Let’s rag on Alabama some more

These are all the Republicans who voted for the Handmaid’s Tale bill:

What do they all have in common? (Hint: there are only 4 women in the state senate, and they’re all Democrats.)

(Although, to be fair, a lot of white women voted for those asshats.)

Perhaps also relevant is that Alabama ranks #49 in the list of ‘best states in the US’. They beat Louisiana, which is nice, but Mississippi beat them, which ought to be a serious embarrassment. For comparison, Washington state is #1, Minnesota is #3.

Also, they ranked 50th in education.

Alabamians, I think you’ve been totally screwed over by your leadership. You can do better.

How stupid are these legislators?

When Senator Clyde Chambliss, a Republican, for example, was asked if the law would allow for incest victims to obtain abortions, he responded: “Yes, until she knows she’s pregnant.”

He did not elaborate on how someone would have an abortion before she knows she’s pregnant, outside of claiming, “It takes time for all the chromosomes to come together.”

Oh, yeah, 50th in education. It shows.

Rural billboards are the worst

I had to make a couple of road trips across the state this past weekend, and while I’m used to those awful Pro-Life Across America and Jesus billboards everywhere, I noticed that some of the Christians were stepping up their game. The fervent fanatics have popped up new billboards all along my route to Minneapolis, and a lot of them are from gospelbillboards.org. They’re insipid and stupid, like this one that’s anti-evolution.

Right. Drawing a big red X on an evolution illustration is convincing evidence. There’s also this common claim:

Babies and DNA! They must have been created. Except…every baby I’ve seen, I’ve got a pretty good idea of how they were made, and it didn’t require spontaneous generation or a magic zap.

This one is my favorite.

It’s not just Alabama

Don’t blame the citizens of Alabama exclusively for their misogynistic laws. This poison is everywhere. Even in Minnesota. Even in your local community. It’s happening here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota.

Our local movie theater has given in to pressure from church groups, like this rag-tag mob of regressive bible-thumpers, to host a showing of the movie Unplanned in town. I can’t blame the theater, they are trying to represent the views of the community, and they did turn down a request to put it in their regular week-long rotation and are instead showing a single Sunday matinee. Still, we’re going to have a showing of a dishonest anti-choice propaganda film right here in my town. We get a fair number of religious films at the theater (the latest was Breakthrough), and I’m not going to complain — I’m just not going to attend. Unplanned, though, is worse than that, because it lies.

It is the story of Abby Johnson, who was a director of a Planned Parenthood in Texas who had a sudden conversion, resigned, and became an anti-abortion advocate. That much is true. She did make a surprisingly abrupt about-face on abortion. Was her motivation principled and honest, though? Probably not.

Johnson’s departure from Planned Parenthood turned out to be a more complex story than it first appeared. At a court hearing for an injunction sought by Planned Parenthood to prevent Johnson from divulging confidential information to her new allies, two of Johnson’s former co-workers testified that she told them in the days before she resigned that she was afraid she was about to be fired. At one time, Johnson, who was named the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate’s employee of the year in 2008, seemed to have a promising future with the organization. By mid-2009, however, her relationship with her employer had begun to deteriorate. Salon reported that on October 2, Johnson was summoned to Houston to meet with her supervisors to discuss problems with her job performance. She was placed on what Planned Parenthood calls a “performance improvement plan.” It was just three days later, on Monday, that Johnson made her tearful appearance at the Coalition for Life. The following day she faxed Planned Parenthood a resignation letter, which mentioned nothing about a crisis of conscience.

She claimed that she was pressured by Planned Parenthood to increase the number of abortions at her clinic, which is just bizarre. PP does not push clients toward abortion, if anything, it’s the opposite — their purpose is to serve the medical needs of the women. There was an increase in the number of abortions at her clinic before her sudden departure, but it was because they were providing more abortion pills at clients’ request. Only 3% of the services offered at her clinic were abortions. Johnson claimed she had an epiphany while observing an ultrasound guided abortion, during which she claimed the fetus struggled to escape from the suction, which is absurd. The fetus is only a bit more than half a centimeter long at six weeks. It has mere bumps for limbs, it still has prominent branchial arches, it’s not motile at all.

Oh, about that abortion in the sixth week: Johnson claims it was a 13 week abortion. At that stage, the fetus is about 7cm long and does have small limbs which exhibit spontaneous movement. Planned Parenthood does keep very careful records of all procedures, of course, and there was no early second trimester abortion on the day she claimed — only one 6th week abortion. So she lied about that, too.

Of course, the movie is going to exaggerate and dramatize everything even further, and lie about the realities of abortion every step of the way — it’s made by the same people who made God’s Not Dead and God’s Not Dead 2, both of which were shown here in Morris, no doubt at the urging of the same ignoramuses who are bringing in this latest abomination from Pure Flix.

Some of us are planning some kind of response. I’ll be attending the movie on the 19th of this month (oh, the pain I suffer to be informed), and we’ve talked about having a post-movie discussion, although I suspect none of the proponents of religious stupidity will attend. We’re also hoping to bring in a showing of No Choice, an excellent documentary from Bill Moyers on why women need this right for a matinee showing the week after — the distributors have been helpful and willing, and the theater is considering helping us out — but I doubt that we’ll get much participation by the people who need the information most.

We are not going to adopt the histrionic scare tactics of the deplorable anti-abortionists, which does tend to limit the magnitude of potential reactions. So no, sorry, we’re not going to stand outside the theater with bullhorns. Does anyone have any other suggestions about what can be done? Unplanned is being shown on Sunday the 19th, while we’re hoping to show No Choice on Saturday the 25th.

The lying theocrats are winning in Alabama

The legislature in Alabama has passed an evil bill to deny women autonomy. This is a transparent attempt to do great harm to the citizens of their state, but only if they are women.

The Alabama bill, which passed 25-6, is even more restrictive than prior state-level abortion laws, and it includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions. Six of the Senate’s Democrats voted against the bill — one abstained — and they staged a filibuster into Tuesday night after debating the bill for more than four hours, with senators discussing the role government should play in legislating what a woman can do with her body and the definition of life.

After a Democratic amendment to the bill that would have provided exceptions for victims of rape and incest failed 21-11, Democrats railed against the prospects of young crime victims having to carry the resultant fetuses to term and having to then live with their assailants’ children for the rest of their lives.

It’s a purely Republican bill, promoted by dumbass Republican men. They fought fang and claw against any exceptions, any amendments, and also shot down an amendment that would have required the state to pay for the medical bills of unwanted babies for three years. This is not pro-life. It’s pro-misogyny.

All those voting for the bill were men. All Republicans. When signed into law by Alabama’s governor, women who have abortions will face no sanction, but doctors performing them could face “10 years in prison for attempting to terminate a pregnancy and 99 years for actually carrying out the procedure,” BBC reports. The only exception is for saving the life of the mother.

There’s a deeper logic behind this: they want this law to go to the Supreme Court, because their plan is to use the stacked judiciary to over throw federal laws — they want to impose their godly will on everyone, in every state. They are not content to oppress only the women of Alabama.

During floor debate, Sen. Clyde Chambliss (R) led the effort for passage of the ban. Its purpose is, Chambliss said, “So that we can go directly to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe v. Wade.”

Apparently, there has been a surge of these kinds of bills all across the country. Abortion foes have been emboldened by the appointment of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and are confident that he’ll tip the balance in favor of religious tyranny. That, and that Trump has been busy packing the courts with incompetent ideologues approved by the Federalist Society.

This is one of the many ugly legacies of the last presidential election. Also note that these “pro-life” people are the ones cheerleading for us to bomb the people of Iran.

Now we’re all sad and alone

We just got back from dropping Skatje and Iliana off at the airport — they’re on the way home. Now I have to go back to being my usual sour, cranky, black-hearted self.

I snapped that picture after telling Iliana, after a long, unpleasant drive, that now she gets to go home to her daddy. I think she only understood one word of that, but it was the important word.

Would you pay $600 for a liter of water?

Yet another reason to break out the tumblers and guillotines.

If you read the review of various over-priced bottled water brands, you’ll discover there exists a profession called “water sommelier”. Yeesh.

Meanwhile, in Flint, Michigan…

Whales just want to say hello

Who wants to go swimming with sperm whales? Their sonar is so intense that they can kill animals with a focused click, but here are some free divers playing with them.

(The video overstates some of its inferences — you can’t predict higher brain functions from the presence of spindle cells, or simply from the size of the brain — but it’s still powerful stuff.)

That’s some adaptation they’ve got, and still we killed them to scoop out the oil in their heads.

5,000 year old crime

Well, this is a dreadful image. It’s a reconstruction of a mass burial in Poland from 5,000 years ago. It’s mostly women and children who were murdered.

The interesting thing about it, illustrated above, is that they did DNA analyses of all the bones and figured out the family relationships.

Evidently, these individuals were buried by people who knew them well and who carefully placed them in the grave according to familial relationships,” they note.

Based on their research, the authors gained a startling glimpse into the families’ relationships. For example, they discovered that four of the individuals were brothers, but did not all share the same mother – though the similarities in the two women’s DNA suggest that their mothers may have been related.

One of the mysteries in the grave is the absence of older males in the grave, except for one father. This has led the authors to suggest that they were the ones who buried the people in the grave, who are mostly women and children.

Based on the nature of their injuries, the authors suggest that the people in the grave were captured and executed, rather than killed during fighting. This would fit the broader context of violence between competing groups at the time, in which women and children were often taken as captives.

The forensic analysis of the nature of the crime is fascinating, but the picture of Neolithic family structure more so, and this was a terrible tragedy that struck these people.

Now we just need to track down the individuals responsible for this horrific act and bring them to justice.

Follow the money

We’ve been castigating Twitter and Facebook for providing a permissive environment that fosters the growth of fascists and Nazis — and that absolutely is a problem that needs to be addressed — but there’s one major player on the Internet who hasn’t been confronted quite as much. Sure, Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer has been shut down multiple times and is constantly struggling to find a stable host, and yes, Gab got shut down for a while, but they keep bouncing back. But 8chan, which might well be the root source of the persistent infection, never seems to have a hiccup. It just keeps going and going and going, fostering a toxic troll culture that occasionally erupts out of its petri dish to poison other environments. How does it do that?

All we need to do is look at who covers 8chan’s payroll.

What’s 8chan’s secret? It can all be traced back to its owner, Jim Watkins and his company NT Technologies. Watkins has created a mostly self-contained system where he hosts the 8chan domain without the help of third parties. And it’s allowed 8chan to remain on solid footing while its contemporaries struggle. While Watkins couldn’t stop Google from delisting 8chan from its search results, people who wanted to find it still knew where to go.

But Watkins still needs an outside source of cash to pay for the servers, bandwidth, and staff that keep 8chan running. A significant source of the site’s funding is Amazon.

Fascinating. Who would have thought America’s richest man, a multi-billionaire whose company has ruthlessly stomped all over all competition, might be a negligent slumlord who enables a slimy underground to fester? Inconceivable.

But that’s where a significant fraction of 8chan’s income comes from. They’ve cut themselves off from the sources that even give a marginal fuck to policing their output, which means they are isolated from vulnerable dependencies, and are getting by on a revenue stream from selling audiobooks through Amazon. They’re peddling total crap, but it’s enough to get the trickle of cash they need to maintain the site.

The site’s videos star attractive Filipina women who deliver pro-Trump news in heavily accented English. And at a time when most news sites obsess over generating traffic from Facebook, The Goldwater largely ignores that platform. Instead, everything it does is catered to the trolls, alt-righters, Trump sh*tposters, and other anonymous members of the internet’s most deplorable message board, 8chan.

8chan is living on ads for one product, their cheesy audiobooks, that is sold through one outlet, Amazon. They can do this because Amazon don’t care. There have been other occasions when people have noticed that Amazon continues to support hate sites despite all protests. Amazon is only about the money.

Watkins’ selection of Amazon as his financial lifeline to the outside world is not an accident. The company does not run away from websites that others deem toxic. When thousands of advertisers abandoned Breitbart after the right-wing website featured racist categories like “black crime,” Amazon continued to run ads on the site.

Of course they put up a policy that tries to look benign, but it’s basically a cover story that they freely ignore.

According to the policies it puts up on its own website, Amazon prohibits the sale of items that “promote or contain materials or activity that is hateful, harassing, harmful, invasive of another’s privacy, abusive, or discriminatory (including on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age).” This would seem to rule out Breitbart and 8chan. But when asked about the apparent contradiction, the company did not respond to a request for comment.

You know they just say that so they can quickly yank out anything that gets the attention of the media and that might harm the reputation (that is, profit) of the company. Well, the media just noticed 8chan is funded by Amazon deals. I’d like to imagine they’d do a fast PR move to protect the company, but they’re so big they don’t care anymore.

Maybe it’s time to break them up so a certain venal plutocrat named Bezos would have to care.