Posted by nell April 28, 2007 in Link Farming
My coblogger, Genni, is crazy talented. She made this bag and a few others.
Photo: gennimcmahon
Stuff I didn’t get to this week because I am all trying to have a work ethic these days:
SEMI-BREAKING
I’m sure someone here will have gotten to the story before this posts, but an Austin parolee has been arrested in the abortion clinic bombing attempt.
THE TILLMANS’ WAR IS OUR WAR, TOO
“It may not be pretty, it may not be like out of a John Wayne movie, but that’s not what war’s all about. It’s ugly. It’s bloody. It’s painful.” Mary Tillman, quoted in an excellent U.S. News and World Report piece about Pentagon-manufactured heroics by Kevin Whitelaw.
“The House Oversight Committee is investigating why Tillman’s family and the public were misled about the circumstances of his death.” Gosh, that hardly took very long at all.
JUST “DUH,” DUDE
Condom Information in Abstinence Programs Called Inaccurate: The ACLU’s gotten involved in this one, so all hands on deck, please brace for conservative teeth-gnashing:
In the ACLU filing, Santelli said the 31 percent figure regarding condoms and HIV was from an outdated 1993 study. More recent studies show that the risk of an HIV-negative person being infected by an HIV-positive partner is reduced by 80 to 87 percent if condoms are used every time they have sex, Santelli wrote.
Authoritative studies also show that the chances of an unintended pregnancy while using a condom are not 1 in 6, Santelli wrote, but about 2 percent over the course of a year if condoms are used correctly every time. And condoms break or slip off less than 4 percent of the time, not 15 percent, Santelli wrote.
Give people the facts, they might fuck more–and they might not even die from it!
EVERYTHING GIVES YOU CANCER
Women Working in Labs More Likely to Get Cancer: They’d better make sure to do extra housework when they get home to prevent it then, huh?
EVERYTHING GIVES YOU CANCER–EXCEPT ABORTION!
Breast Cancer Not Linked to Abortion, Study Says: Please oh please oh PLEASE tell me I am not the only one sitting here still trying to wrap her head around the part where they actually commissioned a study about this. Are we going to commission a study every time some religious fundamentalist makes a batshit faith-based assertion? And what the hell am I even talking about, “going to?”
Anyway, now I’m more psyched than ever about this abortion, I tell you what.
BROADS ABROAD
I do not know enough about French politics to completely understand this article (I am an idiot, remember), but it seems cautiously good. I am also seeing some parallels between the “Sure, you can have free daycare and abortions, but you must adhere to the sexbot mandate,” French, and the “I work very very hard for women’s rights, so why do you care if I’m a sexbot?” position of [whispering] some feminists: Certainly, you can take the view that at least they’ve won all the important freedoms–the daycare, the abortions, and much more, to give the French their due–but only if you don’t think the right to live unencumbered by feminine artifice is important. I do, as it happens. I don’t have children and in fact I can’t have children, so the daycare and the abortions are maybe not so important to me personally, although obviously it’s fine if they are important to you, because I recognize that they’re important to most women.
Now if some could just respect what’s important to me, too, which is, oh, I don’t know, perhaps just tiny little things, like being able to leave the house in comfortable clothes and undone hair without fraternity brothers passing by in a truck leaning out the window to yell “BITCH!” at me, that would be swell.
But that, all that I will save for some other time, some time when I feel like starting a raging blogwar, which time is not now. In fact, please forget I said anything. I fucking love high heels! Bring me my negligee! Damnit, WHERE IS MY LIPSTICK?
Did the United States know about the Japanese comfort women, but choose to turn a blind eye?–Is Day by Day only funny in remixes?
ilyka says:
Actually I think the fundies would prefer for folks to die from fucking; at least when it is not done for makin’ babies. That way thar’d be fewer of them damn sekular humanist types runnin’ around and spoilin’ their fun. [/snark off/]
Nice to see the wheels of justice turning in the Austin incident.
So much for freepers calling it “staged.”
And I bet they’re disappointed that the man arrested looks and sounds very NON-Muslim in countenance and name.
Regarding the women working in labs article:
My O-chem professor always talked about how organic chemist had shorter lifespans than other scientists.
I consider this to be clear proof that organic chemist should get out of the lab and get into the kitchen, were they’re obviously meant to be.
“I’m sure someone here will have gotten to the story before this posts, but an Austin parolee has been arrested in the abortion clinic bombing attempt.”
The problem with long prison sentences is that pro-lifers get to meet one another and form organized gangs. We’ve taken a problem that used to consist of isolated lunatics, and we’ve helped create a vast underground. People should wake up and realize that long prison sentences help turn casual, weekend pro-lifers into careerists who devote their all of their time to pro-life causes.
(I’m only partly kidding.)
Alright, I don’t know if I should have instead e-mailed this to Amanda and Co. instead of putting it in a comment. Regardless, I think the readers here would love to dogpile upon this textbook case of “What About the Poor Widdle White People?”
http://www.joplinglobe.com/editorial/local_story_117204251.html
Notice no mention about the misogyny along with the racism of the Don Imus comment; I’m thankful because surely it would have turned into “What About the Poor Widdle White Men?”
My mom died of breast cancer 17 days ago. She had kids, did housework, but she taught science and math and fervently believed and worked for more girls to choose science and match as academic and career paths. That must have done it.
Re: breast cancer, my understanding is that, if a woman has babies and breast feeds them (especially when young, maybe?) her risk of breast cancer is lower. Women who don’t want babies when young are more likely to have abortions, and thus, slightly more likely to have breast cancer because of the loss of the protective effect from breast feeding.
Note: *NONE* of this is stuff that I have verified; this is a set of vague memories of an explanation from a source that I don’t remember… and since I don’t remember who it was, you shouldn’t trust this as being true, just as an idea you heard from some random weirdo.
But that is my understanding: there was some weak correlation that, of course, got trumpeted by the side of the battle that doesn’t consider truth an ally so much as an inconvenient acquaintance who is always causing trouble.
Well I for one am glad they did that study, because hopefully it might shut a door on the lies they’ve been telling for years, and the crackpot statistically-flawed studies they’ve been using to scare women into their ideology. Maybe not, though, and they’ll continue with their status quo.
While I don’t agree with them, I can at least understand why conservatives take many of the positions they do. I can even understand why they oppose evolution. But I cannot for the life of me understand this War on Condoms.
This is a federally funded program. Your tax dollars are paying for outright lies about serious health issues for teenagers. The next time some conservative accuses liberals of wanting Big Brother, point them to this article. Regulating the sex lives of people is apparently a conservative principle.
“But I cannot for the life of me understand this War on Condoms.”
People who use condoms are less likely to have children. Therefore the Republicans are oppossed to condoms.
“But I cannot for the life of me understand this War on Condoms.”
Actually, I think their argument is that condoms break and therefore they lead to more abortion, as the use of the condom suggests people were having sex when they didn’t want children. They follow that up with the argument that no one should ever have sex unless they want babies. That’s the gist of Eve Tushnet’s take.
“O-chem professor always talked about how organic chemist had shorter lifespans than other scientists.”
It’s true, as a chemE major it was stressful to memorize reactions.
As long as you follow safety guidelines you’ll be fine; one caveat that I know of is that you should avoid pretty much any dangerous vaporous hydrocarbons while pregnant even with safety gear for the kid’s sake.
There is nothing dangerous about doing your share of the groupwork in all the data analysis and writing.
On a lighter note, it’s funny that Derb cites “Every Sperm Is Sacred” as an anti-Catholic sketch. I’ve always found it more crypto-Catholic than anything else. There’s the Protestant husband, pontificating about his Right As A Protestant to wear all kinds of exotic condoms, and there’s his frustrated, longing wife wondering why they never actually have sex; meanwhile, next door, the Catholic world teems with babies and the couple seems to be getting it on every other day. I mean, at least the Catholic couple seems to enjoy messin’ around with one another!
So to my mind, “Every Sperm Is Sacred” is an unintentional verification of the fact that the Catholic “theology of the body” is much more romantic and sexually fulfilling than a contracepted culture. (We should start a campaign to refer to Natural Family Planning as “the H&C method,” for Honeymoon and Courtship, since that’s the real rhythm in the “rhythm method”…)
Like the part where the baby shoots out from under her skirt like a heimlich-propelled martini olive?
Yeeeesh.
You know, I always thought the CofE coda was a slam on stodgy old British people who happen to be married Protestants. But far be it from me to contradict a traditional-conservative read of a work of satire!
Yes, breastfeeding has a protective effect against breast cancer. There’s a looooooong jump from that to any claim that abortion causes breast cancer. 1) It doesn’t. Numerous studies have failed to find a link between abortion and breast cancer. 2) By your logic, abstinence causes breast cancer.
Santelli is being disingenuous. It’s true that condom failure rate is about 2% with perfect use (wrt unwanted pregnancy), but with typical use it’s closer to 15-20%.
Considering that all the physicists I knew that were involved in the Manhatten Project died relatively early of cancer……I’d take my chances with being an organic chemist instead, thank you.
(If you were a theoretical physicist and didn’t insist on mucking around physically with uranium and plutonium, lifespans were pretty good.)
[…] Thanks Pandagon. […]
As a very very Christian type person, I hereby assert that feeding rainne large numbers of cocktails is directly linked to breast cancer.
There’ll be a study to test this hypothesis, right?
…Right?
(Also, ElizabethTX, my flippancy is not meant to offend. And I’m sorry for your loss.)