Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Rick Santorum thinks pregnancy through rape is God's gift? Seriously?

Rick Santorum thinks pregnancy through rape is God's gift? Seriously?: "Invoking God's will as a supporting argument to his position on abortion hardly fits with the constitution he claims to uphold

As a lapsed Catholic turned atheist, a staunch feminist and someone who has a strong general aversion to sleazy, disingenuous men, I was shocked yesterday to find myself feeling something like respect for Rick Santorum, Pope Benedict XVI and Piers Morgan all in the space of three minutes.

The three minutes in question are a clip from Morgan's interview with Santorum on the former's CNN talk show. In it, Santorum declares that even if his own daughter were raped – a hypothetical scenario both men manage to discuss with remarkable calm – the Roman Catholic presidential candidate would maintain his adamantly pro-life position regarding abortion.

I sincerely feel a tiny, grudging mote of respect for that degree of consistency. As anti-choice zealots go, those who will take the "baby killer" argument to its extreme appeal to me slightly more than those who can say with a straight face that abortion is murder, except when the woman didn't want to have sex...."

George Carlin on Abortion & Conservatives

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Talk About Bad Incentives

Encrypting Your Hard Drive No Longer Works Against Federal Prosecution

Encrypting Your Hard Drive No Longer Works Against Federal Prosecution: "Sometimes common "street smarts" fail you. Like when you ask the guy who's selling you drugs if he's a cop. Or when you encrypt your hard drive and refuse to unlock it for prosecutors while citing the self-incriminating clause of the Fifth Amendment.

A federal court judge has just ruled that being forced to decrypt one's hard drive during prosecution does not violate the defendants's Fifth Amendment rights. The ruling stems from a case against Ramona Fricosu, who is charged with mortgage fraud. She has refused to decrypt the contents of her hard drive arguing that doing so would require her to essentially testify against herself...."

Indecision 2012 - The Gingrich Who Stole South Carolina


Monday, January 23, 2012

Motivated In Ohio: Media Matters Goes Light Bulb Shopping

Motivated In Ohio: Media Matters Goes Light Bulb Shopping

Apple's Foreign Suppliers Demonstrate Widespread Scamming and Horrific Abuse of Employees

Apple's Foreign Suppliers Demonstrate Widespread Scamming and Horrific Abuse of Employees: "Apple's bombshell report on its suppliers shows anti-employee practices as common as iPods. White collar criminologist William K. Black investigates.

Apple has released a report on working conditions in its suppliers’ factories, highlighting a form of control fraud (fraud in which the head of a company subverts it for personal gain) that criminology has identified but rarely discussed. I write overwhelmingly about accounting control fraud because it drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. The primary intended victims of accounting control frauds are the shareholders and the creditors. Other private sector control frauds target customers (e.g., George Akerlof’s 1970 article on “lemons”), and the public (e.g., the unlawful disposal of toxic waste, illegal logging, and tax fraud)....."

Goldman Sachs Anti-Recruitment Session at Princeton University - Mic Check!



It's Class Warfare!

Member Of 1% Reveals The Actual Truth About Job Creators

Legal Fiction

Tea Party Jesus: Sermon on the Mall



Sunday, January 22, 2012

Start a 1-Acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead

Start a 1-Acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead: "Everyone will have a different approach to keeping a self-sufficient homestead, and it’s unlikely that any two 1-acre farms will follow the same plan or methods or agree completely on how to homestead. Some people like cows; other people are afraid of them. Some people like goats; other people cannot keep them out of the garden. Some people will not slaughter animals and have to sell their surplus stock off to people who will kill them; others will not sell surplus stock off at all because they know that the animals will be killed; and still others will slaughter their own animals to provide their family with healthy meat.

For myself, on a 1-acre farm of good, well-drained land, I would keep a cow and a goat, a few pigs and maybe a dozen hens. The goat would provide me with milk when the cow was dry. I might keep two or more goats, in fact. I would have the dairy cow (a Jersey) to provide the pigs and me with milk. More importantly, I would keep her to provide heaps and heaps of lovely cow manure to increase my soil fertility, for in order to derive any sort of living from that 1 acre without the application of a lot of artificial fertilizer, it would have to be heavily manured....."

The Awful Reasons Teen Moms Didn’t Use Birth Control

The Awful Reasons Teen Moms Didn’t Use Birth Control: "Results of a new survey show a dearth of knowledge of basic human biology among America's teens, especially when pants are off and hormones are running high. How bad is it? About half of the teens who got pregnant while not using any form of birth control say they didn't contraceptively arm themselves because they didn't believe that it was possible for them to get pregnant. Another quarter didn't wrap it up because their partner pressured them to go au naturel. Oh, brother.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey compiled answers from 5,000 of teenage girls who experienced unplanned pregnancies and gave birth between 2004 and 2008. Some of the findings are encouraging, in a glass half full sort of way; for example, only 13% of teen moms cited difficulty obtaining birth control as their reasoning for not using birth control. Good! But now, for the bad: about half of the girls surveyed say they weren't using any sort of birth control. And their reasons for eschewing safe sex are depressing as hell......"

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms



The Government