@wrathsong 1 month ago (edited)
As a person who lived in South Korea for 10 years in total spanning nearly 2 decades as an academic, please know that we have a history of the USA and other countries giving food to North Korea as a point of negotiation to get them to stop shooting practice missiles. Add to that, the country's most concerned about these exercises are Japan and the United States. [snip - more]

Kristine Kenyon @kristine_kenyon
Replying to @SawyerHackett and @serrano_alej
So they’ll block every child from the benefits of a public library out of pure racist, homophobic spite? Read @hmcghee’s Sum of Us. Perfect cement pool analogy.

Darlene McDonald @Darlene_McD
·
Aug 11, 2022
Read Heather McGhee’s, The Sum of Us to learn how racism drained pools. Southern cities like Birmingham had rather drain community swimming pools and fill them with cement than follow orders to desegregate. The Sum of Us should be required reading for every school board member. twitter.com/CH005Y/status/…

6:53 PM · Apr 10, 2023

Abortions accounted for 3 percent of the nearly 10.6 million total services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics in 2013, according to its annual report.

Some services it provided in addition to abortions were:

4.5 million tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections
3.6 million contraception related services
935,573 cancer screenings including breast exams and Pap tests
1.1 million pregnancy tests and prenatal services

The ecological footprint is a measurement of the anthropogenic impact on earth. It tracks how much biocapacity (biological capacity) there is and how much biocapacity people use by comparing the rate at which we consume natural resources and generate waste to the planet’s ability to replenish those resources and absorb waste. Today, our global footprint is in overshoot. It would take 1.75 Earths to sustain our current population. If current trends continue, we will reach 3 Earths by the year 2050.

The number of people Earth can support is not a fixed figure. The way humans produce and consume natural resources affects how our environment will be able to sustain future populations. As Gerland said, "When it comes to carrying capacity, it's a matter of mode of production, mode of consumption, who has access to what and how."

One study published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(opens in new tab) found that if the population of the United States switched to a vegetarian diet, the land used to grow crops for humans rather than animal feed for meat production would feed an additional 350 million Americans. High-income countries, where females have increased access to education and family planning, tend to have lower birth rates and smaller family sizes than middle- and low-income countries, according to Max Roser, director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development in the U.K., writing in Our World in Data(opens in new tab).

Put another way, there may be an upper limit on how many humans Earth could support, but we don’t know exactly what that figure is. It varies based on how we produce, consume and manage our resources. For Cohen, if we want to affect how many people planet Earth can support, we will need to decide "how many people want Jaguars with four wheels and how many want jaguars with four legs."

President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, removes Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council and disbands Ziemer’s unit, the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Previously, Ziemer was the sole senior official focused on pandemic preparedness. He is not replaced.

By May 2018, however, rather than building on the 2017 task force's recommendations, senior officials in the administration had turned their attention to making cuts in those departments charged with pandemic responses on the NSC. Why this happened, and who was ultimately responsible, remains a mystery. NSC adviser Ambassador John Bolton asserted that it was simply a case of ‘bureaucratic stream-lining’.87 Other officials claimed that the firing of people such as Rear-Admiral Timothy Ziemer and his team, whose office was ostensibly in charge of addressing global health issues including pandemics, was simply ‘a necessary re-organization’.88 It was alleged that the NSC had succumbed to ‘bloat’ under the Obama administration, because by this point it had 400 staffers working on operational issues, rather than what Bolton claimed was the NSC's traditional focus on coordination. But cutting the NSC's Pandemic Response Office was only one of the most visible actions. Funds for PREDICT, USAID's infectious disease monitoring system, were cut by 75 per cent, because, according to a USAID administrator, ‘We typically do programs in five-year cycles, and it had two [years left in its cycle]’.89 And by February 2020, the Trump administration had cut the relatively meagre $203 million budget of the Biological Threat Reduction Program (buried deep in the $700 billion DoD budget) by a third. As John Donnelly reported, the programme

focused on finding and fighting emerging global diseases as early as possible … Yet Defense Department officials have said the money they want to subtract from the biological threats program is needed instead for what the officials called more pressing defense initiatives. These include upgrading the nuclear arsenal and developing the hypersonic weapons that President Donald Trump calls ‘super-duper missiles’.

Donnelly further noted that:

The biological program and related efforts were comparatively less important, the Pentagon said in a report to Congress made public in early February, because they addressed ‘low-to-near zero probability threats’— even though new coronavirus cases were already occurring at that point and the general threat of pandemics had been the urgent subject of numerous internal and public warnings for years.90

Not surprisingly, against this background, no inter-agency process was completed to implement the 65-page pandemic response plan developed by the Obama administration.

Legislators said Tuesday they would consider revising a state law that would require [DeSantis] to resign if he wanted to run for president. Florida is one of five states, along with Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Hawaii, that require officeholders to resign from their current office to run for another.

Like DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) emerged from re-election victories with national profiles and as potential 2024 primary contenders. [snip]

Resign-to-run laws are intended to ensure that elected officials don’t neglect their duties while pursuing other offices, misuse public resources for their campaigns, or unfairly leverage their position for an advantage over competitors. Opponents argue that they make elections less competitive.

Lawmakers in other states have also proven that they are open to debate on such laws under the right circumstances.