Tag Archives: life

WATCH: GOP Lawmaker Compares Getting Abortion to Buying a Car and Picking Carpeting

by MaiYyxefhaon Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A bill is making its way through the Missouri House of Representatives that would require women seeking abortions to undergo mandatory ultrasounds and increase the waiting period for an abortion from 24 to 72 hours—measures that are necessary, in the words of the bill’s sponsor, because women should have as much information about pregnancy as he seeks out when he’s shopping for a car or picking out carpeting for his house.

Republican Rep. Chuck Gatschenberger made the comparison between cars and pregnancy while taking questions on the bill before the Committee on Children, Families, and Persons with Disabilities. In his remarks, captured on video, Gatschenberger noted that he has many sisters and daughters who put ultrasound images of their children on the fridge. An off-camera committee member then asked him, “Do you not trust your sisters to make their decisions for themselves?”

Gatschenberger replied:

“Well, yesterday, I went over to the car lot over here. I was just going to get a key made for a vehicle. And I was looking around because I’m considering maybe buying a new vehicle. Even when I buy a new vehicle—this is my experience, again—I don’t go right in there and say I want to buy that vehicle, and then, you know, you leave with it. I have to look at it, get information about it, maybe drive it, you know, a lot of different things. Check prices. There’s lots of things that I do, putting into a decision. Whether that’s a car, whether that’s a house, whether that’s any major decision that I put in my life. Even carpeting. You know, I was just considering getting some carpeting or wood in my house. And that process probably took, you know, a month, because of just seeing all the aspects of it.”

In a later exchange between Gatschenberger and Rep. Stacey Newman, a Democrat on the committee, Newman called his remarks “offensive to every woman in this room.” Gatschenberger replied to her that he wasn’t comparing reproductive health decisions to buying a car—and then went on to compare reproductive health decisions to buying a car.

Here’s part of the exchange:

Newman: Your original premise, that a woman who is receiving any type of care with her pregnancy, regardless of what decisions are involved, is somehow similar to purchasing a key for an automobile—

Gatschenberger: If you were listening to my explanation, it had nothing to do with that…In making a decision—not making a life-changing decision—but making a decision to buy a car, I put research in there to find out what to do.

Newman: Do you believe that buying a car is in any way related to any type of pregnancy decision?

Gatschenberger: Did I say that?

Newman: That’s what I’m asking you.

Gatschenberger: I did not say that. I’m saying my decision to accomplish something is, I get the input in it. And that’s what this bill does, is give more information for people.

Newman: So you’re assuming that women who are under care…for their pregnancy, need additional information that they’re not already receiving?

Gatschenberger: I’m just saying they have the opportunity, it increases the opportunity. If you want to know what this bill does, it increases the opportunity.

See the whole video here:

Jump to original: 

WATCH: GOP Lawmaker Compares Getting Abortion to Buying a Car and Picking Carpeting

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on WATCH: GOP Lawmaker Compares Getting Abortion to Buying a Car and Picking Carpeting

I Ate Bugs – And So Should You: 9 Reasons To Be An Entomophagist

by HollyA59bq Posted on March 28, 2014

View post:  

I Ate Bugs – And So Should You: 9 Reasons To Be An Entomophagist

Posted in FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on I Ate Bugs – And So Should You: 9 Reasons To Be An Entomophagist

Here Is a Wonderful Video of a 40-Year-Old Deaf Woman Hearing for the First Time

by JosefWOOZigzhlu Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Joanne Milne was born deaf and began to go blind in her twenties thanks to a rare genetic disorder called Usher Syndrome. Last month, at the age of 40 she underwent surgery to have cochlear implants installed. This video of her hearing for the first time in her entire life is the reason I can’t get any work done this morning.

“It might be a bit overwhelming at first,” the doctor warns before turning them on. That’s an understatement.

“Hearing things for the first time is so emotional from the ping of a light switch to running water. I can’t stop crying and I can already foresee how it’s going to be life changing,” Joanne says.

Her friends made her a playlist with one song for every year of her life. The first one she heard was John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Anyway, this is beautiful and amazing and, to be honest, I don’t even like that stupid John Lennon song but I want to listen to it right now on repeat for an hour.

Happy Friday.

(via Gawker )

See the article here:  

Here Is a Wonderful Video of a 40-Year-Old Deaf Woman Hearing for the First Time

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Is a Wonderful Video of a 40-Year-Old Deaf Woman Hearing for the First Time

5 Reasons K-Cups Aren’t OK for the Environment

by MakaylaGallegos Posted on March 27, 2014

Visit source:  

5 Reasons K-Cups Aren’t OK for the Environment

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 5 Reasons K-Cups Aren’t OK for the Environment

GOP Senate Candidate Cory Gardner Disavows His Support for Fetal Personhood—After Sponsoring a Bill Last Year

by VickiHazel Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Col.) has Democrats spooked. Less than three weeks after his late-in-the-game announcement that he would challenge Sen. Mark Udall (D-Col.), a poll from the left-leaning firm Public Policy Polling found Gardner trailing Udall by just two points.

But Gardner, a two-term congressman, brings plenty of baggage to the race, including his background as a fierce culture warrior. Among other attempts to limit abortion access, he co-sponsored a 2011 bill that would have changed the definition of rape under federal law, limiting abortions that could be covered under Medicaid to instances of “forcible rape.” So on Friday, Gardner took a step toward softening his image as a social conservative crusader by recanting his vocal support for fetal personhood laws, which would confer constitutional rights on fetuses and ban abortion from the moment of conception.

“This was a bad idea driven by good intentions,” Gardner told the Denver Post. “I was not right. I can’t support personhood now. I can’t support personhood going forward. To do it again would be a mistake… The fact that it restricts contraception, it was not the right position.”

What changed? Gardner says he “learned to listen” to critics of fetal personhood measures—something it couldn’t have hurt to have done before he co-sponsored a House bill that established a “right to life for every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization.” That bill, which Gardner signed last July, was named the “Life at Conception Act.” During his first run for Congress, in 2010, Gardner boasted of circulating a petition for a personhood ballot measure at his church. Coloradoans voted against that ballot measure—and a nearly identical measure in 2008—by a margin of 3-to-1 that year.

But their opposition didn’t register with Gardner until he faced an electorate that voted for Obama in the 2012 presidential race. Now, his eyes are open. “The voters of Colorado have spoken on this issue,” Gardner told the Post. “To me, that’s the end of it.” What a difference a tight Senate election makes.

Credit:

GOP Senate Candidate Cory Gardner Disavows His Support for Fetal Personhood—After Sponsoring a Bill Last Year

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GOP Senate Candidate Cory Gardner Disavows His Support for Fetal Personhood—After Sponsoring a Bill Last Year

Here’s Some Better Life Advice Than Richard Branson’s

by Ludie69E Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Richard Branson has a life tip for us all: “You only live one life, so I would do the thing that you are going to enjoy.” Tyler Cowen says, “The rest of the advice, more pedestrian, is here.”

Holy cow! What could possibly be more pedestrian than that? Is there any rich and successful person in the entire world who hasn’t given the rest of us this advice?

Now, in fairness, Cowen was referring to the other piece of Branson’s advice: have a sofa in your kitchen. “The truth is, so long as you’ve got a kitchen which has space for a sofa, and a bedroom, and a partner that you love, you don’t necessarily need the add-ons in life.” Uh huh. Can I translate this? “If you have enough money to buy a house with a ginormous kitchen that can comfortably accommodate a sofa, you’re probably doing OK.” If I tried to put a sofa in my kitchen, there would be no kitchen left.

I know I’m being cranky, but I am sick to death of rich people telling us to “follow our passion” or something similar. (In a 10-part list, Branson repeats this advice in five different forms.) Some of us, of course, are lucky enough to get to do that. I’ve come pretty close, for example. But for most of us, this is a recipe for going broke. That’s because, sadly, the world tends to assign a low market value to most of our passions.

Here’s some better advice: try to avoid stuff that you hate. I admit that this is less uplifting, but it’s generally more achievable and produces reasonable results. You might not ever get your dream job, or your dream house, or your dream partner, because that’s just the way the lottery of life works. But with a little bit of effort, you might be able to avoid a soul-crushing job, a two-hour commute, and an empty relationship. Maybe. It’s worth a try, anyway.

But honestly, most of us are better off saving our passions for our hobbies. This won’t get me invited to give any commencement speeches, but it’s still pretty solid advice.

Link to original:  

Here’s Some Better Life Advice Than Richard Branson’s

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Some Better Life Advice Than Richard Branson’s

Want to Be Left Alone? There’s An App for That

by Morona Jill Posted on March 20, 2014

See more here: 

Want to Be Left Alone? There’s An App for That

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Want to Be Left Alone? There’s An App for That

Science Deniers Are Freaking Out About "Cosmos"

by LauriBuzacott Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

If you think the first episode of the new Fox Cosmos series was controversial (with its relatively minor mentions of climate change, evolution, and the Big Bang), Sunday night’s show threw down the gauntlet. Pretty much the entire episode was devoted to the topic of evolution, and the vast profusion of evidence (especially genetic evidence) showing that it is indeed the explanation behind all life on Earth. At one point, host Neil deGrasse Tyson stated it as plainly as you possibly can: “The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.” (You can watch the full episode here.)

Not surprisingly, those who deny the theory of evolution were not happy with this. Indeed, the science denial crowd hasn’t been happy with Cosmos in general. Here are some principal lines of attack:

Denying the Big Bang: In the first episode of Cosmos, titled, “Standing Up in the Milky Way,” Tyson dons shades just before witnessing the Big Bang. You know, the start of everything. Some creationists, though, don’t like the Big Bang; at Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, a critique of Cosmos asserts that “the big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned.”

Fox

Alas, this creationist critique seems very poorly timed: A major new scientific discovery, just described in detail in The New York Times, has now provided “smoking gun” evidence for “inflation,” a crucial component of our understanding of the stunning happenings just after the Big Bang. Using a special telescope to examine the cosmic microwave background radiation (which has been dubbed the “afterglow” of the Big Bang), researchers at the South Pole detected “direct evidence” of the previously theoretical gravitational waves that are believed to have originated in the Big Bang and caused an incredibly sudden and dramatic inflation of the universe. (For an easy to digest discussion, Phil Plait has more.)

Denying evolution: Sunday’s episode of Cosmos was all about evolution. It closely followed the rhetorical strategy of Charles Darwin’s world-changing 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, beginning with an example of “artificial selection” by breeders (Darwin used pigeons, Cosmos used domestic dogs) to get us ready to appreciate the far vaster power of natural selection. It employed Darwin’s favorite metaphor: The “tree of life,” an analogy that helps us see how all organisms are living on different branches of the same hereditary tree. In the episode, Tyson also refuted one of the creationist’s favorite canards: The idea that complex organs, like the eye, could not have been produced through evolution.

The “tree of life” on Cosmos. Fox

Over at the pro-“intelligent design” Discovery Institute, they’re not happy. Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer writes that the latest Cosmos episode “extrapolated shamelessly, promiscuously from artificial selection (dogs from wolves) to minor stuff like the color of a polar bear’s fur to the development of the human eye.” In a much more elaborate attempted takedown, meanwhile, the Institute’s Casey Luskin accuses Tyson and Cosmos of engaging in “attempts to persuade people of both evolutionary scientific views and larger materialistic evolutionary beliefs, not just by the force of the evidence, but by rhetoric and emotion, and especially by leaving out important contrary arguments and evidence.” Luskin goes on to contend that there is something wrong with the idea of the “tree of life.” Tell that to the scientists involved in the Open Tree of Life project, which plans to produce “the first online, comprehensive first-draft tree of all 1.8 million named species, accessible to both the public and scientific communities.” Precisely how to reconstruct every last evolutionary relationship may still be an open scientific question, but the idea of common ancestry, the core of evolution (represented conceptually by a “tree of life”), is not.

Denying climate change: Thus far, Cosmos has referred to climate change in each of its two opening episodes, but has not gone into any depth on the matter. Perhaps that’s for a later episode. But in the meantime, it seems some conservatives are already bashing Tyson as a global warming proponent. Writing at the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters blog, Jeffrey Meyer critiques a recent Tyson appearance on “Late Night with Seth Myers.” “Meyers and deGrasse Tyson chose to take a cheap shot at religious people and claim they don’t believe in science i.e. liberal causes like global warming,” writes Meyer.

Actually, as Tyson explained on our Inquiring Minds podcast, Cosmos is certainly not anti-religion. As for characterizing global warming as simply a “liberal cause”: In a now famous study finding that 97 percent of scientific studies (that bother to take a position on the matter) agree with the idea of human-caused global warming, researchers reviewed 12,000 scientific abstracts published between the years 1991 and 2011. In other words, this is a field in which a very large volume of science is being published. That hardly sounds like an advocacy endeavor.

On our most recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Tyson explains why he doesn’t debate science deniers; you can listen here:

Read article here:

Science Deniers Are Freaking Out About "Cosmos"

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Science Deniers Are Freaking Out About "Cosmos"

Alabama wetland still infested with oil, four months after train accident

by Hyatt Monien Posted on March 17, 2014

Alabama wetland still infested with oil, four months after train accident

By

Public Herald

Cleaning up this oily mess turned out to be hard, so it looks like the railroad pretty much gave up.

The derailment and explosion of a train passing through Alabama wetlands in November helped bring attention to the dangers of hauling oil by rail. But the mess left behind after the explosion has been largely ignored.

The Associated Press recently visited the derailment site near the town of Aliceville and found “dark, smelly crude oil still oozing into the water.” Waters around the oil spill’s epicenter are lined with floating booms to help prevent the spread of surface oil, but environmentalists have detected toxic chemicals from the oil flowing downstream. And questions have been raised about a decision to rebuild damaged tracks without first removing all the oil that surrounded them. Here’s more from the story:

The isolated wetland smelled like a garage when a reporter from The Associated Press visited last week, and the charred skeletons of burned trees rose out of water covered with an iridescent sheen and swirling, weathered oil. A snake and a few minnows were some of the few signs of life.

An environmental group now says it has found ominous traces of oil moving downstream along an unnamed tributary toward a big creek and the Tombigbee River, less than 3 miles away. …

Environmentalist John Wathen, who has conducted tests and monitored the Alabama site for months for Waterkeeper Alliance, said Genesee & Wyoming railroad and regulators did the bare minimum to spruce up an isolated, rural site and left once the tracks were repaired so trains could run again.

“I believe they really thought that because it’s out of sight, out of mind, out in the middle of a swamp, that nobody was going to pay attention,” said Wathen.

Alabama officials told the reporter that they would install wells to monitor groundwater quality, but not until the “emergency” phase of the operation ends.


Source
Oil mars Ala. swamp 4 months after crude train crash; critics raise questions about oil trains, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

This article – 

Alabama wetland still infested with oil, four months after train accident

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Alabama wetland still infested with oil, four months after train accident

Owners of Green Homes Are Remorse-Free, Survey Finds

by EstelaPalfreyma Posted on March 13, 2014

Originally posted here: 

Owners of Green Homes Are Remorse-Free, Survey Finds

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Owners of Green Homes Are Remorse-Free, Survey Finds