Women Born Transsexual

From The Atlantic:   http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/gloria-steinem-on-rape-in-war-its-causes-and-how-to-stop-it/252470/

By Lauren Wolfe
Feb 8 2012

It doesn’t matter where you look; sexualized violence is intrinsic to conflict. Qaddafi’s soldiers committed rape in the last days of Libya’s regime. The Egyptian military has been sexually violating female journalists and protesters in that revolution. Across the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of thousands of women are suffering the fallout of the sexualized violence that has torn apart their bodies, their families, and their communities.

A new project from the Women’s Media Center, initiated by one of its founders, journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, has begun documenting this tool of war and genocide. From the Holocaust through today, Women Under Siege is illuminating the causes as well as the cures of sexualized violence by uncovering patterns and making links between them.

As the director of Women Under Siege, as well as a journalist myself, I interviewed Steinem about sexualized violence in conflict and what needs to be done to understand and stop it.

What are some of the reasons rape is so prevalent in war?

First, it’s important to note that rape and war didn’t always go together. For instance, European colonists wrote astonished letters home about how “even these savages” — by which they meant the residents of this continent they were invading — didn’t rape, not even their women prisoners. But those were wars of self-defense. If you’re going to get groups of men to risk their humanity, health, and lives in wars of offense, the traditional way is not to pay them a lot, but to addict them to the “cult of masculinity.” You have to convince them they’re not “real men” unless they kill and conquer. And, at its most basic, “masculine” means not being “feminine.” On a continuum, it means controlling women, conquering women, raping women, even with objects: bottles and broom handles in “peacetime” here, and gun barrels and knives in Bosnia or Congo. There’s a reason why it’s a truism that rape is not sex, it’s violence.

It’s also true that men may rape in groups out of social pressure to prove their “masculinity” — in peacetime, too — but gang mentality is a way of life in war. Military officers sometimes order men to rape as proof of loyalty and shared culpability. Some men express regret and say they wouldn’t have raped without group pressure. Also the group hatred war requires means humiliating enemies by raping “their” women, implanting sperm, taking over their means of reproduction, wiping out the enemy race or ethnicity. Cultures that put all “honor” in the purity of “their” women — and keep women weak — are actually setting them up as targets.

Continue reading at:  http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/gloria-steinem-on-rape-in-war-its-causes-and-how-to-stop-it/252470/

From Inside Climate News:  http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120209/natural-gas-drilling-methane-air-pollution-noaa-epa

Research suggests that emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2, far exceed current estimates for gas drilling and production.

By Nicholas Kusnetz
Feb 9, 2012

Weeks after Barack Obama promoted natural gas as a key part of U.S. energy policy in his State of the Union address, new research says gas drilling may be emitting far more methane and other pollutants into the atmosphere than current estimates suggest.

The work, performed by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, focused on Weld County, Colo., home to more than 20,000 gas wells. After years of monitoring and study, the researchers estimated that about 4 percent of the methane produced by these wells is lost to the atmosphere.

That’s about twice as much as current estimates would suggest, and twice what the EPA assumes is lost nationally during gas drilling and production, said Gabrielle Petron, a lead author of the study.

“What I’ve learned in the past three or four years is that there’s a lot we don’t know, and the industry may not be aware of these leaks and how important they are,” Petron, a researcher with NOAA and the University of Colorado, told InsideClimate News. “Until you go out there in the field and take measurements you may not have a sense of what is leaking and how much it’s leaking.”

Methane accounts for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide. Leaks during the drilling, production and transmission of natural gas are the largest source, accounting for about a third of all man-made methane emissions.

Continue reading at:   http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120209/natural-gas-drilling-methane-air-pollution-noaa-epa

They should have thought of the consequences of becoming a puppet of the Christo-Fascist right wing.

From The Guardian UK:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/10/komen-race-for-the-cure-limit-damage

Fears grow that breast cancer awareness event run by Komen group could be a casualty of Planned Parenthood criticism

Karen McVeighin New York
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 February 2012

Every month, somewhere in America, people swath themselves in pink, lace up their running shoes and take part in the Race for the Cure, the world’s largest and most successful breast cancer awareness and fundraising event. Since the first race in Dallas in 1983, 1.6 million participants have pounded round the 5km courses in a series which now spans four continents.

But now there are growing fears that the race series, and the millions of dollars it raises, may be one of the most visible casualties of the backlash that has engulfed the organisation that runs it, the Susan G Komen for the Cure Foundation, since it decided to stop funding Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading reproductive healthcare provider – a decision, critics say, that was made under pressure from anti-abortion activists. Planned Parenthood is a target of pro-life lobbies because some of its clinics offer abortions.

A week has passed since Komen was forced to reverse that decision and issue a public apology. But that failed to silence the critics, so on Tuesday, Karen Handel, Komen’s senior vice-president and the apparent architect of the defunding decision, resigned. Yet that, too, has done little to restore public confidence in the organisation.

The brand that Komen’s founder Nancy Brinker has spent 30 years building, promoting and aggressively protecting lies in tatters, tainted by a decision widely perceived as political and which, had it been carried through, would have halted breast cancer screening programmes for uninsured women who would otherwise not have access to such care.

How Komen will ever recover is a question many are asking. There are those who feel it won’t be fixed until Brinker and her entire board resigns.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/10/komen-race-for-the-cure-limit-damage

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/11/francois-hollande-presidential-election-sarkozy

The leftwing candidate in April’s presidential elections, has built up a commanding lead in the polls by attacking big finance

Julian Coman in Paris
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 February 2012

On a bitterly cold morning in Dijon railway station last week, a diminutive Frenchman exited his train to the kind of fuss and fanfare that has escaped him for most of a 30-year political career. Sweeping down the frosty platform with the unmistakable air of a man in possession of his mojo, François Hollande was greeted by a flurry of victory signs from grinning passengers waiting for the 9.34am to Lausanne to leave. Surrounding him was an impressively large media scrum.

“The man of the moment!” said one bystander, as the Socialist candidate for the French presidency paused for another impromptu interview.

Welcome to the new world of the man once derided by opponents as Monsieur Flamby (“Mr Pudding”) – a reference both to Hollande’s weight and a perceived flabbiness in his political opinions. That nickname seems out of date now, after a campaign-defining speech last month in the tough Paris suburb of Le Bourget. Giving an impassioned and polished attack on the speculation and profiteering that led to the economic crisis that has engulfed Europe, Hollande told the 20,000-strong crowd: “My enemy is the world of finance.” Belatedly, French company directors, investment bankers and market movers are waking up to the growing popularity of a presidential candidate who promises to raise taxes on rich individuals and big business in order to boost growth.

With the first round of the French elections barely two months away, the polls suggest that Hollande is choosing the right adversaries. On the day he visited Dijon one survey suggested he would win a straight contest with President Nicolas Sarkozy, gaining as much as 60% of the vote.

For a politician habitually described as slightly bland, the transformation into a fêted “tribune of the people” must come as something of a shock. Up until this election campaign Hollande, 57, was known for his love of a joke, his portly mastery of the backroom politics of the Socialist party (PS), and his failed marriage to the former siren of French socialism, Ségolène Royale, who lost the presidential election of 2007.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/11/francois-hollande-presidential-election-sarkozy

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/visions/154056/why_going_%27back_to_normal%27_is_no_longer_an_option_for_the_american_economy_–_and_where_we%27re_headed_now/

Stop waiting around, because “normal” as we know it isn’t coming back.

By Sara Robinson
February 7, 2012

Former IMF chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has a message for everybody who’s sitting around waiting for the economy to “get back to normal.”

Stop waiting. ‘Cause that train’s gone, and it ain’t coming back. And the sooner we accept that “normal,” as post WWII America knew and loved it, will not be an option in this century, the sooner we’ll get ourselves moving forward on the path toward a new kind of prosperity. The only real question now is: What future awaits us on the other side of the coming shift?

In a don’t-miss article in this month’s Vanity Fair, Stiglitz argues that our current economic woes are the result of a deep structural shift in the economy — a once-in-a-lifetime phase change that happens whenever the foundations of an old economic order are disrupted, and a new basis of wealth creation comes forward to take its place. The last time this happened was in the 1920s and 1930s, when a US economy that was built on farm output became the victim of its own success. Advances in farming led to a food glut. As food prices plummeted, farmers had less money to spend. This, in turn, depressed manufacturing and led to job losses in the cities, too. Land values in both places declined, impoverishing families and trapping them in place.

We remember this as the Great Depression. It lingered until the government stepped in — largely through the war effort — with unprecedented education, housing, transportation, and research investments that created new pathways for all those surplus farmers to come in off the farm, for the factory hands to get back to work, and for both groups to move into the modern industrial middle-class.

Stiglitz thinks that we’re going through much the same kind of process again now, as the postwar manufacturing-based economy that saved us 80 years ago moves offshore, leaving our manufacturing workforce just as surplus and idle as those 1920s farmers were. In his view, the current phase shift is taking us away from industry-as-we’ve-known-it, and on into an economy that will have us relying more and more on many different kinds of knowledge work. (This isn’t a new thesis; Daniel Bell was writing about it back in 1973.) But Stiglitz goes on to point out that because people are misunderstanding the moment, we’re investing in the wrong things.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/visions/154056/why_going_%27back_to_normal%27_is_no_longer_an_option_for_the_american_economy_–_and_where_we%27re_headed_now/

From Reader Supported News:  http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/9927-whole-fraud-the-myth-of-so-called-natural-foods

By Ronnie Cummins, CounterPunch
11 February 12

On Jan. 31, organic and natural foods giant Whole Foods Market (WFM) once again attacked the Organic Consumers Association, the nation’s leading watchdog on organic standards, as being too “hard-line” for insisting that retailers like WFM stop selling, or at least start labeling, billions of dollars worth of so-called “natural” foods in their stores – foods that are laced with unlabeled, hazardous genetically engineered (GE) ingredients.

WFM’s most recent attack on OCA predictably backfired, throwing gasoline on the fiery debate surrounding my previous essay “The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto.” In that essay, written in January 2011, I criticized WFM and several other well-known organic companies for their foolish (now hopefully repudiated) stance of espousing “co-existence” with the USDA and Monsanto, in exchange for minimal federal regulation of genetically engineered crops.

In subsequent articles OCA has called for an end to “organic infighting” and for the organic industry, farmers, and consumers to join forces and pass laws or state ballot initiatives (like the current campaign in California) that would require mandatory labels on products containing genetically engineered ingredients, as well as to make it illegal to label or market GE-tainted foods as “natural” or “all natural.”

Anger is now running so high against Monsanto and the USDA, as well as anyone appearing to tolerate “co-existence” with either group, that rumors are fast spreading that Monsanto has bought out, or plans to buy out, WFM. That rumor is untrue. However, it has focused attention once again on the critical issue of food labeling. WFM, and all of us in the organic community, must put an end to labeling fraud in the “natural” products sector, by passing laws that will require brands and supermarkets to clearly label all genetically engineered ingredients on their products.

Growing awareness has created a strong organic movement

Millions of health-minded Americans, especially parents of young children, now understand that cheap, non-organic, genetically engineered, industrial food is hazardous. Not only does chemical- and energy-intensive factory farming destroy the environment, impoverish rural communities, exploit farm workers, inflict unnecessary cruelty on farm animals, and contaminate the water supply, but the end product itself is inevitably contaminated.

Continue reading at:   http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/9927-whole-fraud-the-myth-of-so-called-natural-foods

I am sick and tired of homophobic misogynistic Christo-Nazis cramming their perverse hatred of women down our throats.

If they want to live in a misogynistic theocracy let them move to Iran or Saudi Arabia.  This is America and they don’t belong here.

Take your theocratic shit and get the hell out of my country.

Fuck you! There is no god.

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/opinion/the-freedom-to-choose-birth-control.html?ref=todayspaper

Editorial
Published: February 10, 2012

In response to a phony crisis over “religious liberty” engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle — free access to birth control for any woman. That access, along with the ability to receive family planning and preventive health services, was at the foundation of health care reform.

Mr. Obama’s new rule on birth control coverage lets institutions affiliated with a religion shift the cost of coverage to their insurance companies, but Mr. Obama assured Americans it would not result in other women, or the rest of the country, subsidizing that shift. By refusing to back down on Friday, Mr. Obama took an action that will help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, abortions and medical complications from pregnancy.

Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution. Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of the right to disagree with that teaching.

If a religious body does not like a public policy that affects its members, it is free to try to change it, but it cannot simply opt out of society or claim a special exemption from the law. Besides, contraceptive access is already in place in 28 states, and has been the law in New York for a decade, without inflicting the slightest blow to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which has complied.

Mr. Obama had already gone too far out of his way to exempt churches and their religious employees from the preventative care mandate. It was not necessary to carve out a further exception for their nonreligious arms, like Catholic hospitals and universities, which employ thousands of people of other faiths.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/opinion/the-freedom-to-choose-birth-control.html?ref=todayspaper

From Truth Dig:   http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/embracing_enough_20120210/

By David Sirota
Posted on Feb 10, 2012

Of all the no-no’s in contemporary America—and there are many—none has proven more taboo than the ancient doctrine of dayenu. Translated from the original Hebrew, the word roughly means “It would have been enough.” The principle is that a certain amount of a finite resource should satisfy even the gluttons among us.

I know, I know—to even mention that notion is jarring in a nation whose consumer, epicurean and economic cultures have been respectively defined by the megastore, the Big Mac and the worship of the billionaire. Considering that, it’s amazing the word “enough” still exists in the American vernacular at all. But exist it does, and more than that—the term’s morality is actually starting to suffuse the highest-profile debates in the public square.

After the financial meltdown, for example, Congress witnessed an unexpectedly spirited fight over enacting pay caps at bailed-out financial institutions. Beneath the overheated rhetoric, the brawl revolved around determining how much is enough to compensate Wall Street’s government-subsidized scam artists.

Today, that conflict has metastasized into a battle over taxes. Marked by mind-numbing arguments over Mitt Romney’s IRS returns and esoteric catchphrases like “Buffet Rule,” the skirmish is really just a proxy war over how much individual income we are going to collectively deem “enough” before the next dollar of income is subjected to a less preferential levy.

Even at the state level, “enough” has gone mainstream, as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, just signed an executive order barring state contracts from going to firms that pay executives more than $199,000 a year. Again, the idea is that such a salary is more than enough to attract skilled workers to taxpayer-funded firms.

Continue reading at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/embracing_enough_20120210/

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/10-1

If you want to know what anarchism is and why we should care, read Kropotkin.

by David Morris
Published on Friday, February 10, 2012 by Common Dreams

On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.

Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism.  This is regrettable, for both the man and the philosophy that he did so much to develop have much to teach us in 2012.

I am astonished Hollywood has yet to discover Kropotkin. For his life is the stuff of great movies.  Born to privilege he spent his life fighting poverty and injustice.  A lifelong revolutionary, he was also a world-renowned geographer and zoologist.  Indeed, the intersection of politics and science characterized much of his life.

His struggles against tyranny resulted in years in Russian and French jails.  The first time he was imprisoned in Russia an outcry by many of the world’s best-known scholars led to his release.  The second time he engineered a spectacular escape and fled the country.  At the end of his life, back in his native Russia, he enthusiastically supported the overthrow of the Tsar but equally strongly condemned Lenin’s increasingly authoritarian and violent methods.

In the 1920s Roger N. Baldwin summed up Kropotkin this way:

Kropotkin is referred to by scores of people who knew him in all walks of life as “the noblest man” they ever knew. Oscar Wilde called him one of the two really happy men he had ever met…In the anarchist movement he was held in the deepest affection by thousands–”notre Pierre” the French workers called him. Never assuming position of leadership, he nevertheless led by the moral force of his personality and the breadth of his intellect. He combined in extraordinary measure high qualities of character with a fine mind and passionate social feeling. His life made a deep impression on a great range of classes–the whole scientific world, the Russian revolutionary movement, the radical movements of all schools, and in the literary world which cared little or nothing for science or revolution.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/10-1

From Slate:  http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/10/obama_riled_up_republicans_on_contraception_and_then_delivers_a_knock_out_punch_.html

By Amanda Marcotte
Posted Friday, Feb. 10, 2012,

After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of “religous freedom,” Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation of religiously affiliated employers who don’t want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan, because as Matt Yglesias explained at Moneybox, contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it’s cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. Because the insurance companies have to reach out to employees directly, there’s very little danger of women not getting coverage because they are unaware they’re eligible.

That’s the nitty-gritty. The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women’s access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they’ve been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they’ll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.

Complete article at:  http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/10/obama_riled_up_republicans_on_contraception_and_then_delivers_a_knock_out_punch_.html

From Working Class Heroes:  http://workingclassheroes.us/?p=542

by Charlie Lindamood,
February 10, 2012

I remember growing up in the 50′s and how I’d hear idealistic phrases like “lots of money doesn’t mean you’re rich..owning land is being rich!”  Owning land meant you would always have a place that was yours,and  its value would increase with time even if your personal wealth decreased.  It was the American dream..own land, a home, raise a family, or not…but always, always pay your taxes.

That was then and this is now…now we “are” our ancestors, we have a new legacy to leave our children. We are experiencing what it is like to be on the verge of losing “the dream.”  Some have already lost the dream. They paid their taxes. They played by the rules..and yet they find themselves, their families, their belongings, out on the street…wondering where they wiill  sleep, or when they will  eat. They are further victimized and accused by some  of wanting to be victims, even that they deserve to be victims! Oh yes..they must enjoy sleeping in their cars, being known as food stamp recipients, wanting to hold signs and beg.. Now they are persecuted for being laid off or losing their jobs.

There used to be one common denominator that all American citizens had in common..work!  Work was supposed to get us “a pot in every kitchen and a chicken in every pot”. The exact wording was “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” from Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign.

America, the land of the free, the words advertised.  Work for a fair living wage. But that is not how it was “then.” There was no living wage, there was no fairness in the workplace. There was no guarantee that there would be a light at the end of  tunnel…retirement. Back when the dream started there was no “middle class,”just the working class.

Continue reading at:  http://workingclassheroes.us/?p=542