Drug users group files decriminalization lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court

© Provided by The Canadian Press


VANCOUVER — A group representing drug users has filed a lawsuit against the federal government in British Columbia Supreme Court seeking to decriminalize the possession of illicit drugs, arguing criminalization during the overdose crisis violates charter rights.

The statement of claim filed Tuesday by the Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs and four individual plaintiffs says drug dependence is well recognized as a medical condition, but criminalization means the toxic illicit market is the only source of most drugs.

It says the illicit drug supply has become increasingly contaminated with the powerful opioid fentanyl and related substances since 2016, fuelling the drug poisoning and overdose crisis that's killing thousands of Canadians every year.

The lawsuit argues criminalization has also created a high degree of stigma, leading many people to use drugs alone and in secret, heightening the risk of overdose.

A statement of defence has not been filed in the court's online search system.

Health Canada spokesman Mark Johnson said that Justice Canada is reviewing the claim.

"Tragically, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the ongoing overdose crisis, with many jurisdictions having reported record high rates of harms, including deaths, throughout 2020 and into 2021," he wrote in an email to The Canadian Press.

The lawsuit challenges drug possession offences in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, asserting that they breach charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person, equality rights and the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual treatment.

The civil claim, among other things, asks the court to strike down all drug possession offences, as well as certain drug trafficking offences related to subsistence.

More than 21,000 people died of drug overdose in Canada between 2016 and 2020, the lawsuit says. It asserts that many of the deaths could have been prevented with a combination of decriminalization, a safe drug supply and harm-reduction services.

The City of Vancouver has requested an exception to federal law to decriminalize the possession of particular amounts of certain drugs for personal use, but Health Canada has yet to approve the request. The City of Toronto and the B.C. government have also backed decriminalization, while the lawsuit seeks an end to the prohibition across the country.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 2, 2021.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Brenna Owen, The Canadian Press

Disorganized elder care in Quebec contributed to COVID-19 death toll: report


QUEBEC — A disorganized and poorly evaluated health system for seniors contributed to the high COVID-19 death toll in the province, according to Quebec's health and welfare commissioner.

Joanne Castonguay released her preliminary report Thursday about the state of the health and social services network for seniors on the eve of the pandemic.

During the first months of the health crisis, from March to August 2020, no fewer than 5,157 elderly Quebecers died, accounting for 90 per cent of total COVID-19 deaths in the province at the time.

"This is probably one of the worst crises that modern Quebec has ever known, if not the most serious of all," she said in the report.

A combination of several factors, she said, led to an unprecedented crisis for seniors in long-term care and other residences across the province. There was no comprehensive strategy to offer a uniform quality of care, services were disorganized and poor data collection prevented care providers from making timely and correct decisions, she said.

Tasked in August by the government to look at the province's COVID-19 response, Castonguay spoke to about 100 health workers who experienced the situation first-hand. She said based on her interviews, it became clear "the management of the first wave of the pandemic has seriously undermined the dignity and integrity of the elderly, leading to a worsening of their physical and psychological health."

Castonguay said there was no official body tasked with compiling results of the evaluations conducted in long-term care homes, adding that the government didn't evaluate the care given to seniors in private residences that had contracts with the province.

As a result of the lack of proper evaluations, it was difficult to hold health-care providers accountable for their conduct during the pandemic, she said.

She said the problems in the network had been well-known under several governments and numerous reports had been produced on the shortcomings, but little had been done. The COVID-19 crisis exacerbated existing problems and the responsibility for the fiasco should be "collective," she said.

"The governance of long-term care and services has received little attention in the major concerns of successive governments," she noted. "We also observe that no mechanism has been provided to ensure the capacity of the state to finance long-term care and long-term services."

The commissioner wrote that she wanted to understand why Quebec had not been able to better protect vulnerable seniors at the height of the pandemic and will provide solutions to prevent a repeat.

Castonguay's final report is due at the end of December.

Health Minister Christian Dubé said in a statement Thursday that several elements raised in the report had been addressed during the last two waves of COVID-19.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 2, 2021.

Jocelyne Richer, The Canadian Press

Guion Bluford's astonishing career — first African American to go to space

Randi Mann - 

On Tuesday, August 30, 1983, Guion Bluford became the first African American to go to space. Bluford was one of five people on the STS-8 mission. It was NASA's eighth mission to space and the Space Shuttle Challenger's third. The shuttle launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission was overall successful, but Bluford really put it on the map.

Bluford was born on Nov. 22, 1942, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His tenure of education includes a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering from Pennsylvania State University, a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Aerospace Engineering (with a bonus minor in Laser Physics), and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Houston–Clear Lake."Bluford on STS-8 in 1983." Courtesy of Wikipedia

Bluford joined the Air Force and received his pilot wings in Jan. 1966. In 1967, he was assigned to the Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas as an instructor pilot. In 1971, Bluford became an executive support officer to the Deputy Commander of Operations.

In 1974 Bluford was assigned to the Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory and served as the staff development engineer. By the time he was recruited by NASA in 1978, he logged over 5,200 hours of jet flight time.

Bluford was a part of NASA astronaut group 8. By Aug. 1979, he was officially an astronaut. Bluford's assignments included working with the Space Station operations, the Spacelab systems and experiments, and the Space Shuttle systems.


© Provided by The Weather NetworkGuion Bluford's astonishing career — first African American to go to spaceSTS-8 launch. Courtesy of Wikipedia

The STS-8 was NASA's first night launch and landing. During the mission, the crew tested the Canadarm (the Canadian robotic arm), deployed the Indian National Satellite, conducted experiments to better understand the biophysiological effects of space flight, and executed other tasks.

The mission completed 98 orbits around Earth in six days, one hour, eight minutes and 43 seconds before landing at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on Sep. 5, 1983.

Bluford completed four flights with NASA, logging more than 688 hours in space. Bluford has been inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame, the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame, and the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

‘The Nanny’ Star Fran Drescher Elected President Of SAG-AFTRA Labour Union

© Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images



After a hard-fought and contentious campaign, Fran Drescher was elected Thursday to become the new president of the acting union SAG-AFTRA.

According to Variety, the former star of "The Nanny" won election against rival Matthew Modine, beating the actor by a vote of 52.5 per cent to 47.5.

The two candidates ran on opposing slates, with Modine's running mate, actress Joely Fisher, winning her race for secretary-treasurer against Anthony Rapp.

SAG-AFTRA was previously led by Gabrielle Carteris, who was aligned with Drescher on the union's moderate Unite for Strength slate, which has controlled the union since 2009.

In a statement Thursday night upon her victory, Drescher said, “Together we will navigate through these troubled times of global health crisis and together we will rise up out of the melee to do what we do best, entertain and inform,” she said. “Only as a united front will we have strength against the real opposition in order to achieve what we all want: more benefits, stronger contracts and better protections. Let us lock elbows and together show up with strength at the negotiating table!”

Fisher, who had criticized Drescher during the campaign, said in her own victory statement, “I will hold Fran Drescher to her promise to us to protect the members and put more money in our pockets through stronger contract negotiations."

Fix broken Access to Information law, public tells federal review



© Provided by The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Civil society groups, journalists and members of the public are telling the federal government it is time to fix Canada's broken transparency law.

Written and oral submissions to a federal review call for expansion of the Access to Information Act, removal of numerous loopholes in the law, strict timelines for responding to requests and more resources to make the system work.

The issue has received scant attention on the election campaign trail, but whichever party forms government will get a clear message: the 38-year-old access law, drafted in the pre-internet era of metal filing cabinets, is in desperate need of reform.

The law allows people who pay $5 to ask for a range of federal documents — from internal emails to policy memos — but it has long been criticized as antiquated and poorly implemented.

The federal review is focusing on the legislative framework, opportunities to improve proactive publication, and assessing processes to improve service and reduce delays.

The Centre for Free Expression at Toronto's Ryerson University says in its submission that the review launched in June last year is an opportunity to demonstrate a commitment to transparency and accountability.

"Today we have an Act with exceptions and exemptions that have been stretched beyond recognition to prevent disclosures, a critically under-resourced access system not equipped to keep up with requests, and a culture of secrecy within government that views access as a threat rather than a right of all Canadians," says the brief.

The centre is the co-ordinator of the Right to Information Alliance Canada, composed of 17 organizations including News Media Canada, the Centre for Law and Democracy, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Greenpeace Canada.

In its submission to the review, the group World Press Freedom Canada says that during the COVID-19 pandemic — a moment when Canadians required access to a stream of government information for their safety — the pipelines were rusted and clogged from years of deliberate neglect.

"The numerous flaws in Canada’s access-to-information regime can be reduced to just two: the law provides far too many reasons to keep information secret, and releasing information takes far too long."

A shift in culture is also needed, says Vincent Gogolek, former executive director of the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

"When estimated time to complete an ATIA request is measured in years, when records either disappear or are never created, and when officials seek to prevent requesters from exercising their rights on the flimsiest of pretexts, these are signs that the problem is not just with laws and regulations, but with policies and with the basic culture of the institutions subject to the Act," says his submission.

"That has to change."

During a series of public consultation sessions this year as part of the review, attended by a total of about 200 people, participants advocated:

— Expanding the right of access under the Canadian law to anyone in the world;

— narrowing exceptions in the law with the guiding principle of releasing as much information as possible; and

— a requirement that government information be disclosed in all cases unless there are valid reasons not to publish it.

A report from the government review is to be submitted to the Treasury Board president by Jan. 31 next year — perhaps a reason the Liberals are not binding themselves to any Access to Information promises in their platform.

The NDP platform is also silent on the access law, though leader Jagmeet Singh expressed a need for more openness when asked about it this week.

"I think transparency is incredibly important and we've seen for a while that it's been difficult to obtain information, and it's something we absolutely believe in," he said in Montreal.

The Conservatives promise to review the access law and to give the information commissioner, an ombudsman for users, the power to order departments to "release information promptly" to end "the current government’s practice of endless delays that makes a mockery of the law."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 3, 2021.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press

Climate science teaches us to love insects. Horror films tell us to hate them. Who will win?

Dominique, the giant housefly in Mandibles, a French-Belgian comedy film written and directed by Quentin Dupieux. Photograph: Lifestyle pictures/Alamy


Creepy-crawlies usually signify death, decay and evil in films – there’s a vast canon going back decades. But has the ‘When Insects Attack’ sub-genre had its day?


Anne Billson
Fri 3 Sep 2021

In Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles, a pair of chuckleheads called Manu and Jean-Gab (think Dumb and Dumber, but French) steal a Mercedes and find, in the boot, a housefly the size of a pitbull. They name it Dominique and train it to rob banks. At no point do they find it scary, even after it eats a dog. It’s so endearing, you will share their feelings.

This is a turn up for the books, since flies in cinema are more usually signifiers of death, decay and evil. Sometimes, as when Annie Graham goes up to the attic in Hereditary, their presence presages the discovery of a cadaver. They buzz symbolically around the grubby cheesecloth-wrapped bundle in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, while Father Delaney’s attempts to bless the cursed house in The Amityville Horror are thwarted by demonic bluebottles. In Phenomena, Jennifer Connelly plays a schoolgirl insect-whisperer who can summon flies for protection, but that doesn’t save her from getting submerged up to her neck in maggots. In the bonkers Indian action-fantasy Eega, a man murdered by his love rival is reincarnated as a vengeful housefly, but fusing your molecules with those of a Musca domestica is more likely to end in loss of vital anatomical parts, as happens in both the 1958 and 1986 versions of The Fly. (Help meeee!)

At best, insects in films are pesky. At worst, they can be downright malevolent, reflecting western society’s attitude to creepy-crawlies in general. It’s estimated that 6% of humans suffer from some form of entomophobia – and for the purposes of this article I am grouping arthropods (spiders, centipedes), gastropods (slugs, snails) and non-arthropod invertebrates (worms) under the broader entomological banner. In the immortal words of the tagline on Shaun Hutson’s novel Slugs: “They ooze. They slime. They kill.” Depending on number of legs or wings, they also creep, hop, scuttle and dive bomb. They can be trained to kill, like the lethal lepidopterans in Tsui Hark’s directing debut, The Butterfly Murders, which behave more like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds than the colourful flitterers we know and love, while The Abominable Dr Phibes manoeuvres a biblical mini-plague of locusts into gnawing the flesh off one of his victims by dripping mashed-up Brussels sprouts over her as she sleeps.

The Xenomorph in Alien (1979) exhibits insect characteristics: egg-laying queen, parasitic behaviour and metamorphic lifecycles. 

Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Allstar

Why do insects make our skin crawl? Perhaps because they are hard to anthropomorphise. They are not furry and you don’t want them sleeping on your bed, though I daresay there are plenty of phasmid fanciers who have formed close relationships with their pets. With their bug eyes and exoskeletons, insects already look semi-alien, so it’s little wonder that film-makers regularly depict our planet attacked by creepy-crawlies from outer space or alternative dimensions, in films such as The Mist or the horror-comedy Infestation (which featured alien insectoids using sound to home in on their prey a decade before A Quiet Place). The Xenomorph in the Alien franchise exhibits insect characteristics (an egg-laying queen, parasitic behaviour, metamorphic life cycles), and the Martians in Quatermass and the Pit, at first mistaken for the devil, are glimpsed in atavistic memory clips hopping around like giant locusts, which ought to be funny – but somehow isn’t, especially once you learn they are engaged in a form of ethnic cleansing. As Seth Brundle says in The Fly: “Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I.”

Creature features are usually constructed around the premise that hey, if people are freaked out by woodlice and earwigs, imagine how scared they’ll be if those critters are mutated by radiation or pollution into colossal versions that can decapitate you with one swipe of a mandible (Starship Troopers) or use brutish giant cockroach strength to fold you in half, like Ivan the luckless waiter in Men in Black. And, of course, you wouldn’t want to run into Shelob, the giant spider from Lord of the Rings, or The Deadly Mantis, Tarantula, the giant bees from Mysterious Island or the enormous parasites from Cloverfield that can make your head explode with just one bite.

But I would contend that giant insects aren’t nearly as scary as normal-sized ones. The ants from Them! are too big to crawl into your ear, the way an ant once crawled into mine as I was gardening. (I sluiced it out with a wet cotton bud, but worried it might have laid eggs in my brain.) The gigantic Eight Legged Freaks in the film of the same name are nowhere near as creepy as the normal-sized spiders in Arachnophobia and the slow-but-deadly tarantulas that interrupt William Shatner’s attempts to chat up a comely arachnologist in Kingdom of the Spiders. Giant worms such as the ones in Dune, Beetlejuice and Tremors, and the bloodworm that slurps up Andy Serkis in King Kong are obviously best avoided, but for that extra-creepy skin-crawling factor they can’t hold a candle to the regular-sized annelids in Squirm, which ooze from showerheads and burrow into people’s faces.

William Shatner succumbs to a tarantula in Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). 

Photograph: Dimension/Allstar

Insect eco-horror peaked in the 1970s with exploitation entrepreneurs such as William Castle, whose final production, Bugs (1975), features mutant cockroaches that set fire to people’s hair and spell out “WE LIVE” on the wall, and Irwin Allen, whose The Swarm proclaims patriotically: “The African killer bee portrayed in this film bears absolutely no resemblance to the industrious, hardworking American honey bee.” Damn migrant bees; coming over here and killing off beloved Hollywood veterans such as Olivia de Havilland and Henry Fonda!

But the insect threat is treated more seriously in the 1971 faux-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, which intersperses fascinating real footage of insect life with “Dr Nils Hellstrom” (played by an actor) predicting the rise of species such as the African driver ant, “a mindless unstoppable killing machine dedicated to the destruction of everything that stands in its way”. More alarming, albeit more obviously fictional, is the only feature directed by legendary credits designer Saul Bass: in his film Phase IV (1974), two scientists investigating unusual ant activity in the Arizona desert find themselves under siege when the colony’s hive mind fights back. Ants clearly appeal to the mindset of surrealistically inclined auteurs, pouring out of a hole in the palm of a hand in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, crawling over a severed ear in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and – in Bass’s original ending to Phase IV, rejected by the studio for being too weird – taking over the world. Bow down to your insect overlords!

Olivia de Havilland as a schoolteacher attacked by killer bees in The Swarm (1977). Photograph: Warner Bros./Allstar

It’s possible that the “When Insects Attack” sub-genre has had its day, given recent developments on the ecological front. As Dr Hellstrom says: “In fighting the insect we have killed ourselves, polluted our water, poisoned our wildlife, permeated our own flesh with deadly toxins. The insect becomes immune, and we are poisoned. In fighting with superior intellect, we have outsmarted ourselves.” Even more troubling than the thought of being overrun by creepy-crawlies is the emerging information that, in the last two decades, three-quarters of the world’s insects have simply disappeared. This might be encouraging news for entomophobes, but it’s a terrible portent for the future of humanity, which has not only failed to acknowledge the importance of insects to the eco-system, but looks set to carry on trashing their natural habitats and spritzing them with ecologically unsound insecticides until every last one is gone.


The 20 greatest smackdown movies – ranked!

While recent eco-horror cinema has focused on climate change, film-makers still seem squeamish about insects; see Wounds, for example, or Mosquito State, or the 2020 French film The Swarm. Perhaps a few more adorable giant critters like Dominique wouldn’t go amiss, so we could start swapping our entomophobia for entomophilia, or we could put Godzilla on pause and start celebrating Mothra, a gentler, kinder sort of kaiju.

And perhaps we should emulate the 80% of the world’s population that regularly eats insects. Crickets, for example, are a rich source of protein and emit less than 0.1% of the greenhouse gases produced by cows. So let’s hope we’ve seen the last of dinner scenes like the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in which the heroine turns up her nose at the crunchy beetles. It’s time now to adopt as a gourmet role model Renfield from Dracula (1931) who has no compunction about tucking into spiders and flies.

Mandibles is released in the UK on 17 September.

#AppleToo: employees organize and allege harassment and discrimination

Group of workers launched campaign to gather and share experiences of inequity, intimidation and abuse at company

‘For too long, Apple has evaded public scrutiny,’ the workers said in a public statement. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Dani Anguiano
@dani_anguiano
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

A group of Apple workers is organizing to fight against what it says are patterns of discrimination, racism and sexism within the company and management’s failure to address them, in a rare public display of dissent within the notoriously secretive company.

Last week, a group of employees launched #AppleToo, a campaign to gather and share current and past employees’ experiences of inequity, intimidation and abuse. The group hopes to mobilize workers at a time when workers across the tech industry are calling for greater accountability from their employers, and to push Apple to more effectively address such complaints.

“For too long, Apple has evaded public scrutiny,” the workers said in a public statement. “When we press for accountability and redress to the persistent injustices we witness or experience in our workplace, we are faced with a pattern of isolation, degradation, and gaslighting,” they added.

The initiative on Monday released five accounts from employees who say they were subjected to discrimination and sexual harassment at work, allegations they say they shared with management but were left unaddressed. The accounts were anonymous, and did not share what department or city the employees worked in.

“There was [an] employee, who was actually someone in an elevated position, who was constantly predatory. Constantly sexually harassing our team members, and nothing was done about it until it became impossible to ignore,” one of the five employees wrote.

“There were several instances where leadership would not let certain employees of color interview for positions that they were very deserving of,” they added.

The initiative comes after workers tried to address complaints with Apple leadership internally, organizers say, to little avail. Apple reportedly has put a stop to surveys from employees that sought to gather data related to pay. Earlier this week, it barred workers from creating a channel on the communication platform Slack to discuss pay equity, the Verge reported, claiming the topic didn’t meet Slack’s terms of use, though it allows channels dedicated to dogs, cats and gaming.

Since launching, organizers say, the initiative has received hundreds of stories from workers across the company. Seventy-five per cent of them involved discrimination of some sort, and almost half involved sexism, retaliation and dismissed HR reports.



The effort has also prompted an outpouring of response on social media from former Apple employees detailing their experiences with discrimination and retaliation.

Cher Scarlett, an Apple security engineer and #AppleToo organizer, said hundreds of people have come to her looking for support. “I can’t even keep track anymore of the number of people who’ve shared their stories with me. These are people’s lives. They are human beings,” Scarlett told Protocol. “What else do you do when hundreds of people you don’t know are coming to you with all of these different issues?”

Scarlett said she had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging the company stopped her effort to conduct pay transparency surveys. She said she had been doxxed by a colleague for pushing for pay transparency, and had been told she was “ruining the company”.

The initiative marks a new phase of employee organizing at Apple. Until recently, the company had largely escaped some of the increased scrutiny faced by other major tech companies. Employees of Activision Blizzard, the video game company behind Call of Duty, staged a walkout in July to call for better working conditions amid allegations of a “frat boy” culture at the company and severe harassment and discrimination against female workers.

Google in 2018 faced global protests from workers over claims of sexual harassment, gender inequality and systemic racism.

Timnit Gebru, a former Apple employee and AI scientist at Google who was fired from Google after the company attempted to suppress her research and she criticized its diversity efforts, has offered her support to those sharing their stories.

“Apple HR and lawyers have the sickest retaliatory tactics I have seen so far,” she said on Twitter. “[Apple] how long do you think you can keep doing these horrible things to people under the radar?”

In response to the workers’ claims, Apple said: “We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace. We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”

SOYLENT GREEN & MAD DAD
'Illuminati is real': Lin Wood goes on eye-popping rant about Walmart selling 'fetal tissue parts' food

Bob Brigham
September 02, 2021

(Screenshot via YouTube.com)

Notorious right-wing lawyer L. Lin Wood has greatly expanded his conspiracy theories beyond QAnon and Trump's "Big Lie" of election fraud.

In a bizarre new video, Wood rattles off multiple conspiracy theories in less than 40 seconds.

Reuters legal affairs correspondent Jan Wolfe described it as "like conspiracy theory Mad Libs."

"Stop going to Walmart, stop going to Target," Wood instructed. "Stop buying the food that they have been producing for years with fetal tissue parts to kill you!"

"John D. Rockefeller was a devil worshipper, part of the Illuminati," he alleged.

"Do the research, connect the dots, Illuminati is real," Wood claimed.

Anti-mask Florida father tells school board the 'deep state medical establishment wants all of us to be depopulated'

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
September 03, 2021

Jeff James (Screen Grab)

The Seminole County, Florida school board has been holding a marathon meeting on masks, which started Thursday at 8:30 AM, and is still going on after nearly nine hours. While there were many anti-science extremists, one parent's speech stood out.

A man who identified himself as Jeff James declared "there are more variants planned," the vaccine is "not a vaccine it's an experimental drug," called mask mandates "charades," and falsely claimed that "masks don't work."

"Masks are pretty much a device to enslave children, make them obedient, so they just learn to obey and not think for themselves. We need critical thinking. We don't need children that are going to be little puppets that don't say anything to speak out for themselves. We need leaders not followers."

But James did not stop there.

"The deep state medical establishment wants all of us to be depopulated," he declared, before announcing his support for far right wing doctors whose anti-vaxx and science denialism have been repeatedly debunked. "I know you guys think that's a conspiracy theory but it's not. It's a conspiracy fact, they're all in cahoots with each other, to depopulate us, they want us divided. They want all of us to fight each other so they can win," he said, without actually explaining who "they" are.

"This is good versus evil, evil is not going to prevail. All you've done is awaken the sleeping giant here, every parent here wants freedom except maybe some of them that are brainwashed by the deep state media. I used to watch Fox News deliberately I'm a conservative I won't even watch that now," he said, adding what sounded through the applause like, "Hannity, all the rest of them are compromised."

He went on to say the people he does "listen to" include Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and Dr. Scott Atlas.

Dr. Tenpenny, who falsely claims the coronavirus vaccine magnetizes people, and has suggested that vaccines “interface" with 5G cellular towers, according to The Washington Post. Scott Atlas was Donald Trump's discredited coronavirus advisor.

His speech won applause from many in the audience.

Watch:

The stomach-churning hypocrisy of the so-called ‘pro-life’ movement has revealed their true face

Susan J. Demas, Michigan Advance
September 03, 2021


Judge Amy Coney Barrett (Screen Grab)

This week, my almost 19-year-old daughter stepped foot on her college campus to take classes for the first time (a year late thanks to the loud, selfish minority's continual refusal to take COVID seriously).

This article was originally published at Michigan Advance

As I hugged her goodbye, it occurred to me that she now has fewer rights as a woman than I did when I left the nest for college 23 years ago.

Thanks to five far-right Supreme Court justices cowardly dropping an opinion in the dead of night Thursday essentially gutting Roe v. Wade, millions of people in Texas just lost their right to safe, legal abortion. (Of course, abortion has been around thousands of years and will always continue — it's just more people will desperately seek out risky methods). Other red states will giddily follow.

When it comes to women's rights in America, we have undisputedly gone backward.

Think your birth control is safe? Same-sex marriage? Please. The extremist Supreme Court will have the final say over what you do with your body and in your bedroom. Basic health care and civil rights will be overturned — perhaps without even giving citizens the courtesy of arguing their case in court.

This is the end point of a far-right Republican Party that considers the American experiment of democracy to be a failure because it's no longer conducive for them to fairly win elections on its unpopular platform of tax cuts for billionaires and basic rights for straight white men only.

Progress is never inevitable and permanency for hard-fought rights isn't guaranteed — that's a lesson we need to heed as we're being attacked on every front, from racial justice to the safety net. But after years of listening to Republicans shamelessly lie about abortion methods and statistics — even in legislation — and male pundits and editors smugly dismiss women who warned Roe would be overturned as “hysterical," I think we're all allowed to be angry right now.

As a journalist, I've been trained to question everything (the old adage is, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.") So it's been wild to see how the so-called pro-life movement has long been treated gingerly by the media.

Their talking points are repeatedly and egregiously false, from claiming that abortion leads to breast cancer to claiming that late-term abortions are casually prescribed to former President Donald Trump's favorite bizarre lie that doctors and women are teaming up for post-birth abortions (which would be straight-up infanticide and of course it isn't happening).

Since Trump came on the scene, many reporters have struggled with how to cover Republicans, whose press releases, tweets and public comments are a gordian knot of falsehoods that take paragraphs to debunk (they're of course counting on us not to bother and just reprint their propaganda).

But the anti-abortion movement wrote the playbook they're following.

Working the refs and loudly complaining about coverage you don't like — complete with threatening reporters' jobs, which some might call “cancel culture" — is a staple of right-wing political training. But there's more at work than that. Many journalists give anti-abortion activists enormous deference, rarely questioning if their moral or religious objection to basic health care is sincere — or if it's just rooted in deep misogyny. After all, pro-lifers are often vocally against the Equal Rights Amendment or even equal pay. It's not like they're hiding their sexist agenda.

But we do our readers and viewers dirty to unquestioningly include anti-abortion lies for the sake of balance — and it's irreconcilable with our core mission of informing the public.

We've also set the stage for how much of the COVID-19 pandemic has been covered, with lies and conspiracy theories spewed by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers often juxtaposed with doctors detailing scientific research and giving sound medical advice.

 Gotta tell both sides.

We've now been living through a horrific pandemic for almost two years that's killed over 640,000 Americans — equivalent to wiping out the entire state of Vermont — and sickened 39 million, roughly the population of California, our biggest state.

It's been fascinating to see the radio silence from the so-called pro-life movement to stop a mass death event. This should have been their moment — if this was really about sincerely held beliefs.

Yet they're not on the forefront of the public health fight for masks in schools — especially to protect vulnerable children — and even lobbied in Michigan for vaccines to come with a warning if aborted fetal cells were used in developing them, which amped up vaccine hesitancy. Oh, and when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued stay-home orders in spring 2020, Right to Life of Michigan stayed mum on the life-saving measure, except to complain that she didn't shut down women's health clinics, sniffing that “her most important audience is Joe Biden's vice presidential selection committee."

It was always about raw political power for the right. It was never about the preservation of human life.

That's why your friendly neighborhood conservative who told you Trump wasn't that bad has been cheering over the Supreme Court's “pro-life" decision in Texas, but he's fine with your babies going to school and getting murdered by an active shooter or getting life-threatening COVID because “freedom."

But after watching anti-abortion activists' flagrant and stomach-churning hypocrisy during the pandemic — which is typically considered the greatest political sin imaginable — it's amazing that most reporters didn't cover groups with any more skepticism.

Last fall, Republicans installed anti-abortion warrior Amy Coney Barrett to replace women's rights champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the high court just days before badly losing the 2020 election. Barrett was mawkishly lauded by some women as “a new feminist icon" while others defended her against attacks on her large family (which Democrats never made).

Well, here's the truth about living in Amy Barrett's America, ladies. She got to have the family she wanted and on her own terms. You don't.


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Modern indulgences: Does carbon offsetting really make up for flying?
2021/9/3 
©Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

It seems like a straightforward transaction: Every time you fly somewhere, you compensate your emissions by donating to an organization that supports projects working to reduce carbon dioxide. However, taking responsibility for your carbon footprint isn't as easy as just throwing money at something. Andreas Arnold/dpa

It seems like a straightforward transaction: Every time you fly somewhere, you compensate your emissions by donating to an organization that supports projects working to reduce carbon dioxide.

However, taking responsibility for your carbon footprint isn't as easy as just throwing money at something. And there are many companies eager to soothe a guilty conscience by taking that cash.

Antje Monshausen from Tourism Watch at the German aid organization Bread for the World makes it clear: "First comes reducing, then comes offsetting." That means flying less would be the better option.

Experts estimate that the annual climate-compatible CO2 budget at a maximum of two tons per person. "That would get me to New York, but not back," says Monshausen.

Which trip is really necessary?

That's why carbon offsetting is mostly just for frequent flyers to feel less guilty, says Monshausen. "It should not be used to legitimize carrying on as we have. That impression would be fatal."

The situation is different if the flight is unavoidable. But what journey is actually unavoidable tends to be a matter of opinion.

In Monshausen's view, flying is avoidable if there is a less climate-damaging means of transport available.

In Europe, for example, most cities are reachable by train. "However, that often means arranging the journey differently," she says. While it's possible to take a night train from Berlin to Rome, for example, the time it takes to travel there isn't worth it if you want to go for just a weekend. It's better then to go for at least a week.

And that's a good thing for travellers, in Monshausen's opinion. "If you fly less often and stay longer, you often have a better quality trip," she says. You can get a deeper sense of the people and place.

Lots of greenwashing

If you decide to fly, you should at the very least spring for carbon offsetting. But it's important to be aware that offsetting doesn't mean that you're undoing the carbon dioxide produced; it merely means that projects that reduce emissions will be promoted elsewhere.

And there's a lot of greenwashing out there, warns Monshausen. One example: "Offers that involve planting trees are unsuitable for offsetting air travel," she says. Look for reputable organizations.

Stay home or offset?

Dietrich Brockhagen is the managing director of Atmosfair, a group that focuses on the fight against climate change, especially in the travel industry. Its website allows vacationers to compensate for the greenhouse gases they have caused during their trip. The money is then used, for example, to promote solar energy through photovoltaic systems in villages that are not connected to the electricity grid.

The money does have an effect on reducing emissions, says Brockhagen. "Some call it selling indulgences because they want to avoid paying. For me, the question is rather: Does this buy me freedom?"

There are two options, according to Brockhagen: Either you can stay at home, where there's no issue, or, if you've flown, you can offset emissions, which is "the best thing you can do for the climate."

However, he also confirms what Monshausen says: "Flying less would be better."