Anti-abortionist zealots seek kinder, gentler image

For decades, the goal of the anti-abortion forces was to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court precedent that said that women had a constitutional right to get an abortion subject to certain limits. Anti-abortion zealots felt that those limits were too lax. They wanted a total ban on abortions and with the overturn of Roe, much more restrictive bans could be enacted by state legislatures. Indeed many legislatures in red states had already drafted those bills and were just waiting for the opportunity to pass them.

And it played out just as expected with red states across the nation passing sweeping legislation that made getting abortions all but impossible in those states. What was unexpected (at least by me) was the widespread backlash that this provoked all across the nation. As is often the case, it is only when a right is taken away that people realize how much they value it. It turns out that a majority of people, while they may not go all the way with unlimited abortion access at any time during the pregnancy, were highly uncomfortable with either total bans or with restrictions that made it far too onerous to obtain. As a result, we saw popular referenda overturning such restrictive laws even in deep red states.

So now the anti-abortion forces that for so long had been on the offensive, now find themselves on the defensive and are seeking to promote the idea that. they are not zealots who want to criminalize women who seek abortions and the doctors who provide them. They now seek to project a kindler, gentler image.
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Film review: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)

A recent post of mine discussed how the airline manufacturing company Boeing, despite having had a well-earned reputation for producing quality safe aircraft, suddenly in 2018 and 2019 had two crashes within five months of its new 737 Max planes that resulted in everyone on board being killed. The subsequent inquiry into what happened revealed that Boeing had been in decline for some time, especially after the merger with defense contractor McDonaldMcDonnell Douglas, when the shoddy practices of defense contractors and the drive for company profits to boost shareholder value and executive compensation became the main focus, as a 2019 article by Andrew Cockburn revealed that I linked to.

In a comment to that post, Sunday Afternoon pointed me to this documentary that looked at the results of the subsequent inquiry into what went wrong. What it reveals is infuriating about how Boeing executives ignored all warning signs that they were putting a dangerous plane into circulation and not giving pilots the training they needed to deal with its new features.
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Trump’s strange behavior in court

In the defamation case against him, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) was so disruptive during the testimony of E. Jean Carroll that it clearly exasperated the federal district judge Lewis Kaplan, so much so that he admonished him.

When Carroll first took the stand, Trump could be seen whispering to his lead attorney, Alina Habba. He sat with slightly hunched shoulders as Carroll testified.

As Carroll spoke, Trump complained audibly and appeared to double down on defamatory denials, her lawyer said during a morning break in the proceedings.

“Mr Trump has been sitting at the back table and has been loudly saying things throughout Ms Carroll’s testimony,” said attorney Shawn Crowley.

“It’s loud enough for us to hear it,” Crowley said, so “I imagine it’s loud enough for the jury to hear it.”
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Banning football for young children

I have been highlighting for some time the danger of brain injury that is posed by American football, evidence for which keeps increasing. My preference would be for schools and universities to not offer football as an extracurricular activity. If adults choose to risk their long-term brain health by playing football, we cannot stop them, anymore than we can stop them from doing other dangerous things. But there is no reason why educational institutions should be encouraging it.

I really had no hope that my proposal would go anywhere in this football-crazy country (see the extent of fan devotion in this article) but I was pleased to learn that there have been efforts in some state legislatures to pass laws that ban children under 12 years of age from playing it, although none have passed it. California is the latest to try and fail.
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I wish we could say, “Bye, bye, Vivek”

The Iowa caucuses were held yesterday and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) won easily as expected, getting roughly half the votes (51%) and half the delegates (20). Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley split the remaining votes (21% and 19%) and delegates (9 and 8) respectively. After the results were announced , Vivek Ramaswamy (who got 7.7% and 3 delegates) and Asa Hutchinson announced that they were suspending their candidacies.

I wish we could say that we have seen the last of Ramaswamy whose personality is even more grating than DeSantis, and that is saying something. But I think he is going to be around for a long while. He will likely be a fixture on right wing media as an all-purpose provocateur, a role that he would clearly relish since he seems to love being in the media spotlight

He has also endorsed SSAT, no doubt hoping that if SSAT wins in November, he will be awarded some post by him. That alone should be enough to vote against SSAT.
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The horror in Gaza and the media bubble in which Israelis live

Following the attacks by Hamas on October 7th that killed 1,200 Israelis and the massive retaliation by Israel that seeks to level Gaza and make it into a moonscape, currently over 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70% of whom are women and children. Furthermore, pretty much all of the entire two million population is now displaced and homeless due to the widespread and incessant bombing, and famine is imminent because Israel refuses to allow in adequate levels of humanitarian aid. The sheer scale of the indiscriminate assault and attacks on refugee camps makes laughable the claims by the Israeli government and military that they are targeting only militants. They are clearly seeking to terrorize the entire population of Gaza, destroy the infrastructure, and make life a living hell for the people there.
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Why the Pentagon pays more for less

With regard to the recent troubles with quality and safety of Boeing aircraft, I linked to an article by Andrew Cockburn titled THE MILITARY- INDUSTRIAL VIRUS: How bloated budgets gut our defenses in the June 2019 issue of Harper’s Magazine, where he said that following the merger of Boeing with McDonnell Douglas where the latter defense company basically took over, the long standing wall that separated Boeing’s civilian aircraft division from its military division was breached and the more lackadaisical practices of the military division seeped into the civilian division, resulting in cost overruns, failures to meet schedules, and poor quality.

But the main point of his article was not about Boeing but about how the poor practices in military contracting was built into the system so that companies could gouge the taxpayer while at the same time not providing anywhere near the amount of hardware that had been promised.
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The threat of fentanyl

While I was generally aware that the drug fentanyl was dangerous and causing many deaths among users, it took one particular statistic for me to realize the great extent of the danger posed by it, that it kills nearly 200 people per day (which works out to about 73,000 annually) and is the leading cause of death for people under the age of 45.

Congress is debating a bill to try and deal with this problem but it has been stymied because it is running into the issue of congresspersons using one bill as leverage to get other bills passed, which can result in a stalemate where nothing gets done.

Colloquially referred to as the Fend Off Fentanyl Act, the measure proposes to implement sanctions and anti-money laundering strategies to curb the flow of the potent synthetic opioid, which generally comes into the US after being manufactured in Mexico using Chinese precursor chemicals.
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The Senate banking, housing and urban affairs committee voted to pass the Fend Off Fentanyl Act in June. But, as ABC News reported, US House member Patrick McHenry blocked it from inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act as part of an unsuccessful effort by McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, to get his own cryptocurrency measure added to the NDAA.

While one can hope that this bill manages to reduce the impact of this drug by tackling the supply side, the widespread overuse of opioids such as these points to an even greater problem on the demand side, that so many people seem to have become addicted this drug, well beyond therapeutic needs. That could be much more difficult to deal with.

The benefits and risks of DNA testing of ancestry

I know many people who have taken advantage of DNA testing to find out information about their ancestry. I have not been tempted to do so because I am not interested in what percentage of my ancestry comes from various parts of the globe. Since I grew up in an island where my known ancestors also lived, I suspect that one would have o go back quite far to find traces of ancestors from other parts of the world. Even then, and even if there are surprises, I am not sure what I would do with that information. But I can understand why it might appeal to some in the US where people come from all over the world and have ancestors who were fairly recent arrivals, say within the last 200 years, and seem to have great curiosity about their ancestry. Thus they might find interesting tidbits.
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Deja vu all over again?

In a move that did not get too much attention in the news, 13 Republicans members of the hard right caucus voted with 203 Democrats to defeat by 216-203 an effort to ‘pass the rule’ for three Republican bills to be brought to the floor, thus stymying their speaker Mike Johnson. Without the rule being passed, Johnson will need a ⅔ majority. (In a post back in November, I explained what this procedural stuff is all about.)

Why did they do this? Apparently they are unhappy with the deal that Johnson made with the White House and the Democratic leadership over the spending bills for the budget, because it did not contain all the measures they sought. I can understand the frustration of the hard right caucus. As Kevin Drum writes, the framework of the deal that Johnson agreed to is pretty much the same that former speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to with the White House eight months ago.
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