quarkscrew

Why? A coupon, a credit card, a couple Cabernets too many, that’s why.

Want one? They’re free to friends of Quarkscrew!

If for some weird reason you would like to wear an advertisement for this blog, send me your snail mail address and I’ll mail you one.

(To theodd1btm@quarkscrew.com)

(I won’t use your address for anything else, promise!)

Posted in Admin, InterNet, weirdness

I didn’t find time to get back to reconstructing my original screed yesterday, but maybe that was luck, as I received this in my email in the meantime from The Progress Report:

The GOP Candidates’ War On Women’s Health Care Feb 15, 2012 | By ThinkProgress War Room Going After Birth Control is Just the Beginning

Disclaimer: I have not yet followed all the links for these statements. If experience is any guide, I’ll come across one or two instances of “Well, that’s putting it pretty strongly, bit of a stretch” but few or no actual falsehoods.

Now, these are all guys who are running in a Presidential primary, and there’s always a tendency to pander to the most ideologically intense party members in such a situation, because those are the ones who turn out for the primaries and caucuses. That said, with the exception of Mitt Romney they’ve all consistently held extreme views like this for a long time.

(Mitt hasn’t held *any* specific position for a long time, other than that people at his incredibly rarefied wealth level should pay less taxes than anyone else. On any other topic, if you don’t like Mitt’s position just wait a week or so.)

More importantly, these are plainly the kind of values that *do* turn out the most fervent Republican voters, or at least most Republican leaders believe they do, and so the GOP at the national and state levels are pushing this agenda.

There have been a slew of “personhood” initiatives, most recently the one badly defeated in Mississippi, which try to equate a single cell with a complete human being (which is plainly a religion-based determination). That’s a two-fer, since it would simultaneously outlaw both abortion and the most common forms of birth control use by women.

Then there are the attempts to make the rights to access abortion and contraception moot, by making the process of exercising those rights just too damn difficult and humiliating and time-consuming.

Examples of these now include initiatives by the “party of small government” to force women to undergo invasive, humiliating, unwanted and medically unnecessary vaginal-probe ultrasounds, watch those ultrasounds and give written or recorded testimony that they have done so, be subjected to mandatory (and in some cases medically inaccurate) government-scripted lectures by the attending physician, and *then* wait several days before having to return for the actual procedure… assuming that the clinic hasn’t had to close due to slashed funding in the meantime.

Then there’s the “conscience” initiatives to allow medical facilities from the hospital down to the local pharmacy to refuse to provide any contraception services, including emergency post-rape contraception, and to refuse even the most medically necessary abortions – and to be clear, some of these contain language making it permissible for a hospital to allow a woman to die rather than perform the procedure.

These are all political, governmental actions which impact women overwhelmingly, and they are all overwhelmingly owned by the Republican Party. (Though there are some conservative Democrats on board, they are very much the minority withing the Democratic Party). That’s what I meant the other day in making “It’s Official: Today’s GOP Hates Women” the title of that post.

What prompted me to write that post, though, was the news that every single Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee had voted against re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act. It still got out of committee on a strict party-line vote of 8-10, but that was a WTF moment for me. Preventing the abuse of women is now a partisan issue? How the hell did that happen?

Just as all the above can be argued as not so much a hatred of women per se but a an overwhelming love for forcing them to give birth as often as possible (and I’m still not sure in which category to include the several attempts to limit the definition of rape to only violent and forcible rape), this bizarre action was justified, to severely abuse that word, as being more about the GOP members’ other and deeper hatreds.

They simply didn’t want the protections afforded by that Act to explicitly include LGBT people or undocumented immigrant women, because those people don’t deserve protection against rape and sexual assault I suppose, and despite the huge backlog in processing rape kits they wanted to slash the funding for that and eliminate the Justice Department group that coordinates responses to domestic violence and sexual assault cases, I suppose because protecting against rape and sexual assault should not in their view be considered a priority of law enforcement by the Judiciary Committee.

So that was what I wanted to say, and somehow most of it got eaten by computer gremlins. I had a lot of links too, but hey, we’re living in the age of Google and all of this is very recently in the news, so if you’re interested do a search. Or you can get up a petition, I’ll hunt the links if enough people ask me to do it.

By the way, as a post-script: Today on Capitol Hill, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform assembled a panel (chaired by Rep. Darrel Issa, R-CA49) to discuss the birth control mandate in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The panel consisted of eight male religious leaders, all previously on record as being anti-choice and anti-contraception. None had health credentials. That’s right, a panel on women’s health issues that included no women and no health professionals.

It seems that to today’s GOP, a person’s rights – but especially a woman’s rights – begin at conception and end at birth. (Unless you have a lot of money of course.)

Posted in current events, government, Law, Politics, United States

“Good heavens!” I hear you cry, “I’m shocked, shocked to hear there is misogyny in the GOP!”

Well, fair enough. It isn’t as if Republican policies have been friendly toward women since about the late 1970s, when the party began vigorously recruiting fundamentalist ministers in a bid to become the go-to party of social conservatives, especially here in the South, building on the earlier Southern Strategy spearheaded by Richard Nixon of appealing to the South’s racial bigotry.

(They absolutely were earlier; the women’s suffrage movement around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries was far more a Republican than a Democratic movement, and feminists continued to be welcome in the GOP fold up until the 1970s. They were the party that led the Civil War against slavery, and continued to be a party that was at least as open to progressive views on race issues until the 1950s, when they turned their backs with a vengeance on those earlier enlightened attitudes. Were Abraham Lincoln and Ida Wells-Barnett summoned back from the Great Beyond they could sing a duet of “It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To.”)

In 1980 the GOP dropped support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and that marked their turn toward being the party that wanted women to be in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Especially pregnant.

EDIT: What the hell? This post was twice this long and full of links and stuff! Damn you, Internet! I have too much else to do to redo all that right now; I’ll try to redo the salient bits in a second post on the subject, tomorrow maybe.

Posted in Difference-making, Health Care, misogyny, weirdness

Today was Charles Darwin’s birthday in 1802. His theory of evolution by natural selection was one of those ideas that are simple and obvious in retropect, and yet it explains an incredible variety of phenomena.

Raise a glass to Chuck today!

Posted in History, Science

Yeah, I know, it’s beneath me…

Man, this freak show just goes on and on. Now Santorum is once again the not-Romney, and rather decisively so. It truly says something about the Republican base, primarily how base they truly are.

_
Maybe it’s that the US economy persists in improving, slowly but surely, which hurts Romney no matter how often he repeats the lie that Obama made the situation worse. Despite having to fight what Congressional Republicans call a focus on jobs, which somehow involved no job creation bills.

Shocker.

It did, however, involve all kinds of  other things not particularly to do with jobs, or the economy in any way other than a fanatical opposition to tax cuts for corporations and extremely wealthy individuals. (Tax cuts for people who live off paychecks, not so much.)

No, it’s been about the kind of thing Santorum loves, the religion-based opposition to women controlling their own reproduction, tilting the playing field in favor of Christianity, and hating on the gays.

Given the two recent pieces of good news on the gay rights front, marriage liberalization in Washington State and the Ninth District Court’s overturning of California’s Proposition 8 attempting to yank back those rights, I would expect that Santorum advantage over Romney to endure a while. As the forthright opponent of contraception he also has a ready-made issue to hand in the ruling that Catholic hospitals have to offer full services *if* they want the federal money (they can sell some Vatican gold if they want to refuse to do so).

Thing is, I don’t think Santorum is smart enough to fight that battle in freedom of religion terms only (which is a bogus argument, see preceding paragraph, but one that can be sold), without making people realize that yes, he seriously thinks contraception should be illegal.

As a former Catholic I’m well aware that official Church policy on contraception is not what Catholics generally support in reality, and outside of the most rabid Evangelicals I doubt many other constituencies relish losing the  ability to screw without risking pregnancy, especially if abortions are forced into the back streets again.

Posted in Catholic Church, current events, Health Care, Politics, Religion, Tea Party, United States

As everyone knows by now, the Susan G. Komen Foundation  For The Cure trashed its good name badly by bowing to right-wing political pressure, from within and without the Foundation itself, and cutting off the funding they had been giving Planned Parenthood to supply mammograms to poor women, because of the other services PP provides (such as STD screening and vaccines, contraception, and particularly abortions).

I’ve made small but frequent donations to the don’t-ask-her-weight pink gorilla in the cancer ward over the years, but no more. No, not even if they reverse this particular horrible decision; part of the blowback has been that many other highly questionable moves by the foundation have been brought to light, for example the “pinkwashing” of products known to be linked to cancer and other bad health outcomes. There are many other cancer fighting organizations to donate to, with less compromised agendas. PZ Myers of Pharyngula recommends the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Breast Cancer Charities of America, CancerCare, and the Cancer Research Institute, and I can’t better that list off the top of my head.

The airing of SGK’s dirty laundry is not the silver lining I refer to in the title though. The silver lining is the rush to support Planned Parenthood and make good the monies this despicable bit of politics has cost them, and in particular New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s offer to match dollar for dollar, up to up to a quarter million dollars, donations made directly to Planned Parenthood. To give double your money’s worth, use this link:

Posted in current events, Difference-making, Politics, Stupidity, United States

Yes, you are reading that map correctly: South Carolina got the second highest grade for K-12 school science standards, according to the National Center for Science Education!

Of course, these are standards not results, but at least we know what we’re supposed to be teaching! Especially in Old Testament Science!*

Seriously, it’s nice to read something positive about the place for a change.

*30 Rock reference, couldn’t resist.

Posted in Education, Science, United States

This is really getting on my nerves. Newt Gingrich proposes returning to the Gilded Age for child labor laws, financial regulation and environmental controls. He wants to go back at least to the 1950s for gay rights, reproductive rights, racial discrimination law, civil rights in general. People barely raise an eyebrow.

What’s the one thing he’s really being mocked for, the one idea that everyone’s cracking up over because it’s so crazy and stupid and out there?

He wants to bring space exploration and exploitation into the 21st century. He wants a permanent Moon base, built and maintained by the United States of America, the only country that’s been there so far.

Out of the whirling maelstrom of bad ideas that Newt Gingrich spews forth, the media has zeroed in on the only one that has a worthwhile core.

Why the hell don’t we have a permanent Moon base already? It’s been fifty fucking years since JFK set the challenge to safely land a manned mission there and bring it back, within the decade, and we did that with time to spare. We’ve had five damn decades of progress since then, developing new materials like carbon-fiber composites and aerogels and nanostructures, new sensors and power supplies and adaptive motors,  computer hardware and software developments jaw-droppingly more powerful and flexible. We’ve had half a shitting century of actual research and experience of space travel, of dealing with hard vacuum and hard radiation, extreme temperatures and accelerations, learning the failure modes of alloys, the subtleties of celestial navigation, the tricks and traps of building and maintaining structures in harsh and exotic conditions.

We’re roughly as far past the Apollo moon mission capsules, in calendar time, as they were past the Wright brothers’ wood-and-canvas prototype airplane. In terms of the accelerating technology curve, our technology would be indistinguishable from magic to Wilbur and Orville. Hell, it’s damn near that for those people who were adults when Armstrong made that one small step, just ask them! We carry phones that might as well be sorcerer’s periapts and think nothing of it, flying over the widest oceans is a matter of course, we treat all manner of medical conditions in outpatient clinics that would have killed our grandparents even with the best of available care.

Watching the Moon landing on television is literally one of my earliest memories. I grew up knowing humanity had visited another world; I cannot count the number of times I looked up at that serene silver face and felt the joy of that thought. I rejoiced in the robot missions too, seeing the sere sands of Mars, the titanic storms of Jupiter, the endless complexity of Saturn’s rings; I still sometimes think of Pioneer and Voyager on their endless outward journey beyond our solar system. The space program has enriched my life enormously.

Had you told me in the 1970s or 1980s that in the second decade of the twenty-first century people would be laughing at the ridiculousness of the very notion that America could build a permanent base on the Moon, I’d very likely have laughed in your face. I certainly wouldn’t have believed it.

Newt Gingrich is a megalomaniac, and a fool in many respects, and beyond question a cad who I would hate to see as President, but doesn’t it make you sad to think that that awful man is one of the few left with the faith in America to believe that we could do something like that, 50 years beyond Apollo?

How have we become so shrunken a people?

Posted in current events, History, Politics, Science, Technology, United States

See that big dark green patch, hanging like a huge booger off the country’s left nostril? I’m in the middle of it, on the Eastern seaboard. That’s the booger of American religiosity. The darker the green, the more people of that state consider religion to be important in their lives.

South Carolina is number three at 80%, trailing Alabama at 82% and Mississippi at 85%.

I suppose that technically that could mean that other people’s religion is important in your life, because they won’t leave you alone and stop trying to force their religious views on you through legislation and sheer saturation, in which case I’d be one of the 80%, but somehow I don’t think that’s what they meant.

I must admit, I’m surprised that Florida isn’t part of the booger, or at least as dark as Texas; every time I’ve been down there it seemed like the place was jam-packed with godidiots. Texas itself definitely would be, as my brother-in-law pointed out, were it not for the havens of Austin, San Antonio, Houston and DFW.

Utah, of course, is no surprise, and the Dakotas I already had enough reasons to avoid.

Here’s the top tens summary.

Edit: I meant “booger” throughout, not “bugger” – although the mistake has its own charms!

Posted in current events, Religion, United States