“Ohhhhhhh….” Maddie shook her head slowly from side to side as she awoke, her temples throbbing with every motion. “What happened?” She didn’t know if she asked the question out loud or in her head – either way, she didn’t receive an answer.
Her mind was fuzzy, but she remembered…blood. So much blood, and it had been everywhere. Why the fuck hadn’t anyone told her how much blood there would be? She hated the sight of blood, especially her own, and yet, she had been desperate enough to make her blood stream everywhere. She tried to move and groaned as the soreness between her legs reminded her why she was so fuzzed out in the first place.
She remembered when she found out she was pregnant – she was as regular as the sun, so when she had been a week late, she knew. Oh, sure, some of her friends said it was because of the stress – only face to face and in whispered tones. You had to be so careful of what you said these days, and you definitely didn’t want to put anything risky in writing – but Maddie had known. She couldn’t take a test because they had been banned, of course, but she could feel the alien being taking seed in her body as surely as if the little line had turned pink.
Maddie frowned. Was the line pink? Was it purple? She didn’t know for sure because hadn’t actually ever seen a pregnancy test – they had been outlawed when she was not seven or eight – but she had heard older women, friends of her mother, talk about sex when they didn’t know she was around. Even as a little girl, Maddie had been able to make herself invisible to the adults around her – a useful talent to have when she wanted to find out how life was in the old days. She couldn’t remember how many times she’d sat right outside the living entrance when Mrs. Wong had her friends over, and they would talk about how wonderful life had been before the Abortion Abolition Act of 2020. (Click for more of a living nightmare)
There is a dire psychological projection to the fraudulent war on fraudulent voting. Because the actual, real, not-imaginary examples of systematic voter registration fraud always bear a Republican stamp. Brad Friedman has the details:
The head of a firm which was paid some $50,000 by the Republican Party in Sacramento to sign up new Republican voters this year has “an extensive criminal history, including a prison sentence for stealing from a family she befriended and buying a van with funds stolen from a youth agency.”
Moreover, one of the employees that “professional con-artist” Monica Harris, the head of the GOP’s Momentum Political Services, hired to work with her at the firm, where she was paid per Republican registration, recently pleaded guilty to fraud charges in a multimillion-dollar mortgage scheme.
Yeah, but, you know — scary new black panther with a stick! And so on. The current career of James O’Keefe III can be summarized as a snipe hunt for evidence of rampant fraudulent voting. It’s a right-wing obsession on a par with the presidential birth certificate.
Using aerial and ground-based surveys, the team identified about 150,000 methane seeps in Alaska and Greenland in lakes along the margins of ice cover.
[...]
“If this relationship holds true for other regions where sedimentary basins are at present capped by permafrost, glaciers and ice sheets, such as northern West Siberia, rich in natural gas and partially underlain by thin permafrost predicted to degrade substantially by 2100, a very strong increase in methane carbon cycling will result, with potential implications for climate warming feedbacks.”
That trend line in the graphic is the sound of climate change getting worse — much worse, because methane has about twenty times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide.
While I disagree vehemently with the view presented herein, this video is a perfect example of free speech as applied in a boycott. Do this to Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors, however, and you may be accused of un-American behavior.
Where Amy Gutmann of the University of Pennsylvania explains why our government is built on compromise and why, without it, we are dead as a nation. Required viewing for those who still think the power lies mainly in the Executive Branch.
Sometimes you learn the strangest things in the most surprising places.
So CEO, author, and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer apparently gave a TED talk on income inequality that isn’t being posted yet. National Journal reports on a hot potato:
Hanauer’s talk “probably ranks as one of the most politically controversial talks we’ve ever run, and we need to be really careful when” to post it, Anderson wrote on April 6. “Next week ain’t right. Confidentially, we already have Melinda Gates on contraception going out. Sorry for the mixed messages on this.”
There can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.
It’s true that we do spend a lot more than the average family. Yet the one truly expensive line item in our budget is our airplane (which, by the way, was manufactured in France by Dassault Aviation SA (AM)), and those annual costs are mostly for fuel (from the Middle East). It’s just crazy to believe that any of this is more beneficial to our economy than hiring more teachers or police officers or investing in our infrastructure.
NJ updates that TED curator Chris Anderson has objections to the overtly political tone of Hanauer’s talk:
“But even if the talk was rated a home run, we couldn’t release it, because it would be unquestionably regarded as out and out political. We’re in the middle of an election year in the US. Your argument comes down firmly on the side of one party. And you even reference that at the start of the talk. TED is nonpartisan and is fighting a constant battle with TEDx organizers to respect that principle….
TED may be nonpartisan, but sometimes the facts themselves are partisan. For instance, how many times must Republicans bring the country to the brink of ruin over billionaire tax cuts to “prove” it’s their number one priority?
“Ohhhhhhh….” Maddie shook her head slowly from side to side as she awoke, her temples throbbing with every motion. “What happened?” She didn’t know if she asked the question out loud or in her head – either way, she didn’t receive an answer.
