that contributed to the Justice Department’s handling of this particular case. It’s also really hard if you’re not open to grappling with the Kierkegaardian reality that Comey faced.

At least the choices now are clearer. Trump must not be allowed to do away with independent law enforcement. Trump must not be allowed to become an absolute tyrant with no checks.

Benjamin Wittes has a long piece on Comey and his book and the emailselectioninvestigationfuss. It’s not a review; he says it would be wrong of him to do a review because he’s not distant enough. It’s reflections on the book rather than a review of it. It includes anecdotes like having lunch with Comey at the FBI cafeteria shortly after Comey became director, and what happened there, and how that fits into the general story of how Comey shifted the culture of the FBI and what people there think of him.

He also takes on this whole question I was talking about yesterday: about having no good options and having the luxury of hindsight that participants don’t have.

My broad point is a simple one: One of the inherent features of no-win situations is that someone loses. Colleagues may understand what you did because they trust you. If you’re lucky, so may your boss. But when something terrible happens, the public will need to assign blame. This is inevitable, and assuming that burden is part of leadership.

Comey and the FBI were in a no-win situation. The no-win we ended up with is Trump. It’s a bitter pill.

Comey’s efforts to break down the cult of the directorship—its successes and its limitations—offer an interesting window into one of the larger themes he struggles with in this book: the effort to insulate the FBI from the perception of intervention in politics when it is investigating both major parties’ presidential nominees during an election campaign. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, turns out to have been even more impossible than eliminating the cult of the directorship. However earnestly one tries, the effort to act apolitically will be understood as politicization. The explanations one then offers of one’s conduct and thinking will be interpreted as ego-driven self-justification. The steps one takes to keep the bureau out of politics in such a situation—however sincere, however open—become politicization.

The problem reminds me of Kierkegaard’s famous passage on marriage:

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it. . . . Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them and you will also regret that. . . . . Hang yourself, you will regret it, do not hang yourself, and you will also regret that; hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. . . . This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.

That the steps designed to keep the FBI out of politics—and perceived as out of politics—will themselves be taken as political acts is not a reason not to undertake the effort. The effort itself is a sacred trust. But it is a reason to understand the inherent limits of the undertaking. Charge Hillary Clinton and you will regret it. Don’t charge her and you will regret that too. Explain your reasoning and you will regret it. Don’t explain your reasoning and you will regret it. Inform Congress of your actions immediately before an election, and you will regret that. Don’t inform Congress and you will regret that too. I don’t know if this is the sum and substance of all philosophy, but it is a good rule of thumb: The steps you take to remain apolitical will make you political.

I find that both eloquent and useful.

An interesting story on what the pilot had to deal with to land that crippled plane safely yesterday.

Just how masterfully Tammy Jo Shults, the pilot of the badly crippled Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, handled the problem of an engine exploding at 30,000 feet is winning admiration from thousands of her fellow pilots—and should finally help to temper the hubris of what has been a notoriously testosterone-charged profession.

Consider this: the Boeing 737’s left engine suffered a catastrophic failure when one of its fan blades—a part that looks like a pirate’s scimitar and is just as lethal when let loose—broke away, ripped through the engine casing that was supposed to contain it, and then, along with other pieces of shrapnel, tore into the skin of the airplane’s cabin.

Airplane cabins are like a pressure vessel. At 30,000 feet, where the jet was when the failure occurred, the pressure inside the cabin was far higher than in the outside air. The debris instantly punctured this pressure vessel, releasing an explosive rush of air. One cabin window was shattered and with the violent release of air, the woman seated at that window, Jennifer Rioardan, was partly sucked out, suffering injuries that were fatal.

Oxygen masks dropped, so the passengers could breathe, but they were still terrified.

The pilots’ first priority was to make a rapid descent to 10,000 feet where the difference between the outside air pressure and the cabin pressure begins to equalize. This greatly reduces the risk that other parts of the cabin structure will rupture because of the pressure stresses.

At the same time Shults was talking to controllers.

For any pilot in this situation the most difficult and urgent thing to judge is how responsive the airplane is to their commands. An airplane as crippled as this one becomes difficult to handle. With only one engine working and damage to the other causing unusual air drag, the pilot must correct for asymmetrical power and drag—the airplane naturally tends to swing away from its direct course.

The pilot had to do it herself:

the flight controls of the Southwest 737, although monitored through computers, remain as they were in the analog age, with the pilot controlling directly through a “yoke.”

And this is where Captain Shults’ background came into play. She was an ex-Navy pilot and one of the first women to fly the “Top Gun” F-18 Hornet, eventually becoming an instructor. Landing supersonic jets on the decks of aircraft carriers is one of the most demanding skills in military aviation. Now, flying on the one engine called for her to use all of her “seat of the pants” instincts to nurse the jet to the runway.

Normally a 737 on final approach would deploy its wing flaps to their full extent, to reduce landing speed to around 140 mph. But Captain Shults’ skills and experience forewarned her that an airplane flying that slowly with its flaps fully extended and with asymmetrical power could become fatally unstable in the final stage of the landing, so she used a minimal flap setting to maintain a higher speed and stability—taking the risk that the landing gear and particularly the tires could [not] survive a higher speed impact.

…

Captain Shults faced another problem with the speed of the landing: she could not deploy the airplane’s engine thrust reversers to help brake the speed after touchdown because of the damage to her left engine. However the touchdown was perfect and, once slowed, the jet came to rest on a taxiway where a fire crew sprayed the damaged engine with foam and put out a small fire from leaking fuel.

God damn. Imagine being on a crippled plane and coming in to land at higher than normal speed and then no engine thrust reversers. You expect the thrust reversers; they’re deployed almost as soon as the wheels touch, and they give you that nice “we are going to be able to stop before we crash into the terminal” feeling. High speed landing and no thrust reversers. [shudder]

When she announced in her senior year at high school that she wanted to be a pilot a retired colonel told her “there are no professional women pilots.” That was, apparently, a problem for her when she applied to train to be a pilot in the Air Force. They rejected her, but the Navy gave her the break—and, obviously, it was a very smart move, particularly for everyone aboard Flight 1380.

Tailhook or no Tailhook.

Jennifer Rubin at the Post on McConnell & Co’s reluctance to “poke the bear”:

Let’s cut through all this: Republicans are petrified of provoking Trump (“the bear”), whom they treat as their supervisor and not as an equal branch of government. The notion that Congress should not take out an insurance policy to head off a potential constitutional crisis when the president has repeatedly considered firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein defies logic. By speaking up in such fashion, McConnell is effectively tempting Trump to fire one or both of them. That will set off a firestorm and bring calls for the president’s impeachment.

Or. McConnell must be hoping, it will bring unmistakable authoritarian rule and a forced end to all this mishegoss.

At critical points during this saga, McConnell has put party over country, and fidelity to the executive branch over the concerns of an equal legislative branch. Remember, according to multiple news reports, McConnell is the one who, before the 2016 election, wanted to water down a bipartisan warning to the country about Russian interference. It was McConnell, together with Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who refused to set up a select committee or an independent commission to address possible Russian collusion. It was McConnell who pushed through the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, despite ample evidence that he had not been truthful with the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding his contacts with Russians. His refusal to consider legislation that might head off a crisis is remarkably reckless.

And for what? Is he thinking this will make the Republicans stronger? If so, does he know something we don’t? Or is it just that he’s not thinking, he’s simply tribalizing.

There is no one — with the possible exceptions of Ryan and House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — who has done more to embolden Trump. Seeing no opposition, Trump has continued his crusade to intimidate and bully the Justice Department and the FBI. As Trump has trashed one democratic norm after another, McConnell has remained silent.

Immediate advantage everything, long term consequences nothing. It’s a big gamble but by god it just might work.

Put aside the Russia investigation for a moment. McConnell hasn’t said boo about Trump’s foreign emoluments, his grotesque conflicts of interest, or the nepotism and self-enrichment that are endemic to his administration. If a Democrat [were] in the White House, McConnell would be leading the inquests into wrongdoing and cheering for impeachment.

Someone exactly like Trump couldn’t get elected as a Democrat, though, because things that are just added ornaments to Republicans would be deal-breakers for Dems. One thing Trump is doing is laying utter waste to the notion that Republicans have the lock on Morality.

What a disgusting bunch of sexist philistines we are.

Professor Mary Beard has accused a US broadcaster of editing her own episodes of Civilisations to make them more anodyne, saying her on-screen appearances as a “slightly creaky old lady with long grey hair” had been cut.

Prof Beard, who hosts two episodes of Civilisations for the BBC in Britain, said the American edits of the show had seen her central arguments erased, her on-screen contributions reduced, and an episode on religion re-edited to focus more closely on Christianity.

This isn’t Fox, either, it’s goddam PBS.

Prof Beard said: “Really hope that friends in USA realise that my Civilisations episodes on PBS are very different from original BBC versions, have been drastically changed.

“The originals were far from ‘anodyne’ I promise.”

Saying the experience had left her grateful for the BBC’s treatment of Civilisations episodes, she told the Telegraph: “Whether people liked them or not, my BBC episodes were at least what I wanted to say!”

The BBC and PBS versions were made by the same production company, but the two broadcasters were each responsible for their final chosen edits.

And PBS decided to give us much less Mary Beard.

While the British version had three hosts, Prof Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama, lead their own programmes, the American edits see them join a number of “contributors” to each show including expert “talking heads” and narration from actor Liev Schreiber.

Ugh. I hate those expert talking heads PBS is so keen on.

Asked on Twitter why the changes were made, Prof Beard wrote: “I wish I knew .. to make it better for an American audience, people say…???? I am rather sad about it. Hope people will look at the originals when they are available.”

Questioned on whether she had approved edits, she said: “Put it this way, if that’s how I had wanted to make the programme, I would have done it that way!”

Dammit PBS.