A Few More Trump Press Conference Thoughts: The Perfidy of the Media, Hillary Clinton Still The Rival

Now that a day has passed since our Dear Leader spoke to, and admonished, the media, I have these thoughts to offer about what makes Donald Trump tick.

1.  The press conference was largely about the Greatness Of One Donald Trump, and about attacking those who in his view are hampering the general adulation he so rightly deserves.

Thus, he kept returning to Hillary Clinton, he kept telling us how much better he is than Hillary Clinton, and he kept reminding us of his absolutely tremendous election victory.

He can't stop thinking about her, the rival who lost,  and this is not the typical pattern new presidents demonstrate when beginning their administration. But Trump is greatly bothered by her, by some niggling doubt that perhaps his victory wasn't quite that shining, quite that bigly, and so he can't stop addressing the topic.

2.  The most common theme in the press conference, by topic count, was Trump's great dislike of the media.  He returned to that topic several times, he admonished the journalists who were present, he demanded certain types of questions, and he kept telling the journalists that they represented fake news.

This is because the media is not sufficiently adulatory, not sufficiently in the anus kissing business.  Trump needs the crowds to cheer for him, and what is a press conference but a small crowd in front of him?  In short, the reasons for the two topics:  Hillary Clinton's perfidy and the crookedness of the media, have the same root:  Trump's narcissism.

3.  My final thought troubles me greatly, and that is the way Trump works to turn the media into his real opposition.  It smells of the treatment of the press in countries where the rulers are essentially dictators (Russia and Turkey come to mind), and it opens up the very real possibility that facts are whatever the Dear Leader wants them to be.

Trump's tirades against the media exclude the Fox News, because Fox is conservative and pro-Trump.  He likes praise!

But note that Trump's anger is squarely aimed at the most highly rated news organizations in the world:  the New York Times, the BBC and so on.  If he succeeds in making a sufficient number of his supporters into the deniers of those news that are most likely to be based on actual research and multiple sources, how are Americans ever able to agree on even what may have happened?

That is not a bug, but a feature in the plans of the power behind Trump's throne, Stephen Bannon.  Dictatorships require what Trump is trying to achieve here, although the reasons Trump attacks the press are much closer to home and have to do with having to read negative news about His Own Greatness.

The question how to determine what "truth"  might be is complicated and philosophically difficult.*  But Trump's only statement on how he decides what  is fake and what is true is demanding that he be viewed as a credible eye-witness:  "I was there."

The problem is that he is not an impartial observer of the events.  Rather' he is the center of the whirlpool and he is extremely interested in shining a good light on himself. 


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  *  But it's feasible to explain how one might try to establish, say, the truth of an academic study:

Establish the credibility of the individuals who carried the study out (based on their curriculum vitae, academic reputations and earlier studies), and the credibility of the journal that published the study, assuming it is a published study (whether it is peer-reviewed, whether access to publishing is just based on paying money etc., the rejection rate of the journal etc.).

Learn about any public statements of the researchers, their membership in various political organizations, and other opinions they have given in interviews.

But NONE of that means anything, except for being a small additional check.

Most of the verification should be focused on finding what other studies, deemed central in the field have found, and of course what the study itself says.  The methods of the study, the theories it chooses to address or to hide, its sampling method, the size of the sample and its composition, the measures the study uses:  All these must be evaluated.  Does the study have methodological errors, data handling errors or severe omissions of alternative explanations?  Do its conclusions follow from its findings?

And if the evaluator's skills or knowledge are insufficient for all that work, then the study authors and other experts should be used to find the answers to unsolved questions.

Doing all this doesn't guarantee that the final assessment is correct, but the alternatives are much worse.

Trump's Speech in Adjectives, 2/16/2017

This is my interpretation of Trump's speech at today's press conference, right to the point when he starts to take questions.  I picked out most of the adjectives he used, and list them here, beginning from the start of the speech.  The list is not necessarily exhaustive, because I based it on listening to the speech, not on the transcript.  The former is the way most people would have received the speech:

great
tremendous
very well
tremendous
fantastic
important
important
strong
strong
terrible
out-of-control
late
terrible
catastrophic
good
proud
incredible
incredible
tremendous
good
good
wonderful
broken
dishonest
tremendous
out-of-control
broken
fantastic
fantastic
great
worst
massive
great
great
happy
greatest
depleted
depleted
depleted
strong
strong
strong
not happy
happy
outstanding
brilliant
great
wonderful
horrible
great
safe
bigly
bigly
great
great
great
great
great
 big

The positive adjectives are used to describe his first weeks of presidency, his cabinet and Supreme Court picks and his future plans.  The negative adjectives are used about the state of the country, the murder rate in Chicago (horrible) and the American media (broken, dishonest, broken).

I find the repetition fascinating, and I bet it works.  Trump also stated that he inherited a mess from Obama  at home (not true) and abroad (not Obama's doing), and he used the word "mess" a total of five times in that context.  He referred to ISIS as a cancer twice, and he used "chaos" to describe both the 9th circuit which ruled against his Muslim travel ban and twice to describe the state of the American media.

The American military, according to Trump (not in reality), is depleted, depleted, depleted, but he will make it, and the police, strong, strong, strong. (Isn't it interesting that he singled out the military and the police for expansion?) 

The Decriminalization of Domestic Violence in Russia: God-Approved

I have written about the decriminalization of domestic violence in Russia before, but Christina Cauterucci at Slate's XX Factor makes a point which I missed.

It is this:

The Russian Orthodox Church has also pushed for looser restrictions on domestic abusers, claiming that the state should not interfere in family matters and that calls to make domestic violence a crime are informed by Western influences that want to impose liberal values on Russia.

I find it shocking how quickly the battle lines of the cold war have been redrawn so that the identities of the enemies remain the same, but the reasons for the enmity are quite different. *

Whereas in the past much of the fighting was over communism vs. capitalism, now at least some of it is about "cultural values," and it's Russia which this time defends conservative patriarchal values against equal rights for women, in general, or for LGBT individuals.

Not that  there actually is any one coherent ideology that could be defined as "liberal values" in the West.  But the West is used in that manner in Russia, to create the appropriate external enemy.

This reminds me of they way the Western colonial oppression in the Middle East created a reaction based on similar arguments about "Western values," and how in that context, too, the equality of women and men and the rights of LBGT people were (and are) opposed as alien constructs and as not supported by religious authorities.

Yet, as I have written before, those civil rights which exist in the West were won only after long and hard struggles, and they are still opposed by many (even in the Trump administration).  To view human rights as an idea applicable to only the decadent** West is terribly sad.  Millions will be deprived of their human rights because of that framing.

Still, my main point in this post is the role of religious authorities in the control of women.  As far as I can tell, women cannot be ordained in the Russian Orthodox Church, but that church still makes statements about women's proper place and appears to choose to side with the domestic abusers against their victims.

This, and many other similar examples from the major religions make feminist questioning of religions always imperative.


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* This is more from Putin's point of view than from the angle of, say, one Donald Trump who probably would nod his head at everything Putin says, though not necessarily having thought about any of it.

**  The concept of "decadence" is seldom defined in these kinds of debates, but when it is, it tends to focus on the assumed behavior of women, not the assumed behavior of men.  Examples are how women dress, how many sexual partners they may have, whether women stay at home caring for their children as good women should and so on.

Even though not all parts of the definition are equally gendered, most are.  Check it out, and you find that it's women's behavior (and also LGBT behavior) that truly disturbs the cultural conservatives, not, say, behaviors such as men's pornography viewing or men having many sexual partners or extra-marital sex.

More Alternative Facts: Trump on the Prevalence of Autism

Donald Trump and Betsy deVos met people* who educate children or are parents at the White House.  There's a short YouTube video on that meeting:



One of the educators works with autistic children, and Trump took the opportunity to make wildly exaggerating statements about the prevalence of autism.

Jesse Singal writes about this.  The educator whom Trump quizzed is called Jane in this clip:

After Jane noted that many of her students have autism, Trump asked, “Have you seen a big increase in the autism, with the children?” Jane replied in the affirmative, but seemed to couch her response as being more about an increase in demand for services — she didn’t explicitly agree there’s been a big increase in the overall rate. Trump continued: “So what’s going on with autism? When you look at the tremendous increase, it’s really — it’s such an incredible — it’s really a horrible thing to watch, the tremendous amount of increase. Do you have any idea?

Singal then quotes an actual expert on autism, Steve Silberman:

“There’s no consensus as to whether or not there’s been any significant increase in the actual prevalence of autism, period,” said Silberman. “The real debate is whether or not there has been a small increase, and there are a number of factors that could play a role in that small increase. For instance, it’s well established that older parents have more autistic kids and people are waiting longer to get married and have kids now, so there may be a small increase there. Some people claim that there are some environmental factors — notably, not vaccines — that may be contributing to a small increase. But the consensus is that there has been no huge, startling, ‘horrible,’ as Trump said, increase in autism. And the CDC estimate has been flat for a couple of years, just as they expected it to be, because the major source of the increase that started in the 1990s was broadened diagnostic criteria and much more public awareness of what autism looks like.”

Looks like Trump disseminates fake facts here, too.

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*  Mostly women,  because teaching is a female-dominated (and not that well paid) occupation until we get to the college level.  I also noticed, based on the introductions, that home-schooling women were the largest single group of educators around that table, even though we are told in the video that those present represent public schools, public charter schools, private schools and home schoolers. 

That is odd, given that home-schooling is much less common than sending one's children to public or private schools.

Whether that is a sign of things to come from the Education Department under deVos is unclear. 

School Lunches in the Republican Era

Representative Steve King (R-IA) has proposed  new legislation:

H.R.610 - To distribute Federal funds for elementary and secondary education in the form of vouchers for eligible students and to repeal a certain rule relating to nutrition standards in schools.

I have no idea if this proposal could pass.

It has two parts.  The first consists of distributing Federal funds for elementary and secondary education through vouchers which could be used to pay for private schools or public schools or home-schooling...

The second part would abolish the nutritional rules about school lunches which were created during the Obama administration:

The rule prescribed by the Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of Agriculture relating to nutrition standards in the national school lunch and school breakfast programs published on January 26, 2012 (77 Fed. Reg. 4088 et seq.), and revising parts 210 and 220 of title 7, Code of Federal Regulations, shall have no force or effect.

So high-fat, low-nutrition school lunches would, once again, be AOK, and the removal of those rules would open up a lucrative additional market for various fast-food chains.  An increase in obese and malnourished children just might be a side-effect of all that, but that's the parents' problem and at least no Michelle Obama is policing what American children eat!


   

The Retirement of Michael Flynn

Russia Today, Putin's mouthpiece, called the resignation of Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn " a retirement."  Put that in your folder labeled "Alternative Facts."

This video, from last year, is worth watching.  It shows how Michael Flynn argued that Hillary Clinton would be a dangerous president, because of her use of a private email account.  The audience of his speech starts chanting "Lock her up!" and Flynn doesn't hush them but agrees with them.

A prime example of projection as a political defense mechanism.*

Given the recent revelations on his own international entanglements, perhaps he would now wish to give a speech about how one Michael Flynn should be locked up?

Nah.  Rules are different for Democrats and they certainly are different for Democrat bitches.  They don't even have to break laws to be lock-uppable.**

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* Like projection as a psychological defense mechanism.
** Not a real word.  But it should be.

Echidne Thoughts, 2/13/2017

1.  Imagine opening a closet door and everything you have ever crammed there comes out in an avalanche.  That's how the topics on which I might write are like now:  Far, far too many.

Should I write about the sprouting fascism?  About the narcissist in power?  About the Russian connections?  About how woman-oppressing, pro-corporate theocracies are being created in many states which are today under complete Republican control?  About the way the Constitution is currently a victim of domestic abuse?

I know the answer to those questions:  I should write where my training and study might let me say something useful.   But when one wakes up every morning and asks, as Dorothy Parker did, what new hell might await us, well, it's then very difficult not to write about, say,  Michael "Vladimirovich" Flynn or about Stephen "Hitler" Bannon, or about the Trump war against Latinx and Muslims.  Or about this truly frightening clip from Stephen "Dead Eyes" Miller.

2.  But then who am I writing to?  And what is it that my imaginary readers want me to write?   There are times when I feel I'm yelling into an empty barrel, the echoes returning, full of loneliness.

3.  Why is the rise not given for women's jeans?  I spent some time measuring myself for jeans which I planned to buy online, and realized that the task is impossible.  The inch measurements that are given are supposed to be about the waist of the jeans, right?  But not all jeans come up to one's natural waist.  In fact, most do not.  So where am I exactly supposed to take that waist measurement?  How many inches above the widest part of my hips or below my natural waist?  The rise would tell me that.

So I made a wild guess and bought a pair online.  They arrived today.  They are vast.

More Chapters From The Handmaid's Tale: Oklahoma

In Oklahoma, a freshman Rep. Justin Humphrey, has drafted an unconstitutional bill on abortions:*

...the legislation would require a woman seeking an abortion first to obtain written permission from her sexual partner. It would also require her to provide his name to her doctor and would forestall the procedure if the man wanted the opportunity to challenge paternity.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar provision in 1992.

It may not have a real chance of becoming a law, but given that this is Oklahoma, who knows?  The proposal was once tabled, but has been put back on the relevant committee's agenda, and is expected to have a hearing on Valentine's Day!!!

Never mind that.  What Humphrey said in defense of his draft proposal is truly fascinating:

At first, Humphrey said that the original intention of the bill was to ensure that fathers are involved in supporting a child from conception. “I was wanting fathers to have to pay child support at the beginning,” he said, but that specific language was excised from the bill.

Pardon me while I roll on the floor laughing.  Note how a woman's sexual partner in Humphrey's world would get the right to force her to give birth, but wouldn't have to pay anything toward her pregnancy!  A win-win for misogynists.

I haven't researched if Humphrey's little bill embryo has any qualifications.  For instance, can a man force a woman to give birth after having raped her?  What about the medical risks of pregnancy?  Would those matter at all?  I certainly hope so.

Most of those who have commented on this Taliban-like proposal have focused on another part of the defense Humphrey gives to his proposal, this:

Ultimately, he said, his intent was to let men have a say. “I believe one of the breakdowns in our society is that we have excluded the man out of all of these types of decisions,” he said. “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” he said of women. “I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’ And you know when you enter into a relationship you’re going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don’t get pregnant,” he explained. “So that’s where I’m at. I’m like, hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”

I have bolded the sentences that have caused the most ire.  At first glance it looks like Humphrey believes women's bodies are not their bodies, but aquaria for fetuses, "hosts."  But it's pretty clear that what he means is the Russian dolls** argument:

"You sluts have gotten another body inside you, and because you chose to have sex and because your precautions failed or you did not take them, now others will decide if that smaller doll can be removed or not.  Now you are just hollow containers.  You had your choice earlier, and because you chose poorly, you will no longer have full human rights."

So.  But what if the cause for the pregnancy was that the man lied about having had a vasectomy, or that he removed the condom without her noticing?  Is that still her responsibility?  And should he still have the right to force her to give birth?

People like Justin Humphrey disgust me.  If his misogynistic proposal became law, the bodies of pregnant women would, indeed, be under the control of their sexual partners.  Pregnancies can have real health risks, and although Humphrey doesn't understand it, the likelihood of conception is not something the male sexual partner cannot manipulate.

Note Justin's real point:

Ultimately, he said, his intent was to let men have a say. “I believe one of the breakdowns in our society is that we have excluded the man out of all of these types of decisions,”

Nope, we have not.  A man is needed for the conception, and most, if not all,  of the men doing the conceiving are voluntary participants who have made that choice, fully knowing that under the current laws women can have an abortion without their permission.  They pre-knew that!  If they don't like the idea, they shouldn't have had sex in the first place.

Just using Humphrey's thought patterns there...***



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* Another draft proposal in Oklahoma would ban all abortions which are based on genetic abnormalities of the embryo or fetus, never mind how early in the pregnancy the abortion is considered.

** These kinds, where the smallest doll goes inside the next smallest, and that one goes inside the slightly bigger one and so on, until all we see is the largest doll, full of embryo dolls!

***  He echoes the arguments of certain types of Men's Rights Activists who want men to have rights over the fetus or embryo in a woman's body, both to force the woman to abort if he doesn't want to become a father, and to force the woman to give birth, if he does.

IF the developing embryo or fetus was outside the woman's body in an artificial womb and IF the burdens of bringing up the child would somehow be fairly figured out in that scenario, THEN those arguments could be entertained.  But given the current birth-giving technology, she has so much more "skin in the game" that he cannot have those rights without removing some or all of her human rights.

The Hillarization of Elizabeth Warren

I coined that term in an earlier post.  It's intended to define the process which the right-wing uses to demonize Democratic politicians who are female.*  That process is harsher than the one used for Democratic politicians who are male.  Much smaller flaws are used and they are greatly magnified by repetition, repetition and repetition.  Just consider how many times Trump in his campaigns called Hillary "crooked."

Now he has said this about Elizabeth Warren:

President Trump reportedly mocked Democrats in a meeting with senators this week for allowing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) become the face of their party.
"Pocahontas is now the face of your party," Trump said in the meeting, sources told CNN.
Trump frequently called Warren "Pocahontas" as an insult on the campaign trail, mocking her for previously talking about having a distant Native American ancestry.

Remember Trump's imaginary Swedish ancestry?   Well, it's true that we have a cornucopia of horrible stuff to pick when trying to call Trump names, whereas Warren is so squeaky-clean that something like one comment about possible Native American ancestry will be thrown into her face forevermore.

To be honest, I don't have statistical evidence on Hillarization, because too few women have reached high enough a level to be deemed dangerous enough for it, so right now Hillarization is my working hypothesis.  If you see evidence for or against it, let me know.

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*  The same process could work in the opposite direction, too, so that female conservative politicians get attacked for flaws which would not be employed to attack male conservative politicians. 

Today's Gender Research Piece: The Cold God of Science vs. the Feather-Brained Gender Feminist

The framing of arguments is always fascinating.  I tend to spot a possible bias in the first paragraphs of most studies, articles and opinion pieces by just looking at the basic framing.

Is the author telling that her or his side is God's side, the objective, neutral side, the absolute truth side, even without any evidence?  Is the author telling that the other side is the Devil's side, the subjective, fluffy-headed side, the absolute ignorance side, even without any evidence?

Looking at those features saves me time, and they saved me time in reading this Los Angeles Times article about girl brains and boy brains by Debra W. Soh, titled "Are gender feminists and transgender activists undermining science?"

It's not the arguments Soh makes about actual research pieces that have that flavor of bias for me.  It's not the fact that she writes a  science column for the Playboy Magazine (about sex, as in threesomes and such) or that she doesn't seem to have gotten her neuroscience PhD yet.

It's statements like these:

Gender feminists — who are distinct from traditional equity feminists — refuse to acknowledge the role of evolution in shaping the human brain, and instead promote the idea that sex differences are caused by a socialization process that begins at birth. Gender, according to them, is a construct; we are born as blank slates and it is parents and society at large that produce the differences we see between women and men in adulthood.
The idea that our brains are identical sounds lovely, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Many studies, for instance, have documented the masculinizing effects of prenatal testosterone on the developing brain. And a recent study in the journal Nature’s Scientific Reports showed that testosterone exposure alters the programming of neural stem cells responsible for brain growth and sex differences.

Here's what I find objectionable in those two paragraphs:

The Scold. AKA Senator Elizabeth Warren.

One hilarious aspect of this Turd Reich is the way all sorts of creepy-crawly critters eagerly come out of the woodwork to say all those things they couldn't say when they had their lips sewn together in that horrible liberal totalitarian era.

The responses to the silencing of a hussy in the US Senate are a good example of this.  Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Ma, was told to shut up by the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, because she was "impugning" the character of a Senator (Jeff Sessions) during the Senate hearings.  (Sessions is now our attorney general, protecting our civil rights, which is a bit like approving of a wolf to care for the lives of sheep.)

McConnell's poetic utterances about Warren have now been etched into our collective memory:

“She was warned,” McConnell said later. “She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

But others have written better about all that and also about the many and varied reasons for McConnell's behavior.

They may not have been rooted in just sexism, because Warren is a very effective speaker.

Neither is the fact that McConnell later allowed several male Senators to read the Coretta King letter for which Warren was censured necessarily just yet another indicator of the widespread conservative view that women are meant to be silent and obedient but men are not.  Because once you step into pig shit by accident, you might not want to then do a step dance in it.  Or in cleaner terms, McConnell stepped into that pig shit and then tried to wipe his expensive shoes clean.

It is the conservative reactions to all this that are of interest.  Here's* Mike Huckabee, god's best buddy forever and a rigid interpreter of the Biblical code for women:

I love that!  A politician is a scold.  And that would be a female politician.

There are two obvious ways this post could go.  The first one, to be saved for a later post**, is a dissection of the way we are now supposed to live in the post-PC era, where everyone, including Mike Huckabee (but excluding anyone on this side of the political aisle), can blurt all sorts of nasty stuff straight into someone's face and expect not to be punished for it at all.

The second one is to note that the Hillarization of Elizabeth Warren has begun.  By "Hillarization" (my term, send royalties to Snakepit Inc.) I mean a process of smearing which is more rigorous, more extreme and more enduring for female politicians than it is for male politicians.  Warren will be Hillarized in no time at all, especially if it looks like she might be running for president in 2020.

We can't have a scold in that august position, now can we?
Heh.




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*  Read the Wonkette take, because it is delicious.

**  I think that post will be quite nuanced.  It's slowly simmering on the slow cooker part of my girl brain.


 

Trump's Enemies And Friends

The Enemies List:


1.  That bitch from the icy hell, though now she is of no consequence but back in her proper place.  Which is a silent one.*

2.  The Nordstrom department store.

3.  The failing New York Times.  And any other media not kissing Trump's anus.

4.  Mexico.

5.  All comedians making fun of Trump or his subordinates.

6.  All judges not kissing Trump's anus.

7.  Senator Richard Blumenthal.

8.  Australia.


The Friends List:

1.  Donald J. Trump.

2.  Donald J. Trump.

3.  Donald J. Trump.

4.  Donald J. Trump.

5.  Vlad "The Impaler" Putin

6.   Stephen "Adolph"  Bannon and other white supremacist boyz.

7.  Ivanka.  She is a perfect ten. 

8.  Breitbart.com

This, my friends, is the president of the most powerful country on earth!  Now also the most entertaining country on earth, a nonstop Reality Show which lets all sorts of people in other countries have a good laugh (while of course also fearing the now-increased possibility of a new world war).

The point of this post, if it has one, is that Trump demonstrates very bad judgement, and because a sufficient number of American voters thought that it doesn't matter, his bad judgement is now our problem, where "we" means the whole world.

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* As Senator Elizabeth Warren learned to her chagrin.

Will Your Vote Count in 2018? You Might Never Know.

This tiny news item might have escaped you, given the flood of horrible news items pouring out of the White House and the Congress.

But it is a very important one:

In a little-noticed 6-3 vote today, the House Administration Committee voted along party lines to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states run elections and is the only federal agency charged with making sure voting machines can’t be hacked. The EAC was created after the disastrous 2000 election in Florida as part of the Help America Vote Act to rectify problems like butterfly ballots and hanging chads. (Republicans have tried to kill the agency for years.)

Why would anyone wish to kill this agency?  The article mentions that it hasn't achieved very much, but is that worse than nobody knowing how votes are counted?

Transparent voting is the most essential safeguard for a democracy. Once we have no idea if the vote totals actually reflect how people voted, all sorts of foreign powers can stick their fingers in the pie.  Not to mention domestic powers.

I agree with the author of this piece, Ari Berman, that we should have strengthened the commission instead of destroying it.  And, honestly, let's return to a way of voting which allows for transparency.  Before it is too late.

All this is darkly funny, given that Trump wants to find and deport those three million imaginary illegal voters who chose not to kiss his feet.

Has anyone else noticed how the Republicans never see any possibilities for election fraud at the counting end?  Only at the end where they try to stop Democrats from voting, especially African-Americans?

Elecshuns Have Conzekwences

Betsy deVos is going to be the the new Education Secretary.  Her qualifications for the job are money, money, money, Christian fundamentalist beliefs in the superiority of Christian madrassas, money, money, money, her beliefs in free markets for even primary education*, and money, money and money:

The 51-to-50 vote elevates Ms. DeVos — a wealthy donor from Michigan who has devoted much of her life to expanding educational choice through charter schools and vouchers, but has limited experience with the public school system — to be steward of the nation’s schools.

Okay.  I very slightly exaggerate in the above paragraph.  But I have searched, and I can't find the formal qualifications deVos would have for this job.   In the hearings she was unable to answer the simplest questions having to do with the laws which govern education or the basic concepts the experts use to evaluate the quality of education children receive.  So she has a lot of studying ahead of her, and, no, the answers are not in the Bible.

Wanna hear my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory?

The conservatives, and especially the white supremacist so-called Alt Right men, don't want to educate the peasants.  They want real education to be reserved for the children of the wealthy (whites). 

The rest should get biiig doses of hierarchical religion, messages about obedience, guilt messages to women (Eve's daughters), general brainwashing (achieved by something akin to the memorization of the social rules that prevailed 2000 years ago in a nomadic shepherding community) and the most basic skills required to be a good lower-level worker.

But absolutely no critical thinking skills.

That pretty much this system of education has created tremendous problems in some Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia doesn't worry people like deVos.  She thinks she can get away with supporting just Christian madrassas.

And what about the spelling in the title of this post?  I want to fit in with the new post-factual era.  More about that in a later post.

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*  Aka as the vouchers.  The problems with the vouchers are many, but a basic theoretical problem is the fact that most parents cannot judge the quality of education for their children without having the child experience it for a fairly long time, and then it will be too late to completely eradicate any negative effects.  Proper market competition requires the very kind of information parents do not have, and that is the major reason why almost all formal education is based on not-for-profit institutions and the avoidance of incentive systems where the administrators can take more money home if they cheat more parents.

What Angered Trump: Girl Playing Sean Spicer on SNL. Weak!

The Saturday Night Live (SNL, a comedy show) did two skits on the Trump Reich.  One spoofed Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer.  The other one spoofed Trump's bellicose nature, his lack of any knowledge about foreign policy and his relationship to Bannon, the evil spirit behind the throne.  Bannon was portrayed as a skeleton, perhaps the grim reaper, with "plans."

But that's not the one people are now discussing.  It's the Sean Spicer one, and the reason is that the comedian who pretended to be him is Melissa McCarthy.

Yes, that is a girly name, a weak name!  Or so Trump seems to have felt:

More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him. And the unflattering send-up by a female comedian was not considered helpful for Spicer’s longevity in the grueling, high-profile job in which he has struggled to strike the right balance between representing an administration that considers the media the "opposition party," and developing a functional relationship with the press.
"Trump doesn't like his people to look weak," added a top Trump donor.

Emphasis is mine.  And naturally I stress the importance of getting Trump to be spoofed by only female comedians from now on.*

And now to something quite trivial:  McCarthy succeeded beautifully in having her too-large suit work exactly like the too-large suit of Sean Spicer in the one press conference I watched.  How does one do that?  And why did he wear such a large suit?  Is there a secret guy message in that?

Here's the McCarthy-as-Spicer video:



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*  Yes, I know.  That is picking up the tools of the opposition who detest girl cooties. 

But isn't all this such a wonderful revelation about the supposed post-feminist era I have been told (ohsomanytimes) we are now enjoying!  Well, at least the White House doesn't have to struggle with the long shadow of email scandals!

We only have to worry about a president who knows nothing concerning the three branches of the government or the separation of the powers or foreign policy.  Still, Trump is not an ambitious bitch from hell, and if he is in the pockets of Wall Street, well it's at least the pockets of man trousers.

From The Handmaid's Tale: Take Two. Rapists' Fatherhood Rights in Arkansas.

So the Republicans in Arkansas have given husbands the right to stop their wives from having an abortion, even if the pregnancy is due to spousal rape. 

Imagine a couple with an acrimonious relationship, veering toward divorce.  The husband could rape his wife and then force her to give birth.  The wife's fertility would then be controlled by the husband whose rights to become a father would not be diminished even by marital rape.

Similar arguments apply to the case where a father has impregnated his daughter.  He still has the right to try to stop her from aborting the pregnancy:

The most disturbing part of the new Arkansas law is a provision that allows the husband or legal guardian of a woman seeking a D&E to stop her from doing so by suing for injunctive relief. This means that a man who rapes his wife or a father who rapes his daughter will be able to prevent her from terminating a resulting pregnancy in the second trimester. A survivor of sexual violence may need an abortion later in her pregnancy because the trauma of assault could make it difficult for her to consider and confront the consequences. If a woman does get a doctor to perform a D&E, under the Arkansas law, her husband could also sue the abortion provider for damages.

Perhaps more insidious than the above extreme cases is the general idea that others can force a woman to give birth, whether she wishes or not.  Others cannot legally force a parent to donate, say, a kidney to their child, even if the refusal to donate results in the child's death.  But somehow pregnancies are viewed differently.  It's as if a woman's womb is a coop where the other family members and the clergy have shares.

I understand that this law is all about trying to make second trimester abortions impossible.  But, as I wrote earlier, the way the law has been sculpted reduces women's human rights.  It's doubtful that the law will be held as constitutional.

What Trump Gives To Those Who Voted For Him, 2/3/17

Great stuff!  The Best Stuff!  Wonderful people, the best white people, are beavering away to destroy the institutions of the state as Bannon wants.

But we are also going to get the usual Republican presents. Here are two fun ones for all those who voted for Republicans:

After a White House meeting with the business executives on Friday, Mr. Trump signed a directive calling for a rewriting of major provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, crafted by the Obama administration and passed by Congress in response to the 2008 meltdown, the White House said. A second directive he signed is expected to halt and possibly require an overhaul of an Obama-era Labor Department rule that requires brokers to act in a client’s best interest, rather than seek the highest profits for themselves, when providing retirement advice.

Taken together, the actions constitute a broad effort to loosen regulations on banks and other major financial companies, put into motion by a president who campaigned as a champion of working Americans and a harsh critic of Wall Street and other global elites.

Sure, Trump campaigned against Wall Street, but that was only so that he could win the presidency.  Things are different now.  So be prepared for another financial markets meltdown if the provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act are rewritten, because nothing fundamental has changed in the incentive systems of the financial market actors.* 

The second directive is even more fascinating:  Brokers wouldn't have to act in their clients' best interest!

Compare that to doctors and their patients.  A similar directive in that context would mean that physicians wouldn't have to give their patients the care that is best for the recovery of their health.  Instead, they could simply prescribe on the basis of what raises their own incomes the most.

What are the overall impact of changes like these if they come to pass?  They will strengthen Wall Street's opportunities to make a lot of money, weaken consumer protections, and ultimately increase income inequalities in the United States even more.

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*  Or stated better here.   "Insane."

So there you go, you famous white working class voters.  These are the gifts you are getting from Daddy Trump.

But at least there is no email scandal.

From the Handmaid's Tale: The Arkansas Edition

I have an unpleasant feeling that there will be many more Handmaid's Tale posts in our future, because putting women back into their proper place is a big part of Dear Leader's agenda. 

It's an even bigger part of the Vice-President's agenda.  Mike "The Taliban" Pence shares those extremist anti-woman values with the Islamic fundamentalists of the Wahhabist and Salafist sorts.  Isn't that weird?

Never mind.  The Republicans have been doing termite work for nearly fifty years to make sure that women ultimately will not have any choices about becoming pregnant and giving birth.  It's not just abortion that they oppose, but also the types of contraception that women themselves can control*.

As an example of this, Arkansas has a new abortion law aimed at greater socialization of women's bodies.  The Repubicans (sic) are very pro freedom and for privatizations, except when it comes to women's fertility.  Then they are socialists (or traditionalists who believe in the mans' right to control his wife's fertility).

This Arkansas law banning one abortion procedure has a hole big enough in it for a rapist to walk through and demand that any pregnancy caused by his raping the woman must be allowed to continue:

A new Arkansas law bans one of the safest and most common abortion procedures and allows family members to block an abortion by suing the abortion provider.

...

A clause in the Arkansas law allows a woman’s spouse, parent or guardian, or health care provider to sue an abortion provider for civil damages or injunctive relief that could stop the abortion. And because Act 45 does not provide any exceptions for cases of rape or incest, the clause could allow the fetus’s father to sue an abortion provider even in cases of spousal rape or incest. 

Asked whether the clause would allow a father to sue in cases of spousal rape or incest, Mayberry told The Daily Beast that the “bill wouldn’t affect a woman seeking an abortion by any other method” than dilation and evacuation, and that the bill prohibited the father from winning monetary damages in the event of rape or incest. The bill would not, however, prevent the father from seeking injunctive relief to stop an abortion under these circumstances.

I doubt the legislators behind that law want to strengthen rapists' fatherhood rights.  But they don't really care if that happens, because they don't care about women's civil and human rights, and that not-caring is visible in the way these laws are drafted.

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* This description applies to the extremists within the forced-birth movement, those who call the IUD and the contraceptive pill abortifacients and thus something that should be banned. 

But given the extremists stomping all over the White House, it makes sense to be aware of the ultimate goals that motivate them, and those certainly include making sure that women cannot control their own fertility and therefore cannot space their children so that they can participate in the labor market or in politics or in any other field the traditionalists would wish to see all-male.

The latter is the real reason why gender equality crucially depends on good access to contraception and also access to abortion when contraception fails.

As a final irony, the subsidized birth control available via the ACA (Affordable Care Act) could very well have worked to drastically lower abortion rates (which are already falling).  But the Repubicans (sic) want to dismantle it so that, once again, poor women must choose between contraception and paying the rent.

I Must Admit That Trump Has Been Efficient And Speedy

In getting two countries (Mexico and Australia) to hate the US in just two weeks!*  And those were allies!  It's going to be very interesting to see which ally he pisses off in his third week as emperor of the world.

Whatever else I've written about the man (and most of it very critical), his new foreign policy is certainly taking shape.  It's not just "America First," but "America All Alone."  Well, after he pisses off both Vlad "The Impaler" Putin and Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.

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* And the Pentagon comes out and openly blames Trump for the botched operation in Yemen, which suggests a rift between the Pentagon and Trump, too.  Our Dear Leader is very good at pissing people off.

President Stephen Bannon

Or at least co-president Stephen Bannon.  We now live in a country where the truly hateful views of the white-Christian-male supremacist movements are affecting the administration, perhaps even ruling the administration.

For the most recent example, the violence at a demonstration about the speech of one Milo Yiannopoulos provoked Trump into yet another tweet:

It wasn't the U.C. Berkeley which carried out violent acts.  The culprits seem to have been a group of anarchists called Black Bloc.  The idea that the university could be deprived of its federal funds for such a reason is mindbogglingly illogical.  The university canceled the speech to protect that asshat Milo.

I strongly condemn violence in demonstrations, and I believe that asshat Milo should be allowed to do his clown act.  But, to repeat, the U.C. Berkeley didn't cancel his speech to silence him; it was canceled to protect him.

Now consider Trump's Twitter response, the idea that the president of the United States does something like this.  It's hard not to think that the response really comes from Stephen Bannon, who was the editor of Breitbart when Yiannopoulos wrote such deeply interesting articles there as "Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy."*  It would be Bannon who wants the opinions of asshat Milo spread all over the country, because the kind of racism and misogyny Milo represents is exactly what Bannon seems to want to see as the basis of the new American state he will create when the current system is destroyed.

So unless I find better evidence, I believe that this little tweet incident is from our real president, Stephen Bannon, and directly from the Breitbart values folder.



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* Yiannopoulos has also argued that bringing back patriarchy would stop mass murders committed by young men (because Afghanistan is such a peaceful country, with its strong patriarchy?), and that feminism is a cancer.