Opinions of a Wandering Waif

On December 1st, World AIDS Day, we must take action to save women’s lives. Right now, young women are rapidly becoming the face of AIDS. Urge the President and Congress to stop abstinence-only programs that are helping to spread AIDS.

Today, women make up an ever increasing proportion of adults living with HIV/AIDS.

• Globally, young adults, ages 15–24, account for approximately HALF of new adult HIV infections
• Most of those young adults are WOMEN - 62% worldwide
• In sub-Saharan Africa, 76% of HIV+ young adults are WOMEN
• In some developing countries, infection rates are up to six times higher among young women than young men.

These statistics are shocking, but real. Act now.

We can make a difference. The U.S. PEPFAR program first initiated under the Bush Administration still has a bias for abstinence-only programs. President Obama reduced this bias, but it is still in the legislation. Approximately half of all PEPFAR money goes to treat those with AIDS, but the prevention funds strongly favor abstinence/be faithful programs over all others.

Urge Congress and the President to fight AIDS with science and medicine, not ideology.

Condoms must not be an afterthought. Right now, the PEPFAR policy of ABC emphasizes abstinence first, be faithful second, and condoms last. Currently, young married women are the fastest growing segment of AIDS victims in sub-Saharan Africa. Condoms must be prioritized first.

Abstinence only has proved to be ineffectual and harmful. It casts doubt on the use of condoms, which have proven to be the first line of defense against AIDS. Ask President Obama and Congress to end abstinence-only programs under PEPFAR now.

For Women’s Lives,

coketalk:

It’s not a diet salad dressing. It’s a female arousal oil for which the networks refuse to run advertising. How odd, considering the fact that primetime television is brimming with geriatrics yammering on about four hour erections.

This rather blatant gender-based double standard has more than a few people wondering out loud to network executives, why are vaginas so scary?

I’m kind of curious myself.

(Source: coketalk)

redvelvetteacake:

This song explains why I am leaving home to become a stewardess.

(via slutever--forever)

cognitivedissonance:

Rand Paul was saying there’s no rich and poor in America. And that we’re all interconnected. This was in defense of tax cuts for the rich.

Please, magical universe karma - transform Rand Paul into a non-white single mother looking for a job with a sick baby, overdue bills, and with no HS Diploma….

cocknbull:

I Hate This Mess: You can burn me at the stake for this…

shonecakepastrypie:

growbeards:

But I said it before, and it looks like science has backed me up.

Men are more intelligent than women.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-405056/Men-intelligent-women-claims-new-study.html

According to a recent study, men have an I.Q…

 Someone else must’ve pointed out all that’s wrong with this article before me, but I’m bored and annoyed:

Firstly, IQ scores measure knowledge, not intelligence. A slight but important disctinction that explains why Native Americans, for example, score lower, on average on IQ tests than whites. [Easy example from a study I recently read: a math question includes a casual reference to an escalator. If you live near a city, that’s all well and good for you. If you were raised on a reservation with little to no outside influence, that question is gonna fuck you up. It doesn’t mean you’re any less intelligent when it comes to math — it means you don’t have knowledge of what a goddamn escalator is.]

Secondly, in relation to my first point, these tests are never culturally neutral/unbiased. Does the fact that Native American students, to stick with the example, tend to score lower suggest in any way that there is some biological aspect of Native American citizens that makes them intellectually inferior to white or black people? Absolutely not, and you’re a fucking moron if you even think race exists, biologically-speaking (and the conductor of this study himself has actually suggested that). Are there social/cultural insitutions at work that necessarily disadvantage Native American people (and women and black people and homosexuals, etc.)? Absolutely, there are. Is that grounds to say women are necessarily dumber, on average? No. Fuck, no.

Thirdly, the conductor of the survey suggests that intelligence is directly linked to brain size. ‘Asians have the biggest brains, so they’re the smartest. Blacks are dumbest, because their brains are small, and whites are in between.’ Really? Wasn’t this argument thrown out a hundred years ago? In any case, the newest research shows that there is an extremely minor correlation and that people with very small brains still score high on IQ tests (see Cernovsky, 1991), and that black people actually tend to have slightly larger brains than white people (Cernovsky 1991, and several more sources I’m not in the mood to list) — but of course, why would someone such as this researcher let facts interfere with causing a needless sexist, racist controversy?

Fourthly, as the article itself states, more female scores were examined than male. That alone casts severe doubt on the veracity of the conclusions drawn.

Fifthly, the integrity of this survey’s conductor, as I’ve alluded to, is severely questionable. This is a man who put forth “evidence” that black people are simply necessarily dumber than white people, based on brain size (which, when his “evidence” for this claim was reviewed, showed the exact opposite — black people tend to have larger brains, as I’ve said, and as well, the research he cited actually came to the conclusion that brain size was dependent on climate/location, NOT ON RACE, yet he decided to use it as “proof” regardless (see Cernovsky, 1995)), and, also, on “research” he gathered from a “nonscientific semipornographic book and to an article in the Penthouse magazine’s Forum” (see Weizmann, Wiener, Wisenthal, and Ziegler, 1991).

Sixthly, just as a personal prediction, I would not be surprised if, in the next ten years when homosexuality becomes more widely accepted, this jackasshole comes out with a study trying to prove homosexuals have smaller brains and are, therefore, dumber.

It’s nonsensical psuedo-scientific, faux-intellectual racist, misogynistic sexist bullshit that makes me ashamed to have a caucasian cock.

This is an article that examines what makes life meaningful.  It was posted at my board, in a discussion about abortion and personhood. 

IMO, the article establishes, in its own terms, very clearly, that a fetus cannot be a person, before 24 weeks:

A quick answer is that we need receptors in the skin to detect threats to tissue and those receptors need to be connected to parts of the brain that can interpret the threat. The receptors, the connections and the relevant parts of the brain are all developed by about 24 weeks gestational age. Thus the fetus can feel pain after 24 weeks but not before. You can perform this same trick with respect to other sensations such as vision, hearing, taste and so forth.

[…]

My retort to the idea that the brain does it can be stated simply – whatever it is that nervous tissue does I am quite certain that it does not feel because cells cannot feel. Only persons can feel.

[…]

The beginning of explicit intent is there in the act that now picks out specific stimuli and organises the various responses into a form of action. Initially, it is the stimulus and caregiver that controls the infant’s action through interaction and reward. The intent is explicit for the caregiver but also implicit in the scenario. As the infant increasingly absorbs the rules of the game she is able to shift her focus from the toy to the caregiver and to herself thus stepping between different points of view within the act. The infant begins to emerge to herself as she absorbs the implicit intent of the action and adopts the viewpoint of each external element.

The outline of an ‘I’ (or a self) develops. It is this ‘I’ who experiences.

[…]

I think Derbyshire is also saying that until the concept of “I” develops, the critter is on shaky grounds in its bid for personhood, too. 

I remember reading of some cultures that don’t consider a born human a person until after the age of 3.  And in Judaism, we may not ritually mourn the death of an infant, less than a month old.

Arguing that a woman has no right to rid her body of a parasitic clump of insensate cells is misogynistic.  After 24 weeks, there is a sliver of a chance that there is concern for the fetus, but before that, and most certainly to claim its personhood at conception, is just bullshit to cover the misogyny. 

—emphasis mine ~ waif

If the media failed to discuss in detail the law’s less attractive points, it also missed one of the campaign’s biggest ironies. Republicans, with their repeal and replace slogans, stirred up discontent about a law that was basically built with Republican and conservative ideas. That irony escaped the media. Right after Congress passed the law, former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote a column on Talking Points Memo noting that “Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation.” So it seems that, for Republicans, transforming the health law into a bogeyman was more important than owning up to their own solutions for fixing the system.

(Source: azspot)

judahkohen:

Alright, Tumblr, I’m 5 months old and I need your help: please go vote for me by clicking the picture (or this link) and then reblog this like crazy so I can become a Gerber Baby!

You can vote once a day, so feel free to keep voting!

Thanks!

Good luck!  He’s such a cutie!  :)

(via kohenari)

the-madame-hatter:

-dreamalittlebiggerdarling:

caughtinacelluloidjam:

fullonswayzeed:

AND YOU’RE ALL A BUNCH OF YOUNGINS.

 1989?  Pshh I was born in 1986.  I’ve already graduated from college when most of tumblr is not even finished with high school yet.

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND EIGTHY FIVE BITCHES!!!!!

ALL YOU YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPERS GET THE HALL OFF MY LAWN!!!!

1984

Ha! Infants! 1955 vintage, here. :p

Yes, you read that right: Nineteen hundred and fifty-five.

(via lagertha-lodbrok)

and I’m rockin my purple shirt. 

Now, I’m venturing forth into the land. 

See youse guise, later.