The New Yorker: The Danger of President Pence

If the job is a gamble for Pence, he himself is something of a gamble for the country. During the tumultuous 2016 Presidential campaign, relatively little attention was paid to how Pence was chosen, or to his political record. And, with all the infighting in the new Administration, few have focussed on Pence’s power within the White House. Newt Gingrich told me recently that the three people with the most policy influence in the Administration are Trump, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Pence. Gingrich went on, “Others have some influence, such as Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. But look at the schedule. Pence has lunches with the President. He’s in the national-security briefings.” Moreover, and crucially, Pence is the only official in the White House who can’t be fired. [...]

On Election Night, the dissonance between Trump’s populist supporters and Pence’s billionaire sponsors was quietly evident. When Trump gave his acceptance speech, in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, he vowed to serve “the forgotten men and women of our country,” and promised to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, and hospitals.” Upstairs, in a room reserved for Party élites, several of the richest and most conservative donors, all of whom support drastic reductions in government spending, were celebrating. Doug Deason, a Texas businessman and a political donor, recalled to me, “It was amazing. In the V.I.P. reception area, there was an even more V.I.P. room, and I counted at least eight or nine billionaires.” [...]

Cecil Bohanon, one of two adjunct scholars at Pence’s think tank, had a history of financial ties to tobacco-company front groups, and in 2000 Pence echoed industry talking points in an essay that argued, “Smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers doesn’t die from a smoking-related illness.” A greater “scourge” than cigarettes, he argued, was “big government disguised as do-gooder, healthcare rhetoric.” Bohanon, who still writes for the think tank’s publication, also has ties to the Kochs. Last year, John Hardin, the head of university relations for the Charles Koch Foundation, told an Indiana newspaper that the Kochs had been funding Bohanon’s work as a professor of free-market economics at Ball State University “for years.” [...]

Pence, who had called global warming “a myth” created by environmentalists in their “latest Chicken Little attempt to raise taxes,” took up the Kochs’ cause. He not only signed their pledge but urged others to do so as well. He gave speeches denouncing the cap-and-trade bill—which passed the House but got held up in the Senate—as a “declaration of war on the Midwest.” His language echoed that of the Koch groups. Americans for Prosperity called the bill “the largest excise tax in history,” and Pence called it “the largest tax increase in American history.” (Neither statement was true.) He used a map created by the Heritage Foundation, which the Kochs supported, to make his case, and he urged House Republicans to hold “energy summits” opposing the legislation in their districts, sending them home over the summer recess with kits to bolster their presentations. [...]

But conservatives blocked the idea, and Pence threatened to veto any such legislation. “With Pence, you need to look at the framework, which is abstinence,” Clere said. “It’s the same as with giving teen-agers condoms. Conservatives think it promotes the behavior, even though it’s a scientifically proven harm-reduction strategy.” In March, 2015, Clere staged a huge public hearing, in which dozens of experts and sufferers testified about the crisis. Caught flat-footed, Pence scheduled his own event, where he announced that he would pray about the syringe-exchange issue. The next day, he said that he supported allowing an exchange program as an emergency measure, but only on a temporary basis and only in Scott County, with no state funding. Clere told me that he spent “every last dime of my political capital” to get the bill through. After Scott County implemented the syringe exchange, the number of new H.I.V. cases fell. But Republican leaders later stripped Clere of his committee chairmanship, a highly unusual event. “I commend Representative Clere for the efforts to help the state deal with this,” Kevin Burke, the health officer in neighboring Clark County, told me. “But he paid a price for it.”

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The Atlantic: The Movement of #MeToo

For a long time, most women defined their own sexual harassment and assault in this way: as something unspoken, something private, something to be ashamed of acknowledging. Silence, although understandable, has its cost. A decade ago, I couldn’t have conceived of the fact that so many women had experienced sexual coercion or intimidation; now, I’d be surprised if I could find a single one who hadn’t. On Sunday afternoon, the actress Alyssa Milano used her Twitter account to encourage women who’d been sexually harassed or assaulted to tweet the words #MeToo. In the last 24 hours, a spokesperson from Twitter confirmed, the hashtag had been tweeted nearly half a million times. [...]

or all the frequent grumbles about the passivity of most forms of Twitter activism, this was a moment in which the form fit perfectly with the message: The goal of #MeToo, as Milano’s friend told her, was simply to give people a sense of “the magnitude of the problem.” Waking up to a feed dominated by women discussing their experiences of harassment and assault, it turns out, will do that. For more than a week, social media has been filled with stories told by women about their interactions with the producer Harvey Weinstein, accusations that range from verbal coercion to rape. But as horrifying as the allegations against Weinstein have been, more appalling still is the sense that his behavior isn’t uncommon. That in industries across the world, from media to music to modeling to academia, women have encountered their own Weinsteins and have deduced, for whatever reason, that nothing could be done about it and nobody cared.

The power of #MeToo, though, is that it takes something that women had long kept quiet about and transforms it into a movement. Unlike many kinds of social-media activism, it isn’t a call to action or the beginning of a campaign, culminating in a series of protests and speeches and events. It’s simply an attempt to get people to understand the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society. To get women, and men, to raise their hands. Recent revelations about the alleged abuses of Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Jimmy Savile and R. Kelly have proven that truth has power. There’s a monumental amount of work to be done in confronting a climate of serial sexual predation—one in which women are belittled and undermined and abused and sometimes pushed out of their industries altogether. But uncovering the colossal scale of the problem is revolutionary in its own right.

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The Atlantic: Gender-Fluid Scouts of America

The naming of the “Boy Scouts of America” came in 1910, when women could not vote, on the heels of Robert Baden-Powell’s 1908 book Scouting for Boys. Baden-Powell, a British army officer, sought to impart a lifestyle that would “combat brooding and selfishness.” Though in his text he also praised “women scouts of the nation” like Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. And Baden-Powell is quoted by the Boy Scouts as having said, “It’s the spirit within, not the veneer without, that makes a man.” [...]

Assuming that’s a genuine question, I may have an answer. A constant tension among human-rights advocacy is whether to focus on protection or freedom. Nowhere is the debate more heated than on questions of gender and sexuality. There are times when it is necessary to highlight differences among groups of people, and there are times when it’s beneficial to downplay differences. When calling out discrimination and injustice predicated on such a difference, it needs to be discussed frankly. When the difference is being named to excuse injustice, it’s better to emphasize what everyone has in common. [...]

During past years’ debates over banning openly gay and trans Boy Scouts and leaders, detractors cited the potential for sexual activity among males in the woods. Some of the same detractors now expressed concern about boys being with girls. The fundamental element there is really not the preservation of heterosexuality, but the preservation of status. The objection is to anything that threatens the exclusive nature of what it means to be a man as it refers to a code of identity that commands power.

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Politico: Brexiteers fear ‘Swiss Trap’ trade deal

For some in the British government, the Swiss model — and the high level of access to the European single market it offers — looks attractive, were it not for a catch which troubles even the mildest of Euroskeptics: If the Swiss break a single clause in any of the numerous bilateral agreements that make up their trade deal with Brussels, their whole economic relationship comes tumbling down.

This all-or-nothing “guillotine clause” forces the Swiss into accepting a large and evolving share of EU law, including free movement of people, with little practical power to break away without risking enormous economic damage. [...]

It is the closest model to the one laid out by U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May in her Florence speech last month, where she rejected Norwegian-style EEA membership as too restrictive, while also insisting a Canada-plus free-trade model did not offer enough access for Britain’s economy. [...]

These agreements are overseen by “more than 15 joint committees,” rather than the European Court of Justice — but if they break any deal, the whole arrangement collapses. The severity of this penalty — and its impact on the Swiss economy — means that in practice the country must go along with whatever is decided in Brussels, if it is related to any of the sectors of its economy where is has a deal with the EU.

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Broadly: This Man Got a PhD in Threesomes

Still, fewer women than men have had threesomes. According to one Canadian study published earlier this year, eight percent of women and 24 percent of men reported having had a mixed-gender threesome. This research also shows that participants were also kind of lazy about arranging threesomes—unless they were men. "It is likely," authors Ashley E. Thompson and E. Sandra Byers note, "that any increase in [mixed-gender threesome] experience among heterosexuals will be driven by men rather than by women." [...]

One reason for the difference between female and male interest in threesomes is that pop culture has traditionally pitched threesomes toward a male gaze. Researchers including Breanne Fahs and activists including Shiri Eisner have written of how TV and porn cultivate an expectation of women's "performative bisexuality," involving men as spectators and participants. And while the idea of being with two women is often exciting for a man, Scoats' research with women suggests that many are initially intimidated by the idea of a threesome with two men—but this is only if the expectation is that the two men won't touch. If all three are interacting sexually, women are more turned on. [...]

Admittedly, Scoats' findings have been limited in scope to middle-class white college students. "We have predominantly found it among younger white British guys," he says of the greater open-mindedness when it comes to straight men's sexual boundaries, "but... there's also some research from the UK [of this happening with] of people from lower socioeconomic classes; there is some research starting to come out with people of color." [...]

In fact, much of the increasing male tolerance of mixed-gender threesomes seems to be limited to the MFM variety, where the two men don't touch each other, rather than MMF, where it's all hands on deck. (The letter in the center corresponds to the person in the middle of the sex sandwich, so to speak.) As one Reddit user on a thread about threesomes notes: "I don't want this dude touching me even if it's by accident."

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Haaretz: Israel's Jewish Religious Fanaticism Is Infiltrating America

Israelis have long suffered from the lies and distortions of the ultra-Orthodox politicians of the Shas and United Torah Judaism parties. But American Jews are now suffering as well, as the extremism of Israel’s religious establishment has made its way to America’s shores.  [...]

The result, according to recent figures from Israel’s finance ministry: Today in Israel, nearly 60,000 yeshiva students engage in full-time study. Only 51% of Haredim participate in the labor force, a number that has been falling, as compared with 89% for the rest of the Jewish population. Among those aged 25-34, when young men usually join the workforce, the rate is a pathetically low 41%. [...]

Since the boys’ education will mainly consist of Yiddish language religious studies, most will speak little English and have no math skills or knowledge of history or science. The result will be that they will possess few if any marketable skills and will depend heavily on various forms of public assistance. The report noted that this assistance has increased dramatically in the last decade, and 43% of Hasidic families are poor.

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Al Jazeera: What price have Iraqi Kurds paid for secession vote?

On September 25, Iraqi Kurds voted in a controversial secession referendum, amid rising regional tensions and international opposition. The referendum set off a chain of events, culminating this week in a military confrontation between Erbil and Baghdad.

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Politico: Germany and France push harder line on Brexit talks

Even as EU leaders plan to extend an olive branch to London by starting internal discussions about a future trade relationship, France and Germany have pushed to include a reference to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in draft conclusions prepared for next week’s European Council summit, according to three EU diplomats. [...]

The push by Germany and France, the EU’s biggest and most powerful members, to include such language in the first paragraph of the draft conclusions (before any other Brexit issues are mentioned) is a reminder to London that the first phase of Brexit negotiations is nowhere near completed and that the divorce terms are not settled. [...]

EU leaders seem prepared to authorize the start of internal discussions despite a lack of sufficient progress on the main divorce issues. The Council has said such progress is required before it will allow negotiators to move on to the second phase of talks. At the end of the fifth formal round of negotiations last week, the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, said the two sides were in “deadlock” over the financial settlement.

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Broadly: Dogs Will Lie to Get What They Want, New Study Says

Next, the dogs were taught how to lead a person to food. They watched as sausages (their favorite treat) and dog biscuits were placed in two identical boxes, which were then set on the ground with a third, empty box. During the test, the dogs was asked to "Show me the food," during which they lead their human partner to one of the boxes on the ground. They were tested twice with the cooperative partner and twice with the competitive partner. While the cooperative partners rewarded the dogs with whatever was in the box, if it wasn't empty, the competitive partners kept their findings. [...]

In other words, more than half of the dogs realized taking the competitive person to the box of sausages would not benefit them in the least, so they lied when asked to show her the food. In fact, two dogs named Arwen and Nelson were so smart, they always led the cooperative person, never the competitive person, to the sausages. Baxter, Cicca, Barni, and Caju also never led the competitive partner to the sausages, although they were less consistent with the cooperative partner. [...]

The question is: Should dog owners start to side eye their pets a little more? Marianne Heberlein, the lead author on the study, suggests maybe so. "A dog still is a loyal, lovely companion," she tells Broadly. "However, the study shows that dogs, like other animals, try to optimize [their] own profit. They seem to know what they want and also can manipulate humans to reach their goal." She recommends owners "be careful and precise in rewarding your dog" as it may have faked a behavior just to get a reward.

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