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- Dr. George Tiller, murdered three years ago today by an anti-choice fanatic. (via iamdrtiller)
I can’t believe it’s been three years.
(via whitedenial-ontrial)
(via whitedenial-ontrial)
LOVE THIS!
(Source: laprima510, via quoilecanard)
By Glenn Greenwald
This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Willie J. Parker, an obstetrician based in Washington, D.C., didn’t always perform abortions. He’s a Christian from Birmingham, Ala., who initially refused to even consider the procedure.
But about halfway into his 20-year career, he changed his mind. Now, he’s one of those rare doctors who is willing to push the limits and provide abortions at 24 weeks of pregnancy. That places him among only about 11 percent of all abortion providers who will do the procedure that late in the second trimester.
Click through to read more.
“Q. Explain why limitations on abortion trouble you.
A. It forces women to take into account the sensibility of people who don’t have firsthand information about what the circumstances are in that woman’s life. It creates a duty and obligation for a woman to make her decision in a time frame acceptable to people other than herself. That time frame may or may not be realistic, and it fails to take into account the complexity of decision-making when it comes to abortion.
As people sit around, and theorize and debate about what should be a reasonable or common ground, the voices of the people who are most affected by this decision are lost. They aren’t represented in these dialogues. Their specific realities don’t count.
So conversations that feel like progress actually end up with restrictions in place on women in desperate circumstances. They don’t reduce unintended pregnancies, they don’t create more access to medically accurate sex education and modern forms of contraception — but they do result in restrictions and rules that push women to desperate measures.”
YES. FUCKING YES EVERYWHERE.
READ THIS.
(via whitedenial-ontrial)
Right now, my cat, Elle, stares out the window, blankly, watching the cars. We are both waiting for the mail. Although she doesn’t know it, a letter that should be in the post today will change her life, as it will change mine. Calmly, with elegance, Elle sits, staring. I am fidgeting at every sound.
It was within my luck that I was liberally educated. It is a trying luck, of sorts. The kind of luck that swings back and forth between good and bad, not out of its nature, but out of the nature and system of the world.
Spending a year in an educational system that was set up to indoctrination and alienation has rendered the fire that once resided in my chest to mere coal. It is a system, not set up to kill, but to have the person slit their own wrists out of despair. It sets up the acceptance of hopelessness and the status quo. It creates too many obstacles when asking questions, thus silence is the only option because exhaustion sets in. Where there should be guidance, support and opportunity, there are shackles and chains. Education should never be mixed with fear for that in indoctrination and manipulation.
The world is set up this way, the status quo is set on self destruct, but we’re all too entertained or too tired to change it. Those who try perish in the struggle, or give in and live in mediocrity.
I am drowning in too many books and not enough knowledge. I am cursed with the memory of a joy that was unending and a sense of hope, that I prayed wasn’t false. One does not lose their liberal education unless it never truly set in. Thus this darkness, however black, is momentary. Those words written by Mills, or Plato or hooks are still true, even if they go unread for a while. Perhaps being liberally educated doesn’t mean that there is no time of hopelessness, but that hopelessness must be gallantly experienced. The melancholy of this systemic terror has taken its toll, no doubt. I stand here, masked in a mirror, refusing to be force feed a lie whilst having known the truth. While I was content to surrender for a time in the cave, watching the shadows too tired to resist their falsehood. My idle time has past and I no longer can stand for the mind-numbing puppetry.
Can I end this piece with optimism? Can I close by stating my reignited flame for education and social responsibility that is tied to it? Perhaps I can, the system didn’t kill me, it showed just want is at stake. I feel sorry for those classmates of mine that honestly think that education is boring and daunting. I wonder how anyone can live in such a culture that can commodity stardust then sell it as coal? How can anyone live in a world that treats life like an inconvenience and money like art? They do this because they never found out that they lived in a cave. At least I know that I was dragged back into one, which means I can climb back out.
(Source: bringtheruckuss, via moonghost)
According to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, U.S. troops willfully massacred an Iraqi family in the town of Ishaqi in 2006, handcuffing and then shooting 11 people in the head including a woman in her 70′s and five children ages five and under.
McClatchy is reporting that the soldiers then called in an air strike on the house to cover up evidence of the killings.
This account differs sharply from an official version of the 2006 incident, which indicated that coalition forces captured an al Qaeda in Iraq operative in the house, which was destroyed in a firefight. The WikiLeaks cable, however, corroborates accounts by Ishaqi townspeople and includes questions about the incident by Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
The cable is dated twelve days after the incident, which took place March 15, 2006. In it, Alston says that autopsies performed in Tikrit on bodies pulled from the wreckage of the farmhouse indicated that all of the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.
If true, this action, although not as egregious as the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, wherein 347-504 unarmed civilians were shot to death by U.S. forces during the Vietnam conflict, still speaks volumes about war and the atrocities committed for war’s sake.
Read the original article (warning: graphic images)
Isolated incident. Psh.
