Syria

Death in Slow Motion

 Trump gives pen to Dow's CEO
Do you see a link between the mindset of men who permit the use chemical warfare on their own citizens? Or is it just me?
 
On the same day Syria's president unleashed nerve gas on his own citizens, Donald Trump signed an "executive" order stripping away a number of environmental protections including the use of the Dow Chemical pesticide, chlorpyrifos, then handed the pen he signed with to Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical.

Chlorpyrifos is an endocrine disrupter, meaning it can cause "adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects," according to the National Institutes of Health. In other words, it's harmful to the brains of children.
Mother Jones
 
UPDATE (3-29-2017): EPA director Scott Pruitt signed an order denying the agency's own proposal to ban chlorpyrifos, according to a Wednesday afternoon press release. "We need to provide regulatory certainty to the thousands of American farms that rely on chlorpyrifos, while still protecting human health and the environment,” Pruitt said in a written statement. “By reversing the previous Administration’s steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world, we are returning to using sound science in decision-making – rather than predetermined results.”

By Friday, President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency will have to make a momentous decision: whether to protect kids from a widely used pesticide that's known to harm their brains—or protect the interests of the chemical's maker, Dow AgroSciences.

The pesticide in question, chlorpyrifos, is a nasty piece of work. It's an organophosphate, a class of bug killers that work by "interrupting the electrochemical processes that nerves use to communicate with muscles and other nerves," as the Pesticide Encyclopedia puts it.