There’s this billionaire guy called Robert Mercer, who gave a lot of cash to Trump as well as other Republicans and right-wing causes.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

So that’s how Breitbart happened. I had wondered.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Psyops. We’ve all taken the bait, and their real plan is something quite other and concealed. They’re going to replace us all with electronic rabbits, or something.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Blatant and rampant discrimination against women directors.

Same thing on stage. Women directors, women playwrights, women actors. Studies have shown that scripts with women’s names are less likely to get read – by a large margin.

Women who write plays are told that the reason they get less attention is that they write plays about women and no one wants to see them. But the majority of theatre ticket buyers are…women. And plays by women often do better at the box office, sell more tickets…and run for a much shorter time. So it isn’t economics driving it.

Meanwhile, men who write plays about women (and there are many) are able to get those produced, even if they are written in a way that isn’t stereotyped or sexist or pointedly anti-feminist. They can be very much like the types of plays women write about women, and still get produced, because…well, mansplaining, I guess.

And if women only write plays about women, then wouldn’t that mean men only write plays about men? No, they write plays about events…about things…about issues…about whatever. Women don’t write about anything important. Lucy Prebble didn’t really write anything important when writing the play Enron, right? Caryl Churchill writes about very serious issues, such as the revolution in Rumania. But about the only time I see plays by women are the one play a year that a local college devotes to women writers, and that “yearly” event frequently skips two or three years.

US immigration authorities in Houston nearly deported a well-known French historian who had arrived to deliver a lecture. He’s a historian of the Vichy regime, so that’s deeply ironic. It’s also, of course, disgusting.

Henry Rousso is one of France’s most preeminent scholars and public intellectuals. Last week, as the historian attempted to enter the United States to attend an academic symposium, he was detained for more than 10 hours — for no clear reason.

On Wednesday, Rousso arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after an 11-hour flight from Paris, en route to Texas A&M University in College Station. There, he was to speak Friday afternoon at the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study.

But things did not go according to plan: Rousso — an Egyptian-born French citizen — was “mistakenly detained” by U.S. immigration authorities, according to Richard Golsan, director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M.

Well, look at it from their point of view. He’s foreign.

Fortunately the university sprang into action when Rousso phoned Golsan with his news, and Rousso was released – after, please note, ten hours in custody following an 11 hour flight. I’ve taken 11 hour flights and I wouldn’t be very delighted to be incarcerated at an airport at the end of one.

It remains unclear what about Rousso was identified as suspect by immigration authorities.

Egypt — from which Rousso and his family, as Jews, were exiled in 1956, after a slew of anti-Semitic measures imposed by the administration of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz — was not among the seven nations in the travel ban, which had been suspended by the time he arrived in the United States.

Egypt is not on the list plus Rousso and his family are Jews – so if the boneheaded goal is to stop Mooslims from those 7 countries, they are doin it rong.

Rousso’s scholarship focuses on the memory of the Vichy regime, the darkest chapter in modern French history, when the government of unoccupied France collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II. Vichy authorities are particularly infamous for assisting the Germans in rounding up and deporting tens of thousands of Jews from France during the Holocaust, which Rousso once called “the past that does not pass.”

There’s an extraordinary French tv series about that history, that makes the ugly behavior of the Vichy authorities very vivid. It’s agony to see us emulating that. (Yes we’re not sending people to extermination camps, but neither were the Vichy authorities at first. These things happen in stages.)

Fellow historians took to social media after news of Rousso’s experience, many pointing out what they considered the uncomfortable irony of the arbitrary detention of a Holocaust historian.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said on Twitter, “His work on cost of forgetting past (Vichy) so relevant.”

Soldiarity to my historian collesgue @Henry_Rousso detained by US Customs on visit. His work on cost of forgetting past (Vichy) so relevant https://t.co/XCNQaq4gpt

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) February 25, 2017

“It is now necessary to deal with the utmost arbitrariness and incompetence on the other side of the Atlantic,” Rousso wrote Sunday in the French edition of the Huffington Post. “What I know, in loving this country forever, is that the United States is no longer quite the United States.”

It’s not. I hope we can get it back very soon.

Bill O’Reilly needed a hotshot Swedish Security Expert for a tv conversation the other day, so he found one that no actual Swedish security experts have ever heard of. Forgive me if I find this funny.

Sweden became a hot topic in the US last week after Trump warbled randomly about “last night in Sweden” at that fascist rally he threw in Florida. “Last night in Sweden?!” many people said. “What is this buffoon talking about?” So O’Reilly decided to help out.

Following Trump’s comments, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly convened an on-air discussion on Thursday over Swedish immigration and crime between a Swedish newspaper reporter and a man identified on screen and verbally as a “Swedish defence and national security advisor”, Nils Bildt.

Bildt linked immigration to crime and social problems in Sweden, lamented what he described as Swedish liberal close-mindedness about the downsides of welcoming newcomers and said: “We are unable in Sweden to socially integrate these people.”

But the Swedish defense ministry and foreign office told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter they knew nothing of Bildt.

He’s a private sector security expert. A freelancer. An amateur. Amateurs have feelings too you know.

Bildt is a founding member of a corporate geopolitical strategy and security consulting business with offices in Washington, Brussels and Tokyo, according its website. His biography speaks to expertise on defence and national security issues, saying his experience includes serving as a naval officer, working for a Japanese official and writing books on issues ranging from investment and political climates to security issues with working in hostile environments.

But security experts in Sweden said he was not a familiar figure in their ranks in that country.

“He is in not in any way a known quantity in Sweden and has never been part of the Swedish debate,” Swedish Defence University leadership professor Robert Egnell said by email to The Associated Press on Saturday. He and Bildt — also known then as Nils Tolling — were in a master’s degree program in war studies together at King’s College London in 2002-2003, and Bildt moved to Japan soon after, he said.

Japan, Sweden – whatever.

Republicans are excited about the project to Make America Great at long last, and one of their ways of doing that is to clamp down on all this god damn protesting. No Great nation allows all this god damn protesting! A Great nation has rapidly flowing traffic, and peaceful sidewalks on which people can sit sipping expensive coffee and talking about mergers.

Since the election of President Trump, Republican lawmakers in at least 18 states have introduced or voted on legislation to curb mass protests in what civil liberties experts are calling “an attack on protest rights throughout the states.”

From Virginia to Washington state, legislators have introduced bills that would increase punishments for blocking highways, ban the use of masks during protests, indemnify drivers who strike protesters with their cars and, in at least once case, seize the assets of people involved in protests that later turn violent. The proposals come after a string of mass protest movements in the past few years, covering everything from police shootings of unarmed black men to the Dakota Access Pipeline to the inauguration of Trump.

Police shootings of unarmed African Americans should go unprotested! People can write tactful letters to someone if they want to, but mass protests are simply vulgar. If Native Americans want clean drinking water and protected sites they should go to DC and speak to their Representatives.

Some are introducing bills because they say they’re necessary to counter the actions of “paid” or “professional” protesters who set out to intimidate or disrupt, a common accusation that experts agree is largely overstated. “You now have a situation where you have full-time, quasi-professional agent-provocateurs that attempt to create public disorder,” said Republican state senator John Kavanagh of Arizona in support of a measure there that would bring racketeering charges against some protesters.

I think there should be a Congressional committee to look into this. They could call it the House Un-American Activities Committee – HUAC for short. Catchy, no?

None of the proposed legislation has yet been passed into law, and several bills have already been shelved in committee.

Critics doubt whether many of the laws would pass Constitutional muster. “The Supreme Court has gone out of its way on multiple occasions to point out that streets, sidewalks and public parks are places where [First Amendment] protections are at their most robust,” said Lee Rowland, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Yes but Trump has a plan to do away with all that and Make America Great Again.

This is by no means the first time in American history that widespread protests have inspired a legislative backlash, says Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociology professor who studies protest movements. “For instance, southern legislatures — especially in the Deep South — responded to the Montgomery Bus Boycott (and the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education) with dozens and dozens of new bills outlawing civil rights groups, limiting the rights of assembly, etc. all in an effort to make civil rights organizing more difficult,” he said via email.

“Similarly,” he added, “laws designed to limit or outlaw labor organizing or limit labor rights were common in the late 19th/early 20th century.”

And on the private citizen side, there was plenty of violence unleashed against the protesters and union organizers.

Even the accusations of “paid” or “professional” agitators, which Trump has promoted, have been leveled at protesters before.

“This is standard operating procedure for movement opponents,” Stanford’s McAdam said. “Civil rights workers were said to be ‘outside agitators, and the tea party was dismissed as an ‘AstroTurf’ phenomenon — funded from on high by the Koch brothers and others — rather than a legitimate ‘grass roots’ movement. In all these cases, including the present, the charges are generally bogus, with the vast majority of protesters principled individuals motivated by the force of deeply held values and strong emotion.”

The Post lists the proposed legislation state by state.

This looks like a ray of hope: a group of lawyers who helped Obama with the ethics part of the job has formed a group to resist the wannabe dictator.

Top lawyers who helped the Obama White House craft and hold to rules of conduct believe President Donald Trump and his staff will break ethics norms meant to guard against politicization of the government — and they’ve formed a new group to prepare, and fight.

United to Protect Democracy, which draws its name from a line in President Barack Obama’s farewell address that urged his supporters to pick up where he was leaving off, has already raised a $1.5 million operating budget, hired five staffers and has plans to double that in the coming months. They’ve incorporated as both a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), allowing them to operate as a nonprofit but participate in some forms of political advocacy as well.

While other Trump opponents focus on taking the president to court over the travel ban and deportations, the new group plans to drill into issues that aren’t already hitting the headlines, like potential intervention in and intimidation of regulatory agencies by West Wing staff.

That’s the ticket. That’s what we need.

“When people hear concerns about democracies declining into authoritarianism, they expect that moment to come in a singular thunderclap where everyone can see that this is the time,” said Ian Bassin, who’s leading the new group. “In reality, often times, democracies decline over a period of years that happen through a series of much smaller steps.”

Definitely, and the wannabe dictator and his filthy team have been taking those smaller steps since January 20th November 8th.

They’ve sent off a bunch of FOIA requests. They plan to share the information with reporters and apply pressure to Congress. That’s the stuff!

They’re also hoping to establish themselves as a base for government employees worried about ethics violations — up to and including becoming whistleblowers — and are hoping that their website, https://unitedtoprotectdemocracy.org/,can become a resource.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, responding to the group’s formation, said, “This administration has raised the level of ethics training and oversight to a new level compared to the practices of the previous administration.”

Oh yes, and houses can fly, and moose can dance ballet, and Trump is a thoughtful and scrupulous human being.

“It’s really important for a bunch of people to shine the light on this question, to make very clear when autocrats are starting in any way to detract from democratic institutions,” said Yascha Mounk, a Harvard Law lecturer who specializes in the rise of authoritarianism and has been having high level strategic advisory conversations with the group.

But it’s more than just the smaller encroachments that are on Bassin’s mind. Trump’s attack on the judge who halted his immigration ban already has him building a plan for what might happen if the White House directly defies a judicial ruling, and what they’d need to do in the potential constitutional crisis that would follow. Existing nonprofits, he said, have not been structured to deal with the kind of unprecedented, norm-breaking threats that he believes are coming from Trump and his aides.

“We need an organization that is specifically and holistically focused on that worst-case scenario,” Bassin said.

Definitely a ray of hope.

You know…Obama made statements on incidents like the one in Olathe, Kansas. He made statements on mass shootings and on hate crimes; the Olathe shooting wasn’t a mass one (although I don’t know what the cutoff number is – maybe three should be enough) but it seems likely it was a hate crime. Maybe not; maybe there’s some story we don’t know of a quarrel between the shooter and the two Indian men he shot, and maybe the witness who said the shooter yelled “Get out of my country!” is lying or wrong. The crime is under investigation. But the reality is that whether it is or not, it at present certainly reeks of a hate crime, and people subject to that kind of hate crime are feeling threatened and upset. Some of them are friends of mine. Some of them are friends of mine from India or Bangladesh or Pakistan. That was the kind of situation in which Obama made statements, telling people who felt threatened that he gave a shit.

I looked it up. USA Today did a story on it last June, after the Orlando shootings.

It was at least the 14th time that President Obama spoke to the nation in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting — and the sixth time within just the past year.

Obama himself has acknowledged that his remarks have become all too predictable. “Somehow this has become routine. The reporting has become routine. My response here, from this podium, has become routine,” Obama said last October, following the shooting at an Oregon community college.

USA Today excerpted several of the statements. Here’s from the one on the Roseburg, Oregon shootings:

“We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston. It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.

“And what’s become routine, of course, is the response to those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: ‘We need more guns,’ they’ll argue, ‘fewer gun safety laws.’ Does anybody really believe that? …

“And of course, what’s also routine is that somebody somewhere will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic….

“I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure as president to offer my condolences to families in these circumstances. But based on my experience as president, I can’t guarantee that. And that’s terrible to say. And it can change.”

Guess who hasn’t said one fucking word about the shootings in Olathe.

Guess who didn’t say one fucking word about the mass shooting at the mosque in Québec.

Guess who just does not give a shit.

Thursday night in Olathe, Kansas a guy in a bar shot three men, killing one of them.

According to witness accounts, the gunman reportedly told two of the people who were shot — both Indian men who work for Garmin, the technology firm — to “get out of my country” before opening fire and had also used racial slurs during the Wednesday evening shooting.

Multiple law enforcement agents launched an investigation into the deadly shooting inside Austin’s Bar and Grill in Olathe, a city about 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. Even as authorities said they had not yet identified a motive for the attack, relatives of the Indian men said they feared the shooting was connected to a climate of fear and xenophobia in America.

The father of one of the people injured pointed to the election of President Trump, who has routinely described a threat posed to Americans from people outside the country’s borders, and pleaded with parents in India “not to send their children to the United States.”

The White House responded by calling the link to Trump’s rhetoric absurd, according to Reuters.

JUST IN: White House, speaking about Kansas shooting, says any loss of life is tragic but absurd to link to president's rhetoric

— Reuters U.S. News (@ReutersUS) February 24, 2017

Of course it’s not absurd. It’s callous and flippant of the White House to dismiss it that way. Racist and xenophobic rhetoric does lead to violence against foreigners and despised races. Trump’s rhetoric is vicious and loathsome, and there is no reason on earth it would not motivate some people to violence. There were outbreaks of violence at some of his campaign rallies.

Police identified the suspected attacker in Olathe as Adam W. Purinton, 51, and said he was taken into custody in Missouri a little more than a day after the shooting.

One of the Indian men shot during the attack — Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32 — died in the hospital later from his wounds, the Olathe police said. The other — Alok Madasani, 32, of Overland Park, Kan. — was released from the hospital Thursday.

The shooting also injured 24-year-old Ian Grillot, another patron at Austin’s, who apparently tried to intervene.

Witnesses told the Kansas City Starand The Washington Post that Purinton was thought to have been kicked out of the bar Wednesday night before the shooting took place. 

“He seemed kind of distraught,” Garret Bohnen, a regular at Austin’s who was there that night, told The Post in an interview. “He started drinking pretty fast.”

He reportedly came back into the bar and hurled racial slurs at the two Indian men, including comments that suggested he thought they were of Middle Eastern descent. When he started firing shots, Grillot, a regular at the bar whom Bohnen called “everyone’s friend,” moved to get involved.

Has the White House issued any statement on the shootings? Not that I can find. The callous dismissal came from Sean Spicer. The callous silence comes from Trump.

Srinivas Kuchibhotla:

Ok I’m wrong – I said in a comment “you don’t see Virginia Woolf dolls, Frances Perkins dolls, Janet Reno dolls” and I’m wrong, you do see Virginia Woolf dolls. She’s pretty damn cool, too.

On the other hand, the doll as a doll is a good illustration of my point. The doll is well supplied with indications that she is Virginia Woolf, while the putative transgender doll is supplied with zero indications that she is transgender.

By “indications” I of course don’t mean “anyone would know that’s Virginia Woolf” – I just mean the doll doesn’t look like your ordinary generic nobody in particular doll.

None of this will make any sense to anyone who hasn’t read the post about the putative trans doll.

I find the Virginia Woolf doll pretty charming, I have to say.