Oh wait wait wait everybody, it turns out everything’s ok after all. This one judge in Ohio had lots of awesome sex with 50 very attractive females (his words) so there’s nothing to worry about. Whew!

Now that the dogs of war are calling for the head of Senator Al Franken I believe it is time to speak up on behalf of all heterosexual males. As a candidate for Governor let me save my opponents some research time. In the last fifty years I was sexually intimate with approximately 50 very attractive females. It ranged from a gorgeous blonde who was my first true love and we made passionate love in the hayloft of her parents [sic] barn and ended with a drop dead gorgeous red head from Cleveland.

Now can we get back to discussing legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis. I am sooooo disappointed by this national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago.

Peace.

What a relief, right? Imagine if they hadn’t all been very attractive? Imagine if there had been only forty of them, or [shudder] thirty?

Yeah but for real – dude missed the point, didn’t he. The issue isn’t having sex. The issue certainly isn’t how attractive Male Candidate X’s sex partners were or were not. The issue is harassment and assault and rape. I think the distinction is pretty obvious. You’d hope it was one that judges were well aware of.

That item about Jordan Peterson’s plan to create a List of courses he considers “neo-Marxist”  blah blah got my attention. As It Happens reported last week:

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson’s stated plan to build a website aimed at reducing enrolment in university classes he calls “indoctrination cults” has drawn the ire of his University of Toronto colleagues, who say it will make them the target of harassment.

“As a science professor, I’m not specifically targeted, but I still believe this website is morally wrong,” U of T physics professor A.W. Peet told As It Happens host Carol Off. “A number of students and faculty members who I’m in correspondence with are concerned about his plans.”

Peterson, who rose to fame in right-wing circles after his outspoken refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns, says he wants to use artificial intelligence to scour university curriculums for what he “calls post-modern neo-Marxist course content.”

“We’re going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be designed to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them,” he told CTV’s Your Morning in August.

“I’m hoping that over about a five-year period a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West. So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.”

Grandiose much?

In a speech posted to his YouTube page on July 9, Peterson elaborates on what type of courses he aims to target with the website.

“Women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go and the faster they go the better,” he said. “It would have been better if they had never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell.”

“Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worse offenders are the faculties of education.”

That’s not scholarship or dissent (or dissenting scholarship), it’s bullying.

The Globe and Mail:

Dr. Peterson has gained a high profile over the past 18 months for his criticism of what he believes is the dominance of Marxism, socialism and postmodernist ideas among university professors and students.

In the United States, a political advocacy group runs a website called Professor Watchlist that seeks to advance right-wing and libertarian ideas on college campuses. A professor in California who was identified on Professor Watchlist as having a “radical agenda” went into hiding after she received death threats, according to media reports.

Right-wing and libertarian ideas can be extremely “radical.” Radicalism is not confined to the left.

Dr. Peterson seems to suggest universities should teach a limited set of disciplines. Social sciences, law and humanities have all been infected by postmodernism, he says, as well as women’s studies and ethnic and racial studies.

Just a little bit sweeping?

Jordan Peterson has the solution to all this sexual harassment everywhere.

With all the accusations of sex assault emerging (eg Louis CK) we are going to soon remember why sex was traditionally enshrined in marriage…

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 10, 2017

Ho yus, that will fix it. Women were never sexually harassed until…what year was it again? 1964? If only women could be permanently imprisoned by marriage, all would be well.

Rachel Giese is not quite convinced.

[C]onsider his recent conversation with fellow provocateur Camille Paglia. Expressing his frustrations with women who disagreed with him, Peterson said that men can’t control “crazy women” because men aren’t allowed to physically fight women. “I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassed against me,” he said. “The parameters for my resistance are quite well-defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.”

It’s like Peterson has been cribbing talking points from Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. He adds that men unwilling to throw a punch are contemptible. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.”

So does that also mean if you [“you” are obviously a man here] are talking to a woman then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect? I think it can be safely assumed of most women that they won’t voluntarily “fight with” a man in the sense of throwing punches, so in Peterson’s world that must mean they’re contemptible, yes?

Peterson has said elsewhere that socialization has a role to play in addressing aggression among boys and men. But talking to [Camille] Paglia, he laments that his own socialization prevents him from taking a swing at a lady. Referring to a woman who accused him of being a Nazi, he said, “I’m defenceless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me.” It’s hard to decide which is creepier: Is it the suggestion, in Peterson’s rueful tone, that he’s kind of bummed out about the fact that he can’t hit women? Or is it the implication, if you were to follow his argument to its conclusion, that because women can’t be hit, they shouldn’t be allowed to participate in civil discourse with men at all?

But there’s also the creepiness of his casual assumption that it’s just normal to throw punches at men who accuse you of being a Nazi. People are supposed to grow out of that assumption in the course of childhood and adolescence. Peterson is an adult academic and he apparently clings to it.

But maybe it’s just something he says. Maybe he doesn’t mean it.

Just a few weeks after he posted his conversation with Paglia, however, there was a surprise retreat from his latest attention-grabbing escapade. Over the weekend, Peterson announced he was shelving his plans to create a website warning university students away from “corrupt” courses in programs like ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, English literature and women’s studies. After a group of University of Toronto faculty released a statement saying that Peterson’s proposed site “created a climate of fear and intimidation,” he capitulated, tweeting the project was on hiatus: “I talked it over with others and decided it might add excessively to current polarization.”

Why didn’t he just punch them all instead?

Grim:

A North Korean soldier who was shot while fleeing across the border has an extremely high level of parasites in his intestines, his doctors say.

The defector crossed the demilitarised zone on Monday, but was shot several times by North Korean border guards.

Doctors say the patient is stable – but “an enormous number” of worms in his body are contaminating his wounds and making his situation worse.

His condition is thought to give a rare insight into life in North Korea.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician,” South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient’s intestines was 27cm (11in) long.

How did he get them? Probably via food grown with untreated human intestinal output.

Humans can get parasites through eating contaminated food, by being bitten by an insect or by the parasite entering through the skin.

In the case of the North Korean defector, the first case is most likely. Parasites which enter the body via contaminated food are often worms.

The soldier’s food may have been contaminated because the North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as “night soil”.

Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters: “Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead.”

If these faeces are untreated and fertilise vegetables that are later eaten uncooked, the parasites get into the mouth and the intestines of the person.

Night soil is a good idea if it’s treated, but ya gotta treat it.

While some don’t cause any severe symptoms, others can be life-threatening, explains Prof Peter Preiser from the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“What they all do is take nutrients away from your body,” he told the BBC. “So [even] if most of them might go unnoticed, they all indicate a poor health status. To put it simply: people who have parasites are not healthy.”

And they don’t feel all that wonderful.

It’s pretty tragic.

I saw this in the Sun last week.

GENITOOL 
Doctor dumped boyfriend because he criticised the smell of her vagina – and wants other women to follow suit

I saw that some typical goons had talked about it on their podcast hur hur hur. I read Jen Gunter’s blog post on it. Now it’s in the Times, as is only fair.

For 25 years she’s been listening to women tell her they’ve been told how Wrong and Gross their genitals are.

These women all shared something: They were told these things by men. While I admit this is anecdotal data, my years of listening to secret shame about healthy vaginas and vulvas seems to suggest it is largely, if not entirely, male partners who exploit vaginal and vulvar insecurities as a weapon of emotional abuse and control.

But it was the Vicks VapoRub that put me over the edge.

Around the internet I am known as the gynecologist who debunks unnecessary and often harmful vaginal trends. Vaginal steaming, douches, glitter, tightening sticks — these are all born from the same need to tame the normal female genital tract. Whether these products are sold by big companies or a lone purveyor on Etsy, whether sold as medicinal in drugstores or marketed under the guise of “natural” and artisanal by brands like Goop, the intent is the same: to monetize intimate fears about intimate places. The idea is to profit from our society’s inability to have public, non-sophomoric discussions about the vagina and vulva. These products and their messages are no different from the Lysol ads of the 1950s telling women they could be like the “the girl he married” again.

Now, apparently, folks were suggesting that it was a good idea to put a mentholated petroleum product in one’s vagina. (It is not.)

Fed up, I wrote the story of how a man had tried to shame me about my healthy vagina. Once, I had dated a man who told me I would be desirable, if only my hair were straight, or if only I lost the weight, or if only I dressed differently. The metric for my supposed perfection kept changing, so it was a herculean task to keep up with my failings, which I now gather was the point.

But while I may not have complete confidence in my appearance, I have professional confidence in spades. There are few people, if any, who know more about the lower genital tract than I do. So when this man began to tell me how my healthy vagina could be better, I dumped him.

She talks about vaginas all day long. It’s the idea that that’s gross that is behind all this experimentation with Vicks VapoRub. (Are you KIDDING me?) So naturally along came a gutter tabloid to say EW GROSS.

What happened next was an article showed up in the The New York Post with the incorrect headline “My boyfriend dumped me because of my vagina smell,” accompanied with a big picture of me. The article itself was accurate — easy enough, since it was essentially quotations from my blog.

And then the men came. They came to share their opinions regarding my vagina, writing on my blog and at me on Twitter. They flocked to my Instagram and my Facebook. One group of gentlemen, in at least their 40s, even decided that this story of me being dumped supposedly because of my vagina was worthy of a laugh on their podcast.

This rash bombarded me in both public and private comments. Men wondered if I had washed “that thang yet?” One man wrote that I “must be INTO smelly ones! How nice for you — we prefer FRESH as a daisy ones!” Another man warned me that “We men had a meeting, all 3.5 billion of us.” At the meeting they had apparently decided to “double down on calling out” my smelly vagina.

A man said I should call my ex and thank him “for alerting me to my smelly vagina.” There was also the #notallmen contingent, who felt it was impossible that my personal experience and 25 years as a gynecologist could offer any evidence that men ever try to control women by preying on insecurities. Obviously it was just my vagina that stank.

Isn’t it nice to know what so many men really think? Isn’t it?

The state of my healthy vagina brought more scorn from men than anything I have ever written about — and I write about second trimester abortions, so that is saying something.

To the women who have been told they were too wet, too dry, too messy, too smelly, too gross, too saggy or too bloody, I have heard you. I know you stand in drugstores wondering why there are all these hygiene products if they are unnecessary. I know you stare into the internet and wonder, if celebrities say they steam their vaginas, or have 10-step vaginal prep regimens, then maybe vaginal neglect really is a flaw that ruins relationships.

All I can say is, if you have a medical concern, see a doctor. And: If someone speaks to you about your body with anything but kindness and concern, it is he who has a problem. And: The vagina is like a self-cleaning oven.

To the rash of mansplainers and The New York Post, thank you. This experience proves that shaming women about physiologically normal and functioning vaginas is epidemic. The cure for this rash is information. You can either listen and learn or you can take a seat in the back of class and shut up. The era in which men can shame women for their perfectly healthy vaginas is now coming to an end.

The other day Bjarte recommended Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. The library found it quickly so I’m reading it. There’s a bit on page 28 in a chapter on willful blindness in love:

“Success confers its own blindness,” says Brown. “Successful people believe they can get away with it. I talked once to a group of men who’d all become millionaires before the age of forty and who’d had affairs. They don’t even see the danger! It isn’t a love of risk. They think the wives will never know, so where’s the harm? Everything else in their lives has worked out, so they think they have some kind of magic, that their success has meant that they can have everything they want and they’re invulnerable. And they were completely blind to the harm that they had done.”

It sounded kind of familiar.

In annals of Things I Neglected in the Hail of All the Other Things, there is the move by Republicans and Trump to halt a rule requiring big companies to collect data on how they pay their employees. The ACLU in September:

Last night, 223 members of the House of Representatives voted against equal pay for our nation’s workers.

If asked, these members of Congress would almost certainly say that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work and that pay discrimination based on gender and race is a scourge that should be eliminated. Yet when the opportunity arose to support an equal pay initiative that is critical in achieving these goals, they voted no.

Believe what they do, not what they say.

The DeLauro-Frankel-Scott amendment that came to the House floor yesterday for a vote would have preserved federal funding for a new equal pay data collection initiative by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces our nation’s antidiscrimination laws. This initiative was developed during the Obama administration and updated an existing survey, called the EEO-1 report.

The original survey, which has been around for 50 years, requires large employers to provide the EEOC and other federal entities with information about the race, gender, and ethnicity of their workforce by job category. The updated EEO-1 report would have required these employers to also provide information about what they pay their employees.

The EEOC equal pay data collection was developed after years of study and two rounds of public comments, and it would have taken effect in March 2018. It is an essential tool in our fight against pay discrimination because it would have lifted the cloak of secrecy that shrouds pay decisions in this country.

But but but then it would be harder for companies to go on paying people less on the grounds that they’re not white men.

While women’s rights and civil rights advocates have found their arguments to be wholly self-serving and unconvincing, members of Congress and senior officials in the White House were, unfortunately, more easily swayed.

Indeed, in July, House Republicans adopted an amendment that cut off federal funding to implement the program. In August, the Trump administration halted the data collection altogether. Although the administration ordered an ill-defined “review” of the program and suggested that the EEOC should resubmit a revised data collection package, there are deep suspicions about the administration’s true commitment to working with the EEOC to ensure the implementation of a similar initiative.

Danielle Paquette at the Post in October:

A coalition of more than 90 civil rights groups is preparing to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to halt an Obama-era initiative aimed at fighting employer discrimination against women and minorities.

Emily Martin, general counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said she and attorneys at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have requested copies of emails, voice mails and other communications among the federal officials who opted in August to freeze a rule that would have required companies to file data broken down by race, ethnicity and gender on what they pay workers.

The rule compelling companies to submit additional information about employees and wages to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was finalized in September 2016 and would have taken effect next year.

Would have, had a reasonable adult human won the presidential election last year, but alas it was not to be.

After Trump launched his deregulation agenda, Neomi Rao, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, stayed the rule, saying in an Aug. 29 letter to the new acting head of the EEOC that the requirement was unnecessarily burdensome and lacked “practical utility.”

Victoria Lipnic, whom Trump appointed in January as acting chair of the EEOC, publicly expressed concerns in April about the burden the rule could put on businesses. (Neither Rao nor Lipnic responded to requests for comment.)

Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, supported the administration’s decision to halt the rule. The first daughter and adviser to the president has positioned herself a champion for women, advocating policies that support female breadwinners.

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” she said in an August statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, OMB, Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”

I did comment on Princess Ivanka’s ludicrous self-serving “statement” at the time:

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” said the first daughter, who recently published a book called ‘Women Who Work’ and markets a clothing and accessories line to working women.

How the hell does she know? Who is she to make that claim? What is the source of her expertise?

Activists who focus on pay equality have blasted this decision, with the executive director of Make It Work, a nonprofit aimed at improving women’s economic lives, calling it “a blatant attack on women.”

“To suspend a crucial Obama-era initiative aimed at increasing pay transparency and reducing the gender and racial pay gap is an unacceptable and deliberate attack on women in the workplace, especially black and Hispanic women who are currently paid only 63 cents and 54 cents to the dollar white men are paid, respectively,” said Tracy Sturdivant, who cofounded the Make It Work campaign.

But Ivanka Trump knows better because…what?

Oh wait, I know – it’s because she’s an employer and a purchaser. She doesn’t want to pay her employees more and she doesn’t want to pay more for the merch she sells. It’s not that she actually thinks it wouldn’t work; she’s lying just like Daddy about that – it’s that she thinks it will cost her money.

So far I don’t see any reason to change my mind about that.

Speaking of narrow authoritarian impoverished versions of “morality,” there’s this sheriff in Texas who is all worked up about…the word “fuck” on someone’s personal vehicle.

A sheriff in Texas is looking for a truck bearing a profanity-laced anti-Trump sticker and said authorities are considering charging its owner with disorderly conduct — a threat that immediately raised alarm among free speech advocates.

I wouldn’t call it “profanity-laced” – it’s too succinct for that. It says simply: Fuck Trump and fuck you for voting for him.

Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy E. Nehls posted a photo of the truck Wednesday on Facebook after, he said, he’d received several complaints about the display from unhappy people in the Houston-area county.

The photo is no longer on Facebook, but it’s easy to find lots of photos of the type via Google images. Here’s one:

Not really an enhancement of the public landscape, but not a police matter, either.

“If you know who owns this truck or it is yours, I would like to discuss it with you,” the sheriff wrote. “Our Prosecutor has informed us she would accept Disorderly Conduct charges regarding it, but I feel we could come to an agreement regarding a modification.”

The Houston Chronicle said the truck’s owners have no plans to remove the custom graphic, which they ordered after Trump’s election.

“It’s not to cause hate or animosity,” Karen Fonseca told the Chronicle. “It’s just our freedom of speech and we’re exercising it.”

Wellll it’s a little bit to cause animosity – the “fuck you for voting for him” part.

At a news conference Wednesday, after his Facebook post went viral, Nehls said he supports freedom of speech, according to the Associated Press.

“We have not threatened anybody with arrest; we have not written any citations,” Nehls said. “But I think now it would be a good time to have meaningful dialogue with that person and express the concerns out there regarding the language on the truck.”

A meaningful dialogue with the police…which is rather different from meaningful dialogue with random fellow citizens.

There’s another good bit of that interview with the Los Angeles priest who works with kids in gangs that I overlooked yesterday. It’s another place where he offers a version of religion that is understandable even to secular types – understandable and worth doing.

You know how you were saying earlier that, like, when you were a child, your prayers were petitional? You know, God help me pass my math test. And now your prayers are more meditative. You have, you know, mantras that you say. Do you ever do petitional prayer anymore?

BOYLE: I don’t.

GROSS: Is there a place for that in your…

BOYLE: Well, I mean, it’s in the liturgy. You know, we’re people – you know, let’s pray for, you know, this guy who died, and let’s pray for unity in our country. And all those things are good because it’s – people are articulating kind of what’s on their mind, and it’s a way for people to stand with each other.

You know, I may not be able to carry what you’re carrying, but we can carry you. And that’s kind of what prayer in the petitionary sense means. But I never do it personally ’cause I don’t – you know, when people say, I believe in the power of prayer or, as speaker Ryan said the other day, prayer works, I go, well, now talk about that, you know? It helps me find God at the center of my life. So yes, it does work. But if – you know prayer, is not going to fix our health care system. Stop it, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

BOYLE: Don’t think that. You actually have to do something about guns. You can’t just pray, and you can’t just, again, extend thoughts and prayers. And so the power of prayer – I don’t think people got that – people haven’t graduated from the third grade. They’re stuck there. They’re still praying for the math test, you know, when there are things that are in our control and that we’re supposed to do and that God doesn’t protect us from Hurricane Maria but will sustain us as we lock arms with each other in its aftermath. I believe in that.

In a way I can believe in that too, or at least see what he’s getting at and not be repulsed by it. People locking arms with each other is a good thing, and if that’s what you mean by “God” then go for it.

GROSS: So if you’re not doing petitional prayer when you have someone who you deeply care about, who’s gone through Homeboy Industries, who’s trying to change their life and they’re sick or they’ve been hurt and they’re in the hospital and they’re hanging on maybe by a thread, when you pray for them, what are you doing? Like, are you asking for them to be healed? Is that too petitional for you to do? Do you know what I’m saying?

BOYLE: Yeah, you know, ’cause yesterday, you know, one of our homies who’s worked for us for a long time – and I buried his brother, and his father was dying. So I went over to the hospital. We all gathered around. You know, I’m a priest, so I do the anointing of the sick. I anoint his forehead, and I invite everybody in the room. There were probably 10 of us. And each one kind of, you know, anointed him very tenderly. And we all touched him, and I said a blessing. Clearly he, you know, had a major stroke, and clearly he was leaving us. And 10 minutes later, he did.

I was so glad I got there not because this was some magical, you know, thing but that it meant a lot to this homie who works for me. And it meant a lot to just sort of gather together. But you’re not praying for some outcome, you know? You’re trying to, you know, step into this – into the wideness of God, you know, this amazing, merciful, spacious and expanse of God. And then all of a sudden, because you’re praying, because you’re bringing this consciousness to the group, everybody is experiencing the tender glance of God in that moment. And then you feel animated to leave each other’s presence and to be that tender glance in the world. That’s how it works.

But the magical thinking of pray that – you know, that this person get healed – and it’s not even pray for God’s will because people die, and people get sick. And there’s nobody who’s not going to have that happen to them. But in the process, we can lock arms with each other, and the prayer is just a way of, you know, putting first things first.

If only more priests were like Greg Boyle.

Last night Trump tweeted his deep concern and fellow feeling toward the people of Tehama County, California Sutherland Springs, Texas over that terrible mass shooting thing they had there wherever it was.

On Tuesday night, Trump posted this message:

Oh gosh, Don, that was ten days ago.

May God be w/ the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI & law enforcement are on the scene. I am monitoring the situation from Japan.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2017

At least he left off the part about monitoring from Japan.

1. We have too many mass shootings. ONE is too many.
2. That's no excuse for a POTUS confusing them. Carelessness is callousness.
3. Trump's done nothing to address root causes. His presence exacerbates the crisis.

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) November 15, 2017

He sent out a generic tweet. What more do you want him to do?

Surprise surprise: there’s a lot of sexual predation in Alcoholics Anonymous. You don’t say! Who would ever think that a quasi-sacred secretive all-anonymous “program” to rescue alcoholics with a success rate of around 6% would foster predators?

“AA has absolutely saved my life,” says Amy Dresner, who has been in and out of AA for 20 years, and recently published a memoir about her addiction and recovery called My Fair Junkie. “I was never sexually harassed per se,” Dresner says. “What I did feel happened to me was that I was preyed upon when I was very vulnerable. When I came in and I was new, no girls pulled me aside and said ‘Hey, these are the guys who usually wait for the fresh meat to come in. These are the guys that fuck the newcomers.’ I was fucked multiple times by guys with who had double digit [years of] sobriety while I was still counting days. I was 13th stepped.”

“13th stepping” is a phrase all of the women I spoke to were familiar with. It is not an actual step in the program, but rather an expression commonly used within the fellowship to refer to the practice in which elder members with more years of sobriety sexually pursue newcomers because they’re in a vulnerable state and more open to manipulation. A 2003 study in the Journal of Addictions Nursing showed that 50 percent of the female AA members surveyed had experienced the 13th stepping phenomenon.

In spite of this, Dresner says it’s the responsibility of those entering the program to go in with their eyes open. “If you’re expecting it to be a room full of saints, you’re an idiot. It’s a place where sick people go to get better. It’s a looney bin. Wherever there’s a power hierarchy there’s going to be sexual abuse. AA is no different. There is a power hierarchy,” she tells me.

Hmmmm yes it’s a place where sick alcoholic people go to get better that fails around 94% of the time and is all anonymous. There’s going to be sexual abuse, you can’t do anything about the abuse because anonymous, and it won’t help you – but it’s awesome all the same.

Monica Richardson was a member of AA for 36 years before she walked away and embarked on a personal mission to expose abusive practices in the 12 step community. She produced a documentary about sexual and financial exploitation in 12 step groups called “The 13th Step,”and states that since starting her blog LeavingAA in 2010, she has received “thousands” of emails from current and former members who have experienced sexual harassment, assault and abuse from other members of “the fellowship.”

One of Richardson’s major points of contention with AA is their refusal to warn newcomers to the program that they may be sitting next to someone who has been court ordered to attend meetings as a condition of probation or parole. AA’s own 2014 membership survey states that 12 percent of members were referred to the organization by the criminal justice system.

They’re not there by choice, and they’re protected by anonymity, and for all you know they’re rapists. Cozy.

“AA needs to warn its members that there could be a sex offender or violent offender who’s been sent there, so be careful who you trust,” Richardson says. She also thinks that the group should tell the court system to stop requiring attendance for violent offenders, that the program should institute a hotline for members to call if they’ve been sexually assaulted by another program member, and that safety guidelines stating that sexual harassment, assault, and exploitation within the group are “not okay” should be read and posted at all meetings. Meeting leaders and sponsors are not required to go through any sort of training.

And there’s no question of evidence or comparing outcomes. It’s just a thing, and you go to it and take what you get. There are actually medical treatments for addiction, and AA is not that.

She also rejects AA’s assertion that the program is a “microcosm of society” where sexual harassment and assault are no more likely to happen than they would anywhere else. “It’s not a microcosm,” she says. “You’re pulling together a group of people who are malfunctioning. They’re addicted to drugs and alcohol. They may have issues with self-esteem and being assertive. And they’re all reading a book from the 1930s.”

It doesn’t work, and there are a lot of risks – yet AA is widely seen as an unquestionable good. It’s nuts.

The United States is a country founded on idealism. We have principles and values and sacred beliefs here, and the holiest of them all is that the rich must always be rewarded many times more generously than everyone else. If the worker makes $10 an hour then by god the CEO had better make at least $1000. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington died on the battlefield to defend that glorious truth.

Like plucky little Whitefish Energy Holdings, for instance.

The small energy outfit from Montana that won a $300 million contract to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s tattered power grid had few employees of its own, so it did what the Puerto Rican authorities could have done: It turned to Florida for workers.

For their trouble, the six electrical workers from Kissimmee are earning $42 an hour, plus overtime. The senior power linemen from Lakeland are earning $63 an hour working in Puerto Rico, the Florida utility said. Their 40 co-workers from Jacksonville, also linemen, are making up to $100 earning double time, public records show.

But the Montana company that hired the workers, Whitefish Energy Holdings, had a contract that allowed it to bill the Puerto Rican public power company, known as Prepa, $319 an hour for linemen, a rate that industry experts said was far above the norm even for emergency work — and almost 17 times the average salary of their counterparts in Puerto Rico.

Hey! They had to line their own pockets didn’t they?! They had to pay themselves first and most didn’t they?! This is AMERICA. Well ok it’s Puerto Rico which is obviously not AMERICA at all but hopelessly foreign, but Whitefish is AMERICA, so those rules apply.

Two weeks after Prepa abruptly withdrew the contract from Whitefish following strong criticism by federal and congressional officials of the company’s expected ability to perform the work needed, more questions are being raised about the deal, including how much it will actually cost. Whitefish will keep repairing power lines until Nov. 30.

Plenty of time for the bosses to make themselves a nice chunk of change.

At least four congressional committees are investigating. The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security has also begun a review of the Whitefish contract, as has the F.B.I., according to media reports.

Whitefish’s chief executive, Andy Techmanski, has called the investigations a “witch hunt.” The company said on Saturday that it had completed repair of more than 150 miles of transmission and distribution power lines.

Ah the old witch hunt ploy. It’s funny how corrupt greedy men keep grabbing that metaphor of the persecution of women.

Jeffrey Bartel, a former senior executive at Florida Power & Light, the third-largest utility in the United States, said markups were routine in subcontracted work, as was charging double time for emergency work.

But “even at double time, the labor cost figures are empirically questionable,” Mr. Bartel said after reviewing the contract at the request of The New York Times. “Possibly most egregious is that this all takes place with a dire and desperate circumstance where people’s lives are at immediate danger without power, and, therefore, there is unequal bargaining position by Puerto Rico, which allows for the possibility of price gouging.”

Price gouging in emergencies is another one of those beautiful American ideals.

Sometimes academic life is a little confusing:

Vancouver Island University is at the centre of a human rights complaint alleging that female staff were not protected from a student who brought a diaper-related sexual fetish to the B.C. school.

Who brought a WHAT?

A 105-page complaint filed by the Nanaimo school’s former director, Human Rights and Respectful Workplace, Katrin Roth, said the man’s behaviour was treated as a disability when it should have been dealt with as a potential threat to female staff.

…

CBC is not identifying the man who was involved in the complaint. He responded to a request for comment saying he was unable to speak about the matter for legal reasons.

“I will say I am special needs and 3, so I am not in my 40s,” he wrote to CBC. “Like the university I do not agree with Ms. Roth’s characterization of events.”

He’s 3…yet he is or was enrolled at a university, and he’s responding in writing to a request from the CBC. Why would a university accept a 3-year-old as a student?

The student in his 40s asked to be treated as an infant, demanding children’s books be read to him, speaking in a baby voice, wearing a soother, and even submitting a selfie of himself in a diaper to one instructor, said Roth. She believes that as soon as the university knew the student had what it terms an “atypical sexual drive that he may impose on non-consenting individuals” staff needed warning.

Ok, enough with the jokes. That is both ludicrous and disgusting. People don’t get to “demand” to be treated as infants or cars or ocelots or plates of toast. People don’t get to impose their fantasies on the rest of the world. Imagine whatever you like on your own time in your own space, but leave the rest of us out of it. Fantasies are not reality, and they are not human rights, either. A sizable body of people has decided they are, lately, but they’re wrong. There’s no such thing as a human right to have one’s fantasies humored. People can decide to humor adult fantasies if they feel like being generous about it, but that generosity can’t be ossified into an obligation.

Roth believes the student had presented himself to at least three other staff members demanding inappropriate treatment.

The former Alberta crown prosecutor is amending the original complaint that she said was deemed too broad — and has filed a second separate complaint after losing her job in 2017.

She said she became concerned after a man who said he needed to wear diapers due to a disability complained to her office. Over the years she said the student threatened to file Human Rights Complaints if his special needs were not considered, including his desire to be handled by female staff only.

In the document she said he presented himself to female staff at different campuses — in several cases asking them to change his soiled diapers. Eventually he came to Roth complaining of discrimination.

“He’s unfortunately obsessed with the fecal matter,” said Roth.

As she investigated his complaint she pushed for a sexual violence risk assessment — as the man who came to her claiming a disability seemed to have a sexual fetish he was subjecting others to, the document reveals.

Ya think?

English professor and chair of VIU’s women’s studies program Janis Ledwell-Hunt describes the man who was her student in spring of 2015 as somebody who left her fearful.

He was one of only a handful of in-person students in the small intensive course. But his “odd” and incessant emails disturbed her, the document says.

Then he handed in an essay with a selfie of himself in a diaper with a baby bottle and a soiled diaper. When she refused to accept it he became belligerent and she turned to VIU authorities for protection, says the complaint.

“He’d show up in a Curious George outfit with a soother around his neck,” said Ledwell-Hunt.

“He was involving me into his fantasy life. Into his fantasy play.”

What I’m saying. Have your fantasy life, knock yourself out, but don’t force it on other people.

Now here’s a funny thing. The opening words of Fresh Air last night made my heart sink within me.

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. My guest, Father Greg Boyle, has worked with former gang members in LA for over 30 years.

Oh no no no no, thought I. Not a Catholic priest; nope nope nope. But I gave it a minute anyway, just in case, and…was surprised. He seems

• like a mensch and
• not at all priesty

I’ll quote some of it but if you’re at all interested I recommend listening, to get the not-priesty quality of his voice and way of talking.

GROSS: With the help of cellphone videos and dashboard videos, Americans have seen with their own eyes how some police officers assault or kill black men. And is that something that gang members you’ve worked with – ex-offenders that you’ve worked with have complained about? And if so, have you worked with officers – with police officers and spoken to them about your concerns?

BOYLE: Well, for the first time in 30 years, you know, we’ve had police officers in training at the police academy. They’re brought over to Homeboy Industries to kind of spend the day. And it’s a softening of, who are these people? And it helps, you know, to have gang members stand up in front of a roomful of police officers who are in training and allow them in – you know, invite them to the difficulties of their own growing up and what they had to endure. And if you can lead them to a place of awe, which is a great leveler – and then pretty soon they stand in awe at what these folks have had to carry rather than in judgment at how they’ve carried it. So it’s softened the demonizing.

GROSS: You describe a meeting you had, like, years ago with a police officer. And you expressed your concerns. And he told you – the police officer told you that the police strategy is to make life as miserable as possible for the gang members. And your response was life is already miserable for them. So where did that leave you in your conversation with him? Do you remember?

BOYLE: Well, then it became let’s shoot the messenger. So then there was this really great outpouring of hostility towards me from the local Los Angeles Police Department. I was the fraternizer with the enemy. I was, you know – I co-signed on bad behavior – and then wild things, like, I held their guns and their drugs – crazy stuff.

But this was – this is ancient history. This was when they would take kids to the factories and beat them down for purposes of interrogation or intimidation. And I was naive because I grew up on the other side of town in LA. Because when the cops arrived, they – you were relieved. They got the cat out of a tree, you know? So here I would go to the captain – I’d say, I think you’d want to know that this is going on. And so then pretty soon, it turned. It was – I knew not to go to the cops and tell them this because it just exacerbated their hostility towards me.

GROSS: But you think things are different now?

BOYLE: But that’s – oh, way different now – just absolutely way different. Now, there isn’t a gang member in LA County who doesn’t have a bad story to tell, not one – and multiple ones at that about how, you know, they were mistreated or picked up and dropped off in enemy territory. They all can reach back and have those stories. But now, again, it’s part of the fabric of how policing happens, that they go out of their way not to do this stuff now, at least in LA. And that’s progress because it was quite bad 30 years ago.

Then they talked about his chronic leukemia and about death. He says it’s not high on his list of things he worries about and she asks why not.

BOYLE: Yeah, I think the only answer to that is I’m probably weird.

GROSS: (Laughter) OK.

BOYLE: But I think part of it, too, is that you have to put – a kid who I buried used to say right after his brother died in his arms – also gunned down. And he was gunned down two years after that. He said death is a punk. And I said, yeah, you know, you’re right. And so I think a lot of it has to do – people are kind of stunned that that none of us will get out of this alive. And that kind of startles me. I want to say, where you been, you know? And it’s kind of an indicator of, you know, the work that everybody has to do is no one gets out of this life. So once you know that then, all of a sudden, death as a punk.

You know, the Dalai Lama – somebody asked him about his own personal death. And he just laughed. And he said, change of clothing. And yeah, I’ll have what he’s having, you know, because I think that’s what it is. So the minute you’re freed from not just the notion of death but you’re freed from the fear of it – and I know that cancer and death is not the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody. And once you know that, then you can compile the lists – you know? – the list of fates worse than death and the things more powerful than death.

I find it interesting that he didn’t say a word about immortality. Maybe “change of clothing” is, but then again maybe it isn’t – it certainly isn’t the Vatican-approved variety.

Same with prayer.

GROSS: What was your understanding of prayer when you were in parochial school compared to what your understanding of prayer is now?

BOYLE: Well, you know, in those days, it was rote, and it was petitionary. And it was – I know I didn’t study for the math test, but please let me pass it, you know, craziness, which led people to go, yeah, he didn’t – I didn’t pass the math test – so much for prayer. So I mean, again, it was third grade. And – but I had experiences when I was in high school where it was profound and unitive and really feeling held and loved and worthy.

GROSS: Is prayer for you a quiet recitation, you know, of prewritten prayer or moments of reflection that have no text attached to it?

BOYLE: Yeah. I don’t have any text. I have mantras all the time. But I try to meditate twice a day and in the morning and then if I can do it during the afternoon or when I steal away some time for lunch. It’s…

GROSS: Yeah, mantra is a Buddhist concept and not (laughter) a Jesuit one…

BOYLE: Don’t tell anybody (laughter).

GROSS: Buddhism comes up a lot in your book. So you obviously see some connections between, you know, the Jesuit approach that you follow and Buddhism.

BOYLE: Yeah, definitely I do. You know, I think it’s very helpful to my own kind of centering prayer. And again, my mantra at the moment is, resting in you, resting in me. And I kind of breathe it in, and I breathe it out. Actually a homie taught me that one.

GROSS: Really?

BOYLE: Yeah. I have a homie named Sergio (ph) who is kind of – I call my spiritual director. And he goes to work at some ungodly hour, at 4. He’s been in recovery for, like, nine years. And he’s my hero. I call him my spiritual director. And every morning, sometimes in real time, but, you know – because I get up at 3:30 in the morning. I get up really early. And so he’ll email me. And he’ll kind of – this is what I’m thinking, and this is what happened to me in prayer. And then I tell him what happened to me. And it’s a profoundly rich thing.

But I look back at him, and you know, he was a meth addict and a drug dealer and a gang member. And now he’s like a spiritual guide to me. But anyway, so we were talking about this kind of breathing in and breathing out and resting in you, resting in me. And so that’s my current one thanks to him.

It’s less repellent than the usual kind, I think.

Originally a comment by iknklast on If she can walk she can marry.

However, the inferior status of women is so “baked in” into what our society considers normal or “normal enough” to make allowances for, that it takes a great deal of effort to even spot specific instances

This has been my experience. In my playwriting collective, there are a number of women, and the members of the group mostly identify as liberal. They would be horrified that anyone would suggest otherwise, or should anyone suggest they see women in a patriarchal role.

Yet there is much in the plays they write, and in how they are produced, that simply accepts the “way women are” as presented so commonly throughout history. It is so difficult for them to see the situation that few noticed when my intelligent, strong, educated woman (and asexual, being a worker bee) was turned into an airheaded ditz during production. Not only that, she was portrayed as a sexually frustrated spinster who swooned over the first boorish male she encountered. While some people were uncomfortable with the sexual overtones that were added to the role by director and actor, even they did not realize the violence done to feminism in the portrayal, and the comfort such a portrayal no doubt leant to the patriarchal structure of our society. And most of them, when the discussion began, simply said, well, it was a success, people like it, so what are you complaining about? Damn.

And no one, absolutely no one else noticed what they did to another strong, educated, intelligent female character who actually managed to perpetuate a nice slap down of the male character when he was acting like a jerk to try to impress her. She came on into an office setting carrying the things to go on her desk – a wastebasket full of bric-a-brac, pictures, hand lotion (which was actually applied during the play), perfume, and other feminine niceties. The male character then stepped in to his desk carrying a telephone and a piece of paper – a lean, mean, working machine contrasted to the feminine, sort of trivial female who was demonstrating that she put family and nurturing first by the pictures on the desk. I know the author of the piece, and I doubt it bothered him. He would say, like they all would say, well, this is just how it is. Women are caring and nurturing, men are stripped down and hungry. Surely you don’t have a problem with that? After all, isn’t it nice that women are like that, so they can make the world a better place to live? Damn it, no. I’m sick of it. It is a subtle way of reminding us that women are more of an ornament and an assistant in the working place, while men are the efficient go-getters.

And as for marrying? I was constantly reminded, from the age of six, that my role was to marry. My mother started my hope chest when I was 8 by buying me a punch bowl for Christmas (have you ever known an 8 year old who would rather have a punch bowl than a Mr. Potato Head?). My older sister began dating at 14, and married the man 2 years later. I was a big disappointment, because I never did what a fundamentalist Christian woman is supposed to do. I guess I wasn’t very good at that stuff. God was more like Santa Claus to me, something you believe in when you’re young and discard when you get older. But I was still expected to toe the line and marry a good Christian man and have good Christian babies, die a good Christian death and get buried next to my husband/owner in a good Christian grave, visited regularly by my 97 good Christian children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. My family considers me hopeless; I have one child, and even though I am now 57 years old, I do not have (nor desire to have) any grandchildren. I am a scientist, a playwright, and a feminist/atheist/environmentalist – in short, the true black sheep of the family. I am the only one who ever finished what I started, and I know that I would have achieved little of that if I had married at 16 like my older sister. But I would have made my parents very happy.

I guess it’s going to be every day now, and soon it will be several times a day. It will stop being reported, because it’s too commonplace and there’s too much of it.

At least four people were killed Tuesday morning in Northern California when a gunman shooting at random struck at multiple locations, targeting an elementary school and a woman driving her children to school, authorities said…Ten people were injured and taken to area hospitals, including at least two children…Police received “multiple 911 calls of multiple different shooting sites, including the elementary school” in Rancho Tehama Reserve…While details about what led up to the gunfire remained unclear, Johnston said authorities were told by neighbors that “there was a domestic violence incident” involving the suspected attacker…After the shooting, Johnston said police recovered a semiautomatic rifle and two handguns believed to be used by the shooter…Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said in a statement that he and his wife were “saddened to hear about today’s violence in Tehama County, which shockingly involved schoolchildren…” Vice President Pence posted in a message on Twitter that the White House would monitor the situation, provide federal support and “pray for comfort & healing for all impacted.”…After the gunfire, worried parents were trying to get to their children at the school…

One thing we do know for sure, though: it’s too soon to talk about gun control.