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xocetaceans

xocetaceans's Journal
xocetaceans's Journal
July 30, 2016

A Look Back in Time: Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?

Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?
Unmarried teenagers would jump off bridges, and other
crazy reasons at-home kits weren’t approved until the late 1970s.

By PAGAN KENNEDY | JULY 29, 2016


In 1967, Margaret Crane was a 26-year-old product designer at Organon Pharmaceuticals, sketching face-cream bottles and ointment jars. One day, as she walked through a lab at the company’s headquarters in New Jersey, she spotted rows of test tubes on shiny racks that twinkled under the industrial lights.

“What are these?” she asked one of the scientists.

Pregnancy tests, he said. A doctor would collect urine from his patient and send it to the company’s lab for analysis. The results would be sent back to the doctor, who would then inform the patient.

But Ms. Crane immediately saw another possibility: Why not cut out the doctor entirely?

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/opinion/sunday/could-women-be-trusted-with-their-own-pregnancy-tests.html
July 29, 2016

FYI...

Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal
By Jason Leopold, Marcy Wheeler, and Ky Henderson
June 4, 2016

...

Hundreds of internal NSA documents, declassified and released to VICE News in response to our long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, reveal now for the first time that not only was the truth about the "single email" more complex and nuanced than the NSA disclosed to the public, but that Snowden had a face-to-face interaction with one of the people involved in responding to that email. The documents, made up of emails, talking points, and various records — many of them heavily redacted — contain insight into the NSA's interaction with the media, new details about Snowden's work, and an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the efforts by the NSA, the White House, and US Senator Dianne Feinstein to discredit Snowden.

The trove of more than 800 pages [pdf at the end of this story], along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented insight into the NSA during this time of crisis within the agency. And they call into question aspects of the US government's long-running narrative about Snowden's time at the NSA.

...

https://news.vice.com/article/edward-snowden-leaks-tried-to-tell-nsa-about-surveillance-concerns-exclusive
July 16, 2016

Trump/Pence 2016...

The hyperbolic or not-so-hyperbolic Trumpfenkreuz:



Feb. 10 2016 3:50 PM
Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

Yes and no.
By Isaac Chotiner

...

To discuss Trump’s rise and its historical echoes, I called Robert Paxton, a leading authority on the history of fascism. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and an expert on Vichy France, Paxton has written numerous books on European history. We discussed the ways in which Trump is and is not a fascist, whether Trump believes what he says, and why now, of all times, so many Americans seem to be embracing him. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Isaac Chotiner: As a historian of fascism, what do you make of Trump’s rise?

Robert Paxton: Well, it’s astonishing and depressing because he’s totally foreign to any of the skills that are wanted in a president of the United States. What we call him is another matter. There are certainly some echoes of fascism, but there are also very profound differences.

...

It’s the same thing. It’s enormously tempting. Anyway, the echoes you can deal with on two levels. First of all, there are the kinds of themes Trump uses. The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist’s recipe book. “Making the country great again” sounds exactly like the fascist movements. Concern about national decline, that was one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse, and Trump is using that full-blast, quite illegitimately, because the country isn’t in serious decline, but he’s able to persuade them that it is. That is a fascist stroke. An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That’s another one. Then, there’s a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media.

...


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/is_donald_trump_a_fascist_an_expert_on_fascism_weighs_in.html



July 4, 2016

That canard again? Please read the following article, and note the trend 63%, 52% and 47%.

Then please read the second article.

Monday, Nov 27, 2000 06:18 PM CDT
How Florida Democrats torpedoed Gore
If the vice president had locked up his party's traditional base in the Sunshine State, the election wouldn't be tied up in the courts.
Jim Hightower

...

These votes weren’t “lost” to misaligned butterfly ballots, pregnant chads or some conniving election official who deposited them in a closet. Rather, these were the uncast ballots of almost half of the American electorate, who chose not to vote this year largely because they feel they’ve been cast out of the process by a vacuous, cynical and elitist political system that no longer addresses their needs and aspirations.

These mostly are middle- and low-income folks, people making less than $50,000 a year. While they make up some 80 percent of the U.S. population, exit polls on Nov. 7 found that for the first time they’ve fallen to less than half of the voting population. As the Clinton-Gore-Lieberman Democrats have jerked the party out from under this core populist constituency, pursuing the money and adopting the policies of the corporate and investor elite, the core constituency of the party has — big surprise — steadily dropped away. In 1992, the under-$50,000 crowd made up 63 percent of voters. In 1996, after Clinton and Gore had relentlessly and very publicly pushed NAFTA, the WTO and other Wall Street policies for four years, the under-$50,000 crowd dropped to 52 percent of voters. After four more years of income stagnation and decline for these families under the regime of the Clinton-Gore “New Democrats,” the under-$50,000 crowd dropped this year to only 47 percent of voters.

At the same time, those who are prospering under the Wall Street boom, cheered on by the policies of both the Republican and Democratic leadership, have become ever more enthusiastic voters. In 1996, voters with incomes above $100,000 (about 3 percent of the population), made up 9 percent of the turnout; this year, they were 15 percent of the turnout.

This rising income skew among voters causes both parties to push more policies that favor the affluent minority, which causes an even greater turn-off for the majority, which causes … well, you can see the downward spiral we’re in. This is especially damaging to Democrats, since the non-voters are their natural constituency. This constituency feels discarded, not only by the Democrats, but by the whole process.

...

http://www.salon.com/2000/11/28/hightower/


Clearly, the attribution of Gore's "loss" to a single cause is fallacious: namely, it fails to take into account the above trend and the reasons behind that trend as noted in the cited article below among many other reasons for Gore's "loss". The theory that you espouse may seem sastisfying, but if one prefers HRC to win the election, one needs to face the root of the problem - not ignore it.


Saturday, Dec 19, 2015 07:00 AM CDT
George W. Bush vs. Al Gore, 15 years later: We really did inaugurate the wrong guy
On the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that installed W., a look back at all the mistakes along the way
Edward Foley

Bush v. Gore is the US Supreme Court decision that has been credited with—or blamed for—ending the 2000 presidential election with its interrupted recount still unfinished. Bush and Gore, of course, were the two candidates: George W. Bush, the governor of Texas and son of the forty-first president, challenging the incumbent vice president, Al Gore. Bush v. Gore, the court case, is often used interchangeably as shorthand for Bush-versus-Gore, the entirety of the dispute over the outcome of the election.

But that dispute encompassed much more than just the US Supreme Court’s decision, which in truth did not even end the fight. Rather, the end came the next day, December 13, when Gore announced he would not attempt to renew the recount through additional proceedings in Florida’s courts. Had he done so, he and Bush conceivably might have pursued their fight all the way to Congress, as Hayes and Tilden had over the 1876 election. If Bush-versus-Gore had reached Congress it would have been the first real test of the impenetrably ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887, with unpredictable consequences. Thus it was Gore’s concession of December 13, and not the Court’s ruling of the previous day, that truly ended the fight for the presidency as a practical matter.

Bush v. Gore, the court case, moreover, concerned only one aspect of the overall vote-counting dispute: the so-called dimpled or hanging chads produced by incomplete puncturing of punch-card ballots. Bush v. Gore did not concern issues that had arisen over absentee ballots, which the Gore campaign abandoned in the wake of public criticism. Much more significantly, Bush v. Gore did not address the problem of the so-called butterfly ballot, which apparently caused thousands of Gore supporters to mistakenly cast their ballots instead for Pat Buchanan, the conservative pundit running as a minor-party candidate. Even Buchanan acknowledged, both then and subsequently, that Gore would have been president but for the butterfly ballot.

Nor did Bush v. Gore, as presented to the US Supreme Court, involve all the issues concerning dimpled and hanging chads. The US Supreme Court was not in a posture to decide what would have been a fair process for the counting of these chads, from the standpoint of either Florida’s legislature setting up that process in advance of the election or Florida’s judiciary attempting to make the best of the situation once confronted with the challenge of how to handle these chads given the state’s existing statutory framework. Instead, the US Supreme Court’s role was limited to considering whether the Florida Supreme Court had acted improperly in its treatment of the chads, and, if so, what to do about the impropriety at that juncture and given the date by which Florida’s recount procedures needed to end.

...

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/19/george_w_bush_vs_al_gore_15_years_later_we_really_did_inaugurate_the_wrong_guy/


The problem for Sec. Clinton is one of either convincing people that her Presidency will better their lives or convincing people that Donald Trump will make their lives markedly worse. Given that she will likely have problems with the former due to her history, one is left hoping that she can make an argument that a Trump Presidency would affect the lives of low income voters in non-abstract ways that they actually would truly care about. Otherwise, there may well be a lot of independent voters who may well decide either not to vote or simply to roll the dice with Trump since they may believe that they already have the measure of Sec. Clinton's suggested policies.

The Nader canard is not a useful piece of analysis.

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