Quickies: Sexual Harassment by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Abortion “Reversal” Laws, and a Man Playing Songs on Cabbage

Mary April 25, 2016

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Blood, Sugar, Sex, Dickheads – “Fuck the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the misogynistic culture of the music industry that kept me from speaking up in 1991. I wish I had. I’m not naive enough to think it would have made much of a difference, but if it kept just one person from having to hear ‘Californication,’ it would have been a start.” From Alex.
One Easy Way to Make Wikipedia Better – “Researchers say the online encyclopedia should have a source-o-meter on each page, reflecting the quality of citations.”
The Washington That Failed Anita Hill – “Confirmation’ is a political procedural that traces the injustice done to Anita Hill at Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Senate hearing.”
Why an obscure Supreme Court case is a big deal for prescription drugs – “Brand-name pharmaceutical manufacturers are warning that the wrong ruling could limit their ability to recoup their investment in research and development, putting their drug pipelines at risk. Health insurers and generic drug companies, meanwhile, are urging the court to uphold a ruling that they believe can help push more generics into the market and, therefore, keeps drug costs down.”
Black Atheists Explain What It’s Like to Be a ‘Double Minority’ – “We talked to five black atheists about what it’s like to be black in America and reject the the idea of a higher power. It’s worth noting that although they do identify as atheists, the term only represents a fraction of their worldview. Some also refer to humanism, a wider encompassing belief that roots itself in the potential of human beings. Here’s what they had to say.” Featuring our own DebGod and other awesome writers! From Alex.
‘Abortion reversal’ laws gain steam, despite scant scientific evidence – “South Dakota will soon require doctors to tell women that they can change their minds after taking the abortion pill and potentially halt an abortion in progress. Arizona and Arkansas passed similar laws last year. And an antiabortion group is promoting model legislation to inform women they can “reverse” medication abortions. Yet that claim has no solid science behind it — just an anecdotal case report written by a physician who invented a protocol and arranged to have it tested on a half-dozen patients who regretted swallowing the abortion pill.”
Accountants of S.H.I.E.L.D. – “The Regional Office is Under Attack!—set in the underground headquarters of an organization deploying a team of ‘superpowered warrior women’ to battle ‘the forces of darkness that threaten, at nearly every turn, the fate of the planet’—is fundamentally an office novel, a tale of the prosaic struggles of young adulthood, set, with deliciously rich irony, against a distant background of absurdly operatic adventure. It refers in passing to, say, the exploits of an operative known only as Gemini, renowned for ‘disrupting the Ring of Three and expanding her mouth into a vortex to swallow whole the swarm of bees set loose on Kansas by the warlock Harold Raines,’ but it will never give you the full and perhaps rather tedious account of those events.” I’m definitely adding this to my book club list.
Watch a Japanese Man Play ‘Amazing Grace’ on a Cabbage – “Junji Koyama makes musical instruments out of fruits and vegetables. His creations, which he shows off with spirited performances of classic songs on YouTube, include a celery nose flute.”