Joé McKen is a progressive civil libertarian and third-wave atheist stuck in suburban Québec, Canada, where he spends his time composing, writing, drawing, nursing a layman’s passion for science and technology, speaking out for social justice, and poking idjits with a sharp pointy stick. Owner of a Nize Hat!, a persistent SIWOTI syndrome and an itchy snark finger.
We can’t call Catholicism good and done quite yet, at least in the US, but if these Gallup numbers are anything to judge by, the end will one day be nigh:
It’s kind of amazing how quick the decline has been amongst younger generations. It’s almost as though the Church had nothing to offer anyone who wasn’t already indoctrinated.
(via Joe.My.God.)
One argument used by anti-choicers is that abortion is medically dangerous and fraught with risks and side-effects. This has always been nonsense, as with everything else they say, and now a landmark new study lays out the obvious: abortion, when performed by qualified professionals in a timely manner, is perfectly safe for women.
The report, called "The Safety and Quality of Abortion Care in the United States," examined the four major methods used for abortions — medication, aspiration, dilation and evacuation, and induction — and examined women's care from before they had the procedure through their follow-up care.
"I would say the main takeaway is that abortions that are provided in the United States are safe and effective," says Ned Calonge, the co-chair of the committee that wrote the study. He is an associate professor of family medicine and epidemiology at the University of Colorado and CEO of The Colorado Trust.
Calonge says the researchers found that about 90 percent of all abortions happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. And complications for all abortions are "rare," the report says.
Of course, complications can arise, but doctors do everything they can to minimize the risk. One thing that increases the risk? Stupid laws that force doctors to lie to their patients, perform unnecessary medical procedures on them and make them wait for no reason, all to try to dissuade women from getting the medical help they need.
But the report did find that state laws and regulations can interfere with safe abortions.
"Abortion-specific regulations in many states create barriers to safe and effective care," the report says.
Calonge says those rules often have no basis in medical research.
[…]
The National Academies report says waiting periods and requirements for unnecessary tests can result in long delays because women may have to travel to get care and have trouble getting appointments.
"Delays put the patient at greater risk of an adverse event," the report says.
And the more adverse events occur, the more anti-abortionists point to them as proof that abortion is dangerous, and the more they push lawmakers to impose further obstacles. It’s a cycle of mendacity and ignorance.
Let’s not think for a moment that this study, or even a hundred like it, could ever sway abortion opponents. Their crusade is ideological, not fact-based. That they can force women to endure unwanted pregnancies, with all the personal and medical ramifications that may follow, and then pat themselves on the back for doing God’s work is evidence enough.
(via Friendly Atheist)
US House of Representatives passes an anti-sex-trafficking bill that would restrict online speech, endanger sex workers, and do absolutely nothing to fight sex trafficking.
As Trump [pictured] makes noises about violent video games causing mass shootings, remember that endless studies have proven him completely and utterly wrong.
(via @mccanner; retweet by @Popehat)
New York man wins $1 million lawsuit after an NYPD officer tried to frame him for drunk driving to cover up how the cop blew through a stop sign and crashed into his car.
(via @natemcdermott; retweet by @KFILE)
Pamela Gellar’s daughters did not fall far from the bigoted tree.
Finally, your headline of the day (and an uncomfortably informative article):
(via @radleybalko)
![‘The Hill’ headline: “Donations of deer semen make up majority of contributions in Texas candidate's race: report” [by Avery Anapol @ 03/02/18 3:11 PM EST]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqtydVbqwEImgJ_U7r2ABkPptUJv40zkRWeTHuZTV8MSmrh50irXPYOfPT7fA-BE91JFxEGrhd4MIOeY8Yf4zysO67ewzaxDu_VLT7q-hMbmPxLhW9L188gHiqYTspLIr4k9Ps7shUXf6/w500/the_hill_headline_deer_semen_contributions.jpg "‘The Hill’ headline: “Donations of deer semen make up majority of contributions in Texas candidate's race: report” [by Avery Anapol @ 03/02/18 3:11 PM EST]")
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Nothing to see here. Just one of two places on the planet synonymous with year-long freezing cold thawing out in the middle of winter.
The sun won’t rise at the North Pole until March 20, and it’s normally close to the coldest time of year, but an extraordinary and possibly historic thaw swelled over the tip of the planet this weekend. Analyses show that the temperature warmed to the melting point as an enormous storm pumped an intense pulse of heat through the Greenland Sea.
Temperatures may have soared as high as 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) at the pole, according to the U.S. Global Forecast System model. While there are no direct measurements of temperature there, Zack Labe, a climate scientist working on his PhD at the University of California at Irvine, confirmed that several independent analyses showed “it was very close to freezing,” which is more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) above normal.
The warm intrusion penetrated right through the heart of the Central Arctic, Labe said. The temperature averaged for the entire region north of 80 degrees latitude spiked to its highest level ever recorded in February.
Always relevant:
(via @adamconover)
Just another day on a planet that isn’t warming at all, no sir.
At the current rate, the world’s oceans on average will be at least 2 feet (61 centimeters) higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
Sea level rise is caused by warming of the ocean and melting from glaciers and ice sheets. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets. It confirms scientists’ computer simulations and is in line with predictions from the United Nations, which releases regular climate change reports.
[…]
Two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century “would have big effects on places like Miami and New Orleans, but I don’t still view that as catastrophic” because those cities can survive — at great expense — that amount of rising seas under normal situations, [lead author Steve] Nerem said.
But when a storm hits like 2012′s Superstorm Sandy, sea level rise on top of storm surge can lead to record-setting damages, researchers said.
(via Joe.My.God.)
The myth: Pot is a “gateway drug” that will send users spiraling into drug addiction, forcing them to turn tricks to pay for their next heroin fix.
A new working paper by researchers at the University of Connecticut and Georgia State University found that in some states that had legalized medical marijuana, alcohol sales had fallen up to 15%.
[…]
This finding is significant, as the consequences for alcohol use are generally considered to be more severe than for marijuana use. This past summer, in a survey of their consumers by Eaze, a cannabis technology company that facilitates delivery of medical marijuana, the company found that many people who used medical marijuana decreased their alcohol use.
Of the respondents that consumed alcohol, 87% said they had reduced their drinking because of their cannabis use and 13% said they had replaced alcohol completely with cannabis.
And it’s not just alcohol being replaced. Fewer people are using opiates, with fewer deaths as a result, and that’s also traceable to marijuana legalization:
A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health concluded that marijuana legalization in Colorado had resulted in short-term reductions in opioid-related deaths. Other research has corroborated this trend, noting that fewer prescription painkillers are prescribed in states where cannabis is legal.
Why, it’s almost as though “drug warriors” were talking out of their ass, and that removing arbitrary and historically racist restrictions on a substance that’s only fractionally as dangerous as drugs that are already legal were an idea that made sense.
(via @fark)
Pew Research Center has a survey out showing the attitudes of various religious (and nonreligious) groups in the US towards abortion rights, and I’m almost surprised by how predictable the results are.
I think both religious and nonreligious people could have predicted that atheists and agnostics would be high on that list, albeit for different reasons – religious folks because they see both atheists and abortion as immoral, nonreligious folks because they don’t have old men in silly hats telling them that giving women autonomy over their bodies makes baby Jesus cry. That said, I’m a little peeved at those Unitarian Universalists for beating us out – dang hippies with their inclusive liberal beliefs.
The survey also shows how many members of conservative faiths break with their leaders’ anti-choice teachings. Sure, it’s hypocritical for almost half of Catholics to think abortion should be legal when their Church is one of the loudest opponents to a woman’s right to choose, but I’d rather have wishy-washy believers who support women’s reproductive rights than steadfast nonbelievers who fight against them.
(via retweet by @religionnews)
One of Trump’s refrains on the campaign trail was that the Obama presidency had so damaged the United States’s reputation around the world that other countries were “laughing at them”, and that Trump, of course, would put an end to that if he got elected. It’s right out of the demagogue playbook: exaggerate the extent of problems facing the nation, then present themself as the only one who can make everything better.
Well, this demagogue’s been in office for a full year (and one day) now, so surely the world’s now teeming with respect for the USA, right? Let’s see what the polling data has to say:
In 2016, 48 percent of the world's citizens approved of the United States from a leadership perspective. By 2017, just 30 percent did. What changed, of course, was the leader. President Donald Trump has overseen a destructive period for America's reputation abroad since he took the reins from Barack Obama a year ago. Support for U.S. leadership has gone underwater—that is, more people disapprove than approve—on every continent except Africa, where a slim 51 percent maintain a favorable view. Approval fell 10 points or more in 65 countries. Gallup, the source for all this good news, conducted its polling between March and November of 2017—that is, before the U.S. president dismissed the nations of Africa as "shitholes." Perhaps that 51-percent figure is out of date.
The state Trump expressed a preference for in that now-infamous Oval Office immigration meeting, Norway, tells its own story. Support for U.S. leadership among Norwegians plummeted an astonishing 42 points between President Obama's final year in office and Trump's first. That was part of a catastrophic showing from European nations, particularly the United States' NATO allies. Approval fell by 10 points or more in 24 European countries, including 18 NATO members. In Portugal, it fell 51 points in a year. The United States is above water in just three European countries: Kosovo, Albania, and Poland. Overall, among European citizens, approval fell from 44 to 25 percent. That's still better than the lowest ebb of the George W. Bush administration, deep into the Iraq War, when just 18 percent of Europeans approved of the job he was doing. It took Bush six years to fall that far, and to sink to 35 percent worldwide. It took Trump roughly six months.
Approval of US leadership also fell by 40 points in Canada, and the cynical part of my mind is surprised it had that many points to lose. I thought outside perception of the US was already waning by the end of Obama’s tenure, dragged down by a combination of unending Republican obstructionism and generally terrible foreign policy, especially the endless wars in the Middle-East. It took Trump only months to demonstrate just how much lower it could sink – quite a bit, it turns out.
Then there’s this bit, which is extremely telling:
We can expect steeper losses among democratic allies, according to Robert Keohane, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University. "People that hold liberal values—constitutional, democratic values—are favorable to the United States when it seems to follow those values," Keohane told me, "and unfavorable when it doesn't." Approval plunged among our liberal democratic allies at the height of the Iraq War (and is plunging now) because these countries are full of educated people in a sophisticated media environment who are appalled when they feel the U.S. is betraying their shared values. […]
(Autocratic states are a different story. Their governments are, by definition, more immune to shifts in public opinion, and usually exercise more control over what information the public is exposed to anyway—thereby influencing opinion.)
There’s something a little too revealing about how other democracies are looking down on the “leader of the free world”, whilst dictatorships and military states are starting to identify with it.
The best part is that despite their fervent attempts to pretend otherwise, Trump and his cohorts have absolutely no-one but themselves to blame. Republicans control the White House, both chambers of Congress and a majority of state legislatures, yet they can’t even pass a bill to keep the government running without tripping over their own feet and pratfalling into a mud puddle. And it’s entirely the fault of their massively unpopular policies along with their own extraordinary incompetence.
(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)
In case you were wondering, yes, the planet is still on fire:
Even without the help of El Niño, 2017 was a top-three scorcher for planet Earth.
Global temperatures last year were the third-highest since scientists began keeping records in 1880, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Measurements from NASA placed it even higher, coming in second over the last 138 years.
Both agencies said the average global surface temperature in 2017 was only slightly below the record-high temperature seen in 2016.
Two years ago, the average temperature across land and ocean surfaces jumped 1.69 degrees above the 20th century average of 57 degrees, according to NOAA. It remained high last year, coming in at 1.51 degrees above the previous century's average.
That makes the last three years — 2015, 2016 and 2017 — the hottest ones since 1880. In fact, both analyses agree that five of the hottest years have occurred just since 2010.
"The fact that 2017 was so warm in a year without El Niño should make very clear how rapidly Earth's global temperature is increasing," said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University who was not involved with the either NASA's or NOAA's report.
Ho-hum, nothing to see here. And when cities start emptying because collapsed agriculture, rising sea levels and extreme weather forces everyone to relocate the remains of our civilization, there really will be nothing to see.
(via @adamconover)
OkCupid is one of the bigger matchmaking sites out there, and one way they leverage this is by periodically polling their vast user base to glean what’s trending in the online dating world (and presumably society in general). One such survey conducted in February, which included some political questions, netted almost 270,000 US respondents, and they gave some very interesting answers.
First, on the question of everyone’s least-favorite White House occupant:
Trump Is A Deal Breaker
Trump certainly gets people riled up, and daters’ views on him — positive or negative — are considered a major deal breaker for singles considering potential matches. 74% of OkCupid respondents answered “Hell no” to the question “Trump?” Only 4% responded “Hell yes.” The more demure responses of “yes” and “no” came in at 7% and 15% respectively. […]
Naturally, they followed up with something now intrinsically Trump-related, with hilarious results:
And now for the golden ticket, er, shower. Believe it or not, some things are more shocking than Putin — like golden showers, and singles’ thoughts on them. Perhaps Trump’s recent scandal made them mainstream (excuse the pun), but a somewhat surprising discovery was how down daters are with golden showers — or at least how open they are to discussing them. While Trump proved to be a major deal breaker, golden showers did not; nearly a quarter of respondents claimed a golden shower was either a turn-on, or they could be convinced to try one out. The central takeaway here? More singles say they are willing to get pissed on than support Trump.
If anything, that’s understating it. According to those numbers, that’s twice as many people who’d either certainly or possibly be okay being pissed on as would put up with dating someone who supports Trump. And given how these numbers come from February and that Trump’s support base has only been eroding since then, that ratio would be even higher now.
Of course, the follow-up question is: How many people would be okay with, or would at least consider, pissing on a Trump supporter?
(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)
The Myth of the Playground Pusher: How “drug-free zones” are less about protecting children and a lot more about drug-warrior politicians who want to burnish their creds with tougher sentences, innocence be damned.
(via @radleybalko)
Rep. Marsha Blackburn [pictured] (R-TN), noted telecom shill who understands nothing about net neutrality, introduces a bill that would codify the FCC’s anti-net-neutrality position into law.
Law firm Appleby, whose leaked documents were the basis for the Paradise Papers, sues The Guardian and the BBC over their reporting, claiming “there was no public interest in the stories”.
(via @KyellGold)
Speaking of bad lawsuits: Password manager company Keeper is suing an Ars Technica reporter who wrote about a security flaw that has since been fixed. Considering that security firms’ credibility rests largely on their transparency regarding security flaws, this mostly ensures that no-one will trust Keeper again.
(via @normative; RT: @Popehat)
More data, this time from Las Vegas, shows that police body cameras reduce the number of complaints and use-of-force incidents.
Ding dong, the child-molestation-enabling cardinal is dead. Naturally, he’ll get a full Vatican funeral with Pope Francis’s blessing.
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) sets his resignation date for January 2, 2018.
(via Joe.My.God.)
Finally, it’s a victory against breed-specific legislation as Montréal, Québec strikes down its pit bull ban.
If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.
One way Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have tried to defend their tough-on-crime posturing is by pointing to (when not lying about) a supposed massive wave of violence sweeping through America’s cities. Their evidence: Some large cities saw an abnormal increase in violent crime in 2016, ignoring every other statistic that shows the overall crime rate has been dropping for decades across the country.
Now the 2017 numbers are in, and they show that trend is still going strong:
New analysis from the Brennan Center:
All measures of crime in the 30 largest American cities — the overall crime rate, violent crime rate, and murder rate — are estimated to decline in 2017 according to a year-end analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
Crime in 2017: Updated Analysis directly undercuts any claims of a nationwide crime wave.
Key findings from the analysis include:
• The overall crime rate in the 30 largest cities in 2017 is estimated to decline slightly from [2016], falling by 2.7 percent.
• The violent crime rate will also decrease slightly, by 1.1 percent, essentially remaining stable.
• The 2017 murder rate in the 30 largest cities is estimated to decline by 5.6 percent. Large decreases this year in Chicago [down 11.9 percent] and Detroit [down 9.8 percent], as well as small decreases in other cities, contributed to this decline. … New York City’s murder rate will also decline again, to 3.3 killings per 100,000 people.
[…]
This is all very good news. The question now is if Trump and Sessions will continue to lie about the crime rate in America, or now that they’ve been in office for a year, if they’ll try to take credit for it.
It’s disheartening, in a jaded way, how difficult it is to tell which it’ll be. In fact, the only uncertainty revolves around whether Trump and Sessions’ policies, governed by their law-and-order shtick and unconstrained by facts, may slow or even reverse this trend. Given Trump & co.’s penchant for tainting absolutely everything, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
