NL Times reports:

Police took four teenaged boys into custody late Sunday in connection with the assault of two gay men in Arnhem. The victims were holding hands walking home from a party early Sunday morning when they were confronted by a group of young men shouting slurs at them.

They were then struck by a man wielding a heavy set of bolt cutters, kocking out four of Ronnie Sewratan-Vernes’ teeth and severing his lip, and injuring the ribs of Jasper Vernes-Sewratan. The two say they usually conceal their relationship in public, but were holding hands after a fun night out.

The journalist Barbara Barend sent a tweet calling on men in the Netherlands to hold hands in public, to show support.

D66 leader Alexander Pechtold and party member Wouter Koolmees arrived hand in hand at the negotiations on the formation of a new Dutch government on Monday.

Less hate, more solidarity.

H/t Stewart

Only in America.

A 20-year-old Connecticut college student whose father was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks has died after choking during a pancake-eating contest.

Police say Caitlin Nelson died at a New York City hospital on Sunday, three days after participating in the contest at Sacred Heart University. She was from Clark, New Jersey, and was majoring in social work at the Catholic school in Fairfield.

Officials say the contest was part of a fraternities and sororities event.

Can we stop doing this now? Can we just shut that whole thing down and never open it again?

Eating contests – in a world where famine and food insecurity and chronic malnutrition still afflict billions of people, what could be more disgusting?

Eating isn’t a skill, so contests in it are stupid to begin with. Overeating is not just not a skill, it’s unhealthy; at the extreme it just ends with vomiting. One of the impediments to “winning” an eating “contest” is the urge to vomit.

Also nobody wants to be in the news for dying in a pancake-eating contest. Nobody.

Via Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers via Wikipedia: Elizabeth Freeman.

Elizabeth (“Mum Bett”) Freeman was a slave in Massachusetts before US independence. She protected another slave whom her mistress was about to hit with a red-hot shovel, receiving a deep wound on her arm and another on her face. She left the arm wound visible as evidence of her mistreatment. After independence, she heard (she was illiterate) the new Massachusetts state constitution, which stated that all men are born free and equal. Consulting an Abolitionist lawyer, she sued for her freedom under the constitution, and won. Her suit effectively ended slavery in Massachusetts.

The Elizabeth Freeman Center has more:

Born into slavery in 1742, she was given to the Ashley family of Sheffield, Massachusetts, in her early teens.  During her period of enslavement to them, she married and had a child, Betsy.  In 1780, Mrs. Ashley struck at Betsy with a heated shovel, but Bet shielded her daughter, receiving a deep wound in her arm in the process.  Bet left this wound uncovered as it healed, as evidence of her harsh treatment.

Soon after the Revolutionary War, Bet heard the Massachusetts Constitution read aloud in the Ashley’s home, and heard these words from Article 1:

“All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

Bet recognized the potential legal and moral import of these words and sought out an attorney to sue for her freedom under the newly ratified state constitution.  With the help of Theodore Sedgwick, a Stockbridge attorney and abolitionist, she pled her case in the Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington in August 1781.  When the jury ruled in Bet’s favor, she became the first African-American woman to be set free under the Massachusetts constitution.  Her case, Brom and Bett v. Ashley, served as precedent in the State Supreme Court case that brought an end to the practice of slavery in Massachusetts.

As a free woman, Bet took the name Elizabeth Freeman.  She worked as a governess in the Sedgwick household until the Sedgwick children were grown, and then she and Betsy bought and moved into their own house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she was widely recognized and in demand for her skills as a healer, midwife, and nurse.

She ought to be a household name.

I saw this cited as a useful source for explanation of “gender identity” and all that: Transgender Identity Formation. In it I read this claim:

Biological

We are just beginning to understand the various aspects of the biological components of who and what we are, and how they interact.

In an invited paper published in the December 2001 issue of Neuroendocrinology Letters, Dr. Gunter Dorner and his colleagues outlined two probable causes of transsexualism that fall into two general categories: 1) genetic enzyme mutations and 2) epigenetic effects which can include stressful prenatal situations and fetal exposure to endocrine disruptors i.e. the breakdown products of DDT (DDE which is estrogenic in nature).

Gender and sexual brain organization is dependent on estrogen and androgen hormone levels occurring during specific and critical developmental periods. “Sex centers” responsible for gonadotropin secretion are organized by estrogens, “mating cen­ters” controlling sexual orientation are organized by androgens and estrogens. “Gender role centers”, responsible for gender role behavior are orga­nized by androgens (Dörner et al., 1987).  The organization periods for sex-specific gonad­otropin secretion, sexual orientation, and gender role behavior are overlapping, but not identical. Therefore almost infinite variations of gender and sexual orientation are possible.

Did you catch it?

“Gender role centers”, responsible for gender role behavior are orga­nized by androgens.

What? People are claiming there are biological “gender role centers” now? Meaning, presumably, in the brain? So there are parts of the brain that deal with gender roles? So gender roles are part of the structure of the brain? Not “gender” itself, not “gender identity,” but gender roles? Golly, who knew? It’s actually a physical part of the brain that girls like dolls and boys like mud and women like to wear stilettos.

So feminism was all just a big mistake, then, like a political movement advocating the right of humans to fly like birds.

Caroline Criado-Perez does it again: Parliament Square will add to its eleven (11) statues of men one (1) statue of a woman.

Prime Minister Theresa May announced on Sunday that Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who campaigned for the right of women to vote, will be honored with a statue to stand in the company of giants like Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela.

Mrs. Fawcett formed the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1897 and died at age 82 in 1929, a year after all women in the United Kingdom were granted the right to vote.

It’s only the right to vote for half of all human beings. No biggy.

Fawcett, a political and union leader, is not the only woman to be honored by the British government this year. Jane Austen’s image will be on the new polymer £10 note, replacing that of Charles Darwin.

The Bank of England caused some controversy when it put Churchill on the new polymer £5 bill, replacing the social reformer Elizabeth Fry. The bank responded to the outcry by putting Austen on bills scheduled to be issued this fall.

Thanks to CCP.

In the United States, some have argued against the Treasury’s plan to move President Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves, to the back of the $20 bill and to place Harriet Tubman, a former slave who escaped to freedom and helped others do the same, on the front. But that plan is proceeding.

I think they should get Jackson off altogether. He owned slaves and he genocided Native Americans. Not a national hero.

Caroline Criado-Perez, who started a petition campaign for a suffrage statute in London, praised the choice of Mrs. Fawcett and thanked supporters.

Writing on Twitter, Ms. Criado-Perez said: “Delighted with such a decisive response” from Mrs. May. “Huge thank you to everyone who supported the campaign from the beginning,” including Mayor Sadiq Khan of London.

By the way, have you heard of Susan B. Anthony?

Administrators at a Louisiana university are busy sweeping away pesky useless shit like scientific specimens to make room for athletic facilities.

The curators of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Louisiana-Monroe got grim news last week from the school’s director: The museum’s research collection had to be moved out of its current home. The reason? The space was needed for expanded track facilities.

The curators were given 48 hours to find a new place on campus to store the collection — something they weren’t able to do. Now they must get another institution to take their several million specimens. Their hard deadline is July, when the track renovations are slated to begin. And if the collection isn’t moved by then, curators said, it will be destroyed.

Making America great again, eh? Less emphasis on research and education, and more on racing around in a circle.

The ULM collection includes some 6 million fish collected by ULM ichthyologist Neil Douglas, one of the leading experts on the fish of Louisiana, as well as half a million native plants. It is an important record of biodiversity in northern Louisiana — a region that stands to see significant environmental impacts as a result of climate change.

Robert Gropp, co-executive director of the American Institute of Biological Sciences and policy director for the Natural Science Collections Alliance, said that smaller collections like this one offer unmatched insight into the history and fate of specific ecosystems.

“Sometimes those collections might be the world-class collection for that specific geographic area because that’s where those researchers spent their careers collecting specimens,” he said. “They’re snapshots of the history, of the genetics and biodiversity, and what lived where and how they interacted. You can’t go back and collect those again.”

Oh who cares; the university will have better running facilities! That’s the important thing. Won’t somebody please think of the athletes?

These research specimens — and the curators who study them — have immense scientific value, said Larry Page, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History. They are the basis for almost all taxonomic research and are vital to understanding changes in the health and distribution of species. Collections-based research has resulted in the discovery of new species and has helped save creatures on the brink of extinction.

“In a period of rapid changes in the environment and climate, specimens in natural history collections serve as the benchmark for gauging the impact,” Page wrote in an email. “The loss of such large and valuable collections as those at the University of Louisiana at Monroe would be a tremendous tragedy to science.”

It’s rare for a collection to be thrown out entirely; another institution usually steps in to save it. Already, several institutions have offered the ULM museum help in relocating its collection.

But Gropp, the American Institute of Biological Sciences co-director, noted that consolidation of collections means more and more specimens are being studied and cared for by fewer people with fewer resources.

“The system as a whole is being stressed,” he said.

Even if the collection is saved, the people who were studying it won’t go with it.

The violence on Westminster Bridge last week was a horror, but so was this:

His name was Timothy Caughman. He was from Manhattan and was 66 when he died. The police say he was stabbed on Monday night by a 28-year-old man who had come to New York City from Baltimore looking to kill black men. It was Mr. Caughman’s misfortune to be male and black when the stranger with a 26-inch sword approached on Ninth Avenue near 36th Street, around the corner from where he lived.

We don’t know much else about Mr. Caughman, but the persona he shared with the world on Twitter was that of a man of buoyant outlook and varied interests, who was amused by many things, fond of music and movies, captivated by celebrities. His profile says he was a “can and bottle recycler” and collector of autographs. “I would love to visit California,” it says. A selfie shows him waiting in line to vote and declaring his love for America. His Twitter feed is generous with condolences for celebrities: for Chuck Berry, Joni Sledge, Al Jarreau. On St. Patrick’s Day he retweeted a photograph of the athletes of Team Ireland competing in the Special Olympics World Winter Games in Austria.

On Thursday, President Trump sent prayers and condolences via Twitter to the family and friends of Kurt Cochran, an American killed in a terrorist rampage in London. He called Mr. Cochran “a great American.” He did not tweet about his fellow New Yorker, Mr. Caughman.

Mr. Trump is easily provoked to outrage. But he seems unable to summon that emotion on behalf of Mr. Caughman, who was poor and black and lived in a shelter for homeless people with H.I.V. and AIDS. Maybe he’s not that kind of president.

No, he’s not.

Lordy. Lor-deee.

Why is Omarosa Manigault there?

Manigault, 43, is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump, whose decision to cast her as an alpha-female villain in the first season of “The Apprentice” more than a decade ago made her a reality television celebrity.

Apparently that’s the reason right there. But I was asking about what qualifications she has to be there. Being a reality television celebrity isn’t a qualification.

But because she is one of the few African Americans in Trump’s immediate orbit, others caution against dismissing her.

“It’s important that we take Omarosa seriously, irrespective of how we feel about her,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor of public policy at Harvard. “The idea of having access to the White House in ways that people of color and civil rights agencies had under Obama — that’s gone. She appears to be the black person who is closest to Donald Trump. So it’s important to think very seriously about what she represents.”

But thinking very seriously about what she represents isn’t the same thing as taking her seriously. My serious thought about what she represents is that she represents just one more example of how random and feckless Trump is about all this.

Armstrong Williams, another longtime Republican strategist and close adviser to Carson, said Manigault’s influence goes beyond “the so-called black agenda.” He said Manigault has input on press secretary Sean Spicer’s daily briefings and that “she carries a lot of weight” with candidates seeking ambassadorships.

Why? What does she know about it?

Manigault’s loyalty might be a more valuable currency to Trump than her experience, said Sophia Angeli Nelson, an author and political commentator who has worked in GOP administrations and in Congress.

Of course, there are African American politicos and wonks who have more history with the Republican Party and its agenda. But in this White House, “they might last 10 minutes,” she said.

“They may be more knowledgeable, but Trump wouldn’t respect them and wouldn’t listen to their opinion,” she said. “In Trump’s world, loyalty means everything to him. And, if that’s the case, Omarosa is the right person.”

Which is just one example of what’s wrong with him. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about qualifications or relevant experience or knowledge or expertise; he cares only about loyalty to him, personally. That’s his administration. It’s just a reality tv show transferred to a larger stage.

Last week, seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus met with Trump in the Oval Office. They told Trump they are concerned about his budget and policy positions, and they related how they don’t appreciate his characterization of black communities as rife with crime and poverty. Sources said Manigault made it clear that the attendance — seven of 49 Black Caucus members — was irritatingly small.

Trump tried to get the group to stand behind him at his desk. The lawmakers declined, ruining a potentially powerful photo op.

Not as powerful as the one where he’s pretending to drive the Big Truck though.

The sleaze continues to deepen, now that both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are what the Times calls senior federal government officials.

But the financial disclosure report released late Friday for Mr. Kushner, which shows that he and his wife still benefit financially from a real estate and investment empire worth as much as $740 million, makes clear that this most powerful Washington couple is walking on perilous legal and ethical ground, according to several prominent experts on the subject.

Unlike Mr. Trump, who is exempt from conflict of interest laws, both Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump — who took a formal White House position this past week — are forbidden under federal criminal and civic law to take any action that might benefit their particular financial holdings.

It’s also the case that Trump is forbidden to hire his relatives to work in his administration, but apparently no one is going to enforce that.

“Donald Trump can evade legal responsibility even if the conflicts of interest remain,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal nonprofit group. “His daughter and son-in-law don’t have that escape hatch.”

Mr. Kushner did resign from more than 200 positions in the partnerships and limited liability companies that make up the family-run multibillion-dollar real estate business. But the financial disclosure report shows that Mr. Kushner will remain a beneficiary of most of those same entities.

And, I would like to know, what interests do they have that aren’t financial? I mean “interests” in the broad sense. What education, experience, training do they have in public policy? What do fashion and real estate profiteering have to do with public policy? What makes them suitable for these jobs? As far as I know, the answer is absolutely nothing.

[R]eal estate projects like the Kushner Companies’ deals have become a magnet for opaque foreign money — often from parts of the world that present thorny policy questions, such as China, where Mr. Kushner’s company has actively sought investors, as well as the Middle East and Russia. As part of his exceptionally broad portfolio in the White House, Mr. Kushner has been a crucial figure in arranging the visit of the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday in Florida.

There’s that mysterious “luxury” hotel and apartment building in a seedy part of Baku, with its possible links to Iran’s theocratic Revolutionary Guard. Ivanka went there and modeled a hard hat.

The actions by Mr. Kushner stand in contrast to the moves by some other top aides to Mr. Trump, such as Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, who before he was sworn in agreed to liquidate all of his stock holdings and his ownership stake in Exxon, putting his assets mostly into Treasury bonds and other permitted investments, such as diversified mutual funds, which make formal financial conflicts unlikely.

Mr. Kushner, by contrast, continues to hold multimillion-dollar lines of credit from institutions such as Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, while companies he is still a beneficiary of have billions of dollars in additional loans from heavily regulated institutions.

Richard W. Painter, who served as a White House ethics lawyer in the Bush administration, said that Mr. Kushner’s financial holdings would complicate any interactions he might have with such banks.

He should especially stay away from anything to do with Dodd-Frank, Painter says. Trump of course wants to get rid of Dodd-Frank.

Several of the companies that are in business with Kushner Companies have faced scrutiny by federal law enforcement. Deutsche Bank, for example, reached a $7.2 billion settlement last year with the Justice Department over its sale of toxic mortgage securities.

Mr. Kushner, who frequently speaks with world leaders and is tasked with overseeing Middle East peace negotiations, also has an unsecured line of credit worth as much as $5 million from Israel Discount Bank. Kushner Companies has also taken out at least four loans from Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s largest bank, though they are not disclosed in the filing. That firm is the subject of a Justice Department investigation into whether it helped wealthy Americans evade taxes with undeclared accounts.

Sleazy enough yet?

The Trump dynasty will go right on profiting from their business interests despite their entanglement in his presidency, even though there are rules against that, because I guess it’s just too embarrassing to tell them no.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, will remain the beneficiaries of a sprawling real estate and investment business still worth as much as $741 million, despite their new government responsibilities, according to ethics filings released by the White House Friday night.

Ms. Trump will also maintain a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The hotel, just down the street from the White House, has drawn protests from ethics experts who worry that foreign governments or special interests could stay there in order to curry favor with the administration.

But pooh pooh to that because hey we just don’t feel like dealing with it.

The disclosures were part of a broad, Friday-night document release by the White House that exposed the assets of as many as 180 senior officials to public scrutiny. The reports show assets and wealth that senior staff members owned at the time they entered government service.

…

Mr. Trump’s administration is considered the most wealthy in American history, with members of his senior staff and cabinet worth an estimated $12 billion, according to a tally by Bloomberg. The Friday filings will add voluminous detail to that top-line figure.

“I think one of the really interesting things that people are going to see today — and I think it’s something that should be celebrated — is that the president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.

“Blessed” forsooth. If this is all the doing of a deity – well really. I’m disappointed, that’s all I can say.

But also this crap about being “successful” – successful at what? If they’re all like Trump, then at cheating and lying and theft, along with lashings of corruption.

Although Mr. Kushner has stepped down from his management positions at the more than 200 entities that operated aspects of the family real estate business, he will remain a beneficiary of the vast majority of the business he ran for the past decade, through a series of trusts that already owned the various real estate companies.

The plan laid out on Friday “is not sufficient,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel and chief ethics office for the Federal Election Commission. “While removing himself from the management of the businesses is an important step, he is still financially benefiting from how the businesses do. This presents potential for a conflict of interest. Given his level in the White House and broad portfolio its hard to see how he will recuse himself from everything that may impact his financial interest.”

It’s not sufficient, but apparently everyone is either unable or unwilling to enforce the rules. Apparently the rules aren’t rules at all, but just suggestions, which can be safely and cheerfully ignored.