April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

Debra

This is What a Feminist Looks Like

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Julie Zeilinger, is a 16-year-old high school sophomore from Pepper Pike, Ohio and the owner of theFBomb.org

In this case the “F Bomb” stands for “feminist.” However, the fact that the “F Bomb” usually refers to a certain swear word in popular culture is not coincidental. TheFBomb.org is for girls who have enough social awareness to be angry and who want to verbalize that anger. TheFBomb.org is loud, proud, aggressive, sarcastic…everything teenage feminists are today.

Never let it be said that feminism is dead!

Congratulations and good luck with your blog.

The Garden A Growing Concern

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The garden is doing quite well. The herbs could actually do with being repotted. They are too big to have so many in one container. It is lovely to just walk out on the balcony and gather a collection of fresh herbs to throw into whatever I’m cooking.. The morning glory have taken right off. Should be a wonderful display in a few weeks. The beefsteak tomatoes will soon be as tall as me!

The birds love the trellis. Often is it just full of birds waiting their turn for the feeder, which at the moment needs topped up again.

Make it Seven Rally

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While Bettman continues to insist that American communities with no interest in hockey should be the one receiving the teams, Jim Balsillie and the City of Hamilton haven’t given up on their bid to bring another team to Southern Ontario. Friday June 19th a rally was held near Copps Coliseum to show support for bringing the team to Hamilton. A side benefit of the rally was a large donation of goods to the food bank. The one drawback to this is that Hamilton my lose the Bulldogs. Bulldog supporters were at the rally too to draw attention to this fact.

Unfortunately the pics below don’t show just how large the crowd was. One of the drawbacks of being short. 🙂

Myth Busters – Health Care Edition

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Andre Maddison a master’s student in Community Health and Epidemiology is one of two winners of the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation’s 2009 Mythbusters Award. He received the award based on his research into whether or not primary care or non-urgent patients are really causing overcrowding and long wait times in Emergency rooms. Turns out while there is some impact it is not the primary cause.

“I started with the view that due to a shortage of family doctors, people are going to emergency departments and overcrowding them,” explains Mr. Maddison, a native of Sarnia, Ont. “But in reality, why EDs are overcrowded wasn’t known.”

While 40 to 50 per cent of cases in the ER are non-urgent patients, after extensive literature research and speaking with physicians, Mr. Maddison found that primary care patients were not overly burdensome. His research illustrated that patients in urgent need of acute-care, admitting beds, extended stay, specialists and other high demand care needs actually have a greater impact on overcrowding. “We can’t discount the affect of so many non-urgent patients, but they are certainly not the main part of the problem.”

Mr. Maddison believes it’s a system level problem, not isolated to the ED. “Emergency department overcrowding is a national problem with potentially devastating effects,” he says. “It is rooted in insufficient physical and human resources and poor integration within and between hospitals.” He went on to say that to best care for both urgent and non-urgent patients effectively, we must determine the purpose of EDs in order to best serve the patients, health care professionals, communities and the country.

Another political talking point shot down in flames.

SOURCE

Conservatives Really ARE Dinosaurs!

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According to two Cornell University studies if you are the squimish or queasy type you are also more likely to be politically and socially conservative.

Participants who rated higher in disgust sensitivity were more likely to oppose gay marriage and abortion, issues that are related to notions of morality or purity. The researchers also found a weak correlation between disgust sensitivity and support for tax cuts, but no link between disgust sensitivity and the other issues.

And in a separate study in the current issue of the journal Emotion (Vol.9: No.3), Pizarro and colleagues found a link between higher disgust sensitivity and disapproval of gays and lesbians. For this study, the researchers used implicit measures (measures that have been shown to assess attitudes people may be unwilling to report explicitly; or that they may not even know they possess).

Interestingly, despite the ‘bleeding heart’ and other monikers denoting ‘wussiness’ it seems that Conservatives not Liberals are the ones ruled by emotion;

Liberals and conservatives disagree about whether disgust has a valid place in making moral judgments, Pizarro noted. Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something — gay sex between consenting adults, for example — is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgements on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm

Disgust was meant as a protection from things that could cause harm or disease not to pass laws or judgements on the choices or morality of others. Being more evolved it behooves us to help our Conservative brothers and sisters to …. oh wait they also don’t believe in evolution…. never mind.

Source

Pro-lie=Pro-death Now & Then

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In this op-ed in the NYT By KATE MANNING we see that the Pro-Lie crowd have always been hypocrites claming a reverence for life to hide their obsession for foetuses.
She tells the story of Ann Lohman;

Lohman, who called herself Madame Restell, was an immigrant from Gloucestershire, England, who started out selling “female pills” to “regulate” women. The medicines — mostly herbs, perhaps some opium — promised relief from an “obstructed womb” and “suppressed” menstruation. “Not to be used when *******,” declared one of the many coy ads she placed, “as miscarriage may occur.”

In the event that the pills did not, in fact, induce miscarriage, Lohman offered a procedure in her offices, charging $20 for poor women, and as much as $100 for her increasingly wealthy clientele. She also boarded pregnant ladies, delivered babies, placed infants for adoption and conducted sex education classes.

Reminiscent of the rhetoric of today used against such doctors as Tiller and Morgantaler, invectives were also uttered against Lohman

In a riot organized in 1846 by the newspaper publisher George Dixon, a mob surrounded Lohman’s house and chanted, “Hanging’s too good for her!” and “This house is built on babies’ skulls.”

Even their underhanded methods have not changed

As a special agent of the United States Post Office, Comstock entrapped Lohman by posing as a husband seeking abortion services for a lady. When she provided him with some tablets, he returned and arrested her — accompanied by two reporters. She faced years in jail.

and finally neither has their disregard for born life;

“A bloody ending to a bloody life,” Comstock commented upon hearing of her death.

Dr. Warren Hern too knows of their disregard for life and children.

Even early on in his practice, Hern did not shy away from confrontation. When people protested outside his office, he stood in the parking lot and wrote down their license plates. When they shouted during his speeches, he shouted louder. When a protester hurled a rock through a clinic window, Hern hung up a sign: “This window was broken by those who hate freedom.”

But his fear grew along with his defiance. When people called his mountain home with death threats, he started keeping a rifle by the bed. “You think, ‘Is it OK to go for a hike? What about walking my son to school? What about going skiing?’ ” he said.

In 1988, a gunman fired five shots into his clinic’s waiting room, prompting Hern to install four layers of bulletproof glass and an electronic security system. That year, Hern and his wife of six years divorced, a breakup Hern attributed in part to the stress of his work.

The ever-present threats made it hard to develop relationships, Hern testified at a 1999 trial in which he and other doctors sued an antiabortion group for placing their names and personal information on a “Deadly Dozen” list. “It has made me feel a great sense of personal isolation, and that has been the most painful part of this experience,” Hern said, according to the Associated Press.

Dr. Hern has endured all this because of his commitment to women’s health

As he studied medicine, Hern said he encountered women ill from botched illegal abortions. In the early 1970s, Hern — who had planned to become an epidemiologist — became convinced that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to legalize abortion would mean nothing if doctors would not perform them.

“I felt doing abortions was the most important thing I could do with my life,” he said.

When Hern performed his first abortion, on a 17-year-old girl, he later wrote, he cried with a sense of relief because he had made a difference in her future.

The Pro-Lie’rs claim that there is no counselling that abortion are forced on women and that doctors take the money anyway yet this story shows the truth, note that he found the forcing of an abortion “disturbing”;

Hern recalled a disturbing situation his staff encountered 15 years ago during the counseling phase. The parents of a 14-year-old girl wanted her to terminate her pregnancy. The girl did not. As she was filling out a form, she wrote, “I think you should all be killed.”

The clinic manager called in Hern and, after more discussion, the doctor refused to perform the abortion. He has no idea what the family decided to do

There is no middle ground, no debate, no discourse that could be had with people whose blatant disregard for both life and truth is so deeply embedded that it has persisted across decades and nearly centuries.