Matt Keeley, Staff Writer - AlterNet / The New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
The misinformation spewed out by Robert Kennedy, Jr. and other anti-vaxxers not only resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans who believed the crap put out by the anti-vaxxers and didn’t get vaccinated. As this report lays out it also seriously impacted the wellbeing of the physicians and other medical personnel who were supporting the effort to get people vaccinated and treated. Willful ignorance and the weaponization of misinformation has become a serious problem in the American culture
Dr. Peter Hotez has become the latest doctor to face online harassment—and a new survey shows he’s not alone. Since 2020, the rate of harassment of doctors and scientists on social media has more than doubled, from 23.3% to 66%.
The research letter, published Wednesday by JAMA Network, surveyed 359 doctors and scientists on their experiences using social media. A total of 238 respondents said they were harassed, with the vast majority saying they were harassed for comments specifically about the COVID-19 pandemic and issues like masking and vaccination. Of those, 66 respondents said they had been doxxed, and others reported death threats.
“This study highlights that physicians and scientists changed the way they used social media during the pandemic,” first author Dr. Regina Royan, a research fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern emergency medicine physician said. “Sadly, those that use social media to share public health messages are more likely to face harassment. These are the people that we can’t afford […]
The pharmaceutical industry and the Republican Congressional whores they rent are trying to do everything they can to stop Biden’s attempt to lower drug prices. If you are a person who requires regular medications, or have someone in your family who needs regular drugs and you vote Republican you are voting against your own wellbeing. I’m not sure MAGAts even realize this. It is yet another example of how easily MAGAt Americans are manipulated by the Republican Party. Quite sad, actually.
Credit: accupacrx.com
Pharmaceutical companies and House Republicans have aligned to launch a full-scale attack on the new Medicare drug reforms, which represent one of President Joe Biden’s signature accomplishments and have already started to lower prescription costs for seniors.
The legal challenge officially got a new and powerful champion on Wednesday when the industry trade group PhRMA filed a lawsuit claiming that the new law’s best-known feature violates the Constitution in multiple ways.
That provision gives the federal government authority to negotiate the price of a limited set of drugs in Medicare. Although seniors wouldn’t see newly lowered prices until 2026, the negotiation process begins in September, and PhRMA wants the courts to intervene before then.
PhRMA filed the lawsuit jointly with a pair of advocacy groups, the National […]
I have been telling you for years that between war, social instability, and climate change we were moving into an age when there are going to be several hundred million people displaced, and that is going to create major problems for the countries where these displaced persons end up. This is becoming a worldwide problem, and it needs some kind of coherent worldwide strategy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, other conflicts like those in Syria and Sudan, and climate-fueled crises have pushed the number of people displaced by war, persecution, violence, human rights abuses and other events to a record 110 million, the UN refugee agency said in a new report Tuesday.
The big picture: The upward trend of forced displacement comes as humanitarian response plans and budgets remain severely underfunded. The right to asylum is also “under threat” in some places, and a rising number of compounding factors have made it even harder to provide protection to those most in need, according to UNHCR.
Last year also exposed the unequal treatment of different refugee groups. Nations, especially in Europe, have been lauded for welcoming Ukrainian refugees with open arms, but some of those same countries have also been criticized for closing their borders to displaced people from other places.
The new UNHCR report is “quite an indictment on the state of our world,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told reporters. “We are constantly confronted with […]
OLIVER MILMAN and DHARNA NOOR, Staff Writers - Mother Jones
Stephan:
The carbon oligarchs don’t want to see an end to the fossil fuel age because it will damage their profits, and they are pouring millions of dollars into renting the MAGAt Republican Congressional whores who work for them. Personally, given the irrefutable evidence about the role of carbon energy in causing climate change, I think this should be seen as a crime against humanity, and prosecuted as such, both the oligarchs and the Congress members. But so great is the corruption of the American government that I doubt anyone will be held accountable.
Charles Koch’s foundation has donated nearly $5 million to the TPPF.Credit: David Zalubowski/AP
In the scramble before the recent end of Texas’s legislative session, a must-pass bill was amended to impose new costs upon renewable energy. This came amid a barrage of anti-solar and wind power measures pushed forward by Republicans to reshape a state that has become the US’s powerhouse of clean energy.
But the conservative lawmakers had help.
Sections of the bill that impose new burdens upon clean energy providers were directly crafted and edited by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative group that has led the backlash to renewables and to make what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels,” according to a copy of the draft language seen by the Guardian.
Several dozen edits were made to the bill’s amendments by Brent Bennett, a TPPF policy staffer, the document shows, and Texas lawmakers subsequently passed parts of this language along with the key TPPF desires—to impose new transmission costs on renewables and require them to source fossil fuel “backup” power when the sun isn’t […]
Thom Hartmann and I tend to agree on most things in politics and, once against he vouchsafes what I have been saying in for years. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision made bribery of public officials legal, and the oligarchs and the organizations they control immediately took advantage of this decision and as a result the United States is now one of the most corrupt nations in the developed world. From the Supreme Court to your local election officials, as well as almost of all of Republican Party, and a few notable Democrats, corruption has become the hallmark.
Back in 2022, I suggested that our federal government should spend about one-third of the cost of the Trump Tax Cuts to buy the three largest oil companies in this country. They could then be run for the public interest, prevented from continuing to fund climate change denial, and end their support of toxic Republican politicians.
So far, no members of Congress or the administration have picked up on my suggestion, but the people in Maine have a similar idea and they’re moving forward with it.
Ninety-seven percent of the electric power in Maine is provided by two for-profit corporations, Versant and Central Maine Power (CMP).
And the profits extracted from Mainers by running these companies doesn’t stay in the state or even in the US: Versant is owned by a Enmax, a company based in Calgary, Canada; CMP’s parent company is owned by Iberdrola SA, a Spanish corporation whose largest shareholder is the Qatar Investment Authority.
The simple reality is that as long as its legal for corporations to drop unlimited amounts of money […]
