The IHEU reports another freethinker slaughtered.

Yameen Rasheed (29) was well-known in the Maldives as a satirist, taking shots at the government, or at Islamist radicals, all the time promoting the values of secularism and democracy that he obviously held dear.

He was found dead in the early hours of Sunday morning, stabbed to death in the stairwell of his apartment.

The IHEU met Yameen Rasheed earlier this year, during his visit to the Human Rights Council with Forum Asia. He spoke on a panel with Rafida Bonya Ahmed, who herself survived a machete attack in 2015 during which her husband Avijit Roy was killed.

IHEU Director of Advocacy, Elizabeth’s O’Casey, kept in touch with Rasheed after meeting him at the event. Rasheed updated the IHEU on death threats against himself and other secularists, and IHEU raised his case with Ahmed Shaheed (the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief).

“I have just heard the horrific news that the world has lost an incredibly intelligent, articulate, kind and courageous man: Yameen Rasheed. I liked him enormously, although I did not know him well enough – to my eternal regret,” said Elizabeth O’Casey today. “And he has now been brutally murdered. And the secularist human rights community has lost yet another light, another blogger and activist, and the world is darker because of it.”

The IHEU joins Forum Asia and PEN International in calling for a full, transparent, impartial investigation, and supports the call by opposition figures for international involvement in the inquiry.

This god hides from us, but wants us murdered if we don’t believe it exists. Could there be anything more tyrannical?

It appears that the White House has refused to provide documents requested by the House Oversight committee investigating Flynn.

Also, the leaders of the committee say Flynn probably broke the law.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn probably broke the law by failing to disclose foreign income he earned from Russia and Turkey, the heads of the House Oversight Committee said Tuesday.

Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), said they believe Flynn neither received permission nor fully disclosed income he earned for a speaking engagement in Russia and lobbying activities on behalf of Turkey when he applied to reinstate his security clearance. They reached this conclusion after viewing two classified memos and a financial disclosure form in a private briefing Tuesday morning.

…

Chaffetz and Cummings stressed that as a former military officer, Flynn would have needed special permission for his appearance at a gala sponsored by RT, the Russian-government-funded television station, for which he was paid $45,000. For his work lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government, he was paid more than $500,000.

“It does not appear that was ever sought, nor did he get that permission,” Chaffetz said.

That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a former military officer could just not be aware of.

The Oversight Committee asked the White House in March for documents pertaining to Flynn’s security-clearance applications, the vetting that occurred before he was named national security adviser, and all of his contacts with foreign agents, including any payments received. In particular, the committee heads requested to see a disclosure form known as the SF-86, on which Flynn was obligated to declare any foreign income.

On April 19, the White House sent the committee a reply, stating that any documents related to Flynn from before Jan. 20 — the day President Trump took office — were not in its possession, and that any documents from after that date did not seem relevant to the committee’s investigation.

“The White House has refused to provide this committee with a single piece of paper in response to our bipartisan request,” Cummings said.

Not good.

God damn. Worse again. The State Department was advertising Mar-a-Lago. Yes that’s right: the State Department was advertising Mar-a-Lago.

The State Department has removed a blog post that touted President Donald Trump’s personally owned private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. The post was available to all embassies through Share America, a State Department program for US embassies.

“The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the President has been hosting world leaders,” a small message reads on the Share America website. “We regret any misperception and have removed the post”

The story is still up on the US Embassy in London’s website, but officials say the post is expected to be removed.

Yes it is. I clicked on that link in a hurry before they took it down, and there it is. Note the url: https://uk.usembassy.gov/mar-lago-winter-white-house/

Embassy DOTGOV slash MAR-LAGO-WINTER-WHITE-HOUSE.

Here’s what the STATE DEPARTMENT’S EMBASSY WEBSITE says about Trump’s expensive golf resort:

Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Florida estate, has become well known as the president frequently travels there to work or host foreign leaders.

The first meeting between Trump and President Xi Jinping of China will take place April 6–7 at Mar-a-Lago, which is located at the heart of Florida’s Palm Beach community.

Trump is not the first president to have access to Mar-a-Lago as a Florida retreat, but he is the first one to use it. By visiting this “winter White House,” Trump is belatedly fulfilling the dream of Mar-a-Lago’s original owner and designer.

When socialite and cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post built Mar-a-Lago — Spanish for “Sea to Lake” — in 1927, she spared no expense. The 114-room mansion sits on 8 hectares of land, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and an inland waterway on the other.

Upon her death in 1973, she willed the estate to the U.S. government, intending it to be used as a winter White House for the U.S. president to entertain visiting foreign dignitaries.

Read the full story at ShareAmerica !

By U.S. Mission to the United Kingdom | 5 April, 2017 | Categories: Policy, President Donald Trump | Tags: Mar-a-Lago, Winter White House

CNN goes on:

In a markedly promotional blog post from April 5 that could eventually benefit the President’s bottom line, should it spur membership or foreign visits, the embassy writes that the property has “become well known as the President frequently travels there to work or host foreign leaders.”

Ethics watchdogs and Democratic groups have been closely eyeing Trump’s ability to benefit his bottom line through the presidency and this blog post has some questioning whether the government is now helping publicize the property.

Questioning? I think they can skip the questioning. Of course it damn well is. This isn’t like writing a little piece about Hyannisport or the Crawford ranch, this is a very expensive for profit resort hotel open to the public. It’s disgusting that the State Department is promoting it.

Both Norm Eisen, former President Barack Obama’s ethics czar, and Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, said the blog post was a violation of federal law that restricts aspects of the government promoting a private business that benefits their superior, the president.

“This is outrageous, more exploitation of public office for Trump’s personal gain,” Eisen said. “Using the government’s megaphone to promote Mar-a-Lago” is like when Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, urged people during a television interview to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.

The man is scum.

It could all just end you know.

It seems eternal because it’s what we know…which is to say, it’s an illusion that it’s eternal, or even all that stable.

Rachel Nuwer wrote a long read on the subject for the BBC.

Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change.

That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own, on the other hand, came as more of a surprise to Motesharrei and his colleagues. Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities. For example, the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Similarly, about half the world’s population lives on less than $3 per day.

Not to mention a lot of stuff we’re already familiar with, like the way poor people keep getting priced out of cities. I’m always wondering why that doesn’t lead to breakdown in the form of labor shortages.

“If we make rational choices to reduce factors such as inequality, explosive population growth, the rate at which we deplete natural resources and the rate of pollution – all perfectly doable things – then we can avoid collapse and stabilise onto a sustainable trajectory,” Motesharrei said. “But we cannot wait forever to make those decisions.”

But instead of making rational choices we do things like electing Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, some experts believe such tough decisions exceed our political and psychological capabilities. “The world will not rise to the occasion of solving the climate problem during this century, simply because it is more expensive in the short term to solve the problem than it is to just keep acting as usual,” says Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and author of 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. “The climate problem will get worse and worse and worse because we won’t be able to live up to what we’ve promised to do in the Paris Agreement and elsewhere.”

Because we’ll vote for people like Trump, who will make sure we don’t.

Complexity is expensive; it eats up a lot of resources. One explanation for the collapse of ancient Rome is that it got so complex it couldn’t keep up with the expense.

So far, modern Western societies have largely been able to postpone similar precipitators of collapse through fossil fuels and industrial technologies – think hydraulic fracturing coming along in 2008, just in time to offset soaring oil prices. Tainter suspects this will not always be the case, however. “Imagine the costs if we have to build a seawall around Manhattan, just to protect against storms and rising tides,” he says. Eventually, investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns, leading to fiscal weakness and vulnerability to collapse. That is, he says “unless we find a way to pay for the complexity, as our ancestors did when they increasingly ran societies on fossil fuels.”

There will be refugees, and resistance to refugees – like now only more so.

Meanwhile, a widening gap between rich and poor within those already vulnerable Western nations will push society toward further instability from the inside. “By 2050, the US and UK will have evolved into two-class societies where a small elite lives a good life and there is declining well-being for the majority,” Randers says. “What will collapse is equity.”

By 2050? How about now? How about 1985 or so?

I don’t have anything cheerful to say about all this.

The Times writes up the making of a tv serial based on The Handmaid’s Tale.

Before the series even debuts on Wednesday, April 26, references to “The Handmaid’s Tale” — shorthand for repressive patriarchy — seem ubiquitous. A photo of a group of male Republicans at the White House debating maternity services with nary a woman in sight earned the social media hashtag #Gilead. Last month, women in Handmaids’ red dresses and bonnets sat side-by-side in the Texas State Capitol to protest anti-abortion measures under consideration.

In short the dystopian premise is horrifyingly more plausible than it was a year ago.

It was still the Obama era when Hulu pursued the property two years ago, as part of a strategy to broaden its identity from a glorified video recorder to a producer of original programming. The showrunner Bruce Miller threw his hat in the ring when Ilene Chaiken, who had been developing the adaptation at MGM, departed for “Empire.” A veteran writer-producer on shows including “E.R.” and “Eureka,” Mr. Miller had been obsessed with the novel since reading it as an undergraduate at Brown, even having his agent continually check to see if the film or TV rights were available.

“Offred spoke to me,” Mr. Miller said. “She’s in this nightmarish situation but she keeps her funny cynicism and sarcasm. She finds really interesting ways to pull levers of power and express herself.”

But Mr. Miller wasn’t a shoo-in for showrunner because producers were looking for a woman, he recalled. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been a seminal rite-of-passage novel for many young women for over three decades; a feminist sacred text.

“It’s sacred to me, too,” Mr. Miller said. “But I don’t feel like it’s a male or female story; it’s a survival story.”

Uhhhhhhhh…well that’s why the producers should have gone on looking for a woman until they found one. Here’s the thing: it is a “female” story. So much so. It’s about what life is like for actual women right now in some parts of the planet, like Saudi Arabia for instance. It’s not about what life is like for people in general in a theocracy, it’s about how theocracy grinds women into the dirt. It is a female story.

However.

“I was incredibly, and am still incredibly mindful, of the fact that I’m a boy,” Mr. Miller said. “You always try to find people who support your deficits.”

To that end, when Mr. Miller finished writing the first two episodes, he sent them to Ms. Atwood; she approved. He made sure his writing staff was almost entirely female, and hired women to direct all but two of the 10 episodes.

I hope they’re all clear that it’s a patriarchal theocracy, not that other kind of theocracy. (That’s a joke, because all theocracies are patriarchal. That’s the point of them. The first thing Islamists do when they take over is shove all the women into hijab or worse.)

Gilead is not technically a futuristic society, but a backward (or sideways) glance. Ms. Atwood is something of a scholar of Puritanism, and she said every horrific episode in the story happened somewhere in history already, whether stonings or enslavement, reproductive restrictions or forbidding women to read.

“The theory being that if human beings have done it once they can do it again,” said Ms. Atwood, who recently received the National Book Critics Circle lifetime achievement award, and at 77, seems more current than ever.

Yeah those second-wavers, man.

I read this thing on a self-described trans dating site yesterday, and found it puzzling in several ways. It’s a “Femininity Guide For Trans Women.”

Trans Women are unapologetically fashion conscious; they have an insatiable desire to look more feminine.

That seems insulting. Surely trans women are like people in general: various. Surely they don’t all have an insatiable desire to look more feminine.

Also what is “feminine”? But more on that later.

Just like cisgender women, they always want to look younger and prettier.

That’s insulting to both. It’s not true that “cisgender” women always want to look younger and prettier. That’s a sexist and belittling stereotype about women.

However, after the sex reassignment surgery, many transgender women find themselves at the end of their wits on how to look more feminine. It is important for transsexual women to understand that clothes, cosmetics, and accessories are not the only aspects of femininity, as femininity encompasses more than physical appearance.

Yes, it also includes being weak and submissive. Welcome to the party, ladies!

Unfortunately, even though transsexual women have a womanly gender inclination, they were not brought up as women. As a result, when they are “reborn” after the sex reassignment surgery, they can face some challenges as they learn to embrace their femininity. The first step towards embracing femaleness should be having a firm grasp on what it means to be female. This involves reading and researching about femininity and, if needed, hiring a femininity coach.

What?

How can that even make sense? The first rule is that “Trans women are women.” The second rule is that they were too so brought up as women, no matter how hard their parents and teachers denied it. They never had male privilege, they never received male socialization, and they were always female. Having to take lessons in being female makes no sense in that context.

Being female is as much mental as it is physical. The way you think, therefore, is the cornerstone of being feminine. If you think you are sexy, then you should walk and talk as though you are the goddess of femininity. Understanding that femaleness is both a state of mind and a physical state is a key factor in unlocking your feminine nature.

And that’s what “being female” is, from soup to nuts: it’s thinking you’re sexy. That’s all there is to it. Women are The Things That Are Sexy.

Some of the main areas that transgender woman should concentrate on improving are how they move and talk. First, it is important to analyze your current movements and identify any areas that are overtly manly and abrupt. A woman is supposed to be gentle in her movements; she should be polished, graceful, and decorous. All of these traits should be readily apparent to everyone the moment you walk into a room. How you sit down and carry yourself should be in line with your feminine side. When seated, for example, your legs should never be apart; they should be neatly closed together and tucked under you.

In other words you should look and act and sit like Doris Day circa 1955.

Your voice should be girly, and then, of course, you must

SMILE

Just like the old song says, “You’re never fully dressed without a smile.” To be more feminine, you need to know how to smile like a woman. A smile not only brightens up your face, but it also makes you look friendlier and more welcoming, traits both associated with femininity and womanly charm.

So, when the man interrupts you every time you speak, smile. When the man catcalls you on the street, smile. When the man gropes you on the bus, smile.

And carry a purse.

The Times has a long-read article on the FBI and emails and Trump and yadda. One of the four reporters on the story tweeted it, and replies to the tweet are raking the Times over the coals for its previous reporting on the subject.

@adamgoldmanNYT @mattapuzzo @nytmike @EricLichtblau Guys, it will NEVER make up for THIS.
J. Miller helped get us into Iraq. Then you hired Wm. Kristol.
Then did THIS & hired Bret Stephens. pic.twitter.com/rt0z3GGOKq

— Padraig O Mearan (@omearan) April 22, 2017

The Times did that, and now we have an ignorant impulsive rage-prone narcissist as head of state.

@adamgoldmanNYT @maggieNYT @mattapuzzo @nytmike @EricLichtblau Rather than this article I'd prefer NYT to apologize for saying during election no FBI investigation of Trump while overreacting to emails

— Nick Osborne (@nickosborne101) April 22, 2017

@adamgoldmanNYT @mattapuzzo @nytmike @EricLichtblau Alt Headline:
The Day Comey Decided To Change History And Use The F.B.I. To Elect Donald Trump.#ComeyTheTraitorhttps://t.co/gSmxzVNClx

—1) tRumpnado (@Trumpnado2016) April 22, 2017

@adamgoldmanNYT @mattapuzzo @nytmike @EricLichtblau The fact that the NYT has still not apologized for this 10/31 article makes it hard to believe current reporting. https://t.co/Uub6ru2SsJ

— Thomas W Polk (@twpolk) April 22, 2017

@adamgoldmanNYT @mattapuzzo @nytmike @EricLichtblau you spent months on the story, only it fails to acknowledge the NYT role in "but emails…" hysteria that directly affected the election. ok

— ben (@tronburger) April 22, 2017

@adamgoldmanNYT @mattapuzzo @nytmike @EricLichtblau When are you guys going to own up to your insanely overwrought coverage of the Comey letter & bizarre dismissal of the Trump investigation?

— Taylor Desloge (@TaylorDesloge) April 22, 2017

It’s funny how ungrateful Trump is to the “failing” New York Times.

1. (STOP [↩]

So apparently the Justice Department is now in the business of telling big American cities how horrible they are.

Today, the Department of Justice sent the attached letters to nine jurisdictions which were identified in a May 2016 report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General as having laws that potentially violate 8 U.S.C. § 1373.

Additionally, many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime. The number of murders in Chicago has skyrocketed, rising more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels. New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s “soft on crime” stance.

That sounds more like Trump on Twitter than like a normal DOJ.

Maggie Haberman of the Times tweeted a statement by the New York Police Commissioner:

The Commissioner tweeted 23 minutes ago:

Today's @TheJusticeDept statement is unbelievably disrespectful to the hardworking #NYPD cops who fight crime and keep people safe everyday. pic.twitter.com/5F9EfvddgF

— Commissioner O'Neill (@NYPDONeill) April 21, 2017

Crime is down, murders are down, but the DOJ sees fit to put out a press release saying they’re up, and implying that it’s because IMMIGRANTS.

That’s both ugly and alarming.

Lots of “sex positive” guys here.

York Regional Police say an undercover operation has resulted in the arrests of dozens of men who sought to buy sex with children over the internet.

“We stopped 104 men from purchasing 104 children,” Det. Sgt. Thai Truong told a news conference Friday.

The four-year operation, dubbed Project Raphael, zeroed in on men who sought sex with girls they believed were between 13 and 16 years old.

How prudish and judgmental to think men shouldn’t be trying to fuck girls of 13.

The men, who ranged in age from 21 to 71, offered to pay between $80 and $300 for encounters of between 30 and 60 minutes with the children.

The children have agency you know. They could buy some really nice clothes with that money.

Officers posing as underage sex workers chatted online with the men, who were then charged with offences including communicating for the purposes of obtaining sexual services of a person under 18, and internet luring.

“When they arrived to essentially complete the transaction, they were arrested,” Truong said.

No tight little child pussies for them. Sad.

Truong said the investigation also brought police into contact with 85 girls who were involved in the sex trade online. Many of them showed signs of physical abuse.

“The world of human trafficking is an ugly world,” he said. “We see a lot of lives destroyed.”

Forty-nine of their pimps were charged, Truong said.

Ahem. We call pimps “sex worker assistants” now. Check your privilege.