Harmony

Some of my favorite songs to sing along with are old Peter and Gordon songs like this one written by Paul McCartney :) ...



xx

"Right matters ...

... And the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost."

You must hear what Adam Schiff said today! ....



Adam Schiff delivers message to senators: 'If the truth doesn't matter, we're lost'

Schiff rocks!

House manager and Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff gave the opening speech today at the impeachment trial and it was amazing! ...

Blackmail

Jared's best friend. There will be no consequences, of course - it's good to be king (or prince).

Help animals

I think I first saw koalas at the San Diego Zoo, which has a special exhibit of them. Their Twitter account now has a request to viewers to help the animals of Australia ...

MLK Day

On Martin Luther King Day, a message from Nina Shaw about the inequities faced by women and racial minorities ....

ERA passes

Yay!



As you would expect, there will be those who will fight against it - religious conservatives. It was ever thus, as we can see from this article at National Catholic Reporter ...

Women are on the verge of constitutional equality, but some Catholics still stand in the way

[...] The ERA was so popular in the 1970s that many expected it to pass. Even some U.S. bishops were in favor of it. Six members of the U.S. bishops' conference formed an ad hoc committee on women in church and society to support the amendment in 1978.

In the end, the U.S. bishops rejected it "because of uncertainty as to its legal and constitutional consequences for family life, the abortion issue and other matters." The bishops were lobbying for a constitutional amendment to limit abortion and, they claimed, their legal counsel had discouraged them from supporting the ERA.

The U.S. bishops, of course, were not powerful enough to neutralize the ERA. But one very conservative Catholic woman was: Phyllis Schlafly. A constitutional lawyer, radical anti-feminist and anti-abortion activist, Schlafly was a culture warrior before the U.S. bishops knew it was cool. Her grassroots movement called Stop ERA (now known as the Eagle Forum) is largely credited with convincing lawmakers to reject the amendment.

[...]

So far, the U.S. bishops have remained silent on whether they will continue to reject the ERA, and my repeated requests for comment to the media office at the U.S. bishops' conference were unanswered.

But the response of the Virginia Catholic Conference gives us a clue as to what the bishops' position will be.

"The Equal Rights Amendment hurts women — both born and unborn," the Virginia bishops wrote in a press release in early 2019 as a surging Ratify VA campaign was getting serious traction ....

I find it hard to understand why any woman would want to belong to the Catholic church, which denies women equality within the institution and works via lobbying to doom women's rights in the greater world as well.

Another study

In the news: Most women do not regret having an abortion, study finds

An overwhelming majority of women [95%] who get an abortion do not regret the decision to undergo the procedure, according to a new study published in the academic journal Social Science & Medicine on Sunday.

Researchers surveyed 667 women across 21 states in the US multiple times over a five-year period, tracking each woman’s emotions around their decision to get an abortion. About 95% of women indicated they believe that going through an abortion was the right decision over the course of the study.

[...]

[T]he claim that going through an abortion is a taxing decision has been used by anti-abortion advocates to justify restricting access to abortion. Multiple states require mandatory abortion counseling and waiting periods that include information on the negative emotional response to getting an abortion ...

This study shows the same results as another earlier 2015 study on the same subject. This information discounts the pro-life talking point that women are the "second victims of abortion". And it shows the great gulf between what most women believe about abortion and what those who want to outlaw it believe. That gulf will not be bridged by enforced ultrasounds - the pro-life movement knows this but since they can't change hearts and minds, they have settled for punishing women instead.

Australia: animals

I keep thinking about the fires in Australia, especially of all the animals - news stories have the death toll at around a billion animals killed and some species are facing extinction. Those that haven't been killed by the fires are often starving. Here's more information ..... Australia's fires have killed over a billion animals. Here's how to help

One place that is helping animals (see the video above) is WIRES. A lot of people are helping the victims of the fires, human and animal: Australian actor Chris Hemsworth (Thor) has contributed a million dollars! ...

Iranian flight 655

There's much in the news about Iran having accidentally shot down a civilian Ukrainian passenger jet. This is weirdly similar to a situation 30+ years ago. Here's a bit from Wikipedia on Iran Air Flight 655 ...

Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser of the United States Navy. The aircraft, an Airbus A300, was destroyed and all 290 people on board were killed. The jet was hit while flying over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, along the flight's usual route, shortly after departing Bandar Abbas International Airport, the flight's stopover location. The incident occurred during the final stages of the Iran–Iraq War, which had been ongoing for nearly eight years. Vincennes had entered Iranian territory after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits ...

Although the US would not admit it had been at fault, Ronald Reagan wrote to the Iranian government expressing regret and a settlement was reached at the International Court of Justice in which the US agreed to pay $61.8 million dollars to the families of the victims.

The Way

Another song: The Way, based on the true and mysterious story of an older couple who drove off together to a nearby festival, though both were ill, and were found later dead, hundreds of miles from where they had planned to go. Heard it at the grocery store and couldn't get it out of my head ...

Bluebird

I had never heard this song by Paul McCartney before. I like the harmony ...