March 2, 2022

A new look at baby 'safe haven' laws, After SCOTUS hearing

After SCOTUS hearing, a new look at baby ‘safe haven’ laws
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Nicole Olson and her son Porter, 10, look at his baby pictures at their home, Thursday, Dec. 17, 2021, in Phoenix. Porter was relinquished at birth through what’s…
by: ASTRID GALVAN , Associated Press

Posted: Dec 22, 2021 / 01:44 AM PST

Updated: Dec 22, 2021 / 01:54 AM PST

PHOENIX (AP) — For years, Nicole Olson had longed for a baby and gone through a rigorous and emotional adoption process. Then Olson and her husband got a call asking if they’d like to adopt a newborn. That day. As soon as possible.

The baby had been relinquished through what’s known as a safe haven law. Such laws, which exist in every state, allow parents to leave a baby at a safe location without criminal consequences. The laws began to pass in state legislatures in the early 2000s in response to reports of gruesome baby killings and abandonments, which received copious media attention. Infants are at the highest risk of being killed in their first day of life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Olson rushed to a Target, filled four carts with baby stuff and was home with the newborn boy by dinnertime. Ten years later, the baby Olson and her husband, Michael, named Porter is thriving. He’s athletic, funny and has adjusted well after a rough time during the pandemic, Olson said.

Safe haven laws drew attention this month when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett raisedthe role they play in the debate around abortion rights. Barrett made the comments during a hearing this month on aMississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — and possibly upend abortion rights established by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion throughout the United States, and upheld by the court’s 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Much more at the link...

https://www.kget.com/health/after-scotus-hearing-a-new-look-at-baby-safe-haven-laws/

🌻❤🌻pants

February 28, 2022

Dirges and chants are so healing. But then so is the bossa nova. 🌻❤🌻

Adding this, I hope it's okay.



Psalms, Chapter 135, KJV


1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise ye the name of the LORD; praise him, O ye servants of the LORD.

2 Ye that stand in the house of the LORD, in the courts of the house of our God,

3 Praise the LORD; for the LORD is good: sing praises unto his name; for it is pleasant.

4 For the LORD hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his peculiar treasure.

5 For I know that the LORD is great, and that our Lord is above all gods.

6 Whatsoever the LORD pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all deep places.

7 He causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings for the rain; he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries.

8 Who smote the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and beast.

9 Who sent tokens and wonders into the midst of thee, O Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his servants.

10 Who smote great nations, and slew mighty kings;

11 Sihon king of the Amorites, and Og king of Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan:

12 And gave their land for an heritage, an heritage unto Israel his people.

13 Thy name, O LORD, endureth for ever; and thy memorial, O LORD, throughout all generations.

14 For the LORD will judge his people, and he will repent himself concerning his servants.

15 The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.

16 They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not;

17 They have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.

18 They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that trusteth in them.

19 Bless the LORD, O house of Israel: bless the LORD, O house of Aaron:

20 Bless the LORD, O house of Levi: ye that fear the LORD, bless the LORD.

21 Blessed be the LORD out of Zion, which dwelleth at Jerusalem. Praise ye the LORD.

🕊🌻🕊

February 28, 2022

How to post a full graphic from Twitter...

Here are the steps...

Open the image in a background file aka a new tab.

Open the drop down menu for the new tab.

Select share.

Copy website address, aka the url.

Paste (share) the url to the new location.

Edit the url up to and including the question mark.

Add a period and "jpg" (.jpg) to the end of the edited url and...voila, you have a new postable graphic. Ta Da !!

You're welcome.

🌻❤🌻

February 22, 2022

Sublime!

Thank you. ❤

February 21, 2022

Playing with Fire

Margaret Atwood on feminism, culture wars and speaking her mind: ‘I’m very willing to listen, but not to be scammed’

At 82, the Canadian author has seen it all - and her novels predicted most of it. Just don’t presume you know what she thinks, she tells Hadley Freeman

Sat 19 Feb 2022 03.00 EST

‘How are you? You’re named after Ernest Hemingway’s first wife,” Margaret Atwood announces by way of a greeting when we meet on a hotel’s heated patio near her home in Toronto. Atwood, 82, has often been described as a prophet, thanks to her uncanny ability to foresee the future in her books. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in January 2021, it looked, terrifyingly, like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale, when the government is overthrown and the dystopian land of Gilead is founded. She seemingly predicted the 2008 financial crash in her nonfiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, published that year. Atwood has always scoffed at any suggestion of telepathy, pointing out that every atrocity in The Handmaid’s Tale had been carried out by totalitarian regimes in real life, and she “predicted” the crash by noticing the number of adverts offering to help people with their personal debt. But as she stands in front of me, snowflakes glittering around her like stars, the flames of the hotel’s gas heaters leaping on either side of her, dressed all in black save for her little red hat, correctly guessing who I’m named after, she certainly seems to have a touch of magic about her. How did she know about the Hemingway connection?

“Because I’m deep into Martha Gellhorn,” she says, launching into a long discussion about the celebrated war correspondent and Hemingway’s third wife. Atwood isn’t writing a book about Gellhorn (yet), but she found a letter from her to the father of her late partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019, and is now a Gellhornologist. After six or so minutes, I wonder if we’ll ever talk about anything else, but Atwood has a regal quality that makes interruption unthinkable. It does not, as I later learn, render argument impossible.

Proceedings begin peacefully enough. Atwood and I are meeting because this month she will publish her latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, a 500-page doorstopper that gathers together her nonfiction output from the past two decades. During this period she also published five novels, one novella and Payback. Atwood is arguably the most famous living literary novelist in the world and unarguably one of the most prolific: in her half century of writing, she has published, on average, a book a year. She has won the Booker twice – in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments, controversially sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. Atwood shrugs off that literary hoo-ha – “So fun! Bernardine’s a great gal” – and adds that she is “a veteran of not winning the Booker”. Of course, being a veteran of not winning means being a veteran of being shortlisted, which in Atwood’s case is four times on top of her wins. So when she describes herself to me as a “grade-A procrastinator and goof-off”, I say that seems unlikely, given how much she writes, and she looks abashed. “I know – it’s horrible, isn’t it?” she says. When I ask how she managed to whittle her essays down to a mere 500 pages, she cringes again at her own productivity. “Horrible!” But adds, “If writing wasn’t a pleasure, I wouldn’t do it.”

And Atwood’s writing is – unfailingly – a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. Whole days of my life have been lost to her novels, including Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood’s love of Victorian literature, but it’s also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back. When she writes her books, she types up yesterday’s handwritten pages and handwrites the pages for tomorrow. “The rolling barrage!” she laughs. When we talk about modern social movements, she refers back to the French Revolution; when we talk about the rollback of abortion rights in the US, she cites Nicolae Ceaușescu, the notoriously anti-abortion dictator of Romania from 1974 to 1989. “As you may have noticed, I like to do my research,” Atwood smiles, after we’ve segued into long discussions of Stalin, or Mao, or Robespierre. It’s all fascinating, and evidence of her tirelessly curious mind. But it can also feel as though she is building a wall of words to protect herself from prying questions. At one point, when she pauses in the middle of such a digression, I ask if her research into Gellhorn has been a way to stay close to Gibson.

“Of course. No-brainer. Next question.” She picks up the menu. “Shall we split the ubiquitous avocado toast?”

Much more at the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2022/feb/19/margaret-atwood-on-feminism-culture-wars

❤

February 18, 2022

You're welcome! ❤

Here are the steps...

Open the image in a background file aka a new tab.

Open the drop down menu for the new tab.

Select share.

Copy website address, aka the url.

Paste (share) the url to the new location.

Edit the url up to and including the question mark.

Add a period and "jpg" (.jpg) to the end of the edited url and...voila, you have a new postable graphic. Ta Da !!



❤

February 16, 2022

There's an abundance of redundancy at DU.

One only has to scan the Latest Threads page to prove that notion. Sometimes the exact same content is posted three times a day or more. Just in the last few days, in the Video & Multimedia Forum, the exact same videos have been posted back to back and more than once.

Sometimes, the exact post is made by two different people at the same time in the same forum or group. None of these things should come as any great surprise when you consider how fast the posting rate in the General Discussion forum is alone.

There's no "peruse before you post" rule and few think to check for duplicate threads before they post. Only in LBN does the OP get a preposting prompt to look for duplicates before posting. In all other areas of DU, you're on your own.

In my reading on linguistics and communication science, I read somewhere that for a written word or phrase to be ultimately valued it should be repeated a minimum of fourteen times. I believe that's one of the reasons why in commercials there's so much repetition of product names.

So in a population of ageing Boomers, which DU appears to enjoy, I think it's a good thing to have that repetition as our memories may be becoming clouded by the passage of time. It helps us remember. ❤

February 13, 2022

All of them...

I still drive a stick, six speed. And we didn't have indoor plumbing until 1971. My grandmother raised me and we were very poor but I remember her cooking a big breakfast, with eggs, biscuits, grits, homemade sausage and coffee percolated on the stove, every day between five and six in the morning.

I also remember pumping buckets full of water that we had to heat on the (first wood, later gas) stove for baths, dishes and what not because it was the coldest water in the world from our eighty foot well. I bathed in what is called a foot tub. Our washer was the hand roller type until we got indoor plumbing. We never got a dryer.

I don't remember food stamps or any food pantries but I do remember shelling peas and butter beans and eating tomatoes fresh in the garden right off the vine. We had a good sized garden which was lots of work. I learned how to plant, hoe, weed, string up string beans and cut okra.

We had a milk cow, a laying hen that lived under a big cast iron pot and we raised our own pigs which grew to enormous sizes. They went to the slaughterhouse and into the smoke house. We also ate squirrel, rabbit, duck and deer that were either killed by my uncle or shared by neighbors.

I don't remember feeling deprived, ever. I was loved and happy and it doesn't seem that long ago. I miss my grandmother every single day.

Interesting OP. Thanks, DURHAM D.

❤ pants

February 4, 2022

Full graphics of under review, banned/removed books...

As a voracious reader and a lover of books this is like killing my friends. Murder. Horrible and heartbreaking.

❤pants