Jamies Winston Gives An Inspiring Speech To Fifth-Grade Boys. To Fifth-Grade Girls? Not So Much.

Tampa Bay quarterback Jameis Winston spoke to fifth graders at a Florida school last Wednesday.  His talk was to inspire the children, to give them hope and higher aspirations.

And this is how he inspired them:

That, my sweet readers, is how traditional gender roles are reproduced, only in a much louder voice than usual.

Winston explains his way of inspiring little girls to do great things by digging the hole deeper:

Imagine the calculation behind that!  To make one boy feel better, it's perfectly acceptable to make every girl in the room feel worse and less confident*.  That's some word choice mistake...

Jamies Winston is not only famous for his football skills but also for this:

On December 7, 2012, Erica Kinsman filed a complaint with the Tallahassee Police Department accusing Winston of “sexual battery, assault, false imprisonment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress arising out of forcible rape.” She was allegedly encouraged to stay quiet, and State Attorney Willie Meggs didn’t open the investigation in to the allegations until 11 months later. Weeks later, Meggs laughed his way through a press conference where he announced that Kinsman’s account of the night wasn’t credible and that no charges would be filed.

More recently, Meggs told reporters that while he didn’t have enough evidence to file charges, he does “think things that happened there that night were not good.”

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* He clearly uses the subtractive model of masculinity, where what the boys are is NOT what the girls are.  Thus, to encourage the boys he must discourage the girls.

President Bannon at the CPAC: The Media Is The Opposition Party

He called the media the opposition party which is always wrong.  Here is a different view about the importance of a free press:

The retired admiral who designed and oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden says President Trump’s superheated charge that the mainstream news media is the “enemy of the American people” is not just wrong, but also could pose a dire threat to American democracy. Reporters, however, must get their facts right, cite reliable sources and be aware of their own biases and pride.
“The president said the news media is the enemy of the American people,” William McRaven said Tuesday. “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

Bolds are mine.

We know by now democracy is not terribly high on president Bannon's to-do-list, though it does top his to-undo-list.

Comedy From The Trump Reich: Sebastian Gorka, CPAC and Alt-Right

Meet Sebastian Gorka, Trump's deputy assistant and a supposed expert on radical Islam.  Here is the most hilarious quote from the article:

But Gorka, who prior to Trump’s inauguration crowed to Fox News that “the alpha males are back” in charge, isn’t in the White House because of his CV; rather, the available evidence suggests he’s there because of his hard-line beliefs.

I love that image of alpha males*!  It's straight out of the manuals of pickup artists, of course, but I got the instant image of Mr. Gorka clad in a furry loincloth, carrying a club, and ululating while hammering at his chest.  Then he grabs Trump by the famous hair and drags him to some backroom.

So.

So How Is Our Dear Leader Faring? Deportations, Bathrooms and Sickness

Our Dear Leader is certainly keeping some of his promises. 

1.  While the Obama administration did deport (or try to deport) those undocumented immigrants who were charged with a serious crime, the Trump administration has truly expanded the definition of who may be deported:

“Under this executive order, ICE will not exempt classes or categories of removal aliens from potential enforcement,” a fact sheet released by the Department of Homeland Security said, using the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “All of those present in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention, and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States.”

That includes people convicted of fraud in any official matter before a governmental agency and people who “have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits.”

Given that, it is to be expected that 15,000 extra customs and immigration officers are to be hired, more camps are to be built and so on.  This is interesting when we consider the simultaneous hiring freeze in the Federal government.

It is also to be expected that the kinds of sweeps which are taking place now create cases like this one.

All this is frightening for what it tells us about the priorities of those who hold the real power in the Trump administration and about the chaotic nature of many of its actions. 

Where are these immigrants going to be returned?  Some proposals suggest that our Dear Leader just plans to dump all of them in Mexico, including the ones who are not Mexican citizens.  I am pretty sure that Mexico won't be happy with that.

And what are the consequences of these mass deportations to American industries where many of the undocumented work?

Finally,  does it matter at all to the Trump people that net immigration from Mexico, say, appears to have turned negative by 2015?   Mexico is still the largest source country for immigrants, both documented and undocumented to the US.*

2.   Trump has rescinded the Obama administration's federal guidelines which allowed transgender students in schools to use the bathroom matching their gender identity.  Now it's up to the states to decide. It sounds like Trump's new Secretary of Education, Betsy deVos, wasn't too happy about that.

I would like to know who is behind this change.  It might let me predict what other rights will be left to the states to decide.

3.  Will the Affordable Care Act (ACA) be repealed and replaced, in the very near future, as our Dear Leader has promised? 

I watch the whole farce with some sinister satisfaction**, because it looks like the Republican Congress members are facing some tough questioning on this at their town halls and because I have an inkling about the enormous difficulties taking apart and rebuilding a complex system will create. 

Anything the Republicans might actually offer will leave poorer Americans without access to good quality care in the medically required amounts.  But as the real point of the repeal is to cut the taxes for the wealthy, some type of repeal we will see.

Or maybe not.

The Republicans in Congress are the dog who likes chasing cars but doesn't actually expect to catch up to one.  Well, now it did.

The mess any rapid and drastic changes might cause will kill people.  So will a return to the pre-ACA status quo, which is what the Republican planlets*** I've read would mean.

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*  Depending on the method used,  China might now be the largest source country.  But the 2015 Pew survey suggests that Mexicans are, in any case,  the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US.

**  I'm obviously not satisfied when I think of the patients in the system or of the people who will now struggle. 

***  Little attempts at plans, without proper numbers etc.

The Milos We Shall Always Have Among Us

That is from the Bible of Echidne, and the Milos refer to Milo Yiannopoulos*, but also to Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing performance artists.  Who knows what their real values are, whether conservative or not,  other than the desire to stand in the glaring limelight of politics and to own several beach properties?  But that type will always be among us, and Milo himself is not gone.

Yes, the CPAC dis-invited him as a keynote speaker,  because of his support for pederasty, even though he was initially invited because of his support of white heterosexual cis-male supremacy and because of his misogyny and open racism.  It's always interesting to find what the unacceptable might be, and pederasty support still qualifies.

Milo also lost his book deal with Simon&Schuster.  I always wondered why Simon&Schuster initially bothered defending the book deal by saying that the book would contain no hate speech.  It's the hate speech its potential market wanted to read, after all.  But never mind.  Once it looked bad for Simon&Schuster, the deal was off.  Probably not enough money now.

And Milo resigned from Breitbart.  But I very much doubt he is gone.  After all, he gets tremendous publicity right now, including from my scaly fingers.  Even if he is gone in this incarnation, another will pop up tomorrow.  Those people are just too much fun as the mouthpiece for festering hatreds, and punching downward is always much the safest form of humor in the society.

Indeed, it's actually the most politically correct form of humor, unlikely to lead to a political assassination with, say, a poisoned umbrella tip.

When I scanned the recent Yiannopoulos headlines I noticed that several of them called him "a provocateur."  That made me imagine what I would be called if I had an act like his but in reverse **.  Probably some much nastier things.  It's always salutary to learn which opinions are called "controversial" and which people are called "provocateurs."

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*  I have discussed Milo, at least in part, in these three blog posts.  The last one links to some of his thoughts on feminism and women.

** Yes, I could easily create one if I was willing to use false generalizations, bad data and call people names and take small isolated incidents and argue that they prevail everywhere. 

Trump's Great Negotiating Skills And the US Trade Policies

High level international politics is like playing simultaneous chess games against dozens of opponents, while blindfolded and on sedatives.  Donald Trump thinks the game is tic-tac-toe, and even in that game he only thinks about his first move.  Hence the way his rallies told us that only he can fix everything, how his extremely simple solutions will fix everything, how he is the smartest yam in the whole wide world.

He cannot see the complexity of the game, or perhaps he doesn't care.  Its agony for all of us who do see that complexity, as we know what could happen after Trump's boisterous first moves.

To give you just one example, Trump's policies toward Mexico cause Mexicans to react:

Some lawmakers were alarmed by reports that Mexico is exploring a deal to buy corn from Brazil and Argentina instead of the United States to retaliate against Trump’s threats of tariffs on Mexican imports. 
“We’ve got plenty of history of when we do something some country doesn’t like then they retaliate against us,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a senior member of the Finance and Agriculture committees.

Imports from Mexico and exports to Mexico are not independent of each other.  Trump cannot yell at the president of Mexico and expect no negative consequences from that, and what he says to Mexico other countries will also hear.  This changes plans and policies everywhere, and I, for one, would like a president who understands that.

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.

Sexists in Russia: Meet Satoshi Kanazawa. Or Why Being Battered Is Supposed to Be An Advantage For Women.

Welcome to the world of the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.  Actually, welcome to an even more sinister world.  Want to take my hand and wander through its door?

Let's begin with this tweet, having to do with the decriminalization of the "milder" forms of domestic abuse in Russia, the kinds that only leave bruises.  That just happened!  According to one proponent of the decriminalization, this allows parents to beat their children, and that child-beating is part of the Russian cultural tradition.*  Family values.  They often seem to be of that type.

But wait!  There are other reasons for the victims of domestic abuse to feel relieved, as this tweet tells us:

I cannot swear that the contents of that tweet did appear in the science section of a popular Russian newspaper, though that's what Alec Luhn's tweet (that this one links to) seems to suggest, because my Russian is not adequate for the task of searching for the source of Luhn's tweet.

But let's assume that all the above is true.  That tweet tells two things about some opinions about gender equality in Russia:

1.  Men should be allowed to beat women

2.  Boys are more valuable than girls

The year, by the way, is 2017.

Now to the core of the assertion:  If this statement actually was published in the science section of a Russian newspaper, what study was it based on?

The Breitbart Contingency in Our Government. And On The Firing of Sally Yates.

If you are not familiar with Breitbart.com, aren't you lucky!  It's an extreme right-wing website which gives its readers strong helpings of racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-LGBT bigotry and misogyny.*  Its comments are a cesspool of white supremacists.  Or were, the last time I waded in.

Given that, it's interesting to note that the Trump administration has hired at least three Breitbarn alumni:  The Rasputin behind Trump's throne, Stephen Bannon, who used to be Breitbart editor, as chief strategist (and quite possibly as the real president), Julia Hahn, a writer strongly opposed to all the "wrong" kinds of immigrants, as special assistant, and Sebastian Gorka, who previously advised Hungary's autocratic president Victor Orban,  as deputy assistant to the president.  Notice that Gorka clearly has expertise in counseling dictators!

A Bitter Pill: Trump the Weathervane and Big Pharma

This is hilarious:  Trump partly campaigned on cutting drug prices:

Donald Trump, who was revealed as TIME's Person of the Year on Wednesday, is pledging to cut the cost of prescription drugs.

In an interview with TIME ahead of his selection, Trump said he doesn't "like what's happened with drug prices" and that he will "bring down" the cost of prescription medication.

Drug companies have hiked prices exorbitantly over the past several years. Notable examples include Valeant Pharmaceuticals, which spiked costs on two heart medications by 300% and 700%, and Mylan's 548% hike on the price of EpiPens.

The issue has yet to be successfully addressed through legislation. On the campaign trail, Trump called for requiring Medicare to negotiate with drug companies to lower costs.

And now?  Heh.  Trump is no longer going to force prescription drug prices down or allow Medicare to negotiate prices.  Instead, he is going to reduce regulation in the pharmaceutical industry.  Which is a great idea!  Who cares about thalidomide and similar problems?

Oh, and I almost forgot!  Trump is going to cut taxes to the Big Pharma, because the poor dears (a global oligopolistic industry, by the way), don't already earn sufficiently huge profits.

It's that fact about the oligopolistic nature of the pharmaceutical industry which makes coleslaw about the idea that Medicare price negotiations would amount to some kind of unprecedented price fixing in the markets.  Because oligopolies do not result in competitive prices in the first place.

People have been asking whether Trump is going to carry out all his nutty campaign promises.  The answer seems to be that those Stephen Bannon's white-Christian-male-supremacy base wants to see will be carried out.  The ones that are about business will not be carried out.

The 2016 Global Gender Gap and the Impact of Global Political Patterns on Women's Rights

1.  The World Economic Forum publishes an annual report on the global gender gap.  Their measures are based on an index which can be criticized*, but which still is an acceptable rough indicator of how women are faring in different parts of the world.

The top ten countries in the 2016 report (those countries where women and men have closest to the same rights and life experiences) are, in order of decreasing rankings:  Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, Ireland, the Philippines, Slovenia, New Zealand and Nicaragua.

The index treats countries in different income groups somewhat differently, and that explains the presence of Rwanda, the Philippines, Slovenia and Nicaragua in the top ten.  Women's rights are easier to negotiate when a country has lots of money and less competition for jobs and such, which makes the income group divisions meaningful.

The bottom ten countries in the 2016 report (those countries where women and men have very different rights and life experiences and where men's rights are higher) are, in order of increasing rankings (beginning with the lowest ranked country:  Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Iran, Mali, Morocco, Cote d'Ivoire, Lebanon.

The United States ranks 45th in the 2016 report.  My post about the 2015 report  notes that the United States last year ranked 28th in the overall index.  Why the drop?   The 2016 report (p. 29) answers:

The United States (45) sees a drop in its ranking due to a decrease on its Economic Participation and Opportunity score. This is partly due to a revised estimate of the size of the gender gap in estimated earned income; however, the country’s female labour force participation has also been stagnating for a number of years, including among legislators, senior officials and managers. More positively, the United States has reached gender parity in education, highlighting the large latent talent pool in the country’s adult female population.

2.  These two videos about women fighting for wider rights in Saudi Arabia and in Afghanistan are wonderful.  Sadly, I cannot tell if they are real.

3.  I have spent some time thinking how the recent global developments affect the fight for women's rights.  The rise of right-wing populism in the West and Russia and religious extremism in many Middle Eastern countries (as well as a mix of the two in Turkey) are not good news for women, because they all agree on women's proper place which pretty much is in the kitchen and in the bedroom, under male headship.  So there's yet another front for us to fight, sigh.

At the same time, the women's marches attracted at least 4.5 million marchers globally, so I think we are equipped for that fight, and we are going to ultimately win (might be a few centuries later).  So don't lose heart!  But don't lose the urgency, either.

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* Somewhere I have a long post on the methodology of the WEF index, but I can't find it.  This 2009 post has a few observations on how the index is calculated.

The Information Colander

Or what you need to fight the disinformation wars of our Dear Leader and his Rasputin, Stephen Bannon:  A way to figure out what might be normal in democratic politics, however, reprehensible, and what might not be that normal.

Mother Jones has a suggestion:

We saw three kinds of developments this week—let's call them normal, normalesque, and definitely not normal. The first kind is simply part of the shift in power to another president and party: changes that could just as easily happen with (just for the sake of argument) a President Warren replacing Trump in 2021. Overhauling the White House website, freezing regulations, and even telling federal workers not to tweet fall, sort of, into this category. 

The second category are policy changes more radical than what we would have seen from other GOP presidents, because today's GOP is more radical. Those changes will in many cases mobilize shock and opposition—even from some in the Republican Party itself. Announcing the border wall, expanding the "global gag rule," repealing Obamacare, banning immigrants for their nationality alone, even nominating cabinet members who disagree with the mission of the agencies they will lead are in this category. They will get, and deserve, a bitter fight on policy grounds, but they are still on the (far end of) the spectrum of what we can expect in a democracy at a time of tectonic political shifts. They are normalesque. 

But then there is a third category—the actions of a man with a temperament and behavior we haven't seen in the White House in modern times, if ever. Trump personally, as near as we can tell, believes in few things except himself; his actions are often precipitated by rumors and stuff on TV that makes him mad; and most significantly he, along with many of his closest advisers, is inclined toward authoritarianism and a retrograde sort of nationalism. The actions that flow from these qualities are the ones that transcend normalcy entirely. Insisting that the constitution doesn't apply when you don't want it to; chastising the press for reporting obvious facts and calling it "the opposition party"; perpetuating a massive smear against the electoral system by claiming that millions voted illegally; and tapping an enabler of white supremacists to set immigration policy in defiance of the agencies charged with implementing it: Those things are not even at the outside edges of normal. Those things draw from another playbook—not that of democracy. *

So. What to do? 

One of the most important things at a turbulent moment like this is to step back: to sift signal from noise and consider which developments rattle the foundations of  of democracy and which are simply the fallout from a change election.

Bolds are mine.  Note that the above classes are not about the pain and suffering or human importance of decisions as such; they try to focus on the long-term effects of the Trump Reich, the kinds of things which would make truly painful and horrible decisions more common, and that in an environment in which we cannot fight back.
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I would perhaps add to that the widespread rumor that border agency officers in some places are refusing to obey the decisions of the Federal courts about the stays of Trump's Muslim ban, stating direct orders from higher-ups.   Why?  Because if the executive branch gives the finger to the judiciary branch, what would stop the former doing whatever it feels like, including violating the Constitution, especially in a situation like the current one where the Congress is ruled by the president's party.

And Now Something More Positive

Because I have been the goddess of gloom for far too long.  This is a good piece on all the good things in a fairly bad week. I particularly like this:

I won’t pretend we’re winning right now. We’re not. But we are planting the right seeds. And yesterday’s rapid airport mobilization to protest Trump’s #muslimban tells me we’re on the right track. Those seeds will blossom into a resistance built for the long fight ahead.

A Coup Dress Rehearsal?

That's what this article suggests about the events of the past few days and the first week or two of the Trump era.  For me the most frightening of the many frightening developments is the new National Security Council.

A National Security Council where the head of the national intelligence or the armed forces are NOT permanent members, but a white-Christian-male supremacist  provocateur is?  What does that mean for the safety and security of all Americans?

And what does this mean?

Facing growing criticism for failing to mention Jews in a statement marking the Holocaust, the Trump administration on Sunday doubled down on the controversial decision.
In a statement on Friday, President Donald Trump broke with the bipartisan practice of past presidents by failing to include any mention of the anti-Semitic views that fueled the Holocaust and left 6 million Jews and millions of others dead.
"I don't regret the words," said White House chief of staff Reince Priebus when asked to defend the statement on NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
"Everyone's suffering (in) the Holocaust including obviously all of the Jewish people affected and miserable genocide that occurs - it's something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad," Priebus added.

A White  House spokeswoman confirmed that the omission of any mention of anti-Semitic views in the context of the Holocaust was not a mistake but a purposeful move by the Trump administration.

Note, also, that the Muslim ban was timed to roughly coincide with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  What does that mean?

So what do I think?

It is extremely hard to arrive at firm conclusions when everything is chaotic, when every morning the sun rises with some new atrocity that was previously unimaginable, when one desperately tries to choose between pure incompetence and pure evil or greed or all of them, and when the government acts now are more opaque than the kind of morning porridge I make.

But these things I know:  I believe in democracy, in freedom of speech, in equal rights and equal respect for men and women and for individuals in different racial and ethnic groups.  I also believe in equal rights for sexual minorities. 

Democracy, in turn, is not possible without constitutional protections for minorities and the use of basic democratic rules in institutional decision-making.  The different branches of the US government, for instance, are all crucial.  An executive branch which spits in the face of the judicial branch, to pick one example, is a possible symptom of the wheels coming off this democracy experiment.  Finally, a free press is crucial for the functioning of democracies.

Are the signs I fret over caused simply by Trump's incompetence and his inability to actually govern, or are they intentional aspects of a coup attempt by the far-right white nationalists?  Or both?   What is happening to the flawed and limping but still surviving democracy in this country?

Take the timing of the travel ban.  It was timed so that individuals didn't get sufficient warning, so that they were caught by it while already traveling, so that individuals who had left the US to visit, say, family, elsewhere couldn't come back.  In short, it was timed to create the maximum havoc and chaos, and also the maximum negative consequences for the detained individuals.

Was this because of incompetence or because of some vile plan?  I can no longer tell.

Why were the usual steps that are taken in creating such executive orders simply ignored?

The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.
NBC is reporting that the document was not reviewed by DHS, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense, and that National Security Council lawyers were prevented from evaluating it. Moreover, the New York Times writes that Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the agencies tasked with carrying out the policy, were only given a briefing call while Trump was actually signing the order itself. Yesterday, the Department of Justice gave a “no comment” when asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed Trump’s executive orders—including the order at hand. (OLC normally reviews every executive order.)
This order reads to me, frankly, as though it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all.

But this could be caused by the boundless arrogance of Donald Trump and his henchmen (and henchwomen). I have learned that Trump believes he innately knows everything worth knowing, and because that is unlikely to include the manner in which presidents make executive orders, he would simply ignore those traditions.

At the same time, this whole debacle can be a sign of the New Way the government will be run from now on:  As a dictatorship, where all old rules are ignored.

This not-knowing leaves me in an awkward place.  But one thing is clear, whether the Trump administration tips toward non-democracy because of cluelessness or because of intent:  We must not normalize this administration and we must continue to resist its efforts.

1/29/17: Document the Atrocities of the Trump Reich: The Muslim Ban and Bannon in the National Security Council

1.  The ban on citizens of certain countries entering the United States took force on Saturday.  The countries listed were Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Trump defends the ban as an anti-terrorism measure.  But this does not hold water: *

The most famous radical Islamic terrorist act in the United States took place on 9/11/2001.  Fifteen of the men committing the massacres were Saudi Arabians, two came from United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon.  Yet none of those countries are in Trump's ban list.   Neither does the list include Afghanistan or Pakistan, both known as areas with terrorist bases.**

You may have noticed how rapidly Trump has attacked his chosen goal of breaking the world.  He has done more damage in a week than most termites get done in a decade.

But haste makes for not just waste, but errors.  There's a reason for the slow passage of important government decisions, and that reason includes thinking all the consequences through as well as getting information and opinions from all the affected parties.  This does not seem to have happened with the Trump's Muslim ban,*** and the outcome is not only unjust (as it was doomed to be from the beginning), but also chaotic.

2.  Stephen "Hitler" Bannon, the ex-editor of Breitbart, is now a very powerful man in the Trump administration: