Tag: environment

The Work Ahead

Starter list of the work ahead:

  • Regarding rampant sex crimes against children aka Epstein associates, arrest and prosecute every culpable molester/rapist no matter how rich or powerful they may be.
  • Ongoing genocide in Palestine and threat of war in Iran:
    • Stop all funding and other support to Israel.
    • Return Israel’s boundaries to the 56% of Palestine established in 1948
  • Ukraine. Give full-fledged U.S. military support to Ukraine. Impose additional restrictions on Russia including a full maritime services ban on oil, prohibiting LNG transshipments, banning additional IT/industrial software, targeting more financial institutions, and further restricting third-country intermediary trade. Expose and prosecute embedded Russian operatives in the U. S. government. Give currently impounded Russian funds of $300 billion to Ukraine for rebuilding.
  • Provide a public accounting of all U.S. military operations and presence around the world, with justification/purpose and cost. No more secret agendas.
  • Terminate the Mars Exploration Project until such time as our government is no longer in budget deficit. Cut back on other space exploration projects.
  • Take over any and all U.S. government projects that pay Elon Musk or his companies and make them nonprofit government programs, primarily SpaceX, for aerospace services, satellite communications, and electric vehicle incentives, totaling billions in contracts, loans, and tax credits over the past two decades. Major shifts include launch of military satellites, NASA missions, and purchasing Starlink services.
  • Restore Premium Tax Credits (PTCs) for Affordable Care Act (ACA); implement universal health insurance.
  • Restore U.S. partnerships with international agencies including 66 organizations, conventions, and treaties, including major entities like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also the World Health Organization (WHO), the Paris Agreement on climate change, and various arms control agreements. 
  • Reverse all Trump actions exposing/selling national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, watersheds, national monuments, and other previously protected areas.
  • Restore water protection gutted by Trump including efforts to change the Clean Water Act, the 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule which stripped federal safeguards from over 50% of wetlands and 18% of streams. He also reduced protections for ephemeral streams, narrowing the definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS), and rolling back regulations on toxic coal ash disposal. 
  • Hazardous chemicals regulation must be restored immediately.
    • EPA’s  2009 Endangerment Finding
    • PFAS (“Forever Chemicals”): The Trump administration failed to designate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as hazardous substances, delayed setting drinking water standards for them, and allowed new, potentially toxic PFAS chemicals to enter the market with minimal review. In 2025, the EPA was reported to be weakening earlier, more stringent PFAS limits.
    • Air Toxics (Mercury, Benzene, Ethylene Oxide): In 2025, the administration invoked emergency provisions of the Clean Air Act to grant two-year exemptions to chemical manufacturers, medical sterilizers, and coal plants, allowing them to release toxic chemicals like mercury and ethylene oxide into the air. This included reversing a 2024 rule aimed at reducing ethylene oxide—a known carcinogen—by 90%.
    • Pesticides (Chlorpyrifos): Trump’s EPA reversed a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxic pesticide linked to brain damage in children, allowing it to remain on the market.
    • Asbestos and Industrial Chemicals: The administration delayed or weakened proposed bans on trichloroethylene (TCE) and methylene chloride, which are known carcinogens and toxic to workers. They also initially moved to weaken regulations on asbestos, a mineral that causes mesothelioma.
    • Chemical Safety at Plants: Rules designed to prevent accidents and explosions at chemical manufacturing plants were delayed or weakened, even in the wake of chemical plant accidents, such as those that occurred after Hurricane Harvey.
    • “Corporate Self-Policing”: The EPA under Trump often shifted to relying on industry-provided data, and, as of 2025, removed requirements for scientific review of certain chemical risks.
  • Reverse/mitigate data removal by Trump and/or DOGE included topics related to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), long COVID, HIV/AIDS, vaccines, transgender and gender identity-related topics, foreign aid, environmental justice, emergency management, employment, and the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
  • Trump’s unvetted DOGE coders put the personal info of millions of Americans in jeopardy. Serious reconstruction of privacy must be undertaken immediately.
  • Tariffs imposed by Trump must be eliminated immediately.
  • Remove Trump’s name on national monuments and organizations.
  • Restore effective manpower levels in all federal agencies.
  • IRS and other agencies must be realigned so that there is no influence of church/religion upon government functions. This is of special importance in education. Re-establish separation of church and state by eliminating federal and state tax dollars provided to private/religious schools. Nationwide educational standards must be restored and enforced even for homeschooled children. No exceptions.
  • Congress must immediately:
    • legalize abortion nationwide.
    • resurrect the 2024 Bipartisan Border Bill (S.4361) and pass it.
    • abolish the Electoral College
    • establish national referendums on issues of national importance/interest
    • remove unnecessary/partisan restrictions on voting
    • require non-partisan redistricting in all states
    • demand a thorough review/return of any illegally-taken persons kidnapped and deported and/or imprisoned under Trump’s immigration actions.
    • require the return of money Trump coerced from media, universities, and other entities.
    • reverse any government actions meant to implement Project 2025
    • develop legal means to require stiffer ethical standards for the president and vice president and SCOTUS members as currently required for elected officials (primary federal conflict-of-interest statute (18 U.S.C. § 208) including ban on stock trading for Congress and executive branch. Strengthen the Emoluments Clause with clearly defined penalties and methods of enforcement.

Please feel free to comment with your additions to this list, or edits you think are needed. It will take all of us. Step up.

Our Job as Citizens

As a nation operating under the concept of self-rule, we the people have to talk coherently about the issues. Mass shootings doesn’t solve our problems, but rather exemplifies our current failures as citizens. How did we get to this point?

Does the 2nd Amendment really grant the right to assault rifles and 100-round ammo clips? No, it does not. Nor do gun hoarders constitute a “well regulated militia.”

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

How did we not understand that waging a drug war against our own people would embed domestic violence in our society? Did we learn nothing from alcohol prohibition when, for fifteen years, underworld gangs selling illegal alcohol used their wealth to purchase weapons and political protection? How could Reagan and Congress think it was a good idea for “surplus” military weapons and equipment to be sold to our city police forces and used in commando tactics within our neighborhoods? How could we not see the horrible outcome of spending more money on prisons than education?

https://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-costs/

We have to talk about immigration—what will stop the mass migration of people to our borders? For over a century, our corporations have been aided and abetted by our military to plunder Latin America for its natural resources and cheap labor. We have blood on our hands in the same tradition as Spain for its 300-year devastating occupation of the same lands. Doesn’t it make more sense to invest more heavily in helping solve problems in these countries so the people don’t have to leave home in order to have an economic future free from violence? What kind of future are we creating for ourselves by destroying Latino families and traumatizing innocent children?

We have to talk about climate change. How can anyone still believe this is fake news? Are there truly so many people who don’t grasp the science of this issue that our entire nation’s public policy can get away with denying climate change exists? What happens when water supplies dry up, crops die on the ground, and there isn’t enough food?

https://www.who.int/globalchange/mediacentre/events/2011/social-dimensions-of-climate-change.pdf

The impacts of climate change will increasingly affect the daily lives of people everywhere in terms of employment and livelihoods, health, housing, water, food security and nutrition, and the realization of gender equality and other human rights. Impacts are expected to hit those living in poverty the hardest, partly due to their more prevalent dependency on the very natural resources affected by climate change and also because they have less capacity to protect themselves, adapt or recuperate losses.

New York Times: A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises By Somini Sengupta and Weiyi Cai Aug. 6, 2019

We have to talk about population—we can’t continue blindly producing more people who need food, jobs, and a place to live when all of those resources are simultaneously shrinking.

In 1950 there were 2.5 billion people on the planet. Now in 2019, there are 7.7 billion. By the end of the century the UN expects a global population of 11.2 billion.

In 2015, there were approximately 141 million births. In the same year, around 57 million people died. It’s clear why the global population is increasing: there are many more births each year than there are deaths. Around 2.5 times as many.

https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

If we think we have an immigration problem now, just wait.

Each of us bears a responsibility to learn the facts on these and any other issues facing us as individuals, communities, and as a nation, engage in discussion with others with the goal of finding common ground, and then participate in the implementation of solutions through community action and voting.

What’s New with Gender?

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Is LGBT new? Is it the craven abandon of our modern godless age that foments such perversion, as social conservatives believe?

Briefly, no.

The Greek island of Lesbos, currently under pressure in the route of refugees seeking safe harbor from war in Syria and Iraq, gave its name to the practice of female-female sexuality. That was 2500 years ago.

Male-male relations aren’t new nor is bisexuality. Greek and Roman men routinely married and produced children with their wives while finding pleasure with other males.

Among the indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European colonization, a number of nations had respected roles for homosexual, bisexual, and gender-nonconforming individuals; in many Indigenous communities, these roles still exist.[1]

So what’s really new?

Consider this:

“If you ask experts at medical centers how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births. But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life.”[2]

Even at the lesser rate of one in two thousand, this is an astonishing number of newborns with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia.

“For 50 years, the medical response to such external abnormalities has been the same: operate quickly to make the genitals as “normal” as possible, then hide the child’s medical history even from parents in the hope of reinforcing the new gender. Convinced they were doing the best for their patients, doctors in the past labeled ambiguous children boys or girls according to the alteration that seemed most feasible and performed highly invasive, irreversible surgeries accordingly. Thus a boy with a tiny penis might be castrated, given a rudimentary vagina, and designated a girl. Even more commonly, in cases in which a girl’s clitoris looked larger than the norm, her clitoris would be cut away entirely.”[3]

Now consider this:

“Over the past decades, an increasing trend in male external genital malformations such as cryptorchidism and hypospadias has led to the suspicion that environmental chemicals are detrimental to male fetal sexual development. Several environmental pollutants, including organochlorine pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls, bisphenol A, phthalates, dioxins and furans have estrogenic and anti-androgenic activity and are thus considered as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Since male sex differentiation is critically dependent on the normal production and action of androgens during fetal life, EDCs may be able to alter normal male sex differentiation.”[4]

Elementary arithmetic is hardly required to connect these dots.

Not surprisingly, most of the research on the effect of environmental pollutants on gender/sexuality has focused on males rather than females. Male sexuality is easier to “measure” and of urgent interest to males who dominate arenas of research and funding. That doesn’t negate the high likelihood that environmental contaminants produce hormonal effects in females.

Since there has never been a ‘norm’ determined for an average number of LGBTs in any population, there’s no way to determine whether the current LGBT ‘movement’ is a result of increasing numbers or simply the result of a freer society. Conversely, we can hardly deny the gender effects resulting from increasing pollution.

Data is data.

Given that data proving climate change seems beyond comprehension for social conservatives, there’s little hope these medievalists would be capable of understanding data showing that any ‘increase’ in the number of LGBTs could be a direct result of fetal exposure to contaminants.

Separate from the effects of increasingly pervasive chemicals and considering that so-called sexual deviance has been a standard throughout human history, maybe it’s safe to conclude that deviance is the norm.

 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex or http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2004/06/the_cutting_edge.html

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21868402