Stephan: Everybody in science gets it, but not as a society, and certainly, the Republican political class doesn't seem to have a clue about how imminent massive change in the earth's climate is.
The scene , in Helmetta, New Jersey, on Aug. 22 following flash flooding after Tropical Storm Henri swept through. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans have experienced a weather disaster since June — showing the extent to which climate change is impacting people’s daily lives. Photo: Tom Brenner/AFP/Getty
Global warming is affecting people’s health — and world leaders need to address the climate crisis now as it can’t wait until the COVID-19 pandemic is over, editors of over 230 medical journals warned Sunday evening.
Why it matters: This is the first time so many publications have come together to issue such a joint statement to world leaders, underscoring the severity of the situation — with the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal among those issuing the warning.
Ahead of this November’s UN general assembly and the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, the journals warned: “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C and to restore nature.”
Threat level: “Health is already being harmed by […]
Stephan: For the Republicans, Texas is just the beginning. This is part of the White male freak-out over women seeking equality, in which weirdly, a surprising number of women are participating.
Debra Sweet, wears a mask inscribed with the words “No Forced Motherhood” as she joins people gathered for a reproductive rights rally at Brooklyn Borough Hall on September 1, 2021 in Downtown Brooklyn in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty
Shortly after Texas adopted its extreme, unprecedented ban on abortion, Republican leaders in at least seven states states are looking into how they could follow its lead. Republican officials in Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina, and South Dakota have already suggested they’re going to do what they can to copy the Texas legislation while Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Ohio are expected to do the same, according to the Washington Post. Others are likely to join the list shortly. All in all, as many as a quarter of all states are expected to introduce legislation that follows the Texas example, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights.
Politico points out that many of the states that appear the most eager to mimic Texas are led by Republican governors with presidential ambitions. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noemi wants to “make […]
Stephan: Here is another data point on the emerging trend I see concerning higher education in the U.S. First, for schools ranked in the National Universities category the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2020–2021 school year was $41,411 at private colleges, $11,171 for state residents at public colleges and $26,809 for out-of-state students at state schools. Given that the average income in the U.S. is $31,133 what does that tell you? Second, The gender equality trend is causing a great deal of disorientation amongst many young men. American culture from the country's founding has been based on male dominance, and adjusting to the new equality is causing a lot of social stress.
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the […]
Stephan: Here is the latest on how the Sackler family is literally getting away with mass murder. This disgusting story illustrates as clearly as anything I know that doesn't involve a politician, just how rotten the American justice system is. If you are rich enough, well connected enough, in the United States, you are essentially above the law. People claim that isn't true, but then you have stories like the Sacklers, that show how true it is. And it is all completely legal; the Sacklers don't even have to admit they did anything wrong.
The Sackler family Credit: Recovery Boot camp
Corporate money has a powerful and malign influence on so many aspects of American life. But even by that low standard, events this week in a New York bankruptcy court are shocking. The legal system has effectively allowed one of the country’s richest families to buy its way out of accountability for what a White House commission called “America’s national nightmare” of mass opioid addiction.
On Wednesday, the court approved a deal for the dissolution of the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma, which kicked off the opioid epidemic two decades ago with its illegal drive to sell a high-strength painkiller, OxyContin. Purdue’s owners, members of two branches of the now-notorious Sackler family, are estimated to have made more than $10bn from the drug – even as the opioid crisis claimed more than 600,000 lives, with the toll climbing higher by the year.
Astonishingly, the Sacklers seem to have been able to work the bankruptcy process to buy themselves immunity from accountability in the civil courts – in return for handing over only a small […]
Common Dreams Editorial Staff, - truthout/Common Dreams
Stephan: Humans are destroying life on earth at a horrifying rate. We just don't seem capable of getting past our greed and stupidity. This, plus climate change, foretells an earth radically different than the one we know today.
Of the 138,374 species assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for its survival watchlist more than 38,000 are now at risk of extinction, as the destructive impact of human activity on our planet deepens.
Efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have largely failed.
In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that more than a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the specter that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in 500 million years.
“The red list status shows that we’re on the cusp of the sixth extinction event,” the IUCN’s Head of Red List Unit Craig Hilton-Taylor told Agence France Presse on the eve of the congress.
“If the trends carry on going upward at that rate, we’ll be facing a major crisis soon.”
On Thursday, a group of human rights NGOs, including Survival International, Attac and Minority Rights Group, held a counter-summit presenting their alternative […]
