Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

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One year after the Supreme Court struck down federal abortion protection with its June 24, 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the issue is as salient to voters as ever. It still hasn’t faded from view, long past the time the (white, male) pundits insisted it would no longer motivate people.

That’s because the harm that decision has done just keeps multiplying, with every red state that decides to force pregnancy and parenthood on people in increasingly cruel ways. It's because the decision is making all forms of reproductive healthcare harder to access as doctors quit in frustration and fear and clinics close. And it’s because it’s brought the issue out into the sunlight, where people are motivated to tell their stories, everywhere. The fact that there’s something like 64 million women of childbearing age in the U.S. whose lives could be directly affected probably has something to do with it, too.

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There are stories like this recent one that aired on “NBC Nightly News,” explaining that Georgia’s post-Dobbs ban on abortions after six weeks has forced OB-GYNs out of practice, which is actually endangering pregnant patients with unborn, wanted fetuses. It’s making prenatal care and routine women’s healthcare harder to get—and not just in Georgia, but in many of the states that have put restrictions on abortion.

People like Beth and Kyle Long, Marlena Stell, Amanda Zurawski, Jill Hartle, Kailee DeSpain, and countless others are sharing their stories. They’re making sure that the issue doesn’t go away, and that the politicians who have imposed these horrors on people know exactly what they’ve done. They are telling their stories to anyone who will listen, and that audience is getting bigger by the day.

Since one of those women, Amanda Zurawski from Texas, nearly died last summer because she couldn’t get an abortion, she’s sued the state, testified before Congress, attended the State of the Union as First Lady Jill Biden’s guest, and met with Vice President Kamala Harris. “I’ve heard a lot of other people’s traumatic stories, which has been difficult. But I’m happy to provide a place for people to tell their stories,” she said. “I can speak up. I’m not scared,” she added. “I have all the right pieces in place [to advocate], and so I will.”

Those are the stories people are seeing on Facebook, in People magazine, on the nightly news. The stories they’re hearing from friends and family. The stories they’re living. Unfortunately, there’s going to be a lot more of them: the horror stories of people trying to get abortions to save their lives, the stories of women dying when they can’t get the care they need.


(full article online)

One year after Dobbs, the horror stories are everywhere—and it will only get worse

One year after the Supreme Court struck down federal abortion protection with its June 24, 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the issue is as salient to voters as ever. It still hasn’t faded from view, long past the time the (white,...

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Drag-themed burger joint scores win against Ron DeSantis

For a guy who wants to win the presidency in 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been doing a lot of losing lately. He’s lost to a cartoon mouse, is losing considerable ground to a twice-indicted cartoon supervillain, lost the plot during a Twitter...

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[Rigby5]

1. A big lie about treachery is used to foment resentment. Nazis: We didn’t really lose World War I. It was a “stab in the back” by Jews and other "November criminals." MAGA: We didn’t really lose the 2020 election. It was a “steal” by politicians and Blacks in big cities.

Wrong.
The reality is the Germans did not start or lose WWI.
The Allies were the bad guys who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, and then France started it by invading Bavaria.
The Germans never were defeated and were still in France.
The Germans surrenders only because the allies illegally targeted food shipments and caused massive starvation.
The US not only illegally joined WWI on the side of the bad guys, but then it was US companies like US Steel, GM, Std Oil, etc., who funded Hitler and caused his rise to power.
They wanted more war profiteering.

 

[Rigby5]

The global pandemic hit the US hard. Given the wide-spread belief that Trump badly mishandled the crisis, we thought it wise to explore the movement’s attitudes toward Covid-19.

The reality is that the countries that did the least, had by far the least deaths per capita.
The US had about 3,200 deaths per million, and countries like Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, etc. which essentially did nothing, only had about 100 deaths per million.

Why is that?
Its obvious.
The quicker an infection spreads, the sooner you achieve herd immunity from recovery, and it ends.
Covid can and normally does end in a month or 2.
But in the US, we prevented it from ending, and made it last 3 years.
That is 36 times the number of deaths it should have been.

So Trump was correct, and Fauci was deliberately lying, so that Moderna and Pfizer could make over 89 billion dollars in profit, selling a mRNA vaccine that did nothing good at all.

 

[Rigby5]

The idea Hitler controlled Germany is foolish.
He was in prison for years, after an attempted "Beer Hall Putsch".
He was not released until 1925, and he was uneducated, poor, and had no connections at all on his own.
He was just picked as a patsy.
He only became popular because foreign investors spent millions on huge outdoor events for Hitler.

 

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[ Florida, trying to become its own separate country ]

 

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Ex-WH official claims Trump made lewd comments about daughter Ivanka

Prepare your barf bags for another 21-vom salute to the 45th president of the U.S., Pervert Hoover! Yes, you’ve heard Donald Trump say he’d “perhaps” be dating Ivanka Trump if she weren’t his daughter. You’ve seen him get a bit handsy with her. You...

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[Rigby5]

{...
Zionism : a movement for (originally) the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.
Zionism: an international movement to oppose the forces arrayed against the Jewish state, something both meaningful and useful – even essential. It did not end when the state was declared; thanks to our enemies, Zionism is a continuing struggle.
Hasbara
"The natural response against anti-Zionism which derives from the hatred of Jews and the desire to destroy Israel as a sovereign Jewish nation"

Denialism is a region of the mind most preferred by those who reject the Jewish Nation/People's right to sovereignty on their own Ancient Land.
...}

This is incorrect.
I am considered Jewish since my mother was considered Jewish, but I have looked into the facts.

Zionism is supposed to be about doing the right thing, and originally meant about the same as Jihad.
But ever since Theodor Herzel around 1895, it meant creating a Jewish state in Palestine.

First of all, Israel is not legitimate since it is less than a third the local population, and never actually paid for any of the land.
It is all stolen land, by murder or illegal expulsion.

Palestine is not an ancestral Jewish homeland.
The Hebrew culture has no trace in Palestine until the invasion around 1000 BC.
Which was incredibly brutal, such as the total genocide of the Canaanites at Jericho.
And only lasted about 250 years, when the Babylonians defeated and removed the Jews.
Not only did the Hebrew come from Egypt, where they lived for over 400 years, but likely came from the Sinai before that, and have no claim to Palestine at all.

The fact the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Romans all sequentially kicked the Jews out of Palestine, indicated there is something wrong with Jewish culture.
The "Chosen People having a right to a Promised Land", is just incredibly illegal and arrogant.
That is not how a real God would work, if there is a real God at all.
It clearly an abuse of religion in order to satisfy greed.
Which is about an anti-religious as one can get.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

The reality is that the countries that did the least, had by far the least deaths per capita.
The US had about 3,200 deaths per million, and countries like Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, etc. which essentially did nothing, only had about 100 deaths per million.

Why is that?
Its obvious.
The quicker an infection spreads, the sooner you achieve herd immunity from recovery, and it ends.
Covid can and normally does end in a month or 2.
But in the US, we prevented it from ending, and made it last 3 years.
That is 36 times the number of deaths it should have been.

So Trump was correct, and Fauci was deliberately lying, so that Moderna and Pfizer could make over 89 billion dollars in profit, selling a mRNA vaccine that did nothing good at all.

Here is a lesson for you. Covid is not over around the world. But you cannot live with that idea in your mind, that is ok. Here are the facts:

Tracking Covid-19’s global spread

Since December 2019, the disease has spread to every continent and case numbers continue to rise

www.cnn.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

In a 1978 case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court held that college admissions policies that considered race as one of several factors in determining admissions—what we know as affirmative action—were permissible. The justices rejected the argument that these policies violated the constitutional rights of white people and denied them equal educational opportunity. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this precedent in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger.

Affirmative action is not about unfair advantage. It is about leveling the playing field in the face of historical discrimination. And despite what the Supreme Court said this morning in a pair of cases ending the use of affirmative action in admissions policies, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, our playing field is not level yet.

I teach at the University of Alabama’s Law School. I’m proud to have the opportunity to teach at a law school where affirmative active policies have helped to develop more diverse classes, full of amazing, smart, engaged students who go on to be the kinds of lawyers our communities need. Some of them come from backgrounds that made it challenging to arrive where they are today. But with a strong education, they become everything from general practitioners in small communities to big-firm lawyers, general counsels to civil rights lawyers, policy wonks, and people who put their law licenses to work in government and business endeavors. Affirmative action has helped our classes look more like the communities that future lawyers are intended to serve.

I hope institutions of higher education will find ways to continue to champion diversity. But help in doing that, it’s clear, will no longer come from the courts.

Today, the Court held that Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They ruled that colleges and universities can no longer explicitly use race as a consideration in admissions. Instead, they can, perhaps—until the next legal challenge reaches the Court—try to backdoor those considerations, for instance by permitting students to write admissions application essays about overcoming challenges they’ve faced in their lives.

Former President Trump posted on social media about the decisions and made a key point, certainly unintentionally, about today’s decisions. “We’re going back,” he wrote.

Going back is the operative language here. Because these are not decisions based on changing facts or evolving legal rules. It’s yet another override of longstanding precedent, based on the new composition of the Supreme Court. The 6-3 ultraconservative majority continues to implement important pieces of the conservative agenda, without regard for stare decisis. Former Vice President Pence made that clear in comments this morning. He said he was glad to see the conservative majority “we” put in place on the Court end affirmative action.

Today’s decision is about politics, not principle.

The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Roberts, with concurrences from Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. But it’s Justice Jackson’s dissent that speaks the loudest to anyone who is truly listening. She begins by writing: “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations. Every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles—the ‘self-evident’ truth that all of us are created equal.” And then, her ringing criticism of the majority: “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

Apparently, her criticism landed with force. Near the end of the Chief Justice’s opinion, he writes, "A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion." The context for that comment is important. There has been some suggestion, as people begin to work through the reasoning in more than 200 pages of written opinions in these cases, that there is a workaround for today’s ruling. If there is, it is an exceedingly slender thread.

Chief Justice Roberts concludes “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today…‘[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.’” It is in this context that Justice Roberts admonishes against taking legal advice from Justice Jackson’s dissent. Do not, he warns colleges and universities, try to get around our decision today. The opportunity to use even the process the justices say is permissible—letting applicants raise their individual experiences and qualifications—is clearly constrained. The majority may not have expressly overruled Grutter, but today’s decisions make it all but impossible to consider the legacy of racial discrimination in any meaningful way going forward. (Interestingly, institutions remain free to affirmatively consider privilege, in the form of making legacy college admissions.)

The Court ended affirmative action today, without formally ending it.

Will these decisions have legs beyond education? I hope not. It feels dangerous to even speculate about it. But just as reversing Roe v. Wadeseemed like an impossibility until it happened, we live in a time where we must confront the possibilities.




(full article online)

History Rhymes Again

The End of Affirmative Action

joycevance.substack.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

A crisis pregnancy center in Massachusetts failed to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy, causing a life-threatening emergency for the patient, a lawsuit filed last week alleges.

The complaint, filed Thursday, says the anti-abortion Clearway Clinic in Worcester, about 50 miles southwest of Boston, engages in deceptive advertising, aiming to persuade women to forgo abortions rather than "providing them with the range of medically appropriate options."


The plaintiff, a Worcester resident who is kept anonymous in the suit, alleges that the nurse who performed her ultrasound scan at the center "did not undertake sufficient medical measures" to ensure the pregnancy was viable.

An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the uterus, most often in the fallopian tube. Such pregnancies are usually nonviable, and they can be life-threatening.

The suit alleges that the woman’s fallopian tube ruptured about a month after the ultrasound scan, "causing massive internal bleeding and necessitating emergency surgery."

Shannon Liss-Riordan, the patient's lawyer, said there is no evidence the nurse intentionally misled her. Instead, Liss-Riordan said, the staffer "missed" the ectopic pregnancy because "she wasn’t qualified to do this."

Representatives of the Clearway Clinic — which has a second clinic in Springfield — did not respond to requests for comment.

The clinic’s CEO, Jill Jorgensen, told the local news outlet MassLive that patient privacy laws prevented clinic officials from discussing a patient’s case. She said the clinic "has served more than 10,000 women and their families in the Worcester area for the past 22 years at no cost and have never had a complaint like this in the past."

Crisis pregnancy centers are facilities that seek to dissuade women from having abortions and often offer resources, including diapers, baby clothes and STI tests, according to Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, a database created by researchers at the University of Georgia. More than 2,500 such centers operate in the U.S. In Massachusetts, where abortion is legal up to 24 weeks, there are 29 crisis centers, outnumbering the state's 19 abortion clinics.

'You don’t know who is doing your ultrasound'​

The lawsuit contends that the Clearway Clinic's website does not make it clear that "its true goal is to dissuade women from terminating their pregnancies."


(full article online)

Crisis pregnancy center failed to spot an ectopic pregnancy, threatening patient's life, lawsuit alleges

The suit claims an anti-abortion center in Massachusetts engages in deceptive advertising and incorrectly told a patient her pregnancy was viable.

www.nbcnews.com

 

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