I keep looking for good trends, positive wellbeing fostering trends, and I see them in other countries but in the United States they are few and hard to find. I have been telling you for years about the growing illiteracy and innumeracy in America, and the growing failure and politicization of public education, and here is the latest data. It is not happy. I don’t know how our democracy is going to survive when half of us are barely literate and only a third of us can name all three branches of government. If traitor Trump and his frankenstein win the executive branch and the rest of the ballot goes to MAGAts I don’t see how we survive. So it is up to us and everyone we know who supports democracy to vote only for Democrats. Not because we think they are close to perfect, but because the alternative is committed to christofascism as the demostrate every day. Just look at the news coming out of Georgia.
Students are welcomed back on the first day of class at Roosevelt Elementary School in Anaheim, California, in 2023. Credit: Paul Bersebach / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register / Getty
Sometimes, panics are overblown. Sometimes, older generations are just freaking out about the youngs, as they have since time immemorial.
That’s not the case, unfortunately, with kids’ learning right now, more than four years after the pandemic shuttered classrooms and disrupted the lives of millions of children. The effects were seen almost immediately, as students’ performance in reading and math began to dip far below pre-pandemic norms, worrying educators and families around the country.
Even now, according to a new report released this week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research group at Arizona State University that has studied the impact of Covid on education since 2020, the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic.
The report — the group’s third annual analysis of the “state of the […]
John B. Alexander, Contributing Writer - Daily Kos
Stephan:
This, I think, is one of the most important issues in the election that is just a few days away: why do so many women support a man and a party that cares nothing for their personal wellbeing? A cult that won’t even give them control over their own bodies, and puts a convicted rapist forward as its candidate for President. If you know such a woman help her to see the implications of voting for MAGAt Republicans.
Credit: Hope Care
One of the most inexplicable paradoxes in American politics is the millions of women who actively support Donald Trump. They are not shy about their vociferous adoration of an adjudicated sexual abuser. Trump, on the other hand, has openly acknowledged that he feels he has the right to engage in sexually assaulting women. The pertinent quote from the Access Hollywood tape was, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Given the relatively recent creation and evolution of the MeToo movement, the open support for a known predator by so many females for is especially perplexing. Regarding MeToo, Britannica states, “The movement is credited with giving visibility […]
Anna Phillips, Reporter - MIcrosoft Start | The Washington Post
Stephan:
I found some good news about schools, makes me feel better. Fostering wellbeing isn’t that hard for a community once they make it a priority.
A transformed former asphalt school playground Credit: The Washington Post
PHILADELPHIA — As a girl growing up here, Natalie McHugh used to play on the vast expanses of asphalt and concrete that coated the city’s schoolyards.
She didn’t question as a student why there weren’t more trees or think twice about the blacktop during her decades as an educator at Southwark Elementary School in South Philadelphia. Then, one day, as McHugh monitored recess with the school’s principal, her boss said something that made her see all that asphalt differently: “He said, ‘This is not good, Nat.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’” she said.
Since then, Southwark’s schoolyard has been transformed, one of more than a dozen in Philadelphia where the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that helps create public parks, has done things such as plant trees, build rain gardens, and install play equipment and an outdoor classroom. Activists and parents have long worked, school by school, to turn asphalt playgrounds into islands of greenery. But as climate change sends temperatures soaring, the […]
Here is a possible explanation explaining why millions of Americans willingly vote against their own wellbeing.
Key Results
The study found a small, positive correlation between amygdala volume and conservative beliefs, but the effect was much weaker than in previous studies. They did not find a significant relationship between ACC volume and liberal beliefs. Some correlations were found between ideology and the fusiform gyrus, but these results were not consistent across all analyses.
ATHENS, GREECE — A groundbreaking new study has reignited the debate over whether political ideology is linked to brain structure. While previous research suggested that conservatives have larger amygdalas – the brain’s fear center – and liberals have larger anterior cingulate cortices (ACC) – involved in conflict detection, this latest investigation paints a more nuanced picture.
The study, published in iScience, examined brain scans from nearly 1,000 Dutch adults, making it the largest analysis to date on the neurological underpinnings of political beliefs. Led by researchers Diamantis Petropoulos Petalas, Gijs Schumacher, and Steven Scholte, the team sought to replicate and expand upon a controversial 2011 study that first proposed structural brain differences between liberals and conservatives.
Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the researchers analyzed […]
Jake Johnson , Staff Writer - truthout | Common Dreams
Stephan:
I have been telling you for at least two decades (see SR archive) that you and I, if you are a reader in the United States, have the most expensive and the worse healthcare in the developed world, and Americans have shorter lives than people living in other developed nations. Here is yet another story confirming what I keep telling you. The only thing that is going to change this is when you and I and everyone we know and that they know demand the Democrats create a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system like the one in the rest of the developed world. The MAGAT Republicans are corporate servants of the healthcare industries whether they know it or not, and don’t even want Medicare.
A report out Thursday shows that the United States’ for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics, including access to care and health outcomes such as life expectancy at birth.
The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.
“Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents,” the report states. “Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier.”
People in the U.S., which spends roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other rich nations, “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths,” Commonwealth noted, pointing to frequent “denials of services by insurance companies” and other systematic defects of the […]
BRENDAN FISCHER, VICTORIA CADOSTIN, Deputy Executive Director | Researcher - Documented.net
Stephan:
When I tell you about the corruption of the MAGAt Republicans and their servitude to the U.S. illness profit system, this report describes one of the many examples confirming this reality.
Credit: Adobe Stock
Washington’s top pharmaceutical lobby oversaw the adoption of model legislation that would restrict voting access at the most recent meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC is an influential organization that brings together state legislators, private-sector corporations, and right-wing advocacy organizations to develop priorities and adopt model legislation for introduction in statehouses around the country. Its policy recommendations often become law in the states.
In this case, the model legislation capitalizes on MAGA-driven conspiracies around noncitizen voting and would make it easier for election officials to purge voters. The “Only Citizens Vote” model legislation directs state election officials to remove suspected noncitizens from voter rolls, offering vague direction that risks seriously restricting voting access for eligible voters.
The Election Integrity Network, led by Cleta Mitchell, helped draft and promote the model legislation. Mitchell — the former Donald Trump attorney who joined the infamous call in which the then-president demanded that Georgia’s top election official “find 11,780 votes” — also moderated a panel at the ALEC meeting.
A frequent critic of campus voting, Mitchell argued […]
