I've been volunteering with Planned Parenthood leading up to our primary election, trying to make sure teen girls have access to abortion services if they need them. I've also been reading up about the Obama administration's cowardly bullshit maneuver excluding abortion coverage from the temporary federal high-risk insurance pools. Oh, and also making note of the fact that the woman-hating asshole contingent in Congress is trying to get birth control coverage blocked from the eventual shadow of health insurance reform we'll theoretically be getting (unless it all gets overturned after the midterm elections). I've been getting a little pissed about everything, taken as a whole… and if I hadn't been so busy trying to get a good stoplight cellphone photo of the bumpersticker in front of me in traffic today, I just may have suffered a wee little bit of road rage:

Apparently the concept of "endangered species" is a little too advanced for you?

When you look at the family planning policy ideas of the fuckwit-Right, all together, it is the biggest pile of woman-hating bullshit you've ever seen. Apparently, we are all supposed to join the Quiverfull movement, and start pumping out child soldiers for Jesus's glorious army, or become nuns. They don't want us getting comprehensive sex education in school, because we're supposed to not have sex until marriage. They don't want us getting birth control from our health insurance, because maybe it promotes fornication? Although having Viagra coverage is OK, because… um… fornication is OK if it's male-initiated? Maybe? And DEAR FUCKING HOLY JEEEZIS we are NOT supposed to have abortions, when our total ignorance about birth control—combined with our restricted access thereto—leads to the inevitable pregnancy.

Women are apparently not supposed to have sex unless we want to have babies, period.
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• LEARN TO SPEAK NATIVE AMERICAN OR GET THE FUCK OUT
  

  A little shout-out to all the anti-immigrant shitheads in the great U S of A…
  More Funny T-Shirts From T-Shirt Hell.com!
• The Beauty Advantage – Newsweek
  

  Click on the "The Changing Face of Beauty" interactive feature, and then tell me how fucking depressing that shit gets during the last 10 years… christ.
  A special report on why the quest to look good isn’t just a vain pursuit. From sexism to ageism to the perils of being too attractive, how beauty can affect your job, your career, your life.
• The 20 Worst Mel Gibson Rant Quotes (Presented By Kittens)
  

  Because kittens make EVERYTHING better. Really.
  The 20 Worst Mel Gibson Rant Quotes (Presented By Kittens): In case you haven't heard the vitriolic taped phone calls between Mel Gibson and his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, here's your chance to experience all the hate and anger in a more palatable way: WITH ADORABLE KITTENS! [ Update : There w…
• http://www.Girl2Woman.org/
  Want to help women and girls? Share a video on www.Girl2Woman.org. Each share raises $1 for reproductive health services around the world.
  
• Lara Logan, You Suck — RollingStone.com
  Wait, what?! You mean the press *aren't* supposed to act like slavering lapdogs when they get access to important sources? Are you sure? Or are you just doing that "sarcasm" thing here?
  I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Rel…

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What BP and NASA Have In Common

guest post by Becca Kastl

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. Following the disaster, a lengthy investigation ensued. It was known almost immediately that the cause of the disaster was due to failure of the "O" ring in the solid rocket booster. However, it wasn't until the completion of the investigation that the full scope and cause of the disaster was actually understood.

We can apply many of the same lessons of causation to understanding the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Challenger disaster can be boiled down to the complexities of aerospace engineering and materials design. But the overarching cause of the Challenger disaster was due to NASA's approach to managing risk within a complex environment.

From the Wikipedia entry:

The Rogers Commission found that NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been a key contributing factor to the accident. NASA managers had known that contractor Morton Thiokol's design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings since 1977, but they failed to address it properly. They also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning and had failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors.

The Rogers Report noted among its findings the risk management approach taken by NASA:

Looking at the highlighted findings of the Challenger disaster, how can we say that BP did not use the exact same risk management approach on the Deepwater Horizon.

The list of issues with the Deepwater Horizon disaster are numerous:

• Non-existent or substandard testing of the well-head seal.
• Failed batteries on the BOP.
• Lack of remote control or acoustic trigger mechanism on the BOP.
• Failed complete testing of the BOP.
• Prior accident in which the BOP was damaged.
• Lack of comprehensive response plan for a blowout at the operating depths.
• Evidence of extraordinary gas pressures.
• Evidence of gas pressure and leakage shortly before the blowout.

… and there are many more.
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