The Blog Anniversary. First Take.

I have been writing this miserable blog for fourteen years now!  I should get my head checked.  The problem with the anniversary (which was yesterday) is that it is also very close to the one-year-anniversary of the Turd Reich and follows a year of Very Bad News.

That coincidence is uncomfortable and cannot but help to affect how I view these years and their puny harvest.

I am planning to have several anniversary posts in a row.  That lets me express some Deep Thoughts and lets you give me presents if you are so inclined.  If not, thanks for reading here anyway.

Gary Cohn, Trump's Economic Advisor, on the Unavoidable Tax Cuts For The Rich

Gary Cohn's arguments about the Republican "tax reform" plan are worth thinking about, because he is hilarious.  He is Trump's economic advisor, and in a recent interview explains why most of the goodies from the Republican tax plan would fall in the laps of the wealthy.

At first he states that the warped outcome of how much various income groups would benefit is just an accident:  Somehow all the money just slipped into a few pockets:

Among other bloopers, the National Economic Council director explained that CEOs of big corporations were “the most excited group out there” about a proposal that would ultimately raise taxes on a good chunk of the middle class. He also said that while the administration hadn’t “set out” to lower taxes on the wealthy, he’s “not upset” about it, as if its massive rate cuts for business owners were merely some form of serendipity.

I'm sure Gary is not upset about getting a lot out of the Republicans' plan, of course.

Then he gives a different excuse for why the middle class will not benefit that much:

Cohn: Yup. But, John, if you look at what we’re doing for middle-class taxpayers, the reality is kind of simple. The median-income family in the United States, the family that earns about $60,000 in the United States, the Speaker [Paul Ryan] talked about them getting a $1,182 tax cut. That family is now paying a marginal tax rate of less than 1 percent. They’re paying less than $500 of total taxes in the system. So a $60,000 earner, family of four, is paying less than $500. We have cut their taxes significantly. You can’t go much further in the tax system.

Harwood: You’re saying you can’t give middle-class taxpayers more of a tax break than you’ve done?

Cohn: Unless you want to start going negative tax rates and go into the negative world. So, when people score this, you’re scoring against the bound of zero.

I'm having so much fun with that.  Remember the many Trump tweets about BIG LEAGUE tax cuts for the middle classes?  Here's one example from the time of the campaigns:

But now his economic advisor says that This Cannot Be Done.

Never mind.  Let's take one more step backward and ask why the Republicans are spending all their remaining energy on trying to get those tax cuts passed, if there's really no way to give the middle class families any kind of "big league" income tax cuts.

The only answer must be that the goal indeed was to return a lot of money into the pockets of the super-rich.  That this money must come from reducing government expenditure (on the poor and on the elderly, it seems) is just an unfortunate and unintended side-effect, too, I guess.

The Virginia Elections

Wow.  I went out to get the flu shot, and this happened?  Maybe I should get one every day.

That was a bad joke and a good example of the way some fake news are created.  More importantly, having paper ballots is important, and all states should return to them, even if they are machine scanned, because paper ballots, kept by the voting districts as separate copies, allow for transparent elections. 

That and stopping voter suppression are the way to go right now, in the fight for democracy. 

The latter can be battled in several ways, of course,  but one would be to call the Republicans' bluff by creating an organization which argues that if certain types of IDs are necessary for voting, then the state is responsible for providing them in some cheap and easily managed way, perhaps at local post offices.  While that process is ongoing, the imaginary organization could pay for such IDs wherever poor or elderly voters can't get hold of them.

My congratulations to the winners in Virginia and, in particular, to Tom Perillo who worked very hard for his erstwhile primary opponent.  I sincerely hope that Virginia is a good omen for the 2018 elections.

The Proud Boys

Are proud.  Of being boyz. They are also an extreme right society for men, and only men, who believe in the superiority of the Western Civilization.  Here's a picture from their magazine (1):

And here's a short summary of the goals of Proud Boys (2):

McInnes calls the Proud Boys a “fraternal order” dedicated to a concept he calls “Western chauvinism,” which is roughly spelled out in the Proud Boys’ list of “tenets,” published in the official Proud Boys magazine.
They include closed borders, free speech, gun rights, and “venerating the housewife.” Proud Boys also abide by a “no wanks” rule, which is a loose prohibition on masturbation, because, they say, it is better to have sex and produce babies.
“Though these are our central tenets, all that is required to become a Proud Boy is that a man declare he is ‘a Western chauvinist who refuses to apologize for creating the modern world’,” according to the Proud Boy Magazine.

A closer examination of those rules suggests that Proud Boys are a society of men (you have to be declared biologically male at birth to be allowed in) who want, among other things,  a certain kind of patriarchy to return.

Short Friday Posts, 11.3.17: Isabelle Karle, U of Notre Dame, Tax Reform, and Endurance Running

1.  An interesting obituary of Isabella L. Karle, a chemist who worked with her husband to reveal the structure of molecules.  Her husband, Jerome Karle,  received the Nobel Prize for his work in 1985, together with mathematician Herbert A. Hauptman.

2.  University of Notre Dame  ends covering birth control in the health insurance policies of its staff and students.  Thanks, Donald!  The university's decision is based on the doctrine of the Catholic Church.  Thanks, celibate guys, running that institution!

The decision also reflects something which I find troubling:  Institutions now have the right to impose their religion on other people, so that Notre Dame (Our Lady!) can refuse to cover birth control even for those employees and students who are not Catholics.

3.  The tax reform plan of the Republicans is tailor-made to cut the taxes of one Donald Trump.  That's perhaps really not such a great surprise.  After all, Trump recently stated that he is the only person who matters.

Heh.  That's from the popcorn section of those watching this stuff.

But even in reality the so-called tax reform plan is aimed at benefiting the very rich, and much of the money needed for that would come from government expenditure cuts on the poor and/or the elderly.  It's a type of "trickle-up" theory the Republicans use:  Taxes are made so much easier if even more of the country's wealth is safely stored in the back pockets of the 0.01 percent at the very top of the distribution.

If the Republicans truly wanted to simplify the way Americans report and pay their taxes, they could copy the policies of several other countries.

4.  Courtney Dauwalter finished the Moab 240 race in 2 days, 9 hours, and 59   minutes.  A great achievement, though I really posted it in answer to some trollish comment about women deserving to be paid less at work because they have less staying power.

That Wide Group Guilt, Again

The horrible terror attack in New York City has provoked all the usual social media debates. I want to address one particular one, exemplified by this troll comment from Eschaton

This day a Muslim murdered 8 NYC people. Liberals everywhere will not comment much because 8 dead is a minor nuisance in their quest to excuse anything that religion's proponents do.

Note the use of two generalizing terms in that quote  "Muslims" and "Liberals".  Thus, according to this troll, all Muslims are responsible for this latest atrocity, and Liberals "everywhere" are abetting that crime.

These kinds of generalizing comments are nothing new, of course.  They are very much the basis of certain types of racism and sexism, in particular stereotypes about how African-Americans are assumed to be, in general, how women are assumed to be, in general, and also about how, say, African-American women are assumed to be, in general.  Thus, it has often been the case that something one person does is attributed to that person's demographic group, to a general tendency shared by all in the group.  All people of the same type are then responsible.

And that is what the above comment about Muslims and Liberals reflects.

Sadly, the generalizing tendency that I describe is not limited to the right side of the political aisle or to those with anti-Muslim bigotry.

It's every bit as alive on the other side of the aisle, where vast demographic groups* are seen as guilty for what some percentage of their members do or have done.

Note that we can't choose the demographic group others decide we belong to, and that's what makes the apparently very easy generalizations** problematic, unless the accusation truly can be shown to apply to every single member of that group.  After all, most concepts of justice require more than sharing some  culprit's very loosely defined demographic grouping.

None of this means that institutional forms of racism and/or sexism do not provide obvious advantages to some demographic groups (such as white men, men or whites) and obvious disadvantages to other demographic groups, and those institutional forms, as well as the explicit sexism or racism of individuals, must be strongly addressed and corrected.

Neither does it mean that theological interpretations of some concepts inside the more extremist types of interpretations of Islam aren't something that needs to be addressed, preferably inside the religion, or that we shouldn't debate more the impact of petro-Islam and its radicalizing influence in the world.

What I write about is something different from those points.  It's also different from memberships in narrowly defined ideological groups, such as the KKK or ISIS, where the group indeed deserves guilt for the actions of individuals carrying out the group's commands.  But belonging to ISIS is very different from being a Muslim, just as belonging to the KKK is very different from, say, being white and living in the American South.

I believe that the rhetorical uses of group or genetic guilt are counterproductive and can even be dangerous.

To see how the latter might work, simply think of those American Muslims who are now afraid of a yet another backlash after the New York terror attack.

To see how the former might work against the intended goals of those who employ the device, observe how difficult it is to know what to do when your whole demographic is viewed as guilty for something you (as an individual) had no role in creating (even if you benefit from it), then observe how nothing you can actually do is likely to stop those accusations.

This is an opinion which I seem to hold pretty much on my own.  Most people are perfectly happy with false generalizations, as long as they are done by their own side, but very grumpy when they are done by the other side.

And I even understand the reasons for that comfort with one's own false generalizations.  After all, if all the abuse one experiences comes from some wide group "x," then blaming x feels right, even if not all its member (as in #notallmen) engage in that abuse, and if x is a group with much more societal power,  demanding that they take responsibility for that institutional edge they command also feels right.  Besides, it's a lot more powerful to write "x" than "the y% of x who voted for candidate z."

Nevertheless, I still believe that assigning wide group guilt is counterproductive and unlikely to result in the kinds of changes we wish to see. 


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*  "Muslims and "Liberal" are a religious and political group, respectively, but many other commonly employed generalizations blame the types of groups which one cannot choose to enter or leave, even in theory.

Examples I have seen used in this way are "white men," "whites", "blacks, "trans people," "cis women," "trans women."   In all the cases I have noticed, the generalization were applied to arguments by one or a handful of individuals or written articles, each by one author.  Yet the views those individuals or articles expressed were generalized to much larger demographic groups.

It's clearly true that "punching upward" is better than "punching downward," that those who have more societal power can do more to change institutional racism and sexism.  But it would be more effective to simply demand that those with more societal power work to remove institutionalized bigotry of all kinds and to ask them to speak up when they observe racism and/or sexism from others inside their demographic group.

**  This practice is so common that I suspect it is part of how we humans parse the world.  I wish we paid more attention to this tendency in ourselves.

Nature's Fall Whispers

I heard this odd noise yesterday morning, from outside. It sounded like hail or extremely loud whispering or some plane landing. I looked out and the neighbor's back yard had roughly 500 or so black birds on the ground and all the trees were black with birds. Some distant sound happened, and they all took flight at the same time..
All those feathers making feather noises which grew giant!

What Is Happening In The Alternative Reality? Fox News Tells Us

The video here shows Sean Hannity foaming at the mouth while listing the zillion evil deeds of one Hillary Clinton.  Lists of various laws appear next to his angry face, each topped by a statement qualifying the lists by "these are the laws that were potentially broken by x scandal," where the x stands for the Steele dossier or the uranium or the emails.

The word I have bolded there is the crucial one.  No actual evidence of such law-breaking has been produced, as far as I can tell, and I have looked, with an open mind.

But the rant is a fun one to watch and to listen to, though they did cut out the bit where Hannity momentarily called Hillary Clinton "president Clinton."

He also tells us that Hillary Clinton would be in prison if she were just the kind of an ordinary person you are or I am.  Or Sean Hannity is.

To understand how weak the ice is on which Hannity's accusations skate, do read this report.

How To Fix The Problem of Sexual Harassment at Work

This post is about how to fix the workplace sexual harassment problem reflected in the alleged behaviors of Messrs. Weinstein, Toback, Wiesenteil and Halperin, among others.  It's based on my recent readings and thoughts.

Here are the proposals I have come across:

On Monday's Indictments : Hope

Today is such an odd day, don't you think?  When I first heard about today's indictments* in the Mueller investigation I felt — weird.  But weird exactly how?

Weird as in gleeful?  Yes, a little, I admit, to my shame, but mostly this odd feeling, one I can vaguely recall from the distant path, seems to be fledgling hope.

Hope that justice isn't only another name for klepto-capitalism or political cronyism by the big money boyz, hope that the balance of the powers could somehow right this sinking ship of democracy before it is permanently water-logged, hope that even the conservatives include among their ranks people (such as Mueller) who just might put democracy and justice before the interests of one political party.

It's a sad statement about this last year that hope tastes so alien to me.   And sure, this hope can still be taken away, turned into a nothingburger, while we are all advised to move on as there's nothing to see.  But wow!  It's so lovely to have some hope again.

Now, media, get going on the erased election server in the state of Georgia.

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* Seth Abramson has a series of tweet threads which explain several aspects of these indictments.  I have no idea if I linked to them correctly or not, but you can find numbered tweets on his page.

The Harasser-In-Chief And The Recent Flood Of Sexual Harassment Allegations

While (alleged) serial sexual harassers in the media and movie industries (like Weinstein, Toback,  Halperin and Wieseltier) are finally made to face the consequences of their (alleged) behavior, our Dear Leader is still the self-admitted harasser-in-chief who was voted in by tens of millions of Americans (even if with Russian help) either despite all that pussy-grabbing or maybe even because of it!

Now how do you explain that paradox? 

It's not a paradox, I think.  Rather, many of the sexually molested women in this country heard the election results and their anger boiled over for the way their suffering* was discounted as just "locker-room talk." 

I argue that the flood of allegations we are currently seeing, against a large number of powerful men, is precisely because Trump is the president.  Once a sufficient number of angry women were willing to take the risks of going public**, others could join them,  because there is power in numbers and in the repeated descriptions of similar harassment by many unrelated victims.

In short, we have Trump to thank for the current evidence on how common sexual molestation in corporate America seems to be.
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*  This suffering is both instant and real, especially if the molestation takes a more violent form. 

But it exists for even the more marginal forms of harassment, because it signals that a particular object of harassment is not really a valid member of the team or the workforce, but is present as a kind of pizza which was delivered for the delectation of others. 

Another way of viewing such harassment is that it's an extra cost for some employees and not for others, something to take into account, something to cope with, something which consumes energy that should go into the work itself.

Note, also, that though the recent newspaper revelations have been about events fairly high on corporate power ladders, women (and men) in low-income jobs face even more harassment and have fewer ways to protect themselves against it.

** These risks are very real.  Nobody likes a trouble-maker, and complaining about a very powerful boss, say, is not going to make future job searches easier or promotions more likely.  Rather the reverse. 

Indeed, in some fields going public with such claims can mean the end of the complainer's career, even if the complaints are shown to be valid. This is one reason why many of the claims turn up years or even decades later.

Photography As A Vehicle For Understanding of History

These old photographs   are quite wonderful.  This article tells more about them:

Itinerant photographer William Bullard left behind a trove of over 5,400 glass negatives at the time of his death in 1918. Among these negatives are over 230 portraits of African Americans and Native Americans mostly from the Beaver Brook community in Worcester, Massachusetts. Rediscovering an American Community of Color features eighty of these unprinted and heretofore unpublished photographs that otherwise may have been lost to history. Bullard identified over 80% of his sitters in his logbook, making this collection especially rare among extant photographic collections of people of color taken before World War I and enables this exhibition to tell specific stories about individuals and recreate a more accurate historical context. Moreover, Bullard’s portraits examine the role of photography as the vehicle for a “new Black identity” during the nascent years of the New Negro movement. Offering a photographic narrative of migration and resettlement in the aftermath of Emancipation and Reconstruction, Bullard’s portraits address larger themes involving race in American history, many of which remain relevant today, notably, the story of people of color claiming their rightful place in society as well as the fundamentally American story of migration, immigration, and the creation of a community in new surroundings

This Happened. Matt Taibbi and the Ames-Taibbi book on Russia.

Garance tweets about something Matt Taibbi recently told us: That the misogynistic stories in the book he co-authored with Mark Ames were a giant cosmic joke, sarcasm, and not true at all:

Taibbi says all that awful stuff in book he co-authored was made up. But it was & still is marketed as journalism. https://t.co/iGfUHwOK98 pic.twitter.com/9HhBCg7XsP

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) October 27, 2017

I recommend the third (last) section of my 2016 post (under the title Mark Ames) on wounded young heroes if you want to understand the context of that tweet better.

As Garance mentions in another tweet, the book has been marketed as non-fiction and:

"all of the characters and events depicted in this book are real" https://t.co/Bn3WonD2QZ pic.twitter.com/NrTB2mZVcJ

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) October 27, 2017

My 2016 post asks what  wounded young heroines could get away with, in terms of their future careers, and concludes that it wouldn't be much, even if written as a sarcastic giant joke on the world.
  

Georgia Election Server Wiped Clean After Suit Filed

This is worth reading.  I have read so many outrageous things today, but this is still the most outrageous thing.

A snippet from the article:

The server data could have revealed whether Georgia’s most recent elections were compromised by hackers. The plaintiffs contend results of both last November’s election and a special June 20 congressional runoff— won by Kemp’s predecessor, Karen Handel — cannot be trusted.
Possible Russian interference in U.S. politics, including attempts to penetrate voting systems, has been an acute national preoccupation since the Obama administration sounded the alarm more than a year ago.
Kemp and his GOP allies insist Georgia’s elections system is secure. But Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff, believes server data was erased precisely because the system isn’t secure.
“I don’t think you could find a voting systems expert who would think the deletion of the server data was anything less than insidious and highly suspicious,” she said.
 

Where is the national movement for elections integrity?  After all, without that there can be no democracy.  None.

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Added later:  More information can be found here.  Note that the server and two backups were all wiped clean, on purpose.

On The Latest Steele Dossier "Scandal"

Here's the interesting fact about this latest "Hillary Clinton scandal:"

I have known for a very long time* that the so-called Steele dossier was acquired in the form of opposition research.  The project was first paid for by a Republican anti-Trump donor, during the Republican primaries.  Once Trump won the Republican candidacy, that person withdrew his or her funding (for obvious reasons) and from that point onward the funding of the project was by Democrats.

So if I, a mere blogger, have had this knowledge from reading easily available published material, then surely the same is true of all those journalists?  It doesn't really seem to make any difference if that opposition research was paid by the Clinton campaign or the DNC, as opposed to having been paid by "Democrats."  And it doesn't make any difference if some Democratic operatives deny their involvement or if the expenses were incorrectly classified as legal expenses.

Those are not good things, of course.  But they have nothing to do with the question of how to judge the contents of the dossier (which should be done carefully, critically and objectively), and they certainly don't prove, even in some bizarre  right-wing world, that it was Hillary Clinton who was helped by all those Russian connections.  After all, it's hard to argue that she would have paid for the clearly pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

The object of the current "scandal" is, of course, to cause doubt on the validity of whatever the Mueller investigation might find.

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*  This might be one of the earliest pieces on that.

Today's Pictures Of The Powerful Share One Characteristic

I should make this into a series, from all over the globe, to make it clearer how power is distributed.

First, this is the picture attached to one story about the powerful oil interests in the New York Times:

Second, this is the picture attached to another story in the New York Times, about the seven powerful people who will be running China:

Third, here's one glimpse of the powers in North Korea:

Now, what might be the common missing aspect in all those pictures?

We get a few sprinkles of that missing aspect in this one, from two days ago:

The framework for judging these is that half the people in this world are female.

Meet The Republican Party. Or Echidne's View Of It.

I rarely write posts based on nothing but my own opinions.  Here is one, just because this is my blog:

How To Write In The Trump Reich?

John Thomas Peele:  The Young Scholar (1871)




Writing about politics in the Trump Reich is a fraught enterprise.  So much that needs to be covered, so little time!  Besides, we now live in the post-rational era, which means that rational arguments are soooo 2016 and of no interest whatsoever.  Files nails, bats eyelashes. 

The one great talent Trump has is to direct our attention to his own peccadilloes:  The most recent one is his petulant attack on Myeshia Johnson, a Gold Star widow!  How does one NOT write about that, especially when her husband may have died because of Trump's incompetence, and when Trump extends his temper tantrum to two women of color:  Ms. Johnson and Rep. Frederica S. Wilson?

But then this is how he always acts, unable to take any criticism in a mature way, unable to feel empathy, unable to put any value above the picture he sees in his mirror, and if we always focus on such outrages (in this case tinged with his racism and sexism), then we never get to talk about the other things which are happening behind the curtain:

-  The great tax cuts for the rich.

-  The expiration of the Children's Health Insurance Program.  

-  The clearly clientelist state his administration is creating:

Puerto Rico has agreed to pay a reported $300 million for the restoration of its power grid to a tiny utility company which is primarily financed by a private equity firm founded and run by a man who contributed large sums of money to President Trump, an investigation conducted by The Daily Beast has found.
Whitefish Energy Holdings, which had a reported staff of only two full-time employees when Hurricane Maria touched down, appears ill-equipped to handle the daunting task of restoring electricity to Puerto Rico’s over 3 million residents.

-  Trump's militaristic boasting and threats, combined with his eagerness to see how nuclear bombs explode.

-  The secret and unelected powers who are financing what is happening to us.

-  And — in particular for someone who writes about women's issues — the apparent intensification in the Republican war against abortion and reproductive choice in general:  Cases like this one, and the new battle front that has opened up on contraception.

Sigh.  So what would work?  We need a more optimistic approach to the whole question of resistance, and probably a better division of labor in how to tackle Trumpology.  He shouldn't be allowed to determine what we talk about the way he currently does.  He plays with us, like a cat plays with a mouse, and much of our writing is just so much squeaking.

The State of The Media Address, 2017. By Echidne

1.  Most news web pages now won't let me read an article without white-listing the page or pausing my Ad Blocker.  This means that I cannot read those sites without being exposed to their ads.

I get the reason: The free rider problem is enormous in journalism, and the development of Craig's List and other similar web markets have largely destroyed the old way newspapers used to fund their activities: By selling ads.  Indeed, the whole industry is dying a painful death, because most everything can now be obtained without paying for it, so why pay?*

But if few are willing to pay for news, then very few journalists will be able to make a living, foreign news bureaus will no longer exist, and ultimately we will all be stuck with trying to guess which rumors on Twitter or Facebook might be news and which might be fake news**.  Besides, money will be available for propaganda (which is at least biased news if not fake news) for much longer than it will be available for news, and the Republicans have a lot more money.

That makes subscribing to mainstream news important, even if they do a less than perfect job, and I do subscribe to all the major news sources I use for my blogging (thanks, nice donors).  But I can't afford to subscribe or donate to every single site I might need to read when I research a topic.  Instead, I read the allowed free articles and use an Ad Blocker.

Why block the ads?  Because moving GIFs and videos performing at a certain frequency give me an almost instant 24-hour migraine.  The sites I have contacted have not been willing to guarantee that their ads won't use those frequencies.  If I want to read that free article, I must take a health risk.  It's only fair.

So it goes.

2.  A recent Politico / Morning Consult survey found that 46 percent*** of the registered voters in the survey believe that the nation's major news organizations (p.146) fabricate**** stories about Donald Trump and his flying circus (administration).  How sad that they did not list those major news organizations!

It makes quite a bit difference if, say, Fox News is listed among them or not listed among them.

Republican men and women are the most likely to believe that the media lie about Trump, however, so it's probably the case that the findings reflect this new world where Republicans and Democrats sit inside their own information bubbles and simply refuse to believe anything from outside that bubble.

Republicans have long decided that the so-called mainstream news are not neutral at all, so it doesn't come as a great surprise that when the weird stuff about Trump's escapades comes out it's simply rejected as "fake news."

After all, that's what he tells his acolytes in plentiful tweets.  Though the weird stuff is also in his tweets and easily available to those acolytes!  Now think of those two facts together inside someone's head,  and your own head will start feeling dizzy.  Mine did, in any case.

Why didn't the survey ask if the respondents think Trump himself fabricates stories?  That's a lot more likely than some kind of a vast conspiracy where all the major news media secretly collaborate with each other.  Besides, it would have been fun to see if the political tribalism is equally fervent when the question is put that way.

What's troublesome about this trend is that I see no easy way to correct the tribal refusal to interrogate news sources of all kinds or to learn, more generally,  how facts can be established.


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*  The free rider problem is an example of the kind of economic behavior which is individually optimal and rational (you get stuff for nothing), but which is destructive from a wider angle:  Ultimately the news we are able to read without paying will no longer be produced as the people working to produce them will not be paid.

Potential readers often argue that the news media would be paid if they worked in a more objective and better way, and cancelling subscriptions is a fun way to show our disapproval.

But even if the media was perfect (which will never be the case), the free rider problem would remain, as its basis is technological.  We really must think of some other way of paying for news, because a free press IS indispensable for democracy.

**  The problem is not limited to the fact that propagandists have a great incentive to disseminate biased or fake news.  It also includes the fact that becoming a good reporter takes skill, practice and learning, and producing news takes money.  Volunteer laypeople can provide anecdotal evidence and their private experiences, but they cannot replace professional news production.

***  Thirty-seven percent of the respondents don't think that the media fabricates such news, seventeen percent don't know.

As a complete aside, the same survey also tells us 66% of the respondents support the provision of contraceptives in health insurance, either strongly or somewhat.  Even the plurality of Republican men (the group which tends to oppose such things) supports that, and so do the majority of Catholic respondents.  This suggests that the current war against contraception is based on some desire by one of the shadowy figures behind Trump (either the white supremacy boyz or some billionaire with a particular pet hatred).

But what's fascinating about the answers to the question are the very large differences  (pp.119-120) between male and female respondents, both overall and within each party.  Contraception benefits both participants in a heterosexual intercourse when no pregnancy is desired, so heterosexual men, too, benefit from contraception used by heterosexual women for the purposes of preventing pregnancy (and without any side-effects to them).  Yet more men than women oppose the idea altogether.

The interesting question is whether the same men who express opposition in these answers would also oppose the coverage of a safe and effective male contraceptive pill in health insurance.  The answers to that would tell us if the opposition is about not wanting to pay for other people's sex or about something quite different.

****  This footnote was added later, because it occurred to me later:  The question actually has "fabricated" in it.  It's not a good word to use, and it's just possible that some respondents didn't realize it's the same as lying.  Why not call it lying? 





  

Abortion Rates Are Down, But The Trump Administration Seems To Want To See Them Up Again

According to the Guttmacher Institute:

Between 2008 and 2014, the overall U.S. abortion rate declined by 25%, from 19.4 to 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44. Key data points that may help explain this decline, including trends in unintended pregnancy, are not yet available for this time period. However, the available information suggests that improvements in contraceptive use—particularly among women aged 20–24, who account for one-third of unintended pregnancies in the United States—were an important driver behind the decline. Abortion rates declined among all demographic groups from 2008–2014, but the declines varied widely by group.

It's too bad that the necessary data to explain the decline isn't yet available, though note that the above excerpt singles out improvements in contraceptive use*.  That the Affordable Care Act made contraception more affordable could well be part of the explanation.  If it is, what the Trump administration is doing right now could reverse that falling trend.

Such an outcome should be the very opposite to what the so-called pro-lifers (who largely voted for Trump) want, if they indeed were motivated by the desire to reduce abortion rates.

But it sounds like the Trump administration has added an anti-contraception stance to its anti-abortion stance. Erin Gloria Ryan writes the following about a leaked memo which is supposed to have come from this administration:

If the Trump administration got its way, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) budget for family planning would be slashed, with “no other family planning programming for girls except fertility awareness methods.” Lapsed Catholics should remember the phrase “fertility awareness” from confirmation class; it’s just a scienced-up term for “the rhythm method,” a form of birth control that doesn’t work for one-quarter of couples who use it.

Title X funding, which helps poor women afford contraception, would be slashed in half if Team Trump gets its way. Money would be diverted from sex education that emphasizes “risk reduction” and instead flow toward “sexual risk avoidance,” which is another term for “abstinence-only education.” Abstinence-only education doesn’t work. A report published this year declared the practice both “ineffective and unethical.”

Bolds are mine.

There was a time when I believed that writing about a conservative attempt to make birth control harder for women to access would be joining the tinfoil brigades.  Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

I'd love to know who is behind this memo.  Is it the extremist anti-contraception Catholics or some other fundamentalist group?  Why do they appear to support policies which will cause suffering and poverty at home as well as abroad?

And what about the impact of such inherently stupid policies (not letting women avoid pregnancies they don't want) on overpopulation in poorer countries,  on increased fights for arable resources and water, on higher levels of conflict, on greater levels of political radicalization,  and ultimately on much vaster numbers of economic migrants?

The goals of world peace, global economic well-being and the empowerment of women both at home and abroad are all at risk if the Trump administration actually manages to reduce poorer women's access to contraception.  But given what else we know about this administration's policies, this could well be the intended effect.

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*  Other explanations are possible, either alone or in combination with the one mentioned in the body of this post.  For instance, the Republicans' strong push to make abortion unavailable in practice, however legal it might be in theory, could have resulted in larger numbers births to women with unplanned pregnancies.  To gauge that theory, we need data on pregnancy rates.  But the available evidence is more likely to support the explanation based on improved contraception use:

And contrary to what anti-abortion advocates might hope, this historically low abortion rate also does not mean that more people are choosing to carry their pregnancies to term instead of having abortions. The abortion rate in the United States has been declining for the last 25 years. As of data from 2011, unintended pregnancies have declined, and as of this past summer, the birth rate in the United States is at an all-time low.