On May 28, the hosts of KRXQ’s “Rob, Arnie, and Dawn in the Morning” devoted half an hour to promoting abuse of trans children and making very cruel and untrue statements about trans children. Now lots of big sponsors like Bank of America are pulling their advertising.
Switch to Opera?
I switched from Firefox to Opera last November, but I switched back after about a month because 1) I missed my extensions and 2) the buttons on several sites (including one of my credit card websites and a site I had to use for one of my classes) didn’t work.
When I heard about the new version of Opera in beta, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s pretty nice, but after just two days of using it, I’m switching back to Firefox. The lack of extensions is a big problem. Not being able to use Zotero is a big issue since it’s the best citation manager I’ve come across. I miss Twitbin and Adblock, too. Then there are lots of annoying little things like this:
 Menu in Firefox |
 Menu in Opera |
This is one of the problems that crops up a lot – text displayed vertically instead of horizontally. Even the little messages in gmail “Loading…,” “Sending…,” etc. are displayed like this. Sometimes it’s not really a problem, but sometimes it makes the text difficult or impossible to read and hides parts of the page, like on Hulu:
 Hulu in Firefox |
 Hulu in Opera |
I’m not exactly sure why this happens, but it’s irritating.
Opera also doesn’t work very well with certain logins and uploads that use flash (?). For example, normally in WordPress when you upload an image, a window pops up to let you browse for the image and edit its size, alignment, caption, etc. and the rest of the WordPress screen grays out. In Opera, that works alright, but you can’t move the image window around on the screen at all, making it impossible to change certain settings or even click to insert the image into the post if you’ve got a small screen. In WordPress, this is easy enough to get around if you know a bit of html, but on other sites, that isn’t an option.
Both of those problems showed up in earlier versions of Opera I’ve used. They were annoying then and they’re more annoying now – why haven’t they been fixed yet? I like that Opera feels faster, but I need to be able to use Zotero for work and the other issues are just frustrating and a waste of time to deal with. Despite all the glowing reviews of Opera 10b I’ve read, I’ll be sticking with Firefox.
Even insurance doesn’t help
Americans aren’t going bankrupt because they’re buying fancy cars and flat screen TVs. They’re going bankrupt because of medical bills, even people who have insurance. And it’s only getting worse – I’m just one of many people who can’t afford to take needed prescriptions.
We are our bodies
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Without the stimulus and guidance of emotion, rational thought slows and disintegrates. The rational mind does not float above the irrational; it cannot free itself to engage in pure reason. There are pure theorems in mathematics but no pure thoughts that discover them. In the brain-in-the-vat fantasy of neurobiological theory and science fiction, the organ in its nutrient bath has been detached from the impediments of the body and liberated to explore the inner universe of the mind. But that is not what would ensue in reality. All the evidence from the brain sciences points in the opposite direction, to a waiting coffin-bound hell of the wakened dead, where the remembered and imagined world decays until chaos mercifully grants oblivion.
George Tiller
George Tiller was murdered a week ago in his church. He was one of just a few doctors in the United States who provide late term abortions.
Ezra Klein points out that his murder was a political act and that Congress needs to act accordingly:
Tiller was murdered so that those in his line of work would be intimidated. In conversations with folks yesterday, I heard well-meaning variants on the idea that it would be unseemly to push legislation in the emotional aftermath of Tiller’s execution. I disagree. Roeder was acting in direct competition with the United States Congress. And it’s quite likely that he changed the status quo. Legislative language and judicial rulings had made abortive procedures legal and thus accessible. Yesterday’s killing was meant to render abortive procedures unsafe for doctors to conduct and thus inaccessible.
If a woman cannot get an abortion because no nearby providers are willing to assume the risk of performing it, the actual outcome is precisely the same as if the procedure were illegal. Roeder has, in all likelihood, made abortion less accessible. It would be, in my view, a perfectly appropriate response for the Congress to decisively prove his action not only ineffectual, but, in a broad sense, counterproductive.
Gloria Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, demands more than candlelight vigils:
But I myself am done with candlelight vigils. I have participated in too many of them, from 1993 with the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola through the seven doctors, patient escorts and staff murdered over the horrifying five-year period thereafter….
Each time, we held vigils all over the country. We wept and we pledged to continue our work. Which we did, increasingly, in isolation. We were the ones who had been wronged, and yet we were labeled controversial, to be shunned rather than supported. The murders were only the tip of the iceberg, among over 6000 cases of violence, vandalism, stalking, bombings, arson, invasions and other serious harassment.
Later, during the nine years I served as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, we dramatically beefed up our own security while figuring out how to make our health centers nevertheless welcoming to patients and workers alike. In fact, we got so adept at the task that during post-911 anthrax scares, we provided federal government agencies with model protocols for dealing with such threats. But though self-sufficiency is valuable, a just society should offer much more succor to citizens who are attacked.
That’s why today, after what happened to George Tiller, I know that the only thing that will assuage my personal grief over his shocking loss is for leaders across our nation to join me in expressing outrage at this heinous crime, this domestic terrorism. And yes, they need to call it out in exactly those terms. That’s what it is.
What I’ve Noticed
It’s about entitlement, stupid.
Dr. Isis gives advice to a grad student who works with a scientist that won’t stop looking at her boobs. Then she responds to the commenters who suggest it’s the grad student’s fault.
Really, being a girl doesn’t make you bad at math.
Beavers are being reintroduced in Scotland – after 400 years.
Patriarchy isn’t good for men either.
My roommate just got her first dyke haircut.
American troops in UN peacekeeping missions – definitely not leading.
If the US were in the Organization of the Islamic Conferences…