Jude Balla Richard Grucza Michael Livingston Tomter Bogt Candace Currie Margaret de Looze, - Social Science & Medicine Journal
Stephan: Here is some good news. Young people are not practicing the harmful behaviors in which earlier generations engaged.
American teenagers
Highlights
Adolescent risk behaviours declined markedly in high-income countries, 1999–2019.•
The causes are complex and not fully understood; evidence to date is reviewed.•
Less unsupervised in-person socialising led to declines in many risk behaviours.•
Behaviour-specific factors contributed to smoking and drinking declines.•
Drinking and smoking declines may have led to declines in sex, drugs, crime.
Abstract
In many high-income countries, the proportion of adolescents who smoke, drink, or engage in other risk behaviours has declined markedly over the past 25 years. We illustrate this behavioural shift by collating and presenting previously published data (1990–2019) on smoking, alcohol use, cannabis use, early sexual initiation and juvenile crime in Australia, England, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the USA, also providing European averages where comparable data are available. Then we explore empirical evidence for and against hypothesised causes of these declines. Specifically, we explore whether the declines across risk behaviours can be considered 1) a ‘unitary trend’ caused by common underlying drivers; 2) separate trends with behaviour-specific causes; or 3) the result of a ‘cascade’ effect, with declines in […]
Stephan: Here is some more good news -- ironically from a Right-wing publication -- although bad news for the Republican Party. As younger voters age, unlike their parents, they are not growing more conservative. They are less racist, less concerned about LGBTQ folk, and far more conscious of climate change. All very smart.
Credit: Daily Caller
A recent study revealed that millennial voters, both in the U.S. and the U.K., are not following the typical rule that as people get older they become more conservative, but instead becoming more liberal over time.
The millennial generation was born between 1981 and 1996, is known for loving their pets more than their children and was the last generation to grow up without the internet, according to The Washington Post. Traditionally, voters follow a regular pattern of leaning more liberal until they are 35 and then move toward more conservative beliefs as they age, but millennials are breaking the mold, according to an analysis by the Financial Times.
Millennials in the U.S. appeared to be on track to move toward conservatism until about 30 but dropped sharply away from conservatism by the time they were 40, according to the Times. In Britain, millennials never truly moved toward conservatism and have steadily dropped farther away from it as they age.
In the 2022 midterm elections, 63% of younger millennials, 25-29, voted for […]
Stephan: Diabetes, particularly Diabetes II is on the rise in the U.S., largely as a result of the poor diet of American youth who eat chemical-infused fast food and prepared food. Food prepared by corporations not for wellbeing, but for maximum profit. It so clearly illustrates what is wrong with our culture.
Diabetic American child being taught how to test her blood. Credit: Chris Fertnig
Diagnosed cases of type 1 and type 2 diabetes are surging among youth in the United States. From 2001 to 2017, the number of people under age 20 living with type 1 diabetes increased by 45%, and the number living with type 2 diabetes grew by 95%.
“Increases in diabetes are always troubling – especially in youth. Rising rates of diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes, which is preventable, has the potential to create a cascade of poor health outcomes,” said, Giuseppina Imperatore, MD, PhD, chief of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, Economics, and Statistics Branch in CDC’s Division of Diabetes Translation. “Compared to people who develop diabetes in adulthood, youth are more likely to develop diabetes complications at an earlier age and are at higher […]
Stephan: For most of my life the Supreme Court, an institution fundamental to a healthy democracy, has been considered a body above politics that in most cases made their decisions honoring precedent and on a basis of law. Now less than half of Americans see the current Supreme Court as an honorable institution. I certainly don't see the Court as an honorable fair body.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito, part of the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history. Credit: Getty
As Republican nominees of archconservative Supreme Court yank back precedents of the last hundred years in an attempt to scrub American society of any rights that old-timey English witch-hunters or Colonial-era slaveholders would find distasteful, we’ve landed ourselves in a place where nobody’s quite sure what is or isn’t covered by United States law because court conservatives have been increasingly unwilling to bother with explaining it to us. Or, rather more urgently, to the lower courts who have been trying to piece together their rulings into a consistency that Justice Blackout Drunk or Justice Papal Seance haven’t bothered to themselves provide.
It’s nice to see judicial experts and reporters alike putting some real numbers to the problem, and The New York Times has a genuinely good(!) examination of the court’s eagerness to change even their own internal processes in order to more efficiently arrive at the preferred conservative outcomes without argument or, increasingly, without waiting for lower court decisions in the first […]
Stephan: Here, from a reliable research source, is the data on how Americans now see and trust the U.S. Supreme Court. I consider this an alarm warning us that our democracy is no longer based on law, instead, we have a high court whose majority is driven by ideology.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
47% trust the judicial branch; previous low was 53%
40% job approval of U.S. Supreme Court is tied for record low
Record-high 42% say Supreme Court is too conservative
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Forty-seven percent of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the judicial branch of the federal government that is headed by the Supreme Court. This represents a 20-percentage-point drop from two years ago, including seven points since last year, and is now the lowest in Gallup’s trend by six points. The judicial branch’s current tarnished image contrasts with trust levels exceeding two-thirds in most years in Gallup’s trend that began in 1972.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7vbF7/3/
In addition to documenting record-low trust in the federal judiciary, the new Gallup poll also finds a record-tying-low 40% of Americans saying they approve, and a record-high 58% saying they disapprove, of the job the Supreme Court is doing.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Ojskl/3/
Approval of the Supreme Court fell from 49% in July 2021 to 40% last September, just after the court allowed a restrictive Texas […]
