MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
To say that Donald Trump's jaw-dropping display of environmental ignorance while in the United Kingdom is an embarrassment to all Americans would be an understatement. But the worst part of his ramblings about how we have "among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics" isn't that it sounds like the ramblings of a Fox News addict. It's that his administration is doing everything it can to work towards the opposite: dirty water, dirty air, and, well, a very dirty climate.
Despite the US being responsible for the greatest buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of any nation on the planet, Trump engages in his all-too-familiar and predictable m.o. of projection and deflection, pointing the finger at other countries ("they don't do [sic] the responsibility".) While Trump insists it is other countries who have "not very good air, not very good water, and the sense of pollution," his administration is giving his billionaire buddies and fossil fuel companies carte blanche to pollute.
Reuters reported that in one month in 2018, a coal company owned by Trump's pal Bob Murray released over 200 times the allowable limit of aluminum into the rivers surrounding his coal mine. So much for Trump's support for "crystal clean clear" water.
And throughout his administration, Trump's political appointees (many of whom have come so recently from the swamp they're still draped in algae and muck) are trying their hardest to expand malicious Trumpian environmental policies across the federal government.
China pollutes at double the rate of the U.S we have more smog cause we have more cars and people on the roads
While the eugenics and abortion movements may have disquieting intersections, the notion that abortion rights are the direct heir to our history of eugenic sterilization is unfounded. Nobody is advocating forcible abortion, for eugenic or any other reason. A state forcibly sterilizing women from disfavored groups bears little similarity to a state allowing individuals to make decisions to terminate their own pregnancies—even in cases in which they may do so because of the fetus’s race, sex, or disability. The former eliminated a person’s ability to decide whether to reproduce, whereas the latter enables it.
But it is important to understand that the alarm over abortion as eugenics is a decoy of sorts. A deeper, more troubling argument that is now gathering force is tucked more quietly into Thomas’s invocation of legal anti-discrimination norms. If the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability can be made relevant to a fetus, then fetuses are figured as entities with anti-discrimination rights—like people. This move imbues the fetus with rights that the pregnant person—and, by extension, the abortion provider—might violate. What is really at stake is an idea of fetal personhood.
It is not coincidental that in the same case, last month, the Court upheld part of the Indiana law, which prohibited abortion providers from disposing of fetal remains as they would surgical waste. Keeping the law in place, the Court reasoned that how fetal remains are disposed of after abortion doesn’t affect access to the abortion itself. But it does transform cultural practices surrounding the treatment of fetuses, through gestures that suggest they are person-like entities, and point at their rights. Indeed, in defending the law, Indiana asserted an interest in the “humane and dignified disposal of human remains.”
Writing in 1990, the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe called abortion “the clash of absolutes,” referring to the clash between the fetus’s development and the pregnant person’s liberty. On one side, the belief that a fetus is a human being would mean that abortion is a form of murder, which makes the idea that it is a woman’s “choice” callous or nonsensical. On the other side, the belief that the abortion decision belongs in the domain of individual autonomy rests on the assumption that, whatever it is, abortion is not the killing of a human being. Tribe observed that “solutions that split the difference—denying some fetuses life and some women liberty—hardly offer a solution.” But splitting that difference has been our legal solution for half a century. During this time, the interest of neither the fetus nor the pregnant woman has been treated as absolute.
…
When Republican lawmakers consider the fact of rape or incest irrelevant to a decision to terminate a pregnancy, and when Thomas invokes the spectre of discrimination against a fetus, they are making the same point—that every “unborn child” is entitled to the same dignity as you or me. And, if fetuses are thought to have basic rights as persons do, then a future ruling might reach beyond overturning Roe. It might hold that it is unconstitutional for any state to allow abortions at all. This position—the constitutionalization of abortion abolition—would go far beyond what either liberals and conservatives have imagined possible, but it is where the ambitions of fetal personhood now entering the legal mainstream are headed.
Probably everyone who followed Donald Trump’s visit to Britain has a favorite scene of diplomatic debacle. But the moment that probably did the most to poison relations with our oldest ally — and undermine whatever chance there was for the “phenomenal” trade deal Trump claimed to be offering — was Trump’s https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/04/brits-are-fiercely-protective-their-health-care-system-trump-suggested-he-wants-it-included-trade-talks/?utm_term=.d9ca13f63cf9 (apparent suggestion) that such a deal would involve opening up Britain’s National Health Service to U.S. private companies.
It says something about the qualities of our current president that the best argument anyone has made in his defense is that he didn’t know what he was talking about. He does, however, know what the N.H.S. is — he just doesn’t understand its role in British life.
After all, last year he tweeted that Britons were marching in the streets to protest a health system that was “https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/05/trump-thought-the-british-were-protesting-against-their-health-service-they-werent/?utm_term=.109419282080 (going broke and not working).” Actually, the demonstrations were in favor of the N.H.S., calling for more government funding.
But never mind what was going on in Trump’s mind. Let’s focus instead on the fact that no American politician, Trump least of all, has any business giving other countries advice on health care. For we have the worst-performing health care system in the advanced world — and Trump is doing all he can to degrade it further.
