Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rights. Show all posts

Friday, September 29, 2023

Random Quote(s)


I'm almost done with "The Second" - which is the kind of real history that assholes like Ron DeSantis won't allow to be taught.

And guess what - not teaching kids the real history of USAmerica Inc is not a new thing.

I think I may have cause to raise a class action suit against the Jefferson County School System of the 60s and 70s. Which I thought did pretty fucking great by me - and they didn't. Not by a long shot.

None of this was taught in any of the many American History classes I took - and I had every right to expect that my teachers would let me know about it.

I will never not be pissed off about this.

"It is impossible to be unarmed when your blackness is the weapon that they fear."

Saturday, August 19, 2023

A Rundown

 Brian Tyler Cohen

The big one at about 12:50: "We the people" - the voters - are the victims of Trump's criminal acts. We have the right to not be excluded from witnessing the proceedings against him.


Crime Victims' Rights Act

18 U.S.C. § 3771. Crime victims' rights


(a) RIGHTS OF CRIME VICTIMS. A crime victim has the following rights:
  1. The right to be reasonably protected from the accused.
  2. The right to reasonable, accurate, and timely notice of any public court proceeding, or any parole proceeding, involving the crime or of any release or escape of the accused.
  3. The right not to be excluded from any such public court proceeding, unless the court, after receiving clear and convincing evidence, determines that testimony by the victim would be materially altered if the victim heard other testimony at that proceeding.
  4. The right to be reasonably heard at any public proceeding in the district court involving release, plea, sentencing, or any parole proceeding.
  5. The reasonable right to confer with the attorney for the Government in the case.
  6. The right to full and timely restitution as provided in law.
  7. The right to proceedings free from unreasonable delay.
  8. The right to be treated with fairness and with respect for the victim's dignity and privacy.
  9. The right to be informed in a timely manner of any plea bargain or deferred prosecution agreement.
  10. The right to be informed of the rights under this section and the services described in section 503(c) of the Victims' Rights and Restitution Act of 1990 (42 U.S.C. 10607(c)) and provided contact information for the Office of the Victims' Rights Ombudsman of the Department of Justice.

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Kids vs Rights

If you tell me you'd be willing to sacrifice the lives of your children in defense of your idea of unlimited 2nd amendment rights, you're either a total fucking liar, or a total fucking monster.

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Kids & Books & Parents


  1. None of the rights guaranteed in the US Constitution is absolute or unlimited.
  2. With every right comes responsibility
"Conservatives" demand the freedom while ignoring the work required to achieve and maintain that freedom.

So who's the fuckin' moocher now?


Opinion
The parents’ rights movement keeps ducking parental responsibilities


The current “parental rights” movement has a dirty little secret: It depicts parents as victims of teachers and librarians. Yet many of the movement’s proposed solutions fob off parental responsibilities onto those public servants.

Listen to enough debates about what books belong in public and school libraries, or about sex education, and a theme emerges: Even as they demand more rights, advocates of book bans and curriculum-dodging appear to wish they could do less parenting.

Take the group of Alaska parents who recently asked their local library to remove books “which are intended to indoctrinate children in LGBTQ+ ideologies” from the children’s section, or put them on a restricted shelf. “Parents who do not wish for their children to stumble across … confusing ideas,” they complained, can’t let their kids browse without close supervision.

Or take this move. Texas state Rep. Jared Patterson introduced a bill requiring vendors who want to sell books in Texas to rate their offerings as “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant,” based on whether the books are “patently offensive,” “pervasively vulgar,” “obscene” or “educationally unsuitable.” Apparently, it’s not enough for parents to keep an eye on what their children are checking out. Instead, librarians must read the minds of every adult in town, anticipate what each one might find objectionable and pre-censor their shelves accordingly.

Such proposals actually give publishers, librarians and school administrators more power to make moral judgments on behalf of parents, not less.

Instead, parents should explain to their kids what they’re forbidden to check out and why. And let their kids’ librarians know. When she was a school librarian, says Andrea Jamison, Illinois State University College of Education professor, she would enforce parents’ rules. But she insisted they explain their reasoning to their children themselves. Stepping in to impart those values on their behalf would usurp parents’ rights.

In dodging these conversations, parents are also transferring their anxiety about how their children are growing up onto teachers and librarians.

It can’t be that young people express authentic interest in gender, sexuality or current events — or even that they crave junky thrillers and bathroom humor. It must be nefarious librarians pushing guides to puberty such as “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health,” and trash classics such as V.C. Andrews’s “Flowers in the Attic.” As Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa put it in March with an air of resignation, “I wish they would pick up Shakespeare.” But it’s Captain Underpants and the Fart Quest series that got her son into books.

And it couldn’t be that kids are naturally curious about racism or climate change. Instead, it’s teachers and librarians who are scattering dangerous ideas through their shelves like so many intellectual improvised explosive devices.

In reality it is the very books adults are trying to protect students from that they find most vital. That’s what kids tell Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who runs the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Students experience violence, they experience racism, they experience poverty,” agrees Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a former middle school English teacher. “If you’re old enough to experience these things, you’re old enough to read about these things.”

More ducking of parental duty shows up in the furor around sex education and other curriculums. Many school districts require parents to actively opt out their children from lessons that run counter to their values. Instead, some parents want to require that families opt in.

These advocates suggest that children shouldn’t be exposed to the social consequences of feeling singled out. For instance, at a 2022 hearing on a proposed sex-ed curriculum, Daniel Gallic, who chairs the Warren Township, N.J., planning board, complained: “An opt-out of the program makes the children subject to harassment and intimidation.” In 2017, a Palo Alto, Calif., parent protested her daughter hadn’t felt comfortable filling a form to skip a sex-ed class because “she would have been the only student in the class to do so and didn’t want to feel left out.”

Certainly, schools should protect students from bullying or discrimination based on their beliefs. But giving middle and high school students practice at explaining their family’s values seems like a form of education everyone should get behind.

“We do not want to raise snowflakes who are not able to take the realities of the real world,” was how Talarico put it in a March 21 Texas House committee hearing on Patterson’s books bill, flipping conservative rhetoric on its head. “We want to prepare our kids, especially our teens in high school, for what they’re going to face when they’re outside our school laws.”

That preparation takes work. Parents who want to assert their rights ought to be ready to take on their responsibilities.

Thursday, February 09, 2023

The Economy


This should mean the owners and managers can be convinced to throw workers a nice bone. Like Paid Time Off, and Insurance, and a better hourly rate, along with normal regular shifts that add up to a solid 40 hours a week, and an end to the "right-to-work" bullshit that torpedoes the right to unionize.

It's about fucking time we honor the debt to people who actually work for a living.


What Recession? Some Economists See Chances of a Growth Rebound.

The Federal Reserve has raised rates rapidly. But instead of cracking, some data point to an economy that’s thriving
.

Many economists and investors had a clear narrative coming into 2023: The Federal Reserve had spent months pushing borrowing costs rapidly higher in a bid to tame inflation, and those moves were expected to slow growth and the labor market so much that the economy would be at risk of plunging into a downturn.

But the recession calls are now getting a rethink.

Employers added more than half a million jobs in January, the housing market shows signs of stabilizing or even picking back up, and many Wall Street economists have marked down the odds of a downturn this year. After months of asking whether the Fed could pull off a soft landing in which the economy slows but does not plummet into a bruising recession, analysts are raising the possibility that it will not land at all — that growth will simply hold up.

Not every data point looks sunny: Manufacturing remains glum, consumer spending has been cracking, and some analysts still think a mild recession this year remains likely. But there have been enough surprises pointing to continued momentum that Fed officials themselves seem to see a better chance that the nation will avoid a painful downturn. That resilience could even be a problem.

While a gentle landing would be a welcome development, economists are beginning to ask whether growth and the job market will run too warm for inflation to slow as much as central bankers are hoping — eventually forcing the Fed to respond more aggressively.

“They should be worried about how strong the U.S. labor market is,” said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, the global chairman of research at Barclays. “So far, the U.S. economy has proved unexpectedly resilient.”


The Fed has lifted rates from near zero early last year to above 4.5 percent as of last week — the fastest series of policy adjustment in decades. Those higher borrowing costs have translated into pricier car loans and mortgages, and for a while they seemed to be clearly slowing the economy.

But as the central bank has shifted toward a more moderate pace of rate moves — it slowed the speed of its increases first in December, then again this month — markets have relaxed. Rates on mortgages, for example, have come down slightly.

That’s showing up in the economy. Mortgage applications have been bouncing around, but in general they have ticked back up. New home sales are now hovering around the same level as before the pandemic. Used car prices had been declining, but they have begun to rise at a wholesale level — which some economists see as a response to some returning demand for those vehicles.

And while retail sales and other measures of household spending have been pulling back, according to recent data, several nascent forces could help to shore up consumer demand into 2023 — with potentially big implications for the Fed’s battle against inflation.

Social Security recipients just received a sizable cost-of-living adjustment in their first check of 2023, putting more money in the pockets of older Americans. More than a dozen states, including Virginia, California, New York and Massachusetts, sent tax rebates or stimulus checks late last year. And while Americans have been working their way through the excess savings that were amassed during the early pandemic, many still have some cushion left.

“Such employment gains mean labor income will also be robust and buoy consumer spending, which could maintain upward pressure on inflation in the months ahead,” Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, said on Wednesday.

There is no guarantee that those factors will be enough to counteract the large amount of policy adjustment the Fed has done over the past year. Technology companies have already begun to lay off workers. Lower-income consumers have burned through their savings buffers more quickly than higher-income people, leaving them with less wherewithal to shop.

“I don’t think we’re re-accelerating,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at the payroll and data company ADP. “You can have a strong labor market and slow economic growth.”

But the possibility that the economy will not grow as modestly as expected is a risk for the Fed.

Inflation has been cooling in recent months, partly because prices for used cars and some retail products have outright dropped, subtracting from overall price increases.

But if auto dealers and retail stores like Walmart and Target feel that they can stop slashing prices as demand stabilizes and they work through bloated inventories, it could keep inflation from slowing as steadily, said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights.

“The concern is now you shift to a situation where that downward pressure goes away,” he said. “Wages are still supportive of people buying more stuff.”

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, acknowledged during a news conference last week that some of the drag on inflation from goods could be “transitory,” meaning that it will fade away. That is, in part, why central bankers are closely watching what happens in other sectors, particularly services.

Lower-income consumers have burned through their savings buffers more quickly than higher-income people, leaving them with less wherewithal to buy things.Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

One major service cost — rent — does look poised to decelerate this year. But both the extent and the timing are enormously uncertain: Some economists think that rent increases will slow in official inflation data within the coming months, while others are expecting the change to come much later.

Lael Brainard, the Fed vice chair, suggested in a recent speech that rent inflation might not decline until the third quarter of 2023, which stretches from July through September.

The trajectory for other service prices, from child-care to restaurant meals, is expected to hinge on what happens with the labor market. Wages tend to be a major cost for service companies, and if pay is climbing swiftly, businesses may charge more. Workers who are taking home bigger paychecks may be able to keep spending through those cost increases.

To be sure, inflation and wage growth have slowed in recent months even with very strong hiring. Fed officials have embraced that, and they have made clear that they’re focused on what happens with inflation rather than aiming for a specific increase in unemployment.


But several have expressed doubts that wage and price moderation can continue with labor demand so robust and a jobless rate at 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1969. Companies will be left competing for a limited pool of workers. And given that today’s disinflation is coming partly from product price declines that are not expected to continue indefinitely, slowing down services prices is crucial.

“The services sector, really, except for housing services, is not really showing any disinflation yet,” Mr. Powell said this week.

The question for the Fed is how much more policy adjustment is needed to ensure that the economy and inflation return to a sustainable pace. The central bank has forecast that it will make two more quarter-point rate increases.

John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, indicated on Wednesday that quarter-point moves were likely to remain the norm, but he suggested that rates might have to adjust by more if demand and price increases stayed elevated.

“Demand in our economy is much stronger right now than you might expect in a regular, prepandemic situation,” Mr. Williams said, attributing that to fiscal support, a strong labor market and other factors. How high rates must climb in order “to be sufficiently restrictive has got to be influenced by that.”

Although many business leaders are still watching consumers warily, some of them have suggested that impediments to growth are fading. The S&P 500 as a whole has been recovering over the past six months, a sign that investors see a sunnier outlook on the horizon.

Ryan Marshall, chief executive officer of the homebuilder Pulte Group, suggested in an earnings call last week that the housing market was noticeably improving.

“Despite the higher-rate environment dominating the national conversation, we saw buyer demand improve as the fourth quarter progressed and can confirm this strength continued through the month of January,” he said.

And David B. Burritt, the chief executive of U.S. Steel, said in a recent earnings call that he expected “prices will be sustainable and higher” in the longer-term as headwinds to growth fade.

“We’re in this transitional period with a lot of uncertainty,” he said, “and frankly I think a lot of people think the Fed is doing a lot better job on this soft landing than what was expected.”

Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro, said that the re-acceleration signs in the economy were “undeniable,” and that inflation could get stuck at unusually high levels as a result — forcing the Fed to keep rates high for longer than expected.

“They’ve been raising rates for a while,” he said. “All they have to show for it is an unemployment rate at 3.4 percent.”

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

It's Elon's Twitter Now

There's a sewer-y part of practically everything. That doesn't mean you should seek it out, and live in it. Although, on the intertoobz at least, that's exactly what some folks are wont to do.

(pay wall)

A BASELESS CONSPIRACY theory about the assault of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi trended on Twitter Monday morning after being boosted all weekend by prominent conservatives and even new Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Hashtags including “PelosiGayLover,” “PelosiSmollett,” “PelosiGate,” and “Listen to the 911” appeared in the trending bar amid the proliferation of false claims about the attack and mockery of Pelosi. Several prominent right-wing figures pushed the false idea that both the attacker and Pelosi were in their underwear at the time of the assault, and that Pelosi knew his attacker and that they were actually lovers because Pelosi had referred to him as a “friend” while attempting to tip off 911 dispatchers as to his situation.


San Francisco police have debunked claims that both men were in their underwear and that Pelosi knew the attacker. The attacker, David DePape, 42, broke into the Pelosi home early Friday morning, allegedly shouting “Where’s Nancy?” before ultimately attacking Paul Pelosi with a hammer. Pelosi underwent “successful surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” and according to a statement from the speaker’s office, “doctors expect a full recovery.”

Musk on Sunday tweeted (and later deleted) a story from right-wing rag The Santa Monica Observer claiming Paul Pelosi was not the victim of a break in, but that the attack was part of a domestic dispute with a male prostitute. It has been widely noted that the Observer has a history of publishing false claims, including that Hillary Clinton had died and been replaced with a body double. Musk later made fun of The New York Times for reporting that the tweet was based on a claim from a regular source of misinformation.

Former first son Donald Trump Jr. mocked the attack on Instagram and Twitter later on Sunday, posting a meme depicting a pair of underwear and a hammer with the text, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” Jr. captioned the post “OMG. The internet remains undefeated.”


Trump Jr. on Monday morning tweeted out a photo of a hammer in a holster, captioned “open carry in San Francisco”


Sitting politicians have also been mocking the attack. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) tweeted, then deleted, an image mocking Speaker Pelosi, captioning the tweet, “That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy was the reason your husband didn’t make it to your fundraiser.”

Researchers have found that while DePape did hold anti-establishment ideologies, his online activity indicated a longstanding pattern of extremist beliefs, including QAnon conspiracies, Holocaust denail, false voter fraud claims, and screeds against trans people and “groomers.”

On Fox News, the hosts of Fox & Friends alluded to the conspiracy on air. “Something, something doesn’t make sense,” said host Pete Hegseth, adding that it “doesn’t add up.” Larry Elder, the former California gubernatorial candidate and frequent Fox News guest, mocked the attack at an event Sunday night, saying that between the DUI conviction and the assault Pelosi was “was hammered twice in six months.”
 

Professional conspiracy theorists beat the disinformation drum on Twitter all weekend. Dinsesh D’Souza began publishing an alternate version of events on social media virtually immediately after the attack happened. Former Trump administration hand Sebastian Gorka published what is allegedly a partial clip of the conversation between 911 dispatchers sending someone to Pelosi’s home, captioning the video “The Paul Pelosi 911 Lie…” (The clip does not feature Paul Pelosi himself speaking to officers.) Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich claimed news outlets are “hiding facts from the public,” suggesting that a break in at the Pelosi home was implausible and baselessly alluding to a connection between the attack and Paul Pelosi’s recent DUI case.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has thrown the future of enforcement of anti-disinformation policies into chaos. Massive layoffs are expected at the social media company, and over the weekend Musk tweeted that he had not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies, but reports indicated that instances of racist and hateful abuse on the platform skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of Musk’s takeover.

On Monday morning, Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt defended Musk tweeting a conspiracy theory about Pelosi’s attack, labeling it a “free speech” issue.

I haven't decided yet whether to stay with Twitter and lurk, so I can keep an eye on it, or bail and try to find something else. 

So far, I've seen a lot more weird shit, but that could be me engaging with the crazies more than I have done (mostly Blue Check Crazies) so maybe the algorithm is slanted in their direction.

I have noticed though that I've lost a couple of hundred followers, which may be the beginnings of "Twexit".

I don't know. Interesting times.

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Those Plucky Persians

For almost 2 months, Iranian women have been standing up and telling the government in Tehran to take their Morailty Police and shove it.

Yes, Morality Police really is what they named it.

Listen up, America - our own future is calling.



Students defy protest ultimatum despite crackdown across Iran

Summary
  • Protests show no sign of easing amid fierce state warnings
  • University students clash with security forces
  • Journalists demand release of their jailed colleagues
  • Rights groups report arrests of activists, students
DUBAI, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Iranian students defied warnings from the feared Revolutionary Guards that nationwide protests must end by Sunday and were met with tear gas, beatings and gunfire from riot police and militia, videos on social media showed.

The confrontations at dozens of universities, along with threats of a tougher crackdown, indicated that the demonstrations, now in their seventh week, were entering a more violent phase.

Iranians from all walks of life have been protesting since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police after she was arrested for attire deemed inappropriate.

What began as outrage over Amini's death on Sept. 16 has evolved into one of the toughest challenges to clerical rulers since the 1979 revolution, with some protesters calling for the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The top commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned protesters that Saturday would be their last day of taking to the streets, the harshest warning yet by Iranian authorities.

Nevertheless, videos on social media, unverifiable by Reuters, showed confrontations between students and riot police and Basij forces on Sunday at universities all over Iran.

One video showed a member of Basij forces firing a gun at close range at students protesting at a branch of Azad University in Tehran. Gunshots were also heard in a video shared by rights group HENGAW from protests at the University of Kurdistan in Sanandaj. Videos from universities in some other cities also showed Basij forces opening fire at students.

Across the country, security forces tried to block students inside university buildings, firing tear gas and beating protesters with sticks. The students, who appeared to be unarmed, pushed back, with some chanting "dishonoured Basij get lost" and "Death to Khamenei".

HISTORY OF CRACKDOWNS
  • The activist HRANA news agency said 283 protesters had been killed in the unrest as of Saturday including 44 minors. Some 34 members of the security forces were also killed.
  • More than 14,000 people have been arrested, including 253 students, in protests in 132 cities and towns, and 122 universities, it said.
  • The Guards and its affiliated Basij force have crushed dissent in the past. They said on Sunday, "seditionists" were insulting them at universities and in the streets, and warned they may use more force if the anti-government unrest continued.
  • "So far, Basijis have shown restraint and they have been patient," the head of the Revolutionary Guards in the Khorasan Junubi province, Brigadier General Mohammadreza Mahdavi, was quoted as saying by the state news agency IRNA.
  • "But it will get out of our control if the situation continues."
JOURNALISTS APPEAL

More than 300 Iranian journalists demanded the release of two colleagues jailed for their coverage of Amini in a statement published by the Iranian Etemad and other newspapers on Sunday.

Niloofar Hamedi took a photo of Amini's parents hugging each other in a Tehran hospital where their daughter was lying in a coma.

The image, which Hamedi posted on Twitter, was the first signal to the world that all was not well with Amini, who had been detained three days earlier by Iran's morality police for what they deemed inappropriate dress.

Elaheh Mohammadi covered Amini's funeral in her Kurdish hometown Saqez, where the protests began. A joint statement released by Iran’s intelligence ministry and the intelligence organisation of the Revolutionary Guards on Friday had accused Hamedi and Mohammadi of being CIA foreign agents.

The arrests match an official narrative that Iran's arch-enemy the United States, Israel and other Western powers and their local agents are behind the unrest and are determined to destabilise the country.

At least 40 journalists have been detained in the past six weeks, according to rights groups, and the number is growing.

Students and women have played a prominent role in the unrest, burning their veils as crowds call for the fall of the Islamic Republic, which came to power in 1979.

An official said on Sunday the establishment had no plan to retreat from compulsory veiling but should be "wise" about enforcement.

"Removing the veil is against our law and this headquarters will not retreat from its position," Ali Khanmohammadi, the spokesman of Iran’s headquarters for "Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice" told the Khabaronline website.

"However, our actions should be wise to avoid giving enemies a pretext to use it against us."

The apparent hint at compromise is unlikely to appease the protesters, most of whose demands have moved beyond dress code changes to calls for an end to clerical rule.

In a further apparent bid to defuse the situation, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said people were right to call for change and their demands would be met if they distanced themselves from the "criminals" taking to the streets.

"We consider the protests to be not only correct and the cause of progress, but we also believe that these social movements will change policies and decisions, provided that they are separated from violent people, criminals and separatists," he said, using terms officials typically use for the protesters.

Friday, August 26, 2022

Oops Again, Republicans

Hoping this is another sign that Republicans have badly over-reached, and that the ladies are coming out to show these idiots what happens when you fuck over half the population.




Judge who denied Florida teen an abortion citing grades loses reelection

A state judge who, in a highly publicized case, denied a 17-year-old an abortion in part because of her grades lost his election in a Florida primary on Tuesday.

Jared Smith, who was appointed to Florida’s 13th Circuit Court by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in 2019, narrowly lost his nonpartisan primary against attorney Nancy Jacobs.

Jacobs received roughly 51.9 percent of the vote, beating Smith by about 3.7 percentage points, or roughly 7,900 votes.

Smith had ruled in January that the 17-year-old, who was kept anonymous in court documents, could not receive an abortion, citing her grades. An appeals court overturned the ruling.

“While she claimed that her grades were ‘Bs’ during her testimony, her GPA is currently 2.0,” Smith ruled. “Clearly, a ‘B’ average would not equate to a 2.0 GPA.”

Florida is one of six states that require both parental notification and consent for minors to obtain abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The teen had asked the court to waive the requirement.

Under Florida law, a judge can waive parental consent if it finds by “clear and convincing evidence” that the minor is “sufficiently mature” to decide to have an abortion. In considering those requests, judges are required to assess factors like the minor’s age, overall intelligence and emotional stability.

The statute has led to multiple high-profile cases, including one earlier this month in which a Florida appeals court ruled a 16-year-old did not demonstrate she met the maturity requirement to circumvent the parental notification and consent requirements.


Smith received an array of endorsements in the primary race, including former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez (R), the Tampa Bay Times’s editorial board and multiple retired judges who served on the circuit.

Democrats have hoped the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion in June will help energize voters in this year’s midterm elections and avoid steep losses for the party as it seeks to maintain control of Congress.

Voters in Kansas, a traditionally red state, rejected a ballot question earlier this month that would remove abortion rights from the state constitution.

As voters headed to the polls in Florida on Tuesday and defeated Smith in his circuit court race, New York’s simultaneous primary showed another sign of the potential impact of the abortion ruling.

Pat Ryan (D), who made supporting abortion rights a cornerstone of his campaign, defeated Marc Molinaro (R) in the state’s 19th Congressional District, a bellwether district that voted for former President Obama in 2012, former President Trump in 2016 and President Biden in 2020.

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

A Little Privacy Please

I don't know how you read some amendments to the US Constitution and not come away with the idea that privacy is at the center of the debate over what rights we do and don't have here in USAmerica Inc.

A1: My private thoughts are my own and the government can go suck eggs.

A3: I get to decide who does and who doesn't stay in my own private housing.

A4: My person and my place and my stuff are private and nobody else's business.

A5: I'll keep my answers to myself so the government can't use my words against me.

A6: Government can't strip me of my privacy without due process.

A10: Information about me belongs to me.


NYT - Opinion by Alex Kingsbury: (pay wall)

We’re About to Find Out What Happens When Privacy Is All but Gone


Whenever I see one of those billboards that read: “Privacy. That’s iPhone,” I’m overcome by the urge to cast my own iPhone into a river. Of lava.

That’s not because the iPhone is any better or worse than other smartphones when it comes to digital privacy. (I’d take an iPhone over an Android phone in a second; I enjoy the illusion of control over my digital life as much as the next person.)

What’s infuriating is the idea that carrying around the most sophisticated tracking and monitoring device ever forged by the hand of man is consistent with any understanding of privacy. It’s not. At least not with any conception of privacy our species had pre-iPhone.

Reconciling the idea of privacy with our digital world demands embracing a profound cognitive dissonance. To exist in 2022 is to be surveilled, tracked, tagged and monitored — most often for profit. Short of going off the grid, there’s no way around it.

Consider just last week: Apple released a surprise software update for its iPhones, iPads and Macs meant to remove vulnerabilities the company says may have been exploited by sophisticated hackers. The week before that, a former Google engineer discovered that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was using a piece of code to track users of the Facebook and Instagram apps across the internet without their knowledge. In Greece, the prime minister and his government have been consumed by a widening scandal in which they are accused of spying on the smartphones of an opposition leader and a journalist.

And this month Amazon announced that it was creating a show called “Ring Nation” — a sort of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” made up of footage recorded by the company’s Ring doorbells. These video doorbells, sold by Amazon and other companies, are now watching millions of American homes, and they are often used by police departments as, effectively, surveillance networks. All in the name of fighting crime, of course.

Step back, and what we’re looking at is a world where privacy simply doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of talking about old notions of privacy, and how to defend or get back to that ideal state, we should start talking about what comes next.

That reality is becoming clearer to Americans after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which eliminated the federal right to abortion. They now understand that their phone location data, internet searches and purchase history are all fair game for the police — especially in states that do not protect abortion rights, and where women can be hunted down for their health care choices. If the courts once defended the right to have an abortion as part of a broader right to privacy, by vaporizing that right, the Roberts court shattered many of Americans’ conceptions of privacy as well.

In 2019, Times Opinion investigated the location tracking industry. Whistleblowers gave us a data set that included millions of pings from individual cellphones around daily commutes, churches and mosques, abortion clinics, the Pentagon, even the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. “If the government ordered Americans to continuously provide such precise, real-time information about themselves, there would be a revolt,” the editorial board wrote.

Yet despite years of talk, Congress is no closer to passing robust privacy legislation than it was two decades ago when the idea first came up. Even their baby steps aren’t encouraging. Two bills in the current session aim to roll back some of this mass monitoring around abortion and reproductive health in particular, although neither one is likely to pass.

One, the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, would prevent law enforcement and government agencies from purchasing location data and other sensitive information from data brokers. Another, the My Body, My Data Act, would forbid tech companies to keep, use or share some personal health information absent written consent. Neither bill would prevent police officers with a court order from getting such information.

Some tech companies, like Google, have announced voluntary measures to protect some user data around reproductive health care. A group of hundreds of Google employees is circulating a petition to strengthen privacy protections for users who look for information about abortion through its search engine.

But even if those bills pass and some tech companies take more steps, there are simply too many tech companies, government entities, data brokers, internet service providers and others tracking everything we do.

Protecting digital privacy is not in the interest of the government, and voters don’t seem to care much about privacy at all. Nor is it in the interest of tech companies, which sell user private data for a profit to advertisers. There are too many cameras, cell towers and inscrutable artificial intelligence engines in operation to live an unobserved life.

For years, privacy advocates, who foresaw the contours of the surveilled world we now live in, warned that privacy was a necessary prerequisite for democracy, human rights and a flourishing of the human spirit. We’re about to find out what happens when that privacy has all but vanished.

Sunday, August 07, 2022

Here It Comes


We've heard warnings from "the lefties" and from women all over the spectrum about the shit we can expect once the pinch-faced blue-nosed puritans get their way. And the shit is not just coming - it's already here - and it's been here for a while.

Women taking it into their own hands could pose a whole set of dangers, but there's some possibility that it just might be the "good news" part of this whole fucked up mess.

NYT: (pay wall)

Some Women ‘Self-Manage’ Abortions as Access Recedes

Information and medications needed to end a pregnancy are increasingly available outside the health care system.


Hannah, a woman in Oklahoma, self-managed her abortion last year, when local clinics were overwhelmed with patients from Texas. 

In states that have banned abortion, some women with unwanted pregnancies are pursuing an unconventional workaround: They are “self-managing” their abortions, seeking out the necessary know-how online and obtaining the medications without the supervision of a clinic or a doctor.

At first glance, the practice may recall the days before Roe v. Wade, when women too often were forced to take risky measures to end an unwanted pregnancy. But the advent of medication abortion — accomplished with drugs, rather than in-office procedures — has transformed reproductive care, posing a significant challenge to anti-abortion legislation.

Even before the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, medication abortions accounted for more than half of abortions in the United States. Federal regulators made access to the pills even easier during the pandemic by dropping the requirement for an in-person visit and allowing the drugs to be mailed to patients after a virtual appointment.

But many states never allowed telehealth abortion, and new laws prohibiting abortion apply to all forms of the procedure, including medications. So women in increasingly restrictive parts of the country are procuring the pills any way they can, often online, despite state prohibitions.

There are no reliable estimates of the number of women who undertake their own medication abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which researches and supports abortion access.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion is now banned in at least 10 states, according to a database maintained by The New York Times. Voters in Kansas on Tuesday rejected a ballot measure that would have removed abortion rights protections from the state constitution.

Limits of one sort or another are nonetheless expected in at least half of U.S. states, and so both sides of the divide are bracing for an increase in self-managed abortions.

Critics of abortion in any form insist that medication abortions are riskier than claimed, and even more so without medical supervision. The procedure should not be undertaken beyond 10 weeks gestation, they note, or performed without a doctor’s visit, because dating a pregnancy accurately is not always possible.

Other medical complications can be missed, they say — including ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus.

Claims that medication abortion is safe “are based on flawed and incomplete data, which prioritize convenience and cost over the health and safety of patients,” said Dr. Christina Francis, chair of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which opposes all abortions except to prevent permanent harm or death to the mother.

Physicians who support abortion tell a different story: There is plentiful evidence that medication abortion is safe, and women already carry out the procedure almost entirely alone at home, even if they do see a doctor to obtain the drugs. Self-management is not so different, supporters argue.

“It’s quite safe and effective based on studies we’ve done, national data provided by the states and the Guttmacher Institute, and the experience of other countries,” said Dr. Beverly Winikoff, the founder of Gynuity Health Projects, who performed much of the research on medication abortion that led to its approval in the United States more than 20 years ago.

The procedure typically involves taking two drugs: mifepristone, which stops the pregnancy by blocking a hormone called progesterone, followed a day or two later by misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract.

More than half a million women had medication abortions in 2020 in the United States, and fewer than half of 1 percent experience serious complications, studies show. Medical interventions like hospitalizations or blood transfusions were needed by fewer than 0.4 percent of patients, according to a 2013 review of dozens of studies involving tens of thousands of patients.

A 2018 review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that abortion medication ended pregnancies 96.7 percent of the time in gestations of up to nine weeks. The World Health Organization endorses self-managed abortion and says it can be used up to 12 weeks gestation.

Bags of medical abortion medication and follow-up instructions for patients were readied at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City in December.Credit...Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Medication abortion “is noninvasive, doesn’t cause sepsis and doesn’t cause ruptures of internal organs,” like the illegal abortions of the pre-Roe era, Dr. Winikoff said.

“It doesn’t mean people can’t have excessive bleeding and need to get care occasionally, but those are not the dire circumstances of people from 50 years ago,” she added.

The drugs are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, however, and are intended to be taken under a doctor’s supervision. The agency discourages internet purchases of mifepristone because patients will be “bypassing important safeguards,” officials said in a statement.

But the F.D.A. does not advise against online purchases of misoprostol (brand name Cytotec), which is used to treat a number of medical conditions. Misoprostol can terminate pregnancies by itself, recent studies have shown.

While no treatment is 100 percent safe, taking the pills “on your own at home does not affect your risk of complications,” said Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, an obstetrician gynecologist and professor at Columbia University and the editor in chief of the journal Contraception.

But self-management also means a woman does not have a familiar health care professional nearby to call in case of an emergency or complications. Dr. Westhoff and other experts fear that women performing their own abortions may be reluctant to seek medical help in states that have criminalized abortion.

Cassie, 20, who uses the pronouns they and them and asked that only a first name be used because they reside in Texas, where most abortions are banned after about six weeks of pregnancy, managed their own abortion in January.

Cassie, who already had a child and was struggling financially, filled out an online request form for abortion pills from Aid Access, which is based in Europe. The drugs took longer to arrive than expected, and when they did, Cassie’s pregnancy was already 12 weeks along.

“I just took them and prayed for the best,” Cassie said. They experienced heavy bleeding, nausea and “the worst cramps I’ve had in my entire life.”

“I was crying, curled up in a ball of pain in the middle of my bed,” they said.

When the bleeding did not subside, Cassie’s partner drove them to the hospital, where the remaining tissue was removed.

“That was its own horrifying experience of praying that they wouldn’t know or suspect I’d caused it myself,” Cassie said.

Both the know-how and the tools to perform an abortion are increasingly easy to access.

Women who live in states where abortion is legal can turn to U.S.-based telehealth providers like Abortion on Demand and Hey Jane, which offer detailed information to women seeking abortions and provide pills by mail after a video visit in states where these services are legal.

MYA Network provides physicians who answer questions about self-managed abortion, and Abortion Pill Info offers tips on keeping online research private.

For women in states with abortion bans, Plan C offers a number of workarounds, including a list of online pharmacies selling abortion drugs that the organization has tested and tutorials on setting up mail forwarding in another state to receive the drugs.

The site also refers people to Aid Access, which screens women online and orders abortion pills from overseas pharmacies that are sent in envelopes without return addresses, even to states where abortion is illegal. The group charges $150 or less, depending on income.

Hannah, a 26-year-old in Oklahoma, said she managed her own abortion with pills from Aid Access late last year, when local clinics, overwhelmed with patients from Texas, could not accommodate her.

Hannah, who asked to not be identified because abortion is now banned in her state, said she suffered from depression at times before she became pregnant, but had plummeted to a new low and was suicidal.

“I couldn’t afford a pregnancy and was not well enough, physically or mentally, to carry a pregnancy,” she said. Her self-managed abortion was “no worse than a normal period for me.”

A medication abortion cannot be distinguished from a miscarriage, and traces of the pills cannot be discovered if they are taken orally, said Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician who founded Aid Access.

If a woman needs care after taking the pills, “we always tell people to say they had a miscarriage,” she said. “It’s exactly the same symptoms, and the treatment is exactly the same.”

A study of thousands of women in the United States who received abortion pills from a provider without an in-person visit during the pandemic found that the practice was safe.

Complications are the rare exception. Another recent study looked at self-managed abortions in Argentina and Nigeria, where abortion is banned except to save the life of the mother (and, in Argentina, in cases of rape).

Twenty percent of the nearly 1,000 women who participated in the study sought care at hospitals after the procedure, but most only wanted to confirm the abortion was complete. About 4 percent reported ongoing pain, fever or bleeding. Seventeen required procedures to complete the abortion, 12 stayed in the hospital overnight, and six needed blood transfusions, according to the study, which was published in The Lancet Global Health in late 2021.

The surprise finding was that while some of the women took the mifepristone-misoprostol combination, the success rate for those taking misoprostol alone — a widely used drug that can be purchased in countries like Mexico without a prescription and is fairly inexpensive — was higher than that of the two-drug combination.

Most state laws that restrict abortion make performing an abortion a crime for doctors, not patients. Only three states — South Carolina, Oklahoma and Nevada — have laws that explicitly make it a crime to end one’s own pregnancy.

Other states, however, have wielded child endangerment statutes or other laws against women suspected of terminating their pregnancies.

In Indiana, Purvi Patel was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2015 for inducing a self-managed abortion; her conviction was overturned in 2016. In Texas, murder charges were brought against Lizelle Herrera earlier this year in relation to a self-managed abortion, but prosecutors said they would not pursue the case.

At least six states have introduced legislation establishing a fetus as a person, which will make it easier to prosecute women who terminate their own pregnancies, said Dana Sussman, the deputy executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Both the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which support abortion as an essential component of health care, oppose criminalizing self-managed abortion, as they say doing so will deter women from seeking medical attention.

At the moment, health care providers are not legally required by any state to report patients they suspect of self-managing an abortion, according to If/When/How, an abortion-rights advocacy group. But laws are in flux.

“We’re operating in an area of complete uncertainty,” Ms. Sussman said.
Abortion Access in the United States
Demand for abortion pills is surging, setting the stage for new legal battles. For now, it is still legal in most states to receive abortion medication by mail and pharmacies risk violating federal civil rights law if they refuse to fill a prescription for abortion pills.

Plan B:
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, many women are stocking up on so-called morning-after pills. Here’s how these differ from abortion pills.

I.V.F.:
Legal experts say the end of Roe could make it easier to place restrictions on genetic testing, storage and disposal of the embryos created outside the womb.

Contraceptive Pills:
The Food and Drug Administration’s first application for a birth control pill that would not require a prescription has taken on new meaning after the Supreme Court decision.

Monday, July 25, 2022

Today's Reddit



Parenthood is not for the faint of heart. If you can't stand up for your kids - for their right to self-determination - for their right to be who they are - then you've failed, both as a parent and as a human being, and you need to step away.

Saturday, July 16, 2022

Abortion Stuff

Why does the shit Republicans are trying to pull remind me so much of the Fugitive Slave shit that the southern states pushed thru in the 1800s?

Every Republican voted against a woman's right to travel freely from state to state.


You are some kinda fucked up, America.

Reuters:

U.S. House passes bill to protect right to travel for abortion

The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed legislation to safeguard the right to travel across state lines to seek an abortion after several states banned the procedure in the wake of last month's Supreme Court ruling.

The Democratic-controlled House voted 223 to 205, largely along party lines, to prevent states that have limited abortion from obstructing women's ability to seek care elsewhere.

The bill faces long odds in the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans blocked similar legislation on Thursday.

Roughly a dozen Republican-led states have moved to ban nearly all abortions since late June, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized abortion rights nationwide since 1973, and more states are expected to do so.

Some Republicans in those states have tried to go further.
Missouri legislators considered a bill that would allow civil lawsuits against anyone who aids a woman in seeking an out-of-state abortion.

The issue received national attention after media reports on a 10-year-old girl who was raped in Ohio and had to travel to Indiana to obtain an abortion.

"Congress has the authority and the responsibility to protect people from these unconstitutional efforts," said Democratic Representative Lizzie Fletcher, the bill's author.

Other efforts to protect abortion rights have repeatedly foundered in the Senate this year, where Democrats need at least 10 Republican votes to advance most legislation.

Still, voting on the bills is one of the few actions congressional Democrats can take to demonstrate they are trying to protect abortion rights ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.

Republican Representative Jodey Arrington said the bill was "wholly inconsistent with our values and founding principles of our nation."

The House will vote next week on a bill to codify the right to access contraception, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a statement on Friday.

And don't give me any crap about how the Democrats have failed to do this or failed to stop that.

Republicans are responsible for the shit Republicans are doing.

People get their houses robbed. It's not the homeowners' fault, and it's not the cops' fault - it's the fucking burglars' fault.

Monday, July 04, 2022

A Rerun

Overheard:

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter when life begins.

It doesn't matter whether a fetus is a human being or not.

That whole line of argumentation is a red herring - a distraction - a subjective and unwinnable argument that could not matter less.

It doesn't matter whether we're talking about a fertilized egg, or a fetus, or a five-year-old, or a Noble Prize winning pediatric oncologist.

NOBODY has the right to use your body against your will - even to save their own life, or someone else's.

That's it. That's the argument.

You cannot be forced to donate blood, or bone marrow, or internal organs, even though thousands of deserving people on the waiting lists die every year.

They're not allowed to harvest your body parts after your death without your explicit, written-signed-and-notarized, pre-mortem permission.

Denying a woman her right to abortion means she has less bodily autonomy than a corpse.