13 posts from February 2008

"A newborn baby girl survived an ignoble birth after slipping down the toilet bowl of a moving Indian train onto the tracks when a pregnant woman unexpectedly gave birth while relieving herself on Tuesday.

"My delivery was so sudden," said the Bhuri Kalbi, the mother of the infant, born two months prematurely. "I did not even realize that my child had slipped from the hole in the toilet."

Kalbi, a 33-year-old woman from a village in Rajasthan, fainted on the toilet seat after the birth for a few minutes before waking up and alerting her family.

"They stopped the train and ran on the tracks to find the baby," she said, speaking from her hospital bed in the western city of Ahmedabad.

Railway staff at a nearby station were alerted and soon found the newborn girl lying uninjured on pebbles by the track. She is now in intensive care because of her premature birth, doctors said.

Most toilets on Indian trains are filthy chutes emptying directly onto the tracks."

Source.

I've had a lot of trouble knowing where to lend my support for this election, mostly due to hype and media coverage. It's been obvious to me that much of the negative air around Clinton is inspired by the stereotype of a power-hungry bitch, using her husband's career as a stepping stone -- this stereotype is propagated largely by the media and voters who fail to recognize the sexist slant ingrained into where we get our information. Obama I've had issues with because of his obvious marketing toward the youth and speeches that seem to pray on emotional appeal. At a glance, it's hard to see past the two Democrats' outer-images, and I refuse to have my vote swayed by either of these.

The Daily Kos has this in common with me. In her blog entry, she decides where to place her vote based on senate voting records, meticulously going through the Library of Congress's website and reading each one. If you don't feel like doing the same, she summarizes the key points quite well.

I suggest all undecided voters check this out.

Clark Country, GA has decided to switch their tactics. Currently, an "abstinence only" curriculum is taught in the high school. The country also has a 4.5% teen pregnancy rate, which is higher than the state average. In order to try to combat these rates, the county has voted to start teaching safe sex in schools, which has proven to be effective in preventing teen pregnancy.

The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the Western world, most likely due to a conflict between an over-sexed media and a moral approach to sex ingrained in the Protestant society. Abstinence only programs only help to support this conflict, telling kids that sex is wrong and then sending them home to their televisions which portray lots of gratifying, unprotected sex -- even on basic cable.  

A law in California passed in October permits actors to smoke during a production. Now bars all over the state have begun to stage "theater nights," making all those who attend actors and therefore allowing them to smoke in the facilities.

Lisa Anderson, owner of Mike's Uptown bar in Hill City, said that last Saturday she staged a "theater night" and packed in four times the usual crowd that has come in since the smoking ban took effect.

Anderson said she has been helping other bar owners who want to put on their own tobacco productions.

"I'm going to continue to do this,'' she said. "It increased my business.'' (source)

People don't realize how much the smoking ban effects business. Since the ban was put in place in my town Chicago in January, bar revenue has dropped 50% and casinos 18% (source). The fact of the matter is that there is a huge economy in this country made off of bad habits. You can educate people as much as you want about the dangers of smoking, but in the end, it's the individual's choice, and a lot of tax money that helps out schools and other important government-funded facilities is made this way. When you try to take away the choice, the economy suffers, and you get a lot of pissed off smokers choosing to stay in their homes and drink rather than be forced out in the cold at a bar.

So everyone knows The Flaming Lips, Pavement, of Montreal, and Andrew Bird. They're fairly popular. Here are bands I've discovered, mostly on my own (most likely through random downloading), whom I think are pretty good:

Fruit Bats - "experimental folk-pop combo" from Chicago.

Josh Rouse - Singer-song writer, "melodic folk / soft rock." In a way similar to Sufjan Stevens, his songs express a strong sense of place and a personal story to go with it.

Fly Pan Am - Often times just Fly Pan Am. A Canada experimental rock band best known for their collaborations with Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Servotron - ROBOT LIBERATION BAND! Need I say more? Their song "People Mover" should ring true to those of you from Detroit (or other areas with People Movers).

The Soviettes - A four-piece punk band with songs reminiscent of the best of Riot Grrl.

Beulah - Although I think they're fairly popular, I know only a few people who actually listen to Beulah. Straight-up indie pop/rock with powerful lyrics and haunting instrumentals.

Califone - Americana folk indie. The front man, Tim Rutili, paired up with Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse to create Sharpen Your Teeth under the band name Ugly Casanova, another favorite of mine. This is the type of band I would listen to after a rough night of drinking and drama, or on a slow Sunday afternoon.

The Hidden Cameras - I fell in love with this band after picking up the Shortbus soundtrack. A Canadian indie pop band with soft vocals that provokes a lot of feelings of nostalgia for me, for no reason I can discern, other than they just create the right type of mood.

M. Ward - Another artist discovered through the Shortbus soundtrack. Best described as "alternative country," similar to Nick Drake, but with a bigger ominous sort of atmosphere to it that just draws me in.

Jana Hunter - I watched her open for some local bands in Detroit -- not really the spot for an artist who has done many outstanding collaborations with Devendra Banhardt. "Houstan's underground folk/experimental-rock representative."

The Little Killers - "Garage rock" very reminiscent of Detroit favorites. Essentially, if The Hard Lessons and The White Stripes had a baby, they'd probably sound like this band.

Owl and the Pussycat - This might be the most obscure band on the list, Last.FM doesn't even have a profile of them. Owl and the Pussycat has one self-titled album with a female vocalist (a male vocalist appears on some tracks). Alternative folk worth checking out, if you can find it anywhere.

That's it for now. Open your copy of Soulseek and get downloading!

Note: This was cross-posted from my Last.FM journal. See original post.

It seems curious that if I was 28 weeks pregnant and presented to my doctor saying there was no way I wanted to continue with the pregnancy, the doctor would not be able to refer me for termination unless I met the restrictive criteria which have been outlined. It would be assumed I had an obligation to the fetus because it was potentially viable and I had passed the point of viability. I therefore would be compelled to maintain its life and deliver the child. In contrast I have a two year old, and if he suddenly became ill, and needed me to donate an organ to survive, I would probably consider myself a heniously immoral woman if I did not concede to that demand. However there is no law in the land that could oblige me to do so. In effect we impose greater obligation to women to preserve the life of their fetuses than we impose to preserve the life of their born children.

In abortion law we are therefore distinctly privileging the life of the fetus over the wishes of the woman in a way we do not do in any other form of medical practice. I would therefore argue that the current abortion law is ethically inconsistent in the way it permits abortion in some circumstances but not in others and that it in denying abortion it undermines the basic principle of individual autonomy which is accepted in the rest of medical practice.

Source.

In this article, the term "feticide" is used to refer to the killing of a fetus, as occurs during abortion or miscarriage. I greatly dislike this term, for it seems to equate "feticide" with words like "genocide" or "homocide," which are inarguably crimes more heinous than the taking of a life of something parasitic and incapable of conscious thought.

This is dangerous. The article itself is about the House of Virginia passing a law that makes "feticide" a class 4 felony. In Virginia, a class 4 felony means 2-10 years of imprisonment and up to $100,000 in fines. Also a class 4 felony in Virginia: rape/sexual assault and statutory rape, so you get the idea to the sort of moral standards its being equated to -- funny that it's with laws that supposedly exist to protect women. Basically, this means that in the eyes of the Virginia law, a woman trying to terminate a pregnancy gets the same punishment as a child molester. Sound a little crazy to you?

This is not to mention the fact that, according to the famous Roe vs. Wade, "feticide" is a constitutional right. Never has the constitution been interpreted by the US Supreme Court to say rape was a constitutional right, but, hey, no one really knows what the fore fathers were thinking when they wrote it!

Death of the father: British scientists discover how to turn women's bone marrow into sperm
By FIONA MACRAE - More by this author » Last updated at 09:28am on 31st January 2008

British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life.

The breakthrough paves the way for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically their own.

Gay men could follow suit by using the technique to make eggs from male bone marrow.

Researchers at Newcastle upon Tyne University say their technique will help lead to new treatments for infertility.

But critics warn that it sidelines men and raises the prospect of babies being born through entirely artificial means.

The research centres around stem cells - the body's 'mother' cells which can turn into any other type of cell. 

Source

James Foley, known as The Water Street Butcher (named for the location where his first three victims were found), was a cop. He would “arrest” prostitutes, then torture, murder, sodomize and mutilate their corpses. All of his victims had been cut from mouth to ear, were missing sections of skin, and were left naked and mutilated in or near the Hudson River in upstate NY. Apparently, Foley shot videos of everything he did, from stalking to disposing of bodies. These tapes have become known as The Poughkeepsie Tapes, after the town they were found in, Poughkeepsie, NY. These tapes are considered by many to be the most horrifically graphic collection of videos ever assembled. Kill count: 12+ (source)