A ballerina wearing a lovely burgundy scrunchie while warming up at the barre.Source/ZUMAPRESS

Here’s your big fashion news of the week:

Women are wearing scrunchies again—in public, and most notably, to the office, where their presence is producing reactions ranging from unbridled enthusiasm, to jokes that might not be jokes, to silent judgment. Some scrunchie fans wonder if they will be taken seriously while wearing one.

….Scrunchies, often in bright colors and patterns, were once everywhere….But W Magazine included scrunchies on its trend list for 2018. Scrunchies appeared on the runway at New York Fashion Week in September during the Mansur Gavriel show.

….Cassandra Jennings, 22, recently tested the scrunchie waters on Wall Street. She works at a marketing firm and usually dresses up, but was having one of those days. “I had a normal hair tie in my hair at first but then my eyes were just going to my scrunchie,” she says. She pulled her hair back in a tight bun and put on a white velvet scrunchie. No one said a word, but she felt self-conscious the whole day.

“I was aware that I was wearing it,” she says. “I think I was judging myself.”

Here in the Drum household, we no longer wear scrunchies. They have long since been demoted to cat toys and then demolished. This means that our current cats have never even seen a scrunchie. That’s kind of sad, so maybe we should buy a few.

Anyway, let’s take a poll. How many men reading this (a) had any idea what a scrunchie is, (b) knew that it was fatally dated, and (c) would have judged any woman wearing one? Also: why isn’t the singular spelled scrunchy?

This is an actual headline from earlier today:

D.C. Councilman Apologizes for Claiming That Jews Control the Weather

This is being played as a guy who’s such a moron he didn’t realize that “Rothschilds control _____” is code for “Jews control _____ .” After reading his muddled apology, I can believe that. But that leaves one teensy little problem. This guy is a DC city councilman. Before that he was on the Board of Education. And he believes that rich people are controlling the weather so they can make lots of money by creating natural disasters. He’s just decided it’s not specificially Jewish rich people who are doing this.

Does anyone care about that? Neither of the two stories I read even bothered to mention it. Is this what we’ve come to in the era of Trump? WTF?

POSTSCRIPT: If anyone’s defense of White is that lots of politicians believe batshit crazy stuff, then I guess I have to say…

…that, um, you’ve got a point. We h. sapiens are a helluva species, aren’t we?

Elizabeth Nolan Brown regales us with news of the weird today:

I’ve been saving the best part for last, of course

Jailed Russian sex guru Alex Leslie’s (now deleted) @fondskolkovo bio said his center was “supported by” @DARPA + @NASA grants and he worked w/Boeing + other US/China/W. Euro artificial intelligence system entities pic.twitter.com/xvCSkY8zyx

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) March 19, 2018

Leslie/Lesley is “the self-help author/seduction coach/international harem leader now imprisoned in a Thai jail.”¹ But it turns out he’s also the director of a Russian AI research group. And his group was supported by DARPA. And he says he has dirt on Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign. And the FBI wants to talk to him but Thai authorities won’t let them.

In the age of Trump, it’s not common for someone to out-weird the master. So I thought I’d share.

¹Among other things, he’s the self-published author of Kindle books called Life Without Panties: Skills of Seduction and The Game of Master and Huntress.

The new congressional map enacted by the Pennsylvania state supreme court.Pennsylvania Supreme Court/www.pacourts.us

The Pennsylvania redistricting case is over. Thanks to the way election law works, the Republican appeal went straight to a 3-judge district court, which unanimously denied their arguments to overturn the new map. This ruling can be appealed only to the Supreme Court, but a few hours later the Supreme Court turned down a similar request to overturn the new map. There were no dissents.

So that’s that. The 2018 election will be held under a map that’s been drawn fairly, and that’s likely to mean Democrats will pick up three or four seats. It’s more bad news for Republicans.

If you’re in a pessimistic mood, this ruling doesn’t mean much since the Republican case was really weak from the start. If you’re in an optimistic mood, it might suggest that the Supreme Court is becoming less tolerant of blatant gerrymandering. Perhaps that means a favorable ruling is in store in the big gerrymandering case currently pending?

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.Christian Charisius/DPA via ZUMA

Here’s the latest on Cambridge Analytica, the data company funded by right-wing billionaires and chosen by Donald Trump to help with his 2016 campaign. It comes from Britain’s Channel 4 News:

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica — the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory — have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.

….In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, [Alexander] Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

….Mr Nix also said: “…Many of our clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company… so often we set up, if we are working then we can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists, there’s so many options we can look at. I have lots of experience in this.”

This is quite an organization: honey traps, bribery offers, hidden identities, and, of course, massive amounts of misused Facebook data. It sounds like a company right after Trump’s heart, doesn’t it?

Amusingly, CA’s defense is that they were entrapping the fake reporter in order to make sure they weren’t dealing with anyone corrupt:

Assessing the legality and reputational risks associated with new projects is critical for us, and we routinely undertake conversations with prospective clients to try to tease out any unethical or illegal intentions. The two Cambridge Analytica executives at the meeting humoured these questions and actively encouraged the prospective client to disclose his intentions. They left with grave concerns and did not meet with him again.

….CEO Alexander Nix acknowledges that on this occasion he misjudged the situation: “In playing along with this line of conversation, and partly to spare our ‘client’ from embarrassment, we entertained a series of ludicrous hypothetical scenarios. I am aware how this looks, but it is simply not the case. I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called ‘honeytraps’, and nor does it use untrue material for any purpose.”

Okey doke.

Rosario Beach, Fidalgo Island, Washington state.

Today you get two charts showing my health status. Exciting!

First off, here’s the usual M-protein chart, which provides a rough idea of how well the multiple myeloma is being controlled:

As you can see, it’s been rising slowly but steadily for several months now. Generally speaking, the Revlimid maintenance phase of my treatment is usually good for about two years, and I’m already past two-and-a-half. When the M-protein level gets consistently above 1.0, it will be time to switch to a second-line treatment. If this happens in late summer, I will have gotten three years out of the Revlimid, which isn’t bad.

But that’s not the only reason my Revlimid phase is nearly over. One of the side effects of Revlimid—along with lots of other chemotherapy—is that it affects your immune system. I get tested every month for this, and here’s what it looks like for the past couple of years:

The normal level for this is about 5,000. When it gets below 1,000, things get a little worrisome. I’ve dipped below that a couple of times recently, and it’s pretty obvious I’m going to drop below 1,000 consistently starting in a few months. This makes me more vulnerable to various illnesses, of course, and it also produces periodic stomach problems. So this is yet another sign that my Revlimid phase is nearly over. My body has simply stopped tolerating it.

Most likely, I’ll switch to a second-line treatment sometime this summer. It’s one of the newer meds combined with the evil dex, which will provide me with an exciting free night once a week, followed by killer naps for a few days afterward as my body tries to recover its lost eight hours. But at least I know what to expect, and the infusion cycle only lasts eight weeks. So that’s not too bad.

Bottom line: things are progressing about as expected. My personal guess is that I’ll cycle through a second-line, third-line, and possibly fourth-line treatment before it’s time to investigate the new CAR-T therapies that are still in development. My oncologist, oddly, had a very negative reaction when I mentioned this to him. I’m not quite sure why, and it’s not a big issue right now. Hopefully the clinical trials will progress well and provide me with an alternative treatment two or three years from now, which is probably when I’ll need it.

I’ve got something to say.

Late on Friday night, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. The official reason is that he “lacked candor” during an investigation about contacts with the media during the 2016 campaign. The IG report making this charge was not released, which means that no one can say for sure what evidence it contains.

This is not an accident. It was deliberate, and it was designed to obscure the fact that the charges against McCabe are completely unfounded and the investigation of McCabe has been bogus from the start. The whole thing was the result of Donald Trump’s search for someone to attack during the campaign. This eventually morphed into President Trump’s search for a scapegoat to explain his loss of the popular vote, which in turn morphed into an insane jihad against the entire leadership of the FBI.

Can I prove this? Of course not. That’s the whole point of withholding the IG report. But everyone in Washington is well aware of how this has unfolded. Everyone is well aware of Trump’s insane obsession with getting revenge on his enemies, both real and perceived. Everyone knows what the McCabe vendetta is about.

At this point, to pretend that we don’t know this—maybe McCabe really did seriously breach the rules, we’ll have to wait and see—is little more than a knee-jerk veneration of faux evenhandedness. It is an attempt to remain willfully ignorant when everyone knows what’s happening.

As with the Nunes memo, here’s what I have to say: We’ve seen this movie before. This entire investigation was bogus. The charges against McCabe are bogus. He did nothing wrong. The whole affair is part of a pathological vendetta begun by the president of the United States. Eventually all the evidence will become public and this is how it will turn out. We should all stop pretending otherwise.

A team of researchers using a massive dataset has published a new paper about intergenerational mobility among American children. The basic question is whether children generally end up with higher or lower incomes than their parents. Here’s the chart:

Take a look at the dark blue dots, which are for white kids. If their parents were in the 20th percentile of income, children are mostly likely to be around the 45th percentile: the kids have done better than the parents. At the 80th percentile, children are most likely to be around the 65th percentile: the kids have done worse than the parents. This kind of reversion to the mean is fairly common.

Now take a look at the red triangles, which are for blacks kids. At the 40th percentile, the kids are most likely to end up around the 35th percentile. At the 80th percentile, the kids are likely to end up around the 50th percentile. At nearly every income level, black kids are likely to do worse than their parents—and far worse than similar white kids.

So what do the authors conclude?

• The black-white gap is almost entirely among men. On a wide variety of measures—wages, college education, etc.—black and white women have similar levels of intergenerational mobility.
• Among families with similar incomes, family characteristics such as marital status, education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap.
• The same is true for differences in ability.
• The gap is mostly environmental: Boys who grow up in certain neighborhoods—those with low poverty rates, low levels of racial bias among whites, and high rates of father presence among low-income blacks—show much smaller gaps. Black boys who move to such areas at younger ages have significantly better outcomes, demonstrating that racial disparities can be narrowed through changes in environment.

As a result of this research, the authors suggest that interventions aimed at improving the conditions of a single generation won’t be very effective. The same is true of policies that focus on reducing patterns of residential segregation. The key is achieving racial integration within neighborhoods:

Our results suggest that efforts that cut within neighborhoods and schools and improve environments for specific racial subgroups, such as black boys, may be more effective in reducing the black-white gap. Examples include mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area.

This paper should give ammunition to everyone. Conservatives will point to the better results in neighborhoods where fathers stay around. Liberals will point to the better results in neighborhoods with low poverty rates. In theory, everyone will agree that reducing racism and improving social interaction between blacks and whites is important.

Jeff Malet/ZUMA

Donald Trump fired former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe today. Technically, of course, it was Jeff Sessions who did the firing, but I don’t think anyone believes that it was anybody but Trump who was really at the controls. After all, it’s Trump who made up the inane conspiracy theory that McCabe was a Hillary Clinton mole during the 2016 campaign. It was Trump who panicked when McCabe testified that he could corroborate James Comey’s incriminating account of his conversations with Trump. And firing McCabe two days before his retirement in order to attack his pension—well, that kind of petty vengefulness has Trump written all over it, doesn’t it?

This whole affair has been contemptible from the start. Trump knows perfectly well that he won the election solely because of the FBI’s interference. This is something he finds intolerable, so he has invented a fantasy in which that never happened. In fact, he’s spent the entire past year spreading the preposterous lie that the FBI actually helped Hillary. Then he went about defaming and firing all the people whose very existence was a continuing rebuke to his election triumph. McCabe is one of them.

It’s possible, of course, that McCabe actually did something wrong and deserved to be fired for it. But the rushed nature of the whole thing, combined with the default assumption that Trump lies about everything, suggests otherwise. Speaking for myself, I don’t believe it for a second. This is a plain old Trump vendetta, pure and simple.

Under the circumstances, it’s worth giving McCabe’s full statement wide and prominent publication. Here it is.

I have been an FBI Special Agent for over 21 years. I spent half of that time investigating Russian Organized Crime as a street agent and Supervisor in New York City. I have spent the second half of my career focusing on national security issues and protecting this country from terrorism. I served in some of the most challenging, demanding investigative and leadership roles in the FBI. And I was privileged to serve as Deputy Director during a particularly tough time.

For the last year and a half, my family and I have been the targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country. Articles too numerous to count have leveled every sort of false, defamatory and degrading allegation against us. The president’s tweets have amplified and exacerbated it all. He called for my firing. He called for me to be stripped of my pension after more than 20 years of service. And all along we have said nothing, never wanting to distract from the mission of the FBI by addressing the lies told and repeated about it.

No more.

The investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has to be understood in the context of the attacks on my credibility. The investigation flows from my attempt to explain the FBI’s involvement and my supervision of investigations involving Hillary Clinton. I was being portrayed in the media over and over as a political partisan, accused of closing down investigations under political pressure. The FBI was portrayed as caving under that pressure, and making decisions for political rather than law enforcement purposes. Nothing was further from the truth. In fact, this entire investigation stems from my efforts, fully authorized under FBI rules, to set the record straight on behalf of the Bureau and to make it clear that we were continuing an investigation that people in DOJ opposed.

The OIG investigation has focused on information I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As Deputy Director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the Director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter. It was the same type of exchange with the media that the Deputy Director oversees several times per week. In fact it was the same type of work that I continued to do under Director Wray, at his request. The investigation subsequently focused on who I talked to, when I talked to them, and so forth. During these inquiries, I answered questions truthfully and as accurately as I could amidst the chaos that surrounded me. And when I thought my answers were misunderstood, I contacted investigators to correct them.

But looking at that in isolation completely misses the big picture. The big picture is a tale of what can happen when law enforcement is politicized, public servants are attacked, and people who are supposed to cherish and protect our institutions become instruments for damaging those institutions and people.

Here is the reality: I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey. The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey’s accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens. Thursday’s comments from the White House are just the latest example of this.

This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally. It is part of this Administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel’s work.

I have always prided myself on serving my country with distinction and integrity, and I have always encouraged those around me to do the same. Just ask them. To have my career end in this way, and to be accused of lacking candor when at worst I was distracted in the midst of chaotic events, is incredibly disappointing and unfair. But it will not erase the important work I was prevailed to be a part of, the results of which will in the end be revealed for the country to see.

I have unfailing faith in the men and women of the FBI and I am confident that their efforts to seek justice will not be deterred.