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A member of a girl band in Indian-administered Kashmir queries why they are described as "un-Islamic" when male bands are allowed to perform

This is the easiest way to make me leave your website and not give you or your advertisers a single additional pageview.

Abandoned cooling tower.
By thebrokenview 

thepeoplesrecord:

The new Jane Crow: How hundreds of pregnant women have had their rights violated & health put in jeopardy as part of the war on choice
February 4, 2013

Regina McKnight was 21 years old when she was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for homicide by child abuse—after she suffered a stillbirth eight-and-a-half months into her pregnancy.

The jury deliberated only 15 minutes before finding McKnight guilty of having committed “child abuse”—because of using cocaine during her pregnancy. She went to jail, and one appeals court after another upheld the conviction—until it was finally overturned eight years later on the grounds that the scientific evidence used to claim McKnight’s drug use was responsible for the stillbirth was “outdated” at the time of her trial.

Laura Pemberton was arrested while she was in active labor—for attempting to give birth at home, rather than undergo a C-section advised by her doctor. A sheriff strapped her legs together and took her to the hospital, where, at an emergency hearing, lawyers argued on behalf of her fetus. Pemberton and her husband were denied counsel during this hearing, though they were “allowed to express their views” as hospital staff prepared Pemberton for surgery.

These stories aren’t scenes out of some horror movie about a nightmarish future society. They are real-life accounts from the war on women and their rights that has been underway since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973.

In a new report titled “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973–2005,” the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) summarizes the experiences of 413 women who have been subjected to cruel punishments or unwanted medical procedures while they were pregnant.

No state or federal law permits the arrest or detention of women specifically due to pregnancy. Yet hundreds of pregnant women—predominantly low-income women and women of color—have had their rights taken away and their health put in jeopardy because police, prosecutors, judges and even medical personnel have claimed the authority to determine what will happen to their bodies. Lynn Paltrow, one of the authors of the NAPW study, calls this phenomenon “a new Jane Crow”—in reference to author Michelle Alexander’s best-selling examination of the mass incarceration system.

The crusade against women’s reproductive rights has been led by politicians and organizations which claim to cherish the “right to life” and champion women’s role as mothers. But the reality made painfully clear by the NAPW’s report is that the anti-choice right wants women to be treated as second-class citizens, denied the right to health care, personal liberty and the right to control their own bodies and lives.

Report authors Lynn Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin say their study understates the number of incidents of incarceration or forced medical intervention against pregnant women in the decades following Roe.

No one has attempted to compile these stories before, and records of the cases are either scattered among different sources or nonexistent altogether. Often, say Paltrow and Flavin, hospital staff impose unwanted procedures without the involvement of state authorities. Plus, the decisions of family and juvenile courts are kept confidential. So the number of victims is likely to be many times greater than the 413 cases verified by the NAPW in its rigorous study.

Nonetheless, the patterns of punishment described in the report paint a frightening picture of the consequences of the right’s campaign against reproductive freedom.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

What “crimes” were committed by the pregnant women whose stories are told in the NAPW report?

In the cases the report documents, women were most often targeted not for attempting to end a pregnancy, but for attempting to carry one to term. The main reason for arrest and detention was drug use during pregnancy, but in other cases, women were punished because they suffered from sexually transmitted diseases or mental illness while pregnant. Others wanted to deliver at home, refused C-sections or failed to access prenatal care.

In several cases, women were charged with one or more felonies after they suffered a miscarriage or attempted to end a pregnancy on their own. And in one case, state prosecutors used the fact that a woman had refused an offer of sterilization in support of its charges. This case, in particular, strikes an old and deep wound, following decades of forced sterilizations of Black, Latina, Native American and immigrant women.

In all, just over half of the women whose stories are collected in the report are Black. Nearly three quarters of those facing legal charges were represented by indigent defense.

African American women have suffered a long legacy of barbaric discrimination—from the separation of families under slavery to the early 20th century eugenics movement that pushed through laws in 32 states allowing the sterilization of women judged “unfit to breed.”

Today, poor Black single mothers are scapegoated for all manner of social problems. In particular, the war on drugs has served as a vehicle for the attack, with drug convictions serving as the excuse for terminating parental rights of incarcerated mothers.

Meanwhile, the media have whipped up a moral panic over drug use during pregnancy. Thus, cocaine was the drug most often associated with the criminal charges against pregnant women documented in the NAPW report. But health professionals now recognize that cocaine use during pregnancy poses no more significant risk to fetal health than poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care or other factors commonly suffered by the poor.

In fact, in most of the cases documented in the report, authorities didn’t claim that fetuses had been harmed, only that there was a risk of harm. And even when actual harm was alleged, in most cases, there was no scientific evidence or expert testimony to substantiate the claim.

For example, Geralynn Susan Grubbs, a 23-year-old woman in Alaska, was threatened with 30 years imprisonment and therefore pled guilty to a lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide in connection with the death of her two-week-old infant. Prosecutors claimed that drug use during pregnancy had caused the infant’s death—this allegation was allowed to stand even after an autopsy revealed that there was no connection between the death of the child and fetal drug exposure.

Such punishment flies in the face of the recommendations of the medical community. Organizations like the American Medical Association have concluded that criminalizing drug use by pregnant women only discourages women from seeking prenatal care and assistance with their addiction.

Nonetheless, Paltrow and Flavin document how threats of arrest or loss of custody lead some pregnant women with drug problems to avoid medical attention, prenatal care and hospital deliveries altogether. In one particularly absurd case, 34-year-old Alma Baker was prosecuted for dealing drugs to a minor—after she gave birth to twins who tested positive for THC, a chemical found in marijuana. Baker stated that if she realized the risk of criminal charges, she would not have gone to her doctor at all.

Alma Baker is white, which makes her case highly unusual among those documented in the NAPW report. Women of all races use drugs at rates roughly equivalent to their numbers in the overall population—yet overwhelmingly those questioned, screened and punished for drug use related to pregnancy were African American.

Full article

joehillsthrills:

thehappysorceress:

scratch-the-maven:

innervenom:

sassclops:

kevstown:

Artist Appreciation: Phil Noto’s Hank Pym’s Photo Archive. 

This is one of my favorite projects by an artist. Not only is each of his works beautifully detailed, but Noto also seems to turn these fictional superheroes into real life people. I love the use of actual dates in order to show us a glimpse into the real lives of these characters. I feel like I would see this “photographs” in old issues of TIME Magazine or something. Fantastic.

Previous Phil Noto posts: Havok and Polaris, Betsy Braddock (1983), and Winter Storm (1978).

I love this so much

He’s so great at making them real. 

Oh wow, these are so lovely.

I want a coffee table book of this.

Lovely. I agree: would love to have a whole book of these on my coffee table. No story necessary. Paging Marvel - can’t you guys plleeeeeezze make this happen?

I was not prepared for how this would make me feel: it’s not just incredibly cool, it’s surprisingly emotional.

bastardkrusher:

Pushead

binaryhearts:

this is beyond well done

Vancouver's light rail foes are threatening to bring a costly lawsuit against Vancouver if the city doesn't have a change of heart about a rejected ballot petition on Monday night.

An anonymous reader writes in with news of the continuing saga of Java patches and exploits. "If you're a Mac user who suddenly can't access websites or run applications that rely on Java, you're not alone. For the second time in a month, Apple has silently blocked the latest version of Java 7 from running on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or higher via its XProtect anti-malware tool. Apple hasn't issued any official statements advising users of the change or its reasons, but it's a safe bet that the company has deemed Oracle's most recent update to Java insecure. That's why the company stealthily disabled Java on Macs back on Jan. 10, the same day a Java vulnerability was being exploited in the wild."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newspaper clipping:

HER GRACE, THE DUCHESS OF LEINSTER
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN GREAT BRITAIN WHO DIED TUESDAY

Found in "The Life of Cicero" by Conyers Middleton. Published by Wells and Lilly, 1818.

-Click to enlarge photos-

AFTER YOU BECOME A LEVEL EIGHT RAW VEGAN YOU CAN ASK THE ELDERS FOR ACCESS TO THE ORIGINAL WHOLE FOODS. ONCE INSIDE YOU CAN ALIGN THE RUNESTONES AND SCALLIONS TO SUMMON THE TRANSFORMING SPIRITS OF ANCIENT LOCAVORES.

IT’S ALL PRETTY ADVANCED STUFF. YOU ARE QUITE NEW TO OUR WAYS. FOR NOW YOU SHOULD PROBABLY JUST CONCENTRATE ON BUYING FAIR-TRADE AND REDUCING YOUR GLUTEN INTAKE.

An expanded version of this post is cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Six years ago, I wrote that the Pittsburgh Steelers had become “America’s Team,” a title once claimed, perhaps legitimately, by the Dallas Cowboys.

Now Ben Blatt at The Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective concludes that it’s still the Cowboys:

…based on their huge fan base and ability to remain the most popular team coast-to-coast, I think the Dallas Cowboys have earned the right to use the nickname  ‘America’s Team’.

To get data, Blatt posed as an advertiser and euchred Facebook into giving him some data from 155 million Facebook users, about half of the US population.  Blatt counted the “likes” for each NFL team:

It’s Superbowls X, XIII, and XXX all over again – Steelers vs. Cowboys.  And the Cowboys have a slight edge.  But does that make them “America’s Team”? It should be easy to get more likes when you play to a metro area like Dallas that has twice as many people as Pittsburgh.  If the question is about “America’s Team,” we’re not interested in local support.  Just the opposite: if you want to know who America’s team is, you should find out how many fans it has outside its local area.

Unfortunately, Blatt doesn’t provide that information. So for a rough estimate, I took the number of Facebook likes and subtracted the metro area population.  Most teams came out on the negative side. The Patriots, for example, had 2.5 million likes. but they are in a media market of over 4 million people.  The Cowboys too wound up in the red  3.7 million likes in a metro area of 5.4 million people.

Likes outnumbered population for only five teams.  The clear winner was the Steelers.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

What fans are looking for from the Blazers is a clear sign that this team truly is ready to stop simply talking about being a playoff team -- and start consistently performing like one.

Harmony Korine, Nashville native and writer/director of the white trash cult-classic film Gummo, penned a sort-of novel back in 1998 entitled A Crack-Up at the Race Riots. He originally plugged the book to David Letterman, who had taken an interest in Korine as a regular goofy guest since his first visit promoting Kids, and described the book as… “It’s about a race war and it happens in Florida. And the Jewish people sit in trees. And the black people are run by M.C. Hammer. And the whites are run by Vanilla Ice. I wanted to write the Great American Choose Your Own Adventure novel.”

Although you can still get the book on Amazon, Drag City is reissuing it for those of us unwilling to pay $70+ for a book, and on April 16, you can own the second edition of this bizarre compilation of print, photographs, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, poetry, and clip art for a reasonable price.

The book’s release will closely coincide with the theatrical release of Korine’s latest exploitation of sub-culture, Spring Breakers, a film which, due to its star-studded cast and viral marketing, may accidentally earn money at the box-office from ticket buyers who misunderstand the stylish irony and instead watch for the bikinis and beach MTV atmosphere.

• Harmony Korine: http://www.harmony-korine.com
• Drag City: http://www.dragcity.com

When the Raspberry Pi project was unveiled more than a year ago, two models were promised: one costing $25 and a more powerful one for $35. Ultimately, only the $35 device went on sale, to extreme popularity, with possibly a million sold.

But for those of you who felt $35 was just too expensive for a computer, that $25 "Model A" is finally available. It's now on sale in Europe, and the company will "lift this restriction very soon so the rest of the world can order too," Raspberry Pi spokeswoman Liz Upton wrote today.

Model A has one USB port instead of two. It also lacks an Ethernet port and comes with 256MB RAM, as opposed to the 512MB of RAM the latest version of Model B ships with. Without Ethernet, users needing Internet access have to use the USB port for a Wi-Fi adapter. Thus, if you need Internet and an extra USB port for a keyboard or other peripheral, a USB splitter would be necessary (which may require a powered USB hub).

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Museum of History & Industry in Seattle dedicates an exhibit to the Big Fish videogame Fetch.

There are museums that celebrate the art of videogame making and the history of the business. But a new exhibit in Seattle reveals the process.

As part of the Museum of History & Industry’s reopening in December, Seattle-based Big Fish Games helped to build an installation that deconstructs the year-long process of making a mobile game.

The exhibit is a little unusual in that it focuses on Fetch, a game that is still a couple months away from launching. Visitors to the museum can get an inside look at how the mobile game was created, from brainstorming the original idea to establishing the look and feel of the art to the final production process.

A couple of steps along the way include hand-drawn sketches from the game’s artists, which show how the style evolved over time. For instance, a sequence of drawings reveals how the tail of the main dog, Bear, gets shaggier over time — just as you might expect in an animated movie. The game itself is about a boy who tries to save Bear after he’s been captured.

The display will be at the museum until September, and visitors are allowed to play the game on iPads as part of the exhibit.

Here’s a video of Brian Thompson, the game’s art director, and Ann Farrington, the museum’s creative director, describing how the two worked together over several months to create an exhibit that celebrated Seattle’s strong videogame industry.

[ See post to watch video ]

So much 80s nostalgia packed into one post. Found this Trivial Pursuit card (Genus II edition) in a paperback copy of "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman.

The answers:




-Click to enlarge photos-

A group of opponents calling themselves Keep Buckman Free have given out yard signs and hosted open houses to gather support.

Last week, I ran across this list of business cards of famous people, among them Isaac Asimov, Mark Zuckerberg, and Harry Houdini. There was also this curious card for Abraham Lincoln:

It seemed a little too jokey for a proper business card, so I tracked the card to its source, The Library of Congress. The card was likely printed in 1864 by the Democratic committee as a campaign souvenir and implies Lincoln would be defeated in the '64 election and on his way back to Illinois to practice law (and split rails).

Tags: Abraham Lincoln

Duff Goldman, of the Food Network show, "Ace of Cakes," says he'll bake a cake for free and drive it from Los Angeles to Oregon for the same-sex couple whose wish for a wedding cake was denied by a Gresham bakery owner who said same-sex marriage goes against his Christian beliefs.

brandonbird:

Full set available here: http://brandonbird.com/shopping.html

Free Wi-Fi in every US city? It'll happen just as soon as this unicorn comes to life. Gordon Ednie

An amazing story circulated today through much of the mainstream media and tech press. The US government is going to build gigantic Wi-Fi networks across the country, giving free Internet access to everyone.

Or perhaps the US would somehow force wireless providers to build these networks—in which case, it's not clear why this amazing new Internet service would be free, unless the goal was to destroy the entire business model of both cellular carriers and Internet service providers in one fell swoop.

The headlines were literally too good to be true, and so outlandish no one should have written them in the first place. "FCC Proposes Free Wi-Fi For Everyone In The US," Popular Science reported. "FCC wants free Wi-Fi for all," said The Daily Caller. On Mashable, it was "Government Wants to Create Free Public 'Super Wi-Fi'," and Business Insider breathlessly reported, "Telecom Corporations Are Trying To Stop The Government From Offering Free 'Super Wi-Fi'"

Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Prince George’s considers copyright policy that takes ownership of students’ work - The Washington Post:

kellysue:

BAD IDEA. (ht @gregpak)

A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.

The measure has some worried that by the system claiming ownership to the work of others, creativity could be stifled and there would be little incentive to come up with innovative ways to educate students. Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.

BUT WAIT, there’s more - 

It’s not unusual for a company to hold the rights to an employee’s work, copyright policy experts said. But the Prince George’s policy goes a step further by saying that work created for the school by employees during their own time and using their own materials is the school system’s property.

Emphasis mine. 

Also disturbing because you can’t simply claim someone else’s copyright by saying that you own it. And taking someone else’s copyright is really hard. (Which means the school board would probably lose any legal case, if they tried to claim copyright ownership of a kid’s school essay). But it’s silly…

RED PAAAAAAAANDAAAAAAS. Also, the bottom right GIF? I can neither confirm or deny that’s what the mock fights and bickering between the StuntHusband and I resemble. NO COMMENT. 

“

On Sunday, February 3, 2013 at approximately 8:40 p.m., Seattle Police were called to a reported strong-arm robbery in the 4200 block of 12th Ave N.E. Earlier in the evening the victim, who is not affiliated with the University of Washington, had been at a restaurant/bar in the University District when he struck up a conversation with an unknown male subject. During the conversation, the victim showed the suspect contents of his backpack, which contained a large sum of cash. When the victim departed the establishment, he was confronted by three male suspects wearing dark color hooded sweatshirts who assaulted him. The victim was knocked to the ground and his backpack containing the cash was stolen. The three suspects fled in two different directions. The victim was slightly injured and later transported himself to UWMC for treatment.

The three suspects are described as male adults without any additional identifiable descriptors.

”

-

From UW Alert.

Okay, victim blaming is bad, right?  But Jesus Christ. 

(via thedistantone)

You know, here’s what interesting about this post: 

Even in this situation, where a reasonable person might come away from it thinking, “Okay, dummy, it’s probably a bad idea to show off your backpack full of cash to strangers at a bar,” the reporting on it still differs dramatically from how we report on rape charges.

• It takes as a given that a crime occurred.
• It describes the motherfucker as a “victim,” which is actually sloppy crime reporting. (“Complainant,” or “complaining witness,” would be more accurate.)

In other words, even in a case where victim-blaming is all but inevitable — if the guy doesn’t show off his backpack full of cash, the odds that his backpack is the one the guys are going to steal drop dramatically — the language surrounding it is significantly different from the language surrounding rape. 

I have friends who are defense lawyers, and I read a lot of criminal defense blogs (strong suggestion: this should probably be a part of the diet of anyone interested in social justice on the Internet), and we frequently disagree on how rape charges are reported. I favor great restraint and circumspection — anything that speculates on what happened in a given situation is probably irresponsible reporting — but I frankly rarely hear the same disagreement when the crime being reported is robbery.

Which is to say: Yeah, lawyer friends, we do talk about rape in a fundamentally different way than we do other criminal charges. That is part of what the term “rape culture” refers to. Nobody accuses this guy of maybe asking for it, or claims that maybe he wanted them to have his backpack. Even in this situation, the story isn’t — and shouldn’t be — reported as though he may have been complicit in his own robbery. He did a dumb thing, and if you have a bag full of cash, you should not show it off to strangers, but we still all agree that the people responsible for the robbery are the fucking robbers. 

(via dansolomon)

Dan is better at social commentary than I am.

Things are getting tense between sociobiologist Jared Diamond and the campaign group Survival International over recent claims made in Diamond's new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? The Pulitzer prize-winning author is putting forth the idea that tribal peoples across the world live in a state of near-constant warfare. Survival director Stephen Corry has condemned the book, saying that it's "completely wrong — both factually and morally — and extremely dangerous" for portraying tribal societies as more violent than modern ones. Now, Diamond has tossed back a volley of his own. More »