D A T A L O G

Information gakked from nagasvoice.

Utah is criminalizing women who get abortions AND SUFFER MISCARRIAGES!

http://bit.ly/CriminalMiscarriage

This is bad. Among the comments at that link, somebody tries to explain it was amended to deal with cases like that of a 17-year-old who paid somebody to beat her until she miscarried. Well, duh--what do you think will happen when you criminalize abortion?

Secondly, down at street level, it doesn't honestly matter what they thought they were doing in the statehouse. What will matter is how it gets interpreted and enforced. If somebody wants to enforce this law against those women who come to a hospital with accidental miscarriages, then they can. It doesn't matter that it wasn't intended that way. Laws get torqued out of all recognition all the time in enforcement, and not by cops or DAs at the bottom, but for higher level prosecutors and mayors and all sorts of people with political axes to grind. Same reasons as these right-wing guys voted for this stuff in the first place.

Maybe Utah citizens could think about electing sane people for a change? As the Amplify site notes:
...Utah is not a state known for its legislative sanity. This, after all, is a state that recently made headlines for proposing to honor gun manufacturers on Martin Luther King Day and for considering the elimination of 12th grade to cut back on education spending.

Well, it just got a whole lot worse.

Utah just became the first state in the U.S. to criminalize miscarriage and punish women for having or seeking an illegal abortion. Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law expands the definition of illegal abortion to include miscarriages, removes immunity protections for women who have or seek illegal abortions, and assumes women are "guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child" if a pregnancy ends after "intentional, knowing, or reckless" behavior.

This law:

* defines legal abortion as a procedure "carried out by a physician or through a substance used under the direction of a physician." Anything else that terminates a pregnancy is now defined as illegal abortion - including miscarriages.

* states that "The killing or attempted killing of a live unborn child in a manner that is not abortion shall be punished as...criminal homicide."

* removes existing immunity from criminal prosecution for women "who seek to have or obtain an abortion" or "upon whom a partial birth abortion is performed."

* applies the legal standard of an "intentional, knowing or reckless act of the [pregnant] woman" as punishable as Criminal Homicide...

But even among states that punish illegal abortions, this "Criminal Miscarriage" law is unique. It doesn't punish individuals who perform illegal procedures; it punishes women.

This is all about PR. The state legislature backed off their proposal to eliminate 12th grade when it was ridiculed in the national press. Dropping a year from high school led to "perception problems" -- because of The Onion! -- but national media has been silent when the state enacts one of the most dangerous abortion laws in U.S. history. That silence ends right now.

It's time for everyone to hear about Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law. The media must to cover it. We must to start conversations all across the country about what this means for women and girls in Utah - and what this precedent means if (or, more likely, when) other states follow suit. (A similar case in Iowa should be all the warning we need.)

As some of you are probably aware, a fairly well-known and successful (clothing lines and brands like Playstation have used her plagiarised work, and paid her for the right to do so) artist named Mijn Schatje has recently come under scrutiny in the ABJD community for her blatant use of other people's work without their permission. Specifically, she has traced over photographs taken by other people, of dolls that belong to those people, and colored her tracings and then presented them as original artwork entirely of her own creation. She hasn't even done a good job at it - looking at the images, her grasp of anatomy is at best slip-shod, and I could color that well when I was in second grade (and that WITHOUT a nice vector-manipulating program). Many of the photographs she ripped off were stock images of dolls from the company websites themselves, and she did all of this without informing the companies or the individuals, much less asking their permission.

See this very informative page put together by RadioTrash for more information.

I hope someone takes legal action against this moron. I wish she'd stolen a photo of mine, just so I'd have the grounds to do so. That's how much I want to see someone take her down.

Oh, fuck me.

No, I'm serious. Dude. Love. So much love. I knew I would like this series when I saw the first 4 episodes...over a year ago. But I finally got around to downloading it and...shiiiiiit. I'm in love.

I want to cosplay Katsushiro. Oh yes. I love that outfit. I love it so much.

Kambei. Kyuzo. The possibilities there....oh my. I must go find good fanfiction. I have to wonder what Mal would do, if she got her hands on this series and saw what I see between those two. Oh, it would be deliciously gritty, I'm sure.

EDIT: Went on my fanfiction search. Was very disappointed - it's a relatively new and not wildly popular series, so I didn't expect to find much, but...well. I hadn't thought it would be this bad, either.

Encountered such gems of phrasing as:

"Kanbei eagerly met his thrusts with jerking movements of his hips, wanting all of the samurai's man meat inside him." (Man meat? WTF? Please, just say penis, or dick, or something. Hell, even 'throbbing member' would have better than 'man meat.' The sentence was painful enough to read without that little creative beauty. **wince** And that's not even considering the fact that Kambei was portrayed as a...whimpering weakling. Er, OOC much?)

..... **whimper**

I've found one thing that looks...tolerable. Possibly. We have a clone Kyuzo, and a captured retiree Kambei. Ehhhh, we'll see. The clone bit was a novel way of setting it after the series and yet still staying true to the story, at least. And there's been no mention of 'man meat' as of yet. **gags**

EDIT 2: **weeps** That fic...the one that looked like it might have potential...WHY MUST OTHERWISE DECENT AUTHORS IGNORE CHARACTER MOTIVATION!?!?! **bangs head on keyboard** I'm sorry, but Kambei is not, would not be, COULD not be a whimpering, mewling, un-resisting ANYTHING. Okay, so the little 'secret rebellion' type thing he had brewing was in-character, but while I could - maybe - see him letting himself get knocked around for the sake of a disguise or to make someone underestimate him - and that's a REALLY BIG maybe, and it better have a hell of a lot of justification behind it - I just can't believe him getting all "oh, woe is me, why me, you should all despise me, I'm not worthy, HERE, LET ME HAVE A PANIC ATTACK FROM A FLASHBACK TO A BEATING, why don't you all abandon me or let me kill myself" over the whole thing. Dude, WTF? He's a samurai. He's a fucking GOOD samurai. He's got this guilt/pessimism issue with being on the 'losing' side in past battles, but he's that makes him no less damned freaking awesome. He is a master tactician, a great leader, charismatic, and capable of chopping VERY LARGE OBJECTS in half with apparent ease. He's also been known to escape from execution-blocks with only a 'borrowed' hairpin as a tool. HE IS NOT A MEWLING COWARD!!! He does not get the crap kicked out of him on a regular basis by someone who - according to the author's own story - can't even dodge an attack from a farmer who had no training at all and is overcome by grief and rage, and thus acting stupidly. **roar**

**pants to regain breath**

...Needless to say, that fic was a bust, too. Urgh. And least that person understood...you know...grammar. **grumble**