WOMANKIND WEB WANDERINGS - 3/16/2012
RESOLVED: The primary goal of The Womankind Party is to create a woman-centered political agenda and run a candidate of our choosing in the 2020 presidential election on the 3rd of November, 2020. The secondary goal, and perhaps actually the more important, is to provide a safe haven for women in a small little corner of the Web, safe from dragons.
**************************
If you would like your voice heard on Womankind, please e-mail rudyblue02@yahoo.com and I will post your opinions, suggestions, ideas, thoughts and dreams in the safety of our home.
Lysistrata
From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Lysistrata (/laɪˈsɪstrətə/, also /ˌlɪsəˈstrɑːtə/; Attic Greek: Λυσιστράτη, "Army-disbander") is one of the few surviving plays written by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace — a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes. The play is notable for being an early exposé of sexual relations in a male-dominated society. The dramatic structure represents a shift away from the conventions of Old Comedy, a trend typical of the author's career. It was produced in the same year as Thesmophoriazusae, another play with a focus on gender-based issues, just two years after Athens' catastrophic defeat in the Sicilian Expedition
From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Lysistrata (/laɪˈsɪstrətə/, also /ˌlɪsəˈstrɑːtə/; Attic Greek: Λυσιστράτη, "Army-disbander") is one of the few surviving plays written by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace — a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes. The play is notable for being an early exposé of sexual relations in a male-dominated society. The dramatic structure represents a shift away from the conventions of Old Comedy, a trend typical of the author's career. It was produced in the same year as Thesmophoriazusae, another play with a focus on gender-based issues, just two years after Athens' catastrophic defeat in the Sicilian Expedition
LYSISTRATA:
There are a lot of things about us women
That sadden me, considering how men
See us as rascals.
CALONICE:
As indeed we are!
These lines, spoken by Lysistrata and her friend Calonice at the beginning of the play, set the scene for the action that follows. Women, as represented by Calonice, are sly hedonists in need of firm guidance and direction. Lysistrata however is an extraordinary woman with a large sense of individual responsibility. She has convened a meeting of women from various city states in Greece (there is no mention of how she managed this feat) and, very soon after confiding in her friend about her concerns for the female sex, the women begin arriving.
With support from Lampito, the Spartan, Lysistrata persuades the other women to withhold sexual privileges from their menfolk as a means of forcing them to end the interminable Peloponnesian War. The women are very reluctant but the deal is sealed with a solemn oath around a wine bowl, Lysistrata choosing the words and Calonice repeating them on behalf of the other women. It is a long and detailed oath, in which the women abjure all their sexual pleasures, including The Lioness on The Cheese Grater (a sexual position).
(read further at Wikipedia............)
That sadden me, considering how men
See us as rascals.
CALONICE:
As indeed we are!
These lines, spoken by Lysistrata and her friend Calonice at the beginning of the play, set the scene for the action that follows. Women, as represented by Calonice, are sly hedonists in need of firm guidance and direction. Lysistrata however is an extraordinary woman with a large sense of individual responsibility. She has convened a meeting of women from various city states in Greece (there is no mention of how she managed this feat) and, very soon after confiding in her friend about her concerns for the female sex, the women begin arriving.
With support from Lampito, the Spartan, Lysistrata persuades the other women to withhold sexual privileges from their menfolk as a means of forcing them to end the interminable Peloponnesian War. The women are very reluctant but the deal is sealed with a solemn oath around a wine bowl, Lysistrata choosing the words and Calonice repeating them on behalf of the other women. It is a long and detailed oath, in which the women abjure all their sexual pleasures, including The Lioness on The Cheese Grater (a sexual position).
(read further at Wikipedia............)
(New content posted later in the day will be added beneath Lysistrata)
OLDIES FOR OLDIES - GOOD NIGHT SONGS
ELUSIVE BUTTERFLY*
SAVE THE LAST DANCE FOR ME
HELLO, STRANGER*
THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT
DUKE OF EARL*
IMHO: YouTube is great! I've never spent much time there, but tonight I did in search of Oldies and discovered a wonderful thing - some of these videos are with the original artist singing recently. They've gotten as old as me. When did that happen?
posted on buzzfeed:
I finally just searched for this because I was sick of some of the comments I was reading on buzzfeed and other website essentially applauding Rush for his disgusting comments. So here is the full transcript of the testimony by Sandra Fluke before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the importance of contraceptive coverage for students and employees at religious-affiliated institutions.
“Leader [Nancy] Pelosi, members of Congress, good morning. And thank you for calling this hearing on women’s health and for allowing me to testify on behalf of the women who will benefit from the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage regulation.
“My name is Sandra Fluke, and I’m a third-year student at Georgetown Law School. I’m also a past-president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice or LSRJ. And I’d like to acknowledge my fellow LSRJ members and allies and all of the student activists with us and thank them so much for being here today.
“We, as Georgetown LSRJ, are here today because we’re so grateful that this regulation implements the non-partisan medical advice of the Institute of Medicine. I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraceptive coverage in its student health plan. And just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously-affiliated hospitals and institutions and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens. We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women.Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses any potential conflict with the religious identity of Catholic or Jesuit institutions.
When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected by this lack of contraceptive coverage. And especially in the last week, I have heard more and more of their stories. On a daily basis, I hear yet from another woman from Georgetown or from another school or who works for a religiously-affiliated employer, and they tell me that they have suffered financially and emotionally and medically because of this lack of coverage.
And so, I’m here today to share their voices, and I want to thank you for allowing them – not me – to be heard.
Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. 40% of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggle financially as a result of this policy.
One told us about how embarrassed and just powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter and learned for the first time that contraception was not covered on her insurance and she had to turn and walk away because she couldn’t afford that prescription. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception.
Just last week, a married female student told me that she had to stop using contraception because she and her husband just couldn’t fit it into their budget anymore. Women employed in low-wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.
And some might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Women’s health clinic provide a vital medical service, but as the Guttmacher Institute has definitely documented, these clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing, and women are being forced to go without the medical care they need.
How can Congress consider the [Rep. Jeff] Fortenberry (R-Neb.), [Sen. Marco] Rubio (R-Fla.) and [Sen. Roy] Blunt (R-Mo.) legislation to allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraception coverage and then respond that the non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are attempting to de-fund those very same clinics? These denial of contraceptive coverage impact real people.
In the worst cases, women who need these medications for other medical conditions suffer very dire consequences.
A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown’s insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy.
Unfortunately, under many religious institutions and insurance plans, it wouldn’t be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Sen. Blunt’s amendment, Sen. Rubio’s bill or Rep. Fortenberry’s bill there’s no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs.
When this exception does exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers rather than women and their doctors dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, women’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body. In 65% of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescription and whether they were lying about their symptoms.
For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her. After months paying over $100 out-of-pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it.
I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of the night in her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room. She’d been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me, ‘It was so painful I’d woke up thinking I’ve been shot.’
Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result. On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor’s office, trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.
Since last year’s surgery, she’s been experiencing night sweats and weight gain and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She’s 32-years-old. As she put it, ‘If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no choice at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies simply because the insurance policy that I paid for, totally unsubsidized by my school, wouldn’t cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it.’
Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at such an early age – increased risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis – she may never be able to conceive a child. Some may say that my friend’s tragic story is rare. It’s not. I wish it were
One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but that can’t be proven without surgery. So the insurance has not been willing to cover her medication – the contraception she needs to treat her endometriosis.
Recently, another woman told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome and she’s struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified to not have access to it. Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown’s policy, she hasn’t been reimbursed for her medications since last August. I sincerely pray that we don’t have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously.
Because this is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends: A woman’s reproductive health care isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority.
One woman told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered on the insurance and she assumed that that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handle all of women’s reproductive and sexual health care. So when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor, even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections, because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that – something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.
As one other student put it: ‘This policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.’
These are not feelings that male fellow student experience and they’re not burdens that male students must shoulder.
In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking what did we expect when we enroll in a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success.
We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of ‘cura personalis‘ – to care for the whole person – by meeting all of our medical needs.
We expected that when we told our universities of the problem this policy created for us as students, they would help us.
We expected that when 94% of students oppose the policy the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for – completely unsubsidized by the university.
We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that we should have gone to school elsewhere.
And even if that meant going to a less prestigious university, we refuse to pick between a quality education and our health. And we resent that in the 21st century, anyone think it’s acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women.
Many of the women whose stories I’ve shared today are Catholic women. So ours is not a war against the church. It is a struggle for the access to the health care we need.
The President of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit colleges and the universities appreciate the modifications to the rule announced recently. Religious concerns are addressed and women get the health care they need. And I sincerely hope that that is something we can all agree upon.
Thank you very much.”
Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law student, testifies before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the importance of contraceptive coverage for students and employees at religious-affiliated institutions. Last week, Fluke was denied the opportunity to speak before the House Oversight Committee hearing on women's reproductive health. Instead, an all-male panel of religious leaders testified on why they should be allowed to deny women contraceptive coverage. SOURCE: C-Span.org
I finally just searched for this because I was sick of some of the comments I was reading on buzzfeed and other website essentially applauding Rush for his disgusting comments. So here is the full transcript of the testimony by Sandra Fluke before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the importance of contraceptive coverage for students and employees at religious-affiliated institutions.
“Leader [Nancy] Pelosi, members of Congress, good morning. And thank you for calling this hearing on women’s health and for allowing me to testify on behalf of the women who will benefit from the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage regulation.
“My name is Sandra Fluke, and I’m a third-year student at Georgetown Law School. I’m also a past-president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice or LSRJ. And I’d like to acknowledge my fellow LSRJ members and allies and all of the student activists with us and thank them so much for being here today.
“We, as Georgetown LSRJ, are here today because we’re so grateful that this regulation implements the non-partisan medical advice of the Institute of Medicine. I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraceptive coverage in its student health plan. And just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously-affiliated hospitals and institutions and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens. We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women.Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses any potential conflict with the religious identity of Catholic or Jesuit institutions.
When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected by this lack of contraceptive coverage. And especially in the last week, I have heard more and more of their stories. On a daily basis, I hear yet from another woman from Georgetown or from another school or who works for a religiously-affiliated employer, and they tell me that they have suffered financially and emotionally and medically because of this lack of coverage.
And so, I’m here today to share their voices, and I want to thank you for allowing them – not me – to be heard.
Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. 40% of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggle financially as a result of this policy.
One told us about how embarrassed and just powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter and learned for the first time that contraception was not covered on her insurance and she had to turn and walk away because she couldn’t afford that prescription. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception.
Just last week, a married female student told me that she had to stop using contraception because she and her husband just couldn’t fit it into their budget anymore. Women employed in low-wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.
And some might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Women’s health clinic provide a vital medical service, but as the Guttmacher Institute has definitely documented, these clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing, and women are being forced to go without the medical care they need.
How can Congress consider the [Rep. Jeff] Fortenberry (R-Neb.), [Sen. Marco] Rubio (R-Fla.) and [Sen. Roy] Blunt (R-Mo.) legislation to allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraception coverage and then respond that the non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are attempting to de-fund those very same clinics? These denial of contraceptive coverage impact real people.
In the worst cases, women who need these medications for other medical conditions suffer very dire consequences.
A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown’s insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy.
Unfortunately, under many religious institutions and insurance plans, it wouldn’t be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Sen. Blunt’s amendment, Sen. Rubio’s bill or Rep. Fortenberry’s bill there’s no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs.
When this exception does exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers rather than women and their doctors dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, women’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body. In 65% of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescription and whether they were lying about their symptoms.
For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her. After months paying over $100 out-of-pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it.
I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of the night in her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room. She’d been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me, ‘It was so painful I’d woke up thinking I’ve been shot.’
Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result. On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor’s office, trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.
Since last year’s surgery, she’s been experiencing night sweats and weight gain and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She’s 32-years-old. As she put it, ‘If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no choice at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies simply because the insurance policy that I paid for, totally unsubsidized by my school, wouldn’t cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it.’
Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at such an early age – increased risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis – she may never be able to conceive a child. Some may say that my friend’s tragic story is rare. It’s not. I wish it were
One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but that can’t be proven without surgery. So the insurance has not been willing to cover her medication – the contraception she needs to treat her endometriosis.
Recently, another woman told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome and she’s struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified to not have access to it. Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown’s policy, she hasn’t been reimbursed for her medications since last August. I sincerely pray that we don’t have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously.
Because this is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends: A woman’s reproductive health care isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority.
One woman told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered on the insurance and she assumed that that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handle all of women’s reproductive and sexual health care. So when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor, even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections, because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that – something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.
As one other student put it: ‘This policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.’
These are not feelings that male fellow student experience and they’re not burdens that male students must shoulder.
In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking what did we expect when we enroll in a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success.
We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of ‘cura personalis‘ – to care for the whole person – by meeting all of our medical needs.
We expected that when we told our universities of the problem this policy created for us as students, they would help us.
We expected that when 94% of students oppose the policy the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for – completely unsubsidized by the university.
We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that we should have gone to school elsewhere.
And even if that meant going to a less prestigious university, we refuse to pick between a quality education and our health. And we resent that in the 21st century, anyone think it’s acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women.
Many of the women whose stories I’ve shared today are Catholic women. So ours is not a war against the church. It is a struggle for the access to the health care we need.
The President of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit colleges and the universities appreciate the modifications to the rule announced recently. Religious concerns are addressed and women get the health care they need. And I sincerely hope that that is something we can all agree upon.
Thank you very much.”
Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law student, testifies before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the importance of contraceptive coverage for students and employees at religious-affiliated institutions. Last week, Fluke was denied the opportunity to speak before the House Oversight Committee hearing on women's reproductive health. Instead, an all-male panel of religious leaders testified on why they should be allowed to deny women contraceptive coverage. SOURCE: C-Span.org
"WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?"
(Please listen while reading the following entries and wonder.......)
CIVILIANS KILLED AND WOUNDED
The ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have taken a tremendous toll on the people of those countries. By our estimate, at least 137,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. We don't know how many civilians have died in Pakistan, but the number killed may be as high or higher than the toll in Afghanistan. Civilians, police, soldiers, insurgents, aid workers and journalists continue to die in these wars. In fact, 2011 has seen an increase in the intensity of the killing over previous years.
People have been killed in their homes at night and in markets and on roadways during the day. They have been killed by bombs, bullets and fire and by weapons whose acronyms have newly entered the lexicon -- improvised explosive devices (IED) and remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs or "drones"). Civilians die at checkpoints, as they are run off the road by military vehicles, when they step on a mine or a cluster bomb as they try to collect wood or tend to their fields, and when they are kidnapped and executed for purposes of revenge or intimidation. They have been killed by the US and they have been killed by its allies and they have been killed by insurgents and sectarians in the civil wars spawned or fanned by the invasions and what followed.
And death can happen some time — weeks or months — after a battle. In March 2002, Human Rights Watch documented the results when one U.S. cluster bomb that had failed to explode on impact was detonated by five boys on their way to a picnic in Takh-te-Sefar, Afghanistan, "Ramin, 15, died immediately. . . . Soraj, 12, lost both legs. Ismaeel, 16, sustained a chest wound. Farhad, 18, injured his foot. Waheed, 5, received a chest wound and minor head injury."[1] The survivors would need immediate medical care, long-term care, and prostheses.
And the effects of war death and injury linger. When families lose members to death or injury, not only is the human suffering immense, but there is also often loss of the household’s only breadwinner. There are also financial burdens for medical care, care of a disabled or orphaned relative, and funeral expenses.[2]
When the nongovernmental organization Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict visited a neighborhood in 2008 affected by an airstrike in Herat city, Afghanistan on October 22, 2001, it found that the neighborhood remained damaged from the strike. "The air-strike reportedly missed a military target and directly hit an area within the city, damaging or destroying the houses of forty-five families, killing twelve and injuring tens of others." CIVIC investigators interviewed survivors. "According to the father of one family, everyone he was close to was affected: 'One of the bombs landed in our yard. The other landed on my brother’s house, the other my neighbor here, the other my neighbor there.'" CIVIC also found that "Even those who were spared direct harm complained about a general deterioration of their quality of life, and that they had received no help to recover."[3]
Civilians also die when war damages infrastructure. These indirect war related deaths would not have occurred were it not for the damage to infrastructure, and environmental disruptions and dislocations produced by the war’s violence. Refugees from the violence, for example, often lose access to a stable food supply and/or to jobs and income, resulting in increased malnutrition and vulnerability to other disease. Loss of home or destruction of sewage treatment facilities can lead to lack of access to safe drinking water. Loss of access to health care is also common leading to fatalities that would otherwise not have happened.
It is almost always difficult to record and count the dead and wounded in war. And there are often disputes about the identities of the dead. A variety of war zone observers have asked: Were these "innocent civilians" or "insurgents"? Were they killed by the U.S., by other pro-government forces, by anti-government forces, or by others? Given how the laws of war are written, many ask, were their deaths intended, the foreseeable consequence of using a particular weapon in a populated area, or an “acceptable accident”?
The challenge of counting the civilian dead in these war zones begin with these basic questions and then continues with contentious debates about the answers and the methods for recording and counting casualties.
The Costs of War project describes the specific challenges of estimating civilian death and wounding in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The reports also discuss the ways civilians have been killed in each of these war zones and how the pattern of killing has changed over the course of the wars. The reports survey the various counts and estimates given by different sources, and then makes an estimate from them of the dead and wounded.
Download the full research paper here.
The ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have taken a tremendous toll on the people of those countries. By our estimate, at least 137,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. We don't know how many civilians have died in Pakistan, but the number killed may be as high or higher than the toll in Afghanistan. Civilians, police, soldiers, insurgents, aid workers and journalists continue to die in these wars. In fact, 2011 has seen an increase in the intensity of the killing over previous years.
People have been killed in their homes at night and in markets and on roadways during the day. They have been killed by bombs, bullets and fire and by weapons whose acronyms have newly entered the lexicon -- improvised explosive devices (IED) and remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs or "drones"). Civilians die at checkpoints, as they are run off the road by military vehicles, when they step on a mine or a cluster bomb as they try to collect wood or tend to their fields, and when they are kidnapped and executed for purposes of revenge or intimidation. They have been killed by the US and they have been killed by its allies and they have been killed by insurgents and sectarians in the civil wars spawned or fanned by the invasions and what followed.
And death can happen some time — weeks or months — after a battle. In March 2002, Human Rights Watch documented the results when one U.S. cluster bomb that had failed to explode on impact was detonated by five boys on their way to a picnic in Takh-te-Sefar, Afghanistan, "Ramin, 15, died immediately. . . . Soraj, 12, lost both legs. Ismaeel, 16, sustained a chest wound. Farhad, 18, injured his foot. Waheed, 5, received a chest wound and minor head injury."[1] The survivors would need immediate medical care, long-term care, and prostheses.
And the effects of war death and injury linger. When families lose members to death or injury, not only is the human suffering immense, but there is also often loss of the household’s only breadwinner. There are also financial burdens for medical care, care of a disabled or orphaned relative, and funeral expenses.[2]
When the nongovernmental organization Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict visited a neighborhood in 2008 affected by an airstrike in Herat city, Afghanistan on October 22, 2001, it found that the neighborhood remained damaged from the strike. "The air-strike reportedly missed a military target and directly hit an area within the city, damaging or destroying the houses of forty-five families, killing twelve and injuring tens of others." CIVIC investigators interviewed survivors. "According to the father of one family, everyone he was close to was affected: 'One of the bombs landed in our yard. The other landed on my brother’s house, the other my neighbor here, the other my neighbor there.'" CIVIC also found that "Even those who were spared direct harm complained about a general deterioration of their quality of life, and that they had received no help to recover."[3]
Civilians also die when war damages infrastructure. These indirect war related deaths would not have occurred were it not for the damage to infrastructure, and environmental disruptions and dislocations produced by the war’s violence. Refugees from the violence, for example, often lose access to a stable food supply and/or to jobs and income, resulting in increased malnutrition and vulnerability to other disease. Loss of home or destruction of sewage treatment facilities can lead to lack of access to safe drinking water. Loss of access to health care is also common leading to fatalities that would otherwise not have happened.
It is almost always difficult to record and count the dead and wounded in war. And there are often disputes about the identities of the dead. A variety of war zone observers have asked: Were these "innocent civilians" or "insurgents"? Were they killed by the U.S., by other pro-government forces, by anti-government forces, or by others? Given how the laws of war are written, many ask, were their deaths intended, the foreseeable consequence of using a particular weapon in a populated area, or an “acceptable accident”?
The challenge of counting the civilian dead in these war zones begin with these basic questions and then continues with contentious debates about the answers and the methods for recording and counting casualties.
The Costs of War project describes the specific challenges of estimating civilian death and wounding in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The reports also discuss the ways civilians have been killed in each of these war zones and how the pattern of killing has changed over the course of the wars. The reports survey the various counts and estimates given by different sources, and then makes an estimate from them of the dead and wounded.
Download the full research paper here.
Fay Easter's Photos: THE NEXT TIME ANY OF THE REPUBLICAN ASS HATS SAY "BOMB" IRAN-I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER THIS PHOTO BECAUSE IT IS THE TRUTH !
posted by Kelli Brethour - Some things never change ... :(
Afghan Women Published: December 2010
Twenty-five years ago an Afghan girl with green eyes haunted the cover of National Geographic. She became the iconic image of Afghanistan's plight, a young refugee fleeing the war between the Soviet-backed communists and the American-backed mujahideen. Today the iconic image of Afghanistan is again a young woman—Bibi Aisha, whose husband slashed off her nose and ears as punishment for running away from him and his family. Aisha fled to escape beatings and other abuse.
Why do husbands, fathers, brothers-in-law, even mothers-in-law brutalize the women in their families? Are these violent acts the consequence of a traditional society suddenly, after years of isolation and so much war, being hurled into the 21st century? And which Afghans in this society are committing the violence? There are significant differences between the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Pashtuns, the most populous and conservative group and the one that has dominated political life since the 1880s.
In the Pashtun crescent, from Farah Province in the west to Kunar in the northeast, life was—and in many ways still is—organized around the code known as Pashtunwali, the "way of the Pashtun." The foundation of Pashtunwali is a man's honor, judged by three possessions--zar (gold), zamin (land), and zan (women). The principles on which the honorable life is built are melmastia (hospitality), nanawati (shelter or asylum), and badal (justice or revenge).
The greater a Pashtun man's hospitality, the more honor he accrues. If a stranger or an enemy turns up on his doorstep and asks for shelter, his honor depends on taking that person in. If any injury is done to a man's land, women, or gold, it is a matter of honor for him to exact revenge. A man without honor is a man without a shadow, without assets, without dignity.
But it is not generally acceptable for Pashtun women to extend hospitality or exact revenge. They are rarely agents. They're assets to be traded and fought over—until they can stand it no longer.
At a shelter in Kabul for women who have escaped domestic abuse, I heard about a girl from one of the richest Pashtun families in a province bordering Pakistan. She fell in love with a boy from the wrong tribe. Her father killed the boy and four of his brothers, and when he discovered that his own mother had helped his daughter escape her father's wrath, he killed his mother too. Now he is offering a $100,000 reward for his daughter's dead body.
These are extreme actions by an extreme man. But many Pashtun men perceive that their manhood and very way of life are under assault—by a foreign military, foreign religious leaders, foreign television, international human rights groups—and they hold fast to traditions that for so long have defined what it means to be a Pashtun man.
One day in a Kabul bookstore I found a collection of landays—"short ones"—the two-line poems the Pashtuns recite to each other at the village well or at wedding celebrations. The book, originally published as Suicide and Song, was compiled by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, a celebrated Afghan poet and writer assassinated while in exile in Pakistan in 1988. He first collected women's landays in his native Kunar River Valley.
Majrouh, a humanist, found glory in these cries from the heart, which defy convention and in many ways mock male honor. From cradle to grave, the Pashtun woman's lot is one of shame and sadness. She is taught that she is undeserving of love. This is why, Majrouh wrote, landays are "a cry of separation" from the idea of love and a revelation of the misery of misalliance.
A woman's husband is often either a child or an old man forced on her through tribal bonds:
Have you with your white beard no shame? You caress my hair and inside myself I laugh.
Tauntingly, a woman lances a man's virility:
In battle today my lover turned his back to the enemy. / I am ashamed of having kissed him last night.
Or voices her frustrated desire:
Come, my beloved, come quickly and be close to me! / The "little horror" lies in slumber and you may kiss me now.
The "little horror" is the man a woman is forced to marry, a kind of dupe. Only without his knowledge will she find true love. As Majrouh understood them, Pashtun women, for all their submissiveness, have always lived in a state of deep craving for rebellion and for the pleasures of earthly life. He called his book Suicide and Song because these two acts are how they protest their anguish. In Majrouh's time the two methods of suicide were poison and drowning. Now they are poison and self-immolation.
The Afghan Parliament recently drafted a law intended to eliminate violence against women, who are beginning to reject old cultural practices and assert themselves in public and in private. I went to the Kabul home of Sahera Sharif, a Pashtun and the first female member of parliament from Khost. "No one knew a woman could put up campaign photos and posters on the walls in Khost—men didn't allow women to even have jobs in Khost," she said.
As a girl, Sharif stood up to her father, a conservative mullah, locking herself in a closet until he allowed her to go to school. She lived through the civil war between competing mujahideen groups, who ravaged Kabul before the Taliban conquest in 1996. She witnessed unimaginable cruelty and many deaths. "Much of the violence and cruelty you see now," Sharif said, "is because people are crazy from all these wars."
After the Taliban fell in December 2001, Sharif started a radio station to educate women about hygiene and basic health. More radically, she volunteered to teach at the university in Khost (a first there). She took off her burka (another first) and stood before the male students teaching them psychology. They blushed. And so she began to reeducate them.
As we talked, I could see what an inspiration Sahera Sharif has been to her 15-year-old daughter, Shkola, who interrupted her mother to show me a photograph of a woman in a magazine. The woman was lying with her throat cut, murdered by her husband's family. The woman's mother, mad with grief, had begged the magazine to publish the photograph. "I became crazy from this picture," Shkola said. "I saw it over and over like a film."
Shkola is studying Islamic history and law. She intends to become a lawyer in order to help women defend themselves against violence and injustice. In the meantime, she is scouring books from Iran to find stories for children "like you have," she said. "We have almost none here. So I'm translating them into Pashtu, and I'm also writing a novel."
In various corners of the country—in Khost and Kandahar, in Herat and Kabul—I've met young women like Shkola. They're writing not the old landays but poems and novels, and they're making documentaries and feature films. These are the new stories women are telling about their lives in Afghanistan.
Elizabeth Rubin is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Photojournalist Lynsey Addario is based in New Delhi, India.
Veiled Rebellion
Afghan women suffer under the constraints of tribalism, poverty, and war.
Now they are starting to fight for a just life.
Afghan women suffer under the constraints of tribalism, poverty, and war.
Now they are starting to fight for a just life.
LAUGHTER AND BEAUTY - Noon Update
Ivy Jo Cochran shared FBumper Stickers's photo.
Artist Bev Dolittle
Artist Jody Bergsma
Artist Ann Geddes
Artist Caroline Young
IMHO: Much of the artwork above is from women artists and are available in jigsaw puzzles. I have a number of them. Tomorrow I'll come back and post some more with the artist's name beneath them. Still doing housework, so must go back to work now. But this was a nice break. I love laughter and beautiful works of Art. Have a good afternoon. In Sisterhood, Blue
WWW Contributor Heather McMeekan shared a link on Facebook.
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Rush Limbaugh on Twitter (Slutgate)
Posted on March 15, 2012 by admin
For those who have been working on the Rush boycott efforts on Twitter, if you needed any further evidence (as if there weren’t enough already) that the Twitter campaign is working, you got it today. Unlike Facebook, where a post you make on Rush’s or a sponsor’s page can be deleted by that page owner, everything you tweet on Twitter is out there, for the whole world to see, and the only one who can delete those tweets is you. There can be no censorship, and others can easily see and pass along your tweets. During multiple segments of his show, Limbaugh encouraged his followers to get on Twitter, follow him, and blindly retweet (RT) any propaganda he posts on his Twitter account. (Actually, he specifically told them he wouldn’t be tweeting fifteen hours a day, which presumably means some paid minion paid by a PR firm will be doing the tweeting for him.)
.........MORE
← Protection While Signature Gathering (Important - Read)
Rush Limbaugh on Twitter (Slutgate)
Posted on March 15, 2012 by admin
For those who have been working on the Rush boycott efforts on Twitter, if you needed any further evidence (as if there weren’t enough already) that the Twitter campaign is working, you got it today. Unlike Facebook, where a post you make on Rush’s or a sponsor’s page can be deleted by that page owner, everything you tweet on Twitter is out there, for the whole world to see, and the only one who can delete those tweets is you. There can be no censorship, and others can easily see and pass along your tweets. During multiple segments of his show, Limbaugh encouraged his followers to get on Twitter, follow him, and blindly retweet (RT) any propaganda he posts on his Twitter account. (Actually, he specifically told them he wouldn’t be tweeting fifteen hours a day, which presumably means some paid minion paid by a PR firm will be doing the tweeting for him.)
.........MORE
WWW Contributor Sharon Starkey Jacobs
on Facebook
Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With Republicans
on Facebook
Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With Republicans
Lynn Leseth in San Diego on Thursday at the Rally for Women's Rights, which denounced efforts to limit reproductive freedoms.
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: March 10, 2012
As baby showers go, the party Mary Russell attended to celebrate her niece’s first child was sweet, with about a dozen women offering congratulations over ice cream and cake.
But somewhere between the baby name game and the gifts, what had been light conversation took a sharp turn toward the personal and political — specifically, the battle over access to birth control and other women’s health issues that have sprung to life on the Republican campaign trail in recent weeks.
“We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago,” said Ms. Russell, 57, a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and “old school” Republican of the moderate mold.
Until the baby shower, just two weeks ago, she had favored Mitt Romney for president.
Not anymore. She said she might vote for President Obama now. “I didn’t realize I had a strong viewpoint on this until these conversations,” Ms. Russell said. As for the Republican presidential candidates, she added: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”
In Iowa, one of the crucial battlegrounds in the coming presidential election, and in other states, dozens of interviews in recent weeks have found that moderate Republican and independent women — one of the most important electoral swing groups — are disenchanted by the Republican focus on social issues like contraception and abortion in an election that, until recently, had been mostly dominated by the economy.
And in what appears to be an abrupt shift, some Republican-leaning women like Ms. Russell said they might switch sides and vote for Mr. Obama — if they turn out to vote at all.
The sudden return of the “culture wars” over the rights of women and their place in society has resulted, the women said, in a distinct change in mood in the past several weeks. That shift adds yet another element of uncertainty to a race that has been defined by unpredictability, at least for Republicans.
To what extent women feel alienated remains unclear: most interviews for this article were conducted from a randomly generated list of voters who had been surveyed in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, and their responses are anecdotal, not conclusive. But the latest comments from the Republican candidates and in the right-wing media, aimed at energizing the party’s conservative base, have been enraging to some women.
After the talk show host Rush Limbaugh denounced a Georgetown University law student as a “slut” and a “prostitute” for her advocacy of insurance coverage of contraception, some women were critical of Mr. Romney’s tepid response.
Rick Santorum , a former senator from Pennsylvania who is one of Mr. Romney’s rivals for the nomination, created a tempest late last month by speaking out against prenatal testing. Earlier comments about women in combat and the role of “radical feminism” in encouraging work outside the home also left some women ill at ease.
“Everybody is so busy telling us how we should act in the bedroom, they’re letting the country fall through the cracks,” said Fran Kelley, a retired public school worker in Seattle who voted for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama in the 2008 election. Of the Republican candidates this year, she added, “They’re nothing but hatemongers trying to control everyone, saying, ‘Live as I live.’ ”
She continued, “If Republicans would stop all this ridiculous talk about contraception, I’d consider voting in November.”
From 1992 to 2008, Democrats won the overall women’s vote in every presidential election.
But in the 2010 midterm election, women swung to the Republicans. Now there are signs of another shift: in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, the president finished ahead of Mr. Romney among all women by 57 percent to 37 percent. He held much the same advantage over Mr. Santorum.
But how moderate Republican women gauge social issues as a factor in voting is unclear. Nor have there been many women at the Republican primaries who consider themselves moderate.
Last week Joyce Kimball, a retired secretary in Greenville, Ill., who voted for Mr. McCain in 2008, said she had recently become “fed up,” adding that it was not out of the question for her to vote for a Democrat in November. “I’m looking to hear how the candidates propose to put people back to work, not what they think about contraception,” she said. “I hope to God they stop talking about this.”
Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said the party intended to focus on women’s issues as they relate to the economy to win in November. “It’s the kitchen table issues, the cost of milk and gas,” she said. “That’s what we are going to be talking about.”
Even more than Mr. Romney, Mr. Santorum has made himself a champion of the traditional family with two parents, arguing in speeches that single motherhood increases a child’s chances of poverty and related problems.
The stance particularly vexes Meredith Warren, a Republican strategist in Andover, Mass. “Well, guess what?” she said. “There are a lot of single moms out there. That’s reality. I don’t think he does himself any favors denigrating that situation.”
Ms. Warren said her job had not been made any easier lately. “A lot of my younger friends are Democrats, and it’s hard for them to understand how, as a woman, you can be a member of the Republican Party,” she said.
Deborah R. Stevens, a self-described “dyed in the wool” Republican, said she felt hopeless.
“I’m looking for a candidate that will be honest, that will come out and say, ‘Yes, I support women, I want you advanced and not trampled upon,’ ” said Ms. Stevens, 63, who lives near Myrtle Beach, S.C. “I want answers desperately. I want candidates to tell me, ‘I’m not overturning Roe v. Wade.’ It’s there. Leave it there.”
Ms. Russell, who changed her political views at the baby shower, said she was impressed with how Mr. Obama handled his administration’s compromise over the much-debated birth control policy, saying, “I think he’s more of a women’s candidate.”
Mr. Romney’s reaction to Mr. Limbaugh’s statements about the Georgetown student cemented a negative view of him. “I expected him to have the guts to stand up and say what Rush did was wrong,” she said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong in every sense of the word wrong.”
A rally for women’s rights in San Diego on Thursday drew Jessica Lopez, 27, a registered independent who said she voted for President George W. Bush in 2004. Ms. Lopez said her choice this year became clear amid the Republican debate on contraception and abortion. “This has really energized me, that I need to get more involved with the Obama campaign,” she said.
Ms. Lopez added: “The G.O.P. has never been so clear about their agenda for women. I’m afraid if we get a Republican president, my health will be up to their personal discretion.”
Reporting was contributed by Rob Davis from San Diego, Dan Frosch from Denver, Ian Lovett from Los Angeles, Malia Wollan from San Francisco and Steven Yaccino from Chicago. Allison Kopicki contributed analysis.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 11, 2012, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With G.O.P..
Opinion Contributor
Women are facing sexual McCarthyism
Women are facing sexual McCarthyism
The 'war on women' is reflected in the volume of demeaning measures, the author says. | Reuters
By JENNIFER GRANHOLM | 3/12/12 9:22 PM EDT
Guys, I’m thinking it’s hard for you to imagine what it’s like to have your most private decisions made for you. By women.
Let’s put it this way: Imagine that you need Viagra. Imagine that a law passed by an 80 percent female Legislature mandates that to obtain a prescription, you have to procure an affidavit from a sexual partner verifying that you are indeed incapable of an erection.
Or maybe, before obtaining a vasectomy, you have to undergo an ultrasound on your testicles — wherein a technician must apply gel and press a hand-held transducer on your private parts. The legislation mandates that you watch images of your sperm on a monitor as a doctor describes the millions of pre-human lives you are about to end.
Far-fetched? A female legislator in Virginia introduced an amendment to the ultrasound bill that would have required men to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs. It was narrowly defeated 21-19. There were just not enough women in the Legislature to make the point.
The “war on women” can be measured, in one sense, by the volume of demeaning and physically violating measures that not only force women to undergo procedures against their will, but force doctors to perform procedures that are medically unnecessary.
Virginia may have backed away from the invasive transvaginal ultrasound law, but requiring a standard ultrasound runs contrary to the guidelines of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Nine states now mandate this “overreach” of government into a very personal and private decision between a woman and her doctor.
Look, it’s obvious that abortion is the most sensitive of public policy issues. Women deeply understand the wrenching trade-offs they must make in weighing such a personal decision. So, in addition to legislatively forced physical procedures, it should come as no surprise that women are angered by patronizing bills mandating waiting periods or forced “reflection” on images or on text written by legislators — bills that assume women are empty-headed children.
So much for “trusting” the citizens. So much for Republicans as the party of small government.
Consider this: After the election of 2010 that saw Republicans gain control of state Legislatures across the country, more than 1,100 anti-choice laws were introduced in 2011 — a new record. Eighty-three measures have been passed into law. So far in 2012, an additional 430 were introduced. We may break the record again this year.
In some cases, these bills are reaching beyond abortion and right into control over women’s health care in general.
Take Texas. Gov. Rick Perry and the 80 percent male state Legislature. They said they would forgo $35 million in federal funding to keep Planned Parenthood from getting one dime of it. Eleven Planned Parenthood clinics have shut down. This comes even though Texas already bars clinics that take such money from performing abortions.
After an uproar, Perry has since said that Texas will find the money “somewhere” for these clinics — but the Legislature has already cut the budget for care from $111 million to $38 million this year. It’s estimated the cuts would lead to 400,000 women losing health care services. This could mean 20,500 additional births because of lost access to contraception — costing the state $57 million in maternity bills.
Hmmm. Seems a pricey way to make a political point about Planned Parenthood.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73894.html#ixzz1pGpELRX0
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73894.html#ixzz1pGp3VQPP
By JENNIFER GRANHOLM | 3/12/12 9:22 PM EDT
Guys, I’m thinking it’s hard for you to imagine what it’s like to have your most private decisions made for you. By women.
Let’s put it this way: Imagine that you need Viagra. Imagine that a law passed by an 80 percent female Legislature mandates that to obtain a prescription, you have to procure an affidavit from a sexual partner verifying that you are indeed incapable of an erection.
Or maybe, before obtaining a vasectomy, you have to undergo an ultrasound on your testicles — wherein a technician must apply gel and press a hand-held transducer on your private parts. The legislation mandates that you watch images of your sperm on a monitor as a doctor describes the millions of pre-human lives you are about to end.
Far-fetched? A female legislator in Virginia introduced an amendment to the ultrasound bill that would have required men to undergo a rectal exam and cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs. It was narrowly defeated 21-19. There were just not enough women in the Legislature to make the point.
The “war on women” can be measured, in one sense, by the volume of demeaning and physically violating measures that not only force women to undergo procedures against their will, but force doctors to perform procedures that are medically unnecessary.
Virginia may have backed away from the invasive transvaginal ultrasound law, but requiring a standard ultrasound runs contrary to the guidelines of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Nine states now mandate this “overreach” of government into a very personal and private decision between a woman and her doctor.
Look, it’s obvious that abortion is the most sensitive of public policy issues. Women deeply understand the wrenching trade-offs they must make in weighing such a personal decision. So, in addition to legislatively forced physical procedures, it should come as no surprise that women are angered by patronizing bills mandating waiting periods or forced “reflection” on images or on text written by legislators — bills that assume women are empty-headed children.
So much for “trusting” the citizens. So much for Republicans as the party of small government.
Consider this: After the election of 2010 that saw Republicans gain control of state Legislatures across the country, more than 1,100 anti-choice laws were introduced in 2011 — a new record. Eighty-three measures have been passed into law. So far in 2012, an additional 430 were introduced. We may break the record again this year.
In some cases, these bills are reaching beyond abortion and right into control over women’s health care in general.
Take Texas. Gov. Rick Perry and the 80 percent male state Legislature. They said they would forgo $35 million in federal funding to keep Planned Parenthood from getting one dime of it. Eleven Planned Parenthood clinics have shut down. This comes even though Texas already bars clinics that take such money from performing abortions.
After an uproar, Perry has since said that Texas will find the money “somewhere” for these clinics — but the Legislature has already cut the budget for care from $111 million to $38 million this year. It’s estimated the cuts would lead to 400,000 women losing health care services. This could mean 20,500 additional births because of lost access to contraception — costing the state $57 million in maternity bills.
Hmmm. Seems a pricey way to make a political point about Planned Parenthood.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73894.html#ixzz1pGpELRX0
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73894.html#ixzz1pGp3VQPP
WWW Contributor Gadfly Granny shared Psych Recovery, Inc's photo:
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