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.

Former ATF Director Stephen E. Higgins and others intimately familiar with the agency’s history say the root of the problem is that ATF has no political constituency, no one invested in seeing it succeed and willing to stand up against those determined to see it fail. The success of ATF’s critics in reining in its authority is nowhere more evident than in the bureau’s appropriation statute, which is two pages long, devotes 11 lines to describing the agency’s budget and the remaining 76 lines to proscriptions on its powers. Many of these “riders,” as they’re known, go to the agency’s most basic investigative functions. Two of the riders effectively ban consolidation and computerization of records. One limits access and use of crime gun trace data, while another undermines the credibility of whatever trace data are released. One rider overturns ATF efforts to ban the import of large-capacity shotguns, which the agency found had no “sporting purposes.” Another overturned an ATF regulation to limit the import of dangerous weapons under a law originally designed to protect collectors of “curios and relics.” [snip]

According to Cox, the most important of the ATF riders “is a prohibition on creating or maintaining a database of gun owners or guns,” which the NRA and other gun-rights advocates say could be used by a tyrannical government to confiscate firearms. The rider, which dates back to 1978, was a response to President Carter’s attempt to create a national registry of handguns. A related rider, dating to 1997, bars the government from creating an electronic database of the names of gun purchasers contained in 597 million gun sale records from 700,000 out-of-business dealers. (Those dealers are required by law to turn their records over to the ATF.) In addition, a 1986 law, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, explicitly forbids the government from creating a database of gun owners. [snip]

Today, gun sale records are kept at 60,000 separate locations by the nation’s 60,000 federal firearms licensees (FFLs). With a centralized database, an ATF agent in possession of a gun found at a crime scene could simply plug the gun’s serial number into a computer and identify the name of the dealer who sold the weapon, along with the name of the first purchaser. Without a database, agents must often embark on a Rube Goldberg-style odyssey, contacting the gun’s manufacturer or a gun’s importer who will direct the agent either to a middleman who sold the weapon to a dealer or to the dealer himself, who can identify the first buyer. Dealers are required to keep records of each firearm transaction. Frequently, however, the records are on paper, and dealers can’t locate particular ones quickly. At the same time, there is no law requiring consolidation of wholesale weapon transfers—those sales by the manufacturer or middleman—which means ATF inspectors have no way of knowing whether a dealer’s ledgers accurately represent all of the guns he has bought or if he is illegally selling guns off the books.

One gun database that works

Joseph Vince, a former ATF special agent and now a partner at Crime Gun Solutions, a consulting firm, says solving gun crimes is all about gathering information and having the tools to make sense out of it. He says US gun laws often make that work far more difficult. “People talk about 9/11 and not connecting the dots; but when we talk about gun laws, we’re taking the dots off the paper.” Vince says concerns that a centralized database of guns and gun owners will lead to gun confiscation have been disproved by 80 years of history with the National Firearms Act, a 1934 law that requires citizens who own machine guns, short-barrel shotguns and certain other highly dangerous weapons to register them with the federal government. Owners of NFA firearms, as they are known, are fingerprinted, photographed and subjected to an FBI background check, and the serial numbers of their guns are kept in a federal database, whose contents, Vince says, have never been divulged outside of a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. Most important, these weapons are rarely used to commit crimes. The NFA has effectively removed these guns from the criminal marketplace.

The 1968 Gun Control Act gave the ATF authority to regulate federally licensed gun dealers. In 1978, the ATF tried to make dealers report most sales each quarter. The National Rifle Association and other groups denounced the plan, and lobbied to kill the reporting requirement. Congress did as the gun lobby requested, blocking the quarterly report proposal and reducing the ATF’s budget by $5 million: the amount the agency had sought to update its computer capacity. [snip]

The war on searchable technology continued. In 1986, Congress enacted the Firearms Protection Act, which bans the ATF from creating a registry of guns, gun owners or gun sales.

Congress also put a rider barring the agency from “consolidation or centralization” of gun dealers’ records in every spending bill affecting the agency from 1979 through 2011, then made the prohibition permanent, under law.

First comes keyword searches, and the next thing you know, you have national gun registries.

That, at least, is the rationale for the law that prevents the ATF from creating a searchable system. Gun rights groups argue that once the government has a list of firearms, it could use that list to confiscate weapons from private citizens.