Stephan: This I think is where the anti-choice movement is going. They know that about 40% of abortions are now done by medications, requiring no visit to a physician or a clinic. That is driving the anti-choice people crazy. That is why Texas wrote the law with a bounty hunter component. These people are determined to put women in a subordinate position, in which men control what a woman can do with her body. So in Red states, after Roe is overturned you are going to see all kinds of laws designed to stop women from leaving their Red state to go to a Blue state where they can terminate a pregnancy. Or making it illegal for a woman to order a medication and have it delivered to her home. That will only be possible with what is being called "uterus surveillance," and that will mean more laws forcing women into a second class status. And I predict millions of women in Red states will vote for submission.
Protesters at the Defend Roe v Wade Emergency March in San Francisco, US, last month. Credit: Michael Ho Wai Lee / Sopa Images /Rex / Shutterstock
If you are looking for a cheerful column that will make you giggle and distract you from everything that is wrong with the world, click away now. This week I have nothing but doom, gloom and data trackers for you. If you are hoping to sink into a well of existential despair, maybe let out a few screams into the void, then you’ve come to the right place.
Here goes: the US supreme court, as you are no doubt aware, is expected to overturn Roe v Wade and the federal right to an abortion very soon. At least 13 Republican-led states have “trigger laws” in place, which means that the moment Roe is overruled, abortion will be fully or partly banned. Other states will follow suit. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organisation, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion when Roe falls.
Perhaps you are the glass half-full sort. Perhaps […]
Elizabeth Kolbert, Environmental Writer - The New Yorker
Stephan: Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the most sensible environmental writers, and I read this with interest, and present it here.
If consciousness is fundamental and causal, as Einstein and Planck asserted, and experimental data affirms, then we live in a matrix of consciousness, in which the human perception, is but one of millions. All life is interconnected and interdependent. Kolbert's essay about the researchers exploring this matrix makes this point.
One evening almost sixty years ago, a Tufts University researcher named Roger Payne was working in his lab when he heard a radio report about a whale that had washed up on a beach nearby. Although it was a cold, wet March night, he decided to drive to the shore. When he arrived, he discovered that the animal had been mutilated. Two passersby had carved their initials in its flanks. Someone had hacked off its flukes, and another person, or perhaps the same one, had stuck a cigar butt in its blowhole. Payne stood in the rain for a long time, gazing at the corpse. He had been studying moths; now he decided to switch his attention to cetaceans.
Aside from the dead one, Payne had never actually seen a whale, nor did he know where whales could be observed. At the suggestion of an acquaintance, he made his way to Bermuda. There he met an engineer who had worked for the United States Navy, monitoring Soviet submarines via microphones installed off the coast. While listening […]
Stephan: For the gun obsessives -- 44 percent of Republicans -- the answer to the massacres is not fewer but more guns. They actually fantasize a world in which everyone in America carries weapons as a matter of course. As for the murders, well, that's what freedom is like, get used to it. And these people are all going to vote in November, and they are all going to vote for Republicans. People like Boebert, Green, and Gaetz are in office only because the gun obsessives voted for them.
Wooden crosses with the names of the victims left by citizens at a memorial dedicated to the Valde, Tx massacre. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty
Nearly half of Republicans think that mass shootings are “unfortunately something we have to accept as part of free society,” according to a new CBS News poll conducted by YouGov.
That fatalistic sentiment from 44 percent of Republicans—and the view that changes to gun laws threaten overall freedom—show why it’s so hard to pass significant new gun laws through Congress in spite of overwhelming public support for many measures.
But nearly three-quarters of Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans, say that mass shootings are “something we can prevent and stop if we really tried,” a sign that there’s broad-based appetite for gun law reform.
The poll shows that large majorities of Americans support legislation to address gun violence.
More than four-fifths of Americans want to require background checks on all potential gun buyers. Almost three-quarters support passage of a federal “red flag” law that would allow law courts to order the temporary removal […]
Stephan: Amy Coney Barrett, like Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh should never have been approved to sit on the court by the Senate. None of them are legal scholars, they are ideologues who make partisan judgments. And none of this is subtle. Thomas is married to a christofascist activist who was involved with an attempted coup. Barrett was known to have been raised in and to be a member of a "submissive woman" christofascist cult. The Republicans didn't care. What mattered is that she would render predictable christofascist judgments.
Here is the information you need to know.
Associate Supreme Court and christofascist Amy Coney Barrett
The founder of a Christian sect to which Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett belongs was described in court documents as exerting total control over the group’s women and girls.
A sworn affidavit filed by a former member in the 1990s described a sexualized atmosphere in the home of People of Praise founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife Dorothy Ranaghan — where Barrett stayed while attending law school at Notre Dame — and alleges instances of abuse and inappropriate sexual behavior, reported The Guardian.
“When I was part of the People of Praise I was in full life submission to Kevin Ranaghan, under full obedience to him and he exercised this authority over most areas of my life,” wrote former member Colette Humphrey, who supported the claims in the affidavit. “For example, we were ‘in common’ financially, which meant that I had to hand over my paycheck to Kevin Ranaghan and he would decide on how that paycheck would be used. Kevin Ranaghan controlled […]
Stephan: The GOP climate proposal is a measure of the corruption of that party. The Republican Congress members either do not understand or do not care about climate change and what it is doing to the earth. What they care about is the money they get from the carbon industry corporations that pays to keep them in power. Your wellbeing, the wellbeing of your children and their children is of little or no consequence to these members.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Credit: Win McNamee / Getty
In an apparent bid to win over midterm voters, House Republicans announced a climate and energy plan on Thursday that would accelerate expansion of the fossil fuel industry and other sources of pollution — and sets no reduction goals for climate-warming emissions.
Republicans say their strategy would harness the power of “entrepreneurship” to promote cleaner energy and reduce emissions. Lawmakers leading the effort have enjoyed lavish campaign contributions from the oil and gas sector.
The plan, first outlined in a brief press release Thursday morning, appears to contain few new policy ideas. What it does contain are clear giveaways to the fossil fuel lobby, according to environmental groups. Republicans would provide tax credits or incentives to controversial (and struggling) “carbon capture” projects as well as to nuclear power, while weakening environmental rules to speed up permitting for oil drilling, pipelines, natural gas export terminals, and other large infrastructure.
Republicans say their plan would also benefit the renewable energy sector, but House Democrats quickly panned the […]
