Wednesday, July 17th, 2013
DARSHAK SANGHAVI, - Slate
Stephan: Over the past several weeks, as I have published story after story of the Theocratic Right's suppression of the rights of women, a number of women who are SR readers have written to tell me why it is important to understand that the tiny number of abortions that occur after 20 weeks are medically necessary, and why restricting access, as has now happened in a number of Red Value states, constitutes dreadful law.
As one of these women wrote me, 'No woman has an abortion after 20 weeks for casual reasons. You are well and truly pregnant, and your body shows it. It is a heart-wrenching painfully difficult decision. In my case, at 20 weeks we learned our little girl could not survive birth except as a permanent patient, possibly even unable to speak, requiring constant medical care, and that my own life was at risk if I continued the pregnancy. As painful as it was my husband and I have never regretted our choice, and we have had two healthy children since that fateful day.'
I was so moved by these emails, that I have been looking for a story that explains the issue well. This is the best I have found.
The Texas House of Representatives this week passed HB2, a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of gestation. Many opponents of abortion may hope this means that all late mid-term fetuses in Texas would soon be carried to term and live healthy lives instead of being terminated. But lost was any discussion of why women might seek a late mid-term abortion in the first place-and the unintended, counterintuitive effects of a ban on such procedures, which might even increase the total number of abortions.
Abortions today are common. At current rates, it is estimated that roughly 1 in 3 women will have one by the time they reach 45 years of age-including in places like Texas. One important reason is that half of all pregnancies are unintended. The cause isn’t just unprotected sex; as I wrote last year in Slate, many forms of birth control are much less reliable than many women realize. For example, 5 percent of women on the pill still get pregnant each year.
Of the roughly 7 million American pregnancies each year, about 1 million end in abortion. However, almost all of the procedures are performed early in pregnancy. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only about 1 […]
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Wednesday, July 17th, 2013
DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I have written extensively about the constant fear mongering used by the Rightist media to keep their readers and viewers in a constant state of alarm, and therefore easily manipulated. This is a trend with very negative consequences. The Tea baggers are its creatures, and study after study has shown that people that watch Fox News are both the most misinformed, and the most fearful segment of the population. I thought I had seen everything Fox was capable of but, then, I read this story.
Fox News on Tuesday advised viewers to revert to vehicles from the 1960s or even a ‘horse and buggy
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Wednesday, July 17th, 2013
APRIL M. SHORT, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Since the November elections when Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana not just for medical, but for recreational purposes the Federal government has bizarrely increased its harassment of medical marijuana stores. This has engendered, and I have been tracking, the growing pushback trend that has arisen as a result of this Federal bullying. Here is a good account of what I mean.
Anyone who looks are this issue, as long as their personal rice bowl is not tied to prohibition, very quickly understands that well-regulated, taxed, legal marijuana sales produce a wide range of positive outcomes.
Mexico’s former president, Vicente Fox, met with Steve DeAngelo, the Oakland-based executive director of California’s largest marijuana dispensary, and former Microsoft executive Jamen Shively on July 8. After the meeting, Fox told reporters [3] that legalization is the only way to end the violence of Mexican drug cartels, which he said was a result of the U.S. government’s war on drugs.
As a result of illegal drug cartels, 40 people a day die on average in Mexico, and almost 90,000 people have died since 2006. That is almost twice the number [4] of U.S. soldiers killed in the Vietnam War (58,220 casualties). Mexico’s cartels are deriving 40 to 70 percent of their revenue from cannabis, DeAngelo told AlterNet.
‘Fox and other people legitimately concerned about public safety have no real ax to grind as far as cannabis goes. They’ve recognized the cost of prohibition is way too high to tolerate any longer,
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BILLY PARISH, - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Here is some hard truth. But it is problematic whether we can overcome the drag of carbon energy interests and their control of the government.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — The clean energy industry is as American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. It invented the solar cell. It designed and perfected the electric wind turbine. The sector has largely defied the economic recession, with worldwide investments soaring 600 percent between 2004 and 2011. The result? Texas now has more solar workers than ranchers. California now has more solar workers than actors. And the United States now has more solar workers than coal miners or steel workers. But we’re losing our edge.
Last year, for the first time, China surpassed the US in terms of total dollar investments in clean energy. America now ranks an unimpressive 10 on a list of countries ranked by clean energy capacity installed since 2006. It doesn’t even make the top 10 lists for clean energy investment growth in the past five years.
This US drop matters because clean energy adds an outsized spark to the economy. The solar energy sector added jobs at nearly six times the rate of the rest of the economy in 2011-2012. The US added more green jobs during the recent economic recovery than jobs in any other sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
OPINION: 8 steps […]
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Stephan: Here is an excellent essay that addresses an issue that has come to concern me more and more: the apathy of Americans, our passive acceptance of what is happening to our country.
This is the big question, right? It’s what people are wondering everywhere.
The answer is simple and plausible – but the explanation is a bit more complicated. The majority of Americans are suffering terribly from the current economic crisis, but they do not yet have a political self-identity that will allow for a successful fightback. They don’t know who they are or what they’re fighting for. Neither do they understand whom or what they are fighting against.
‘If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles . . . if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.’ These are the words of SÅ«n ZÇ, a 6th century BCE Chinese general, military strategist, and author of The Art of War, an immensely influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy.
All fighting is the same. Self-knowledge and knowledge of the enemy confer on the fighter the outlines of a winning strategy, based on the best utilization of available weapons of offense and defense.
The majority of Americans, unknowingly, are members of the working class, AKA the proletariat, and will be fighting for the kind of socialism in which sharing, […]
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