This sums it up: Henry Morgentaler - The Lancet

Physician and proponent of the Canadian abortion rights movement. Born in Lodz, Poland, on March 19, 1923, he died on May 29, 2013, in Toronto, Canada, aged 90 years.

He was acclaimed as a Canadian hero, a champion of the women's rights movement, and in 2008 awarded the Order of Canada, one of the nation's highest honours. Yet when Henry Morgentaler died there were few words of praise from the country's ruling elite and the location of his funeral was kept a secret for fear it would draw anti-abortion protesters. Even in death Morgentaler, the man who did more than any other to change Canada's restrictive abortion law, was a divisive figure.

Morgentaler did his first abortion in 1968—on the 18-year-old daughter of a friend—when the deed was punishable by life imprisonment. “I decided to break the law to provide a necessary medical service because women were dying at the hands of butchers and incompetent quacks, and there was no one there to help them. The law was barbarous, cruel and unjust”, he said. Over the next two decades Morgentaler opened a chain of clinics across Canada, trained scores of doctors, and performed thousands more terminations himself. He was assaulted and imprisoned, attacked, one clinic was firebombed, and he took to wearing a bulletproof vest. But in 1988 he won a historic victory when the Supreme Court of Canada removed all legal restrictions on abortion, which led to the spread of abortion clinics nationwide.

A Holocaust survivor, Morgentaler said his imprisonment by the Nazis in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps honed his sense of injustice and prepared him for the battles ahead. But he caused anger and frustration among some of his supporters with his imperious and authoritarian style. “He was not a team player”, said Catherine Dunphy, author of the book Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero. Yet his supporters said that without him, they would never have achieved what they did.

The son of Jewish socialists, Morgentaler spent much of World War 2 in Poland's Lodz ghetto with his mother, brother, and sister. His sister died there. His father, a textile worker and union organiser, had been killed by the Gestapo when the Nazis invaded in 1939. He was sent to Auschwitz with his mother and brother in 1944 where his mother was executed. After liberation in 1945 he studied medicine in Germany and Belgium before moving to Canada in 1950, where he completed his medical training at the University of Montreal. He settled down as a general practitioner in a working-class district of the city where he remained for the next 15 years. He had married his childhood sweetheart, Chava Rosenfarb, in 1949, and they had two children.

But Morgentaler was not satisfied with a quiet life; he joined humanist groups and in 1967 addressed a parliamentary group calling for safe, unrestricted abortion. That changed everything. Afterwards he was swamped with requests for terminations which he initially refused until his feelings of cowardice and hypocrisy overcame him. By then he was already in his mid-40s and for the next 20 years he battled the Canadian authorities and was rarely out of the headlines. Judy Rebick, the feminist campaigner and author who became spokesperson for his Toronto clinic from its opening in 1982, said he had not looked for the cause—it had found him. “He was challenged by women who wanted help. It was pretty rare for someone in their 50s to confront the law and risk everything. Especially a doctor living a comfortable life. His willingness to risk everything inspired a lot of people”, Rebick said.

Morgentaler himself believed abortion would reduce crime. “Well-loved children grow into adults who do not build concentration camps, do notremoved and do not murder”, he said in 2005, on being awarded an honorary degree by the University of Western Ontario. The award cost the university a bequest of CAN$2 million, withdrawn as a result. Despite being a diminutive figure, Morgentaler had an imposing, charismatic personality. After divorcing Chava Rosenfarb he married Carmen Wernli in 1979, by whom he had a son before a second divorce. Later he married Arlene Leibovich and had another son. She and his four children survive him. A few months before his death a group of friends and supporters gathered at his Toronto home to mark the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision. Christopher DiCarlo, a family friend who spoke at the celebration, said: “Henry stood his ground and succeeded where so many refused to go.”

Well it was a nice article until the first sentence of the last paragraph. But I am deciding to keep this piece in the interest of honesty.

Title image from: La justice en procès : l'affaire Morgentaler - NFB

See also Womens Liberation part 5 —FORWARD—Abortion rights campaign & Morgentaler Defence Campaign

tldr: Same dev as pixelfed. It's not available yet, it won't be open source right away (but it's planned). Moderation TBD. iOS, android sideload. desktop later. Donations-based business model.

Loops, meanwhile, was developed by Daniel Supernault, who also created the federated Instagram rival Pixelfed. In fact, Loops will run under the Pixelfed project, according to an FAQ on its website.

In addition to the eventual benefit of being open source and distributed, Loops claims it will not sell or provide user data to third-party advertisers, use your content to train AI models, or gain the rights to any content uploaded on its service. Instead, users only grant Loops permission to use their content, but will retain full ownership of their contributions, the Loops website explains.

... Aimed at users 13 and up, Loops will allow you to follow other users, as well as like, comment on, or share their videos. But as a part of the federated web — the open social web running on ActivityPub — remote users from other platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed will also be able to follow users’ Loops accounts and then view the videos in their home feed on those respective platforms. These remote followers will also be able to like, comment on, or share videos if their platform supports it.

Videos published to the app will be held for moderation if the uploader has a low trust score, but trusted users will be able to skip the queue and publish immediately. The trust score is also used to hide problematic comments on posts and apply content warnings, Supernault notes.

... According to Supernault, a side-loadable APK will be made available to Android users, and an iOS app will initially arrive on Apple’s TestFlight testing service when approved. A web interface won’t be an immediate focus but will come later on.

Dealing With October 7: 'Trauma Is Like a Scar, or a Tumor, and It Ripples Out to Friends and Families'

Ilana Kwartin talks about setting up a space to help traumatized victims of October 7 and the war with non-traditional, mind-body methods: 'This is a huge change in our Israeliness. It's not for nothing that the Shin Bet, the Mossad and the police send us their people'

August 16, 2024

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The top United Nations court announced Friday that public hearings will open Dec. 2 in a landmark case seeking a non-binding advisory opinion on “the obligations of States in respect of climate change.”

The U.N. General Assembly sent the case to the International Court of Justice last year, with Secretary-General António Guterres saying at the time that he hoped the opinion would encourage nations “to take the bolder and stronger climate action that our world so desperately needs.”

The court said it had received written comments from 62 nations and organizations related to 91 written statements on the issue it had earlier received. Under the court’s rules, the written filings are confidential. The court can decide to make them public once the hearings open in early December.

The U.N, court’s panel of 15 judges from around the world will seek to answer two questions: What are countries obliged to do under international law to protect the climate and environment from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions and what are the legal consequences for governments where their acts of lack of action have significantly harmed the climate and environment?

Here is the ICJ page for the case: Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change

COVID started in 2020 and now it is 2024. Most jurisdictions, organizations and structures having a nominally democratic process will have had at least 1 round of elections since that time.

Has anyone done analysis of what effects COVID has had?

for example

• were incumbent candidates more/less successful than excepted?

• were parties in power at the time more or less likely to stay in power compared to expected?

• moving to the left, moving to the right?

• differences depending when the democratic processes took place, e.g. elections in 2020 vs 2023

• were any effects seen at local levels compared to national?

• overall an change in voter turnout or public participation?

Probably lots of other interesting questions that could be asked. These are just examples to explain what I'm getting at.

I found a way to retrieve the text of comments deleted by user or mod. I don't think it is an issue of federated instances not respecting the deletion.

Is it a bug?

Or is "deleting" always really just "hiding"?

For a long time I hated markdown.

Now I love it.

What do you think?

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Wed, Apr 10th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families.

Most of these pampered monopolies have shifted over to monopolizing prison phone videoconferencing as well. And the relationship between government and monopoly is so cozy, several of these companies, like Securus, have been caught helping to spy on privileged attorney client communications.

There’s not much in the way of oversight, so the problem just keeps evolving. Case in point: Ars Technica notes that a civil rights group has filed a two new lawsuits against two Michigan counties, two county sheriffs, and two prison monopolies, Securus and Viapath (formerly known as Global Tel*Link Corporation, or GTL.

The lawsuits allege that Michigan banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a “quid pro quo kickback scheme” with prison phone companies. It’s something the group states has become increasingly common over the last decade as telecom monopolies lobby governments and private prison contractors to ban in-person visits to make more money:

“Why has this happened? The answer highlights a profound flaw in how decisions too often get made in our legal system: for-profit jail telecom companies realized that they could earn more profit from phone and video calls if jails eliminated free in-person visits for families. So the companies offered sheriffs and county jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we’ll give you a cut of the increased profits from the larger number of calls. This led to a wave across the country, as local jails sought to supplement their budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from some of the poorest families in our society.”

Much like telecoms out in the broader free world, government has such a cozy relationship with telecom monopolies, the incentive to hold them accountable for much of anything is largely muted. In instances like domestic surveillance, it’s often impossible to determine where government ends and private monopolies like AT&T begin.

One lawsuit documents how Securus lobbied to have in-person visits eliminated and video kiosks installed where in-person visitation centers used to be. A contract was signed that doled out kickbacks to government so they got a big chunk of the revenue, incentivizing prisons to keep inmate populations high:

“Securus pays the County 50% of the $12.99 price tag for every 20-minute video call and 78% of the $0.21 per minute cost of every phone call. The contract promises the County an entirely new revenue stream, as well as a minimum guaranteed annual payment of $190,000 paid up front. And the contract gives Securus the right to terminate its video call service or pay the County less money if the jail population decreases by more than 5% or if
the jail fails to ensure a minimum number of monthly paid video calls.”

Much with the broader prison industrial complex, it’s not hard to see how perverse financial incentives point in all the wrong directions. It’s also not hard to see how this sort of relationship can easily be sold to cash-hungry counties and municipalities as more profitable, safer, and more secure. A win all around, unless you’re a poor inmate family member with limited resources and no personal lobbyists.

Efforts to do something about prison telecom monopolies were scuttled by FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose former clients included Securus. Pai not only routinely opposed efforts by ex-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to drive change in the prison telco sector, one of his very first acts as FCC boss was to pull the rugs out from underneath his own lawyers as they tried to support those reforms in court (they, as intended, lost).

I had this RS-1 Plus handheld gaming console. I liked it because:

• comes with lots of games
• cheap I think about $15
• fairly comfortable and has actual buttons not like trying to play a game on a phone
• fun to play for a little while but not toooo fun that it can't be put down

main problem was it wouldn't save any progress even when the game seemed to allow it. I guess it just doesn't have any writable storage or however they got the games didn't include that function.

is there something similarly low end and simple that allows saving? I don't want to DIY.

See this weirdly sarcastic blog post about the RS devices for some info hal of which I don't understand.

i don't know anything about trucks much less truck-human mating please forgive my ignorance comrades.