ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and LAUREN GARDNER, Staff Writers - Politico
Stephan:
Here is some good news from Biden and his FDA about women being able to control their own bodies. It is still not optimal, but the new regulations are better. I predict at both the federal and state level in 2023 Republicans will attempt to block this. The anti-choice/male dominance community has not given up.
Let me also say something about my views on abortion. I am a scientist, and what I care about is objectively verifiable data. The evidence is overwhelming that there is continuity of consciousness. That is: consciousness is causal and fundamental. Spacetime arises from consciousness not consciousness from spacetime. There is an eternal self in the nonlocal nonphysiological consciousness domain, what religion calls the soul. Episodically this eternal self chooses to manifest an incarnate personality. We choose our race, our culture, or parents our socio-economic level. This is the realm of the will. An abortion is essentially a woman saying I am not prepared or feel I am unable to take on your incarnation. It does not kill the eternal self seeking to manifest the physical incarnation of a personality and its physicality.
Abortion simply denies passage into the physical through that woman. That eternal self must go to other women, other passages. The entire anti-abortion worldview is based on materialism, and that is not supported by the facts. It is also brutally manipulative.
The policy, once implemented, will allow chain and independent pharmacies to stock and dispense mifepristone to pregnant people with a prescription. | Credit: Allen G. Breed/AP Photo
The FDA on Tuesday updated a rule allowing brick-and-mortar pharmacies to dispense the abortion pill mifepristone — expanding access to the drug amid a wave of state efforts last year to impose restrictions.
Pharmacies in more than a dozen states that have near-total abortion bans would not be able to participate and those in states without bans would have to go through a certification process to qualify.
The Biden administration took a major step to open up access in 2021, making permanent pandemic-era rules allowing people to access the pill within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy via telemedicine and mail delivery. But the FDA’s proposed rule opens new legal and regulatory fronts in the ongoing battle over abortion following the fall of Roe v. Wade, and is likely to draw lawsuits from anti-abortion groups and state officials.
What’s in the rule:The policy, once implemented, will allow chain and independent pharmacies […]
Stephan: This is good news about U.S. employment and its trend under the Biden administration. I have deliberately chosen the report on employment of a Rightwing website that would not be disposed to report something favorable about Biden and his administration, yet they had to.
Credit: Leonardo Munoz / VIEWpress
Reversing recent declines, the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work increased slightly to 62.3 percent in December, up one-tenth of a point from November, and four basis points higher than the 61.9 percent in December 2021.
In its final report for 2022, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics counted a record 159,244,000 employed Americans in December, an increase of 717,000 from last month’s 158,527,000 (revised number); and the number of Americans counted as not in the labor force dropped below the hundred million level to 99,879,000.
People who are not in the labor force have no job and are not looking for one. This group includes retirees, students, caregivers, and others who have dropped out of the labor force at a time when jobs go begging.
Despite higher interest rates, the economy added a strong 230,000 jobs in December, above expectations of 200,000. Notable job gains occurred in leisure and hospitality, health care, construction, and social assistance.
Along with the record number of employed Americans, the number of unemployed — no job […]
Derek Lynch, Professor of Agronomy and Agroecology, Dalhousie -
Stephan: Industrial chemical mono-cultural agriculture is killing the soil where food plants are grown and that is causing a food crisis, so I see this as some good news for Canadians and Canadian agriculture.
A productive but moderate range of farming intensity is ideal for preserving the soil, its carbon content and biodiversity. Credit: Unsplash / Red Zeppelin
We have little chance of tackling climate change and reducing biodiversity loss without a redesign of the world’s largest industry: agriculture and food.
With crops grown in farm fields, more intensive management means a reduction in the diversity of crops grown, combined with increased application of nutrients and use of mechanical soil tillage on the farm.
Common cash crops, such as soybean, leave very little residue (which is mostly carbon) to add to the soil to help reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. This intensification has led to a continuing decline in the amount of carbon in soil.
Based on the facts, the United States has the most violent incompetent law enforcement of any developed democracy. In the past five years alone the police have murdered at least 5,710 men, women, and children. American police kill more people in a single year than all the European countries combined. I want to be clear here. There are police who are genuine heroes, who do everything you could reasonably ask of a policeman or sheriff. But there is another cohort who are little more than thugs and bullies. Interacting with the police in the United States, particularly if you are a person of color, can be very dangerous.
It is my view that this very serious problem arises because the police in the United States are the least educated, most ineptly selected, and poorest trained of the world's developed democracies. Again, let's just stick with facts. In Norway a man or woman seeking to be a member of the police trains for three years. Between 2002-2016 the police killed 4 people in total. In Finland, you train for three years, and a total of 7 people were killed by police between 2000-2018. In Germany, a person trains for two years and from 1990 to the present 267 people were killed by police. In stark contrast in the United States, all you need is a high school degree, and you only train for 21 weeks. Do you notice some recurring correlations?
US law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence since experts first started tracking the killings, a new data analysis reveals.
Police across the country killed an average of more than three people a day, or nearly 100 people every month last year according to Mapping Police Violence. The non-profit research group maintains a database of reported deaths at the hands of law enforcement, including people fatally shot, beaten, restrained and Tasered.
The preliminary 2022 total – a possible undercount as more cases are catalogued – marks 31 additional fatalities than the year before. In 2021, police killed 1,145 people; 1,152 in 2020; 1,097 in 2019; 1,140 in 2018; and 1,089 in 2017. The earliest data goes back to 2013, when advocates began counting these fatal incidents. A database run by the Washington Post, which tracks fatal shootings by police, also shows 2022 as a year with record killings.
The data release comes two years after the murder of George Floyd sparked national uprisings calling for racial justice, police […]
Stephan: Part of the problem with having such poorly educated and poorly trained police and sheriffs is that they are easily influenced by popular attitudes and junk science, and this incompetence negatively affects the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. Again, let's stick with facts, and here is an example of what I mean.
Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. “I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like,” he once said.
Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.
So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.
Prosecutors know it’s junk science too. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win […]
