Stephan: More than one million Americans are now dead in the United States as a result of contracting Covid. A majority of these millions died because they would not get vaccinated or wear a mask. They were volunteers in the American death cult. Statistically, it is estimated that nine million Americans have experienced the loss of a family member or close friend. Sadly, people are still dying each day from Covid, again mostly the unvaccinated. But that is only part of the story, as awful as it is. The research data now suggests that even if you contracted Covid and survived you may not be home free. Here is the latest data and it is very depressing.
For the research study that provides the basis for this report: Multivariate profile and acute-phase correlates of cognitive deficits in a COVID-19 hospitalised cohort: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702200147X
Credit: Engin Akyurt / Unsplash
A severe coronavirus infection could leave patients with the brain of a 70-year-old, lowering someone’s IQ by 10 points, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London found that COVID patients are dealing with levels of cognitive impairment which are similar to the decline a healthy person sees between the ages of 50 and 70. Disturbingly, the team warns that this damage may never fully heal.
Long-term cognitive and mental health problems have been a growing issue during the pandemic. Even after the infection passes, a large number of patients continue to experience “brain fog,” problems recalling words, sleep issues, PTSD, and dozens of other symptoms for months — a condition doctors call long COVID. A recent study found that up to six in 10 recovering patients develop long COVID.
Even a mild case of the virus can lead to lingering cognitive issues. Study authors say as many as three-quarters of hospitalized COVID patients could suffer from some level of brain damage […]
Stephan: I have always been aware of antisemitism because my surname is Schwartz and many people, particularly antisemites, assume I am Jewish. I'm not. It was the name my father's family was given at Ellis Island when they came to the U.S. from Romania in 1906. Whatever they said had too many consonants I was told. Apparently, such name changing was once quite common. I told this story at a conference some years ago and afterwards, a woman came up and introduced herself as Mary O'Reilly. I said that's certainly an Irish name, and she responded, "It is but my family is Czech, we had the same problem." In a way, I have been glad about this little oddity of naming because it has given me the gift of experiencing hateful bias, and how irrational it is. And this irrationality is a fundamental part of the MAGAt world. The increasing frequency of antisemitic events, often accompanied by violence, like a symptom of a disease, is warning us how sick American culture has become.
Credit: Markus Schreiber/Associated Press
The Anti-Defamation League this week released a report showing that in 2021, there were more antisemitic incidents in America than in any other year since the group started keeping track over 40 years ago. “We’ve never seen data like this before, ever,” Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the A.D.L., told me.
The rapid growth of Jew hatred isn’t limited to the United States. According to a new report from the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, antisemitic incidents were up last year in such countries as Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Comparisons to 2020 might be misleading, because pandemic lockdowns likely reduced the numbers of antisemitic assaults and in-person harassment. But in several countries, including the United States, there were more antisemitic incidents in 2021 than in the prepandemic year 2019.
As the Tel Aviv University report pointed out, there are countless conferences, training programs and legislative proposals devoted to fighting antisemitism. “There is no shortage of organizations dedicated to the cause, which gained […]
Stephan: The MAGAt anti-abortion movement is just the opening salvo. Next, they will try to ban contraception, and drugs that cause abortions. At the same time they will be moving against public education because Republicans want children to be indoctrinated, not educated. This is all straight out of the authoritarian fascist playbook used by Stalin and Hitler.
Texas Republican Governor, and leading christofascist Greg Abbott Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty
Despite glib right-wing claims to the contrary, as many legal scholars and constitutional experts were quick to point out, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion ending abortion rights opens the door wide open for the reversal of decades of human rights litigation. At issue is Alito’s rejection of the ninth amendment, which states that the “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Or, in plain English: Plenty of rights are guaranteed by implication in the Constitution — such as a right to privacy — even if not explicitly delineated. Despite his alleged “originalism,” however, Alito was quite clear that he feels the opposite is true: If it ain’t singled out by name in the Constitution, it’s not a right.
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion,” he writes in the draft opinion that was leaked to Politico. As political scientist Scott […]
Amy Mackinnon, National Security and Intelligence Reporter - Foreign Policy
Stephan: I am old enough to remember when abortion was illegal and "the pill" did not yet exist, and I knew two women, one 22 the other 24 who died from back-alley abortions. And, no, I was not the father, just a friend who observed their dying, and mourns their passing. Making abortion illegal does not end abortion. And in the U.S., a country with the worst maternal mortality, childcare, and early childhood support amongst the developed nations, more unwanted births to mostly low-income girls and women of color are virtually inevitable. And this article is an extreme example of what that looks like. Is this the United States you want?
Romanian orphans in a Bucharest orphanage shortly after the December Revolution in 1989. Credit: Kevin Weaver / Getty
As lawmakers in Alabama this week passed a bill that would outlaw abortion in the U.S. state entirely, protesters outside the statehouse wore blood-red robes, a nod to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which childbearing is entirely controlled by the state. Hours later, the book was trending on Twitter.
But opponents of the restrictive abortion laws currently being considered in the United States don’t need to look to fiction for admonitory examples of where these types of laws can lead. For decades, communist Romania was a real-life test case of what can happen when a country outlaws abortion entirely, and the results were devastating.
In 1966, the leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, outlawed access to abortion and contraception in a bid to boost the country’s population. In the short term, it worked, and the year after it was enacted the average number of children born to Romanian women jumped from 1.9 to 3.7. But birthrates quickly fell again as women […]
Stephan: The Founders had a passionate commitment to seeing that there was an unbreachable firewall between religion and the state. They felt this way because personally they or members of their families had suffered from religious persecution. States like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were specifically founded on this issue. Now because of the Republican Party and the complete lack of ethical standards in the Supreme Court this centuries old firewall is being breached. Jennifer Rubin gets this point very clearly, and her comments should be understood by every American, particularly every American woman. This abortion battle is about far more than abortion.
Abortion rights supporters protest outside of the U.S. Supreme Court on May 3. Credit: Jose Luis Magana / AP
In their never-ending quest to turn politics into a game and dumb down the most serious of issues, the media continues to use the term “culture wars” to describe a range of issues in which the right seeks to break through all restraints on government power in an effort to establish a society that aligns with a minority view of America as a White, Christian country. In using “culture wars,” one would think this were a battle between two sides over hemlines or movie ratings or “lifestyles.” If media outlets keep up that distorting language, they are going to find it hard to explain the firestorm that awaits the overturning of Roe v. Wade, if the leaked draft opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. prevails.
The livid reaction from progressive advocacy groups and Democratic politicians across the country about the potential evisceration of abortion rights — and possibly others protected by the
