Stephan: The deep sickness of America's obsessive gun psychosis is now the leading cause of death amongst U.S. children. And yet I had to go to a medical journal and a British media outlet to find this report. Evermore Republican-controlled legislatures have passed or are trying to pass laws allowing people to carry concealed firearms with no training, and no licensing. Next year I expect the death figures to be even higher.
Guns overtook car crashes to become the leading cause of death for US children and teenagers in 2020, new research shows.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that over 4,300 young Americans died of firearm-related injuries in 2020.
While suicides contributed to the toll, the data shows that homicides form the majority of gun-related deaths.
More than 390 million guns are owned by US civilians.
According to the research – which was published this week in the New England Journal Medicine – the rise in gun-related deaths among Americans between the ages of one and 19 was part of an overall 33.4% increase in firearm homicides nationwide.
Homicides, the study noted, disproportionately impact young Americans.
Over the same time period, the rate of firearm suicides in the US rose by 1.1%.
The overall rate of gun deaths of all reasons – suicide, homicide, unintentional and undetermined – among children and teenagers rose by 29.5%, more than twice that of the wider population.
“We continue to fail to protect our youth from a […]
Stephan: A million dead in the U.S., and here is the latest death report from the American, mostly MAGAt, death cult. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive and well had they not been too brainwashed and moronic to not get vaccinated. Those are facts, anti-vaxxers, can you open your minds enough to comprehend them?
Within weeks, it’s likely that the 1,000,000th American will die of covid-19. The millionth death on record, that is — it’s likely that the number of deaths is undercounted. At the outset of the pandemic, after all, medical professionals didn’t know what they were looking for, and Americans were unprepared for the effects of the coronavirus and the disease it causes.
The good news is that there now exist vaccines that largely eliminate the risk of death. Data from the months since vaccination was made broadly available in the United States has consistentlyshown that those who are vaccinated are far less likely to succumb to covid-19 than those who aren’t.
New analysis from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) quantifies the effects of vaccination. Since June 2021, the point at which every American adult had access to coronavirus vaccines, they estimate that just over 234,000 unvaccinated Americans died who could have lived had they been immunized against the virus.
RAKESH KOCHHAR and STELLA SECHOPOULOS, Senior Researcher | Research assistant for social and demographic trends - Pew Research Center
Stephan: The American middle class is shrinking and becoming less educated, everything an authoritarian oligarchy dreams of. The MAGAts don't even realize they vote for their own degradation and shrinking financial status so great is their fear, racism, hate, and resentment.
The middle class, once the economic stratum of a clear majority of American adults, has steadily contracted in the past five decades. The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
The shrinking of the middle class has been accompanied by an increase in the share of adults in the upper-income tier – from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021 – as well as an increase in the share who are in the lower-income tier, from 25% to 29%. These changes have occurred gradually, as the share of adults in the middle class decreased in each decade from 1971 to 2011, but then held steady through 2021.
The analysis below presents seven facts about how the economic status of the U.S. middle class and that of America’s major demographic groups have changed since 1971. A related analysis examines the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the financial well-being of households in the lower-, middle- and upper-income […]
JESSE BENNETT, RICHARD FRY, and RAKESH KOCHHAR, Senior Researchers - Pew Research Center
Stephan: As I noted in the previous article the American middle class is shrinking while the richer are getting much richer, and he poor are getting poorer, a clear measure of the Republican dismemberment of American democracy. Click through, answer the questions, and see where you stand.
Our latest analysis shows that the share of adults who live in middle-income households varies widely across the 260 metropolitan areas examined, from 39% in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to 67% in Ogden-Clearfield, Utah. The share of adults who live in lower-income households ranges from 16% in Ogden-Clearfield to 49% in Las Cruces. The estimated share living in upper-income households is greatest in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California (34%) and the smallest in El Centro, California (7%).
Lower-income adults, already under significant financial pressure, have been especially vulnerable to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 29-May 5, 2020. The survey found that 36% of lower-income adults and 28% of middle-income adults said they had lost a job or taken a pay cut due to the coronavirus outbreak, compared with 22% of upper-income adults. In a Center survey conducted in April 2020, only 23% of lower-income adults said they had rainy day funds that could last three months, compared with 48% of middle-income adults and 75% of upper-income adults.How we did this
How the income calculator works
The calculator takes your household income and adjusts it for the size of your […]
Stephan: As I watched the news today what struck me was the astonishing corruption, lying, bullying, and scamming that now defines the Republican Party. And yet, not a single high-ranking Republican is being held to account for any of it. This lack of accountability is poisoning our democracy, and once established that you can do such things and fear no consequence it will be next to impossible to stop it in the future. Where are the public hearings from the 6 January committee; where is Merrick Garland and the DOJ; where is the Manhattan DA; where is the Georgia Case against Trump? What I see day after day is more and more evidence of the criminality of the Republicans and everyone seems to go Ho-hum, what's on the movie channel. That and stories of how the Republicans are going to gain majorities in both the House and the Senate. I am in Orwell's 1984 and I don't like it.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally to promote his America First agenda on April 2, 2022, near Washington, Mich. Credit: Scott Olson/Getty
Attorney General Merrick Garland is under immense pressure to deliver high-level grand jury indictments around the Jan. 6, 2021, violent insurrection. The Justice Department’s website lists hundreds of “Capitol Breach Cases” and the FBI has an extensive “most wanted list for the U.S. Capitol violence.” But so far, the raft of accuseds glaringly includes zero people who were at the top of the federal payroll that day, including most prominently former President Donald Trump himself.
This is not for lack of evidence. In February, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade did the legal spadework supporting such an indictment in a carefully rendered “model prosecution memo.” In it she details — using only publicly available evidence — how Trump may have violated at least two federal criminal statutes by pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to thwart the election results: conspiracy to defraud the United States […]
