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Let’s rumble.
The Unabashed Feminism Department will probably want this dispatch from our Religious Conservatives Do the Damndest Things department, starting with an 11 year-old denied an abortion despite alleging rape against her uncle because the rape wasn't proven and the law in Romania provides few exceptions or provisions for termination (malformed baby and danger to mother's life) past 14 weeks. In Poland, a similarly religious country, where it is legal for a raped girl to get an abortion, the woman went to a clinic, was instead shown a priest that the gynecologist had called and told they would not perform the abortion, had her second clinic occupied by potentially violent pro-lifers until that clinic refused the procedure, had the state take her into emergency child care after people compained about her mother's role in the matter, accusing the mother of coercing her child to have an abortion, and finally managed to find a clinic and get the abortion done when the state health minister stepped in and found one. For which the minister faces potential excommunication, or perhaps already is, according to the canon law (as the girl would, too). They were potentially racing a clock, too - Polish law has exceptions after 12 weeks for death, deformity, or crime, but from the account of what went on, even if it was legal, there may not have been a way to actually get the procedure done without all of this stuff and more happening. So, for a girl to get a legal abortion after she was raped, she has to go through breaches of confidence, harassment, threats of violence against her and excommunication of those who helped her, child services being called on her mother (who still has to go through proceedings), and the potential violence and shame that anti-choice activists were hounding her with every step of the way. And people in this country want similarly restrictive laws.
Some other Religious Nuttery, not nearly as traumatic, includes a string of events related to Ray Comfort - first up, his attribution of houses on fire through wildfires and lightning strikes in California as the wrath of God lashing out against homosexual marriage, for which he draws a laugh and a dismissal from PZ Meyers, especially on the part about who is living in the imaginary world. The General worries that God may be missing a step or two, in that his smiting isn’t as creative or painful as they used to be, and they aren’t necessarily affecting whole populations all at once.
TPM Muckraker takes a look at Esther Slater McDonald, one of the two names mentioned in the investigation into the Department of Justice's slanted hiring policies, and find her to be actively rejecting candidates based on their political views, essays, and other information she obtained while searching for ideologically pure candidates. Just before she was going to submit to investigation by the Office of the Inspector General, she resigned her position, delaying long enough to try and secure counsel first. Because that’s not suspicious at all. Even better, she, like the person who hired her, Monica Goodling, came from a religious schooling background. For a sample of what life was like for her, take a look at Pensacola Christian College's rule book.
And Ben Shapiro bizarrely blames Jews not believing in a close and personal God and their own status as a favored nation for why bad things happen to them, suggesting that Jews need to think of themselves as the chosen people again and return to their religious roots if they are to become anything other than a doormat in the world, because the international communities are apparently all against them and Israel.
Elsewhere in the world, Russia is making the United States nervous by flying planes unannounced into zones requiring scrambles and identification. And some members of the German ruling coalition are strongly requesting the U.S. remove their atomic weapons in the country and destroy them, after a report came out that decried foreign base security as not up to Pentagon standard. Finally, North Korea is destroying one of their most prominent symbols of nuclear weapons capability on camera, with diplomats in attendance, as a gesture toward Washington and the West that they are serious about their commitment toward not developing more nuclear weapons than they already have.
The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan is on its way to the Philippines to provide humanitarian aid to those affected by the typhoon that struck recently. I think Mr. Olbermann may have mentioned a Presidential gaffe when referring to the people of the islands yesterday, something about remembering the people when sitting down to his table.
In domestic matters, the SCOTUS struck down Washington, D.C.'s ban on firearms, asserting that people do have the right to own guns for self defense and for hunting.
Workers on the Washington, D.C. metro lines were charged with arranging prostitution, apparently even going as far to call customers for their trysts over the public address loudspeakers.
More groups ask the EPA to suspend or drop ethanol requirements, citing the increased price of food and believing that adding more supply into the markets would help drop those prices.
Getting to opinion matters, Thomas Sowell finishes his reasoning why taking after Europe on politics and economics is a bad idea, because of the uniqueness of the American economy, and the many times that Europe has been wrong (or “wrong”) about the past, including Hitler and the Soviet Union. Tony Blankley makes a case that Iraq, even as a potential failure, was worth the effort, even though he doesn’t think of it as a failure. His point rests on the idea that the fact that the United States was willing to go to this kind of war, suffer these casualties, and keep trying indicates our resolve and what kind of resources we will throw at the problem, if it happens again. In addition to that, he points out that terrorists in Iraq are running away and that there’s a good chance many of them will have a hard time recruiting after the perceived spanking the United States gave them.
The Wall Street Journal looks askance at the idea of personal carbon allowances, considering them yet another insidious way for the environmental movement to try and regulate each individual’s life. Selfish reasons notwithstanding, I’m beginning to wonder if the long reach of environmentalism isn’t the beginning of a new type of Gaia-consciousness, trying to think of the planet as a whole, and thus regulate the individual units more like a colony of ants rather than rival packs (although rival colonies will no doubt fight with each other, so that analogy is not quite on top of things).
Getting into candidate matters, Larry Elder pounces on the possibility to attack someone who puts racial solidarity over politics, pointing out all the conservative research that says the conservative candidate is better than the liberal one, pointing out that Southern Democrats were against civil rights and relishing in the unsavory origins of the KKK and Planned Parenthood. All in an attempt to make Senator Obama look like the representative of a party that wants to cause more harm to black people than the party that wants to send them off to war, let corporations run roughshod over them, has no want to improve bad schools, only to let parents send their children elsewhere, if they can afford it, thinks that tight immigration controls will help blacks get those coveted low-skill, low-wage jobs, and thinks that government assistance programs have destroyed the family and marriage. (On that, go see “The Way We Never Were”, sir. Having just finished it, I can tell you that any thought about how welfare destroyed “family values” is a fantasy.)
Our technology bin has better underseas wireless communication, with more bandwidth at shorter ranges and bigger ranges than before, although the data rate suffers with distance. There’s also an attempt at an inspiration machine that captures what's being talked about in a brainstorming session and then crawls the web for images to display to the participants, a Spinner car, of Blade Runner fame, made entirely of Legos, and a gentle conception of what the amount of data Google processes daily would look like if it were tangible. Enough rice grains to drown London in 20 meters of rice. Daily. For those interested, a quick primer on how search engine queries tend to work.
In science, a potential missing link between water-dwellers and land-dwellers. A fish-like creature with flippers that looks to be almost completely evolved and adapted to land. Elsewhere, having a touch of certain evil traits may mean you have a better sex life. Being slightly narcissistic, slightly Machiavellian, and slightly psychopathic apparently means you get all the chicks/dudes.
Last for tonight, just to make some people claw their eyes out and scream “Why, God, Why?!”, Tampon Crafts. Because there’s a lot more you can do with that than meets the eye initially.
And now, the sweet siren song of sleep.
The Unabashed Feminism Department will probably want this dispatch from our Religious Conservatives Do the Damndest Things department, starting with an 11 year-old denied an abortion despite alleging rape against her uncle because the rape wasn't proven and the law in Romania provides few exceptions or provisions for termination (malformed baby and danger to mother's life) past 14 weeks. In Poland, a similarly religious country, where it is legal for a raped girl to get an abortion, the woman went to a clinic, was instead shown a priest that the gynecologist had called and told they would not perform the abortion, had her second clinic occupied by potentially violent pro-lifers until that clinic refused the procedure, had the state take her into emergency child care after people compained about her mother's role in the matter, accusing the mother of coercing her child to have an abortion, and finally managed to find a clinic and get the abortion done when the state health minister stepped in and found one. For which the minister faces potential excommunication, or perhaps already is, according to the canon law (as the girl would, too). They were potentially racing a clock, too - Polish law has exceptions after 12 weeks for death, deformity, or crime, but from the account of what went on, even if it was legal, there may not have been a way to actually get the procedure done without all of this stuff and more happening. So, for a girl to get a legal abortion after she was raped, she has to go through breaches of confidence, harassment, threats of violence against her and excommunication of those who helped her, child services being called on her mother (who still has to go through proceedings), and the potential violence and shame that anti-choice activists were hounding her with every step of the way. And people in this country want similarly restrictive laws.
Some other Religious Nuttery, not nearly as traumatic, includes a string of events related to Ray Comfort - first up, his attribution of houses on fire through wildfires and lightning strikes in California as the wrath of God lashing out against homosexual marriage, for which he draws a laugh and a dismissal from PZ Meyers, especially on the part about who is living in the imaginary world. The General worries that God may be missing a step or two, in that his smiting isn’t as creative or painful as they used to be, and they aren’t necessarily affecting whole populations all at once.
TPM Muckraker takes a look at Esther Slater McDonald, one of the two names mentioned in the investigation into the Department of Justice's slanted hiring policies, and find her to be actively rejecting candidates based on their political views, essays, and other information she obtained while searching for ideologically pure candidates. Just before she was going to submit to investigation by the Office of the Inspector General, she resigned her position, delaying long enough to try and secure counsel first. Because that’s not suspicious at all. Even better, she, like the person who hired her, Monica Goodling, came from a religious schooling background. For a sample of what life was like for her, take a look at Pensacola Christian College's rule book.
And Ben Shapiro bizarrely blames Jews not believing in a close and personal God and their own status as a favored nation for why bad things happen to them, suggesting that Jews need to think of themselves as the chosen people again and return to their religious roots if they are to become anything other than a doormat in the world, because the international communities are apparently all against them and Israel.
Elsewhere in the world, Russia is making the United States nervous by flying planes unannounced into zones requiring scrambles and identification. And some members of the German ruling coalition are strongly requesting the U.S. remove their atomic weapons in the country and destroy them, after a report came out that decried foreign base security as not up to Pentagon standard. Finally, North Korea is destroying one of their most prominent symbols of nuclear weapons capability on camera, with diplomats in attendance, as a gesture toward Washington and the West that they are serious about their commitment toward not developing more nuclear weapons than they already have.
The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan is on its way to the Philippines to provide humanitarian aid to those affected by the typhoon that struck recently. I think Mr. Olbermann may have mentioned a Presidential gaffe when referring to the people of the islands yesterday, something about remembering the people when sitting down to his table.
In domestic matters, the SCOTUS struck down Washington, D.C.'s ban on firearms, asserting that people do have the right to own guns for self defense and for hunting.
Workers on the Washington, D.C. metro lines were charged with arranging prostitution, apparently even going as far to call customers for their trysts over the public address loudspeakers.
More groups ask the EPA to suspend or drop ethanol requirements, citing the increased price of food and believing that adding more supply into the markets would help drop those prices.
Getting to opinion matters, Thomas Sowell finishes his reasoning why taking after Europe on politics and economics is a bad idea, because of the uniqueness of the American economy, and the many times that Europe has been wrong (or “wrong”) about the past, including Hitler and the Soviet Union. Tony Blankley makes a case that Iraq, even as a potential failure, was worth the effort, even though he doesn’t think of it as a failure. His point rests on the idea that the fact that the United States was willing to go to this kind of war, suffer these casualties, and keep trying indicates our resolve and what kind of resources we will throw at the problem, if it happens again. In addition to that, he points out that terrorists in Iraq are running away and that there’s a good chance many of them will have a hard time recruiting after the perceived spanking the United States gave them.
The Wall Street Journal looks askance at the idea of personal carbon allowances, considering them yet another insidious way for the environmental movement to try and regulate each individual’s life. Selfish reasons notwithstanding, I’m beginning to wonder if the long reach of environmentalism isn’t the beginning of a new type of Gaia-consciousness, trying to think of the planet as a whole, and thus regulate the individual units more like a colony of ants rather than rival packs (although rival colonies will no doubt fight with each other, so that analogy is not quite on top of things).
Getting into candidate matters, Larry Elder pounces on the possibility to attack someone who puts racial solidarity over politics, pointing out all the conservative research that says the conservative candidate is better than the liberal one, pointing out that Southern Democrats were against civil rights and relishing in the unsavory origins of the KKK and Planned Parenthood. All in an attempt to make Senator Obama look like the representative of a party that wants to cause more harm to black people than the party that wants to send them off to war, let corporations run roughshod over them, has no want to improve bad schools, only to let parents send their children elsewhere, if they can afford it, thinks that tight immigration controls will help blacks get those coveted low-skill, low-wage jobs, and thinks that government assistance programs have destroyed the family and marriage. (On that, go see “The Way We Never Were”, sir. Having just finished it, I can tell you that any thought about how welfare destroyed “family values” is a fantasy.)
Our technology bin has better underseas wireless communication, with more bandwidth at shorter ranges and bigger ranges than before, although the data rate suffers with distance. There’s also an attempt at an inspiration machine that captures what's being talked about in a brainstorming session and then crawls the web for images to display to the participants, a Spinner car, of Blade Runner fame, made entirely of Legos, and a gentle conception of what the amount of data Google processes daily would look like if it were tangible. Enough rice grains to drown London in 20 meters of rice. Daily. For those interested, a quick primer on how search engine queries tend to work.
In science, a potential missing link between water-dwellers and land-dwellers. A fish-like creature with flippers that looks to be almost completely evolved and adapted to land. Elsewhere, having a touch of certain evil traits may mean you have a better sex life. Being slightly narcissistic, slightly Machiavellian, and slightly psychopathic apparently means you get all the chicks/dudes.
Last for tonight, just to make some people claw their eyes out and scream “Why, God, Why?!”, Tampon Crafts. Because there’s a lot more you can do with that than meets the eye initially.
And now, the sweet siren song of sleep.
