The Wisdom Of The Founding Fathers
Posted on March 22, 2014 in Political Cartoons
In short: “good luck figuring out the whole ‘freedom’ thing, losers!”
America’s War On Immigrants
Posted on March 22, 2014 in Articles
The Article: America’s War On Immigrants by Belén Fernandez in Al Jazeera.
The Text: As the interminable debate in Washington over immigration reform wears on, undocumented migrants in the U.S. continue to exist at the mercy of law enforcement efforts that defy all pretenses of justice and legality.
Earlier this year, Al Jazeera America reported on the stop-and-frisk-style raids being conducted in New Orleans by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to boost migrant deportation quotas. In that article, a Honduran immigrant recounts his experience of being handcuffed and shackled in the back of an ICE vehicle, which had been deployed to round up undocumented people using racial profiling techniques, saying, “I heard one of the agents say to another, ‘This is like going hunting.’ … And the other responded, ‘Yeah, I like this s—.’”
Also mentioned in the article is the fact that ICE agents in New Orleans “use mobile fingerprinting devices similar to those used by the U.S. military during its counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
New ‘Ukraine Bites’ Cereal Allows Consumers To Talk Like Real Pundits
Posted on March 21, 2014 in Videos
Discussing how geopolitics, trade deals and constructivist identity theory can make the Ukrainian crisis understandable? Nah, more than 140 characters. If you try “Ukraine Bites”, you’re guaranteed to sound just like a real-life talking head, spouting incessantly about Putin as the reincarnation of Hitler, the resurgence of the Cold War, and how Russia’s brazen breach of international law to maintain its influence over a country is like so, totally not OK!
Everything Wrong With Planned Parenthood In Two Handy Charts
Posted on March 21, 2014 in Images
You read right: not only does abortion comprise a whopping 3% of all services provided to godless Planned Parenthood patrons, but the center’s STD tests are 95% cheaper than that provided by a private insurer.
The Toxins That Threaten Our Brains
Posted on March 21, 2014 in Articles
The Article: The Toxins That Threaten Our Brains by James Hamblin in The Atlantic.
The Text: Forty-one million IQ points. That’s what Dr. David Bellinger determined Americans have collectively forfeited as a result of exposure to lead, mercury, and organophosphate pesticides. In a 2012 paper published by the National Institutes of Health, Bellinger, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, compared intelligence quotients among children whose mothers had been exposed to these neurotoxins while pregnant to those who had not. Bellinger calculates a total loss of 16.9 million IQ points due to exposure to organophosphates, the most common pesticides used in agriculture.
Last month, more research brought concerns about chemical exposure and brain health to a heightened pitch. Philippe Grandjean, Bellinger’s Harvard colleague, and Philip Landrigan, dean for global health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, announced to some controversy in the pages of a prestigious medical journal that a “silent pandemic” of toxins has been damaging the brains of unborn children. The experts named 12 chemicals—substances found in both the environment and everyday items like furniture and clothing—that they believed to be causing not just lower IQs but ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. Pesticides were among the toxins they identified.
“So you recommend that pregnant women eat organic produce?” I asked Grandjean, a Danish-born researcher who travels around the world studying delayed effects of chemical exposure on children.
