Obi-Wan: Prince-Consort Bail Organa of Alderaan, I entrust to your keeping one of the children of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala. Hide her well, and keep your family safe.
Bail Organa: I shall raise her as my own child and, when she is of age, send her off to a high-profile job in the Galactic Senate. Also, I shall become one of the main spokespeople for dissent against Emperor Palpatine.
Obi-Wan: That... That is a terrible idea.
Bail Organa: I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of your plan to give Darth Vader's other kid to Darth Vader's step-brother on Darth Vader's home planet.
Obi-Wan: In my defence, Anakin is incredibly dim.
The term “fetal alcohol syndrome” (FAS) refers to a group of problems that include mental retardation, growth problems, abnormal facial features, and other birth defects. The disorder affects children whose mothers drank large amounts of alcohol during pregnancy.
Right?
Well, not exactly.
It turns out that only about 5% of alcoholic women give birth to babies who are later diagnosed with FAS. This means that many mothers drink excessively, and many more drink somewhat (at least 16 percent of mothers drink during pregnancy), and yet many, many children born to these women show no diagnosable signs of FAS. Twin studies, further, have shown that sometimes one fraternal twin is diagnosed with FAS, but the other twin, who shared the same uterine environment, is fine.
So, drinking during pregnancy does not appear to be a sufficient cause of FAS, even if it is a necessary cause (by definition?). In her book, Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility, sociologist and public health scholar Elizabeth M. Armstrong explains that FAS is not just related to alcohol intake, but is “highly correlated with smoking, poverty, malnutrition, high parity [i.e., having lots of children], and advanced maternal age” (p. 6). Further, there appears to be a genetic component. Some fetuses may be more vulnerable than others due to different ways that bodies breakdown ethanol, a characteristic that may be inherited. (This may also explain why one fraternal twin is affected, but not the other.)
To sum, drinking alcohol during pregnancy appears to contribute to FAS, but it by no means causes FAS.
And yet… almost all public health campaigns, whether sponsored by states, social movement organizations, public health institutes, or the associations of alcohol purveyors tell pregnant women not to drink alcohol during, before, or after pregnancy… at all… or else.
These campaigns all target women and explain to them that they should not drink any alcohol at all if they are trying to conceive, during pregnancy, during the period in which they are breastfeeding and, in some cases, if they are not trying to conceive but are using only somewhat effective birth control.
So, the strategy to reduce FAS is reduced to the targeting of women’s behavior.
But “women” do not cause FAS. Neither does alcohol. This strategy replaces addressing all of the other problems that correlate with the appearance of FAS — poverty, stress, and other kinds of social deprivation — in favor of policing women. FAS, in fact, is partly the result of individual behavior, partly the result of social inequality, and partly genetic, but our entire eradication strategy focuses on individual behavior. It places the blame and responsibility solely on women.
And, since women’s choices are not highly correlated with the appearance of FAS, the strategy fails. Very few women actually drink at the levels correlated with FAS. If we did not have a no-drinking-during-pregnancy campaign and pregnant women continued drinking at the rates at which they drank before being pregnant, we would not see a massive rise in FAS. Only the heaviest drinking women put their fetus at risk and they, unfortunately, are the least likely to respond to the no-drinking campaign (largely due to addiction).
Originally posted in 2010 and developed into a two-page essay for Contexts magazine.
I love art pieces saying how dependent that millennials are on technology that are made in Photoshop. Then posted in an online newspaper article. Which is then shared on social media.
It’s like a performance art piece and they don’t even know that they made it.
This is how it works. America makes civil rights progress in long, painful battles that pit liberal forces for change against conservative forces for maintaining the status quo. For asking that America treat its citizens more equally, or more fairly, or with more justice the liberal voices are demonized as communists or socialists, declared to be criminal elements, lambasted in speeches and at hearings called by congressional conservative leaders, "exposed" in salacious conservative news stories purporting to have discovered true malevolence lying underneath their supposedly noble ideas, are often met by conservative rioters, are sometimes shot at, and are sometimes murdered outright.
Then the change they sought goes into affect and, a few decades later, the liberal icon is held up as one of history's greatest Americans in a conservative debate by conservative politicians seeking to out-conservative one another.
During the second GOP presidential debate Wednesday night, Donald Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) said they would be open to putting civil rights activist Rosa Parks on the $10 bill. But the Republican candidates might be surprised to learn that Parks sat on the national board of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, one of the GOP’s biggest political enemies.
And there is of course no way any of these fine tools would possibly know that, because what Rosa Parks actually believed or did has been entirely beside the point for a good long time now. Most people who have heard about What Rosa Parks Did believe that the lone black American woman, in a fit of spontaneous pique, simply decided that she liked the seat she was sitting on and had had entirely enough of having to get up and move to another one. In reality Parks was an active member of the civil rights movement, was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, and with other local and national civil rights leaders deftly maneuvered her arrest into international coverage and, eventually, the desired changes to the law. She went on to fight against housing discrimination and against police abuse of minorities—you might call her a founding member of the Black Lives Matter movement, if you wanted to twist the dagger into conservative ribs a little deeper. And yes, she sat on the national board of Planned Parenthood.
None of this comes up, of course, because what Rosa Parks stood for was long ago whittled down to the bare necessities. She helped fight against segregation; since any political figure worth their salt now considers segregation to have been a Bad Thing, she is granted heroine status for that role, and all the pesky details about how she helped do that, or who her accomplices were, or (pointedly) who her most vociferous enemies were need to be cast aside if respectable conservatives are going to showcase their eminent reasonableness by declaring their admiration of her now.
In all the conservative odes to American civil rights icon Rosa Parks, I have never heard a single one note that her enemies were, in fact, conservatives. That everything she fought against were things supported, and demanded, by conservative forces of the time. It would do the movement few favors, after all, to point out that conservatism has from then until now at every point in time been a force of segregation, suspicion, bigotry and racism, a force so strong that it fractured and rebuilt America's political parties wholesale and still came out waving the same Confederate flags on the other side. So no, it's not at all surprising that Ted Cruz can go back and forth between praising Rosa Parks, advocate of civil rights, and frothing demonization of her own causes. She is no longer alive; she won't be correcting him.
At 23 weeks chances are good that this fetus is being removed because it is:
a) Already dead b) Suffering abnormalities such as it developed no brain, or had a serious genetic condition that would kill it quickly. c) Was actively dying (not dead yet but would be within a few days, 100% guarunteed, 0 chance of saving it) d) Was actively killing the pregnant person.
Late term abortions, as shown here, make up only 1.5% of all abortions. The above four reasons are the only reasons such procedures are performed. Almost every abortion performed after 20 weeks is done on a wanted pregnancy. So you know what that means? You’re calling people who miscarried murderers. You just implied people who had a miscarriage or would have died murderers. How dare you call yourself pro life for that.
Now for the fun fact: They used to use a different procedure for these abortions in which they removed the fetus intact and allowed these people to grieve for the intact fetus, have pictures, etc. Pro lifers decided people losing a wanted pregnancy should not be allowed to grieve an intact fetus and we were left with this.
Congrats. Your movement is the reason they use this one now when people lose a wanted pregnancy late into the pregnancy. Your movement is intentionally making it harder for people to recover from the lose of a much wanted pregnancy. It’s your movement who left grieving people with this instead of allowing them something easier to deal with, something that would let them hold their deceased fetus.
Congrats. If you think you were ‘saving’ something think again. You’re hurting born people. You’re hurting people who lose a wanted pregnancy by shaming this abortion procedure. And you’re movement is the reason this is procedure doctors are forced to use now. You’re probably an awful and mean person to tell people losing a wanted pregnancy that they’re killers.
This is the post that made me pro-choice. Glad to see it still circulating.
I lost a baby brother at something like 14 weeks because he’d attached to the uterine wall backward, and when he started kicking he tore himself away and hemorrhaged to death.
You goddamn “pro-lifers” were ready to let my mother die with him rather than “killing him before God’s time.” He was already dead; it was a matter at that point of him bleeding out. My mother was bleeding with him. My mother was dying with him. And the hospital she was in? That fine pro-life hospital? Refused to let her transfer to another hospital to abort. She had a ten-year-old and an eight-month old at home, but making sure Joey didn’t die “before God’s time” was more goddamn important than making sure my mother survived.
My mother asked the nurse if she’d take pictures, saying that the ultrasound images were really blurry and she’d at least like something to remember him by. The nurse, after Joey was dead and my mom was in recovery, threw pictures on my mother’s bed. This fine pro-life nurse gave my mother pictures of a baby that was jet black where he wasn’t blood red. He didn’t even look human. And she threw the pictures in my mother’s face, like it was her fault that there was a terrible, terrible biological mistake that made it impossible for her baby to survive.
We wanted him. Not that the fact that you’ll notice he already had a name picked out would’ve clued you in. I would have had a baby brother just a year younger than me. My sophomore year in college I spent a lot of time crying alone in the student union, thinking it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, I should be taking my brother to dinner with friends or helping him study for his first midterms. I’m a big sister with no little brother to show for it, and there was a year that pain and loss came back eighteen years after the fact to wound me when I least expected it. There was a year when there were songs I couldn’t bring myself to listen to without crying because they reminded me of what I could have had. And I still wish, I still wish, they’d aborted him. Because the end result would have been the same. And my family would have been spared a world of pain believing we were losing brother and mother both. I was in ICU at the time after an allergic reaction that left me unable to breathe. How do you suppose my sister felt? Mother dying, sister dying, brother dead—just a matter of time on that one. Ten years old, watching her entire family struggling to breathe, struggling to live.
And you motherfuckers would call my mom a murderer for this. And you cared more for a baby already dying than you did for the two already born who needed their mom.
Fuck you. You’re not pro-life. You’re anti-woman, anti-family, anti-compassion and anti-love.
Someone on my FB shared this photo and I had to go sit in silence for awhile at the stupidity of her comment that went along with it. Most people don’t wait so late into a pregnancy and randomly decide ‘kill the baby’ because they want to. What the fuck is wrong with people.
So I was re-watching CATWS and noticed something interesting about the artwork in Sam Wilson’s house – namely, that every piece of wall art is monochrome, and has a rough quality to its work.
First, a blurry photo in black and white, of two women laughing and a trumpet in motion. It seems to be printed out on basic paper, tacked to the wall without any frame or decoration:
Then there’s this painting, also in muted colours. There’s a raw feel to the work, in the roughness of the paintwork and the grey tones. Even the image of a man sitting slumped, looking up at the viewer, gives it a more emotional tone:
Finally there’s this large photo/painting, which is also in black and white, though I don’t know what the image is:
Sam also has a semi-blurry photo of army planes in formation in the sky, somewhere in his living room. And in the guest bedroom where Steve and Nat talk, there’s a grey frame with just the blur of a grey-toned image.
The art is such an interesting contrast to Sam’s house, because he seems to love brighter colours in his home: every room is painted in different shades of greens and blues, with accents of bright browns and amber… there’s no boring white walls anywhere. But the artwork is always shades of grey.
The roughness of these pieces of art (nothing delicate or intricate, nothing with colour) makes me wonder if Sam is an amateur artist – much like Steve. Someone who paints his feelings and emotions as a way to cope with coming home from the war. Or, perhaps more likely, he brings home the photography and artwork from veterans of the support group, and places them in clear view in his living area. I realize this is wild speculation, but that would be so Sam.
“Put down the burger.” “Get to the gym.” “Don’t you care about yourself?”
The calorie-driven, carb-counting messages informing our decisions regarding weight loss and weight gain seem to have something in common: They put a lot of pressure on people of size to change life-long behaviors.
Personal responsibility is a fragment of the picture. Asking overweight or obese people to shoulder the entire burden of America’s $200 billion-a-year obesity problem won’t end it. Several recent studies have begun to chip away at the obesity myths and show us the reality. And it’s not all about what’s on your plate.
1. There may be a master switch controlling our body weights.
First of all, there are two types of fat. Brown fat helps burn calories and white fat insulates our bodies (particularly our bellies, legs and butt) to keep us warm.
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School recently discovered that our body’s “obesity gene,” known as FTO, may program certain immature fat cells to become white fat rather than brown fat, Medical News Todayreports. And whether or not our obesity gene turns the cells into white or brown fat is part of our genetic code, not due to our behaviors.
Scientists are hoping that by editing a piece of the FTO gene, they may be able to reprogram our bodies to produce more brown fat.
2. Having less food may actually cause childhood obesity.
Food insecurity — a lack of access to food for an active, healthy life — may actually cause obesity in our nation’s children, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. The study uses data from a nationwide survey of United States children from 1999 to 2006. The data show that the less access a child had to food, the higher the child’s body mass index was, and that kids from households with very low food security had a higher obesity prevalence rate than the national average of 18.4%.
Food insecurity disproportionately affects our nation’s low-income households and households of color. The former study’s authors wrote students with more access to food may also have more access to other health benefits, like spaces for physical activity. Also, kids from homes that can afford food “may also have diets that avoid inexpensive high-fat, high-sugar and energy-dense foods.”
3. Bacteria in your gut may determine your weight more than you do.
You have trillions — yes, trillions — of bacteria in your stomach. The type of bacteria you have in your gut may be determined by your genes, not what you eat. And the type, number and diversity of these genes play a central rolein our digestion, metabolism and whether we are prone to things like type 2 diabetes or obesity.
A recent study published in Cell Metabolismtheorizes a diet may be most effective by identifying the types of bacteria that live in your gut. Another study from the Joslin Diabetes Center recently showed that people who are overweight or obese have completely different gut bacteria than those who are not and that transferring bacteria between people may be a potential obesity cure.
4. Firstborn kids may be more prone to obesity than younger siblings.
In a study of more than 26,000 Swedish women, older sisters were found to be 40% more likely to be at risk for obesity, Medical News Today reports. According to the researchers, that data is in line with earlier studies on men, as well. They caught up with sisters during their first three months of pregnancy: Firstborn women had a BMI 2.4% higher than their younger sisters.
“Our study corroborates other large studies on men, as we showed that firstborn women have greater BMI and are more likely to be overweight or obese than their secondborn sisters,” the study authors wrote.
5. Being overweight actually makes it a lot harder to lose weight.
Knowing that you are overweight and the stress of carrying that stigma may actually force overweight people to gain, rather than shed, pounds. A paper published in the International Journal of Obesity“found consistent evidence that perceiving oneself as being overweight was associated with increased weight gain,” the Guardianreports. One of the three studies in the paper found the stress of being perceived as overweight can cause people to comfort-eat to relieve stress, leading to weight gain.
Another study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that the higher your BMI, the less likely you are to achieve a BMI in a medically-acceptable range.
6. Just one lost night of sleep can affect your weight.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen found lack of sleep can lead to a decrease in physical activity, an uptick in alcohol intake and weight gain. Swedish researchers found that losing even one night of sleep can alter our genes and affect metabolic processes, including the way we process sugar.
“Better knowledge of the importance of sleep, not just for biological restitution, but also for making healthy lifestyle decisions, may help people make informed decisions about prioritizing how to spend the night – catching up on work emails, surfing social media or going to bed and ensuring a good night’s sleep,” said Alice Jessie Clark from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Public Health.
7. Fat-shaming can cause weight gain, too.
Those who make others feel bad because of their weight may be a part of the problem, according to research from the University College of London. Researchers spoke to people who reported disrespectful treatment or harassment in public.
Over a period of four years, those who reported weight discrimination gained weight, while those who did not lost weight. Lead author Dr. Sarah Jackson of UCL’s Epidemiology and Public Health Department said, “There is no justification for discriminating against people because of their weight.”
Regardless of this shit fat people should not be shamed for existing. Period.
To my fellow straight white guys, let me say this: You have been pandered to for your entire life. Nearly every piece of media you have ever consumed, from comics books to TV to cartoons, has been tailored made with you in mind as its primary audience.
In fact, pandering to us is one of the greatest driving forces in entertainment today. I’d go as far to say that it’s responsible for many of the creative shortcomings of today’s media.
This kind of mindset is, to put it frankly, a cancer that’s rotting away at the creative core of the industry.
The whole “I’m not like other girls” movement should really be called the “I don’t want men to treat me the way they treat other women” movement because that’s what it really is. Women know that a girl who wears makeup is as respectable as a girl who wears none. A girl who’s played every Final Fantasy game is as respectable as a girl who digs Candy Crush. A woman who started her own law firm is as respectable as a single mom who works in the service industry. A girl who enjoys casual sex is as respectable as a girl who has never had her first kiss. A lesbian who has no interest in men is as respectable as a straight girl who loves her boyfriend. A girl who reads People magazine is as respectable as a girl who reads Dostoyevsky.
Women have been extensively shamed for saying “I’m not like other girls” when what they are really saying, maybe without knowing it, is “I’ve heard the way men talk about specific types of women, typically women who do things that they don’t understand or relate to, and I really, really want them to separate me from that and see me as a person who is worthy of being respected.” How much respect a woman gets from men is very rarely indicative of how much she deserves.
“I don’t want you to treat me the way you treat other girls, because you treat other girls like shit.”
I support tax funded abortions available at any hospital, or appropriately staffed medical clinic, on demand and without hurdles. If you can’t afford to go get an abortion ya can’t afford to raise a child and we shouldn’t be forcing people who aren’t prepared (financially or just generally in their lives) to carry a pregnancy to term that they don’t want or can’t afford.
I’m glad little Ahmed is going to space camp and will do well in his future. Good for him. But holy fuck, does no one care that the Texas police threw the law out of the window here? What they did was actually illegal. Will they be punished? No. Probably not.
But the mainstream press don’t care. MY GOD, MARK ZUCKERBERG LIKES HIM. THAT IS BASICALLY THE WHOLE STORY HERE.
If Bernie loses the primaries: YOU STILL MUST VOTE
Tumblr’s become so attached to Bernie that I’m not sure y’all are still gonna vote in the election if he loses. I will vote for him, I know most of you might too, but we must still be prepared for something like that :/
I know it would mean that you will have lost the one candidate you believed in the most. I know it will possibly mean voting for Hillary over the Republicans, when all of you don’t like her that much, I understand, believe me.
BUT HERE’S WHY YOU STILL VOTE:
1. Because are you going to give the Republicans a greater chance of victory?
I know it seems like HRC and the Republicans are one in the same to most of you, but if both HRC and the GOP REALLY dislike each other? You can tell that’s not exactly true. Granted when compared to Bernie, Hillary seems conservative, but Bernie’s super liberal where Clinton reflects most of the party, center-left, like Obama. She’s not the progressive you all want, but she sure as hell ain’t conservative. Bernie has positive things to say about Hillary, and, let’s face it, she is still a better choice than any GOP candidate.
2. Not voting means you are still deciding who has a better chance of winning in the election, don’t be fooled.
Don’t think that Bernie not winning the Dem nomination means that there is no hope at all for change and that voting for any Democrat is useless, if you don’t vote, you give the Republicans a greater chance of winning, just like I said above. And you know what? Good. Because that’s exactly what they want. Why would they want young people voting if it means they might vote Democrat? Think about that hard.
Seriously,he released a whole video on how “elites want big money to dominate the political process” and this:
And he KNOWS they don’t want that. You will not be making a positive change if you don’t vote, hence he is saying you will make the problem worse, if you avoid voting.
This is not only for this election. It is 2016 and beyond. Don’t forget that, please.
The U.S. primary system can be complicated and difficult to understand to those outside our borders, to say nothing of our own citizens. I believe these two infographs will help clear things up.
by Beth Skwarecki on Vitals, shared by Whitson Gordon to Lifehacker
Children get a lot of vaccines these days, which is a good thing: it means they’re protected against a lot of diseases. But some parents (and certain presidential candidates) wonder if kids are getting too many shots all at once.
The Sacramento sheriff’s deputies shot Danny Sanchez on Friday. The shooting occurred when the Sheriff’s department SWAT team showed up to arrest his neighbor .
When Sanchez saw the incident, and the SWAT team converge, he began recording from his garage. He assumed there wouldn’t be any problem, since he was so far away from the incident, on his own property and even out on the edge of the garage.
Police say that Sanchez was extending his arm with “an object” in his hand. That “object” was a cellphone, Sanchez’s father John “Sonny” Sanchez said. His son was simply trying to videotape the arrest of Ledford. That’s when police opened fire on him.
“He was yelling, ‘Dad I’m shot, I’m shot,’
so I grabbed him inside and closed the garage door. I put a tourniquet around his leg and a clean towel,” John Sanchez explained.
He pointed out four additional bullet holes in his garage as well as several more in his car.
“You can see how many shots they did: one, two three, four — shooting at my son with a cell phone. C’mon that’s ridiculous,”
On top of shooting him and arresting him, Sanchez’s home was also searched. But Sgt. Ramos acknowledged Sanchez committed no crime.
And they searched the house? Probably trying to find or manufacture some justification for themselves.
When is it going to become ok to begin shooting at cops “because they were holding something” or any of the other idiotic excuses you hear come out of the mouths of these supposed “officers”? If the same litmus tests were given for ordinary citizens it would literally be ok to shoot any cop you see on sight and then search their fucking possessions.
Real cops aren’t nervous little pieces of chicken shit that shoot at their own shadows like these worthless government employees.
No, it is not reasonable to shoot people simply because they are holding something. That you think it is reasonable speaks volumes of the problems with policing today.
And the fuckup cops that shot the guy couldn’t even hit center mass of a guy who wasn’t fucking moving even after shooting a half dozen or so shots. What kind of fuck up cops are these? SWAT team my ass. If these guys were ever in a real fight where people shoot back they’d be seriously fucked. Thank god they are such bad shots, but maybe they should have their firearms taken away for that reason alone.
congress just voted to defund planned parenthood???
whaaaatttttttttttt
The House of Representatives is not all of Congress. The bill passed, but it won’t make it through the Senate, Obama has threatened to veto it if it does, and there is no way Congress can override the veto.
This is a budget funding fight in nasty rhetoric, and the current mainstream wisdom is that even the Republican leadership wants to stop the squabbling.
This is how it works. America makes civil rights progress in long, painful battles that pit liberal forces for change against conservative forces for maintaining the status quo. For asking that America treat its citizens more equally, or more fairly, or with more justice the liberal voices are demonized as communists or socialists, declared to be criminal elements, lambasted in speeches and at hearings called by congressional conservative leaders, "exposed" in salacious conservative news stories purporting to have discovered true malevolence lying underneath their supposedly noble ideas, are often met by conservative rioters, are sometimes shot at, and are sometimes murdered outright.
