David Badash, Senior Editor - New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
Trump and his Trump christofascist Party (TCP) do not like public education, and are openly making it clear if Americans elect them they are going to gut the system that probably educated you. They don’t want education. Like Hitler and the Nazis they want indoctrination not fact-based education. Don’t say you haven’t been warned about their intentions. They also want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s the TCP’s agenda, is that what you want?
In two separate videos on Trump’s little-noticed “Agenda 47” website, the ex-president details his vision to take millions of dollars away from the endowments of private colleges and universities, through lawsuits and fines, as retribution for some students he suggests embraced Hamas after it attacked Israel. Those millions of dollars would be used to create an entire new federal government university system which, Trump vows, would be entirely non-political: no “wokeness” would be allowed.
Trump claimed colleges and universities are “turning our students into communists, terrorists, and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions. We can’t let this happen. It’s time to offer something dramatically different. Under the plan I’m announcing today we will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy.”
Trump also announced plans to entirely eliminate the U.S. Dept. of Education, allowing states to keep those funds so they can determine what and how children should be taught.
“Rather than indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual and political material, which is what we’re doing now, our schools […]
Andrea Petersen, Reporter - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
A large percentage of Americans have terrible diets because they eat ultra-processed foods, as described in this report. If you do this, please stop. This is one of the reasons Americans have such poor health, are so obese, and have a life expectancy five years shorter than most Europeans and the Japanese.
Illustration by Elena Scott / The Wall Street Journal
Ultra-processed foods may not only affect our bodies, but our brains too.
New research suggests links between ultra-processed foods—such as chips, many cereals and most packaged snacks at the grocery store—and changes in the way we learn, remember and feel. These foods can act like addictive substances, researchers say, and some scientists are proposing a new mental-health condition called “ultra-processed food use disorder.” Diets filled with such foods may raise the risk of mental health and sleep problems.
The science is still early and researchers say there is a lot they don’t know. Not all ultra-processed foods are equal, some scientists say, adding that some might be good for you. A diet high in ultra-processed foods has been linked with obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease, but researchers are still figuring out exactly why, beyond calorie counts and nutrient composition.
Makers of foods such as processed meats and muffins defend their products, and note that there isn’t a consistent, universally accepted definition of ultra-processed food.
Adult children are still being supported in some way by their parents. And so many, 50 per cent as reported in this article. It is a major change in our culture.
AdultChildren supported by their parents. Credit: Scary Mommy
The study – conducted by Savings.com – found that young, working-class Americans were not substantially benefiting from the recovery of the country’s economy, as “evidenced by high employment, falling inflation, and economic growth”. That has forced many of them to continue to rely on their parents to help cover costs of living.
The average age of adults receiving financial help from their parents – sometimes at the risk of the parents’ retirement security – was 22, according to the study. And while parents surveyed in the study on average said their adult children should become financially independent by 25, many were supporting those children beyond that milestone.
Of parents providing support, 21% were helping millennials (age 28-43) or members of gen X (age 44-59). Millennials and gen X adult children were on average given between $907 and $960 each month by their parents.
Gen Z adults (between 18 and 27) were getting more help from their mothers and fathers, averaging about $1,515 monthly.
I have been writing about the failure of America’s illness profit system for over 30 years, and it has been getting worse and worse as the years have gone by. The United States has the worst healthcare amongst developed democracies as factually demonstrated by the worse factual outcome data. Highest maternal mortality, highest infant mortality, lowest rank in healthcare systems, and on and on. Here is some current to the day facts about how bad our healthcare system is. The question is why does America have such poor healthcare? The answer, of course, is the same thing that afflicts all American society. U.S. healthcare is not a system designed to foster wellbeing; it is all about maximizing profit. So then, one has to ask why can’t the Congress create universal birthright single-payer healthcare like the other developed democracies. The answer, once again, is the corruption of the Congress. Corporations involved with healthcare pour hundreds of millions of legalized graft into the pockets of politicians, particularly, but not only, TCP politicians.
Credit: Adobe
The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs — a topic that, for the millions of people now without healthcare insurance, is anything but relaxing.
Imagine this: since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years. Worse yet, the nation is only halfway through the largest purge ever of Medicaid as the expansion and extension of healthcare to millions, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, have ended, leaving some families no longer eligible, while others need to reapply through a new process in their state.
This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when […]
Fred Schulte, - MedPage Today / Kaiser Family Foundation
Stephan:
It isn’t just that we are on the verge of ceasing to be a democracy. The fundamental problem in the American culture is that integrity and honesty are no longer considered priorities, and our politics and the illness profit system are perhaps the greatest examples of what we have become.
A Maryland firm that oversees the nation’s largest independent network of primary care medical practices is facing a whistleblower lawsuit alleging it cheated Medicare out of millions of dollars using billing software “rigged” to make patients appear sicker than they were.
The civil suit alleges that Aledade’s billing apps and other software and guidance provided to doctors improperly boosted revenues by adding overstated medical diagnoses to patients’ electronic medical records.
“Aledade did whatever it took to make patients appear sicker than they were,” according to the suit.
For example, the suit alleges that Aledade “conflated” anxiety into depression, which could boost payments by $3,300 a year per patient. And Aledade decided that patients over age 65 who said they had more than one drink per day had substance use issues, which could bring in $3,680 extra per patient, the suit says.
The whistleblower case was filed by Khushwinder Singh, MD, in federal court in Seattle in 2021 but remained under seal until January of this year. Singh, a “senior medical director of risk and wellness product” at Aledade […]
