Even More Musings

Various musings

        I thought "Hints from Heloise" couldn’t get any more inane than yesterday's startling revelation that ice could be used to cool a hot drink. I was wrong. You can’t make this shit up: “My husband and I refuse to eat sausage with the casings on, and I have tried numerous ways to take them off, which end up with a mess, until I tried using a vegetable peeler, which works better than other measures we’ve tried.”  That’s the letter! I would offer as an alternative that perhaps this couple should switch to bacon which comes already peeled. Alternatively buy any of the multitude of sausage patties on the market. “Peeling” sausage? Really?

        With all the incredibly politicized garbage and bad legislation being floated by several states regarding late term (in fact, almost any) abortions, one candidate has managed to deliver, in a couple of paragraphs the most cogent and well stated opinion I have seen regarding this contentious issue.

       “So, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, that means almost by definition you’ve been expecting to carry it to term,” he said.  

“We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen a name, women who have purchased a crib — families who then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice. The bottom line is, as horrible as that choice is, that woman, that family, may seek spiritual guidance, they may seek medical guidance, but that decision isn’t going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.”

"Mayor Pete" has distilled all the Bible thumping and vote pandering right wing bullshit down to the intensely personal and medical consideration that it really is in just one brief response to a Fox News Town Hall meeting question. Compare this to all the Donald Trump, et all, bloviating, vote pandering, rhetoric. Sad, huh?  

       At the Scripps National Spelling Bee recently, the judges finally called it quits and awarded an 8-way tie for first place. As an aside, 6 of the eight winners were Asian Indian. Damned immigrants, taking all the good jobs from “’Murrican” spellers. (note, for those who don’t know me, the previous is sarcasm as a form of humor)

       Finally (for today, anyway) Clarence Thomas (you remember the USSC Justice who says little and does less, other than watch porno?) has opined that abortion and birth control are plots by Eugenicists to limit….something - what he doesn’t actually say.   At this point, as an exemplar of his true mediocrity, he never actually mentions what I suppose we’re expected to glean from his 

20-page polemic which, one supposes, is that Eugenicists would seek to limit Black births, a canard of the highest order,  and statistically false, especially since he lumps birth control and abortion together.

        So, what does he get wrong? The first and most obvious example is that if birth control was meant to limit Black births, it has failed for the following reasons:

·       Eighty-three percent of black women at risk of unintended pregnancy are currently using a contraceptive method, compared with 91% of their Hispanic and white peers, and 90% of their Asian peers. Yeah, that’s the opposite of what Thomas implies.

·       Among women at risk of unintended pregnancy, 92% of those with an income of at least 300% of the federal poverty level and 89% of those living at 0–149% of poverty are currently using a contraceptive method. Yep, you read it right, lower income, less use of contraception.

       So, here’s where it gets even murkier. Because he’s an ignorant man, Thomas is apparently unaware that those who were identified with the Eugenics movement in America, including such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger,  while favoring birth control, generally violently opposed abortion. A horde of historians, Black and White have illuminated this embarrassing fact and described Thomas’s drivel thus:

·       “ignorant and prejudiced when it comes to birth control and wholly inappropriate when it comes to abortion, vis-à-vis eugenics.”

·       “Thomas is guilty of a gross misuse of historical facts, and especially in the U.S. context,”

·       “historically incoherent.”

·       “The American Eugenics Society regarded it (abortion) as murder"

·       “Eugenicists were initially hostile even to birth control because they knew that the women who would use it were the type of women they would want to encourage to reproduce, so-called ‘better’ women — upper-middle-class women,”

·       “This has been part of the sensationalist rhetoric of antiabortion activists for a long time. What is striking about this is that this is now in an opinion by a Supreme Court justice.”

It would seem that even when Justice Thomas does do something and issue an opinion, he’s wrong.