Saying there is no such thing as a legal right to clean running water, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes dismissed a request from Detroit residents to impose a six-month moratorium on water shutoffs by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) on Monday.

The plaintiffs had argued last week that the DWSD shutoffs over delinquent water bills violated the human rights of impoverished citizens who had no ability to pay what the city says they owe, and who were left without access to clean water by the shutoff policy.

“There is no such right or law,” Rhodes said, according to the Detroit News. He also rejected the idea that citizens have a right to “service based on an ability to pay.”

Those remarks are notable because Rhodes didn’t even have to speak to the substance of the plaintiffs’ arguments. Bankruptcy law doesn’t give him the power to force the city to take the sort of action the plaintiffs requested, so Rhodes could have dismissed the request on simple procedural grounds.

By choosing instead to rebuke the notion that the health and safety implications of being cut off from running water service due to dire financial straits constitutes a violation of Detroiters’ rights, Rhodes positioned himself opposite the United Nations. After activists made a formal request for U.N. intervention in June, a trio of U.N. experts called the DWSD’s aggressive approach to a multi-million-dollar backlog of water bills “a violation of the human right to water and other international rights.”

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on drinking water issues said that “when there is a genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections.” The city of Detroit has raised water rates by triple-digit percentages in recent years despite having one of the poorest customer bases in the country.

DWSD has been shutting off thousands of water pipes every month since the spring, with one brief break in late summer after the policy attracted months of negative press attention. Activists allege that the department has been far more willing to shut off water to individuals than to businesses even though delinquent bills from businesses are much larger on average and make up a disproportionate share of the total revenue DWSD is owed. (A DWSD official disputed that portrayal to ThinkProgress over the summer and promised to provide numbers proving those allegations are false, but never did.)

When the water shutoffs began, the city’s path out of bankruptcy was still rocky and complicated. The thorniest part of the city’s unpayable debts had always been the $5 billion in borrowing tied to the DWSD. When the future of the water department was up in the air, it made a certain brutal kind of sense to get aggressive about clearing up $175 million in unpaid bills in order to make the water department a more attractive asset in various negotiations.

Since then, the city has struck an agreement with neighboring counties to put a regional water authority in place — something that should help to make service more affordable for Detroit residents in the long run while also bringing in much-needed revenue for repairs to the aging pipes and filtration infrastructure. The chief financial officer of the DWSD told the Detroit Free Press that it must keep the pressure up on poor Detroiters in order to fulfill its agreement with the suburban counties and maintain its bond rating.

The total outstanding water bills have been cut in half to less than $90 million since the spring. As the water shutoffs were getting underway in April, Rhodes approved the city’s request to pay that same amount of money to a trio of banks over some legally questionable financial deals tied to casino revenue. Rhodes had previously said the city should sue to cancel those deals rather than buying their way out of the bad debts.

The post Judge Says Poor Have No Right To Clean Water, Allows Detroit Water Shutoffs To Continue appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Gregg Araki's latest offering, White Bird In A Blizzard, is set during the time period when Araki first began making films (1988-1991). Because of this, the sets and costumes are rendered with a loving nostalgia that never feels overly novel. It's an aesthetic that melds vintage Araki with the modern cadence of young actors like its star, Shailene Woodley, who was born just barely at the tail end of the narrative's span. Coupled with voiceover pop-prose - the screenplay is based on Laura Kasischke's novel of the same name - the result is endearingly odd.Woodley plays the teenaged Kat, a typical cinematic only child from a broken home. What makes her home broken, though, is stranger than usual: her mother, Eve, has seemingly up and...

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What's happening world? After a long and hot summer, the weather is getting to the ideal temperature out here in sunny San Diego. Without a doubt, Fall is my favorite season. Everything starts to cool down, and leaves begin to die. It's very symbolic. Plus, that also means Halloween is right around the corner! Anyways, I figured to celebrate my favorite season, I'd share with everyone another HEAVY Italian gem on the highly sought after label Sermi. What we have here is Alessandro Alessandroni's extremely rare LP called "Farfalla". The cover alone is outstanding. The music ranges from Jazz to Psyche to just about everything you can imagine. It's kind of hard to pin point what genre this would fall into. Regardless, it's outstanding. This is not your average library record that has a few dramatic loops and open drums. It's top notch! Also, there's not many of these are floating around. Even more of a reason to share it with all of you. As always with my posts, it has never been reissued. So until it is, enjoy this rip. Also, be sure to peep the sound clip!

http://www.mediafire.com/download/88rl4v21remz0pe/Farfalla.zip

Fresh from its near-sweep of the horror categories at Fantastic Fest, IFC Midnight have released the US trailer for Jennifer Kent's Australian horror film The Babadook. A single mother, plagued by the violent death of her husband, battles with her son's fear of a monster lurking in the house, but soon discovers a sinister presence all around her. A big hit at Sundance and around the globe everywhere it has played, get a taste of what is proving to be one of the year's big buzz titles below....

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In 1979 Harry Nilson took a hiatus from recording what would turn out to be his final (full) album, Flash Harry, in order to act as musical director behind filmmaker Robert Altman’s 1980 film, Popeye. Co-produced by Bruce Robb, with arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, Nilsson composed all of the film’s original songs. An inspired […]

Ritualistic, eclectic, mystical, beautiful.

Unland is the project of Germany-based Jonas Meyer (piano/fx), Christian Grothe (guitar/fx/sampler) and Shabnam Parvaresh (clarinet). The concept: “to come together and create improvised musical landscapes” as the trio puts it. The first result: a spacious, texturally intoxicating, emotionally open and highly atmospheric 4-track experimental ambient album.

Grothe also produces mini ambient adventures alone under the moniker Kryshe, and is about to release a lovely 5-track digital EP via the colorful Australian imprint Hidden Shoal this September (review will follow). Meyer is a part of the post-rock band frames and also produces ambient under the moniker The Holographic Field Ensemble. Iranian-born Shabnam Parvaresh, who currently resides in Osnabrück, is also a talented abstract painter. These three gifted artists are driven by curiosity and passion, and together as Unland offer something fresh and exotic for the adventurous music consumer.

The ride starts with the allure of a chillingly quiet endless sea of sadness under dark ominous skies. Meyer’s melancholy piano glow sets the tone, while Grothe’s dynamic textural guitar wonder and delicate electronics add color and subtle movement, and in between, Parvaresh’s clarinet drifts croon from the depths. After a dramatic finish, Scene 2 soon balances things out with a graceful blooming nectar of optimism. After six comforting, hopeful minutes, mystery and darkness creep in again. Scene 3 is gloomy but not as the first one. Mysticism is on display, and the scents are almost of a Middle Eastern or Indian Classical affair. This beautiful sensation is generated mainly by Parvaresh, who at that point lets more traditional influences seep in from her heart smoothly into the mix, and Meyer, who produces a peculiar charm out of the piano with the help of pedal work and an interesting external effect use. Grothe’s part is not less essential on that scene, his bow-generated guitar streams provide a rich and effective backbone, and even a bit of otherworldliness in the end. The ride ends with a bewitching dance of dangerous winds and looming shadows over bleak wide landscapes.

This self-titled debut album truly deserves a physical release and more exposure. I believe that under the wings of the right label, Unland will get the physical release it deserves and will reach more people across the globe as it should. Germany’s multifaceted and prolific label Denovali could be the perfect home for this trio. In fact, I can’t think of a label more suitable than Denovali for releasing this music. Unland is definitely a project worth keeping an eye on, and a little bird told me we’ll be hearing more from it soon. These four scenes assemble an unsettling and mostly pensive world that leaves the listener enchanted and addicted. The entire recording stage was filmed and can be watched on Unland’s YouTube channel.

Unland is available as a free/name your price album on Bandcamp.

It's not just that the conservative judge ruled against marriage equality; it'a also that he compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and incest in the ruling.

As those who know me will tell you, when not busy being a movie geek I spend rather a lot of time being a music geek. And from time to time these two interests intersect, which makes Todd a happy boy indeed. And one of those times is today.Panos Cosmatos' Beyond The Black Rainbow is a great favorite in these parts, a psychedelic head trip of a scifi film very much intended to be a complete sensory experience with the auditory part of the experience delivered via an amazing retro-futurist electronic score from Sinoia Caves. I adore this score. Flat out adore it, to the point that I have literally been nagging Cosmatos for years about when it would be available to own. The answer:...

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‘Orally Fixated’ hitmaker Róisín Murphy’s said her new album “goes to places most pop music never does”, which sounds simultaneously exciting and terrifying.

Communicating with the world via the medium of a hand-written note uploaded to Instagram, Murphy said the following:

There was a desire to make an unquestionably refined record. It’s multi layered, electronic and live instrumentation, musically it goes to places most pop music never does. It’s emotionally bare and laced with irony. I definitely didn’t set out to make something unique per-se but eddie’s [Stevens, producer] vision is like nobody else’s on the planet and it really is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. So it’s impossible to describe except to say..it’s heartfelt.

There’s no release date set for all this just yet of course.

A recent story of a flight diverted after a passenger squabble over legroom has prompted a lively national national debate over the ethics of seat-reclining. Some, like the New York Times' Josh Barro, argue that there's nothing wrong with reclining your own seat and possibly depriving the person behind you of a little legroom.

Others, like The Washington Post's own Alexandra Petri, contend that "while leaning back makes you only moderately more comfortable, it makes the person behind you vastly more uncomfortable."

I've searched for public opinion polling on the ethics of the airline recline and have come up empty-handed. However, there is some data on the device at the center of the current controversy, the Knee Defender. The $22 device, which has been available for over a decade, clips on to the airline seat in front of you and prevents that person from reclining.

In 2004, Newsweek conducted 1,006 telephone interviews and asked respondents the following question: "A company called 'Knee Defender' sells a device that you wedge into the airplane seat ahead of yours, keeping the person sitting in front of you from reclining their seat. Do you think it is ethical for someone to use a product like this, or not?"

Respondents overwhelmingly said use of the device was unethical. Sixty-eight percent called it unethical, compared to only 15 percent who said it was ethical. An additional 17 percent were unsure.

These responses were consistent across different educational attainments and genders. Young people were more polarized on the question than older people: Only 10 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds didn't have an opinion on the question, compared to nearly a quarter of those age 65-plus. The 18-to-29 crowed had higher rates of support (18 percent) and opposition (73 percent) to the Knee Defender than members of any other age group.

There was also some disagreement by region. Southerners (20 percent) were more than twice as likely to call the device ethical as Midwesterners (8 percent). Residents of the Northeast and West were in the middle at 15 percent.

While these figures are illuminating, they don't tell us much about opinions on the ethics of seat reclining in general. So in the absence of other data, I've posted a totally unscientific survey question below. What do you think?

Take Our Poll

Whoever is picked to perform at the Super Bowl halftime thing – and rumours are it’s between Rihanna, Katy Perry and Coldplay – might have to pay for the privilege, according to a new report.

The Wall Street Journal (as quoted here) are saying that those artists’ ‘camps’ have been asked if they’d be willing make some sort of financial contribution to the NFL, with one option being a slice of their post-Super Bowl tour income.

As you may remember, Beyoncé announced her Mrs Carter, non-album supporting ‘jaunt’ straight after her singsong.

A spokeswoman from the NFL declined to comment on any of the contract stuff and had this to say when asked who on earth would be doing next year’s one: “When we have something to announce, we’ll announce it.”

Cheers!

A few weeks ago I received an anxious text from my wife informing me that a group of young men were fighting outside of our apartment building. We've spent most of our adult lives in New York, and most of that time in New York living in Harlem. I love Harlem for the same reason I love all the hoods I have lived in. I walk outside in my same uniform, which is to say my same jeans, my same fitted, my same hoodie, and feel myself washing away, disappearing into the boulevard, into the black and (presently) the brown, and becoming human.

There have been young people fighting outside my window for as long as I can remember. I was no older than five sitting on the steps of my parents' home on Woodbrook Avenue watching the older boys knock shoulders in the street—"bucking" as we called it then—daring each other to fire off. From that point on I knew that among my people fisticuffs had their own ritual and script. The script was in effect that evening: show cause (some niggas jumped me in the park), mouth off (I ain't no punk), escalate (wait right her son, I'm bout to get my shit). 

My wife wanted to know what she should do. She was not worried about her own safety—boys like this are primarily a threat to each other. What my wife wanted was someone who could save them young men from themselves, some power which would disperse the boys in a fashion that would not escalate things. No such power exists. I told my wife to stay inside and do nothing. I did not tell her to call the police. If you have watched the events of this past week, you may have some idea why. 

Among the many relevant facts for any African-American negotiating their relationship with the police the following stands out: The police departments of America are endowed by the state with dominion over your body. This summer in Ferguson and Staten Island we have seen that dominion employed to the maximum ends—destruction of the body. This is neither new nor extraordinary. It does not matter if the destruction of your body was an overreaction. It does not matter if the destruction of your body resulted from a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction of your body springs from foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be be destroyed. Protect the home of your mother and your body can be destroyed. Visit the home of your young daughter and your body will be destroyed. The destroyers of your body will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. 

It will not do to point out the rarity of the destruction of your body by the people whom you pay to protect it. As Gene Demby has noted, destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. All of this is old for black people. No one is held accountable. The body of Michael Brown was left in the middle of the street for four hours. It can not be expected that anyone will be held accountable.

We are being told that Michael Brown attacked an armed man and tried to take his gun. The people who are telling us this hail from that universe where choke-holds are warm-fuzzies, where boys discard their skittles yelling, "You're gonna die tonight," and possess the power to summon and banish shotguns from the ether. These are the necessary myths of our country, and without them we are subject to the awful specter of history, and that is just too much for us to bear.

James Poulos is trying admirably to get at this, noting that we fear Lincoln's awesome prophecy. But even Poulos can't quite escape:

We know that America is exceptional in one key respect—we came to democracy without much bloodshed. Around the world, from Hungary and Russia to Iraq and Nigeria, we see the dream of peaceful democratization dragged again and again to what the philosopher Hegel called the slaughter-bench of history. Racial strife and murderous governments, not liberty and democracy, are the rule in history, the established pattern. We know that, mercifully, democratization scourged us only once in ferociously modern style: during the Civil War.

The last sentence here nullifies the first. Some 600,000 Americans—2.5 percent of the American population—died in the Civil War. What came before this was a long bloody war—enslavement—against black families, black communities and black bodies. What came after was a terrorist regime which ruled an entire swath of this country by fire and rope. That regime was not overthrown until an era well within the living memory of many Americans. Taken all together, the body count that led us to our present tenuous democratic moment does not elevate us above the community of nations, but installs us uncomfortably within its ranks. And that is terrifying because it shows us to be neither providential nor exceptional, and only special in the subjective sense that our families are special—because they are ours.

My family lives in Harlem. My wife did not call the police. An older head told the angry boys that they needed to take it somewhere else, which they did. Black people are not above calling the police—but often we do so fully understanding that we are introducing an element that is unaccountable to us. We introduce the police into our communities, the way you might introduce a predator into the food chain. This is not the singular, special fault of the police. The police are but the tip of the sword wielded by American society itself. Something bigger than Stand Your Ground, the drug war, mass incarceration or any other policy is haunting us. And as long we cower from it, the events of this week are as certain as math. The question is not "if," but "when."

There has always been another way.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/Reparations-For-Ferguson/376098/

loves-the-outs:

Screen shots of huntercanning in Matthew Connor’s video of How Is July Already Over.

http://www.out.com/entertainment/music/2014/08/12/exclusive-matthew-connors-video-how-july-already-over

Raising children in societies that adhere to rigid gender roles, with fixed ideas about what should be considered “masculine” and “feminine,” can actually be detrimental to their physical and mental health, according to a study that observed 14-year-olds’ interactions over a three month period.

“Usually we think of gender as natural and biological, but it’s not… We actually construct it in ways that have problematic and largely unacknowledged health risks,” lead researcher Maria do Mar Pereira, the deputy director for the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, explained in an interview with ThinkProgress.

Pereira drew her conclusions after being embedded in a class of teenagers in Lisbon, Portugal. The kids in the study knew they were being observed by Pereira — who participated in all aspects of their everyday lives, including attending classes, eating lunch in the cafeteria, playing on the playground, and joining them on trips to the mall after school — but they didn’t know her specific area of focus. In addition to her one-on-one interviews with each teen, her observations allowed her to track the ways they interacted with their ideas about masculinity and femininity.

Pereira observed both boys and girls regulating their behavior in potentially harmful ways in order to adhere to gender norms. For instance, even girls who enjoyed sports often avoided physical activity at school because they assumed it wouldn’t be a feminine thing to do, they worried they might look unattractive while running, or they were mocked by their male peers for not being good enough. The girls also put themselves on diets because they believed desirable women have to be skinny.

“All of the girls were within very healthy weights, but they were all restricting their intake of food in some way. So what we’re really talking about here is 14-year-old girls, whose bodies are changing and developing, depriving themselves at every meal,” Pereira said. “In the extreme, that can lead to things like eating disorders. But even for the women who don’t reach the extreme, it can be very unhealthy for them.”

Meanwhile, the male participants in the study all faced intense pressure to demonstrate the extent of their manliness, which led to what Pereira calls “everyday low-level violence”: slapping and hitting each other, as well as inflicting pain on other boys’ genitals. They were encouraged to physically fight each other if they were ever mocked or offended. They felt like they had to drink unhealthy amounts of alcohol because that’s what a man would do. And they were under certain mental health strains, too; struggling with anxiety about proving themselves and suppressing their feelings, all while lacking a strong emotional support system.

Ultimately, the study concluded, “this constant effort to manage one’s everyday life in line with gender norms produces significant anxiety, insecurity, stress and low self-esteem for both boys and girls, and both for ‘popular’ young people and those who have lower status in school.” The findings ended up forming the basis of a book, Doing Gender in the Playground, about negotiating gender roles in schools.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The teens who participated in the Lisbon study — including the kids who bullied others and the kids who were victims of bullying themselves — weren’t happy about the gender roles they were expected to follow. In their one-on-one interviews, they all said they didn’t actually like paying so much attention to the right “feminine” and “masculine” behaviors, and just assumed that’s what they were supposed to do. When Pereira concluded her research and held a group meeting to explain her results to the kids, they were amazed to learn that everyone was on the same page about that.

“It was a revealing experience for them to be in that room and realize they were all performing and no one was happy about it,” she recounted. Slowly, things started to change. Pereira acknowledges it’s not like it was “suddenly paradise,” but she noticed the kids stopped mocking their peers as much for falling outside the bounds of traditionally gendered behavior. Girls and boys started to become more integrated in athletic activities. There was less physical fighting. And some of the kids’ parents even started calling Pereira to tell her about positive changes in their behavior.

Although Pereria’s observations took place at a school in Lisbon, she believes her results have widespread implications for Western nations that are subject to similar cultural messages about gender. Indeed, previous research in British and American schools has reached many of the same conclusions as her study. Sociologists agree that children “learn gender” from being subjected to society’s expectations, even though pressuring kids to conform to those rigid roles can end up having serious mental health consequences for the children whose parents try to over-correct their behavior. There are countless examples of schools becoming environments where gender stereotypes are strictly policed and kids are even sent home for wearing the “wrong” type of clothing.

The Lisbon findings could also give people hope about the possibility of creating a different kind of approach to these issues. It’s important to remember that teens are still shaping their attitudes about what it means to be a man or a woman.

“Sometimes adults think it’s impossible to change gender norms because they’re already so deeply entrenched. But they’re much more entrenched in adults than they are in young people,” Pereira pointed out. “It’s actually fairly easy to reach young people if you create opportunities for discussion, if you get them to think about their own experiences.”

The post Forcing Kids To Stick To Gender Roles Can Actually Be Harmful To Their Health appeared first on ThinkProgress.

It’s been a busy week for popstar smells and big band aficionado Lady Gaga’s announced details of her new ‘scent’ called – wait for it – Eau De Gaga.

Which is distinct from her Tony Bennett album which looks more like a case of ‘oh dear, Gaga’. RIGHT GUYS??

Anyway, having a chat with some of her fans on Twitter after they didn’t believe that she has actually called a perfume Eau De Gaga, she said that is was a “unisex scent, inspired by the adventurous woman and the man who loves her”.

 

Presumably she means man or woman, given that there is strong evidence these days that lesbianism almost certainly exists.

Apparently the smell’s base notes are “sparkling water, lime, leather.”

Great!

Asked by a fan if they could get a “100% male version”, the ‘GUY’ hitmaker replied: ”[You] don’t need it with this fragrance. It is an extremely sexy and arousing smell for all genders. Alluring and ready for sex.”

Apparently Gaga’s first perfume Fame has sold over 30m bottles and earned over $1.5 billion (!) worldwide so you can see why she’d be keen to keep this particular gravy train running.

Minimal drops and wickedly complex percussive wizardry that keeps you locked to the groove yet constantly on guard, advancing cautiously into the unforgiving night.

With the deceptively innocent chimes of a child’s toy, Maduro welcomes us into his world. A dystopian megalopolis caught in the crux between machine domination and the fading echoes of organic artistry. Eerie strains of honky-tonk torn from shattered jukeboxes struggle against frenetic synthetic percussion and not quite random electrical fluctuations. Like you’ve stumbled into a dive somewhere in the Sprawl to discover a lonely alcoholic piano player jamming with a broken robot drum machine.

What began as an offshoot from the terrific June release on Octofoil (Blood Turns Black) has been fully explored here as an homage to Williams Gibsons 1984 classic Neuromancer. It’s the sort of undertaking that could easily fall short in so many ways. Fortunately Maduro’s experience shines through and he is able to summon a subtle yet powerful invocation of Gibsons world. The liasion is brilliantly managed and the reference feels neither dominating nor superfluous.

There is a sonic texture, a clanging, distorted reverberation which seems to perfectly capture the cyberpunk spirit. And this texture permeates throughout, whether over the groovy jazz jams of “Club SubDermal” or the Sega Mega Drive vibes of “This is Hers.” There is depth here too, a feeling of desperate, even helpless struggle against brutally incomprehensible forces. Lonely melodies enveloped by spiraling chasmic pads and chaotic synth stabs.

Sci-Fi aside it’s also extremely refreshing to hear the now all too familiar screeches and whomps of modern Bass Music in a unique and inspiring context that draws more from Venetian Snares than from Skrillex. Which is to say constant evolution, minimal drops and wickedly complex percussive wizardry that keeps you locked to the groove yet constantly on guard, advancing cautiously into the unforgiving night.

Black Ice Ballet is available on Octofoil.

According to Timbaland, ’9th Inning’ hitmaker Missy Elliott’s new single, which is produced by one Timothy Z Mosley, is a “game-changer”.

“It’s coming,” he confirmed to Rolling Stone when asked about the single’s whereabouts. ”It’s on her. She got the first single, it’s just a matter of when she wants to do it. We got the hollow-tip bullet in the gun. We have the game-changer right there.”

Asked to describe it in more detail, he added: ”It’s something you ain’t never heard Missy do. It sounds today, but the future.”

Banjo and a donk then.

Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” is a strange, haunting thing. Largely carried by Cohen’s monotone, yet slightly lilting voice and sparse guitar accompaniment, the song evokes a dark, ambiguous feeling. The angelic backing vocals and seraphic strings that periodically emerge give the song a heavenly relief – a bittersweet release of giving yourself into a formless and […]

The Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed some for-profit companies to claim a religious exemption to Obamacare’s contraception mandate, has sparked a heated debate over the definition of religious liberty and its role in modern society. At this point, even a Satantic cult has decided to weigh in.

The Satanic Temple — a faith community that describes itself as facilitating “the communication and mobilization of politically aware Satanists, secularists, and advocates for individual liberty” — has launched a new campaign seeking a religious exemption to certain anti-abortion laws that attempt to dissuade women from ending a pregnancy. The group says they have deeply held beliefs about bodily autonomy and scientific accuracy, and those beliefs are violated by state-level “informed consent” laws that rely on misleading information about abortion risks.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, the Satanists point out, it strengthens their own quest to opt out of laws related to women’s health care that go against their religious liberty. “Because of the respect the Court has given to religious beliefs, and the fact that our our beliefs are based on best available knowledge, we expect that our belief in the illegitimacy of state­ mandated ‘informational’ material is enough to exempt us, and those who hold our beliefs, from having to receive them,” a spokesperson for the organization said in a statement.

The Satanic Temple, sometimes referred to as “the nicest Satanic cult in the world,” falls somewhere between satire, performance art, and activism. The group says its central mission is to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will.” It has a set of seven tenets that closely track with humanism. Typically, wherever issues of church and state are overlapping, the Satanic Temple isn’t far behind.

Members of the Satanic Temple first made national headlines when they rallied in support of Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) for approving a bill that allows prayer in public schools, saying they’re glad the new policy will allow children to pray to Satan. Since then, they’ve also held “a formal ceremony celebrating same-sex unions” on the grave of the mother of the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, declaring that she has posthumously become a lesbian, and commissioned a seven-foot-tall Satanic statue near a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma State Capitol.

And now, the Satanic Temple is turning its attention to “campaigns to assert our religious protection for women with health needs that are being complicated by unreasonable laws,” focusing on the abortion-related legislation that goes against science.

State-level abortion restrictions that aren’t actually based in medicine have swept the nation. “Informed consent” laws, which typically require women to receive biased counseling before being allowed to proceed with an abortion procedure, are now in place in 35 states. Many of those laws require doctors to tell their patients misleading information about abortion’s potential link to mental health issues and breast cancer. Some of them put words directly in doctors’ mouths, forcing them to refer to the fetus as an “whole, separate, unique, living human being.”

Members of the Temple of Satan are encouraging all women who share their belief in medical accuracy to seek their own exemption from these laws, even if they don’t personally identify as Satanists. They’ve drawn up a sample letter to help women talk to their doctors about the issue, as well as created “Right to Accurate Medical Information” t-shirts for purchase.

Satanists aren’t the only activists fighting back against the junk science used to justify anti-abortion laws. The secular humanist group Center for Inquiry recently launched a “Keep Health Care Safe and Secular” campaign to encourage more Americans to fight back against laws limiting women’s access to health services. Similarly, NARAL Pro-Choice America sometimes uses the slogan “Politicians Make Crappy Doctors.”

The post Satanists Demand Religious Exemption From Abortion Restrictions, Cite Hobby Lobby Ruling appeared first on ThinkProgress.

On Tuesday FiveThirtyEight released the results of a poll of Americans' opinions on the "Star Wars" universe. Not surprisingly, Jar Jar Binks is the most reviled character in the series. As Walt Hickey notes, the Gungan from Naboo posted lower favorability numbers than Emperor Palpatine, "the actual personification of evil in the galaxy."

On the other hand, with a net favorability of -8, Jar Jar is considerably more popular than the U.S. Congress, which currently enjoys a net favorability rating of -65. In fact, the last time congressional net favorability was above that was February 2005. Incidentally this was just before the release date of "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," which marked Jar Jar's last appearance on the big screen.

But picking on Congress' unpopularity is a bit like beating a dead tauntaun. After all, the legislative branch has been less popular than lice, brussels sprouts and Nickelback for some time now. What if we compared the favorability of 2016 presidential hopefuls and other political leaders with that of "Star Wars" characters?

Hillary Clinton currently has the highest net favorability of any 2016 White House contender. But to put her 19 percent favorable rating in context, she's tied with Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who froze Harrison Ford in carbonite.

None of the 2016 hopefuls is polling higher than Darth Vader. You'll recall that Vader chopped off his son's arm and blew up an entire planet, but evidently in the eyes of the American public these are minor sins compared to Benghazi, Bridgegate and Gov. Rick Perry's hipster glasses. These numbers suggest that if "Star Wars" were real and Darth Vader decided to enter the 2016 presidential race, he'd be the immediate front-runner.

Meanwhile President Obama is polling just two favorability points below Emperor Palpatine, Lord of the Sith. Make of that what you will.