AP reports a shift in Trump, from however reluctantly taking some guidance from his aides, to getting sick of them and doing whatever he wants. Last week in West Virginia he threw his prepared speech up in the air. BO-RING.
This president has never been one to stick to a script, but that abandoned speech illustrates a new phase in Trump’s presidency. He is increasingly at odds with his staff — and growing wise to their tactics.
One favored staff strategy: Guide the president to the right decision by making the conventional choice seem like the only realistic option. Except now, 14 months into his administration, Trump is on to them, and he’s making clear he won’t be boxed in.
That was the message that an irritated Trump delivered to his national security team last week in a classified meeting about U.S. involvement in Syria.
Trump’s advisers, among them Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, were advocating for an ongoing U.S. military presence to provide stability. They aimed to rely on the same playbook they used last year in persuading Trump to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. They would paint a dire picture of a pullout, of regional chaos benefiting Russia and Iran, and the potential resurgence of the Islamic State group.
But even before they could begin their pitch in that meeting Tuesday, Trump headed them off, saying he wanted to remove U.S. troops immediately. The ensuing heated argument put new distance between the president and his team and left the military with a mandate, if not a formal order, to remove U.S. troops from Syria within six months.
Of course, military advisers give their advice from a military point of view. There are all kinds of institutional reasons for them to choose the advice they give, and the institution in question is the military, which has its own well known dangers. We’re supposed to be civilian government. But the trouble is, Trump is Trump. His biases are not likely to be an improvement on military biases, and he has infinitely less knowledge and experience. The US does keep getting itself entangled in wars that go on forever and do harm to millions, and from the outside it can seem best to just get out – but it could still be the case that just getting out would do even more harm. It’s complicated. The thing about Trump is that he seems to assume that because he was elected therefore he is the best qualified to decide. He thinks the president has and should have dictatorial power and that he as president necessarily knows more and better than anyone else.
You know how it’s been a theme of the coverage on Prince Jared that there’s this nagging $1.2 billion payment on 666 Fifth Avenue coming due and the Kushners have been sweating bullets trying to come up with the $$$? And how that is of course a massive red flag for corruption or worse? Well, Judd Legum at Think Progress reports that someone has come up with the $$$ and we don’t know who or how. People on Twitter suggest it’s MSB in payment for the secret intel that Jared gave him that prompted him to imprison more than 200 members of the House of Saud.
Upon entering the White House, Jared Kushner divested the property only in the most technical sense. He “sold” the assets to his brother and a trust controlled by his mother. A lawyer described the transaction to the New York Times as a “shell game.”
Now, with Kushner ensconced as a senior adviser in the White House, someone has emerged to bail him and his family out of this mess. The identity of Kushner’s white knight is a mystery.
Whoever it is certainly is generous.
In a filing with the SEC on Friday, Vornado revealed the existence of an extraordinary “handshake” agreement that would not only refinance the $1.2 billion but allow the Kushners to buy out Vornado’s portion of the debt. This means the Kushners would once again own the entire office tower and Vornado would own only the retail space.
The key question, however, is who would lend $1.2 billion to the Kushners to refinance an aging office tower with high vacancy rates? As of now, neither the Kushners nor Vornado is revealing who is facilitating the deal.
The existence of the deal, however, raise troubling questions about the whether it is based on the economic potential of the property or an effort to gain access and influence in the Trump White House.
Especially since, as Legum explained, the economic potential of the property appears to be all in a downward direction – the building is in decline and can’t command high rents, aka it’s under water. Genius Kushner paid way more than it’s worth so he’s in one of them there negative equity situations. Why anyone else would want to participate that is a mystery, which hints at sinister reasons. By “hints at” I mean “points to with loud blaring horn sounds.”
The New Yorker reported that Kushner’s father and sister met with Qatar’s finance minister, Ali Sharif al-Emadi, in New York last April. They pitched a $1 billion investment to renovate the struggling tower. The Qataris rejected the pitch because they did not believe they’d ever be able to recover their investment. Soon thereafter, the Trump administration supported an economic blockade of the country by Saudi Arabia.
It’s so fussy of people to reject a deal just because they think it would be a loss. Serves them right to be punished by dear dear Saudi Arabia.
“Here’s a question for you: If they had given Kushner the money, would there have been a blockade? I don’t think so,” a financial analyst opined to the New Yorker. NBC News reported that “Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. in late January and early February considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their country’s Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country.”
When NBC knows that you can bet Mueller’s investigators know that and more. Lots more.
The Trump administration officially withdrew an Obama-era rule that would set higher standards for the treatment of animals whose meat can be sold as organic.
The rule, created under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), would require poultry to be housed in spaces large enough to move freely and fully stretch their wings. Livestock would be required to have some access to outdoor space year-round.
The USDA officially overturned the rule Monday, after delaying its implementation three times. It was first created in 2016 and built on seven years of deliberation.
So I guess it’s not like all those reports about what Pruitt was doing when really he was just starting the process of trying to do them and might fail. I guess “officially overturned the rule” means what it says.
Many hens and cows live in the same or similar conditions as their nonorganic counterparts, with no room to move and only screened-in porches for “outside” access. The USDA estimates that about half of all organic eggs come from hens living in total confinement.
“Organic” of course doesn’t mean “humanely raised,” but people tend to conflate the two.
The rule was poised to hurt large-scale organic egg farms that house up to 180,000 birds in one barn, said the Organic Trade Association (OTA), which represents organic farmers. Some of these farms house as many as three egg-laying hens per square foot, with no time spent outdoors.
In contrast, Organic Valley, one of the most popular medium-scale organic producers in the United States, provides each bird with 5 square feet of space. In Europe, birds are given 43 square feet.
43 square feet versus a third of a square foot – quite a difference.
The proposed rule drew 47,000 comments, but only 28 supported its withdrawal, according to data compiled by the OTA.
“This is representative of the influence lobbyists and election money has at the Trump administration’s USDA,” said Mark Kastel, co-director of the Cornucopia Institute, which provides research on organic agriculture and has long been critical of USDA standards.
“They’re servicing large, conventional egg producers at the disservice of small and medium-sized organic farms,” he said. These large companies recognize the growing popularity of organic products and want to trick consumers into purchasing their own by obfuscating the way they treat their animals, Kastel argued.
The worse they treat the hens, the more $$$ they make. Let’s remember what’s important here.
Another entry in the “my enemies should be killed” department:
Musician and NRA board member Ted Nugent likened Democrats, members of the media and others to “rabid coyotes” on Friday and suggested people should not wait to “get” their guns and “shoot” them on sight.
Nugent, a major proponent of gun rights and the Second Amendment, applied the same comparison to Hollywood and RINOS – the common acronym standing for Republicans in name only – during an interview on InfoWars’ The Alex Jones Show.
“Don’t ask why. Just know that evil, dishonesty, and scam artists have always been around and that right now they’re liberal, they’re Democrat, they’re RINOs, they’re Hollywood, they’re fake news, they’re media, they’re academia, and they’re half of our government, at least,” Nugent said according to conservative media watchdog Media Matters.
Nugent continued: “So come to that realization. There are rabid coyotes running around. You don’t wait till you see one to go get your gun. Keep your gun handy, and every time you see one, you shoot one.”
One wonders how all these people with their guns will know when they “see one.” Recognizing a coyote is one thing, recognizing a rabid coyote is another, and recognizing liberals, Democrats, RINOs, Hollywood people, journalists, people in media, academics, and half the government – that’s really quite different.
Last week Nugent was busy verbally attacking Parkland students.
President Donald Trump previously lobbied against a proposed bill requiring high-rise buildings, like Trump Tower, to install life-saving sprinkler systems. A fire in his 5th Avenue building Saturday, with no sprinklers present, left one person dead and multiple firefighters injured.
Then one of New York’s most prominent real estate developers, Trump in 1999 rang city officials to argue against proposed legislation that would have required high-rise landlords to install the systems following fatal high-rise fires in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
The December 1998 blazes killed nine people, including seven firemen.
Trump said it would be too expensive. The bill was altered to exclude older buildings, like for instance, oh just picking one at random, Trump Tower, opened in 1983.
Last night’s blaze tore through part of the 50th floor of the 5th Avenue Trump Tower.
“We found fire on the 50th floor of the building. The apartment was entirely on fire. Members pushed in heroically, they were knocking down the fire and found one occupant of the apartment,” Daniel Nigro, Commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, said.
That resident, a 67 year-old man, was found by firefighters passed out from fume inhalation, and later died in hospital. Seven firefighters were also injured in the blaze.
“This was a very difficult fire. As you can imagine, the apartment is quite large, we are 50 stories up,” Nigro said.
Matt Yglesias decided to stir things up yesterday.
My guess is that if Hitch were alive today he’d be the leading pro-Trump columnist in America, following the siren song of faux contrarianism to its ultimate end. https://t.co/Gq3Nj4HyML
My guess is that if Hitch were alive today he’d be the leading pro-Trump columnist in America, following the siren song of faux contrarianism to its ultimate end.
That’s an incredibly stupid “guess,” as a number of people pointed out. Hitchens wasn’t right about everything, but he would never have been a toady of Trump’s. The idea is ludicrous.
He’d be a regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s show doing segments about the Deep State’s plot against Trump and how the left lost its way, calling Elizabeth Warren a shrill harpy, and denouncing the excesses of political correctness.
He’d be a regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s show doing segments about the Deep State’s plot against Trump and how the left lost its way, calling Elizabeth Warren a shrill harpy, and denouncing the excesses of political correctness.
He seems to have him confused with Bannon. Other way around, dude – Bannon wishes he were another Hitchens.
Utter, utter nonsense here. You have no idea what you're talking about.
— Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens (@amhitchens) April 7, 2018
What utter drivel. Makes you sound you like you never read or heard him. Trump is everything Hitchens hated most: a vicious, moronic fascist in league with appalling religious fanatics
Ok, here’s a little primer on the perjury trap: What it is, what it isn’t, and whether Bob Mueller’s seeking an interview with Trump in which Trump might lie is one or not.
First off, the perjury trap is a real thing. It’s not simply a concoction of the right-wing fever swamp. When it happens—and it is successfully argued only rarely—it is a form of entrapment that can constitute an affirmative defense against a charge of perjury.
Bennett Gershman, in a law review article on the subject, described the perjury trap as “the deliberate use of the grand jury to secure perjured testimony” and suggested that the hallmarks include the intentional solicitation of false testimony by a high-value target who cannot be prosecuted for underlying activity for one reason or another.
He included a link to the article but it’s broken.
Second, it is emphatically NOT a perjury trap to put someone in front of a grand jury believing that he might not be entirely truthful and with a willingness to hold him criminally accountable for any lies he might tell. The perjury trap, like all entrapments, requires more.
At that point I paused to wonder how an interrogation by a prosecutor could ever be entrapment, seeing as how prosecutors don’t go undercover to interrogate people. I came up with maybe trick questions and the like. But the basic difficulty is no doubt why it’s not a very popular defense.
Second, it is emphatically NOT a perjury trap to put someone in front of a grand jury believing that he might not be entirely truthful and with a willingness to hold him criminally accountable for any lies he might tell. The perjury trap, like all entrapments, requires more.
Apologies if the image is unreadable.
Note two things here: First, as with any claim of entrapment, the claim of a perjury trap is an affirmative defense that thus has to be proven by a defendant. Second, the perjury trap requires a showing that the perjurious testimony was procured improperly by the government.
In other words, if Bob Mueller seeks an interview with Donald Trump for good faith reasons related to establishing his state of mind in an investigation of certain of his actions knowing—as we all know—that Trump lies constantly, that is not even CLOSE to a perjury trap.
And yet that is the basis for most or perhaps all of the squawking – “It’s SO unfair, he CAN’T tell the truth, he doesn’t know HOW, he lies every time he opens his MOUTH, talking to him at ALL is entrapment, this is an OUTRAGE.”
That is called conducting an investigation of a subject with a propensity—one shared by many criminals, by the way—to lie to investigators. The reason we have perjury and false statements statutes is to give such people a strong incentive to tell the truth.
Someone will have to explain to Trump what “incentive” means.
As the US Attorneys manual puts it, “when the grand jury is attempting to obtain useful information in furtherance of its investigation, the perjury trap doctrine does not apply.”
Put simply, for the perjury trap argument to be more than simple rhetoric, one would have to show that Mueller was acting in bad faith—was somehow not really seeking evidence for an underlying investigation but was merely setting up Trump to lie.
He added one more thought an hour later.
One other thing about the perjury trap: Given that obstructions are specific intent offenses, it is unimaginable that Mueller would conduct an obstruction investigation without trying to hear from Trump. That’s not evidence of a perjury trap. It’s evidence of an investigation.
The truth is that Scott Pruitt has done a lot less to dismantle the EPA than he—or his critics—would have you believe.
It’s not for lack of trying. Pruitt has taken aim at just about every major Obama-era EPA rule, which has made him a pariah on the left, a hero on the right and the bureaucratic face of Trump’s vocal advocacy for fossil-fuel interests and other industrial polluters. But so far he’s only managed to delay a few rules that hadn’t yet taken effect. His supporters, critics and boss have all promoted the perception that he’s repealed Obama’s environmental legacy and shredded America’s environmental rulebook—and no one has promoted that perception more energetically than Pruitt, who frequently sued Obama’s EPA when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general. Nevertheless, that perception is wrong.
Pruitt’s problem is that major federal regulations are extremely difficult and time-consuming to enact, and just as difficult and time-consuming to reverse. The rulemaking process can take years of technical and administrative work that Pruitt and his team have not yet had time to do. And even if Pruitt manages to keep his job long enough to complete that process for any of his efforts to weaken clean-air and clean-water rules, the EPA will inevitably face years of litigation over each one.
Oh good. Let us know if we can help with any of that.
[T]he EPA rules that were in effect in 2016 are still the rules in 2018, despite Pruitt’s efforts to overturn them. He tried to impose a unilateral stay on an Obama rule regulating climate-warming methane emissions from oil and gas operations; a federal appeals court deemed the stay “unauthorized” and “unreasonable,” so the methane rule is now in force again. He tried a similar maneuver to suspend Obama’s restrictions on smog; after a group of state attorney generals sued, Pruitt reversed course, so those restrictions also remain in effect. Obama’s EPA had worked on both rules for years, engaging with stakeholders and the scientific community, creating a lengthy administrative record. Pruitt still hopes to rewrite them, but success would require the same kind of meticulous process.
Also, he’s widely reviled.
“The silver lining with Pruitt is that his incompetence has helped mobilize a backlash against his agenda,” says Jeremy Symons, the Environmental Defense Fund’s vice president for political affairs. “We’re very optimistic that most of what he’s started won’t get finished.”
More recently, Trump has told friends he is eager to stage more energetic, frenzied rallies — yet another realm where he can theoretically slip Kelly’s shackles.
Witches, man. Just when you thought we were safe from their malignant influence on America’s virtue, the NFL has proven we are still in real danger from their dark powers.
In danger how? Witchy witchy seduction.
Bailey Davis, the 22-year-old former New Orleans Saints cheerleader, was recently fired for violating team social media rules by posting an Instagram photo of herself in one-piece lingerie that shows as much skin as a one-piece swimsuit in a Nordstrom’s ad, and a lot less than their cheerleading outfits. She has since filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for gender discrimination. When she spoke to a representative from the Saints’ human resources department, he complained that in her photo she had a “dirty face” (clear proof she was casting her spell compelling virtuous men to “filthy carnal acts”) and that he’d never allow his granddaughters to post something like that.
Interesting, but I don’t think “what dude X would never let his granddaughters do” is a legit criterion for firing someone.
Grandpa’s pompous Lord Tywin Lannister response encapsulates exactly what’s wrong with NFL management: They insist on being the self-appointed guardians of America’s mythological vision of itself. Malt shops on every corner, Pat Boone crooning on the jukebox, and modestly dressed virgins sitting around with knees clamped together waiting to be asked to prom. This 1950s, Father Knows Best soundstage fantasy doesn’t stop with paternalistic and puritanical gender stereotypes, but also promotes simplistic notions about race and patriotism. The NFL’s anachronistic fancies aren’t just a misguided attempt to pander to what they think their traditionalist fans want, but also projects the hard-core conservative values of the mostly rich, white one-percenters who own the teams. We must live in their Disneyland – or else.
Mind you, in the 50s the NFL wasn’t raking in huge bucks from television, but that’s ok – just let them have the technology and $$$ of now combined with the white male dominance of the 50s and they won’t say another word.
The country would be outraged if a team’s rules stated that if a black player was eating at a restaurant and a white player walked in, the black player would have to leave the restaurant. Yet, those are the rules for Saints’ cheerleaders, who must leave a restaurant they are eating at if a Saints player arrives. We would be equally outraged if a company demanded that office personnel address top executives only with “hello” and “you’re wonderful”. Yet the Saints’ cheerleaders are restricted to saying only “hello” and “great game” to players. Other restrictions about weight, makeup, body hair, tampon use and forbidding sweatpants in public make it seem as if the Saints watched The Handmaid’s Tale and thought, “They just don’t go far enough.” In other words, shut up and jiggle.
These highly trained and skilled women are being told that the NFL just wants to protect them from sexual predators, particularly NFL players. Like the grumpy grandpa in human resources who wouldn’t “allow” his granddaughters to post photos he doesn’t approve of, the NFL wants to be their (creepy? pimpy?) daddy. These are adult women who should be permitted to make their own decisions about who they contact and who they don’t, especially since the players have no such restrictions. A cheerleader poses in modest lingerie and she’s fired; a player knocks out his wife on video and is suspended for two games. Boys will be boys, but girls must be what the NFL tells them to be.
Jordan Peterson joins the club of macho writers who have thrown a fit over a bad review.
The New York Review of Books, which is famous for drubbing high-profile authors, was particularly harsh on Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson in a review published online on Monday. Surveying 12 Rules For Life, Peterson’s new book, critic Pankaj Mishra warned that the self-help guru “may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage,” but that he draws on a tradition of writers like Carl Jung who were prone to—as the headline put it—“fascist mysticism.”
Peterson’s elegant but forceful response:
You arrogant, racist son of a bitch Pankaj Mishra: How dare you accuse me of "harmlessly romancing the noble savage." That's how you refer to my friend Charles Joseph (https://t.co/uF5XV2DVXx), who I've worked with for 15 years? https://t.co/s8fqE1M7D7
Apart from everything else wrong with that response, there’s the oddity of (apparently) treating “noble savage” literally rather than as a reference to a very familiar literary/philosophical trope originating with Rousseau. Mishra doesn’t mention Charles Joseph, so “That’s how you refer to my friend Charles Joseph?” is mystifying.
Then he expands on the point.
And you call me a fascist? You sanctimonious prick. If you were in my room at the moment, I'd slap you happily. https://t.co/sC3Lc9Hhlu
The dissonance is comical in a Judd Apatow movie kind of way, where a human oxymoron is the punchline. Jordan is The Angry Guru, The Pissed-Off Yogi, The Totally Untogether Psychiatrist. A fragile authority who spends his time dishing it out but just can’t take it. A brittle ego who exhorts his fans to find peace by accepting that life is tough – while losing it completely every time he steps barefoot on a metaphorical piece of Lego. A tragic physician who cannot heal himself. It’s so jarring. Reading Jordan is, according to the writer Hari Kunzru, “like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong”.
How about if Judd Apatow makes him the next Seth Rogen, and then we could all forget about him.
Jordan reminds me of the youngish Muslim preachers who became all the fashion in the Arabic-speaking world after the proliferation of satellite TV in the 90s. They just wanted youth to live a better life by following the simple rules of submission to the natural order of things – the pain was in fighting it. These preachers, always men, and always appealing to other men to shoulder their responsibilities, had the preternatural calm of the faithful but when challenged, the temperament of the hysterical. They derived their status from the hierarchy, and so once it was questioned, they were all fire and brimstone. They had little intrinsic value to offer, and even less original thinking.
It’s a strange experience, watching a younger, more innocent version of yourself onscreen. It’s stranger still—surreal, even—watching it with your child when she is much closer in age to that version of yourself than you are. My friend was right: my daughter didn’t really seem to register most of the sex stuff, though she did audibly gasp when she thought I had showed my underwear. At one point in the film, the bad-boy character, John Bender, ducks under the table where my character, Claire, is sitting, to hide from a teacher. While there, he takes the opportunity to peek under Claire’s skirt and, though the audience doesn’t see, it is implied that he touches her inappropriately.
The audience does sort of see – it sees him lunging between her knees before the movie cuts to her reaction. Her reaction is apparently to slam her knees closed on his head, but that we don’t see, we only hear him squawk.
I kept thinking about that scene. I thought about it again this past fall, after a number of women came forward with sexual-assault accusations against the producer Harvey Weinstein, and the #MeToo movement gathered steam. If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes. I made three movies with John Hughes; when they were released, they made enough of a cultural impact to land me on the cover of Time magazine and to get Hughes hailed as a genius. His critical reputation has only grown since he died, in 2009, at the age of fifty-nine. Hughes’s films play constantly on television and are even taught in schools. There is still so much that I love in them, but lately I have felt the need to examine the role that these movies have played in our cultural life: where they came from, and what they might mean now.
As one does, even if one didn’t act in them. Doctor Strangelove for instance – the only woman is General Buck Turgidson’s [geddit?] secretary/piece of tail, fielding a phone call from another general in the middle of the night dressed in a bikini.
The successful teen comedies of the period, such as “Animal House” and “Porky’s,” were written by men for boys; the few women in them were either nymphomaniacs or battleaxes. (The stout female coach in “Porky’s” is named Balbricker.)
The industry hasn’t really changed all that much.
I filmed “Sixteen Candles” in the suburbs of Chicago the summer after I completed the ninth grade. Once we were done shooting, and before we began filming “The Breakfast Club,” John wrote another movie specifically for me, “Pretty in Pink,” about a working-class girl navigating the social prejudices of her affluent high school. The film’s dramatic arc involves getting invited and then uninvited to the prom. In synopsis, the movies can seem flimsy—a girl loses her date to a dance, a family forgets a girl’s birthday—but that’s part of what made them unique. No one in Hollywood was writing about the minutiae of high school, and certainly not from a female point of view. According to one study, since the late nineteen-forties, in the top-grossing family movies, girl characters have been outnumbered by boys three to one—and that ratio has not improved. That two of Hughes’s films had female protagonists in the lead roles and examined these young women’s feelings about the fairly ordinary things that were happening to them, while also managing to have instant cred that translated into success at the box office, was an anomaly that has never really been replicated.
Truth. So much truth is it that I’ve seen most of Pretty in Pink, in slices at various times. The girl-centeredness of it makes it magnetic to me. But there are things like that crotch-dive scene.
It’s hard for me to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot. Looking for insight into that darkness, I decided to read some of his early writing for National Lampoon. I bought an old issue of the magazine on eBay, and found the other stories, all from the late seventies and early eighties, online. They contain many of the same themes he explored in his films, but with none of the humanity. Yes, it was a different time, as people say. Still, I was taken aback by the scope of the ugliness.
“A Dog’s Tale” has a boy watching his mother turn into a dog. “Against His Will” features an “ugly fat” woman who tries to rape a man at gunpoint in front of the man’s wife and parents because she can’t have sex any other way. “My Penis” and “My Vagina” are quasi-magical-realist stories written from the points of view of teen-agers who wake up in the morning with different genitalia than they were assigned at birth; the protagonist of “My Penis” literally forces her boyfriend’s mouth open to penetrate him, and the male in “My Vagina” is gang-raped by his friends once they discover he has one. (The latter story ends with him having to use the money he saved for new skis on getting an abortion.) The “Hughes Engagement Guide” is an illustrated manual on how to protect yourself against women. It gives examples of women “bullshitting to not put out,” and teaches readers how to do a “quickie pelvic exam,” how to detect “signs of future fat,” and how to determine if a woman has any ancestors of different races, based on what her relatives look like—there is an accompanying drawing of an Asian person and an African-American—and on and on.
The October, 1980, issue included a piece, co-authored by Ted Mann, titled “Sexual Harassment and How to Do It!” The guide explains, “If you hire a woman from another field or with a background that is not suited to the duties she is to assume, you’ve got the glans in the crevice, or, if you prefer, the foot in the door.” It continues, “Not only will her humility prepare her for your sexual advances, it will also help steel her for her inevitable dismissal.” There are sections describing different kinds of secretaries based on their ages, and how best to reward and punish them. (The older ones are “easier,” the younger ones “preferable.”) There’s even a section on arrest: “Sometimes even guys with cool sideburns and a smooth line of patter get arrested for sexual harassment and are issued summonses.” It goes on to suggest different methods for cozying up to the police officer.
It’s all satire, of course, but it’s pretty clear that it’s not the chauvinists who are being lampooned but the “women’s liberation movement.” Women had begun to speak out, in the mid-seventies, against harassment in the workplace.
Therefore naturally there had to be a backlash.
How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art—change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.
I guess the only way we can feel about such things is ambivalent. We both love and oppose; we think and discuss; we try to do better.
Classic. Trump’s own people tell him that Scott Pruitt’s many corrupt and/or brainless acts have made him toxic and Trump reeeeeeeally ought to replace him with someone not quite so extravagant and cozy with lobbyists, but Trump is so happy with the way Pruitt is making the water dirty again that he just can’t bear to lose him. Dirty water and filthy air for the people! Wave the tiny fist!
John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told President Trump last week that Scott Pruitt, the embattled administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, needed to go in the wake of damaging allegations about ethical infractions and spending irregularities, according to two officials briefed about the conversation.
But Mr. Trump, who is personally fond of Mr. Pruitt and sees him as a crucial ally in his effort to roll back environmental rules, has resisted firing him, disregarding warnings that the drumbeat of negative headlines about the administrator has grown unsustainable and that more embarrassing revelations could surface.
Yes yes yes yes but he’s rolling back environmental rules. What does the drumbeat of “negative” headlines amount to next to that? They get to trash the environment!! It’s worth all the bad headlines anyone could come up with to be able to ruin everything.
White House officials said on Friday that Mr. Trump continues to believe that Mr. Pruitt has been effective in his role, and stressed that it was up to the president alone to decide his fate.
“No one other than the president has the authority to hire and fire,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “The president feels that the administrator has done a good job at E.P.A.”
Okay, Sarah, but he’s still the stupidest meanest laziest adult any of us have ever seen.
Earlier, in a brief interview, Ms. Sanders said that Mr. Pruitt’s success in achieving items on the president’s agenda — including rolling back a large number of environmental regulations — may weigh heavily as a counterbalance to allegations that he misused taxpayer dollars.
“He likes the work product,” she said of Mr. Trump.
Of course he does. He can buy clean air and water, and people who can’t afford to do that should go live in what’s its name, the one up there – Canada.
On Friday, Mr. Trump pushed back against news reports that he had considered replacing Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, with Mr. Pruitt, saying in a tweet that his E.P.A. chief “is doing a great job but is TOTALLY under siege.”
That came hours before yet another embarrassing revelation Friday afternoon, when Politico reported that the lobbyists who owned the condominium Mr. Pruitt paid $50 a night to rent had leased the space to him for only six weeks, and became frustrated when he declined for months to leave, eventually pushing him out and changing the locks.
Hahahahahahahaha he’s the Bad Roommate. He’s the asshole who won’t leave. He’s out in the street with all his underpants in a pile.
A young #trans man broke his arm playing football & is rushed to hospital. Before being treated he is asked to discuss his trans status & hormones at length. Why? So wrong!
It’s called taking a medical history, and it has to be done. They have to know what meds patients are on in order to avoid killing them. That’s why.
Jessica Valenti points out what one would think was obvious: something said on Twitter isn’t magically not what the tweeter actually thinks, simply by virtue of being on Twitter.
On Thursday, the recently hired columnist Kevin Williamson was fired from the Atlantic after an uproar over his views on abortion – namely his belief, first mentioned in a 2014 tweet, that women who have the procedure should be executed by hanging.
Initially, the editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, defended Williamson, writing in a memo to staff that he did not believe “taking a person’s worst tweets … in isolation is the best journalistic practice”. But after the release of a podcast in which Williamson talked at length about hanging women, the writer was fired, and Goldberg admitted “that the original tweet did, in fact, represent [Williamson’s] carefully considered views”.
But sometimes a person’s worst tweets, like a person’s worst blurts or jokes or exclamations, tell you something.
Expressing a belief in a tweet – or on Facebook or Instagram – does not make that belief any less yours. That’s why I found it so odd when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an open letter to Williamson this weekend, apologizing to him over having his character “assassinated”.
“I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet. When you write a whole book on the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions, then I’ll worry,” Stephens wrote.
Easy for him; he’s not among the people Williamson would like to see hanged.
The truth, of course, is that Williamson never should have been hired in the first place; the Atlantic and Goldberg knew about Williamson’s belief about executing women who had abortions and brought him on anyway. They knew they would be forcing the women at the magazine – some of whom we can assume have had abortions – to sit in an office with a man who wanted them dead.
Or not so much wanted them dead as thought they ought to be dead, because executed by hanging for ending their own pregnancies. In a way that’s worse. Just wanting them dead…well lots of men seem to feel that way about women. But thinking they ought to be dead? At official hands, for making decisions about their own bodies? That’s cold.
Of conservative writers, Kevin Williamson is one of those most willing to be heterodox, most committed to reality-based reporting, with a bold intellect and indomitable character. But the philistine progressive mob can’t stand him. Why? Because he won’t bend the knee…to them.
Heterodox, bold, indomitable – that’s how we describe a columnist who advocates hanging for women who end their pregnancies?
It’s “philistine progressive” to say a columnist who advocates hanging for women who end their pregnancies shouldn’t be on the staff of a mainstream magazine? On the grounds that advocating hanging for millions of women should not be normalized in that way? If only we were less “philistine” we would understand the profundity and subtlety and artistry of advocating hanging for millions of women? It’s “heterodox” to advocate hanging for millions of women? Heterodox and bold and indomitable? It’s not murderous and genocidal and misogynist?
Nobody expects conservatives to agree with everything left, or they wouldn’t be conservatives. We expect them to be decent human beings who would not execute women for a medical procedure we don’t think should be illegal. That’s not a stratospheric bar.
The US has imposed sanctions on seven Russian oligarchs and 17 senior government officials, accusing them of “malign activity around the globe”.
Twelve companies owned by the oligarchs, the state arms exporter and a bank are also sanctioned.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the penalties targeted those profiting from Russia’s “corrupt system”.
The move was a response to Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, he said.
The sanctions are also being imposed because of the actions taken by the Kremlin in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria, Mr Mnuchin said in a statement on Friday.
He accused the Russian government of “malicious” cyber-activities and said the sanctions would target “those who benefit from the Putin regime”.
Well. I can’t help thinking that will sour Trump’s friendship with Volodya.
Alexander Torshin, a senior Russian official with reported ties to the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), has been blacklisted.
Mr Putin’s bodyguard, his son-in-law, the head of Russia’s national security council, and former prime minister Viktor Zubkov are also sanctioned.
Russian state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, one of the companies targeted, said the sanctions were designed to force Russia out of the global arms market.
Any assets they have under US jurisdiction have been frozen and US nationals are forbidden from doing to do business with them.
No that really doesn’t seem like something Putin will cheerfully embrace.
A new study published Wednesday adds to a growing body of hard evidence to back up those stories.
It finds that men in STEM subject areas overestimate their own intelligence and credentials, [and] underestimate the abilities of female colleagues, and that as a result, women themselves doubt their abilities — even when hard evidence such as grades say otherwise.
It’s a wonderful loop, isn’t it – men think they’re better than they are so they forge confidently ahead regardless and they feel entitled to tell women they’re not good enough so women are kneecapped, so men think they’re even more better than they are and so on forever.
The students worked in groups and as partners and when asked to rate themselves compared to their closest workmate, the men thought they’d be smarter than 61 percent of their colleagues. Women put the number closer to 33 percent.
“This echoes what has been previously shown in the literature; a review of nearly 20 published papers on self-estimated intelligence concluded that men rate themselves higher than women on self-estimated intelligence,” Cooper and Brownell wrote in their report, published in Advances in Physiology Education.
“More and more of these studies are painting similar pictures,” Brownell said.
Yes, I’ve seen them before, and I bet we all have.
So what’s the result? STEM fields are full of Damore-type men telling women they’re not smart enough, or, more euphemistically aka deniably they’re more into relationships than mathematics. Also, in a thrilling new bonus, they have platoons of thinky men telling us all that this is Free Speech and must be not only protected but encouraged and widely disseminated and greeted with rapture. How dare Google fire Damore just for fitting this pattern of Mediocre Men Telling Women They Are Too Stupid Empathetic to Work at Google?
Ilana Seidel Horn, a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University, says it’s been shown that girls and women doubt their own mastery of a subject more than boys and men do.
“Really bright girls often don’t feel like they know something unless they very much understand it, whereas boys are more comfortable saying they understand something without having an actual deeper understanding,” Horn said.
It’s more of a guy thing.
The attitudes do not stay inside people’s heads. Pearson said she felt the disdain of her male classmates regularly.
“I can’t even tell you how many of my early successes (awards and grants) were attributed to my being the only girl, and ‘they had to’ give the award to a woman,” Pearson said.
“I am reasonably successful by a variety of measures, but I still doubt everything I do. And it’s because a lifetime of being told I don’t belong and I’m not good enough that got into my head.”
Even the most confident girl or woman might begin to doubt herself when confronted with such attitudes from fellow students, teachers and colleagues, Brownell said.
