i haven’t seen this on tumblr yet so i thought i would put it here. maybe you’ll laugh at me, maybe it’s futile, but it literally cannot hurt to try. it’s fast and easy. enter your zipcode and it spits out the letters that you can email with the simple click of a button. please. try anything. i know this could go viral.
NEW YORK — In response to Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, had the following statement:
“For nearly 100 years, the American Civil Liberties Union has been the nation’s premier defender of freedom and justice for all, no matter who is president. Our role is no different today.
“President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.”
“These proposals are not simply un-American and wrong-headed, they are unlawful and unconstitutional. They violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step. Our staff of litigators and activists in every state, thousands of volunteers, and millions of card-carrying supporters are ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedoms and rights.”
“One thing is certain: we will be eternally vigilant every single day of your presidency and when you leave the Oval Office, we will do the same with your successor.”
You can donate to the ACLU and/or join in their actions help them with the fight to defend the freedoms of those who need it most.
All those posts talking about how we can fight– this is one good way to do it.
If you want a cause to contribute to in the aftermath of this wretched election, the ACLU is one of your best bets. They cover a wide variety of issues, and they get RESULTS. They are fighting in your corner, they punch way above their weight class, and there is nothing they love more than fucking authoritarians’ shit up.
They’re also a long-beloved, nonpartisan, well-organized Civic Institution™ with a variety of ways to contribute. Dollars, volunteer hours, legal aid, participation in local letter-writing campaigns and petitions, signal boosting, swinging by their online store and picking up a pocket Constitution, etc. The ACLU is basically one-stop shopping for where the meaningful battles are and what you can do to help just about every group–and every civil right–Donald Trump is about to try and fuck over.
Seriously, though. If you’re feeling helpless, frustrated, like nothing you do or say or contribute could even help restrain the 2016 political dumpster fire, let alone strike a decisive blow, you might want to take a stroll through the ACLU’s greatest hits.
You may have heard of Loving v Virginia?
Or the Scopes monkey trial?
How about a little court case called Roe v Wade?
Or fucking every precedent-setting free speech case in the history of ever, including New York Times v Sullivan, aka those libel laws Trump wants to “open up” so he can sue people who say mean things about him into silence. Buddy, that’s not how the Force the Constitution works.
Or basic safeguards like the right to a lawyer for indigent defendants (Gideon v Wainwright), the inadmissibility of evidence obtained by illegal searches (Mapp v Ohio), public schools not being Constitution-free zones (Tinker v Des Moines), being informed of your right to remain silent before the police can wring incriminating statements out of you (Miranda v Arizona), the Constitutional right to privacy (Griswold v Connecticut, in the specific context of contraceptive bans)…
Lawrence v Texas: states can no longer make gay sex illegal (2001). Goodridge v Department of Public Health: gay marriage in Massachusetts (2003). Obergefell v Hodges: gay marriage nationwide (2015).
Fuck yes I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. THEY GET SHIT DONE. They’ve been a thorn in the side of powerful bullies since 1920, and if Donald Trump tries to make good on even a fraction of his campaign promises, I will take enormous pleasure in being there to help the ACLU fucking rip him to itty-bitty wannabe-totalitarian shreds.
In 2016, 14 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election. The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions. Those 14 states are: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. This is part of a broader movement to curtail voting rights, which began after the 2010 election, when state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote.Overall, 20 states have new restrictions in effect since the 2010 midterm election. Since 2010, a total of 10 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place (and six states have strict photo ID requirements) seven have laws making it harder for citizens to register, six cut back onearly voting days and hours, and three made it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.
You see, the whole Electoral College system has gotten on people’s nerves over the years [citation needed/s], and some states have opted to allocate their Electoral votes to whoever wins the popular national vote, no matter what. The map of states that have signed that compact looks something like this:
All the green states are the ones have adopted the compact, and all the yellow states currently have the compact under review.
Furthermore, all the yellow states are states that Trump won. Turning those electoral votes over to Hillary, the winner of the popular vote, would give her the presidency.
Now the Electoral College apparently doesn’t actually cast their votes until December 19th, which means that if the compact is passed before then in those four states–Missouri, Arizona, Michigan, and (most importantly, as it has the largest number of Electoral votes) Pennsylvania–then those states’ Electoral votes will go over to Hillary and she will win the presidency.
Of course, that leaves just over a month to get four state governments to pass an agreement into law. In any normal situation, that would be nigh-impossible. But the nation is essentially in crisis mode right now, and with enough attention maybe this can get fast-tracked through. Or even if it doesn’t, drawing attention to the mere fact that this compact exists may help motivate Electorates to vote against their state and towards the overall will of the country.
Either way, share this information. There’s still time.
Researchers have definitively traced how HIV first spread to the US, thanks to an impressive genetic analysis of thousands of blood samples collected in San Francisco and New York in the late 1970s.
The study, published on Wednesday in Nature, focused in particular on decoding the viral strains carried by eight people who were infected with HIV. Because the HIV virus mutates rapidly from one person to the next, it’s possible for scientists to compare genetic markers in each strain to track the history of how it spread.
These eight new genetic sequences, along with a ninth from sub-Saharan Africa that had been done years earlier, are the oldest full copies of the HIV genome.
“Looking at these archival samples allowed us to step back in time,” Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and lead author of the study, told BuzzFeed News.
Worobey’s analysis shows that after emerging in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1900s, HIV hit the Caribbean by 1967, and made its way to New York City around 1971. Within about five years, it then spread to San Francisco.
Exactly how the virus traveled from the Caribbean to the US remains unclear.
“There’s many plausible routes that the virus could have taken,” Worobey said. “It could be a person of any nationality moving from one region to the next. It could have been a contaminated blood product, since until the mid-1970s a lot of commercial blood products were imported to the US from Haiti. We simply don’t know.”
The paper is a technical feat, but also has a powerful human side: It definitively clears the name of “Patient Zero,” a gay French-Canadian flight attendant named Gaétan Dugas who for decades has been accused of bringing the virus to North America.
Dugas was hired by Air Canada in 1974, and his job took him to dozens of cities across North America. In 1980, he was diagnosed with skin cancer, just a year before the Centers for Disease Control flagged a mysterious cluster of infectious diseases in five young and previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles.
By 1982, the CDC had identified the mysterious illness as AIDS. Although tens of thousands had been infected by that time, scientists struggled to figure out what was spreading and how it was being spread. The CDC’s study of the initial cluster study grew to include 40 cases in several cities, displayed in CDC papers published in 1984 as a ball-and-stick diagram showing how they were connected by sexual encounters.
Dugas, known simply as Patient “O” (for “Outside of California”) in the CDC papers, was near the center of the cluster. A mistake in CDC communications, however, labeled him as Patient “0.”
Dugas died that same year, but the mistake would plague his name posthumously. In 1987, Randy Shilts published the widely read And The Band Played On, the first popular history of the AIDS epidemic. In it, Shilts named Dugas and delved deep into his life, portraying him as “Patient Zero,” a sexually promiscuous flight attendant who knowingly spread the virus.
The book spurred many sensational takes about the highly feared and poorly understood epidemic. The New York Post ran a front page headline that read, “THE MAN WHO GAVE US AIDS,” claiming that Dugas had triggered a “gay cancer” epidemic in the US. The National Review nicknamed Dugas “the Columbus of AIDS.” People magazine declared Dugas one of “The 25 Most Intriguing People of ‘87,” writing that his “fierce sexual drive gave impetus to an epidemic that claimed his life and thousands more.”
AIDS activists as well as scientists at the CDC tried to make the public aware that the label was untrue.
“We spent a lot of time denying that and refuting that, but some people kept on believing it,” said Jim Curran, an epidemiology professor at Emory University who led the CDC task force on AIDS in 1981. Although “Patient 0” had become the agency’s shorthand for Dugas after the mistake was popularized, he said, they never claimed he was the first case in the US.
While scientists struggled to work out the mechanics of the virus, the accidental phrase “Patient Zero” — never before used to describe the first case of any epidemic — took hold in the public’s imagination.
“There was so much anxiety and fear about HIV and origins of HIV that it led to blame — blame along people’s beliefs, blame along people’s prejudices,” Richard Elion, an HIV researcher at George Washington University, told BuzzFeed News. “People want to believe that bad things in the world happen because of bad people. But biology doesn’t work that way.”
Worobey’s new study goes a long way to address the myth of Patient Zero. In addition to the eight genomes that showed the virus’s movement from the Caribbean to the US, the researchers sequenced Dugas’s viral genome and showed that it was typical of other US strains at the time. In other words, the virus he carried had no markers distinguishing it as an earlier strain.
“People want to believe that bad things in the world happen because of bad people. But biology doesn’t work that way.”
For the activists and scientists who have been trying to clear Patient Zero’s name for decades, the fact that the myth persisted for so long should serve as a warning.
“Patient Zero sort of served as a gay boogie man,” Mark Harrington, executive director of the Treatment Action Group and a longtime activist, told BuzzFeed News. “We still see that — certain people are still portrayed as predators for transmitting AIDS to partners. We need to do a better job of distinguishing diseases from villains.”
There may be scientific value in figuring out the “Patient Zero” of any disease, such as understanding what enables viruses to spread or what gives certain people the ability to fight infections. But Worobey hopes his study will help prevent future cases of finger-pointing.
“I think for any infectious disease — whether it’s Zika or Ebola or SARS or flu or HIV — there is value in trying to understand what it takes to make a successful outbreak,” he said. But, he added, “the idea of blaming people for a pathogen that infected thousands of people before anyone knew about it is absurd.”
A Middleground 