Science magazine on the government shutdown:

The shutdown is “just deeply disappointing because Congress has had months to fund the government,” said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a statement. “Without a resolution the federal scientific enterprise will come to a screeching halt, potentially adding millions of dollars in costs and months of delay to taxpayer funded projects.”

It’s the spawn of “starve the beast” – of that whole right-wing trend to frame all government as the enemy, from Ayn Rand to Grover Norquist to these pieces of crap who are trashing everything now. They want to make the US a failed state; that’s the goal.

The shutdown’s impacts could be especially complicated at federal facilities that host researchers who are not federal employees. The federally-operated Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, for example, “will be closed to the public and all employees except for a few staff needed for security, animal care and emergency responses,” stated Anson Hines, SERC’s director, in an email. The one-third of the center’s staff who are federal employees “will not be allowed to do any work offsite, and all who are on travel will be required to return home as quickly as possible.” But the other two-thirds are funded through the Smithsonian’s private trust, “so they’re expected to work as much as possible offsite. However, I’m sure you can imagine, without access to the SERC laboratory, the work they can do will be limited.”

The beast is duly starved.

The National Secular Society on Arif Qawi and St Stephen’s school last Monday, before the theocrats bullied them into submission.

The chair of governors at a highly-performing primary school has called on the Government to issue guidance to help enforce standards on the Islamic headscarf and fasting.

Arif Qawi, chair of governors at St Stephen’s in Upton Park, east London, said the Department for Education should “step up and take it out of our hands”.

Mr Qawi said the school had faced a “backlash” from some parents after banning girls under the age of eight from wearing the hijab in school and encouraging children not to fast on school premises. He said he found it “unfair” that the Government had left uniform policy to individual head teachers and their governing bodies.

His words echo a request from the National Secular Society in September. In a letter to the then Secretary of State for Education, Justine Greening, the NSS urged the Government to issue guidance making clear the Government would support schools which choose not to incorporate the hijab into their uniform codes.

“The guidance should also make clear that the freedom to make accommodations to allow the wearing of the hijab does not extend to primary schools,” the letter said.

“Given the ‘justifications’ that lie behind so called ‘modesty’ codes, and its implicit sexualisation of children, we regard it as a matter of deep regret that so many schools are facilitating young girls being dressed in the hijab.

“Education policy should empower girls and help them to make their own decisions once they are ready to do so. Whilst policies permitted the wearing of the hijab are so often framed in terms of choice and freedom, we urge you to recognise that this ‘freedom’ is often dictated by social pressure.”

Social pressure backed up by religious zeal, which is a kind of social pressure it’s very hard to resist, especially for young children.

Neena Lall, the head teacher, said the school had made the changes to help pupils integrate into modern British society. “A couple of years ago I asked the children to put their hands up if they thought they were British,” she said. “Very few children put their hands up.”

Mr Qawi said the school had not banned fasting altogether, but had “encouraged them [children] to fast in holidays, at weekends and not on the school campus”. Some parents expected their children to fast during Ramadan.

He said it was “common sense” that the Government should “take it out of our hands and tell every school this is how it should be”.

“Here we are responsible for their health and safety if they pass out on campus. It is not fair to us.

“The same for the hijab. It should not be our decision. It is unfair to teachers and very unfair to governors. We are unpaid. Why should we get the backlash?”

He said some parents were “pleased” that the school had taken a stand.

But the godbotherers have now overruled them.

Oops, no freedom from hijab for you, little girl.

St Stephen’s primary school in Newham, east London, hit the headlines at the weekend after the Sunday Times reported it had banned Muslim girls under the age of eight from wearing headscarves, to the delight of campaigners who argued it enforces religious conformity on children.

That decision, along with curbs on children fasting on school days during Ramadan, upset many parents, who said they had not been consulted.

Consulted about starving and dehydrating their children? Consulted about treating little girls as sexual vampires who have to be muffled up in cloth to keep them from Tempting males? Parental rights stop where child abuse begins.

On Friday, the school’s chair of governors, Arif Qawi, said he was stepping down, telling colleagues in an email: “I wish the school continued success and am truly sorry that my actions have caused any harm to the reputation of the fantastic school.”

Qawi’s comments regarding “Islamisation” posted on social media attracted sustained criticism, while parents complained that they first heard about the ban through the media rather than the school.

The website for St Stephen’s posted a note on Friday, headlined as a uniform policy update, that read: “Having spoken to our school community we now have a deeper understanding of the matter and have decided to reverse our position with immediate effect.”

So, victory for theocratic bullies and defeat for secular education and children’s welfare.

Miqdaad Versi, the assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said his organisation welcomed Qawi’s resignation because of his “appalling” statements in support of the ban.

“This decision on religious symbols did not appear to target adherents of other faiths and appears to have been made without consulting the parents or community,” Versi said. “Yet serious questions remain unanswered as to the school leadership’s attitude towards Muslims, which are potentially discriminatory.

“It is deeply disappointing that a primary school with such a reputation has acted in this way. We hope that future decisions are made carefully and with full consultation with local communities.”

So that schools will never be a refuge from religious fanaticism and a place to learn about and participate in the real world instead of religious dogma.

Amina Lone, an activist who has lobbied the government to bar hijabs in schools for young girls, was disappointed by the school’s U-turn: “A result of clicktivism in all its polarised glory. So much for choice and individual liberty. Terribly sad day for a secular democracy,” Lone wrote on Twitter.

It’s pathetic.

As you may have seen, Trump and Co want to force people to work to qualify for Medicaid.

Under the planned new Health and Human Services regulations announced last week, waivers will be granted to states willing to restructure their programs to force individuals who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid to work—generally for about 20 hours a week—to qualify for coverage.

What if they’re not well enough to work? What if they can’t find work? What if they have small children at home and no one else to take care of them?

They should have thought of that before they became poor.

The plan purports to help the poor economically and health-wise, but its almost certain to make people poorer and sicker instead. Nationwide, the changes are expected to drastically reduce enrollment, arbitrarily denying millions of impoverished people access to life-saving medical services.

Anti-poverty and health-care advocates say the waivers, which enable state Medicaid programs to mandate employment for all so-called “able-bodied” adults, are not only cruel but irrational: The vast majority of working-age Medicaid recipients (excluding the elderly and people with disabilities) currently are already employed anyway. Those who aren’t are often facing severe employment barriers precisely because of poor health. According to the think tank CLASP, “over one-third of working-age Medicaid recipients not working are unemployed because of illness or disability.”

They should just build a luxury high rise and get rich; problem solved.

Those who would be forced to find work as part of the administration’s work requirements will likely be tracked into low-wage jobs that simultaneously lack employer-sponsored benefits and leave them ineligible for Medicaid, according to a Community Catalyst analysis: Essentially, they would make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but still not get any benefits from their boss. These workers would also fall into an ever-widening coverage gap: too “rich” for Medicaid, too poor for subsidized insurance the federal health-care exchanges.

It’s what we do here – heap ever more rewards on the already rich, and ever more punishments on the struggling poor.

Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Great respect but it’s time to step aside.

I’m afraid my first reaction to some of these spoutings is to ask, “Which man told you to say that?”

That isn’t always justified. In fact I don’t often say it but the thought recurs and sometimes it is needed. There are too many people about who can be catapulted straight into apoplexy by my saying, “Yes, I remember that. In the early ‘80s I was spearheading the campaign at work to get an evidence-based job evaluation scheme introduced which looked only at what work you did, what knowledge you had had to gain and left out entirely matters of sex, race, class.” The previous model, such as it was, had paid far too much attention to where you were seen to be in some social hierarchy. We got there in the end, not solely down to me, as once we had the agreement in principle I stepped back and a new team took over to slog through the technicalities and the resistance of a few fairly useless managers who were going to lose their place at the top table.

Feminism has always been about race and class, as well as gender equality. Some of the great classics come out of the USA and they acknowledge that. An entirely different angle comes out of France, though I’ve read less of that because so little of it was published in English and my French is a bit dodgy.

In contrast, much of what we are now hassled with seems to pop out of the spiel of political illiterates, float across the Atlantic on a raft of discarded plastic and pop straight out of the mouths of those who have not yet engaged their brains.

It’s the old, old story – whether it was Marx who first said it or not – if you don’t learn your history you are doomed to repeat it. A far better idea would be to learn first, speak later.

A modest suggestion – try Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. You won’t like it. You certainly won’t agree with it: I don’t now either but I’m bloody glad I read it before I allowed my brain to be set in a couple of concrete cliches. An easier read is Norris and Liddington, One Hand Tied Behind us (the copy I have is Virago) but you need to know that too. Jill Liddington lives a couple of miles up the hill from me, technically retired but still at it. She’ll probably go on doing feminism her way, as will all us second wavers, until she drops.

Why should we not? We have achievements we can show you youngsters. We have proof that it works.

Oh this again,  or rather, still. Always. Never not. Woman interviews an idol of the right, woman is target of a torrent of abuse. The woman is Cathy Newman of Channel 4 (the UK one), the idol of the right is Jordan Peterson.

Ben de Pear, the editor of Channel 4 News, said Newman had been subjected to “vicious misogynistic abuse”. Having to calling in security specialists was a “terrible indictment of the times we live in”, he said.

Newman interviewed the psychologist, Jordan Peterson, about gender on Tuesday. A video of the full 30-minute interview has been watched more than 1.6m times on the Channel 4 News YouTube page and has attracted more than 36,000 comments.

I’ve watched a bit of it. She challenges some of his claims, as interviewers sometimes do.

The combative Channel 4 interview led to praise for Peterson and criticism for Newman on some right-leaning sites. James Delingpole, a Breitbart columnist, said the interview marked a “pivotal victory in the culture wars” and that the “weaknesses of the regressive left have never been more cruelly or damningly expose”. Douglas Murray in the Spectator said: “I don’t think I have ever witnessed an interview that is more catastrophic for the interviewer.”

Newman has faced a wave of abuse and threats online, including on Twitter. There is no suggestion that Peterson, Delingpole or Murray are behind the threats or instigated them.

Are they, I wonder, doing anything to try to discourage them? Are they bothering to say they don’t admire fans who instigate waves of abuse and threats? Are they taking a moment to say that disagreeing with Cathy Newman need not entail abuse and threats?

De Pear said on Twitter on Friday: “Our Channel 4 News on-screen journalists expect to be held to account for their journalism but the level of vicious misogynistic abuse, nastiness, and threat to Cathy Newman is an unacceptable response to a robust and engaging debate with Jordan Peterson.

“Such is the scale of threat we are having to get security specialists in to carry out an analysis. I will not hesitate to get the police involved if necessary. What a terrible indictment of the times we live in.”

Newman retweeted De Pear’s posts. In response to Murray’s column – in which he said Newman should get Channel 4 to remove the video from the internet because of how “catastrophic” it was – she said earlier in the week: “Always grateful for advice from Douglas Murray but I won’t be suing or taking out a super-injunction. I thoroughly enjoyed my bout with Jordan Peterson as did hundreds of thousands of our viewers. Viva feminism, viva free speech. Stay tuned Douglas.”

Cue the abuse and threats.

Guest post by James Garnett.

I see a lot of people cheering on a government shutdown. You need to consider what this means. It’s not just parks closing. During a shutdown, the National Science Foundation stops payments, which can rapidly result in research coming to a halt. For time-sensitive studies, this can mean the loss of data collection that can destroy a study completely. Research projects that have been funded to the tune of millions or even billions of dollars, which have been ongoing for years, can come to an abrupt end without results. That can cripple careers.

Thought for the day:

I have great respect for the contributions that many older women made to the feminist movement, at times when it was harder than I have ever experienced. It is also time for them to listen, to learn, to step aside

— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) January 17, 2018

Nope.

Not stepping aside.

Shocking and astonishing fact: young people are not always automatically right, and old people are not always automatically wrong. It’s a little more complicated than that.

Originally a comment by iknklast on The right to refuse to do your job.

I nearly lost my mother when I was 9 because a Catholic doctor had refused her any contraceptive care – then bawled her out when she got pregnant again. I suppose he felt my mother, a married woman in her mid-30s, had no right to have sexual relations anymore because getting pregnant was dangerous.

For the record, my mother was not, and never had been, Catholic. She was a member of a religion that didn’t go around poking its nose into married people’s bedrooms, though they could be fierce if someone got pregnant outside of marriage.

My mother had five children at the time, ranging in age from 3 to 14. She had decided 5 was enough, but her doctor refused to treat her like she was adult enough to make such decisions for herself. Fortunately, she did manage to survive the 6th pregnancy, but spent the entire time bedridden, with her 7, 9, and 12 year old daughters having to care for her instead of doing 7, 9, and 12 year old things. What if we hadn’t been able to do that?

Also for the record: this doctor did not work for a Catholic hospital or a Catholic clinic. He worked for the United States government. He was a Navy doctor, and the Navy had no rules prohibiting married women from receiving contraceptive care, even surgical. The Supreme Court had already declared that to be a right of married women (which took too damned long, having happened only 4 years before!)

Trump would love for us to go back to a time where women have no say whatsoever over their own reproductive rights. And until the Supreme Court gets rid of those 4 pesky liberal judges who persuade Justice Kennedy to vote with them on not totally knocking out the right to these procedures (though Kennedy does vote to uphold every limitation short of overturning), the best he can do is put in a religious provision that does the same thing in effect for many women.

How many women will die? And who in the Trump administration will give damn? (That last question is rhetorical; the obvious answer is “no one.”)

Barbara Kingsolver pulls no punches:

Patriarchy persists because power does not willingly cede its clout; and also, frankly, because women are widely complicit in the assumption that we’re separate and not quite equal. If we’re woke, we inspect ourselves and others for implicit racial bias, while mostly failing to recognise explicit gender bias, which still runs rampant. Religious faiths that subordinate women flourish on every continent. Nearly every American educational institution pours the lion’s share of its athletics budget into the one sport that still excludes women – American football.

Most progressives wouldn’t hesitate to attend a football game, or to praise the enlightened new pope – the one who says he’s sorry, but women still can’t lead his church, or control our reproduction.

[waves madly] I would! I’ve written a lot about what’s wrong with American football (and I wouldn’t go near a game), and even more about how loathsome the pope’s church is.

In heterosexual weddings, religious or secular, the patriarch routinely “gives” his daughter to the groom, after which she’s presented to the audience as “Mrs New Patriarch,” to joyous applause. We have other options, of course: I kept my name in marriage and gave it to my daughters. But most modern brides still embrace the ritual erasure of their identities, taking the legal name of a new male head of household, as enslaved people used to do when they came to a new plantation owner.

I can already hear the outcry against conflating traditional marriage with slavery. Yes, I know, the marital bargain has changed: women are no longer chattels. Tell me this giving-away and name-changing are just vestiges of a cherished tradition. I’ll reply that some of my neighbours here in the south still fly the Confederate flag – not with hate, they insist, but to honour a proud tradition. In either case, a tradition in which people legally control other people doesn’t strike me as worth celebrating, even symbolically.

If any contract between men required the non-white one to adopt the legal identity of his Caucasian companion, would we pop the champagne? If any sport wholly excluded people of colour, would it fill stadiums throughout the land? Would we attend a church whose sacred texts consign Latinos to inferior roles? What about galas where black and Asian participants must wear painful shoes and clothes that reveal lots of titillating, well-toned flesh while white people turn up comfortably covered?

That’s a lot of punches not pulled. [cheers]

Years ago, as a college student, I spent a semester abroad in a beautiful, historic city where the two sentences I heard most in English, usually conjoined, were “You want to go for coffee?” and “You want to have sex with me, baby?” I lived near a huge public garden where I wished I could walk or study, but couldn’t, without being followed, threatened and subjected to jarring revelations of some creep’s penis among the foliages. My experiment in worldliness had me trapped, fuming, in a tiny apartment.

Oh yeah. We were just talking about that the other day.

She solved the problem by pretending to be pregnant, and it worked but of course it was annoying to have to wear a pillow in order to go out unmolested.

Let’s be clear: no woman asks to live in a rape culture: we all want it over, yesterday. Mixed signals about female autonomy won’t help bring it down, and neither will asking nicely. Nothing changes until truly powerful offenders start to fall. Feminine instincts for sweetness and apology have no skin in this game. It’s really not possible to overreact to uncountable, consecutive days of being humiliated by men who say our experience isn’t real, or that we like it actually, or are cute when we’re mad. Anger has to go somewhere – if not out then inward, in a psychic thermodynamics that can turn a nation of women into pressure cookers. Watching the election of a predator-in-chief seems to have popped the lid off the can. We’ve found a voice, and now is a good time to use it, in a tone that will not be mistaken for flirtation.

Beautiful.

Guest post by Raymond Dickey.

There was a certain rich man who had a doctor, and an accusation was brought to him that this doctor was making him look bad. So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of my physical, for you can no longer be my doctor.’

Then the doctor said within himself, ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the position away from me. I cannot diagnose; I am ashamed to plug pharmaceuticals. I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of medicine, they may receive me into their party.’

So he reviewed every one of his master’s medical measurements, and said to the first, ‘How much does master weigh?’ And he saw, ‘Over 300 pounds.’ So he said to himself, ‘Take the report, and sit down quickly and write 239.’ Then he reviewed another, ‘And how much blood pressure?’ And he saw, ‘Dangerously high.’ And he said to himself, ‘Take the blood pressure, and write normal.’ And he considers the master’s cognitive function, but decided not to even go there.

So the master commended the incompetent doctor because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this party are more shrewd in their fabrication than the sons of the other party, yea, or the daughters thereof.

In other “pesky brown foreigners wanting to come here” news, it turns out you have to pass a test to be a humanist.

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

Uh…what? Who says Plato and Aristotle even are humanist philosophers? Especially in any modern sense that an ex-Muslim would have in mind? Aristotle is a largely secular philosopher perhaps; Plato isn’t even that. They’re considered part of a broad humanist education, I’ll buy that, but that’s because of the long history of humanist education as meaning drawing on the Greek and Roman classics. Very few modern humanists would put them on a basic humanism reading list, I should think. Maybe the Euthyphro, but more likely a modern version with mention of the Euthyphro.

Walayat, who has lived in the UK since 2011, said he had received death threats from members of his family and community in Pakistan after integrating into secular British life, forming a relationship with a non-Muslim partner and refusing to conform to the expectations of conservative Islam.

Apostates are subject to discrimination, persecution and violence in Pakistan. In March last year, a student who had stated he was a humanist on his Facebook page was murdered at his university.

Yes yes yes but did he know who Anaxagoras was?

Walayat claimed asylum in July last year after being served with removal papers for overstaying his student visa.

After an interview with immigration officials, the Home Office said he had “been unable to provide a consistent or credible account with regards the main aspect of your claim, namely that you are a humanist”.

When tested on his knowledge of humanism, Walayat gave a “basic definition” but could not identify “any famous Greek philosophers who were humanistic”.

That is simply ridiculous. People who want to kill him for being an apostate won’t be fretting about his familiarity with the Greek philosophers, I can assure you.

The Home Office concluded: “Your knowledge of humanism is rudimentary at best and not of a level that would be expected of a genuine follower of humanism.”

Hey! The requirements are nowhere near that stringent. They are simply non-belief in Islam, non-worship of the prophet, non-compliance with Sharia, non-attendance at a mosque, non-observance of Ramadan, not-praying five times a day, and the like. They’re negative; they’re refusal; they’re saying No. The Home Office really ought to know that.

Walayat joined the Humanists UK organisation in August, but said he had believed in the basic principles of humanism from childhood.

According to Humanists UK, “humanism is not a ‘canonical’ belief system, where adherents must learn and follow a strict set of behaviour codes. As a descriptive term, humanists can be someone who has simply rejected religious belief but holds some positive conception of human values.”

In a letter in support of Walayat’s asylum application, Bob Churchill, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, said: “For many, the broad descriptive ‘humanist’ is just a softer way of saying atheist, especially if you come from a place where identifying as atheist may be regarded as a deeply offensive statement.”

Andrew Copson, of Humanists UK, said the move “set a dangerous precedent for non-religious people fleeing persecution. The Home Office is simply incorrect to claim that non-religious people seeking asylum don’t get the same protection in law as religious people do.”

The questions put to Walayat “reveal a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of humanism”, he added.

Or, more cynically, just an underhanded excuse for denying someone asylum.

It looks as if Trump’s Fake News Awards aren’t today after all.

Trump will name “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media” on Wednesday, according to a Jan. 7 tweet, but he appears to have done little preparation for the event — if there even is an event.

“We’ll keep you posted on any details around that potential event and what that would look like,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday when asked about the awards.

Posted? Potential? Would look like? But the awards are supposed to be today. Has he not prepared? No shopping for medals or tiny statues? No combing through the entries? No secret ballots?

What happened to the president’s tweeted claim, nine days earlier, that “the interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated”?

Heightened interest was Trump’s stated reason for pushing back the awards, which he initially said he would give out Jan. 8.

Maybe there’s so much interest he’s put the awards off until 2037.

The racism blowup isn’t going away.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Tuesday, while testifying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the president used “tough language” during a conversation on immigration policy in an Oval Office meeting last week. But Nielsen said she did not hear Trump describe some African countries and Haiti as “shithole countries,” as has been reported.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) found that impossible to believe. He preceded to express his frustration with why Nielsen — and Republican lawmakers Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) — seemed unable to recall what the president said in an Oval Office meeting.

Maybe they Repressed the Memory.

Booker also shared some of his recent conversations with black Americans regarding the comments that the president and his allies deny. He said that the offensive characterization of the countries sending black immigrants to the U.S. was foremost on their minds:

Why is this so important? Why is this so disturbing for me? Why am I frankly, seething with anger? We have this incredible nation where we have been taught that it does not matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter your color, your race, your religion, it’s about the content of your character. It’s about your values and your ideals, and yet we have language that from Richard J. Durbin to Lindsey O. Graham, they seem to have a much better recollection of what went on. You’re under oath. You and others in that room that suddenly cannot remember.

It was Martin Luther King that said there’s ‘nothing in this world more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’ And so here we are in the United States of America, and we have a history that is beautiful and grand and also ugly — where from this nation to others we know what happens when people sit by and are bystanders and say nothing. When Oval Office rhetoric sounds like social engineering, we know from human history the dangers of that.

The commander in chief in an Oval Office meeting referring to people from African countries and Haitians with the most vile and vulgar language. That language festers when ignorance and bigotry is aligned with power — it’s a dangerous force in our country. Your silence and amnesia is complicity.

It keeps coming up, which is not surprising given both Trump’s history and his nature. He’s been a racist all his adult life, and he actively enjoys being the kind of person who is a shameless racist. He’s a narcissist and a showoff, and he thinks racism is something to show off.

It is a regular sight on cable news to see black commentators passionately making a case for their humanity when discussing the latest comment from the president’s statements on white supremacists defending Confederate memorials in Charlottesville, or NFL players protesting racism, or black immigrants from African and Caribbean countries.

They often appear heated and exasperated, frustrated and annoyed or simply disgusted and hurt because more than 50 years after the peak of the civil rights movement, black Americans find themselves having to make the case that some comments, ideas and even policy proposals targeting black people are a direct attack on their humanity.

Remember two years ago? We didn’t know this was going to happen. I miss that.