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Wednesday, April 20, 2011

It's about the having of the sex

By Will Femia
  -  
Fri Apr 15, 2011 7:09 PM EDT

A larger theme in the Republican war on abortion rights didn't occur to me until I read it in a comment by GrrrlRomeo on Wednesday's links post. Since then I've seen it echoed a few more times, including on the show last night in the interview with N.O.W. president Terry O'Neill.
The idea, in short, is that if your goal is to restore old-fashioned gender roles and family structure to the American way of life, taking away a woman's ability to have sex without getting pregnant is a fast way to reach that goal.
Yes, there is a faction of anti-abortion activists that only want to save the fetuses at any and all costs. But the broader mainstream conservative strategy is the same as it ever was. They don't think the government should fund services for people they deem to be leading an immoral lifestyle (people who have sex).
While there have been a lot of mentions of Pap tests, no one is really saying what it's for. It's a cancer screening for a cancer that's caused by HPV, a sexually transmitted infection that affects 50% of men and women at some point in their lives.
For eons now, people have been wondering why the two sides can’t just join hands and agree to work together to reduce the number of abortions by expanding the availability of family-planning services and contraception.
The answer is that a large part of the anti-abortion community is also anti-contraception.
....
Beyond the science, there’s the fact that many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.
....
What we have here is a wide-ranging attack on women’s right to control their reproductive lives...
And here`s the thing -- this hostility to women`s abortion rights doesn`t stop with abortion.  What we`re seeing across the board really is hostility to women`s reproductive health care rights.  We just had a fight in which the extremists in the House of Representatives and in Congress tried to cut off funding, all funding, for family planning clinics that serve more than 5 million women and men every year, right?  These are family planning clinics that don`t provide abortions, that provide contraception, pap tests, mammograms, STD testing and treatment, HIV/AIDS testing.

What`s happening is that as abortion -- as anti-abortion laws gain more and more traction, we`re also seeing attacks on all of the other aspects of women`s reproductive health.  And frankly, defunding the family planning clinics is a public health nightmare in the making.  But we`re seeing these attacks across the reproductive health rights.
I also went back and re-watched Wednesday night's interview with Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and I believe she was also alluding to this larger theme:
But I think what is important, too, Rachel, that folks understand that literally what the House of Representatives and what Speaker Boehner are trying to do is not end abortion services.  They are trying to eliminate birth control and cancer screenings for women. 
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Underwater Microphone Captures Honshu, Japan Earthquake


Audio: Underwater mike in Aleutians recorded Japan earthquake

Published: April 15th, 2011 12:02 PM
Last Modified: April 15th, 2011 12:06 PM
An underwater microphone deployed by marine scientists 900 miles from northern Japan off Alaska's Aleutian Islands captured the sound of the March 11 earthquake roaring through the Earth's crust. At the quake's peak, the noise seems to overwhelm the mike. The recording -- accelerated by a factor of 16 -- was released this week on YouTube by the federal Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. Read more at Our Amazing Planet.



 


Uploaded by  on Apr 12, 2011
Scientists at the NOAA Vents Program at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and Oregon State University heard the March 11, 2011 Honshu, Japan earthquake using a hydrophone located near the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents

Real-time Magnetosphere Simulation 03 30 2011


Uploaded by  on Mar 31, 2011
wow!

Chopin plays the Magnetosphere



Uploaded by  on Apr 6, 2011
Real-time Magnetosphere Simulation from March 29th. through April 4th. 2011
Pollini plays Chopin Nocturne op.9 no.1
The two seemed to fit the mood.

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Premium Support System


By Will Femia
  -  
Sat Apr 16, 2011 12:27 PM EDT

Are Republicans trying to rebrand the privatization of Social Security or sell shapewear?
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America being America

By Will Femia
  -  
Mon Apr 18, 2011 7:59 PM EDT

I've seen the story of Rick Santorum's latest campaign slogan being a line from a Langston Hughes poem a few times on the air today so I imagine it has crossed your radar. What I haven't seen in any of the coverage I've looked at is the poem itself. It seems to be enough that Hughes was gay and black (mixed race) and liberal. But still, it's quite a poem, and I've been looking for a reason to point out that April is National Poetry Month, so
ADDING: Credit to Lawrence, who read almost the whole poem on the air last week.
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!


O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
 

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Turn out the lights. The Tea Party's over


By Laura Conaway
  -  
Tue Apr 19, 2011 9:29 AM EDT
The Tea Party held its annual Tax Day rallies this week, and not that many people showed up. In 2009, the Tea Party turned out tens of thousands. This year, crowds of a few hundred, or afew dozen, or even just a dozen. "Judging by their public events -- which is what we used to judge them by when we said they were strong -- the Tea Party seems to have peaked," Rachel said on the show. "It seems to be over. Someone please tell the Beltway press."
If you want to see a political movement on the wax as opposed to the Wane, check out thedrive to recall Wisconsin Republican state senators. @Triumph68 forwards the pic below of petition signatures to recall State Senator Luther Olsen being delivered yesterday. Organizers says they're delivering the signatures required to recall State Senator Sheila Harsdorf today. They join State Senators Randy Hopper and Dan Kapanke on the recall list -- meaning recall proponents will soon have four of the eight contests they seek.
@MSpicuzzaWSJ
Delivering signatures to recall Wisconsin State Senator Luther Olsen.

By Will Femia
  -  
Tue Apr 19, 2011 2:14 AM EDT

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Symmetry

By Will Femia
  -  
Tue Apr 19, 2011 2:35 PM EDT




More (via) http://everynone.com/


http://www.radiolab.org/
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Robotics? Really

It is essential that, before unmanned systems become ubiquitous (if it is not already too late) that we consider this issue and ensure that, by removing some of the horror, ... that we do not risk losing our controlling humanity and make war more likely.

By Will Femia
  -  
Tue Apr 19, 2011 9:01 PM EDT
When your step 1 is to toss out Asimov's First Law of Robotics, where do you go from there?
Sunday's Guardian website pointed out a new report from the UK's Ministry of Defence(pdf), outlining important considerations that are not being properly undertaken in the rush to robotize war and weaponry. The report details the current state of technology and some legal issues that come along with remotely flying a piece of equipment over people and property. Most compelling, however, is the section on moral and ethical issues that begins on page 5-8.
In addition to the quote above and the associated issue that if you're not risking anyone, you don't have to convince anyone of the righteousness of the mission, there's an interesting set of questions about how to identify combatants and the battlefield when the weapons are operated remotely:
The concept of fighting from barracks as it has been termed raises a number of interesting areas for debate. Is the Reaper operator walking the streets of his home town after a shift a legitimate target as a combatant? Would an attack by a Taliban sympathiser be an act of war under international law or murder under the statutes of the home state? Does a person who has the right to kill as a combatant while in the control cabin cease to be a combatant that evening on his way home? More broadly, do we fully understand the psychological effects on remote operators of conducting war at a distance?
And perhaps most disturbing is the subject of war robot autonomy:
There is also an increasing body of discussion that suggests that the increasing speed, confusion and information overload of modern war may make human response inadequate and that the environment will be 'too complex for a human to direct' and this has already been exemplified by the adoption (described above in the legal section) of autonomous weapon systems such as C-RAM. The role of the human in the loop has, before now, been a legal requirement which we now see being eroded, what is the role of the human from a moral and ethical standpoint in automatic systems?
The italics are original to the report, but the idea that humans can make wars that are too complicated to be humanly manageable caused my brain to impose its bold and underscore.
Wired's Danger Room reminds us that 1 in 50 troops in Afghanistan is a robot (which sounds sexier than it is, but still).
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