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Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 03:30
Remember the 10 year old girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion? And they tried to prosecute the doctor who helped her? Well:  Indiana’s attorney general has dropped a lawsuit that accused the state’s largest hospital system of violating patient privacy laws when a doctor told a newspaper that a 10-year-old Ohio girl had traveled to Indiana for an abortion. A federal judge last week approved Attorney General Todd Rokita’s request to dismiss his lawsuit, which the Republican had filed last year against Indiana University Health and IU Healthcare Associates, The Indianapolis Star reported. The suit accused the hospital system of violating HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and a state law, for not protecting patient information in the case of a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to Indiana to receive abortion drugs. Dr. Caitlin Bernard ‘s attorneys later that she shared no personally identifiable information about the girl, and no such details were reported in the Star’s story on July 1, 2022, but it became a flashpoint in the abortion debate days after the U.S.
Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 03:06

“Is My Cat a Prisoner? And Other Ethical Questions About Our Pets.” — Headline from The Cut’s recent Pet Ethics issue.

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“Is It Bad That I Stopped Loving My Cat After I Buried Him in the Mi’kmaq Burial Ground, and He Came Back Wrong?”1

“Am I Forcing My Dog to Rescue My Son from Wells?”2

“Why I Wish I’d Loved My Puppy Less, So He Didn’t Grow Up to Be the Size of a Literal House”3

“Our Dog Loves Our Children. So Why Shouldn’t She Act as Their Full-Time Nanny?”4

“What Does Your Vet and His Parrot Receptionist Really Say to Your Pet Behind Your Back?”5

Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 00:30
Corporate capitalism too Sociologist Jessica Calarco (“Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net“) believes that one reason we cannot have nice things, The Ink explains, is “because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal.” That system is not just propped up by cheap labor, but by women’s labors specifically: The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market.
Created
Thu, 15/08/2024 - 00:13
As a subject, economics seems to have a fear and disgust of thinking about philosophy and methodology that might be described as Freudian. While other social scientists’ obsession with minute discussions of their methods and rhetoric, standards of proof and what they hope to achieve might be thought of as pathological in another way, the […]
Created
Wed, 14/08/2024 - 23:27
You are reading this because Mr. Sauce, Esq. pointed out I didn’t do a single Wiener Wednesday this summer. And I want to give him a hearty thanks because, however neglectful I’ve been to the blog, I couldn’t let this year pass without an addition to the Wiener Wednesday archives. It would be wrong. Plus,Continue reading WIENER WEDNESDAY: 203. Stuffed Franks
Created
Wed, 14/08/2024 - 23:00
WTFness at the NYT The spouse’s sharp eyes picked out a detail in a New York Times account of Ukraine’s surprise counterattack last week that sent its forces over the border into Russia: Ukrainian troops sliced easily through a thinly defended border, pushing tens of miles into Russia and shifting the narrative of the war after a glum year in which Ukraine had struggled, often in vain, to hold back Russian advances across its eastern front. By Monday, Ukraine’s commanding general had told President Volodymyr Zelensky that his troops held 390 square miles of territory in Russia’s southeastern Kursk region. Two dozen settlements were overrun. You take some of our land, Vlad? Fine, we’ll take some of yours. But that account from Monday is not what raised the wife’s ire. It was the story in Tuesday’s The Morning briefing by German Lopez on what Ukraine hoped to gain from the incursion: to “divert Russian troops from strategic locations,” to improve Ukrainian morale, to impress Washington, and “to shore up support abroad“: Kyiv has relied on aid from Western nations to defend itself.
Created
Wed, 14/08/2024 - 22:00

Let us go then, youse and I…

Do I dare
Distoib the universe?

In the room the women come and go,
Talking of Larry, Curly, Moe…

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…
You knucklehead! That’s not coffee—it’s gunpowder!

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!

The yellow fog…
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
Zzzzz—mimimimimimi—zzzzz—mimimimimimi…

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us—
Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop!
—and we drown.

Created
Wed, 14/08/2024 - 20:04
I spent yesterday evening watching Agnieszka Holland’s remarkable film “Green Border” which has just been released to streaming in the UK after spending about 30 seconds in cinemas. The episode that provides the film’s context is the 2021 decision of Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus and Putin’s puppet, to make use of refugees as a […]