Blood for Dracula (1974)
Paul Morrissey
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day Substack:
Conservatives have spent a lot of time, energy and money on the lie that abortion bans won’t send women to prison. It’s a crucial strategy: Voters already overwhelmingly oppose abortion bans, and the last thing Republicans need is for already-worked-up Americans to start thinking about the women they love behind bars.
Despite how obvious the deception is—women were being arrested before Roe was even overturned, and when you make something a crime, people tend to be criminalized—anti-abortion lawmakers and activists continually insist that they will never, ever prosecute women.
Thanks to a slip-up by the Alabama’s Attorney General’s office, however, we now know exactly how Republicans plan to get around those false promises.
For years, politicians and major anti-abortion groups have dismissed feminist warnings about women being prosecuted as ‘myths’ and misinformation. And since Roe was overturned, those same people have pointed to abortion bans themselves as ‘proof’—noting how many contain clauses stating that women are not to be arrested.
Indeed, that language does exist. In Alabama, for example, the Human Life Protection Act explicitly says, “this bill would provide that a woman who receives an abortion will not be held criminally culpable or civilly liable for receiving the abortion.” And when Roe was overturned, Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall went on television to assure voters that the law “is not a criminal offense against the mother.”
But conservatives wouldn’t be conservatives if they weren’t thinking about new and innovative ways to punish women, and Alabama Republicans were never going to let a little thing like the law they wrote stand in the way of putting women in jail.
In the worst wink-wink-nudge-nudge statement I’ve seen in a long time, the Alabama AG’s office told a conservative reporter that just because the abortion ban won’t let them arrest women, it doesn’t mean that the state can’t use other laws to put women behind bars: A spokesperson for Marshall told 1819 News this weekend that even though the Human Life Protection Act exempts women from being prosecuted, it “does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law—which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children.”
[…]
And while they don’t want voters to realize just how cruel they are—hence the continued insistence that women will never be jailed for abortion—Republicans’ appetite for abuse will always win out.
The anti-abortion extremist claim that women won’t be imprisoned due to a state’s laws on banning abortion is a whole load of bullpucky, as there have been several instances in the wake of the Dobbs ruling (and even before then) that women have been arrested for obtaining an abortion.
New tractor powered by bullshit | Boing Boing
A new tractor that runs on methane developed from cow manure is just as capable as oil-powered versions. The video says that if the cows are fed the right stuff, the tractors can be carbon natural.
The tractor looks like a giant children’s toy. …
Scientists find pair of black holes dining together in nearby galaxy merger - Phys.org
While studying a nearby pair of merging galaxies using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—an international observatory co-operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)—scientists discovered two supermassive black holes growing simultaneously near the center of the newly coalescing galaxy.
These super-hungry giants are the closest together that scientists have ever observed in multiple wavelengths. What’s more, the new research reveals that binary black holes and the galaxy mergers that create them may be surprisingly commonplace in the universe.
The results of the new research were published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and presented in a press conference at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington.
At just 500 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cancer, UGC4211 is an ideal candidate for studying the end stages of galaxy mergers, which occur more frequently in the distant universe, and as a result, can be difficult to observe. When scientists used the highly sensitive 1.3mm receivers at ALMA to look deep into the merger’s active galactic nuclei—compact, highly luminous areas in galaxies caused by the accretion of matter around central black holes — they found not one, but two black holes gluttonously devouring the byproducts of the merger. Surprisingly, they were dining side-by-side with just 750 light-years between them. …
Court tells Detroit museum to keep van Gogh painting | wzzm13.com
A judge on Wednesday ordered a Detroit museum to hold onto an 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh in response to a lawsuit by its owner, who claims it has been missing for nearly six years.
The painting, titled “The Novel Reader” or “The Reading Lady,” is part of a rare van Gogh exhibit, which ends Jan. 22 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Brokerarte Capital Partners LLC and its sole proprietor, Gustavo Soter of Brazil, acquired the painting in 2017 for $3.7 million, but a “third party” took possession of the art, according to the lawsuit.
“Plaintiff has not known the location of the painting,” the lawsuit states. “Recently, however, plaintiff learned that the painting is in the DIA’s possession, on display as part of the museum’s ‘Van Gogh in America’ exhibition.”
The lawsuit seeks to have the painting turned over to the owner. U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh barred the museum from moving it, a temporary step before a court hearing on Jan. 19.
The painting is worth more than $5 million, according to the lawsuit.
The museum declined to comment on the dispute but said “no allegation of misconduct by the DIA has been alleged.” …
Independent Order of Odd Fellows Tracing Board, Oil on canvas by Unidentified Artist, United States, 1850–1900. Courtesy Collection American Folk Art Museum, New York
Enceladus is blanketed in a thick layer of snow
The fluff suggests the moon’s famous plume was once more active than it is today
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is shrouded in a thick layer of snow. In some places, the downy stuff is 700 meters deep, new research suggests.
“It’s like Buffalo, but worse,” says planetary scientist Emily Martin, referring to the famously snowy city in New York. The snow depth suggests that Enceladus’ dramatic plume may have been more active in the past, Martin and colleagues report in the Mar. 1 Icarus.
Planetary scientists have been fascinated by Enceladus’ geysers, made up of water vapor and other ingredients, since the Cassini spacecraft spotted them in 2005 (SN: 12/16/22). The spray probably comes from a salty ocean beneath an icy shell.
Some of that water goes to form one of Saturn’s rings (SN: 5/2/06). But most of it falls back onto the moon’s surface as snow, Martin says. Understanding the properties of that snow — its thickness and how dense and compact it is — could help reveal Enceladus’ history, and lay groundwork for future missions to this moon.
“If you’re going to land a robot there, you need to understand what it’s going to be landing into,” says Martin, of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
To figure out how thick Enceladus’ snow is, Martin and colleagues looked to Earth — specifically, Iceland. The island country hosts geological features called pit chains, which are lines of pockmarks in the ground formed when loose rubble such as rocks, ice or snow drains into a crack underneath (SN: 10/23/18). Similar features show up all over the solar system, including Enceladus. …
