To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.
— Huff Po (via rachelfershleiser) [Send her an e-mail telling her she’s great.]
(via isabelthespy)
Source: The Huffington Post
Big Fat Whale, “Shitty Cinema Season” (Brian McFadden)
And in the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.
— Wait, what? (via motherjones)
Source: motherjones
Matt Bors, cartoonist (via The Strauss-Kahn ‘Rape’ - Campus Progress)
(via stayfunny)
Source: campusprogress.org
The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness.
The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that everything seems to take on a therapeutic character, even working, even love. All those “how’s it goings?” that we exchange give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other’s temperatures. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter. Where it’s always better than the bitter cold outside. Where everything’s false, since it’s all just a pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since we’re all too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling over.
— The Coming Insurrection, first circle
Source: libcom.org
If algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important.
Eli Pariser
- LQ favorite John Darnielle, of Mountain Goats, covering Joe Hill’s 1913 classic “There is Power in a Union”
Source: laphamsquarterly
“Too many conservatives think global warming can be dismissed as a socialist conspiracy. Too many progressives agree with the 90-year-old ecologist James Lovelock that ‘it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while’ in order to deal with global warming. There is a real danger of our running aground between these two big, ignorant, smug schools of thought—and a real need for those who comprehend the threat to start speaking out more forcefully about it.”
—Timothy Ferriss, The Oxford American (#70)
Really? Because it seems as though liberal democracies, in conjunction with the economies they engender, give people free reign to consume indefinitely.
On the other hand, maybe actions that will make the earth uninhabitable fall under “harm to others,” just the sort that even a classic liberal would intervene to prevent.
The facts are that people will keep fucking things up until it’s too late. It is, by some estimates, too late already. We need to be stopped and we won’t do it ourselves. It’s not smug to say that our current system isn’t adequate. The biggest, most ignorant school of thought is doing very well already.
Source: utne.com
In the next couple of weeks, Congress will vote on cutting funding for family planning. This funding, in place for 40 years, is what lets clinics like Planned Parenthood serve thousands a year on a sliding-scale basis. Come &/or tell NYers you know.
Source: standupforwomen
“On October 21, 1988, in response to antiabortion protests and concerns of majority (54.5%) owner Hoechst AG of Germany, Roussel-Uclaf’s executives and board of directors voted 16 to 4 to stop distribution of mifepristone, which they announced on October 26, 1988. Two days later, the French government ordered Roussel-Uclaf to distribute mifepristone in the interests of public health. French Health Minister Claude Évin explained that: “I could not permit the abortion debate to deprive women of a product that represents medical progress. From the moment Government approval for the drug was granted, RU-486 became the moral property of women, not just the property of a drug company.”
Rare to hear such ethical certainty from health bureaucrats.
Source: Wikipedia
