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crickets
crickets's Journal
crickets's Journal
May 7, 2023
Every time they claim this, perhaps the blood money amounts should be publicized.
That ought to shut them up.
The deaths? It's the GUNS. The lack of legislation? It's the MONEY.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/guns
May 7, 2023
Absolutely horrific.
Now imagine this in a grade school classroom. Every single representative should have to look at full color, full-sized scenes like this every single time this happens. If a scene like this from each shooting (blurred faces if need be) landed on TV every single time, there would be movement on this issue. Shit would get done.
I realize this image is upsetting, but images just like this one helped finally end Vietnam.
There is no reason any country should call itself civilized and suffer these repeated, senseless tragedies. None.
April 13, 2023
The top comment is interesting:
There was hope that N Korea would talk to China about food. They got an offer from Russia instead to send food in trade for weapons. No word on whether NK and Russia have gone through with the deal AFAIK.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/white-house-russia-korea-engaged-food-arms-deal-98240629
---
Let's talk about Russia, North Korea, and missteps... (11 days ago)
Yes, Kim does this to get food. And to show strength in his own country.
Rather than shooting out over the ocean, sending missiles close to or over Japan, though? Yoiks. Not good. Knock it off, dude.
I'm going to share a couple of videos because they were fascinating to me, and taught me a lot more about the situation with N Korea.
---
Let's talk about North Korea, perspective, and two projections... (one month ago)
The top comment is interesting:
@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]
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]
There was hope that N Korea would talk to China about food. They got an offer from Russia instead to send food in trade for weapons. No word on whether NK and Russia have gone through with the deal AFAIK.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/white-house-russia-korea-engaged-food-arms-deal-98240629
---
Let's talk about Russia, North Korea, and missteps... (11 days ago)
April 10, 2023
How kind to let the public know that they don't deserve a public library. Unreal.
https://twitter.com/kristine_kenyon/status/1645560700981645312Kristine 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.
6:53 PM · Apr 10, 2023
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
April 10, 2023
Never mind that women's health clinics are staffed with doctors and nurses who provide health care in detecting cancer and other women's health issues, family planning aimed at preventing unwanted pregnancies, and prenatal care for those who have planned a pregnancy and want a healthy outcome - for some troglodytes crawling the Earth, women have been reduced to mere baby factories ripe for abortion at any moment. Ugh.
For the same reason women's health clinics are called "abortion clinics."
https://www.factcheck.org/2015/09/planned-parenthoods-services/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:
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
Never mind that women's health clinics are staffed with doctors and nurses who provide health care in detecting cancer and other women's health issues, family planning aimed at preventing unwanted pregnancies, and prenatal care for those who have planned a pregnancy and want a healthy outcome - for some troglodytes crawling the Earth, women have been reduced to mere baby factories ripe for abortion at any moment. Ugh.
April 10, 2023
There is some disagreement about the attempt to reach a true estimate of Earth's carrying capacity, and world population growth has slowed but not yet peaked.
https://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-support.html
Lucky us, Republicans are so het up about controlling women and going back to "the good old days" that they're trying to make women pop out more babies at any cost. Ugh.
Yes, that is a big part of the issue.
When it comes to resources of any kind, the earth only has so much to give, and right now the human race is likely past the carrying capacity of the planet.
https://worldpopulationhistory.org/carrying-capacity/
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.
There is some disagreement about the attempt to reach a true estimate of Earth's carrying capacity, and world population growth has slowed but not yet peaked.
https://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-support.html
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."
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."
Lucky us, Republicans are so het up about controlling women and going back to "the good old days" that they're trying to make women pop out more babies at any cost. Ugh.
April 2, 2023
Good reading at the above link with a search on Bolton's name - at least three Democratic members of Congress sent letters to express alarm and ask Bolton to reconsider firings and budget cuts, to no avail.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7499565/
There is no "mystery" here. As National Security Advisor, John Bolton pulled the rug out from under almost every bit of the pandemic preparations the country had, and is every bit as responsible for millions of deaths as the orange idiot. "Super-duper missiles" - jaysus.
Absolutely. Also, Bolton is the idiot who recalled the US lab workers from China
and thoroughly dismantled Obama's pandemic preparedness program, just in time for the pandemic to begin.
https://www.justsecurity.org/69650/timeline-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-u-s-response/
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.
Good reading at the above link with a search on Bolton's name - at least three Democratic members of Congress sent letters to express alarm and ask Bolton to reconsider firings and budget cuts, to no avail.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7499565/
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
Donnelly further noted that:
Not surprisingly, against this background, no inter-agency process was completed to implement the 65-page pandemic response plan developed by the Obama administration.
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.
There is no "mystery" here. As National Security Advisor, John Bolton pulled the rug out from under almost every bit of the pandemic preparations the country had, and is every bit as responsible for millions of deaths as the orange idiot. "Super-duper missiles" - jaysus.
April 2, 2023
Always a way around the rules for some of those among us 🙄... but for now, according to state laws, Abbott, DeSantis, and Kemp are required to resign if they decide to run.
Just in case anyone's wondering about resign-to-run laws.
https://pluribusnews.com/news-and-events/resign-to-run-laws-affect-a-few-potential-2024-contenders/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.
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.
Always a way around the rules for some of those among us 🙄... but for now, according to state laws, Abbott, DeSantis, and Kemp are required to resign if they decide to run.
March 30, 2023
PREACH! Louder! Do NOT bring it down a notch.
The man who interrupted him (edit: Massie, KY) with nonsense about arming teachers just stopped Bowman's message with what he knew was idiotic. The nutbars who claim to want MORE guns are to be ignored completely because they are doing exactly what Bowman said: carrying water for the gun lobby. To even address nonsense arguments about things like arming teachers is a waste of time and that is the only point of such: to waste time.
DO NOT ENGAGE with faithless actors who just want to interrupt for its own sake. KEEP ON MESSAGE and keep doing this every single day until they answer questions seriously about gun control and saving children's lives.
Bravo! Bravo!
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