deadissue.com

Having to deal with all that…

Watching the documentary of Cash Playing San Quentin on CMT and it hits me, this idea that they’ve got scripts, budgets and perhaps actors already selected just waiting for the most famous living Americans to kick the bucket.  How creepy would it be if Jamie Foxx somehow already knew he had the Ray Charles role before the guy actually died? 

One of the perks that comes with living in a blue state is the amount of information I’m provided prior to purchasing food for my family.  Generally I try to steer clear of products heavy with preservatives, use fresh ingredients whenever I can and always go with fish caught at sea rather than grown in a farm.  One Discovery Channel documentary on farmed seafood would convince anyone reading this to do the same, but hey, it’s only what we’re putting into our body, so what’s the big deal, right?

States determine what information must be provided to consumers, but with WalMart having become the nation’s top grocery seller and a Congress more apt to operate as an extension of the market than respresentative of the people, the lobbists have finally managed to get legislation in the works to strip the states of this right:

“This bill would strip state governments of the ability to protect their residents through state laws and regulations relating to the safety of food and food packaging,” the attorneys general wrote.
The obvious target, they said, is California’s Proposition 65, a law passed by voters requiring companies to warn the public of potentially dangerous toxins in food. The law has prompted California to file lawsuits seeking an array of warnings, including the mercury content in canned tuna and the presence of lead in Mexican candy.

Oh, the poor food producers.  Forget about someone like me who actually takes the time and purchases certain good based on where it comes from or how it’s made, consumers are there for the corporations, not the other way around!  That’s the message if this bill passes, and from then on when I go to the store to buy haddock, shrimp or salmon, it’ll be a spin at the roulette wheel as to whether or not the fish lived out it’s life surrounded by it’s own waste and that of the other 50 abominations it’s lived a cramped life amongst. 

Republicans, this is what they’re all about unfortunately.  Watch this thing pass with flying colors, and then we’ll have politicians and food-sponsored reports from think tanks all saying that farmed seafood pumped with steroids is just as good as what you’ll find in the ocean.  Like global warming, many many idiots across the country will see someone of authority, wearing their team jersey, telling them that it’s all a ‘hoax’.  Soon, if you doubt the methods of the food America produces, you’re unpatriotic.   

Not the toughest thing adjusting to, but when a traffic light in the center of town is still blinking yellow a week after it went first went out, reality sets in like a big soft Vilseck-Hampstead-Macadamia Nut cookie.  Questions spring up two or more times a day when I hit the once safe intersection now hooked on mayhem, turning us all into raccoon-eyed junkies, tapping the gas and thinking twice, again, again, “FUCK!”, again, again…

Something I love about deadissue.com and blogs in general is that a spoof topic like ‘Faking Your Own Death’ can somehow spawn a debate on abortion, of course after veering into the rhelm of animal rights and whether or not we should kill bears. 

This is a topic that has a special way of affecting each of us emotionally, and for as long as I’ve been alive on this earth, nothing seems to get the blood boiling quite like a good ol’ fashioned abortion debate.  My own experience as a militant pro-lifer provided a cause I was able to champion outside the rhelm of numbers or facts, and as I grew older and further away from fundamentalist religion, numbers and facts gained more and more relevance with each passing year.

As a society, policy effects us as a whole and at times individually.  The policy question as I see it in terms of abortion is ‘legal or illegal’.  My position is based entirely on the statistics available, and here are a few samples of what happens when abortion is criminalized:

For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn’t reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia – where abortion is illegal even if a woman’s life is in danger – averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

It’s a matter of science to me, and the day someone on the pro-life side of the argument can produce a study or example somewhere else in the world where abortion is illegal and it doesn’t adversely affect society as a whole, it’ll be a first.  Read More