Sunday, September 30, 2012

Never Seconds

In Scotland in a small town named Lochgilphead, a nine year old school girl from named Martha Payne took an interest in the lunches served at her school.  She began photographing them and posting the photos along with a rating on a blog she created called 'Never Seconds'.  She soon found many other young students from other countries sending in photos and reports about what they were eating at their school lunches. Her blog became such a sensation that one day the authorities at her school called her in to the 'office',  and told her she could no longer photograph her school lunches and write about them. 


Martha Payne


Martha reported to her blog followers that she was being shut down.  What followed was a minor firestorm, with internet followers from around the world coming to Martha's defense.  The school board backtracked and gave their blessing to Martha to resume her daily ritual of photographing and reporting on her meals at school. 

Now Martha's blog is largely focused on the stories of students and school lunches around the world.   Martha has a donation link on her page to a group called Mary's Meals that is raising money to build kitchens at schools in places like Malawi in Africa.  Martha's effort has raised a lot of money for Mary's Meals.





Martha Payne and her father have co-authored a book about her experience.  Next, they will travel to Malawi to visit students there who were touched by her blog.


Here is a story from the U.K. Guardian newspaper about Martha's story...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jun/16/martha-payne-never-seconds-blog-climbdown


Here is the link to Martha Payne's Never Seconds webpage...
http://neverseconds.blogspot.com

I love stories like this.  They give me hope...



Saturday, September 29, 2012

Amazing Mindreader Reveals His Gift

This is a viral video from this week on You Tube. The surprise it reveals is something that lurks in every person's life

Here is the link to 'Amazing Mindreader'...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I



Friday, September 28, 2012

Ice Free Arctic - Take Two

Here is an article that just appeared in Scientific American on the impact of an ice free arctic.  Very unsettling...

What Will Ice-Free Arctic Summers Bring?


This summer's record melt suggests the Arctic may lose its ice cap seasonally sooner than expected. What impacts can we expect?


On Sunday, September 16, the sun did not rise above the horizon in the Arctic. Nevertheless enough of the sun's heat had poured over the North Pole during the summer months to cause the largest loss of Arctic sea ice cover since satellite records began in the 1970s. The record low 3.41 million square kilometers of ice shattered the previous low—4.17 million square kilometers—set in 2007. All told, since 1979, the Arctic sea ice minimum extent has shrunk by more than 50 percent—and even greater amounts of ice have been lost in the corresponding thinning of the ice, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
"There is much more open ocean than there used to be," says NSIDC research scientist Walt Meier. "The volume is decreasing even faster than the extent [of surface area] as best as we can tell," based on new satellite measurements and thickness estimates provided by submarines. Once sea ice becomes thin enough, most or all of it may melt in a single summer.
Some ice scientists have begun to think that the Arctic might be ice-free in summer as soon as the end of this decade—leaving darker, heat-absorbing ocean waters to replace the bright white heat-reflecting sea ice. The question is: Then what happens? Although the nature and extent of these rapid changes are not yet fully understood by researchers, the impacts could range from regional weather-pattern changes to global climate feedbacks that exacerbate overall warming. As Meier says: "We expect there will be some effect…but we can't say exactly what the impacts have been or will be in future." 

On thin ice

Arctic ice influences atmospheric circulation and, hence, weather and climate. Take away the ice and impacts seem sure to follow. There's more warming to come, as well, particularly in the Arctic, which is warming faster than the rest of the globe. Given cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, there's likely at least as much warming to come as has occurred to date—a rise of 0.8 degree Celsius in global average temperatures, most of that in the past 30 years.
The biggest impacts of the loss of Arctic sea ice, of course, will be felt locally: from the potential for more snowfall (which can act like an insulating blanket keeping the ice warm and incapable of growing) to more storms with stronger winds. These will also whip up waves to pound the shore, eroding it, as well as bringing warmer temperatures to thaw the permafrost—leading to "drunken" trees and buildings as well as villages slipping into the sea. A loss of sea ice will also affect the largest animals in the Arctic: seals, walruses and polar bears. "My people rely on that ocean and we've seen some dramatic changes," said Inupiat leader Caroline Cannon at a Greenpeace event on the Arctic in New York City on September 19. "We are the gatekeepers of the ocean. We speak for the animals. They provide for us so it's our time to speak for them," by arguing to ameliorate climate change.
Noting the climate change in Cannon's backyard, the rest of the globe is indeed taking action—just not the type that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "The world is looking at the Arctic as a new ocean to be developed and exploited," notes Arctic system scientist David Barber of the University of Manitoba, most particularly oil as evidenced by Shell's bid to drill the first offshore well in the Chukchi Sea. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic holds an oil and gas bonanza—and companies from Russia to the U.S. are lining up to start exploiting it.
But the dwindling sea ice may actually interfere with that effort. Shell's bid to drill this year had to be halted due to the dangers of drifting ice. In fact, the reduction in sea ice actually makes the Arctic Ocean more hazardous for oil exploration, not less, thanks to massive chunks floating free and much more speedily than in the past. "Overall, sea ice is becoming much more mobile," Barber says. On the other hand, shipping across the Arctic Ocean has become viable for the first time—and weak or rotten ice, as it is called, suggests a path across the topmost part of the planet is already open for at least a short period of time. "We have already reached that point," Barber argues, based on three decades of field experiments on the ice.
The warmer Arctic waters and land have also begun to release methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas that is also the primary hydrocarbon in natural gas fuel. The Arctic Ocean alone contains more methane than the rest of the world's oceans combined—though when and even if such a thawing would contribute a massive methane release remains a "known unknown" in the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and oceanographer Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. "If we release that methane, we will amplify global warming by an unknown amount," Maslowski says. "We have no idea."

Global impacts

On a larger scale, the biggest impact may be the changes in the Arctic's ability to function as a cooling system for the global ocean. Both the Pacific and Atlantic now have warmer waters from the top to the bottom, based on measurements from computerized floats. The Arctic has been functioning as a global air conditioner, losing roughly 350 watts of heat per square meter of open ocean to the atmosphere during the fall storm season as well as the early part of the winter. A warmer Arctic may not be able to shed those greater amounts of heat.
That inability, in turn, will affect the temperature differences between the northern polar region and areas further south. In the atmosphere, it is that temperature gradient that creates and sustains the jet stream—a band of high winds at altitude flowing from west to east that typically steers weather systems in the Northern Hemisphere. "The jet stream becomes more kinked," NSIDC's Meier notes, which allows cold air to spill further south or warm air to penetrate further north.
The loss of this temperature gradient may also stall weather patterns within the jet stream, allowing particular weather systems to park for a while in one place. That may, in turn, create stronger heat waves and droughts or precipitation. "If it's a rain pattern that gets stuck in place, you get flooding that becomes a problem," Meier says.
Understanding these so-called "teleconnections" is an urgent area of scientific rsearch, given the potential impacts on farming and other vital pursuits. "Our society depends on stable agriculture," Barber notes. It is also likely to be the one that people notice. As climate scientists Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison wrote in a paper laying out how Arctic warming might stall weather patterns via the jet stream: "Gradual warming of the globe may not be noticed by most, but everyone—either directly or indirectly—will be affected to some degree by changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere."
Warming oceans globally will also allow for more thermal expansion of the waters themselves—the distance between liquid water molecules rises as the water grows warmer. That will raise sea levels further than the current roughly three millimeters per year.
Those warmer ocean waters are already lapping at the icy shores of Greenland, speeding the melt of outlet glaciers for the massive ice sheet. Combined with weather anomalies, like a heat wave that hit central Greenland this July and temporarily melted nearly the entire ice sheet surface, this could presage a more precipitous meltdown in the North. "Extreme melting from past years is preconditioning this year's melt," says ice melt researcher Marco Tedesco of the City College of New York, by melting away any accumulated snowfall from the winter sooner. "It's like putting money in a bank account. If you start spending more money than you put in, you go negative. That is what is happening on the ice sheet."
If Greenland were to melt entirely—which is still a distant prospect according to most glaciologists' estimates—the ice sheet contains enough water to raise sea level by six meters globally. "How many people live within six meter sea level rise of the coast?" Barber asks. "The answer is: too many."

Not all is lost

The seasonal loss of all "Arctic sea ice is one of those tipping points and unfortunately we're going to pass that tipping point," said climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, at the same Greenpeace event. "I think we're going to lose that sea ice. The good news is: this tipping point is reversible." Should local conditions change, for whatever reason, however, it is possible the ice could regrow.
After all, the ice spreads anew each cold, dark Arctic winter. Some scientists and environmentalists have even suggested it might be time to attempt geoengineering of one form or another to restore the Arctic's cooler temperatures. "We need to look at the possibility of [solar radiation management], which some people call geoengineering," which could be an option to control or reverse the Arctic meltdown, argues environmentalist Rafe Pomerance, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Development. "Effectiveness and downsides and what the risks are, we need to know all that." Cutting back on emissions of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide—such as methane or black carbon—might also have a bigger impact in the Arctic than elsewhere, given the role that soot plays in melting ice.
There are potential positives to the loss of sea ice to consider as well. Open ocean might permit more carbon-absorbing plankton to bloom, much as happens in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. "At this time, the Arctic Ocean is a biological desert," notes ecologist Louis Fortier of Laval University in Quebec City. If the plankton blooms, the tiny photosynthesizers pull carbon dioxide out of the air and can serve as the bottom of a food chain that could create new and productive fisheries. Plus, if the plankton die without being eaten or decomposed, they could bury CO2 with them as the tiny corpses fall to the seafloor. In fact, artificially fertilizing such plankton blooms has been tried as a geoengineering technique in the Southern Ocean, with some success.
But that success is unlikely to be repeated in a more watery Arctic Ocean. The northerly sea is "already more productive [in terms of plankton] than the ice-covered ocean of the near-past," says marine biologist Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who helped lead those biological sequestration experiments in the Southern Ocean. But local conditions, such as a lack of nutrients and a lack of deep- and shallow-ocean water mixing, suggest that the newly open waters of the Arctic Ocean are unlikely to produce massive blooms, large fisheries or sequester CO2. "The CO2 sequestration potential of the Arctic is very limited," Smetacek says. The Arctic will not save itself.

Model failure

Regardless of what the Arctic meltdown reveals, what is increasingly clear is that the computer models that scientists rely upon to make predictions have failed to capture the rapid pace of change in the far north. The problem stems from spatial resolutions that are too large—a single grid in a typical computer model encompasses 100 square kilometers—to "see" small but important features such as warm ocean water currents or ice export. And the computing capacity is insufficient to render Arctic cyclones and the role they play in breaking up the ice. "Are the models still too conservative or not?" Maslowski asks of the computer simulations that underpin future predictions. "If this present trend continues, we might be having almost no ice by the end of this decade."
Such a total summer loss of sea ice remains speculative at this point. "I wouldn't expect it to keep going straight down," NSIDC's Meier says. "The ice that is remaining may continue to stay thick even with more melt and that may be harder to get rid of. The melt could plateau." At the very least, the sea ice is likely to rebound next year, as has happened after every previous ice melt record. "That wouldn't surprise me at all," Meier says.
What may surprise, however, are the global impacts of the already far advanced loss of Arctic sea ice, particularly on the weather. "We need a few more years of empirical evidence to give a confident answer," Hansen says of the challenge of figuring out how the Arctic meltdown will affect the rest of the globe. Thanks to ever increasing greenhouse gas emissions trapping more and more heat, the world will find out this winter—and for many years to come.
"There's evidence in the paleo-climate record that the climate system is capable of changing quite rapidly," Barber notes. "We're moving into new territory and the impacts of that are unknown scientifically."



 

Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Ig Nobel Prizes

The Nobel Prizes have been around for more than a century.  Swedish Industrialist Alfred Nobel launched them in 1895 as a way of recognizing exceptional achievement in the sciences, in economics, literature, and, in the case of the Peace Prize, outstanding service to human welfare.
The Nobel Prizes are now considered worldwide to be the epitome of achievement in the disciplines they honor.


Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prizes have been given out annually to some of the strangest scientific enfeavors one can imagine. Based at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts,  the Ig Nobels, according to the website,  are intended to first make people laugh , and then make them think. 

The ceremony itself is a hoot.  The prizes are presented by genuine Nobel Prize winners. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Ig Nobels, the ceremony includes some running jokes. An example is Miss Sweetie Poo, a little girl who crys out 'Please stop, I'm bored' in a high pitched voice when speakers ramble on too long.

The following is a list of 2012 Ig Nobel Prize winners, taken from the Ig Nobel website.

 
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS] and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller"

REFERENCE: "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation," Anita Eerland, Tulio M. Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science, vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Tulio Guadalupe.


PEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Igor Petrov



ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

REFERENCE: "SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback", Kazutaka Kurihara, Koji Tsukada, arxiv.org/abs/1202.6106. February 28, 2012.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada



NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.

REFERENCE: "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction," Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, 2009.
REFERENCE: "Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Multiple Comparisons Correction," Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-5.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford



CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Johan Pettersson [SWEDEN and RWANDA]. for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green.

ATTENDING THE THE CEREMONY: Johan Pettersson



LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

REFERENCE: "Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies," US Government General Accountability Office report GAO-12-480R, May 10, 2012.



PHYSICS PRIZE: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.

REFERENCE: "Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles." Raymond E. Goldstein, Patrick B. Warren, and Robin C. Ball, Physical Review Letters, vol. 198, no. 7, 2012.
REFERENCE: "Ponytail Motion," Joseph B. Keller, SIAM [Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics] Journal of Applied Mathematics, vol. 70, no. 7, 2010, pp. 2667–72.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, Robin Ball



FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

REFERENCE: "Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?" Hans C. Mayer and Rouslan Krechetnikov, Physical Review E, vol. 85, 2012.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Rouslan Krechetnikov



ANATOMY PRIZE: Frans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.

REFERENCE: "Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception" Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99–103, 2008.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny



MEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.

REFERENCE: "Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery," Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp. 5295–8.
REFERENCE: "Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to Be Safe," E. Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrotté, and E. Lerebours, European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, vol. 16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8.

ATTENDING THE THE CEREMONY: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan


_________________


Here is a link to the website for the Ig Nobel Prizes
http://www.improbable.com/ig/




Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Eve Ensler - Global Gamechanger

Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues and founder of the global women's outreach organization, V-Day, has launched a new, global scale initiative.  It is called One Billion Rising.

On February 14, 2013  a billion women and men will stand together in cities around the world to protest violence against women. The intention is to spotlight the cultural attitudes, the public policy and the criminal behavior of those who inflict pain and suffering on women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not the only voice for women in her time; neither were Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony or Margaret Sanger.  History remembers these women because of the unique blend of courage, fortitude and creativity that each brought to her cause.  Today, there are more women (and men) than ever before fighting for justice and equality for women.  Eve Ensler stands tall among them.  Eve Ensler is a leader.  Eve Ensler is a force.


Eve Ensler
 

One Billion Rising, the global outreach initiative launched by Eve Ensler and V-Day, may turn out to be the largest, global scale political action in the history of huimanity.  I very much hope it goes that way.

Here is a bit of prose that reflects what One Billion Rising is all about:

Over It
By Eve Ensler

I am over rape.

I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.

I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.

I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.

I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don't have a sense of humor, and women don't have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really fucking funny. We just don't think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot.

I am over how long it seems to take anyone to ever respond to rape.

I am over Facebook taking weeks to take down rape pages.

I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.

I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.

I am over rape happening in broad daylight.

I am over the 207 clinics in Ecuador supported by the government that are capturing, raping, and torturing lesbians to make them straight.

I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called "comrades."

I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to have an abortion.

I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.
And I'm over CNBC debate host Maria Bartiromo getting booed when she asked him about it. She was booed, not Herman Cain.

Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.

I am over rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.

I am over starving Somali women being raped at the Dadaab in Kenya, and I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.

I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it's their fault or they did something to make it happen.

I am over violence against women not being a #1 international priority when one out of three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime - the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.  No women, no future, duh.

I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what and who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.

I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters - film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes - while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.

I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren't you standing with us? Why aren't you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

I am over years and years of being over rape. And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5 years old. And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape. And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.

I am over being polite about rape. It's been too long now, we have been too understanding. We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine - once and for all - what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need you to let our rage and our compassion connect us together so we can change the paradigm of global rape.

There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.

ONE BILLION WOMEN.

The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.

Today it begins, moving toward February 14, 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.

Because we are over it.




Legalize Pot and Tax it

The state of Colorado has decriminalized medical marijuana,  yet the Federal government is still harassing people engaged legally in that business, despite President Obama's commitment not to do that.

In response,  an initiative has been put on Colorado's ballot for this November that would legalize marijuana use without conditions. Polls indicate this initiative has a good chance of passing with voters.

The so-called 'War on Drugs' is a joke. Marijuana remains illegal in most places,  but its not called weed for nothing.  You can get it anywhere. Why not sell it legally and tax it, so that the government gets money from it, rather than criminal drug purveyors.    Those addicted to hard drugs could be treated at a fraction of the cost of the police, the courts, and the prison system required right now to catch, prosecute, and incarcerate drug offenders. Billions of dollars are pissed away annually, policing the drug trade.  The drug war has been going on for decades without putting even a dent into the public's use of marijuana and other drugs.

The medical evidence suggests that marijuana, at a minimum, is safer to use than alcohol. There are plenty of studies that affirm this, including one that just came out that reports marijuana as an effective treatment adjunct for some forms of cancer.

Polls consistently show the public is ready to see the drug war end.  More and more states are taking the half-measure of legalizing medical marijuana. 

So, where is the money coming from to resist the decriminalization of weed?  Turns out, its a lot of folks whose personal interests are threatened by free access to cannabis. 

1. International drug traffickers

2. Liquor and tobacco producers and distributors

3. Corporations that run private prisons for hire by state governments

4.  Police and prison guard unions

5.  Federal government employees whose jobs are directly tied to the 'War on Drugs'

It's time to turn the use of marijuana from something that costs society billions of dollars annually and ruins countless lives, into something that can generate substantial tax dollars to benefit local, state, and the Federal government.

Here is a link to a brief presentation by Judge Jim Gray, a Republican appointed conservative, talking about the need to decriminalize marijuana. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6t1EM4Onao



Monday, September 24, 2012

Ten Huge Problems Being Ignored in the Election

I pulled the following article off of Alternet, for Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The author should have added human induced climate change, the feckless state of the media,  and our broken political system to the list.  Nobody is doing anything about those challenges either.




10 Huge Problems Being Totally Ignored in the Presidential Campaign


 
The media focus on political minutiae in the presidential campaign can often crowd out the substantive issues that the winner will have to deal with once taking office. And while the candidates themselves occasionally talk about these issues, there’s a number of critical concerns that get no attention, including some of the worst problems (in terms of the harm they cause to people’s lives) in the United States and the world. To address this lamentable state of affairs, ThinkProgress has compiled a list of ten of the most significant problems being severely underserved by the campaign and American political discourse more broadly. In no particular order:

MASS INCARCERATION AND THE DRUG WAR
 
Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik termed [2] “mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history…perhaps the fundamental fact [of American society], as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” Indeed, as Gopnik notes, there are more black men are in prison today than were enslaved then and more total people in prison than there were in Stalin’s gulags at their largest. The result of this wave of imprisonment was structural inequality so severe that it was called “the new Jim Crow” by a famous book of the same title, as the strict limitations placed on convicted felons have rendered millions black Americans second-class citizens [3]. One of the principal causes of the rise of mass incarceration is the War on Drugs, which has failed abysmally [4] at limiting the use of dangerous drugs but succeeded wildly at aiding and abetting [5] racial inequality in the United States and themurderous drug trade [6] abroad. The Justice Department recently doubled down on these policies by initiating a massive crackdown [7] on medical marijuana in states that have legalized the drug’s medicinal use.
 
THE HOUSING MARKET
 
Though it’s well-known that the housing bubble collapse precipitated [9] the financial collapse, the subsequent woes of the housing market have received comparatively little attention. John Griffith, Julia Gordon, and David Sanchez, in a recent report for the Center for American Progress, call the current housing market “one of the biggest drags on our recovery,” writing that [10] “The historic decline in home prices since 2006 has cost Americans more than $7 trillion in household wealth, forced millions of families out of their homes, and left nearly one in four homeowners owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Private investment in housing is a fraction of its historic norm, translating to billions in lost economic output and millions of missing jobs. And more than five years into the crisis, the U.S. mortgage market remains on life support as the federal government guaranteed more than 95 percent of home loans made last year.”
 
THE INDIA/PAKISTAN CONFLICT
 
As the United States exits Afghanistan, tensions are likely to flare up again between the two nuclear-armed [12] states over concerns about terrorism and relative influence [13]in the country. The status of the contested Jammu-Kashmir province also remains unresolved. Former Pakistani director of Arms Control and Disarmament Affairs, Feroz Hassan Khan, concluded in a paper published [14] by the US Army War College that “this region seems to be the one place in the world most likely to suffer nuclear warfare due to the seemingly undiminished national, religious, and ethnic animosities between these two countries.”
 

OVERFISHING
 
Fish stocks have been in free-fall since 1989, and the reason for that is clear: humans are killing fish [17] so quickly that “large ocean fish” stocks have been reduced to ten percent of their pre-industrial peak. This pace, which could destroy every fishery in the world [18] by 2048, isn’t just of interest to animal rights activists, as the fishing industry plays a critical role in both feeding the world’s poor [19] and theAmerican economy [20]. Marine ecologist Daniel Pauly goes further, worrying that [21] the effects of the “end of fish” on the ocean ecosystem could imperil its stability altogether, undermining [22] one of the central bases of life on earth.
 
GLOBAL DISEASE AND MALNUTRITION
 
Without question, the most significant cause of easily preventable death in the world is treatable illness in impoverished countries. Two-thirds of the nearly nine millionchildren under 14 who die each year succumb to diseases [24] like pneumonia or diarrhea. This is a consequence of the massive gulf in wealth between the First and Third Worlds — the vast majority [25] of such child deaths of these kinds come in low-income countries. One of the major reasons poverty facilitates the spread of these diseasesis undernutrition [26], as underfed bodies can’t fight off disease as effectively as healthy ones. Moreover, there is some evidence that the burden of disease and starvationprevents poor countries [27] from developing economically and creating enough wealth to indigenously address the crisis. Mitt Romney has called for zeroing out [28] American foreign aid, which includes health and food assistance.
 
INTERNET PRIVACY
 
We routinely put our vital information online without thinking, but it’s becoming increasingly unclear that such information is protected from government and corporate spying. As products like Facebook become essential services, tech companies are employing shady privacy [30] and security [31] procedures that make it very easy for data to be leaked to third-party sources without your consent. Moreover, FBI and similar government agents can gain access [32] to private electronic information through national security surveillance powers.
 
AMERICA’S SECURITY STATE AND SHADOW WARS
 
Though Guantanamo Bay, the PATRIOT Act, and warrantless wiretapping were thought to be vestiges of the Bush Administration in 2009, the Obama Administrationhasn’t rolled them back [34], threatening to make the supposedly emergency-only national security state a permanent institution [35]. In recent years, the the security state at home has been supplemented by an escalating shadow war against terrorist organizations in several countries around the world, waged principally by Special Forces and a secretive drone program [36]. These stepped-up counterterrorism policiesmay be weakening [37] al-Qaeda and associated movements, but it’s not clear if the potential costs in terms of privacy violations, blowback, and deaths of innocent civilians [38] are well understood, let alone worth it.
 
FACTORY FARMING
 
Several billion animals live and get killed [40] on factory farms, concentrated animal-raising plants where sentient creatures are forced to live their entire lives in tiny, often poorly maintained pens. The treatment of the pigs, cows, and chickens on factory farms is horrific [41] — the pens are so tight that animals develop sores [42], the stress of confinement produces psychiatric disorders that result in self-harming behaviors like gnawing on metal bars, and proprietors conduct painful, medically unnecessary tail amputations simply because they want to. Factory farming also hurts humans; the “farms” are ideal breeding grounds [43] for infectious diseases and do serious damage [44] to the local and global [45] environment.
 
THE CIVIL WAR IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
 
Between 2.7 and 5.4 million people (roughly) have been killed [47] by violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), making it the most deadly ongoing conflict in the world today. An invasion sparked by the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwandadevolved [48] into a brutal multi-sided civil war plagued by the mass murder and rape of civilian populations. Though the situation has calmed somewhat today, the predations of the “Movement 23″ militia in the eastern DRC threatens to reignite [49] a wider war.
 
SEGREGATION BY RACE AND CLASS IN EDUCATION
 
Despite Brown v. Board of Education, there is a pronounced trend [51] toward resegregation by race and class in American schools. Poor students, especially black and Latino ones, are being shunted into [52] a separate-but-unequal school system while wealthy students attend parallel, superior institutions. The effect of this, as Chris Hayes documents [53] in his book Twilight of the Elites, is to create a self-perpetuating class cycle where the wealthy use their advantage to secure that their children get access to the best possible schooling, making it significantly easier for said children to become wealthy and successful and do the same for their kids. The less well off, by contrast, have only very limited ability to break into the upper echelons of American society through education, helping to cement broader trends toward inequality in the United States.
Source(s): Think Progress
Author(s):

Teaser:
Some of the worst problems (in terms of the harm they cause to people’s lives) in the United States and the world are not being addressed.
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - 08:56
Sparse Template:


Sunday, September 23, 2012

Arctic - Ice Free in Four Years

It was reported to today in the Guardian U.K. that British climate researcher, Peter Wadhams from Cambridge University has revised his estimate of the point when Climate change will cause the arctic ice pack to dissappear completely during summer months.  He now expects it to happen in four years. Four years! 

Some people think this is great.  New sea lanes open to shipping... ease of access to offashore oil fields in the Arctic.  You know what?  I think we've managed just fine without either of those things. 

According to Professor Wadham, who has spent many years collecting measurements and analyzing the arctic ice,  the loss of the sea ice is most assuredly due to human induced global warming. In 2011, the arctic warmed seven degrees celsius above the historic norm.

For polar bears, no sea ice on which to hunt maay well spell doom.  But the truly frightening implication of Wadham's findings lies  far deeper.  Just as the arctic surface warms, so does the sea bed, in which massive quantities of methane hydrate have been locked up frozen for millennia.  The warming is likely to induce the release of this trapped methane hydrate into the atmosphere.  As a greenhouse gas, methane hydrate is four times worse the carbon dioxide.   We are looking at a runaway greenhouse condition, which would leave humanity with few or no options. 

It is just stunning to me that this kind of phenomenon couild be looming, and very close at hand, yet our political eaders, in whose hands we have delivered our fate,  are sitting on their hands.

Here is a link to the Guardian article...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice?newsfeed=true



Saturday, September 22, 2012

Purely Pacific Northwest

Portland Photographer John Ekland spent several years putting together time lapse video clips of some of Oregon's most beautiful places, including Crater Lake, Mount Hood, Lost Lake, and Cannon Beach.

Oregon is a beautiful place to live. Here is a link to John Ekland's video that showcases that beauty.
http://vimeo.com/48787310



Friday, September 21, 2012

Tchaikovsky

This guy's music is awesome. He only lived 53 years (1840-1893), but the mark he left on the world can never be erased..  Among his great works, Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed magnificent pieces for the ballet, including Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty,  and The Nutcracker. He wrote amazing symphonies, operas, concertos, sonatas, songs, and overtures. 


Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky

I don't claim to be an expert or to have a well trained critical ear. I just know what I like.  There are so many brilliant pieces of music writen by Tchaikovsky.  They don't seem to share or reflect a particular 'Tchaikovsky style'.   Each great work stands alone; sublime and scintillating in its own way.


Swan Lake

Here is a brief video of a selection from Swan Lake...
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S76CGGPqI3s


Another piece my wife and I both love is Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto.  Here is a link to a video of that piece played by brilliantly by Van Cliburn and the Moscow Symphony in 1962...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M7M4UoqBpA

Another awesome piece by Tchaikovsky is Marche Slave.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5poSw7tFLB4


Finally, a wonderful segment from Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, made famous in the sound track for the movie, The Right Stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAyviZx7Ifw




Thursday, September 20, 2012

Koko

In 1971, a female lowland gorilla was born in the San Francisco Zoo.  At one year of age, she was given into the care of a behavioral researcher named  Francine Patterson.  The young gorilla was named Koko.  

Koko has lived with Francine Patterson ever since. Koko is 41 years old now.  Over the years, she has learned to sign with her hands (American sign language). She can use 1,100 different signs and can understand more than 2,000 words in spoken English.



Koko with Francine Patterson


What can be said about Koko?  She is an animal; a primate, sharing all but about one percent of the DNA genetic code that we humans have in our cells. The normal life of gorillas is in Central and West Africa, living in small family units, eating mostly plants. Wild gorillas are shy creatures, who divide most of their time between munching and snoozing. They are generally quiet and non-aggressive, except when threatened.

The difference between humans and other animal species has traditionally involved the concept of sentience.  A sentient being is one that feels pleasure and pain, and is capable of at least a modicum of awareness of  itself. There are those that hold the view that even higher animals like gorillas are incapable to such feelings.  

Koko is without question a sentient being. She is intelligent (as gorillas go), and very much an emotional being.

Nothing demonstrates Koko's ability to  feel deep emotion than her relationship with her pet kitten, which she herself named 'All Ball'.



Koko and 'All Ball'



Koko cared for the kitten like it was her own baby.

Unfortunately, the tale of Koko and 'All Ball' took an unexpected turn that fully demonstrated just how sentient Koko is. 

The following link is to a video that shows Koko's touching reaction to some very bad news about 'All Ball'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqTUG8MPmGg


Gorillas are not humans.  There is a difference. But like so many other animal species, there is ample evidence that they are capable of feeling pleasure and pain; of being happy or sad.

In the case of the gorilla, there is only a small area in the Congo River basin and in Rwanda where they are indigenous.  Their numbers have been in constant decline over the past few decades.  Habitat loss, due to human encroachment is the biggest cause.  The human population has exploded in the few places where gorillas live in the wild.  Pretty much all of the people living in those places must survive off of what the land provides. There is some agriculture, but the biggest part of the protein in the human diet in those places is from wild animals.  About 20% of animals killed by hunters for human consumption are primates, including gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. The term used to reduce these wild creatures into a market commodity is 'bushmeat'. I wrote an earlier blog entry about bushmeat in 09/08/2012.

The future of gorillas like Koko and other primates in the wild is not good.  In fact, that's probably a big league understatement. The human population in the Congo is currently about 76 million. That number is expected to grow to 180 million by 2050.   Given that most people in the Congo depend on bushmeat,  it's hard to imagine that any kind of wild animal species will survive.   Knowing this pains me to the core. I so wish there was something I could do about it.





Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The Woman Rebel

There was a time, when it was illegal to use birth control, or even discuss it as a possibility.  Reproductive freedom is something we now enjoy, but even in 2012, obviously cannot afford to take for granted given the surly regressiveness of religious conservatives.

The reproductive rights we have today came in large part because of  the indefatigable determination of a woman named Margaret Sanger.   




This extraordinary lady stood tall in a time when women had no ability to control their reproductive health. Beginning in the late 19th century, Margaret Sanger fought restrictive laws, wrote subversive articles, published a pamphlet called, Woman Rebel, and battled the US Postal Service to get it distributed to women across America.   Margaret Sanger's courage and fortitude helped shape the world we live in today.  If you don't kinow who she is, you need to read the article that follows....




How Margaret Sanger Led the Birth Control Movement - and Why the GOP Still Hates Her

September 10, 2012 |

Editor's Note: In an inspiring new book, scholar Peter Drier sets out to celebrate the movements that have made our lives better by bringing attention to the figures who sparked them. Reaching out to historians, political scientists, journalists, and other experts, he set out to find out who had helped make America great over recent generations, and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger's name was a sure winner. Loathed by conservatives for nearly a century, Sanger was a pioneer who fought tirelessly to ensure than women would have control over their reproductive lives -- which she knew was also the key to economic well-being. In light of the relentless GOP attacks on women's reproductive rights and the shocking ignorance displayed by figures like Todd Akin, it seems like a good time to remember Sanger and the pivotal role she played in the quest for freedom and equality. Excerpted with permission from The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame [3], by Peter Dreier. Available from Nation Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2012.

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966)

When federal agents arrived at Margaret Sanger’s home with a warrant for her arrest in 1914, she calmly ushered the men into her cluttered living room and quietly spent the next three hours explaining why she had mounted a campaign to promote birth control, especially to women of little means. She had been indicted by a grand jury on nine counts of breaking federal laws against distribution of birth control information with her newsletter the Woman Rebel. The potential prison sentence was forty-five years. By the time Sanger completed her persuasive argument, the agents agreed with her. Nevertheless, they said she had broken the law, and they had no power to rescind the warrant.

Throughout her life, Margaret Sanger ran afoul of the law in her quest to promote women’s health and birth control.

Born Margaret Higgins, she was the sixth of eleven children in a working-class family in Corning, New York. Her father, Michael Higgins, a stonemason, was a freethinking atheist who gave Margaret books about strong women and encouraged her idealism. Her mother, Ann, was a devout Catholic and the strong and loving mainstay of the family. When her mother died from tuberculosis at age fifty, Sanger had to take care of the family. She always believed her mother’s many pregnancies had contributed to her early death.

Sanger longed to be a physician, but she was unable to pay for medical school. She enrolled in nursing school in White Plains, New York, and as part of her maternity training delivered many babies—unassisted—in at-home births. Some of the women had had several children and were desperate to avoid future pregnancies. Sanger had no idea what to tell them.

Soon after her 1902 marriage to architect and would-be painter William Sanger, she became pregnant, developed tuberculosis, and had a very dicult birth, followed by a lengthy illness and recovery. The young family moved from New York City to the suburbs for Margaret’s health, but two babies and eight years later, Sanger insisted that they return to the city.

In the city the Sangers were part of a left-wing circle that included John Reed, William “Big Bill” Haywood, Lincoln Steffens, and Emma Goldman. Goldman had been smuggling contraceptive devices into the United States from France since at least 1900 and greatly influenced Sanger’s thinking. Sanger joined the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, providing support for its strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913. Sanger also returned to nursing, working as a visiting nurse and midwife at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side. Again, women repeatedly asked her how to prevent future pregnancies. In those days poor women tried a range of quack medicines and dangerous methods to end pregnancies, including knitting needles. A turning point for Sanger came when one of her patients died from a self-induced abortion. Sanger decided her life’s mission would be fighting for the right of low-income women to control their destinies and improve their health through family planning.

The Sangers went to France, which was then, with regard to contraception, the most progressive nation. After learning as much as she could from the French, she returned to the United States and launched her newsletter the Woman Rebel in 1914, with considerable backing from unions and feminists. As Sanger and her friends sat around her dining room table addressing newsletters, they brainstormed what to call their emerging movement for reproductive freedom. From that conversation, the term “birth control” was born. Encouraging working-class women to “think for themselves and build up a fighting character,” Sanger wrote that “women cannot be on an equal footing with men until they have full and complete control over their reproductive function.”

Sanger also began writing on women’s issues for the Call, a socialist newspaper. She developed two columns that later became popular books, What Every Mother Should Know (1914) and What Every Girl Should Know (1916). When she covered the topic of venereal disease, she went up against the US postal inspector Anthony Comstock, a one-man army against all things sexual. In 1873 Congress had passed the Comstock Law, which made illegal the delivery or transportation of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material and banned contraceptives and information about contraception from the mails.

Comstock censored her column, the first of many run-ins. He then seized the first few issues of the Woman Rebel from Sanger’s local post oce. She got around him by mailing future issues from different post oces. Thousands of women responded to the newsletter, anxious for information on contraception.

Sanger’s next project was an educational pamphlet, Family Limitation, which described clearly and simply what she had learned in France about birth control methods such as the condom, suppositories, and douches. She planned to print

10,000 copies, but there was great demand from labor unions, representing members from Montana copper mines to New England cotton mills. She scraped up enough money to print 100,000. Over the years, 10 million copies would be printed, and the pamphlet was translated into thirteen languages. In the 1920s in Yucatán, Mexico, feminists distributed the pamphlet to every couple requesting a marriage license.

But before she could distribute Family Limitation in the United States, Sanger had to go to court for the Woman Rebel, whose distribution was the “crime” for which she had received the arrest warrant. With very little time to prepare her defense and faced with a judge who seemed hostile to her cause, she made the snap decision to jump bail and flee, alone, to England. While in Europe, she visited a birth control clinic in Holland run by midwives, where she learned about a more effective method of contraception, the diaphragm, or “pessary.”

By the time Sanger returned to the United States, Comstock had died. Her hopes were raised that the laws might not be so vigorously enforced and that she might not have to stand trial. A well-publicized open letter to President Woodrow Wilson, signed by nine prominent British writers, including H. G. Wells, supported Sanger and her work. Newspapers wrote about Sanger’s notoriety, and she gained sympathy when they reported that her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, had died suddenly of pneumonia. In the face of public pressure, the government dropped the case, but the laws remained on the books.

Sanger opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in October 1916 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, primarily serving immigrant Jewish and Italian women. She, her sister Ethel Byrne (a registered nurse), and Fania Mindell (who helped translate for the immigrant patients) rented a small storefront space and distributed flyers written in English, Yiddish, and Italian advertising the clinic’s services. Sanger smuggled in diaphragms from the Netherlands and tried to re- cruit a physician to properly fit them in her patients, but no doctors were willing to face possible imprisonment. Although doctors were allowed to provide men with condoms as protection against venereal disease, they were not allowed to provide women with contraception.

Instead, Sanger and Byrne provided the services. The first day the clinic opened, they saw 140 women. Women—some from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts— stood in long lines to avail themselves of the clinic’s services. After nine days, the vice squad raided the clinic, and Sanger spent the night in jail. As soon as she was released, she returned to work. Again, the police came, and this time they forced her landlord, a Sanger sympathizer, to evict them.

Following the eviction, Sanger, her sister, and two others were arrested for “creating a public nuisance.” Ethel was the first to be convicted, and she responded to her sentence of thirty days of hard labor by going on a hunger strike. After four days, the judge ordered her to be force-fed; it was the first time this punishment had been used in the American penal system. Headlines around the nation publicized her plight. “The whole country seemed to stand still and anxiously watch this lone woman’s fight against an iniquitous law,” wrote a reporter for the Birth Control Review in 1917. Ethel almost died before Sanger was able to secure a par- don from the governor and rescue her.

Sanger’s trial began on January 29, 1917. She was also convicted, but the judge offered her a suspended sentence if she would agree not to repeat the offense. She refused. Offered a choice of a fine or a jail sentence, she chose the lat- ter and spent thirty days in jail.

Sanger appealed her conviction, and a year later the New York Court of Appeals upheld her conviction. However, the judge ruled that physicians could legally prescribe contraception for general health reasons rather than exclusively for venereal disease.

Sanger continued to fight for the right to disseminate birth control information and to import contraceptives from abroad. She launched the monthly Birth Control Review in 1917 and started the American Birth Control League (the pre- cursor to Planned Parenthood) in 1921, focusing particularly on physicians, nurses, and social workers. Two years later she opened the Birth Control Clinic Research Bureau in New York, the first legal clinic to distribute contraceptive information and fit diaphragms, directed by women doctors. But it was not until

1936 that a federal district court in New York City ruled that the US government could not interfere with the importation of diaphragms for medical use.

Feminists and progressive reformers were divided over Sanger’s crusade for birth control. Alice Hamilton, Crystal Eastman, and Katharine Houghton Hepburn (mother of actress Katharine Hepburn) supported Sanger, but others, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Carrie Chapman Catt, thought that birth control would increase men’s power over women as sex objects.

To the detriment of her reputation and the cause of reproductive freedom, Sanger was also attracted to aspects of the eugenics movement. In the 1920s, some scientists viewed eugenics as a way to identify the hereditary bases of both physical and mental diseases. Some, however, viewed it as a means of creating a “superior” human race. Among them were leading Nazis, who opposed birth control or abortion by healthy or “fit” women in order to promote a white master race. In fact, the Nazis banned and burned Sanger’s books on family planning.

Sanger’s primary focus was on freeing women who lived in poverty from the burden of unwanted pregnancies, but by embracing eugenics, she appeared to be crossing the line in troubling ways. For example, in a 1921 article, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” she argued that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” Although many of the eugenics movement’s leaders were racists and anti-Semites who promoted involuntary sterilization in order to help breed a “superior” race, Sanger was not among them. Her embrace of eugenics was intended to stop individuals from passing down mental and physical diseases to their descendents. She believed that reproductive choices should be made on an individual basis. She always repudiated the use of eugenics, including sterilization, for specific racial or ethnic groups. In the 1920s, when anti-immigrant sentiment reached a peak and some scientists sought to justify restricting immigration by claiming that some ethnic groups were mentally and physically inferior, Sanger spoke out against the stereotyping that led to the Immigration Act of 1924.

In 1930, with the support of W. E. B. Du Bois, the Urban League, and the Amsterdam News (New York’s leading black newspaper), Sanger opened a family- planning clinic in Harlem, staffed by a black doctor and a black social worker. In

1939, encouraged by Du Bois, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem’s powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church, journalist Ida Wells, sociologist E. Frank- lin Frazier, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and other black leaders, Sanger expanded her efforts to the rural South, where most African Americans lived.

Sanger remained an activist for birth control and women’s rights throughout her life. She helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952. She spent the end of her career raising money for research. Her efforts contributed to the development of the birth control pill.

In 1961, Estelle Griswold, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven with Dr. C. Lee Buxton, a licensed physician and professor at Yale’s medical school. They were arrested in November 1961 for violating a state law prohibiting the use of birth control. They appealed the case to the US Supreme Court, which in 1965 ruled in Gris- wold v. Connecticut that the law violated the right to marital privacy. The case es- tablished a woman’s right to control over her personal life and made birth control legal for married couples. This paved the way for Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that recognized a woman’s right to choose abortion.