Tara Bahrampour and Ted Mellnik , Staff Writer | Analyst - The Washington Post
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for over a decade (see SR archive) that the United States is becoming a majority-minority country. I don't have any problem with that, but the data makes it clear that for about a third of the population -- basically the MAGAt White population -- this is the source of fear, resentment, and hate. The good news is that younger Americans are fine with a multi-racial society, just as they are okay with gender equality, and LGBTQ issues. So we are moving culturally in the right direction.
People walk on the street in New York last April. The once-a-decade U.S. head count shows where the population grew during the past 10 years and where it shrank. Credit: Mark Lennihan/AP
For the first time in the history of the country’s census taking, the number of White people in the United States is widely expected to show a decline when the first racial breakdowns from the 2020 Census are reported this week.
For fiveyears now, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual updates of the 2010 Census have estimated that the nation’s White population is shrinking, and all population growth has been from people of color.
The new census data, planned for release on Aug. 12, will show definitivelyhow the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods shifted over the past decade, based on the national house-to-house canvass last year. It is the data most state legislatures and local governments use to redraw political districts for the next 10 years.
If the White decline is confirmed by the new data, that benchmark will have come about eight years earlier than previously projected, said William Frey, […]
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, Professor, and Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: As usual Paul Krugman gets to the core of things and has written an essay with which I am in total agreement, also as usual. The anti-science orientation of the MAGAt world is proving to be absolutely lethal for large numbers of people, and yet MAGAts seem to care more about ideology than life itself -- including their own lives. I think that is one of the main takeaways historians will settle on in the future.
Credit: Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse/Getty
Before the right embraced Covid denial, there was climate denial. Many of the attitudes that have characterized the right-wing response to the coronavirus pandemic — refusal to acknowledge facts, accusations that scientists are part of a vast liberal conspiracy, refusal to address the crisis — were foreshadowed in the climate debate.
Yet from the response to Covid-19 among Republican officials — especially the opposition to lifesaving vaccines — it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the paranoid, anti-rational streak in American politics isn’t as bad as we thought; it’s much, much worse.
On Monday the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report. The conclusions won’t surprise anyone who has been following the issue, but they were terrifying all the same.
Major damage from climate change, the panel tells us, is already locked in. In fact, it’s already happening, as the world experiences extreme weather events, like heat waves in the Pacific Northwest and floods in Europe, that have been made far more likely by rising global temperatures. And unless we take drastic action very soon, […]
Stephan: Over the past 18 months, I have received several dozen emails from anti-vaxxers telling me that the vaccines were not like earlier vaccines and these new vaccines were more dangerous than Covid itself. These assertions were often accompanied by their touting a drug I had never heard of, Ivermectin, a drug I discovered was used to de-worm horses, as the way to respond to the Covid virus. It was all crap, of course, your typical faux-science nonsense from MAGAt world. But I don't want to be casual about this. This Ivermectin disinformation influenced how many people? How many contracted the virus as a result? How many died? I really have run out of patience or tolerance for MAGAt world's anti-science stupidity.
Tablets of Ivermectin drugs Credit: Soumyabrata Roy/Nur/Getty
In November 2020, a pre-print study touting the safety and efficacy of an anti-parasitic drug called Ivermectin was published on the Research Square website, a platform where scientific studies are submitted before they are peer-reviewed and accepted by a journal. The study, led by Dr. Ahmed Elgazzar of Egypt’s Benha University, claimed that in a randomized control trial of nearly 600 people, hospitalized COVID-19 patients who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery.”
In the search for a COVID-19 wonder drug, the preprint study seemed promising. But then, in July 2021, the paper was pulled “due to ethical concerns.” Those concerns included alleged plagiarism and calculation of data points that were “mathematically impossible,” according to The Guardian.
Despite the retraction, the anti-parasite drug is allegedly flying off shelves of local farmer supply stores, according to various local news reports who say some feed stores are struggling to keep it in stock.. That’s because the drug has become a political flashpoint, enveloped by the culture wars just like nearly everything else related to the pandemic.Advertisement:https://a30138ed0d3836b1aab1020a40c73236.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Indeed, Republicans politicians like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have promoted Ivermectin as […]
Stephan: Finally, after all this digging into the 2020 election proof of election tampering has been discovered. How ironic the tampering was done by a Republican to serve the interests of Donald Trump.
Credit: The Bulwark / Shutterstock
After months of being promised by the former President and his stooges that Dominion Voting Systems had RIGGED the election, we finally have our first credible investigation into voting machine tampering.
The lede in Monday’s Grand Junction Sentinel brings the Kraken: “The Mesa County Clerk’s Office is under investigation…for a breach in security over its election system.”
A breach! It’s Happening!!!
But no, the breach wasn’t coming from the anti-Trump deep state. Instead, the clerk who is under investigation for tampering with the county election system is Tina Peters, a fervent supporter of Donald Trump and amateur vaccine science aficionado, who appears to have executed a self-own of historic proportion.
Last week Gateway Pundit reported that Q himself…errr “CodeMonkeyZ” Ron Watkins…posted a video and a few screenshots to his Telegram that had been provided by a “whistleblower.” The posts were supposed to demonstrate that Dominion Voting Systems machines could in fact be connected to the internet, which is a necessary but not sufficient element in support of their bat guano theory of election fraud.
The grainy, shaky video presented a conversation […]
Stephan: This is an alarming and disgusting account of the corruption of the American illness profit system. It is the best account I have read about how the opioid crisis developed because of that corruption and once again it demonstrates how the rich live in a different legal world than ordinary people.
Credit: Mother Jones illustration; GraphicaArtis/Getty
The American Medical Association’snew training on pain management arrived in the midst of a burgeoning crisis. It was September 2007, and doctors were prescribing enough opioid painkillers each year for every American adult to have a bottle of the addictive pills. Overdoses were at a historic high and showed no signs of slowing down. Just four months earlier, executives at Purdue Pharma had pleaded guilty to felony charges for misleading regulators and physicians about the dangers of OxyContin.
In light of this news, one might have expected the AMA—the prestigious organization that bills itself as the “unified voice” of America’s doctors dedicated to “the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health”—to bring attention to the crisis in its newly updated continuing education course on how to treat pain.
Instead, the 12-module training suggested that doctors were still too tentative about prescribing narcotics. “The effectiveness of opioid therapy may be undermined by misconceptions about their risks, particularly risks associated with abuse and addiction,” read materials from one session. The class includedideas like “pseudoaddiction,” referring to when pain patients seem “inappropriately drug seeking,” but aren’t truly addicted—rather, they […]
