BRIAN KENNEDY and ALEC TYSON, Staff Researchers - Pew Research Center
Stephan:
Social Media is destroying American society, as we have known it. I have now done fact-based story after story about what is happening to American culture,in both daily SR and my SR podcast, and here is the latest. Thanks to social media Americans, particularly younger Americans, no longer believe in or trust objectively verifiable facts and science. Here are the objective facts on what is happening.
A new Pew Research Center survey finds the share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen and there’s been a continued decline in public trust in scientists.
Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society. This share is down 8 percentage points since November 2021 and down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
About a third (34%) now say the impact of science on society has been equally positive as negative. A small share (8%) think science has had a mostly negative impact on society.
Trust in scientists
When it comes to the standing of scientists, 73% of U.S. adults have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. But trust in scientists is 14 points lower than it was at the early stages of […]
Here is an example of what happens in states in which anti-science Republicans are in charge. They don’t want to talk about climate change on a factual basis in the textbooks used by children — as if this will stop climate change from happening. I am increasingly concerned that the willful ignorance of the Republican officials is rendering the nation unprepared to deal with the reality of what is happening. Texas, as it happens is going to be severely impact by climate change whether the Republicans like it or not. But the willful ignorance of these Republican politicians and the MAGAts who follow them is going to cause people who live in Texas enormous misery and considerable death.
Protesters turn their backs to the Houston school board during a meeting on Thursday, August 10, 2023 in Houston, Texas. Credit: Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle / Getty
Seven of 12 proposed science textbooks for Texas 8th graders were rejected Friday by the Republican-controlled state Board of Education because they propose solutions to the climate emergency or were published by a company with an environmental, social, and governance policy.
The Texas Tribune reported that the 15-member board, which for the first time was required to include climate education for 8th graders, approved five of 12 proposed science textbooks, but called on their publishers to remove content deemed false or presenting a negative portrayal of oil and gas in the nation’s biggest fossil fuel producer.
“America’s future generations don’t need a leftist agenda brainwashing them in the classroom to hate oil and natural gas,” said Republican state energy regulator Wayne Christian, who had urged the board to choose books that promote planet-heating fossil fuels.
Scott Wilson, Senior National Correspondent - The Washington Post
Stephan:
The American healthcare system is an ongoing tragedy, particularly for women. You’ve seen the stories that I have done on what is happening in Red states, but the system is so bad that it is now happening in rural sections of Blue states as well. It continues to surprise me that Americans don’t seem to grasp the implications for their own lives on the benefits of universal birthright, single payer healthcare. If you vote for Republicans such a system is never going to happen. And if you vote for Democrats for heaven sake write them or call them, and tell them you want universal birthright single payer healthcare and you want it now.
The closure of Madera Community Hospital in January created a lack of health-care services in Madera, Calif. Credit: Melina Mara / The Washington Post
MADERA, CALIFORNIA — There is no place in this county to give birth short of an emergency.
The only facility caring for adults, Madera Community Hospital, closed in January, leaving women in labor a 40-minute drive to the closest alternative in another county. Babies often cannot wait out the ride.
More than 1,000 women had delivered babies each year at Madera Community. Over just a couple of weeks this fall, with it closed, a woman gave birth in a car on the shoulder of Avenue 9 in downtown Madera. A second delivered her baby at Valley Children’s Hospital, which, while in Madera County, does not have a maternity ward and other doctors and services that would certify it for adult care. It is also a roughly half-hour drive away from the city center.
“When my kids feel sick, we’d just head over there,” Erika Castro, a 50-year-old maid who gave […]
The growing number of Congressional retirements is going to become a major factor in the 2024 elections. It offers an opportunity, if voters awaken to it, to flip both houses to Democrat majorities, which means our democracy will survive. If it goes the other way, it will be the end of America as you and I have known it.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s decision not to seek reelection almost certainly means his party will lose the West Virginia Senate seat he’s held since winning a special election in 2010. Credit: Anna Rose Layden / Getty
A surge of lawmakers calling it quits the past three weeks is on the verge of putting Congress on pace to have more members retire before the next election than in any similar cycle over the past decade. And the implications are huge.
In most cases, retirements deprive their party of a proven fundraiser and vote-getter. And several recent retirements are injecting fresh uncertainty into the tight battles for control of each chamber in 2024. Over the past few weeks, Democrats have lost a three-time winner in ruby-red West Virginia and a handful of swing-district House members who had success in competitive territory.
This month alone, nine members of the House and Senate have said they won’t run for reelection next year. That’s the second-most in any single month going back at least as far […]
Exactly as I have been predicting in SR for years (see SR archive), climate change is causing other beings to move North as the climate changes. This is a warning story about mosquitoes and the neglected diseases they are bringing into Europe and in the U.S. The governments of the world are not preparing properly for what is happening, because they are controlled by corporate interests whose only interest is immediate profit. As a result there is going to be a lot of misery and death.
Europe long thought itself safe from neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Those old certainties have now evaporated. A warmer and wetter climate has made the continent more welcoming to vectors of debilitating and sometimes deadly pathogens. Climate change is just one of the forces driving the expansion of NTDs. Globalization, and the increase in international trade and travel that it brings, is playing its part in bringing vectors and their pathogens together in Europe.
Although the impact of these diseases is not on the scale of that in tropical countries, the effects on European public health are already being felt. People are catching, and sometimes dying from, NTDs and other mosquito-borne diseases that were once confined to the tropics, such as West Nile, Zika, dengue and chikungunya viruses, as well as parasitic diseases such as schistosomiasis. Cases of vector-borne diseases that are already endemic in Europe, such as leishmaniasis, are on the rise. For many of these infections, there is no vaccine or cure.
Europe is not alone. Parts of the non-tropical world that have previously had the luxury of not worrying about NTDs — […]
