people made of smoke and cities made of song

amateurvalkyrie:

Watching the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series again… and in this episode a scientist (speaking about Kahn and his fellow frozen peeps) says that people were often frozen for interplanetary space travel. But only apparently until the YEAR 2018 when we got our shit together and figured out faster means of travel like Warp Drive.

 And then I think about the defunding of NASA and the poor levels of science education in the US here in the year 2013… and my heart breaks a little.

Poor Roddenberry was far too optimistic…

stfuconservatives:

shortformblog:

• April 24 An eight story garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. Investigations quickly revealed that the building’s owners forced employees to return to work hours before the building fell, after a work stoppage (resulting from safety concerns) was ended.
• May 23 A committee formed by the government of Banglasdesh recommended life prison sentences for the owners of the building, though the maximum term each man currently faces is only seven years. The committee also recommended that the government provide free medical treatment to the 2500-plus injured survivors of the tragedy. source

Hahahaha you can tell it’s not America because the people responsible were actually punished

robot-heart-politics:

thepeoplesrecord:

May 23, 2013

On March 14, 2009, 31 weeks into her pregnancy, Nina Buckhalter gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. She named the child Hayley Jade. Two months later, a grand jury in Lamar County, Mississippi, indicted Buckhalter for manslaughter, claiming that the then-29-year-old woman “did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, kill Hayley Jade Buckhalter, a human being, by culpable negligence.”

The district attorney argued that methamphetamine detected in Buckhalter’s system caused Hayley Jade’s death. The state Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the case on April 2, is expected to rule soon on whether the prosecution can move forward.

If prosecutors prevail in this case, the state would be setting a “dangerous precedent” that “unintentional pregnancy loss can be treated as a form of homicide,” says Farah Diaz-Tello, a staff attorney with National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a nonprofit legal organization that has joined with Robert McDuff, a Mississippi civil rights lawyer, to defend Buckhalter. If Buckhalter’s case goes forward, NAPW fears it could spur a wave of similar prosecutions in Mississippi and other states.

Mississippi’s manslaughter laws were not intended to apply in cases of stillbirths and miscarriages. Four times between 1998 through 2002, Mississippi lawmakers rejected proposals that would have set specific penalties for damaging a fetus by using illegal drugs during pregnancy. But Mississippi prosecutors say that two other state laws allow them to charge Buckhalter. One definesof manslaughter as the “killing of a human being, by the act, procurement, or culpable negligence of another”; another includes ”an unborn child at every stage of gestation from conception until live birth” in the state’s definition of human beings.

The cause of any given miscarriage or stillbirth is difficult to determine, and many experts believe there is no conclusive evidence that exposure to drugs in utero can cause a miscarriage or stillbirth. Because of this, prosecuting Buckhalter opens the door to investigating and prosecuting women for any number of other potential causes of a miscarriage or stillbirth, her lawyers argued in a filing to the state Supreme Court—”smoking, drinking alcohol, using drugs, exercising against doctor’s orders, or failing to follow advice regarding conditions such as obesity or hypertension.” Supreme Court Justice Leslie D. King also raised this question in the oral arguments last month: “Doctors say women should avoid herbal tea, things like unpasteurized cheese, lunch meats. Exactly what are the boundaries?”

Full article

The list of things pregnant people aren’t supposed to do is a mile long.

Did you know drinking caffeine—especially in your first trimester—increases the risk for miscarriage? So if you drink 2 cups of coffee a day instead of 1 in your first trimester, and you have a miscarriage—which may or may not even be related, you have no way of knowing—someone could try you for murder.

If you’re in a car accident that was your fault, but not in any way intentional, and you lose your pregnancy, you could be tried for murder.

If you have gestational diabetes and you occasionally flub your diet because, I don’t know, being pregnant is totally miserable and sometimes food makes you feel better, and you end up having to deliver your baby early and it doesn’t survive, you could be tried for murder.

You eat a sandwich with lunch meat that wasn’t kept properly, get sick, and have a miscarriage. You could be tried for murder.

Not because you wanted your baby to die, but because you had the audacity to violate a 5-page list of don’ts your doctor gives you and it might in some way have impacted your pregnancy, but also possibly had no impact at all because pregnant people violate the rules all the time with no issues, and it resulted in losing your pregnancy. It’s your fault. You willfully and maliciously murdered your baby in cold blood because you failed to be an obedient, submissive incubator for a man’s unborn baby, who has more of a right to life than you do.

Women’s bodies or bodies perceived to be female are community property, and all this shit is about is controlling women and bringing them under male control.

This is an offensive absurdity.