random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
(About his comment that His Dark Materials isn't fantasy, it's stark realism):
I've had to deal with that frequently in the last couple days at this festival. People say, "What were you talking about? Of course you're writing fantasy!" Well, when I made that comment I was trying to distinguish between these books and the kind of books most general readers think of as fantasy, the sub-Tolkien thing involving witches and elves and wizards and dwarves. Really, those authors are rewriting The Lord of the Rings. I'm trying to do something different: tell a story about what it means to grow up and become adult, the experience all of us have and all of us go through. I'm telling a story about a realistic subject, but I'm using the mechanism of fantasy.
How did I miss this Alabama story?
Greg L. Gambril, a DA in south Alabama (Covington County), is prosecuting women for endangering their fetuses under a chemical endangerment law intended to protect children from meth labs — “chemical endangerment of child”.
“When drugs are introduced in the womb, the child-to-be is endangered. It is what I [...]
Jenna Freedman posted an outrageous story about a medical database: Popline has made the word “abortion” a stopword, meaning you can’t search on the term; the database ignores the word as it ignores words like “the”.
Why? Popline responded that “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, [...]
* Judge White withdrew his order requiring the shutdown of wikileaks.org. See also 3/1 bits blog. (NYT 3/1)
* The music industry has yet to pay artists any of the money it has received in settlements and lawsuits; the artists are pissed. NY Post 2/27)
* The owners of the game scrabble are pissed off at Scrabulous. [...]
Speaking of penumbra yet again (1, 2) , I had previously blogged about a Circuit split on laws banning sex toys — it was Valentine’s Day, and I was feeling a bit whimsical, so I wished for a “penumbra” that would strike down stupid laws.
LawPundit “ha[s] an opinion” on my wish for a [...]
I’ve written before about the ways in which criminalizing specific medical procedures — e.g., the “partial birth abortion act” — is a technological mandate. As a technological mandate, bans on specific abortion procedures are subject to all the same flaws, overreaches, underreaches, definitional problems, and obsolescence problems that mandates involving technological protection measures for [...]
patent your tax strategies!
No, I’m not kidding. Go read the article. 52 patents for tax strategies have been issued since the first was issued in 2003, and 84 more are pending.
If this annoys you and causes you to mutter grumpily about State Street Bank and the Federal Circuit*, put a smile on your face [...]
check out this awesome overpass/sidewalk art at yonkis.com — you have to scroll all the way to the right, and it’s not a flip photo so do it slowly enough to notice the homo sapiens-like creatures … at the shortest point of the wall, at about the 75% mark (L-to-R).
The pointer came from pharyngula, where [...]
Two quickies:
(1) badgerbag posted this photo of Walgreen’s “Emergency Contraception Encounter Form” — probably from California, but perhaps implemented elsewhere. Nine states (including California) allow women to get EC directly from a pharmacist. Apparently, this is what women have to do to get EC. Holy Griswold, Batgirl.
(2) The FCC has finally broken thru [...]
(1) Today’s NYT article on “tough questions” for gubernatorial candidates on abortion: all the gubernatorial candidates quoted are men. [NYT 6/5]
(2) Mercury Rising discusses what happened to Wen Ho Lee after the racist government debacle a few years back. [sideshow 6/4]
(3) I don’t believe I’ve plugged Ann Bartow’s “Fair Use and the Fairer Sex” [...]
i’ve been too angry to post about south dakota — and really, too unsurprised and cynical to have anything particularly interesting to say — but some music has been particularly resonant to me the last few weeks watching the South Dakota legislators presume to regulate the personal lives and medical decisions of women. so here’s [...]
questionable authority reviews a pro-’intelligent design theory’ entry that describes a future history of the fabulous medical and scientific breakthroughs generated by ‘intelligent design theory’ and the abandonment of ‘Darwinism’. While the whole post is highly recommended, it was one of the commentors who really tickled my fancy. Responding to the future history’s [...]
yet more depressing news:
iraq: where people keep dying. A friend recently met with her family who lives in Baghdad, who reported a) her elderly aunties regularly have laser sightings trained on them by US soldiers; b) her cousin’s cousin was recently shot & killed by US soldiers; c) they still don’t have power & [...]
I never cease to be astonished by how smarmy politicans can be: today, leaders in the Smarm Community, the anti-choice people (’pro-lifers’). The latest RU-486 story in the NYT, sensationalistically titled “2 More Women Die After Abortion Pills”, covers two recent RU-486 deaths (two, for a total of five; four of which were [...]
others speak so i don’t have to:
Liberals vs. Radicals, copyright version - Seth Finkelstein weighs in on Derek Slater’s plea for copyright critics to unify.
on ratzinger’s past & present: jeanne of bodyandsoul explains what’s so troubling about Ratzinger
and other things i’ve read recently:
Nyarlathotep’s Miscellany - discussing what choice means for minors
the conscience clause
guy [...]
“Why can’t I make my own decision?” A 13-year-old girl in Florida who has been making her own decisions about sex thinks she should also be able to make her own decisions about whether she ought to carry a pregnancy to term. The girl, in DCF custody, notes that “It would make no sense [...]
carpetbagger report cites to an editorial in the Miami Herald, from Glen Harold Stassen and Gary Krane, on abortion — looking at statistics that show that abortion rates, which had been declining, have increased since George W. Bush took office with his anti-choice rhetoric, lack of sex ed, and Mexico City policy.
