Stephan: One of the hallmarks of American christofascists is their hysterical obsession with what people do with their genitals, and with whom they do it, and stopping women from having control over their own bodies. I see this as a major and growing factor in the Great Schism Trend, which I have been covering in SR for years now. The latest area the christofascists are targeting is pharmaceuticals that end pregnancies because they offer and option Roe vs Wade does not address. Look at the map that heads this report and you can see yet again the Red state Blue state divide. Just another reason not to live in a Red State, particularly if you are female.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weaken or topple its nearly 50-year-old abortion rights decision, Roe v. Wade, giving states wide latitude to restrict the procedure.
But most legislatures will be adjourned by then, and anti-abortion lawmakers aren’t waiting to address what they expect will be one result of widespread limits on clinical abortions: spiraling demand for medication abortions.
Since January, legislators in at least 20 states have proposed bills that would restrict or ban access to abortion pills approved more than two decades ago by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
This year’s flurry of bills was spurred in part by an FDA ruling during the coronavirus pandemic that eliminated a long-standing requirement that patients consult with prescribers and pick up the pills in person.
Under the FDA’s temporary ruling, which was made permanent in December, patients for the first time can consult with prescribers via telehealth and receive the pills by mail.
In response, lawmakers in Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee quickly proposed bills that would […]
Stephan: Personally, I like to sleep in the dark, but not everyone does. However, this issue has now gone from personal preference to medical evidence which I urge my readers to take seriously, particularly if you are diabetic or obese.
Citation for the resarch study upon which this report is based:Light exposure during sleep impairs cardiometabolic function
Just one night of sleep in a moderately lit room was found to increase heart rate and insulin resistance Credit: Depositphotos
Researchers from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine have found sleeping in a moderately lit room can potentially harm a person’s cardiometabolic health. The study saw just one night of sleep in a room with moderate ambient light increased nighttime heart rate and spiked insulin resistance in the morning.
Less understood is the relationship between light exposure while we sleep and general health. Observational studies have detected associations between bedroom light levels and conditions such as diabetes or obesity but only a few investigations have experimentally looked at the effect of sleeping under bright lights.
This new study recruited 20 healthy young adults […]
Steven H. Woolf, MD, MPH, Faculty Center on Society and Health, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond - JAMA
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for years that based on objectively verifiable social outcome data that Republican governance is consistently and universally inferior to Democratic governance. You rarely see this mentioned in general audience media, but in the scientific journals I see paper after paper making this point, and here is the latest published in JAMA, the world's leading medical journal. If you live in a Red state, and you vote Republican, you are voting to have a shorter lifespan with generally poorer health. Here are the facts.
People who live in Republican governed states have shorter lives than people who live in Democratic governed states. This is 2022 data. Credit: World Population Review
For decades, the population of the US has experienced shorter life expectancy and higher disease rates than populations in other high-income countries. The gap in life expectancy between the US and 16 peer countries increased from 1.9 years in 2010 to 3.1 years in 2018 and 4.7 years in 2020.1 The US health disadvantage is even worse in certain states, with states such as Alabama and Mississippi having the same life expectancy as Latvia (75 years).2,3
Disparities in health across the 50 states are growing, a trend that began in the 1990s.4 For example, in 1990, life expectancy in New York was lower than in Oklahoma, but the trajectories separated sharply in the 1990s and, by 2016, New York ranked third in life expectancy, whereas Oklahoma ranked 45th.2 By 2019, mortality rates at ages 25 to 64 years differed by a factor of 216% between the states […]
Stephan: Republicans don't like educated people because research shows educated people tend to vote Democratic. Because of that Republicans don't like honest public schools which properly educate children. They are backing charter schools where they can easily control what is taught, particularly American history. They also want children to be indoctrinated into their version religion. You may think I am being partisan saying that, but I am not. As I tell my readers frequently what I care about is objectively verifiable data. Facts. And I always support whatever supports and fosters wellbeing. What surprises me is how many people in Red states seem to be okay with indoctrinating their children rather than educating them. Thomas Jefferson saw the problem at the country’s founding. In a letter he wrote to his friend Charles Yancy, he said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Chalkboard with a map of the continental USA, with pins leading toward Hillsdale associated schools, and a desk with a portrait of Donald Trump, a copy of The 1766 Report, and an apple with a cross carved into it. (Illustration by Ilana Lidagoster/Salon)
In recent years, Hillsdale College, a small private Christian school in Michigan, has quietly become a driving force in America’s ongoing fights around education. A “feeder school” for the Trump administration, Hillsdale led President Trump’s controversial 1776 Commission and serves as a testing ground for the right’s most ambitious ideas: For instance, that diversity erodes national unity, that Vladimir Putin is a populist hero and that conservatives should lure so many children out of public schools that the entire system collapses.
Hillsdale has inconspicuously been building a network of “classical education” charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American. In January, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced plans to partner with Hillsdale to launch as many as […]
Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: You have probably noticed that Putin's evil attack on Ukraine has essentially pushed Trump's blatant criminality off the news. That doesn't make indicting and prosecuting Trump any less important or urgent. Also I, for one, find the deafening silence from Merritt Garland very notable. And I am not alone in thinking it is time to bring Trump up before the law, as this commentary by two leading legal scholars makes clear. It is very important for the health of democracy that this happens. No one should be above the law.
“On the supposedly difficult question of ‘criminal intent’, prosecutors should have no trouble convincing a jury.” Credit: Getty
On 8 March, a jury took three hours to render a guilty verdict against Guy Reffitt, a January 6 insurrectionist. Donald Trump could not have been pleased. DC is where Trump would be tried for any crimes relating to his admitted campaign to overturn the election.
Jurors there would have no trouble finding that the evidence satisfies all statutory elements required to convict Trump, including his criminal intent, the most challenging to prove. That is our focus here.
A 3 March New York Times story asserted that “[b]uilding a criminal case against Mr Trump is very difficult for federal prosecutors … given the high burden of proof … [and] questions about Mr Trump’s mental state”.
The clear implication is that justice department leaders may simply be following the path of prudence in hesitating to indict, or even to robustly investigate, Mr Trump. But based on the already public evidence – and there’s undoubtedly lots more that’s […]
