Greta G > Recent Status Updates

"Vesta is perhaps the last remaining example of a protoplanet, a half-formed world from the very earliest days of the Solar System. Frozen in time, this is a stage that every world we know of passed through, including the Earth."

Good luck America!
The world is watching...

"The case (Edwards v. California, 1941) was a challenge to a California law that made it a crime to transport a poor person into the state. Twenty-eight states had laws of this kind, which were known as anti-Okie laws, after the Oklahoma migrants immortalized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, who were the sort of people they were intended to keep out."

“Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.”

"But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality . Because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or eviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans."

“No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”

“How a tenant responded to an eviction notice could make the difference. Women tended not to negotiate their eviction like men did, and they were more likely to avoid landlords when they fell behind. These responses did not serve them well. Landlords and building managers generally hated it when tenants avoided them. ‘Ducking and dodging’, they called it.”

“Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants. If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

"CCAP stood for Consolidated Court Automation Programs. Like many other states, Wisconsin believed its citizens were entitled to view the affairs of its criminal and civil courts. So, free of charge, it provided a website that catalogued all speeding tickets, child support disputes, divorces, evictions, felonies, and other legal business." This is terrible. Americans seem to have no privacy rights at all!

“In larger cities like Washington, DC, the wait for public housing was counted in decades. In those cities, a mother of a young child who put her name on the List might be a grandmother by the time her application was reviewed.”

A harrowing but acutely relevant book.

The aftermath of the fleeting campaign to immunize all Americans against the swine flu was a tidal wave of litigation. ... All said they had become ill after receiving a swine flu shot. All wanted the government to pay. The government, after all, had said it would be responsible for compensating people who had been injured by the swine flu vaccine. And now here they were—the injured.

if Americans have flu shots in the numbers predicted,as many as 2,300 will have strokes and 7,000 will have heart attacks within two days of being immunized. Why? Because that is the number statistically expected,flu shots or no flu shots, he wrote. Yet can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

"Until President Ford launched his swine flu campaign, few outside of drug companies had thought much about who was liable when someone claimed injury from a vaccine. There had, however, been one notable vaccine lawsuit, and it had sent chills through the industry, making the companies wary of what might happen with a swine flu vaccination campaign."

"Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief."

“I’ve already had the lethal injection of Mormonism,” Ron barked back. “And I kind of wanted to try something different this time. . . . I’ll take the firing squad. How’s that? Is that pretty clear?”
“That’s clear,” said the judge, and then sentenced Ron to be shot to death for his crimes—underscoring the fact that Mormon Fundamentalists are by no means the only modern Americans who believe in blood atonement.

“Like us, many animals evaluate everything that happens to them against a backdrop of past and future. Timeline emotions that transgress the present can no longer be denied, given the mounting evidence that animals hold memories of specific events, are forward-looking, exchange favors, and engage in an eye-for-an-eye.”

"The war and life back home have one thing in common: neither are anything like the way they're described in books! I've created a world of my own for myself, thank God, a world of books and music which has cut me off from all that and been my salvation."

“As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore’s thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie’s own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself.”