Andy Corbley, Editor of World at Large - GODD NEWS NETWORK
Stephan:
This is a lovely story, made me feel good to read it Not only what the boy did, but also because it speaks once again to the interconnected and interdependent matrix of life.
Cynipid gall wasp egg inside an oak gall, the foundation of a new radical multi-species interaction. CC 2.0. Credit: Judy Gallagher
2 years ago, little Hugo Deans from Pennsylvania found some red-colored seeds on the ground by an ant’s nest in his backyard.
Hugo was excited—he didn’t know ants collected seeds, and his excitement grew when he showed his father Andrew, an entomologist at Penn State, who didn’t know they did either.
The two bug enthusiasts didn’t know it at the time, but Hugo’s discovery was to prime a canvas on which was to be painted a scientific discovery of dramatic complexity—a co-dependent relationship between oaks, ants, and wasps that highlights the incredible interconnectedness of our planet.
The discovery connects two separate plant-insect relationships, the first being cynipid wasp species inducing oak trees to create “galls” or small protective bubbles of leaf matter, around their eggs which they lay on the leaves—a clever trick that saves the wasp the hassle of nest-guarding.
The second is a phenomenon called myrmecochory, or seed dispersal by ants. Certain wild North American plants produce […]
I have been telling my SR and Explore readers for several decades now that we don’t have a healthcare system in the United States, we have an illness profit system and, as this article describes, the system is getting worse and failing to produce appropriate and adequate healthcare for millions of Americans. The result is that physicians and nurses feeling increasingly “morally wronged” as the article describes. Meanwhile instead of doing anything to rectify this growing failure the Democrats, except for a few members like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are weak and compromised, and the Republicans want more of the same and spend their time arguing about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Like so many things in America today the result ranks third rate compared to the rest of the developed world. WE are not the world’s leader and, increasingly the world no longer sees us that way.
After nearly two decades working in emergency rooms around the country, Corl’s idealism gave way to disillusionment as he struggled to provide patients with the type of care he’d been trained to deliver. Credit: Balazs Gardi / The New York Times
Some years ago, a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide. Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered. The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland. Dean started asking the physicians she knew how they felt about their jobs, and many of them confided that they were struggling. Some complained that they didn’t have enough time to talk to their patients because they were too busy filling out electronic medical records. Others bemoaned having to fight with insurers about whether a person with a serious illness would be preapproved for medication. The doctors Dean surveyed were deeply committed to the medical profession. […]
One of the worst aspects of the illness profit system, which is run by corporations owned by equity investors, is its blatant racism. If you are Black in America, unless your are affluent, you get second class healthcare. The Republican Party and it Christian Nationalist component have made racism as bad as it was backed the the 1950s.
Non-Hispanic Black newborns are 2½ times as likely to die before their first birthdays as non-Hispanic whites. Credit: Adobe
Research has long shown that Black people live sicker lives and die younger than white people.
Now a new study, published in JAMA, casts the nation’s racial inequities in stark relief, finding that the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths relative to white Americans over more than two decades.
Because so many Black people die young—with many years of life ahead of them—their higher mortality rate from 1999 to 2020 resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life compared with the white population, the study showed.
Although the nation made progress in closing the gap between white and Black mortality rates from 1999 to 2011, that advance stalled from 2011 to 2019. In 2020, the enormous number of deaths from covid-19—which hit Black Americans particularly hard—erased two decades of progress.
Authors of the study describe it as a call to action to improve the health of […]
Increasingly, I am being forced to conclude that MAGAt world simply is so willfully ignorant they cannot even see when their own wellbeing is being sabotaged. I don’t see how any person who receives Social Security could vote Republican.
Speaker of the House and Republican Kevin McCarthy. Credit: Official White House / Andrea Hanks
A panel comprised of three-quarters of the House Republican caucus released a budget proposal on Wednesday that would raise the Social Security retirement age—cutting benefits across the board—while further privatizing Medicare and slashing taxes for the rich, a plan that Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocacy groups said is a clear statement of the GOP’s warped priorities ahead of a critical spending fightthis fall.
The proposal outlined by the 175-member Republican Study Committee (RSC), led by Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), would gradually raise Social Security’s full retirement age—the age at which people are eligible for full Social Security benefits—to 69, up from the current level of 67 for those born in 1960 or later.
Nancy Altman, the president of Social Security Works, said the RSC budget would “destroy Social Security as we know it,” using a “modest shortfall” that’s more than a […]
This is serious good news. In diametric contrast to the Republican actions this is what Illinois Governor J.B. Pritsker, a Democrat, is doing. Making sure libraries are not subject to censorship by MAGAt complainers. And just to make the contrast absolutely clear note what Texas MAGAt Republican Governor Greg Abbott was doing at the same time, as Governor Pritzker was protecting freedom.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs a bill prohibiting book bans in the state’s public libraries on June 12, 2023. Credit: @GovPritzker / Twitter
Free expression advocates this week are applauding Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker for signing a first-in-the-nation law that prohibits book bans at public libraries—a move that the Democratic governor said was a matter of resisting “a dangerous strain of white nationalism” that’s behind a nationwide push to restrict access to books about people of color and LGBTQ+ communities.
The law (H.B. 2789) was signed Monday and will go into effect on January 1, 2024, barring public libraries from accessing state grants unless they adopt the American Library Association’s (ALA) Library Bill of Rights, which states that materials must not be proscribed or removed from a library “because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
“We’re showing everyone what it looks like to stand up for liberty. As simple as that,” said Pritzker on social media after signing the bill. “Because what these book bans in libraries really are about is censorship—marginalizing people, ideas, and facts.”
