It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse. It’s another edition of your Weekly Reader! If you have a link to share, head on over to the comments and let me know about it. The more reading materials, the better!
I was 12 years old and pregnant. Alabama’s abortion ban bill would punish girls like me. (from USA Today): “I need you to know that any child’s pregnancy is the result of rape, because no child can consent to sex. I need you to know that any child’s pregnancy is traumatic, no matter the outcome, because little girls aren’t supposed to have full wombs. I need you to know that I didn’t know I had options, because I knew girls who got pregnant were called sluts and girls who had abortions were called murderers.”
When We Talk About Abortion, Let’s Talk About Men (from The New York Times): “Our entire abortion debate pits the fetus against the woman. Men are absent. They can shrug off an unwanted pregnancy as someone else’s problem, even though they contributed half the genetic material to the fetus. Most men probably won’t think the abortion bans littering statehouses have anything to do with them.
They are both wrong and right.”
Separated by Design: How Some of America’s Richest Towns Fight Affordable Housing (from Pro Publica): “But this sad patch of land is also the physical manifestation of a broader turf war over what type of housing — and ultimately what type of people — to allow within Westport’s borders.”
Why Do You Think They Cross the Border? (from John Pavlovitz): “The “right way,” is a phrase used by people who’ve never experienced true desperation.
The “right way,” is a telling symptom of inherited privilege that was born insulated from extreme poverty and violence.
The “right way,” is the rally cry of someone who’s never been faced with the kind of urgency that leaves you utterly hopeless.
The “right way,” is what selfish people say when they don’t want other people to have what they’ve been handed with a birth certificate.”
A White Man’s Republic, If They Can Keep It (from The Atlantic): “The disparate approaches taken by two of the Court’s conservatives to the Voting Rights Act reflect the right’s dueling impulses toward civil-rights laws. Where Scalia rejected the very effort to guarantee black people the same right to cast a ballot as white people as a “racial entitlement,” Roberts insisted that he agreed with the law’s underlying premises, but that the statute now did more harm than good.”
The ‘Great Dying’ Nearly Erased Life On Earth. Scientists See Similarities To Today (from NPR): “There have been other mass extinctions, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, but this one, at the end of the Permian Period, was mostly caused by too much carbon dioxide rising into the atmosphere. And the Smithsonian notes often in its exhibit that the current warming of the planet is déjà vu all over again.”
Scientists Save Schrödinger’s Cat (from Gizmondo): “You might be familiar with Schrödinger’s cat. It’s a thought experiment in which a cat’s life depends on some two-state quantum process, and according to the rules of quantum mechanics, once the experiment is set in motion, the cat is alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box. In this case, the cat being alive is the ground state, and the cat being dead is the excited state. The implication of this research is that the scientists can indirectly watch the “cat” move from the alive state to the alive-and-dead simultaneously state, and intervene to save the cat.”
The Body Behind The Dumpster #Innocents (from Godless Mom via Patheos): “Here was a tiny, teenaged girl, arrested for the severe beating that came after (or before) an apparent rape of a grown man. Once interrogated, they found she had an alibi – one that could be backed up by one of Lobato’s neighbours. Noneof the vast amounts of evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Lobato. Even more infuriating, the story a tipster phoned in about Lobato cutting off a man’s penis? It happened, but it was a mere stab after a man tried to assault her, and it happened in May. May. Bailey was murdered in July.”
I was married with 2 kids when I realized I’m gay (from CNN): “There’s a price of admission for coming out as gay later in life. Over the course of several months, I paid the price daily. It was like I was watching a movie about myself but unable to control what was unfolding. Everything fell apart.”
YouTube’s week from hell: How the debate over free speech online exploded after a conservative star with millions of subscribers was accused of homophobic harassment (from Business Insider): “Crowder, who hosts a roundtable discussion and sketch show with a conservative bent, has repeatedly featured segments ripping on videos made by Maza, where he contradicts their ideas while also jabbing at Maza’s sexual and ethnic identity.
In his original tweetstorm, Maza said that the personal attacks led to doxxing and harassment from Crowder’s supporters, while also allegedly violating YouTube’s harassment and bullying policy.”
And that’s all for now. Drop by again for even more articles worth reading. Until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 