Trump’s stupid childish greedy “military parade” is planned for November. Newsweek points out that it will cost many dollars.
President Donald Trump’s military parade is set to kick off on Veterans Day, but at a cost that even conservative estimates show could feed every homeless veteran for at least two weeks, a Newsweek analysis found.
…
Using the most conservative estimates available from federal agencies and non-profit organizations, Newsweek found Trump could completely eliminate hunger among homeless veterans, serving them three meals a day, for at least 14 days.
But Trump wants a show. Providing meals to homeless veterans across the country isn’t a show.
In February, Trump told Fox News he wouldn’t hold the parade if the cost was exorbitant.
“We’ll see if we can do it at a reasonable cost, and if we can’t, we won’t do it, but the generals would love to do it, I can tell you, and so would I,” he said.
No, they wouldn’t. That’s just one of those things he made up in his moth-eaten head.
A former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia, Theresa May has told MPs.
The prime minister said the government had concluded it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March.
She’s summoned the Russian ambassador to talk it over.
My first thought was: stupid of them to use an agent with their fingerprints on it. My second thought was: oh wait, no it isn’t, because they’re sending a message. We will get you.
During World War II, Churchill declared himself in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing of Dresden were the result.
In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” to scatter them.
Like what the fascists carried out in Guernica, but decades earlier. The fact that Churchill liked the idea doesn’t mean it happened, and I don’t think it did, though there was plenty of violence without that – but the fact that Churchill was keen is of interest.
Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the colonies, Churchill acted as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes; it would spread a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an entire village wiped out in 45 minutes.
In Afghanistan, Churchill declared that the Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.” He wrote: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. … Every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”
In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for white colonial settlers and the forcing of more than 150,000 people into concentration camps. Rape, castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots, and electric shocks were all used by the British authorities to torture Kenyans under Churchill’s rule.
But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them. He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet colleagues, whom he criticized for their “squeamishness,” declaring that “the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable.”
Figuratively shot down that is, which is not what he had in mind for the Indians.
This isn’t one of those “yes but things were different then” situations. Churchill was way out there even for 1920 or 1940. (Also, we don’t give Roosevelt the “different times” excuse for the internments; he was wrong and he had plenty of people telling him he was wrong.)
In such matters, Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times. Even his own secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Adolf Hitler’s.
Thanks to Churchill, some 4 million Bengalis starved to death in a 1943 famine. Churchill ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. When reminded of the suffering of his Indian victims, his response was that the famine was their own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.”
Not just a cute old geezer with a cigar and and a gift for rhetoric.
Steve Mnuchin has no problem with Trump’s calling Maxine Waters “low IQ” or Chuck Todd a “son of a bitch.” It’s just his adorable sense of fun.
On Saturday, the president attacked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), a veteran African American congresswoman and outspoken Trump critic, saying, she’s a “a very low IQ individual — you ever see her?” On Sunday, his Treasury Secretary dismissed this and other attacks made by Trump at a Pennsylvania event as irrelevant “campaign rally issues.”
“You know I’ve been with the president and at campaigns,” Steve Mnuchin told NBC’s Meet the Press. “He likes to put names on people.”
“The president likes making funny names,” he added.
The president likes making sexist, racist, insulting, belittling names.
Arizona State University has suspended Lawrence M. Krauss, a prominent theoretical physicist, while the university investigates accusations of sexual misconduct over a decade.
“In an effort to avoid further disruption to the normal course of business as the university continues to gather facts about the allegations, Krauss has been placed on paid leave and is prohibited from being on campus for the duration of the review,” the university said in a statement released on Tuesday.
Oh but I’m sure they’re just a bunch of fanatical SJWs out to get Krauss for no other reason than terminal political correctness.
Dr. Krauss, a professor in the university’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, is director of Arizona State’s Origins Project, a multidisciplinary research effort to tackle questions about life, the universe and complex social problems. He gained prominence for his book, “The Physics of Star Trek” in 1995. He later became one of the leaders of the so-called “skeptics” movement that espouses science over religion. He has also written essays and Op-Ed articles that were published in The Times.
Well, no, not exactly. There are no “leaders” in such a formal way that he could “become” one. They’re not literally “leaders” at all. What they are is guys (always guys – always) with name recognition because of best-selling books or similar achievements. They get invited to talk and present and front because of the name recognition, so their name recognition expands, repeat forever. It’s not a terrible arrangement in every way, because some of the best-sellers are outstanding and some of the “leaders” are good at talking and presenting and fronting. It does, however, tend to result in hero-worship which in turn tends to result in ferocious verbal harassment of anyone who dares to criticize – plus there’s the always guys aspect.
The university is not the only one to take action against Dr. Krauss. The American Physical Society and other organizations have withdrawn invitations to Dr. Krauss for upcoming talks. The Center for Inquiry, an organization that promotes secularism, suspended its association with Dr. Krauss on Monday.
On Tuesday, Dr. Krauss resigned from the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is best known for its Doomsday Clock that represents that danger of atomic war and other calamities to the planet. In his resignation letter, he said he was resigning from the board because he did not want to distract from the organization’s work.
Additionally, a conference scheduled for next month to mark the 10th anniversary of the Origins Project has been canceled. “What we hope to do is reschedule it for another time,” Dr. Krauss said in an interview on Wednesday.
Trump said that allowing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for drug dealers — an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping — is “a discussion we have to start thinking about. I don’t know if this country’s ready for it.”
“Do you think the drug dealers who kill thousands of people during their lifetime, do you think they care who’s on a blue-ribbon committee?” Trump asked. “The only way to solve the drug problem is through toughness. When you catch a drug dealer, you’ve got to put him away for a long time.”
As if we didn’t put enough people in prison for a long enough time.
It was not the first time Trump had suggested executing drug dealers. Earlier this month, he described it as a way to fight the opioid epidemic. And on Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was considering policy changes to allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty.
4. “A lot of evil. A lot of bad people. A lot of bad people.”
This is Trump talking about Washington. It’s a throwaway line, but think about what he is saying here. It’s not just that there are people who disagree with him in Washington. It’s that these people are bad, they are evil. Rhetoric like this has consequences. I think Trump knows that but doesn’t really care because it works for him.
I didn’t find the specifics of most allegations fully convincing, yet the fact that there were so many of them that resembled each other meant that they could not be ignored. As I’ve said, the more independent claims there are against a person, and the more they paint a consistent pattern of behavior, the greater the likelihood that the accused is guilty.
After that article appeared, I did some digging on my own, and came up with three cases that have convinced me that Krauss engaged in sexual predation of both a physical nature (groping) and of a verbal nature (offensive and harassing comments). The allegations that convinced me are not public, but the accusers are sufficiently credible that I believe their claims to be true. Further, these claims buttress the general allegation of sexual misbehavior made in BuzzFeed. In my view, then, Krauss had a propensity to engage in sexual misconduct. I therefore disassociate myself from the man. He has, of course, denied every allegation in the BuzzFeed article, but the cases that pushed me to write this post aren’t in that piece. But to me these other cases make it likely that at least some of the allegations in BuzzFeed are true.
Oddly enough, that’s also how the BuzzFeed reporters saw it, which is why they reported on the story. There were a lot of allegations, independent of each other, describing a pattern.
Sam Harris tells a bunch of lies about BuzzFeed.
I’m transcribing the worst bits so I’ll be updating to add more.
At 1:30:
BuzzFeed is, on the continuum of journalistic integrity and unscrupulousness, somewhere toward the unscrupulous side…Salon, Alternet – these are not websites that are especially assiduous in how they fact check.
At 2:24
There were a couple of people cited in the article who I know to be totally unethical and one is probably a psychopath; these are people who’ve made it their full-time job to destroy reputations of prominent atheists. So there are reasons to be cautious in accepting this BuzzFeed piece.
Parenthetical – I hate listening to him. His voice sounds so dead. He sounds so empty of affect. He creeps me out. I don’t think that’s entirely irrelevant to all this – I think his lack of affect is connected to his total inability (unless its refusal) to see things from the women’s point of view. He talks and seems to think like a robot; it’s creepy.
That’s rude, but not half as rude as he was about BuzzFeed.
Interestingly, however, he then goes on to say that though he felt there was good reason to be cautious about the BuzzFeed story, still, where there’s smoke there’s fire, but on the other hand he didn’t think he and Matt should be expected to pronounce on the subject on stage 24 hours later, but on the other other hand his decision not to share the stage with Lawrence that night “was based on a sense that there’s very likely some truth in it, and that it would be bad for me and Matt to be onstage, accepting his blanket denials, and then pretending to move on to other topics.” What’s interesting about that is that it’s not what he said at the time. At all.
4:05 Generically, BuzzFeed is terrible. There were certainly signs of bad faith in the article.
BuzzFeed is not terrible. BuzzFeed broke the story on the Steele dossier, remember? Sam Harris is just throwing mud…the way he claims women are throwing mud when they say Krauss is handsy and obnoxious.
4:25 The fact that there’s this much chatter about how he’s behaved is certainly a cause for concern.
He just can’t help himself, can he. Chatter. Would he have said that if it had been men reporting something men care about? No. It’s stupid women, who can’t talk without chattering.
But then he does admit that he’s heard from people who don’t want to go public but do confirm that this is how Krauss behaves, so he can’t defend him. He can first throw shit at BuzzFeed and express contempt for women, but he can’t defend Krauss.
What he can do, though, is inform us that there are gradations. Oh thank fuck he told us; we had no idea.
At 5:25 he announces that if you’re not going to make the distinctions then it’s very hard to take the allegations seriously.
Then he says again he can’t defend Lawrence but – BUT – BUT – we must be careful, it’s so easy to destroy people’s reputations. He means men’s, not people’s. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about women’s reputations, or BuzzFeed reporters’ reputations when they’re reporting on sexual harassment.
One more update: he goes on to explain that there are gradations, as if we didn’t know that. At 8:00:
It stretches all the way to cases where had the guy been desirable to the woman his behavior would have totally passed as flattery and successful flirting…but because he was undesirable it was viewed as unwanted attention and in some cases is being classes as a kind of assault, or a kind of harassment.
In other words, women have the audacity to have preferences.
Some 1.6 million people tune in to “Fox & Friends” every morning, but when Kristian Saucier told the network why he believed he should be pardoned for his national-security-related felony conviction, he clearly had one very specific, very powerful fan of the show in mind: the viewer-in-chief.
“Obviously, there’s two different sets of laws in this country, for the politically elite and for those lower-level individuals, Americans like myself,” he said on the network Sunday. “And I think that’s very upsetting on a basic level for most people. It should be.
“I accepted responsibility. I didn’t go to trial. I pleaded guilty. I said, ‘Look, I made a mistake when I was a young kid, and my family still continues … to be punished for that mistake.’ Whereas Hillary Clinton not only was not punished, but was allowed to run for the highest office in the country, and that should be very upsetting to the American people.”
And Trump took the bait. Of course, Clinton didn’t do what Saucier did, but don’t let that stop you. Less than a week later Trump pardoned Saucier and gave him a high five on Twitter.
So what did this hero do?
Saucier’s self-imposed saga started in 2009, when he snapped photos inside the nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Alexandria while it was in Groton, Conn. The sailor, then 22, said he only wanted mementos of his service as a machinist’s mate on the sub. But federal prosecutors painted him as a disgruntled Navy man whose pictures of the sub’s reactor compartment and propulsion system were a national-security risk.
The “mementos” claim doesn’t wash. Here’s how I know: my brother was in the Navy (the fam had a good time for awhile calling him Ensign Benson, until promotion to Lt jg spoiled that fun), and we once went to visit him and his ship. It was some kind of open house for relatives thing, I guess, because we got to go on board and walk around on deck a little. But. At some point while we were on shore looking at all the ships and chatting, I took a snap of one, and my brother told me that was a big no-no. I was surprised because it seemed to be such a public place and the ships were just sitting there in plain view, so how were they enforcing that? I don’t remember what the explanation was, but I do remember that photography was a Big Red Flag. There’s no way Mr SauceMaker thought it was fine to take snaps inside the sub.
(Irrelevant detail: my brother’s ship was an aircraft carrier; it picked up the astronauts after one of the missions.)
The photos were discovered by chance in 2012. Saucier left his phone at a garbage dump in Hampton, Conn. A supervisor who found the phone powered it on, and showed the photos of the submarine to a retired Navy buddy who recognized the pictures for what they were. They went to authorities.
When federal agents confronted Saucier about the photos, he said the phone was his but initially denied snapping the pictures. Later, the FBI says, he went home, smashed his computer and camera, and flung the pieces in the woods behind his grandfather’s house.
Not all that similar to what Clinton did, is it. Nothing like it, in fact.
Courtlin Arrington. This is the name of the girl who died yesterday. Shot to death in school. Barely any media coverage. She was going to be a nurse. pic.twitter.com/2AKaBLJofJ
Arrington, a high school senior, had been accepted to college and planned to become a nurse. She is the 20th person to be gunned down on a U.S. high school campus this year. The episode at Huffman High is the third fatal school shooting this year.
The shooting happened Wednesday as classes let out at the school, exactly three weeks after 17 people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla. Another school shooting, at a Kentucky high school, killed two students and left 12 other people wounded in January. Students in Florida mourned for Arrington on Twitter and shared their condolences with Huffman High students, knowing all too well the grief of losing a classmate to a school shooting.
This can’t keep happening. This girl is my age, and now, she will never realize her dreams. This is why we scream “never again” till our lungs burn with rage. https://t.co/dezjB3KdHL
Belinda Luscombe interviewed Jordan Peterson for TIME. One thing they talked about was Peterson’s view that Disney’s Frozen is propaganda, as opposed to for instance Sleeping Beauty, which instead is Archetype. Luscombe asks him why he calls Frozen “deeply propagandistic.”
It attempted to write a modern fable that was a counter-narrative to a classic story like, let’s say, Sleeping Beauty — but with no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics. You could say that Sleeping Beauty was raised out of her unconsciousness via a delivering male. Another way of reading the story is that unconsciousness requires active consciousness as an antidote. And the unconsciousness is symbolized in that particular story by femininity and active consciousness by masculinity. I could hardly sit through Frozen. There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.
Awesome. So a story that paints women as unconsciousness and men as active consciousness – note the active, which reminds us that women are passive as well as comatose – is not propaganda at all, it’s Underlying Archetypal Dynamics, while rejecting that not very flattering portrait of women is the subjugation of art to propaganda. How convenient.
She asks him if it’s more propagandistic than say The Little Mermaid, he says the old movies are based on folktales that go back 13,000 years.
Aren’t we allowed to make up new stories?
Not for political reasons.
Oh? Who made up that rule?
God, what a yutz. No, we have to take all folktales as they are, no questioning allowed, no parody allowed, no improvement allowed, no counter-stories allowed, because the only “political reasons” permitted are the ones that are already in place.
Oh, that meeting with Kim that Trump was going to have? Never mind. He got excited and he didn’t mean it and it was all a misunderstanding. Next question?
South Korean official Chung Eui-yong was in the White House yesterday meeting with other officials. Trump decided to see Chung right away; maybe Fox News was in repeats or something. Trump “then asked Mr. Chung to tell him about his meeting with Mr. Kim,” reports the New York Times. “When Mr. Chung said that the North Korean leader had expressed a desire to meet Mr. Trump, the president immediately said he would do it, and directed Mr. Chung to announce it to the White House press corps.”
It sounds from this account that Trump had no real idea that North Korea has always wanted a face-to-face meeting with the U.S. president, and the U.S. has always imposed conditions. That would certainly be the logical interpretation of this account, given that, in the last week, Trump has confused North Korea with the other, extremely different South Korea, and demanded a laughably tiny $1 billion trade concession from China when he was supposed to demand $100 billion. It certainly appears Trump believed, in the moment, that North Korea had not been interested in a meeting until then, so he needed to take the deal before they changed their mind. Whatever. Art of the Deal.
Gee. It’s a little bit too bad he didn’t find out about that before immediately saying, “I’ll do it!!!” It’s a little bit too bad he has no idea about any of this.
Now the administration is backing away without admitting that’s what it’s doing.
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters today Trump won’t meet with North Korea unless they offer concrete concessions beforehand:
Press Sec. Sanders on talks with North Korea: "The president will not have the meeting without seeing concrete steps and concrete actions take place by North Korea." https://t.co/phiWfrQOEUpic.twitter.com/7xHdQse21v
But that’s just the same old policy it always was.
Which means Trump shot off his mouth and got excited and then his advisers had to explain to him why he can’t do that. Or maybe they haven’t explained it to him and are backing out without his permission. Whatever the explanation, the major policy change Trump announced appears to be completely moot because he plays the president on television but isn’t really president.
An Iranian woman who publicly removed her veil to protest against a mandatory hijab law has been sentenced to two years in prison, prosecutors say.
The woman, who has not been officially named, was found guilty of “encouraging moral corruption”, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi said.
Because a woman who refuses to wear a heavy scarf covering her hair and ears and neck is “encouraging moral corruption.” Women’s hair must be all but radioactive.
Most have been released, but many are being prosecuted.
Women showing their hair in public in Iran are usually sentenced to far shorter terms of two months or less, and fined $25.
Oh a mere two months imprisonment for not wearing a scarf. How liberal.
Iranian law, in place since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, stipulates that all women, Iranian or foreign, Muslim or non-Muslim, must be fully veiled in public at all times.
But the zeal of the country’s morality police has declined in the past two decades, and a growing number of Iranian women in Tehran and other large cities often wear loose veils that reveal their hair.
In some areas of the capital, women are regularly seen driving cars with veils draped over their shoulders.
Dolatabadi said he would no longer accept such behaviour, and had ordered the impound of vehicles driven by socially rebellious women.
The prosecutor said some “tolerance” was possible when it came to women who wear the veil loosely, “but we must act with force against people who deliberately question the rules on the Islamic veil”, according to Mizan Online.
A celebrity atheist facing a raft of allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards women has backed out of a New Zealand tour.
Lawrence Krauss was due to speak on a double-bill with Richard Dawkins at the Science in the Soul tour in May in Auckland and Christchurch, but the promoter this morning announced he would no longer be on the bill.
Instead, Dawkins would appear at the two Science in the Soul shows alone, with a new co-host to be announced, Australia-based Think Inc said.
Then not alone but with a new co-host. Anyway – do we think there’s any chance the new co-host will be a woman?
Not a lot, is my view. They’re stuck in the loop – only men are famous enough to sell tickets, because only men get asked to do these things, because only men are famous enough to sell tickets, because only men get asked to do these things, etc. Women never get the chance to get famous enough to be asked to do these things, because everyone is too busy assuming that only men put bums on seats.
The move comes after Auckland University of Technology pulled its sponsorship of the tour, and New Zealand event management firm Loop had also backed out.
It’s not clear if they will change their minds now that he has decided not to go.
A number of Krauss’ public speaking arrangements have already been cancelled in America since allegations spanning over a decade about his inappropriate behaviour towards women were recently published by news website Buzzfeed.
“Has my language or demeanour sometimes made others feel uncomfortable? Clearly yes, and for that I sincerely apologise,” he wrote.
“Nevertheless, the BuzzFeed article effectively paints a false picture of me and my relationships with others through a mosaic constructed largely out of anonymous hearsay and a web of often vague innuendo.”
So it’s pure coincidence that there are many such claims about Krauss while there are none (at least that I’ve ever heard of) about for instance Sam Harris?
As any longtime legal hand in the capital remembers well, it was a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by an Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, against Bill Clinton that led to his impeachment for lying about his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.
The case of the adult film actress, Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage-name Stormy Daniels, may not get past even the first considerable obstacles. But if her court case proceeds, Mr. Trump and his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, may have to testify in depositions, several lawyers said in interviews on Thursday. Ms. Clifford’s suit could possibly also provide evidence of campaign spending violations, which would bolster a pending Federal Election Commission complaint against Mr. Trump’s campaign.
In a perfect world I’d rather see him fall for even worse things, but on the other hand, there’s a certain poetic justice if it’s the pussygrabbing habit that gets him. Pussy fights back.
David A. Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said the lawsuit Ms. Clifford filed on Tuesday centered on a limited contract law matter, but he noted that it also specifically stated that Ms. Clifford would amend her complaint in the future to add the names of people who she said participated in wrongdoing with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen.
He suggested that Ms. Clifford and her lawyer might be starting with a narrow argument aimed at getting the contract declared invalid, perhaps intending to broaden it later to include claims that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen coerced her into silence. “If that happened,” he said, “they certainly could seek to depose Trump.”
And in that case, he said, “I can certainly imagine how it might get broader. And if it did, the wide array of Trump’s sexual interactions could be addressed, just as the wide array of Clinton’s sexual interactions was addressed in the Paula Jones case deposition.”
In an interesting paradox, Ms. Clifford might be unable to sue because of the NDA, but on the other hand if the NDA is so sweeping it amounts to a gag order then it’s invalid.
“If the parties agreed to binding arbitration, they have waived their right to file a lawsuit,” said H. Christopher Bartolomucci, a law partner at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington who previously worked in the White House as associate counsel to President George W. Bush. Ms. Clifford’s signature on the contract, and acceptance of the money, could count as a clear sign of agreement.
But other legal experts were struck by the sweeping nature of the nondisclosure agreement Ms. Clifford signed, and expressed skepticism that it would hold up in court. Beyond the circumstances of the alleged sexual relationship, the agreement barred her from doing anything, even indirectly, to “publicly disparage” Mr. Trump.
“It actually presents a relatively clean issue for the court,” said Lawrence M. Noble, a former top lawyer at the Federal Election Commission who is now the general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group. “What she signed amounts to a gag order, and she has rights if this agreement is not found to be valid.”
The investigation into the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal has widened, as police sealed off the graves of his wife, Liudmila, and son, Alexander, and confirmed that a total of 21 people had been treated as a result of the incident.
The police officer who was exposed to the nerve agent used on the Skripals, named on Thursday as DS Nick Bailey, remained in a serious but stable condition.
…
Forensics officers began a major search for evidence at Skripal’s semi-detached house. They also cordoned off the graves in Salisbury cemetery where Liudmila and Alexander Skripal were interred in adjacent plots, and sealed off a garage and recovery service elsewhere in the city.
I wouldn’t want to be living in the other half of that semi.
Experts at the government’s laboratory at Porton Down have identified the poison used but are keeping shtum.
The use of a nerve toxin, usually only held in state military stockpiles, is being seen as a key indicator of possible Kremlin involvement. On Thursday, the Russian embassy in London sent a sarcastic tweet, saying of Skripal: “He was actually a British spy, working for MI6.”
Moscow has repeatedly denied it has anything to do with the attack, the same line used when the FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006 with a radioactive cup of tea. A public inquiry a decade later ruled the Kremlin had ordered the hit.
I’m starting to think the Russian government is not a very benevolent outfit.
The Salisbury attack left Skripal and his daughter in a comatose condition last Sunday afternoon, on a bench in the Maltings shopping centre.
Detectives will be seeking to establish how the toxin was delivered – and, crucially, where. One source suggested that Bailey was exposed to the nerve agent from inside Skripal’s house and not in the city centre, as was previously thought.
It is understood that the cordon at the cemetery is in place primarily to keep media away from the graves of Liudmila Skripal, who died of cancer in 2012 aged 59, and Alexander Skripal, who died in March last year in St Petersburg, aged 43.
There was no sign of activity taking place on the site, but the family’s run of ominous bad luck is likely to prompt police to examine whether Liudmila and Alexander may have been victims of foul play.
Trump is wishing he had some of that stuff, whatever it is.
The Times solemnly reports on Trump’s North Korea caper as if it were sane and normal and likely to produce excellent results, and doesn’t talk to anyone who sees it differently until the last few paragraphs. Waaaay down at the bottom we get:
Analysts expressed skepticism about Mr. Trump’s decision to meet Mr. Kim, saying there was no indication that North Korea had given up its determination to be a nuclear weapons state.
“There is every reason to believe that North Korea is attempting to blunt sanctions and secure de facto legitimacy for its nuclear weapons program with this gesture,” said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser to President George W. Bush, speaking by telephone from Tokyo.
Evan S. Medeiros, an Asia adviser to President Barack Obama, said that any direct talks would elevate Mr. Kim and legitimize him. “We got nothing for it. And Kim will never give up his nukes,” Mr. Medeiros said. “Kim played Moon and is now playing Trump.”
This week, administration officials had spoken in scathing terms about North Korea’s offer of direct talks. They noted that Mr. Kim said nothing about halting the production of nuclear bombs or missiles during negotiations — which meant the North could build its arsenal while stringing out the talks.
It seemed that the only thing that changed was Mr. Kim’s invitation to meet Mr. Trump himself. The president’s deal-making skills, one of his aides said on Thursday, could produce an outcome different from previous rounds of diplomacy, which have always ended in failure and disappointment.
[Editing to add: actually a year and a week ago. I should have realized. I knew he’d started doing it as soon as he got the chance, but I assumed this was a new phase. Reminder to self: check the year.]
President Trump stepped up his attack on federal environmental protections Tuesday, issuing an order directing his administration to begin the long process of rolling back sweeping clean water rules that were enacted by his predecessor.
……………………………What kind of fucking evil sack of shit gets rid of clean water rules?
Stupid question; I know; the fucking evil sack of shit who stole the election and now gets to destroy everything. I know. But making the water more toxic…god damn.
The order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to set about dismantling the Waters of the United States rule takes aim at one of President Obama’s signature environmental legacies, a far-reaching anti-pollution effort that expanded the authority of regulators over the nation’s waterways and wetlands.
…
“It is such a horrible, horrible rule,” Trump said as he signed the directive Tuesday aimed at the water rules. “It has such a nice name, but everything about it is bad.” He declared the rule, championed by environmental groups to give the EPA broad authority over nearly two-thirds of the waterways in the nation, “one of the worst examples of federal regulation” and “a massive power grab.”
It won’t be easy or quick for him though.
Both the climate and the clean water rules were enacted only after a long and tedious process of public hearings, scientific analysis and bureaucratic review. That entire process must be revisited before they can be weakened. It could take years.
…
Trump vowed Tuesday that he would continue to undermine the Obama-era environmental protections wherever he sees the opportunity, arguing they have cost jobs. “So many jobs we have delayed for so many years,” Trump said. “It is unfair to everybody.”
Many industries take issue with that interpretation. Tuesday’s order, for example, was met with a swift rebuke from sport fishing and hunting groups. They said the clean water rule has been a boon to the economy, sustaining hundreds of thousands of jobs in their industry.
“Sports men and women will do everything within their power to compel the administration to change course and to use the Clean Water Act to improve, not worsen, the nation’s waterways,” a statement from a half-dozen of the organizations said.
If there’s a shitty thing that can be done, you can be sure Trump will do it.
