Mick Mulvaney may have made things hot for himself by publicly saying he requires payment before he will meet with lobbyists.

Ethics experts say Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, should be investigated for potentially violating federal bribery laws after he admitted that, as a congressman, he only gave meetings to lobbyists who donated to his campaign.

Speaking before 1,300 financial industry executives at the American Bankers Association conference in Washington on Tuesday, Mulvaney encouraged the officials to use their money to influence policymaking.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” said Mulvaney, a former lawmaker from South Carolina, according to The New York Times. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Norm Eisen, a former top ethics official under President Barack Obama, told Business Insider that Mulvaney “better hope that he never went beyond selling access.”

So it’s officially permissible to sell access? Why?

Eisen said the White House official should be investigated for possibly engaging in a quid pro quo, in which individuals or groups donated to his campaign in exchange for specific actions he took in his capacity as a lawmaker.

That’s the same distinction Bill Clinton made, that I’ve always found so repellent – “money shouldn’t buy you legislation but it should buy you access.”

As a congressman, Mulvaney received $63,000 in campaign contributions from payday lenders, and since taking over at the CFPB he has loosened regulations on the payday lending industry, which has been accused of engaging in predatory practices.

At the expense of poor people, who are the only people who need payday loans.

Ethics and legal experts point out that the legal threshold prosecutors must reach in order to convict a public official of bribery is high.

The evidentiary bar was raised after the Supreme Court’s June 2016 decision in McDonnell v. United States, in which it unanimously overturned a former Virginia governor’s public-corruption conviction, reigning in what Chief Justice John Roberts called the government’s “boundless interpretation” of federal bribery laws.

Oh, so that’s why it’s permissible to sell access.

Prosecutors now must now prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an official took specific actions in exchange for a bribe, illustrating an obvious quid pro quo.

“The evidence stinks to high heaven, but it’s very hard to prove,” Painter said of Mulvaney’s case, adding that Mulvaney’s admission makes him “morally unfit for public office.”

Prosecution is one thing, and workplace rules are another. Mulvaney should be fired.

Many argue that regardless of whether Mulvaney engaged in any illegal conduct, his Tuesday admission is a fireable offense, and excusing it perpetuates a culture of impunity in Washington.

“It is the perfect picture of all that is wrong with DC — and that will remain wrong with DC, even after this administration is gone,” Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor and former Democratic presidential candidate, told Business Insider in a statement.

Damn right.

Hm, maybe beautiful friendship not so beautiful after all.

[O]n the last day of his state visit on Wednesday, Macron showed he will not be trifled with. He used a speech to a joint session of Congress to engage in a full-scale takedown of Trumpism, wrapped in a love letter to the United States and a call on Americans to live up to the values embedded in our own history.

Macron, speaking forcefully in English, held nothing back. He warned against “the illusion of nationalism” and politicians who “play with fear and anger.”

No president we’ve had in living memory (I can’t swear to anything about Jackson) has played with fear and anger more enthusiastically than Donald Trump. Macron warned against Trump.

Macron predicted that, despite Trump’s abandonment of the Paris climate accord, the United States would one day rejoin it. Turning Trump’s signature campaign theme on its author, the French president issued his patented call to “make our planet great again.” For good measure, he pointedly asked climate change deniers to confront the consequences if they proved to be wrong. “Let us face it,” Macron said, “there is no Planet B.”

…

If Trump underscored his permissive attitudes toward autocracy by referring on Tuesday to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as “very open” and “very honorable,” Macron spoke of the obligation to stand up for democracy and against authoritarian threats across the globe. And he reminded his American listeners that the chief architect of the multilateral institutions defending democratic ideals was — the United States of America.

“The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism,” Macron said. “You are the one now who has to help to preserve and reinvent it.”

If Trump understands that, he won’t like it.

Again and again, the French leader took on the policies Trump has pursued over the past 15 months. “Massive deregulation,” which is what Trump has been up to, is a bad idea, Macron said. The founder of a new down-the-middle French political party may well be a centrist, but he held nothing back in assailing “the abuses of globalized capitalism” and “financial speculation.” He also urged joint U.S.-European regulation to protect the users of social media.

And he put all he said in the context of a thoroughly Gallic nod to rationality. “Without reason, without truth,” he said, “there is no real democracy.”

There’s only an orange man shouting in rage.

The French are not as in love with Macron as Donnie is. They’re definitely not in love with the beautiful friendship between the pair of them.

[D]isdain for Trump is not a fringe phenomenon in France, where opinion polls consistently show that the U.S. president is deeply unpopular — much more so than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping. The general sense is that Macron is playing with fire, even if he can establish himself, and France, as Trump’s leading interlocutor in a Europe that has largely remained at arm’s length.

Some in France have also started using the evidence of the increasingly tactile relationship between Macron and Trump to point out what they consider to be uncomfortable similarities between the two presidents, especially on immigration.

They hates it, both of them.

Macron’s immigration policy had already alienated some of his supporters in recent months.

In January, the French magazine L’Obs, formerly known as Le Nouvel Observateur, which was favorable to his candidacy throughout his presidential run, placed him on the cover behind a barbed-wire fence: “Welcome to the Country of Human Rights,” the headline said.

Macron’s perceived similarity with Trump on the issue has only fanned the flames of outrage.

In a bilateral news conference on Tuesday, Trump underscored these apparent points of intersection, in remarks about “uncontrolled migration.”

He could always go back to Scotland…

In other misogyny news…the San Francisco public library is hosting an exhibit that includes an “I punch TERFs” Tshirt.

Just in case the original poster blocks me, I am posting the image here. But this is 2018 a display in a public library in San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/AU24mItuRm

— The Lies They Tell (@sarahstuartxx) April 25, 2018

Another view:

https://twitter.com/schmendergender/status/989113129899646976

I found the page for the exhibit on the library’s website. Sometime in the last few hours it has added a note:

Note: This exhibit contains strong language, blood and mentions of transmisogyny and police violence. Due to concerns raised by library patrons, we have altered the exhibit to remove a piece of artwork that could be interpreted to promote violence, which is incompatible with our exhibitions policy.

Yeah, “die cis scum” and “I punch TERFs” could indeed be interpreted to promote violence. It’s not a very labored interpretation, if you ask me.

Glosswitch points out what ought to be obvious: that men don’t have a “right” to access to women’s bodies.

https://twitter.com/glosswitch/status/989200220385939456

Maybe, rather than just raging at “incels”, we should question the idea that any man has a right to violent porn, paid-for sex and women’s bodies in general. This entitlement doesn’t come from nowhere. Even Amnesty have suggested men have a “right to sex”.

I think they ended up walking that back. I found this Q&A where they explicitly reject the obvious implication:

7. Does Amnesty International believe that paying for sex work is a human right?

No. Our policy is not about the rights of buyers of sex. It is entirely focussed on protecting sex workers, who face a range of human rights violations linked to criminalization.

Nor does Amnesty believe that buying sex is a human right (but we do believe that sex workers have human rights!).

To be clear: sex must be agreed between people at all times. No one person can demand it as their right.

I think they wouldn’t have had to say that “to be clear” bit if they hadn’t previously babbled about a “human right to intimacy” while defending their decrim policy.

Think Progress has more on the “incel” uprising and Facebook:

Alek Minassian, 25, was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder during a brief court appearance on Tuesday. Minassian had previously posted a status on Facebook praising Elliot Rodger, the socially-awkward mass shooter who killed six people in Santa Barbara in 2014 before turning the gun on himself.

“Wishing to speak to Sgt. 4chan please…. The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” Minassian wrote on Facebook Monday, at around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time — around the same time the attack begun. “We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Facebook later confirmed that the post was authentic.

https://twitter.com/mattbraga/status/988785784789577729

If he’d simply shot up a women’s college it would have been no big deal, but the trouble with these scattershot drive down the sidewalk things is that you risk mowing down real people, i.e. men, along with the sluts.

It’s possible that the Toronto sidewalk-murderer is one of those guys who thinks he’s entitled to sex and thus that women are required to say yes to his demands for sex.

Shortly before a rented van ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 others, a short and cryptic message was posted on the Facebook account of Alek Minassian, the man accused of carrying out the attack.

The post referred to another mass killer – Elliot Rodger, who shot dead six people and wounded 13 others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 – and said that the “incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and the Stacys”.

What’s “the incel rebellion”? You know, it’s where men who think women owe them sex are going to unite and fight and just take it.

As in other reactionary subcultures that reject consensus liberal beliefs, those who take on the incel creed are said to have taken “the red pill” – referring to the scene in the science fiction movie The Matrix where the protagonist chooses to leave his illusions behind.

Frequently such ideas lead to a generalized bitterness towards women. Indeed, the big incel hubs are often viciously misogynistic and regularly feature calls for rape or other violence.

It couldn’t be anything else. If a man believes a woman – any woman – has no right to refuse to have sex with him, he is by definition calling for rape, and that of course is misogynistic.

Some with this mindset take it upon themselves to commit horrendous violence. In videos and a manifesto, the Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger justified his own mass homicide in 2014 by presenting it as revenge for his own romantic rejections, and the fact that at 22, he was still a virgin.

It’s such a bizarre belief, this idea that because you have a burning desire to stick your penis in someone, therefore that someone is obliged to let you stick her penis in her, quite regardless of her thoughts on the subject. Bizarre yet utterly pervasive.

Behind the layers of irony and disavowal, then, some incels have constructed a kind of violent, insurrectionary rhetoric from romantic failure and the belief that they are owed sex.

If only they could just put all the women under some kind of house arrest so that every man would be able to stick his penis in at least one of them whenever he wanted to.

Ah how touching – they’re celebrating “Confederate Memorial Day” in selected Southern states.

State government offices are closed today in Mississippi and Alabama for Confederate Memorial Day.

Georgia on the other hand renamed it “State Holiday” in 2015 after the slaughter in Charleston.

In some parts of the South, the debate has prompted a counter-effort to honor Southern heritage and preserve symbols of the Confederacy.

A Georgia lawmaker tried to revive Confederate Memorial Day in name in 2017. The proposal, which did not gain traction, made no direct reference to slavery or the Civil War. But it sought to recognize the “four-year struggle for states’ rights, individual freedom and local government control.”

“Southern heritage”=slavery. That’s it. There is no grand other Thing that was wholly separate from slavery that is “Southern heritage.” The South had some people who got very rich growing cotton, and not much else. It was an impoverished backwater with bad schools and worse universities. The “heritage” thing is a heritage of dominance and exploitation. Walk away.

The Great Piece of Turf never comes amiss.

Albrecht Dürer, The Great Piece of Turf, 1503 pic.twitter.com/xlDqxjTp7V

— Rabih Alameddine (@rabihalameddine) April 24, 2018

The Beeb a few days ago:

Campaigners have lost a High Court challenge to the government’s two-child limit on some benefits.

Lawyers representing three families had argued that the policy was incompatible with human rights law.

But a judge has ruled that limiting tax credits and universal credit to a family’s first two children is lawful.

Kate Smurthwaite draws the inevitable conclusion:

I don’t see why the public purse should be paying for Kate Middleton’s third child unless it was the result of rape. Right?

Truth innit!

Disturbing.

There's a lot going on here pic.twitter.com/ewQbIqE5cJ

— jordan (@JordanUhl) April 24, 2018

Today in Parliament Square:

A statue commemorating the life of the suffragist, Millicent Fawcett, has been unveiled opposite Parliament.

She campaigned for women’s right to vote during the early 20th Century and is seen as one of the most influential feminists of the past 100 years.

Prime Minister Theresa May paid tribute to the “truly great” campaigner’s “lasting impact” after it was unveiled.

The bronze casting, by the artist Gillian Wearing, is the first statue of a woman erected in Parliament Square.

How did it happen?

It followed a campaign by the feminist writer and activist Caroline Criado Perez, who also led last year’s successful effort to get Jane Austen to appear on the £10 note.

She said she came up with the idea for the statue when she was out running on International Women’s Day in 2016 and realised the only historical figures commemorated there were men.

Only two years ago. She gets things done.

Some of the hundreds of women and men who gathered to watch the unveiling ceremony were simply there to witness a moment in history.

“It is very important to me to see a woman in Parliament Square. It has taken a long time,” said student Poppy Sharpe, who was there with her friend Macushla Savvides (pictured above).

Boys grow up seeing that they can become someone immortalised as a statue, said Emma Camp, but girls don’t: “It’s about role models.”

But for others it was a chance to stress that the battle for equality fought by Millicent Fawcett and the other suffragists is far from over.

And. And for others it was a chance to stress that the battle for equality fought by Millicent Fawcett and the other suffragists is far from over. The two don’t contradict, they go together.

A basic trope about the reasons for Trump’s appeal to voters is the economic anxiety factor. Niraj Chokshi at the Times points to a study that cites status anxiety.

White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

The study is not the first to cast doubt on the prevailing economic anxiety theory. Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.

If that’s true it at least helps explain how people at the bottom of the ladder manage to see Trump as their dude. Economically that makes zero sense, but culturally it does make some. Trump is neither poor nor working class but by god he is racist.

Her survey also assessed “social dominance orientation,” a common psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. People who exhibited a growing belief in such group dominance were also more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected.

“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said.

…

What does it matter which kind of anxiety — cultural or economic — explains Mr. Trump’s appeal?

If wrong, the prevailing economic theory lends unfounded virtue to his victory, crediting it to the disaffected masses, Dr. Mutz argues. More important, she said, it would teach the wrong lesson to elected officials, who often look to voting patterns in enacting new policy.

Like deporting people and defunding Planned Parenthood.

Massimo Piglucci on Michael Shermer on moral philosophy:

You may have noticed that I don’t opine on quantum mechanics. Or jazz. The reason for this is that — although I’m very interested in both topics — I just don’t know enough about them. Not enough to be able to offer an informed opinion, at any rate. So I sit back, read what other, more knowledgeable people have to say about quantum mechanics and jazz, form my own second-hand opinion, and try to avoid embarrassing myself by pontificating in public.

Apparently, my friend Michael Shermer does not follow the same philosophy. At least, not when it comes to the field of moral philosophy. He has recently published a column in Scientific American entitled “Does the philosophy of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ have any merit?” which starts out simple (simplistic, really) enough, and ends in a crescendo of nonsense. Let’s take a look.

Shermer’s done more than that, he’s written a whole book on moral philosophy. I have no plans to read it.

Massimo picks apart the SciAm column; I’ll share a sample:

After a brief mention of Kantian deontology, the article really veers from simplistic to nonsensical: “Historically the application of a utilitarian calculus is what drove witch hunters to torch women they believed caused disease, plagues, crop failures and accidents — better to incinerate the few to protect the village. More recently, the 1:5 utilitarian ratio has too readily been ratcheted up to killing one million to save five million (Jews: “Aryan” Germans; Tutsi:Hutu), the justification of genocidal murderers.”

What?? No, absolutely not. Setting aside the obvious observation that utilitarianism (the philosophy) did not exist until way after the Middle Ages, no, witch hunts were the result of fear, ignorance and superstition, not of a Bentham- or Mill-style calculus. And this is the first time I heard that Hitler or the Hutu of Rwanda had articulated a utilitarian rationale for their ghastly actions. Again, they were driven by fear, ignorance, superstition, and — in the case of Nazi Germany — a cynical calculation that power could be achieved and maintained in a nation marred by economic chaos by means of the time-tested stratagem of scapegoating. (The latter is also what perpetrators of witch hunting and the Rwandan genocide did: prey on the weak, it’s easy to do and get away with it.)

I wonder where Shermer got the idea that Hitler or the Hutu did what they did for utilitarian reasons. I wonder if he thinks racism itself is utilitarian.

The true nonsense comes right at the end, when Shermer puts forth his preferred view, the one that, in his mind, has allowed for true moral progress throughout the ages: “both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics are trumped by natural-rights theory, which dictates that you are born with the right to life and liberty of both body and mind, rights that must not be violated, not even to serve the greater good or to fulfill a universal rule.”

Setting aside that you get precisely the same result from Mill’s rule utilitarianism, not to mention that natural rights theory has no argument against Kant, “natural rights” are what Jeremy Bentham famously, and correctly, referred to as “nonsense on stilts.” There is no such thing as a natural right, and we, therefore, are not born with them (contra the mindless libertarian mantra that Shermer is repeating). Michael is confusing human desires and instincts — some of which are actually culturally dependent (it is empirically not the case that everyone on earth desires liberty of mind, for instance) with rights. But rights are, obviously, a human creation. Which accounts for why, as Shermer himself notes, they have to be written down in things like the Bill of Rights, and protected by the force of state-enabled law. It’s also why people have come up with different lists of rights at different times. The United Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, provides a much more extensive list than the one arrived at by James Madison and co. back in 1789.

To argue that rights are “natural” is to commit the most elementary logical fallacy in ethics, that of the appeal to nature. And even if one were to overlook that little problem, there simply is no consistent empirical evidence for most of such alleged rights (i.e., desires, instincts) in Homo sapiens or its recent ancestors. Yeah, we all prefer to be alive rather than dead, other things being equal, but natural selection does not care about mere survival, it only favors survival that leads to reproduction. And it favors it, it doesn’t guarantee it. (So you can’t derive a natural right to sex. Too bad!)

This is the sort mess one gets when Michael talks about moral philosophy. Or when I talk about quantum mechanics. Or jazz. Please, let us all stick to what we know. It’s hard enough as it is.

Mind you…we all have more reason to take a stab at some kind of moral philosophy than we do quantum mechanics or jazz. We have more reason to do that if we want to do the right thing, refrain from doing harm, avoid hurting people, be more helpful or generous or kind, be less selfish or mean or a bully. We want to have some idea of why we should, and we may want to explain to other people why we and they should. We have some crude tools for doing that – instinct, training, emotions, experience, observation, rules – but they are crude, and they can compete with each other, and we can just get them all wrong.

It’s a problem. Amateurs bungle it (especially if they’re amateurs like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, both of whom have pretty terrible moral compasses, frankly), but professionals don’t talk to us much.

I had an odd realization a few days ago, which is that I don’t know where the keys on the keyboard are. I know how to hit them fast and accurately, but I don’t consciously know where they are. I do know the QWERTY part, as a unit, but even that doesn’t translate to knowing where the E or the T is on its own. I know the how well enough that it’s overridden the where.

I did a little Facebook post about it and other examples of the phenomenon came rolling in – phone numbers, piano keys, the moves we make when driving, figure skating, ballet. I added my library card number – I’ve noticed many times that I can type it but I cannot simply call it to mind and write it down – I know what the final 7 or so digits are but not their order or where they repeat. I have to pretend to type them to get it right. Unconscious processing is so weird and interesting.

Stewart pointed to Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore exploring how it works at the piano.

https://youtu.be/xVwFqGSGBCU

This morning Steve Watson contributed the link to the perfect Awkward Yeti.

God damn can this be true?

https://twitter.com/TonyNBC6/status/988214739611389952

Nashville mass killer used AR-15 seized by IL police after his arrest at White House while seeking to meet Trump. Father returned rifle and other guns to him before he killed in TN — and that’s not illegal. This is the state of gun laws in America 2018.

From the NBC News article:

Four people were killed and two others were injured when a semi-nude gunman opened fire at a Waffle House restaurant near Nashville, Tennessee, early Sunday, police said. The shooter remained at large Sunday afternoon, and authorities warned that he could still be armed.

Travis Reinking, 29, of Morton, Illinois, was being sought Sunday night on criminal homicide charges, police said. They said he was naked except for a green jacket when he got out of his car at about 3:23 a.m. (4:23 a.m. ET) Sunday and shot two people outside the restaurant with an AR-15 rifle, killing them both.

He then went inside the Waffle House and continued firing, killing two more people, police said. The victims were identified as: Taurean C. Sanderlin, 29, of Goodlettsville, an employee of the restaurant; Joe R. Perez, 20, of Nashville; DeEbony Groves, 21, of Gallatin, Tennessee; and Akilah Dasilva, 23, of Antioch, Tennessee; who was critically wounded and died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

One more salient point: Travis Reinking is white. The victims were black. This was a white guy mass-murdering black people.

Don Aaron, a spokesman for Metro Nashville police, said federal and state authorities had run across Reinking before.

The Secret Service said Sunday afternoon that Reinking was arrested on July 7 and charged with unlawful entry “after crossing an exterior security barrier near the White House Complex.” The Secret Service’s Nashville Field Office and headquarters division were working closely with law enforcement involved in the shooting investigation, the statement added.

He had crossed a security barrier and he then refused to leave, so they arrested him.

After the incident, Illinois revoked Reinking’s license to carry firearms and seized four guns — including the AR-15 that was used in the Waffle House shooting — at the request of federal authorities, Aaron said at a news conference later Sunday.

But Illinois authorities then returned those firearms to Reinking’s father, who Aaron said admitted giving them back to his son.

So, yes, it’s true. This country is pathetic.