Stephan: Yet another horror story about the anti-vaxxers. A generation from now, probably sooner, young researchers will be writing their doctoral dissertations on the anti-vaxxer death cult. How many hundreds of thousands of dead people this movement caused, how it almost collapsed an already dysfunctional healthcare system in America, the hundreds of millions of unnecessary costs it incurred. I am currently writing an academic paper on this topic, and am absolutely gobsmacked at the hard data proving how much damage and death this malevolently stupid movement has caused already, and continues to cause.
Credit: Getty
Doctors have known for more than a year now that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin isn’t effective against Covid. The FDA has explicitly warned against prescribing it to Covid patients, but many physicians still do—and public and private insurance companies are paying for it. A study published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that this drug has cost insurance companies more than a hundred million dollars. “People are really annoyed with insurance, that they don’t cover things that are evidence-based,” says lead author Kao-Ping Chua, an assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. “And at the same time, now here’s an example of insurance covering something that’s not evidence-based.”
Last August, Chua noticed an alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that noted a dramatic increase in ivermectin prescriptions during the pandemic. Before 2020, ivermectin prescription rates from US doctors were low—just a few thousand a week for parasitic diseases like scabies. Yet by the week […]
Stephan: Yet another warning about sea rise, and yet another example that the nations of the world, and particularly the United States, are not doing anywhere close to enough to deal with what climate change is doing to earth, as a result of human activity. According to the study covered in this report the iceberg "A68a lost more than 152 billion tons (138 billion metric tons) of fresh water in just three months — a mass equal to an incomprehensible volume of water that could fill more than 60 million Olympic-sized swimming pools."
Iceberg A68 Credit: ESA/SENTINEL-1
After the world’s largest iceberg snapped off of the Antarctic Peninsula in July 2017, it drifted north on a three-year death march, shedding an unfathomable amount of meltwater into the sea. Now, a new study of the doomed iceberg (named A68a) reveals just how much water the infamous mega-berg actually lost — and how that could impact the local ecosystem for generations to come.
Using observations from five satellites, the study authors calculated how much the iceberg’s area and thickness changed as it drifted north through Antarctica‘s Weddell Sea and into the relatively warm waters of the Scotia Sea. There, while the berg appeared to be headed for a direct collision with South Georgia island, iceberg A68a lost more than 152 billion tons (138 billion metric tons) of fresh water in just three months — a mass equal to an incomprehensible volume of water that could fill more than 60 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to the study authors.
“This is a huge amount of meltwater, and the next thing we want to learn […]
Stephan: The Republican attempt to destroy American democracy is becoming ever more blatant, and seems to be coming out of the Nazis playbook, and how Hitler destroyed German democracy and rose to power. Here is the latest move.
Ron DeSantis and Barry Goldwater Credit: Salon/Getty
Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.”
Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the ’60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: They’re part of a larger election fraud program the GOP has used to suppress the vote for 60 years now.
This election year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is raising the stakes: He’s planning to put together a force of “election police” under his personal command to travel the state intimidating voters while pretending to look for “voter fraud.”
DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to ‘investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation’ of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”
Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling […]
Stephan: The attack on democracy being mounted by the Republican Party is causing enormous widespread emotional and mental stress on the American population. Here is the actual research paper supporting this statement. You may be feeling stressed yourself. I certainly feel democracy in America is fragile and near collapse, and that the only thing defending it are the American voters -- if, and only if, everyone votes only for Democrats.
Citation: Smith KB (2022) Politics is making us sick: The negative impact of political engagement on public health during the Trump administration. PLoS ONE 17(1): e0262022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262022
Abstract
Objectives
To quantify the effect of politics on the physical, psychological, and social health of American adults during the four-year span of the Trump administration.
Methods
A previously validated politics and health scale was used to compare health markers in nationally representative surveys administered to separate samples in March 2017 (N = 800) and October 2020 (N = 700). Participants in the 2020 survey were re-sampled approximately two weeks after the 2020 election and health markers were compared to their pre-election baselines.
Results
Large numbers of Americans reported politics takes a significant toll on a range of health markers—everything from stress, loss of sleep, or suicidal thoughts to an inability to stop thinking about politics and making intemperate social media posts. The proportion of Americans reporting these effects stayed stable or slightly increased between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2020 prior to the presidential election. Deterioration in measures of physical health became detectably worse in the wake of the 2020 election. Those who were young, politically interested, politically engaged, or on the political left were more […]
Stephan: One of the negative consequences of not taxing the uber-rich fairly when combined with Citizens United is that bribery of public officials is easy, and the uber-rich have lots of money to do it. It is my view that all elections should be publicly funded, and it should be illegal for any individual, corporation, or PAC to fund politics in anyway. Here are some facts about why I feel so strongly about this.
Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam listen as then-President Donald Trump delivers remarks at a rally in Las Vegas on February 21, 2020. Credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
Marking the 12th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision, the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness on Friday published a report showing that U.S. billionaires dumped a staggering $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections—a 39-fold increase compared to 2010.
“Billionaires shouldn’t get to use their enormous wealth to pick and choose who they want in office.”
Over the course of the 2020 election cycle, ATF found, America’s 661 billionaires contributed nearly $1 out of every $10 spent attempting to influence the outcome and determine who sets policy for a nation of 330 million.
Nearly a third of the billionaire campaign funding in 2020 came from the mega-rich couple Sheldon and Miriam Adelson—former President Donald Trump’s top donors—and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who doled out $152.5 million during the 2020 election cycle, not including the $1.1 billion he spent on his own short-lived White House bid.
