A perfectly executed strike last night. Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2018
Is Trump really unaware of “Mission Accomplished”s history and implications? Or is he just demonstrating that no matter what ahistorical thing he says, no matter how ignorant he demonstrates himself to be, no matter how much he contradicts himself, he’ll still be labeled presidential for ordering an airstrike, while retaining an approval rating in the high 30s? It’s probably the first one, but there’s really no way of knowing.You forgot the third option: Trump is completely aware of how Bush was punched around for using that phrase in a celebration of a specific mission that in fact was accomplished, and he would like the naysayers to come after him the way they came after Bush, and when they do, he'll show us all how to handle that kind of anti-military negativity.
In his memoir, Mr. Forman said the producers of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, sought him out because “I seemed to be in their price range.” In fact, they had made a perfect match between filmmaker and material, in this case a cult novel by Ken Kesey....All the great movies with white male anti-heroes! They seem to belong to a bygone era now. How influential these movie characters were on me.
“The People vs. Larry Flynt” pressed the limits of tolerance for an antihero with its sympathetic portrait of the Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt....
In 1999, “Man on the Moon,” Mr. Forman’s complex portrait of the comic Andy Kaufman and his alter-ego Tony Clifton, did only a little better for Universal Pictures....
President Trump ordered a military attack against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Friday, joining allies Britain and France in launching missile strikes in retaliation for what Western nations said was the deliberate gassing of Syrian civilians.Yes, I was just listening to a news podcast that said if after all his threats Trump didn't strike Syria, he'd be the same as Obama drawing a red line and doing nothing when Assad crossed it. That seemed like a bad analogy to me, but Trump has now acted, so Trump is quite unlike Obama.
The assault followed repeated threats of military action from Trump, who has been moved by civilian suffering to set aside his concerns about foreign military conflicts, since the reported chemical attack that killed civilians in the rebel-held town outside Damascus last weekend.
“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Ms. Constand said. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”
Mr. Libby’s case has long been a cause for conservatives who maintained that he was a victim of a special prosecutor run amok, an argument that may have resonated with the president. Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that the special counsel investigation into possible cooperation between his campaign and Russia in 2016 has gone too far and amounts to an unfair “witch hunt.”...
[C]ritics insist that Mr. Mueller enjoys protection under Justice Department regulations, which provide that the special counsel may be “removed from office only by the personal action of the attorney general” for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.”Congress is considering a bill that would purport to protect Mueller from firing, but even assuming that did become a statute, it would be subordinate to the Constitution, which gives the President the power to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." There is Supreme Court case law on that subject — Morrison v. Olson (1988), about the now-defunct independent counsel law (Congress's answer to Watergate). It's hard to picture Morrison v. Olson getting overruled, but that's not the issue unless and until Congress passes the bill (and wouldn't Trump veto it? Perhaps not!).
According to this view, Mr. Trump must convince Rod Rosenstein, the acting attorney general, to fire Mr. Mueller. If Mr. Rosenstein refuses, Mr. Trump can fire him and replace him with someone willing to do the dirty work. Alternatively, the president could order Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has recused himself from the Mueller probe, to rescind the regulations, which date back to 1999, and then fire Mr. Mueller.
But this narrow view of the president’s options rests on a misunderstanding of basic constitutional principles. Ever since the founding, presidents, Congresses and the Supreme Court have recognized that the chief executive has constitutional power to remove executive officers....
A regulation issued by the Justice Department should not be read to limit the president’s constitutional power to remove officers....
The short-lived FaceMash website began with a love-scorned Zuckerberg in 2003, who began to drink and write in his blog about an idea to hack university servers and download photos of students without permission, according to a 2008 profile in Rolling Stone. Then, fellow students could vote on their attractiveness using an algorithm that ranked the selections.He was very unattractive himself — physically and, apparently, emotionally — and he found a sneaky on-line way to restore his pride. I guess that's what the movie (mentioned at this point in the hearing) was about. "Social Network." I never bothered with that thing, so this FaceMash stuff feels new to me, though I'm sure I've read it before. It's interesting to think about the psychic pain and struggle that underlies Facebook. But some of that is Hollywood narrative. Yesterday, Zuckerberg brushed off FaceMash as a prank. Yet in these days when women are making our perspective dominant, the ugliness of men can't be laughed off as a prank. We're having a reckoning, remember?
“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics,” he wrote that night....
Bidders affiliated with 86 rescue and advocacy groups and shelters throughout the United States and Canada have spent $2.68 million buying 5,761 dogs and puppies from breeders since 2009 at the nation’s two government-regulated dog auctions, both in Missouri, according to invoices, checks and other documents The Washington Post obtained from an industry insider. At the auctions, rescuers have purchased dogs from some of the same breeders who face activist protests, including some on the Humane Society of the United States’ “Horrible Hundred” list or the “No Pet Store Puppies” database of breeders to avoid, maintained by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Most rescuers then offered the dogs for adoption as “rescued” or “saved.”
“I think it’s the ultimate loss of control,” says financial dominatrix Bratty Nikki. “A lot of men are judged on how successful they are, and that is a good portion of what makes up their sense of self. When they say, ‘Hey, I’ve earned all this, and this is what I’ve worked for, this is a huge chunk of what makes me me, and I’m willing to give that up for you.’ I think they really enjoy that loss of power.”The highest-rated comments all make the analogy to marriage, which is best summed up in the joke attributed to Willie Nelson and quoted in one of the comments: "Why get married? Just find a woman who hates you and buy her a house."
Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers, shredded any sense that the defense would be cowed by the #MeToo moment. He presented Mr. Cosby’s accuser, Andrea Constand, in his opening remarks to the jury as a willful, greedy woman who ran a “pyramid scheme” and took advantage of a man who had lost a son.
“You are going to be asking yourself during this trial, ‘What does she want from Bill Cosby?’ And you already know the answer: ‘Money, money and lots more money,’” he said. “She has a history of financial problems until she hits the jackpot with Bill Cosby,” he added....
Back then, beauty standards favored flat over busty: Many Chinese women bound their chests with white cloth or wore tight vests. Small so-called lilac breasts — as well as tiny feet — had long been the stuff of Chinese men’s sexual fantasies. On Women’s Day in 1927, a group of sex workers demonstrated naked in Wuhan, now situated in central China’s Hubei province, to protest breast binding. The year after the Wuhan demonstration, the government banned breast binding nationwide for health reasons, as it had done for foot binding more than a decade earlier....But the lightweight bras, without padding, present the problem of showing nipples, which, we're told, is "still taboo" in China, but:
Lingerie wasn’t something people talked about publicly until the 1990s, when modern advertising once more redefined society’s feminine aesthetics — this time favoring large bosoms.... But the tide is turning again — spurred in part by rising feminist awareness — and many young Chinese women are no longer ashamed of their small breasts...
“We are probably the first Chinese [underwear] brand that uses models with small breasts — in the past, every brand would look for models who had a ‘career line,’” Liu says, referring to cleavage enhanced by push-up bras that supposedly lead to smoother career paths in male-dominated offices.
Mao, the public relations officer [at a retailer of non-padded bras], solves the problem by opting for thicker clothes whenever she wears a bralette. But she thinks visible nipples will gain acceptance at some point. “I’ve seen Rachel’s nipples on ‘Friends’ popping out many times,” she says.
Local government could finance a homeless granny flat for three years for as little as $15,000 annually — roughly the cost of a shelter bed. Backyard units expand housing options without compromising the character of the region's single-family neighborhoods, the mayor's design consultant said....All right then.
The mini-cabins -- or passenger modules, as Airbus (EADSF) and Zodiac (ZODFF) describe them -- will sit directly on the cargo floor and will not affect the loading of freight and luggage. Airlines will be able to swap the sleeping modules in and out of planes in place of regular cargo containers, the companies said.
According to The Guardian, the site allowed sex workers to screen potential online clients before meeting them in person. It was a simple layer of safety without resorting to pimps for protection. These deals, that were once handled online, will now be pushed back into the open streets, leaving women on their own to protect themselves.From the linked Guardian piece:
“It’s devastating,” said a sex worker who goes by the name Jala Dixon. “They just took everything from me.” Dixon, who is based in Georgia, said she chose to do sex work to help save money for school and that she was now considering turning to the streets. “This is really not doing anything but making us unsafe and putting us at risk.”By the way, Trump hasn't signed the bill yet, so this is a plea for a veto.
Kristen DiAngelo, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project of Sacramento, said her phone had been ringing off the hook since the seizure of Backpage: “The fear is astronomical.... They’ve just unemployed massive amounts of marginalized people... They’re taking away life-saving resources.”
Ted Cruz: There are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. There have been numerous instances with Facebook. In May of 2016, Gizmodo reported Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news — including stories about CPAC, about Mitt Romney, about Glenn Beck. In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chik-fil-A appreciation page, blocked posts of a Fox News reporter, blocked over two dozen Catholic pages and most recently blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silk’s page with 1.2 million Facebook followers after determining their content and brand were ‘unsafe to the community. To a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias. Do you agree with that assessment?Excellent answer by the well-prepped Zuckerberg. I am reading this looking for how Ted Cruz "savages" Zuckerberg. That's the word at The Federalist. Zuckerberg is saying, essentially, that the culture of Silicon Valley is so pervasively left-wing that well-meaning human beings applying what are supposed to be neutral standards may produce bias results. Zuckerberg acknowledges the problem of implicit bias and says he wants to deal with it.
Zuckerberg: I understand where that concern is coming from, because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place. This is actually a concern that I have in that I — and I try to root out in the company, is making sure we don’t have any bias in the work we do and I think it is a fair concern that people would wonder about....
Cruz: Are you aware of any ad or page that’s been taken down from Planned Parenthood?Where's the savaging?! Zuckerberg committed to avoiding political bias on Facebook. He didn't give Cruz that fight. Cruz was ready to show that the bias was happening, and Zuckerberg came prepared to defuse that: It can happen inadvertently because the political culture of Silicon Valley is so strong, but he's not defending that — he's working on it. I'm not saying I trust Zuckerberg to do that or even that he sincerely intends to do that. I'm only saying that Cruz gave Zuckerberg nothing he wasn't prepared to deflect.
Zuckerberg: Senator, I’m not, but let me just …
Cruz: How about MoveOn.org? Or any Democratic candidate from office?
Zuckerberg: I’m not specifically aware. I’m not sure.
Cruz: In your testimony you say you have 15,000 to 20,000 people working on security and content review. Do you know the political orientation of those 15,000 to 20,000 people engaged in content review?
Zuckerberg: No, we do not generally ask people about their political orientation when they’re joining the company.
Cruz: Do you feel it’s your responsibility to assess users, whether they are good and positive connections or ones that those 15,000 to 20,000 people deem unacceptable or deplorable?
Zuckerberg: I think there are a number of things we all agree are clearly bad. Foreign interference in elections. Terrorism. Self-harm.
Cruz: I’m talking censorship.
Zuckerberg: You would probably agree that we should remove terrorist propaganda from the service. We want to get that done and we’re proud of how well we do with that. What I can say, and I do want to get this in — I’m very committed to making sure that Facebook is a platform for all ideas.
Is it my imagination or is Zuckerberg failing the Turing Test in front of Congress?
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 10, 2018
In the document known as an Apostolic Exhortation called "Gaudete et Exsultate," (Rejoice and Be Glad)... Satan gets more than a dozen mentions... as Francis talks about how life can be "a constant struggle against the devil, the prince of evil."There's a difference between saying the devil is not just a myth and what the Pope did say: we should not think of the devil as a myth. It's a "mistake" to "think of the devil as a myth" not because you'd be factually wrong but because we'd "let down our guard... grow careless and end up more vulnerable."
He continues in the same section: "Hence, we should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea. This mistake would lead us to let down our guard, to grow careless and end up more vulnerable."
Francis refers to the "wiles of the devil", "the spirit of the devil", "keeping the devil at bay", how to "banish the devil", and "snares and temptations of the devil".
Dr. Lawrence C. Newman, a neurologist and director of the headache division at NYU Langone Health, said, “On a one to ten scale, it’s off the charts.”....
The new study does suggest that capsaicin, being investigated for its role in alleviating pain and lowering blood pressure, can have unexpected effects on certain people....
The Reaper was bred to reach record levels of heat. Reached by phone at the PuckerButt Pepper Company in Fort Mill, S.C., the Reaper’s creator, Ed Currie, offered mixed advice on pepper consumption.
On the one hand, he said, “People who eat whole Reapers are just being stupid.” But Smokin’ Ed, as he calls himself, also gave the impression that wasn’t such a bad thing. “We eat them all the time,” he said, with no ill consequences beyond pain.
In contemporary popular culture, blonde women are stereotyped as being more sexually attractive to men than women with other hair colors.... Some women have reported they feel other people expect them to be more fun-loving after having lightened their hair. The American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler offers an appraisal of the blonde as social criticism in his novel The Long Goodbye (1953):
“He led a very out-there life,” said Jodi Stuart, who was Mr. Brassner’s first girlfriend and had been in and out of his life since. “Out there in sports cars, out there in rock ’n’ roll, playing Hendrix on guitar, bigger than life.... We used to go to the Fillmore East and Max’s Kansas City... Todd got right in with the Factory and Andy Warhol. He picked em: Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol, Jaguars, beautiful homes, beautiful women.”...
Todd Brassner fit right into the Warhol orbit, and often went shopping with the artist, said Stuart Pivar, a collector who was very close to Warhol. “They were like two 14-year-olds, seeing the world..."...
Mr. Brassner’s struggle with drugs brought him into contact with “shady characters, who snookered him out of masterpieces,” Mr. Pivar said. The apartment was so cluttered Mr. Brassner could barely move, Mr. Pivar said.
“There are many trans folks because of genetics and/or lack of material access who will never be able to embody these standards. More importantly many trans folks don’t want to embody them, and we shouldn’t have to to be seen as ourselves and respected as ourselves.” A few years ago, Cox launched the hashtag #transisbeautiful, explaining on her blog that she wanted to “celebrate all those things that make trans folk uniquely trans.” She has spoken of being grateful that, by the time she could afford facial-feminization surgery, she no longer wished to undergo it.If you assume that it makes sense for individuals to say that their true identity is different from what their body actually looks like, would you necessarily have to go along with the idea that the true identity of a person born with a man's body and face is not just a woman's body and face but a beautiful woman's body and face (or an unusually-feminine-looking woman's body and face)?
My day just got 1,000% better....UPDATE: WaPo reports: "Trump attorney Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud, campaign finance violations, according to a person familiar with the case."
Wow. The system works. It really works....
If a porn star winds up being the one to take Trump down, it will prove to me that karma actually exists in the absence of other forms of justice....
Whoa, wait. I thought this was a "nothing burger." I heard it so many times, and now the Feds have raided this man's office. Practitioners of "Nothingburger-ism," please, explain.
...there appears to be some periodic feminine compulsion on the editresses’ part to strike a suffragette attitude...That excerpt sets up IIB's quip: "I'm guessing the period is approximately every 28 days..."
And as one descends to a lower level of the fashion structure, to Glamour (Condé Nast) and Charm (Street and Smith), one finds a more genuine solicitude for the reader and her problems. The pain of being a BG (Business Girl), the envy of superiors, self-consciousness, consciousness, awkwardness, loneliness, sexual fears, timid friendliness to the Boss, endless evenings with the mirror and the tweezers, desperate Saturday social strivings (“Give a party and ask everyone you know”), the struggle to achieve any identity in the dead cubbyhole of office life, this mass misery, as of a perpetual humiliating menstrual period, is patently present to the editors, who strive against it with good advice, cheeriness, forced volubility, a psychiatric nurse’s briskness, so that the reiterated “Be natural,” “Be yourself,” “Smile,” “Your good points are you too” (Mademoiselle), have a therapeutic justification.And that description of the "BG (Business Girl)" is exactly what I was talking about at the end of the previous post, the one about "Nomadland" (a book that describes the RV life as "dark and depressing"). I said:
Perhaps all jobs could be described in words that would move readers to say oh, those poor, desperate people. A journalist can, in words, find what she wants to find.And look at those words McCarthy came up with! Office life is like "a perpetual humiliating menstrual period." McCarthy set herself above the women who were writing the magazines for women. She saw the office workers as living dark and depressing lives, and the editors had their own dark and depressing lives, forced to churn out prose to con the BG (Business Girl) into buying another magazine to ease "the pain of... envy of superiors, self-consciousness, consciousness, awkwardness, loneliness, sexual fears, timid friendliness to the Boss, endless evenings with the mirror and the tweezers, desperate Saturday social strivings [and] the struggle to achieve any identity in the dead cubbyhole of office life."
The “workamper” jobs range from helping harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to Amazon’s “CamperForce,” seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to frigid campgrounds at night.... Few have chosen this life. Few think they can find a way out of it. They’re downwardly mobile older Americans in mobile homes.Yeah, but what if you are someone who's chosen this life and loved the chance to see the spring training games? You're like a Dead Head of baseball, making enough money on the side to keep following your passion, hanging out with other people who love baseball, not taking the work seriously. Boy, do you look stupid now! You're not living a great life. Bruder's got news for you. You are pitiable and downtrodden! Suffer now, doing all the things you'd once imagined were enviable.
Some of the Nomads had to work alongside robots, such as in the Amazon warehouses. How was that?But the seasonal workers don't drive the robots "bonkers," and the robots never need a break, and if they did need to be programmed to take detours to the break room, they'd never find it "insane."
The robots were making them bonkers. This is isolating work and there’s one scene in the book where a robot kept bringing a woman in her 70s the same thing to count.
What needs to change to prevent people from having to become Nomads or to help them live better if they are?
For one thing, Amazon should pay its workers more and give them better working conditions. It’s laughable that the workers get a 15-minute break when they have to spend it walking to the break room. It’s completely insane.
By the way, do you find "editrix" jaunty and amusing, annoying and groan-worthy, or evidence that Dowd isn't doing feminism right?It doesn't really matter who the "editrix" in question was, but it was some former editor of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire.
"Editrix" is anachronistic, as are terms such as "waitress" and "actress," etc. The terms "editor," "waiter," (now "server"), and "actor" are not innately masculine in their connotations, and so are suitable--preferable--when referring to females working at these jobs.Mary Beth did the research:
"Editrix" is anachronistic, as are terms such as "waitress" and "actress," etc. The terms "editor," "waiter," (now "server"), and "actor" are not innately masculine in their connotations, and so are suitable--preferable--when referring to females working at these jobs.
Yeah, like early 20th Century, when the word was first used. Google Ngram shows it becoming popular in 1911, except for one fluke blip in the graph in 1838. It actually looks like it's becoming more popular.Though rhhardin joked us in a childish direction — "Editrix is for kids" — quite a few minds went straight from "-trix" to "dominatrix." Owen said:
We don't need gendered nouns in a non-gendered language so the use of one seems like an affectation. It was still the most interesting thing in what I read.
"Editrix" should be "editrice." Sounds less like black leather and fishnet stockings, more classy.And Ignorance is Bliss said:
I find a sudden urge to check if PornHub has and editrix category, just to see what that might involve.And I think that's something of what's going on in the mind of tim in vermont:
As a man, I can only say "editrix" communicates female power and competence. But we men know nothing, we think that the sexes are different in many ways not visually obvious.Similarly, FIDO:
["Editrix"] is perfect for a controlling female authority figure, adding a little panache to an otherwise dreary field.I'm front-paging all that because I thought this was quite a coincidence yesterday: I was continuing my reading of Mary McCarthy's "Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue" (in the essay collection "On the Contrary: Articles of Belief"), first blogged about in this post on April 3d (which I was reading because I'd done the research and discovered that it is the first published appearance of the word "Orwellian" (in 1950)). And I encountered the word "editress."
Unlike the older magazines, whose editresses were matrons who wore (and still wear) their hats at their desks as though at a committee meeting at the Colony Club, Mademoiselle was staffed by young women of no social pretensions, college graduates and business types, live wires and prom queens, middle-class girls peppy or sultry, fond of fun and phonograph records....There are 2 other appearances of "editress" in the essay, including one, I realize now, that was in the excerpt I put up on April 3rd:
But beyond the attempt [by Vogue] to push quality goods during a buying recession like the recent one, or to dodge responsibility for an unpopular mode (this year’s sheaths and cloches are widely unbecoming), there appears to be some periodic feminine compulsion on the editresses’ part to strike a suffragette attitude toward the merchants whose products are their livelihood, to ally themselves in a gush with their readers, who are seen temporarily as their “real” friends.
As an instrument of mass snobbery, this remarkable magazine [Flair], dedicated simply to the personal cult of its editress, to the fetichism of the flower (Fleur Cowles, Flair, a single rose), outdistances all its competitors in the audacity of its conception. It is a leap into the Orwellian future, a magazine without contest or point of view beyond its proclamation of itself, one hundred and twenty pages of sheer presentation, a journalistic mirage....I'm not going to insist that Maureen Dowd read my blog post, but if it's more than coincidence that her next column uses a feminine form of "editor," I wonder if she considered the word "editress" and opted instead for "editrix" and, if so, why? I think the answer is up there in what various commenters said: "editrix" sounds more exciting and dominating and "editress" is condescending. Mary McCarthy certainly meant to sound condescending as hell.
A testy and fidgety Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates made another electronic appearance at the antitrust trial of his company yesterday, giving answers that were alternately combative and forgetful as he fielded questions in a videotaped deposition about rival Internet software products.The government (in the form of David Boies) was out to make Gates look dishonest and conniving its own special theater (the court system), and the government (in the form of some Senators) will try to do that to Zuckerberg, who at least is taking the precaution of getting special training in how to perform in the theater that is the U.S. Senate.
His responses, which included quibbles about the definitions of such words as "concerned" and "compete," prompted the judge hearing the case to chortle and shake his head in disbelief....
Microsoft officials say that Gates responded in the same way that any company leader would in a similar situation, trying to focus questions so that he could give precise answers....
"We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."I note the Trumpianly short phrases and clear speech. As with Trump, of course, the relationship between those crisp words and what he really knows, feels, or intends to do is completely ambiguous.
"Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and ... Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this," he said in an email to USA TODAY. "The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.... Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you," Wozniak said. "As they say, with Facebook, you are the product."Yeah — "as they say" — it's what everybody knows. You get something free and the website is monetized with advertising, just like TV, but Facebook is especially well positioned to show advertisers who will see the ads. We've known this for a long time, and people don't seem to mind that they're getting precision-aimed ads. Some of us even like that about the advertising. For example, I see mostly ads for shoes and clothes from sellers I like.
On Sunday, [Wozniak] deactivated his Facebook account after posting the following message: "I am in the process of leaving Facebook. It's brought me more negatives than positives. Apple has more secure ways to share things about yourself. I can still deal with old school email and text messages."Apple is better, he says. Perhaps he's remonetizing himself.
“We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,” declared then-Secretary of State John Kerry on Meet the Press in 2014. ... But there were two important and deadly loopholes. The first was that Assad did not declare everything—a reality that Kerry acknowledged publicly, including in a farewell memo to staff, in which he wrote that “unfortunately other undeclared chemical weapons continue to be used ruthlessly against the Syrian people.” The second was that chlorine gas, which has legitimate civilian uses, was not part of the deal....But, despite that surprising headline, the article doesn't accept Trump's blaming of Obama:
President Trump has labeled the [recent gassing] “an atrocity,” blaming the Obama administration for declining to enforce its declared “red line” against chemical weapons use in 2013. But if anything, until this morning it looked like the Trump administration was more interested in extricating itself from Syria entirely. The attacks follow a strange few days in Washington, as the president stated his desire to get out of Syria “very soon;” his advisers insisted the U.S. was staying to finish the job of defeating the Islamic State; and the White House tried to resolve the contradiction by insisting that American troops would stay in Syria until ISIS was gone, an outcome that was rapidly coming to pass.The article doesn't say what should be done, and of course, I don't know. I'll just say that if Assad had civilians gassed just as Trump was saying let's get out of Syria soon and his advisers were contradicting him and saying we need to finish the job, Assad seems to be weighing in on the side of the advisers and saying Bring it on. Now, why would he do that?
I call Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of Hearst magazines and the former editrix of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. The 55-year-old Brit has a new book called “Love Rules,” a guide to avoiding the digital sand traps in relationships....Take it from a 55-year-old Brit with a book to sell.
“There’s a new sense in which young women feel that they are now in competition with porn, and if they don’t put out, it’s easy for the guy to go home, log in to Pornhub and get what he needs there,” Coles says. “They’re sublimating their own needs to try and please the guy. Then they realize their needs weren’t being met at all.
“Porn sex is designed to get men off in six to eight minutes. Many men don’t know how to interpret female behavior in bed unless it replicates a porno film.”
Like other Capgras patients, Marty Berman believed his wife had been replaced by an impostor. Others have dismissed loved ones as aliens, robots or clones. A number of cases have involved shocking acts of violence toward the delusional misidentified person. A 2014 report describes two cases of men with Capgras syndrome murdering their own mothers, while a 2015 report details how a Capgras patient with Parkinson’s disease became increasingly violent toward the different “versions” of his wife. One earlier reported case involved a patient who decapitated his “robot” father to find the batteries in his head....One theory about how this happens is that there's "brain damage that prevents familiar faces from evoking an emotional response" and something else "prevents patients from rejecting the delusional belief."
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