MoveOn has a petition to stop the appointment of Sam "Scalito" Alito to the Supreme Court. They're trying for 250K signatures in 48 hours; please take a moment right now and go sign it.

Briefly, here's why this matters so much:

Basic Rights for Working Families
As a judge on the Appeals Court, Alito issued a ruling to gut the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one in an emergency. The Supreme Court effectively overturned that ruling in 2003—but if Alito were on the Supreme Court he would pose a grave threat to the basic rights of working families.

Civil Rights (in the workplace and beyond)
In separate cases, Alito wrote dissenting opinions that would have made it essentially impossible to prove employment discrimination based on race or disability. He was overruled and harshly criticized by his colleagues, but if he were on the Supreme Court he could turn back the clock on decades of progress in securing civil rights for minorities and the disabled.

A Woman's Right to Choose
Alito's judicial record and published views make him widely regarded as a sure vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. The extremist anti-abortion group Operation Rescue (who opposed Harriet Miers) responded to Alito's nomination today by saying: "Roe's days are numbered...We are trusting that we are now on the fast-track to derailing Roe v. Wade as the law of the land." If Alito were on the Supreme Court, reproductive freedom would be in serious jeopardy.

Privacy and Civil Liberties
In one significant case, Alito wrote a dissenting opinion that would have allowed an unauthorized strip search of a woman and her 10 year-old daughter, in their own home, without a warrant. Again, Alito was outvoted and strongly criticized by his fellow judges, but if he were to join Thomas and Scalia on the Supreme Court he would pose a grave threat to civil liberties and individual freedoms.

This guy is a wingnut's wingnut, an American Taliban wet dream come true -- and he's up for Day O'Connor's seat. Let your representatives know you're watching, and you expect them to fight this and win.

This is fun: Frappr lets you stick a virtual pin in an online map to show where in the world you are. You can even attach a photo and a comment if you want to.

If no one signs my map, I'm gonna be all hurt. (Those of you with anonymity to protect, pick a location you'd like to be in.) I'll update the screencap if y'all show up.

Update: whee! I like the way that, if two or more virtual pins are stuck too close together to show up separately, the shadow darkens to indicate more than one entry.

From the ACLU:

This Tuesday the deadline expires on a public comment period for Plan B, a form of emergency contraception that would already be available without a prescription if it were not trapped in bureaucratic limbo for purely political reasons.

Although scientists overwhelmingly agree that Plan B is safe for over-the-counter use, the FDA has unconscionably put off making a decision on whether or not it will allow over-the-counter sales for over two years. Even senior members of the FDA support making the drug available without a prescription. In fact, Susan Wood, director of the FDA's women's health office for nearly five years, has resigned because of this delay.

To add your voice to the call for reproductive rights by posting a comment to the FDA website, click here.

More information is available here, here and here; FDA's weaselly bullshit here. This is the comment I sent:

I urge the FDA to approve Barr Laboratory's application to market Plan B over-the-counter. By continuing to delay a decision on this application the FDA fails to meet its obligation to promote and protect women's health.

How many women have suffered needlessly in the two years the FDA has been dragging its feet on this issue, in direct defiance of medical evidence and opinion (from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association, to name just three authoritative bodies who support otc access to Plan B)?

The current requirement for a prescription for Plan B is utterly ridiculous: emergency contraception must be taken within 72 to 120 hours after unprotected intercourse. What part of 'emergency' are you having trouble understanding? Do you require a prescription for snakebite antivenom? (Well no, of course not: men might get bitten by a snake.)

The decision to limit otc availability of Plan B to women seventeen years or older will do nothing but humiliate women who are already dealing with a traumatic situation. It smacks of pandering to the repressive, authoritarian, misogynistic religious right. So let's get away for a moment from the madonna/whore nonsense the fundies are peddling. Every year approximately 25,000 pregnancies occur because of sexual assault, and the prescription requirement serves as a major barrier to access to emergency contraception for many of these women. Would you, whoever you are reading this, be prepared to face any of these women and tell them, tough, you need a prescription: you have to find another doctor, answer more personal and painful questions, and find a pharmacy to fill your prescription, all in the next 72 hours? Plan B can immediately and safely remove the risk of unwanted pregnancy; what possible reason could there be for denying the victim of sexual assault this protection?

Finally, there can be no objection to Plan B on the grounds of opposition to abortion. Plan B is NOT an abortifacient; it prevents implantation¹. It is contraception, no different in functionterms of whether it causes abortion from a condom. Otc access to plan B will significantly reduce abortion rates.

More than 70 medical organizations and the FDA's own drug advisory committees support making Plan B available over-the-counter. Continued stalling makes it plain that the FDA is not an independent regulatory body but a political organization, not an advocate for citizen health and safety but a pliant tool in the hands of power.

Everyone should know about emergency contraception. You can learn what it is, how it works and how to get it from Back Up Your Birth Control and Princeton U's Emergency Contraception page.

¹ Update: oops. Although progestin does prevent implantation in some animal models, there is no direct evidence that it does the same thing in humans. What it clearly does do is prevent ovulation. This matters because sperm can survive up to five days in the reproductive tract, and a mature egg has a window of about 24 hours during which it can be fertilized. Note, though, that this can in no way represent abortion, since implantation does not occur until 7 days after ovulation.

How do I know all this? I read ema's post over at The Well-Timed Period. You should too. (Hat-tip: Prof B.)

Did you leave the FDA a comment yet? If not, please do.

The Last Post has sounded for the last digger to see active service: Evan Allen, 106, died last week and was laid to rest in a state funeral today. From the Australian:

Born in Bega in New South Wales in July 1899, Mr Allan enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy as a boy sailor at the outbreak of World War I when he was only 14 years old.

As an able seaman, he was a member of the crew of HMAS Encounter from 1915 until 1918.

He sailed in the Pacific and also in the Indian Ocean escorting troop ship convoys.

Mr Allan served in the Royal Australian Navy for 34 years and also saw service in World War II.

During World War II, he served at sea in the Royal Navy armed merchant cruiser HMS Moreton Bay, as well as at Flinders Naval Depot, as Piermaster at HMAS Ladava at Milne Bay, New Guinea, in 1944, aboard HMAS Australia and as an instructor at HMAS Cerberus.

Mr Allan retired from the navy in 1947 with the rank of lieutenant.

He had lived as a boy on a family property in Upper Brogo, NSW, and after leaving the navy returned to the land, this time on a small farm near Frankston, Victoria.

In 1999, Mr Allan received the 80th Anniversary Armistice Remembrance Medal, awarded to all living Australian World War I veterans.

He was also awarded the King's Silver Jubilee Medal in 1935, the King's Coronation Medal in 1937 and the Australian Centenary Medal for the 2001 Centenary of Federation.

Mr Allan ... is survived by his daughter Judith Blake and grandchildren Duncan and Philippa.

Thanks, mate.

"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."


Rosa Parks is gone. Kevin has the best title: Last Stop. Obituary from WaPo and another from NPR, profile by Time, Wikipedia entry. Got the picture from Jeanne, and added this to my wishlist in Mrs Parks' honour.


"Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others."

That is a photo, but it's a photo of the shadow KC cast as she sat in the front window. I didn't have time to grab the tripod so it was underexposed, hence the noise from altering levels and sharpening in PhotoShop. I'd prefer it sharp, I think, but I like it well enough this way.

That's roughly what Osedax mucofloris means. It's a new species of "zombie worm" that feeds on whale-fall (which may be the most self-explanatory piece of bioscience jargon ever). O. mucofloris was discovered on a "planted" whale carcass in the shallow North Atlantic, near Sweden, by a collaborative research team from the Natural History Museum, Tjärnö Marine Biological Laboratory and the University of Hawaii. Its only known relatives hail from whale carcasses in the deep (1500–3000m) northeast Pacific, but O. mucofloris can be grown in aquaria.

I swiped the image from BBC News, which has several more pictures; I got there via the AIR blog. Although, sadly, the research article isn't open access, that page contains the abstract and a neat video (direct link to .mov file).

But really, I just like saying "bone-eating snot-flower".

Jay Manifold has left the blogroll. He thinks it was excusable for US troops to position two dead Taliban facing Mecca and burn their bodies, then taunt onlookers:

Desecration

Jay Manifold

TIME dutifully reports that:

... as one Kabul cleric Mohammed Omar told newsmen, "The burning of these bodies is an offense against Muslims everywhere. Bodies are burned only in Hell."
I know just what he has in mind. <----------- (WARNING: Twin Towers 9/11 image!)

October 22, 2005 11:31 AM

(Warning added by me.) I don't remember, and can't be bothered looking up, whether Manifold had anything to say when the bodies of US contractors were desecrated in Falluja. If he did, I bet it wasn't self-righteous and approving.

Update: Jeanne has links to a transcript of the original broadcast and an interview with the photographer.

Posting has been patchy lately because I find myself starting up the same pattern that precipitated my recent hiatus -- too much to think about, too much to cover here, what to do what to do? I will have to find a better way to cope than throwing up my hands, but for now I just want to highlight this brief but important observation by Rafe Colburn:

One of the biggest mistakes people make in assessing their success or failure is discounting the effect of luck. People prefer to think that they are masters of their own destinies but the truth is that in large parts we are victims of circumstance. Yes, you should avoid problems that you see and make the most of the opportunities that you are presented with, but luck is the main factor. Heck, I was born a white male American with responsible parents who placed a high premium on education. Furthermore, I was born during the period of time when a natural curiousity in computers and the Internet could lead to a decent career. That alone makes me luckier than a huge majority of the people in the world. People are fools not to take those sorts of things into consideration.

Rafe is absolutely right. Failure to take such luck into account is a large part of what makes Republicans. I don't mean conservatives, I mean Republicans -- the modern kind, like Bush Mere: mean-spirited, narrow-minded, empty-hearted assholes with an empathy deficit that would be terminal if there were such a thing as abstract justice. Her son is another perfect, if extreme, example: born into privilege, shielded all his life by that same privilege both from hardship and from the consequences of his own mediocrity, he has nothing but contempt for anyone who does not share his good fortune, which he firmly believes is not fortune but the consequence of his own natural superiority. Less spectacular examples abound; as the spousal unit likes to say, this is why we can't have nice things.

I think your mind is probably twisting in the wind, too, dear reader, and there's cool piss dripping from your boots, too, and that rope is creaking above you too in the coming dark.

Stavros is writing again. Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy! Or, you know, go read.

Prof B has the goods, and because I'm busy I'm just going to swipe her whole post. Watch out for that first link if you're squeamish, it's a post-op picture of a mastectomy.

This is what breast cancer is about.

Here's a place to start doing research on the latest news related to breast cancer: disease, diagnosis, treatment.

Here is an animated explanation of how to do self-exams. Do them. If, like me, you forget, order yourself a free shower card to help remind you.

October 21 is National Mammography Day. Call and schedule a mammography for yourself. And/or encourage your wife, sister, girlfriend, daughter, to do so.

Wanna donate to breast cancer research or activism? Think Before you Pink.

That's my girl.

Ronnie Barker -- the inimitable Fletcher, the unmistakable Arkwright -- is dead at 76. Heart failure, with his wife of nearly forty years at his side.

*snif*

Together with Dave Allen, Barker formed much of my early ideas about comedy and is intrinsic to my personal definition of "funny". He was by all accounts a rather private individual, and I certainly have very little impression of the man behind the comedy. I'm still going to miss him.

(I nicked the picture from Wikipedia. Fletch would've wanted it that way.)

Amp has a post up about Portland city council pulling funding from the Salvation Army's Harbor Lights Program. While Amp is quite right that there is an urgent need to increase, not decrease, such resources, I'm not going to call for the head of Tom Potter just yet. (And to be clear, Amp's not asking anyone to do that -- just write Mayor Potter and Commissioner Erik Sten and advocate for improved emergency facilities for homeless women.)

A quick look around the internets turns up this story in the local news, which links to the city's plan to end homelessness and quotes counselors from a local intervention center as saying that

...while the city is doing a great job at moving women into permanent housing, there is always an urgent need for emergency shelters.

It seems there's also more to the story about Harbor Lights:

For some advocates, the continued presence of empty mats at Harbor Light represents their ongoing frustration with Portland's largest social service provider and symbolizes the city's inability live up to assurances it made last summer, when homeless women began showing up dead in Forest Park.

"I put my reputation on the line to get the funding for the women's Harbor Light shelter," said Chuck Currie, outreach director at the United Methodist Church and Goose Hollow Family Shelter, "and I really feel like they are failing to live up to their promises." [...]

"The Salvation Army has the ability to provide excellent service," Currie says. "So they can turn Harbor Light around. They have to want to, though. They have to look at this as providing service for homeless women who are often in danger rather than as padding for their budget."

(Those are very selective quotes, so go read the whole thing, and note that it's from 1999.) On top of that, the Salvation Army has a history of active homophobia and discrimination, so it's an organization I'd be cautious about funding with public monies. (Note, though, this story about the Canadian branch behaving more responsibly, so there's at least an argument for a sunshine policy instead of a boycott.)

In any case, what seems clear in all of this is that Portland needs more, not fewer, emergency shelters for homeless women. Amp makes the point that Potter and Sten do listen, and do have their hearts in the right place. Here's the text of my letter:

I read with concern that the city council has withdrawn its support for the Harbor Lights overnight emergency shelter program. While the city's long term plan to end homelessness certainly seems sound, and appears to be generating postive feedback from the relevant experts, I am very concerned that short-term, urgent needs may be overlooked in a ten-year plan. In particular, homeless women and children are an extremely vulnerable population who often require dedicated facilities, and I do not know of any other place for them to go for emergency shelter in Portland. If I have the figures straight, the city provides thirty such emergency beds for well over a hundred homeless women.

I would appreciate hearing back from you as to what plans are in place to provide for the immediate, urgent needs of homeless women and children in the absence of the Harbor Lights beds.

Update: damn, that was fast. Mayor Potter is overseas, but his office responded in about thirty minutes:

[...] Your email suggests to me that you saw or read the story broke initially by KATU. The Bureau of Housing and Community Development's (BHCD) decision to withdraw City funds from WENS was based on a long-term evaluation of the shelter. BHCD concluded that WENS has maintained both substandard facilities and services for a long time going. Furthermore, WENS did not transition their clients (many of whom have patronized the shelter for months) into long-term housing solutions.

Please know that BHCD, with community partnerships, is funding enhanced services for the 34 chronic residents of WENS to transition them into permanent housing. KATU's report fails to mention this, and that is extremely disappointing.

I was glad to read that you are concerned about homeless issues. I encourage you to support organizations that will find permanent solutions for the homeless.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Van Keuren, Public Advocate
Office of Mayor Tom Potter

(WENS= Women's Emergency Night Shelter; BHCD = Bureau of Housing and Community Development)

While this underlines the city's commitment to long term solutions, I feel it neatly sidesteps my point about overlooking urgent short term needs. I don't feel up to engaging Mr Van Keuren on the substance though, since another quick search turned up a Transition Projects report from 2004 (warning, pdf) that shows how little I know about the situation:

In June 2000, our "Women's Reality" report found that on any given night, there were more than 800 homeless single women in the city of Portland, with fewer than 161 beds available to homeless women who were not seeking shelter from domestic violence. While bed availability has expanded slightly in the interim, there is still a dramatic lack of shelter availability for homeless single women in Portland.

Eight hundred. Whoa. If I'd stopped to think about it, I'd have realised the number had to be well over the hundred of my initial guess (grabbed in haste from a website somewhere). I have some reading to do.