Category: Media and Culture,

Reality Winner is serving 5 years in jail for leaking one document. Her mother says she’s being silenced

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

A US Air Force veteran, was sentenced to prison for more than five years in August 2018 as part of a deal in which she pleaded guilty to leaking a classified NSA document providing details of a 2016 Russian cyberattack on a supplier of US voting software.

…Winner, 27, who worked in the US Air Force’s drone program, is serving the longest sentence ever given to a journalistic source by a federal court, according to the Department of Justice.

…The government secured Winner’s conviction under the World War I-era Espionage Act, though prosecutors do not call her a spy, and in her plea agreement, government attorneys recognize that the document she leaked was sent to a news outlet rather than a foreign adversary.

…Winner-Davis said her daughter should never have been charged or convicted under the Espionage Act. “She’s not a traitor. Reality served her country,” she said. “She protected and defended us.”

“What did she release? She released something that actually helped us to defend ourselves against an attack by Russia,” she said.

…”It was very frustrating for her, day after day, to hear the news, to know that the country was struggling with not knowing the truth, and then seeing that she had the truth right there … in front of her on her desk.

“She printed that document out and she kept it on her desk for a couple of days before sending it. This is not something that she just did on a whim … in her mind, this was the right thing to do for America. This is what needed to be done.”

…”She has paid the price, but I wouldn’t change what she has done because I think that what she did was noble, and I think that what she did was patriotic.”

Reality Winner is serving 5 years in jail for leaking one document. Her mother says she’s being silenced – CNNPolitics

hmmmm

Abortion law: Republican and conservative women don’t all agree

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,Leave a comment

“Republicans don’t have fewer abortions than Democrats or liberals or anarchists or communists. It’s that our political rhetoric paints people who have abortions as largely the same – poor women, young women, irresponsible women, women who hate children,” said Amanda Reyes, president of the Yellowhammer Fund, which provides funding for women seeking access to any of Alabama’s three abortion clinics. “It’s gotten us to a point where we can’t see the fact that we’re all having abortions, and we’re doing it for reasons we personally think matter – and that’s all that matters. Pro-life women are having abortions, too.”

…Polling shows about a third of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center, and more than half of Republican women support keeping Roe v. Wade, according to a poll in 2018 from the nonpartisan public opinion research firm PerryUndem. Nearly 90% of voters say they would support a friend or family member if they had an abortion.

…Roberts had five more children (though she eventually split from her husband) and considered herself anti-abortion until the day she found herself in a Planned Parenthood clinic seeking an abortion. An ultrasound revealed her pregnancy was not viable, and she was told she would miscarry. 

“I realized then I’m not actually better or different,” she said. “I was sitting in the waiting room with all of these women who were just as scared as me. None of us looked like we wanted to be there. Some looked ready to get it over with. Life brought us to be at this spot, on this day, and it wasn’t a value judgment.”

Roberts co-founded the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, an organization that helps fund abortion access in Mississippi, primarily serving low-income black women. Mississippi has one abortion clinic. 

Roberts said most of the women she takes calls from are religious. 

Abortion law: Republican and conservative women don’t all agree

hmmmmmmmm

Trump quietly shuts down HIV cure research to appease the religious right

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Science and Stuff,Leave a comment

A “pause” on research that uses aborted fetal tissue, something Christian conservatives strongly oppose, was announced by the Trump administration this past September. The move will affect numerous biomedical research programs.

Congressional Republicans have tried to ban all fetal tissue research for years to appease the religious right. 85 Republican House members wrote a letter to the head of the FDA asking for a ban on fetal tissue research shortly before the “pause” was announced.

…Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division that would handle complaints from health care providers who did not want to take part in an abortion or treat transgender people.

Trump quietly shuts down HIV cure research to appease the religious right / LGBTQ Nation

Aggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Kansas Supreme Court: Abortion now a constitutional right in state

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Local Interest,Leave a comment

The court said the Kansas Constitution gives women the right to make their own decisions regarding their bodies. That means abortions would be legal in Kansas even if Roe v. Wade is reversed at the federal level.

“Our Supreme Court had not made a ruling in that regard until today,” said Robert Eye, a lawyer who represents two abortion doctors in the Supreme Court case.

Kansas Supreme Court: Abortion now a constitutional right in state

hmmm

Beyond Romantic Advertisements: Ancestry.com, Genealogy, and White Supremacy

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Race,Leave a comment

In the past year, Ancestry changed its search engine to detach the history of slavery from basic genealogical inquiries. When searching for an individual’s name, Ancestry.com stopped including results from the 1850 or 1860 United States Census Slave Schedules.

…Before this change occurred, Ancestry.com subscribers would often have to face the uncomfortable fact that their family kept others enslaved. …Attempting that research today would hide this distressing (though important) aspect of [a] family’s history.

The search engine functions to hide both slave ownership and enslaved people from the eyes of contemporary genealogists. 

…Even if a casual observer did suspect a family history of slave ownership and had the inclination to then search the slave schedules themselves, they found the schedules no longer searchable by name on Ancestry.com. 

…While Americans who are descended from enslavers are now less likely to discover the full truth of their family histories, this change also presented similar difficulties for professional historians. The 1860 Slave Schedule represents the gold standard among Civil War historians wanting to establish whether someone owned another human being. 

…These recent issue with the census slave schedules do not appear to be a conspiracy to hide slave ownership, but instead the byproduct of trying to please a small group of customers without thinking through the societal ramifications of those choices. …The tech world is overwhelmingly populated with white men. Diversity isn’t just about doing the right thing morally—although perhaps that should be enough. It is also about making certain that products function well and don’t accidentally reinforce racial disparities by privileging one group’s search for the past over that of another.

…Bad historical knowledge can lead modern inequities to appear as solely the fault of the impoverished and not the product of centuries of discrimination. In this twisted world view, affirmative action can be understood as reverse discrimination because historically created inequality does not appear to even exist. Denying the existence of institutional racism, produced by a long history of oppression, serves to maintain inequality today. The danger of hiding slavery’s extent, horrors, and legacy is that it leads Americans to fundamentally misunderstand why racism remains such a problem. And you can’t solve a problem if you do not understand its roots.

Beyond Romantic Advertisements: Ancestry.com, Genealogy, and White Supremacy – AAIHS

sigh…

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America into Something akin to Soviet states.

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

A century of evidence from around the worldshows that coercive reproduction policies correlate weakly with actual fertility rates. The fact is that women’s decisions about family size are based on material realities. When basic food supplies are scarce (as in Romania in the 1980s), women will risk their lives having back-alley abortions, for fear of lacking the means to care for a child. Where paid parental leave and childcare are absent or prohibitively expensive, as they are in the US, women will make similar economic choices, regardless of the laws on the books.

After communism, Romania’s people recognized that democratic societies have a responsibility to guarantee women’s bodily autonomy, and to respect the right of all citizens to make their own decisions about whether and when to start or add to a family. It is odd that in the “land of the free,” one of the major parties would emulate a communist dictator.

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America by Maria Bucur & Kristen R. Ghodsee – Project Syndicate

hmmmmm

Woman whose rapist was granted joint custody of child speaks out – CBS News

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Chick Stuff,, Modern Parenting,Leave a comment

Woman whose rapist was granted joint custody of child speaks out – CBS News

Agggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Why the fuck can people who are involved with out in-justice system fucking THINK?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The judge who made the original ruling should be in jail.