Meanwhile, uptown, a psychology professor at Columbia Teachers College and some students head to her office.

As they entered her workspace, they passed a mezuza, a small box containing Hebrew religious texts, affixed to her doorpost.

But the sight that met them next made the professor and her students stop in their tracks.

Anti-Semitic graffiti had been spray-painted on the office walls of Elizabeth Midlarsky, a clinical psychologist and Holocaust scholar at Columbia’s Teachers College on the Upper West Side of New York. The vandalism included swastikas and an anti-Semitic slur, “Yid,” painted in bright red on the white walls of her office foyer. The outer door had been closed but not locked, one student said.

“I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it,” Midlarsky said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I’m usually not a fearful person, but they got me. I’m afraid.”

Rya Inman/Columbia Daily Spectator

Last month was the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Of course she’s afraid.

Dark times.

This crap again. A conference called PantheaCon, meaning I assume AllthegoddessesCon, explains why after inviting the well-known scholar Max Dashu to speak it then told her to stay away. It explains, of course, by pouring abuse on Max and licking the bums of people it claims would be terrified by her presence.

To the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming members of the PantheaCon community:

It was a mistake to include Max Dashu in the program and I want to personally apologize to each of you. I have communicated with many of you directly and have read every letter sent personally. I want to apologize for my part in causing the fear, pain, and sense of exclusion that many of you felt. Providing a safe and inclusive space is of primary importance to me and the convention staff. In order to provide that safe space, all trans-exclusionary advocates and those in close association with them will not be presenting at PantheaCon for the foreseeable future. I hope we can have healthy debates about our many societal issues at this and future Cons.

That basically amounts to saying Max is a bad bad scary dangerous bad person, and that they did a bad bad thing inviting her to speak in the first place. And yet – you’ll not be surprised to learn – Max is not a bad bad scary dangerous bad person, and it’s disgusting to behold these people who invited her to speak now flinging shit at her in public.

To all our PantheaCon community:

I also apologize to the whole PantheaCon community for the chaos and confusion caused by our dis-inviting both Max Dashu and Witchdoctor Utu after they had been accepted in our program. Please be assured that this will not happen again. In the future, we will make every effort to more carefully verify presenter credentials and check a variety of sources in our background research. We will also consider the social and political impact of each presenter and presentation in making decisions going forward. If a presenter seems too controversial or divisive to community members, we hope to determine that before the program is published.

Look at that. There’s not even any substance to it. “Too controversial or divisive to community members” – what on earth does that mean? Controversial on what subject or subjects?

The only hint is the recipient list – “the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming members of the PantheaCon community.” So trans people have an automatic and sweeping veto over all speakers who seem too controversial or divisive? But given how touchy the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming community is, that would be almost everyone – except fellow members of the the trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming community.

These people, I swear. They’ll kill off intellectual life if we let them.

Via Screechy Monkey in the Miscellany Room, the Miami Herald on the plea agreement that spared Jeffrey Epstein a long prison sentence:

On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.

…

[Lefkowitz’s] client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.

He was also suspected of trafficking young girls for “parties” with his friends.

Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.

But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.

Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.

Acosta even agreed that the deal would be kept secret from the victims – which violates federal law.

Now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. He also has been on a list of possible replacements for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure earlier this month.

Trump was one of his partying friends back in the day, as was Bill Clinton.

“This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story,’’ said retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, who supervised the police probe.

Now there are two unrelated civil law suits that could turn up what was buried ten years ago.

Federal prosecutors, including Acosta, not only broke the law, the women contend in court documents, but they conspired with Epstein and his lawyers to circumvent public scrutiny and deceive his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The law assigns victims a series of rights, including the right of notice of any court proceedings and the opportunity to appear at sentencing.

“As soon as that deal was signed, they silenced my voice and the voices of all of Jeffrey Epstein’s other victims,’’ said Wild, now 31. “This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars.’’

As most of us aren’t.

Despite substantial physical evidence and multiple witnesses backing up the girls’ stories, the secret deal allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas to two felony prostitution charges. Epstein admitted to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a prostitute, even though she was 14, which is well under the age of consent — 18 in Florida.

…

“It’s just outrageous how they minimized his crimes and devalued his victims by calling them prostitutes,’’ said Yasmin Vafa, a human rights attorney and executive director of Rights4Girls, which is working to end the sexual exploitation of girls and young women.

“There is no such thing as a child prostitute. Under federal law, it’s called child sex trafficking — whether Epstein pimped them out to others or not. It’s still a commercial sex act — and he could have been jailed for the rest of his life under federal law,” she said.

…

A close look at the trove of letters and emails contained in court records provides a window into the plea negotiations, revealing an unusual level of collaboration between federal prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team that even government lawyers, in recent court documents, admitted was unorthodox.

Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.

Did you catch those? Dershowitz, who is now prostituting himself for Donald Trump? Starr, the scourge of Bill Clinton? Yet Clinton himself was reportedly one of Epstein’s buddies.

But Epstein did get some chastisement, yes?

Not really.

Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week, for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.

12 hours in a nice office, 8 sleeping…so that leaves four hours awake in a cell.

In 2011, Epstein petitioned to have his sex offender status reduced in New York, where he has a home and is required to register every 90 days. In New York, he is classified as a level 3 offender — the highest safety risk because of his likelihood to re-offend.

A prosecutor under New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance argued on Epstein’s behalf, telling New York Supreme Court Judge Ruth Pickholtz that the Florida case never led to an indictment and that his underage victims failed to cooperate in the case. Pickholtz, however, denied the petition, expressing astonishment that a New York prosecutor would make such a request on behalf of a serial sex offender accused of molesting so many girls.

“I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this. I have done so many [sex offender registration hearings] much less troubling than this one where the [prosecutor] would never make a downward argument like this,’’ she said.

Epstein has a book full of names.

The story is book-length. Much dirt to shovel.

Grotesque.

A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

Boom.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Whatever it was a bid for, it’s dirty dirty dirty.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.

WELL NO SHIT, SHERLOCK, THAT’S THE POINT. That’s what makes it dirty dirty dirty.

Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office.

But a public relations campaign should be wholly beside the point. It’s not a vote whether or not Trump is a crook, it’s a factual question.

While Mr. Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, who accused Mr. Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant, according to the people. That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects.

Awwww; I hope they can be friends again some time down the road.

In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, the president seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, he tweeted: “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”

I wish a prosecutor twenty feet tall would just tear the roof off the White House right now and pluck Trump out and smash his head on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Maryam posted a Manifesto on Women and Secularism:

International Conference on Sharia, Segregation and Secularism
25 November 2018, London

Today, far-Right movements, including religious fundamentalisms, are seizing power and on the rise in both democratic and authoritarian states. Even in more secularised societies, religious organisations have gained power because they have been considered valuable allies – to provide services as the state shrinks, to oppose radical social justice movements, as part of counter-terror strategies and post conflict ‘stabilisation,’ and as part of the privatisation of law. From development banks to Western aid and human rights organisations, fundamentalists, particularly Islamists, have been promoted in the name of minority and religious rights. The growth of community based ‘Sharia’ and other parallel legal systems is part of this process of acquiescence and promotion by western states and international institutions as much as by fundamentalist regimes and movements.

When far-Right movements, including religious fundamentalists, take power or gain social acceptance, women are the first targets. They erase women from the public space, treat them as second-class citizens and consider them extensions of family and religious and national honour, not individuals with universal human rights.

On the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we recall that the peoples of the world came together in the hope of ending war, colonialism and fascism and ensuring human rights for all regardless of sex, race, citizenship or other status.

These struggles insisted on our common humanity and equality – not difference or superiority. Yet, we are concerned that many of the struggles that constituted universal rights have been erased from history and labelled ‘western’ by regressive identity politics. Those who see human rights and secular values as ‘western’ simply negate the history of local African, Middle Eastern and Asian struggles for secularism and do not recall that secular values were clearly understood to be the only framework which could build multi-ethnic, multi-religious, plural societies based on the emancipation of women and minorities.

Today, we acknowledge that we owe our rights to liberation and civil rights struggles across the globe, which created the foundation of modern human rights, including the right to women’s equality, freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, i.e. freedom of and from religion. We confirm our opposition to the fascist far-Right as we oppose all religious fundamentalisms. One feeds into the other. They are complementary and indispensable to each other. One can never excuse the other. We affirm the centrality of the universality of rights and the principle of secularism – the complete separation of religion from the state – to ensure that religion cannot influence the state and public policy and impose itself on private lives.

‘One Law for All’ stands for the struggle for universalism, secularism and against religious oppression.

More.

Peter Tatchell does keep getting this wrong.

I support both trans rights & women's rights. I deplore threats, intimidation & violence. The best way to resolve this issue is by peaceful protest & by rational, evidence-based ideas that show why trans women are not a threat to non-trans women pic.twitter.com/Iy6XYqRZVg

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) November 27, 2018

First of all the priority. Trans rights first, women’s rights the also-ran. What the hell. First of all that’s one of the core reasons for this whole conflict: this relentless insistence that trans rights are far more important and urgent than boring old women’s rights. Second, why? Why put trans rights first? Women are half of everyone; trans people are a tiny fraction of everyone. What is it with this constant shrugging weary eye-rolling indifference to women’s rights from people who fancy themselves progressives?

Then there’s calling us “non-trans women.” Fuck right off with that. We’re women. That’s it. We’re not “cis” and we’re no more non-trans than we are non-reptile, non-plaster, non-chocolate, non-asteroid.

And most of all there’s his assuming the conclusion and announcing that “rational, evidence-based ideas” will get us there. There’s his assuming as fact that “trans women are not a threat to non-trans women” and that all there is to do is “show” that.

It’s probably true that most trans women are not a threat to women, but Peter Tatchell can’t possibly know that no trans women can ever be a threat of any kind to women. He can’t know that and we can’t know that and governments can’t know that, so systematically removing all arrangements intended to make women safe from voyeuristic or violent men is not automatically a brilliant plan.

That’s speaking generally, but speaking particularly, there’s also the fact that plenty of trans women are visibly and vocally and publicly a threat to women right now as we watch. Plenty of trans women are working hard to silence women who talk back in the way I’m talking back right here. They got a scalp a couple of days ago when they had Meghan Murphy permanently banned from Twitter. So yes, Peter, some trans women and their “allies” are a threat to women right here and right now.

Mars from a mere 4,700 miles away.

Image of #Mars captured from a distance of 4,700 miles by #Marco pic.twitter.com/RPYWlJewSs

— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 26, 2018

Oopsie. You know how Manafort agreed to a plea deal in exchange for getting some charges dismissed? Well he went and lied to the prosecutors after signing the deal, which means they’re filing those charges again.

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to federal investigators in breach of a plea agreement he signed two months ago, the special counsel’s office said in a court filing late on Monday.

Prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, said Mr. Manafort’s “crimes and lies” about “a variety of subject matters relieve them of all promises they made to him in the plea agreement. But under the terms of the agreement, Mr. Manafort cannot withdraw his guilty plea.

Manafort’s lawyers said oh no he didn’t.

[A]fter at least a dozen sessions with him, federal prosecutors have not only decided Mr. Manafort does not deserve leniency, but also could seek to refile other charges that they had agreed to dismiss as part of the plea deal.

So much for making a deal.

Originally a comment by Freemage on There are wheels that have been squeaking for a lot longer.

Religion is an instrument of societal control, but the New Atheist dream that a world without religion would immediately cast off the old chains has been largely and soundly debunked, primarily by the actions and rhetoric of the New Atheists, themselves. Undermining religious conservatives, in particular, does deal with one stumbling block, but it helps to remember there are progressive religionists, too (Quakers, for instance, tend to be a decade or two on the right side of historical changes), who can be counted upon as allies in fights against oppression, at least so long as their atheist counterparts don’t kick things off with, “You’re dumb. Help us.”

I do wonder how much of the extreme trans-woman rhetoric (and yes, it does seem to largely be confined to the transwoman side, with the standard caveats about humans being capable of anything accounting for the handful of transmen extremists) represents the larger body of transwomen, particularly among those who actually seek GRS. I’ve known a small number of transwomen over the years (possibly more, as the ones I KNOW were trans were the ones who transitioned after I’d met them, and I’ve seen enough of them post-transition to realize that I’m not particularly good at telling the difference on sight), and literally none of them have ever spouted off the sorts of nonsense and hateful rhetoric Ophelia regularly quotes here. Instead, they were generally inclined to keep to themselves and were way too busy navigating the assorted difficulties of life to deal with this sort of thing.

The bit that blows my mind is the extreme trans alliance with the ‘non-binary’ movement. The latter absolutely SHOULD be a feminist-adjacent cause, but got co-opted by the trans extremists somehow, even though they always seem to have opposing agendas, to my understanding. To feminist ideology, there’s little difference between ‘non-binary’ and ‘breathing’–a truly ‘binary man’ would be more like a Chuck Norris meme come to life; I’m not even sure I could imagine a genuinely ‘binary woman’, since the definition of femininity is almost always rigged to make sure that no human being could fit all the requirements (because that makes it easier to point out how any given woman is a ‘failure’ to meet the contradictory requirements). Sure, there’s a bit of special snowflake-ism to calling yourself non-binary, but that seems like it could be a window to getting the person to realize that this is the natural human condition, and that the gender roles they’re rejecting shouldn’t be forced on anyone.

The logic of it.

Well done @AlexSharpe64 @BBCWomansHour for articulating the utterly sensible argument that cis women have nothing to fear from changes to the GRA. As Alex clearly stated, trans women have always been present in women’s toilets, refugees etc. That’s because trans women are women.

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) November 26, 2018

By the same token, men have always been present everywhere. And? Does it follow that women have nothing to fear from men? Hardly. It’s not a vanishingly rare occurrence for men to use their superior size and strength to get violent with women. Even if you think it’s uncomplicatedly true that trans women are women, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some men will pretend to be trans women in order to assault women. It doesn’t even rule out the possibility that some men could consider themselves trans women while not actually being trans women. (What? What does that mean? Isn’t saying it the same as being it? Well that’s the issue, isn’t it. What, exactly, is the difference between saying it and being it? If it really is just a matter of saying, why can’t people just say it for the moment and then unsay it 30 seconds later? How do we know they mean it? How do we know they’re not just having a laugh? How do we know they’re not being sarcastic? How do we know it’s not a ploy? How do we know anything? When trans is both a profound and intense inner [lived] experience and a simple matter of self-declaration, what is it at all?)

Sally Hines might as well have said men have always been married to women therefore women have nothing to fear from marriage to men. Most women don’t, of course, but some do, and the men who are going to turn violent don’t come with labels saying so.