Missouri tracked Planned Parenthood patients’ periods to control them.

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

According to the Star, the spreadsheet “was based on medical records the investigator had access to during the state’s annual inspection, also included medical identification numbers, dates of medical procedures and the gestational ages of fetuses.” It was created in an attempt to find so-called failed abortions, the reason state health officials are giving for refusing to renew the clinic’s license. State officials denied that the director of its health department requested the data, despite the spreadsheet being attached to an email entitled “Director’s request.”

…Missouri passed a law earlier this year forbidding abortions after the eight week of pregnancy, not even making an exception for rape or incest.

…The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the health and safety of unaccompanied minors who enter the United States,  …was tracking pregnancies among the cohort, putting such details as the length of their pregnancy and whether they requested an abortion on a spreadsheet. The office’s former head Scott Lloyd — who is writing a book about his antiabortion beliefs — read the spreadsheet on a weekly basis.

Missouri didn’t track Planned Parenthood patients’ periods to protect women. It was to control them. – The Washington Post

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The public deserves action regarding our insecure election systems

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Infrastructure and Transportation,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Privacy,Leave a comment

The software that is used to tabulate the ballots and generate the initial vote counts is one of the weakest links in our entire election process.

Currently, this software is supplied (and controlled) by private corporations. This creates a plethora of problems. For one, the software is proprietary, so it can’t be audited by the large numbers of software security experts, from university professors to hi-tech security firms. For another, the corporations are motivated by profits, which is actually at odds with providing the most robust solution possible.

The public deserves action regarding our insecure election systems – The San Francisco Examiner

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Keystone pipeline leaks oil in northeastern North Dakota

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Environment,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

State regulators were on the scene Wednesday afternoon, and they estimated that the area of the spill was 1,500 feet long by 15 feet wide. Glatt said some wetlands were affected.

…The company was still working to contain the spill Wednesday afternoon.

…It has experienced problems with spills in the past, including one in 2011 of more than 14,000 gallons of oil in southeastern North Dakota, near the South Dakota border.

In 2017, the pipeline leaked an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil onto agricultural land in northeastern South Dakota, in a rural area near the North Dakota border.

Keystone pipeline leaks oil in northeastern North Dakota – StarTribune.com

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World Series: Astros must pay a steeper price beyond firing assistant

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[The Astros]  finally stumbled upon the decision to fire assistant general manager Brandon Taubman for his expletive-laced tirade supporting an alleged domestic abuser directed at three journalists, all of them women, in the Astros locker room Saturday night after the American League Championship Series.

…In their Thursday statement, the Astros did say that they were wrong about this, and “sincerely” apologized to SI’s Stephanie Apstein, who exhibited the professionalism, grace and class to try to get a comment from the Astros Monday before writing even one word about this troubling incident, only to be trashed by the Astros PR people, who really should be joining Taubman in finding a new line of work.

Let’s go back to that Monday statement. The Astros called Apstein’s story “misleading and completely irresponsible,” then proceeded to make up a story to cover for Taubman. “We are extremely disappointed in Sports Illustrated’s attempt to fabricate a story where one does not exist.”

World Series: Astros must pay a steeper price beyond firing assistant

wow…. F’ the Astros

The women who fall into America’s white power movement

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 “Like 70 percent of the time, the women earn the money and the men do podcasts. And they do podcasts about how women shouldn’t have jobs.”

…”It was unconscionable for me to justify creating manipulative content to draw young women into an organization where they were going to alienate themselves from friends and family and open themselves up to predatory men,” she said.

…The movement emerged from the same parts of the internet as violently misogynist groups like incels, or involuntarily celibate men. She says, “I don’t think it’s even possible to have an alt-right movement without the underlying misogyny.”

Women recruiters in these movements are caught in a “really toxic stew of misogyny and self-loathing,” Reaves says. But at the same time, they’re morally implicated.

…Samantha and her former IE friend both say the alt-right was like a cult, in that it separated people from their families and friends and demanded total ideological adherence.

“Like any cult, they want to expose you to as much as they can, but not so much you just turn away,” the woman said. The one difference is that there’s no single leader who dictates the culture and doctrine. Instead that’s created and enforced by largely anonymous people on message boards and in chat rooms, each one trying to one-up the others by posting more cleverly racist and cruel jokes.

“It never was past me that this stuff was dark,” Samantha says. “You become so numb to it… I don’t know if I ever thought it was funny. I don’t know if I ever explicitly said it wasn’t funny.”

How women fall into America’s white power movement – CNN

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Romney on Trump

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“By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” Romney tweeted earlier this month.

In recent weeks, the senator’s acts of rebellion against the commander in chief have been flagrant: from publicly confirming “Pierre Delecto” as the secret identity he used to counter Trump on Twitter to bashing Trump’s Syria policy on the Senate floor to positioning himself on the front edge of any move by GOP lawmakers to break away and either censure the president or vote to remove him from office if the House follows through with impeachment.

Here’s the price Mitt Romney is paying for standing against Trump

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Romney’s big suggestion about Trump and Turkey

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[Romney] suggested Trump got bullied into the withdrawal by Turkey — and that he backed down.

“Are we so weak and inept diplomatically that Turkey forced the hand of the United States of America? Turkey!?” Romney said. “I believe that it’s imperative that public hearings are held to answer these questions, and I hope the Senate is able to conduct those hearings next week.”

…Most of the theorizing about what happened has focused on the idea that Trump got rolled by Erdogan, who has been pitching the idea that Turkey could take over the fight against ISIS in northern Syria for a long time. The possibility that Trump gave away the farm because Erdogan was particularly convincing or because of something else — Trump’s business interests in Turkey, his desire for Middle East withdrawals, etc. — is a well-trafficked theory among Trump’s opponents.

…Trump basically got told what was going to happen and essentially let Erdogan dictate the terms of a withdrawal. We are talking about a relatively small country forcing the hand of the United States and the supposed dealmaker in chief.

Romney’s big suggestion about Trump and Turkey – The Washington Post

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In Edward Snowden’s New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are Personal

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Snowden, of course, is the former intelligence contractor who, in 2013, leaked documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, dispelling any notions that the National Security Agency and its allies were playing a quaint game of spy vs. spy, limiting their dragnet to specific persons of interest. 

…Sweeping up phone records of Americans citizens, eavesdropping on foreign leaders, harvesting data from internet activity: For revealing these secret programs and more, Snowden was deemed a traitor by the Obama administration, which charged him with violating the Espionage Act and revoked his passport, effectively stranding Snowden in Moscow, where he has been living ever since.

…The internet of the 1990s was a liberating space, he says, where adopting and discarding different avatars could open up possibilities for more authentic expression and connection.

…What does it mean to have the data of our lives collected and stored on file, ready to be accessed — not just now, by whatever administration happens to be in office at the moment, but potentially forever? Should such sensitive work be outsourced to private contractors? What entails effective “oversight” if the public is kept in the dark? When can concerns about “national security” slip into bids for unchecked power?

In Edward Snowden’s New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are Personal – The New York Times

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Edward Snowden: My Hope in Obama Was ‘Misplaced’

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Snowden also wrote that America had engaged in “self-destruction” after 9/11, “with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars.”

…“I fully supported defensive and targeted surveillance,” Snowden writes, but he called the government’s “bulk collection” of data hypocritical. According to The New York Times, Snowden felt like Obama was doubling down on the Bush administration’s surveillance programs.

Edward Snowden: My Hope in Obama Was ‘Misplaced’

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Trump wrongly tells female astronauts they’re first women to spacewalk

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“This is the first time for a woman outside of the space station,” Trump, who appeared to be reading from a script, said on the phone call. “They’re conducting the first-ever female spacewalk.”

In fact, the first woman walked in space in 1984 — the cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya holds that record. The NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to do so later the same year.

…”We don’t want to take too much credit because there have been many other female spacewalkers before us,” Meir, who was doing her first-ever spacewalk, said. “This is just the first time that there have been two women outside at the same time, and it’s really interesting for us. We’ve talked a lot about it up here, you know, for us, this is really just us doing our jobs. It’s something we’ve been training for for six years.”

Trump wrongly tells female astronauts they’re first women to spacewalk – Business Insider

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