Stephan: It is amazing to me that the anti-vaxxers just seem impervious to facts and are literally willing to put the lives of themselves and their children at risk because of political misinformation. The death toll from this willful ignorance now runs to the millions.
Growing vaccine hesitancy fuels measles, chickenpox resurgence in U.S. Credit: Paul Vernon / AP
A rapidly growing measles outbreak in Columbus, Ohio — largely involving unvaccinated children — is fueling concerns among health officials that more parent resistance to routine childhood immunizations will intensify a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases.
Most of the 82 children infected so far are old enough to get the shots, but their parents chose not to do so, officials said, resulting in the country’s largest outbreak of the highly infectious pathogen this year.
“That is what is causing this outbreak to spread like wildfire,” said Mysheika Roberts, director of the Columbus health department.
The Ohio outbreak, which began in November, comes at a time of heightened worry about the public health consequences of anti-vaccine sentiment, a long-standing problem that has led to drops in child immunization rates in pockets across the United States. The pandemic has magnified those concerns because of controversies and politicization around coronavirus vaccines and school vaccine mandates.
DAVID SIDERS, SEAN MCMINN, BRAKKTON BOOKER and JESÚS A. RODRÍGUEZ, - Politico
Stephan: At the fundamental level, in my opinion, what is driving our culture is that we are becoming a majority-minority nation. For about a third of the White population who have principally aligned with the Republican Party, this is making them crazy. It is what drives the Replacement Theory. It is the reason racism has suddenly become such an issue. The only way out of this without massive violence, which is what the christofascist world talks about, is to promote democracy and foster wellbeing. As this article lays out this is not going to be easy as the new culture emerges. Our taxes need to be restructured back to what they were in the 1950s. We need the equivalent to Roosevelt's WPA to rebuild the country's infrastructure, make the tranisition out of the carbon era, improve public education and make it fact-based, and transition to universal birthright single-payer health care. We can pay for much of this through the combination of taxing the rich in the pattern of the 1950s, and reducing America's absurdly bloated military budget.
HOUSTON, TEXAS — Back in 2017, Jon Rosenthal, a mechanical engineer who’d been spurred into politics, like many Democrats, by Donald Trump’s election, was having drinks with a group of local party activists when one of them suggested that he run for office: Why not challenge the Republican who’d been holding onto his state House seat for more than 20 years?
Rosenthal was intrigued. And as he began considering his prospects, poring over demographic data on a laptop in his suburban Houston home, he saw an opening. People of color were exploding as a proportion of the population in the 135th state House district — Latinos, but also Black people, the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting bloc. Given the district’s rapidly increasing diversity, it made no sense to Rosenthal, who is white, that his Republican representative, Gary Elkins, who is also white, was still in power. And it seemed possible to him that a Democrat — even one who had never held elected office — could flip that seat.
Stephan: We humans are doing so much damage to the earth's matrix of life, out of willful ignorance and greed, that it both enrages me, and makes me deeply sad. Beyond my emotional issues, this abject failure by humans is going to severely impact each and ever human on earth. Rich or poor our children and grandchildren, and for who knows how many generations beyond that are going to live in a world so profoundly damaged by our stupidity that I expect we, today's generations, will be reviled and loathed and condemned as the worst generations in history.
A mother Emperor Penguin and her chick
Two-thirds of Antarctica’s native species, including emperor penguins, are under threat of extinction or major population declines by 2100 under current trajectories of global heating, according to new research that outlines priorities for protecting the continent’s biodiversity.
The study, an international collaboration between scientists, conservationists and policymakers from 28 institutions in 12 countries, identified emperor penguins as the Antarctic species at greatest risk of extinction, followed by other seabirds and dry soil nematodes.
“Up to 80% of emperor penguin colonies are projected to be quasi-extinct by 2100 [population declines of more than 90%] with business-as-usual increases in greenhouse gas emissions,” it found.
Published in the journal Plos Biology, the research also found that implementing 10 key threat management strategies in parallel – which would cost an estimated US$23m annually – could benefit up to 84% of Antarctic organisms.
Influencing global policy to effectively limit global heating was identified as the conservation strategy with the most benefit.
“There are multiple threats impacting Antarctic species despite the fact that we think of it as this remote and pristine wilderness,” said […]
Stephan: We are coming to the end of 2022, and what has been a very difficult time for America. I hope you and those close to you have come through the year safe and well, and reasonably undisturbed. 2023 will be the 32nd year I will be doing SR. Think of it as 3-4 hours of unpaid work each day, seven days a week. I don't charge for SR, and I don't permit advertising which would help offset the costs associated with the publication because I cannot be sure of the integrity of the companies that approach me about putting up advertising and whether they support wellbeing.
I do SR today for the same reason I started it back in 1991. I support wellbeing, that is what matters to me because I think based on the scientific evidence that policies fostering wellbeing are the most effective, most efficient, most productive, longest enduring, nicest to live under, and the cheapest of all the options. I think we would all be better off if we made wellbeing our nation's social priority. When I began SR I did so because I had become concerned that White supremacy christofascists funded by a growing cadre of authoritarian oligarchs were deliberately attempting to manipulate the American culture through disinformation propaganda to destroy our democracy. When I thought about what I could do to counter that I realized I did not have enough money to make a difference that way, but that if I put out fact-based information about the trends shaping our culture, whether for good or ill, I could make a difference that fostered wellbeing. and so SR began.
If you have contributed to support SR I want you to know how much I appreciate your help. SR gets more expensive to do every year and your help has made a difference. If you read SR but have not supported it, may I ask you to consider doing so, whether a one-time donation, or even more helpful, a monthly contribution. If you are not in a position to make a contribution but find SR useful please continue to read it. But if you can help, please do so.
DONATE HERE
Tony Pipa, Senior Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. - The New York Times
Stephan: Rural America is in crisis in so many ways and finally, the Biden administration is seriously trying to do something to revitalize what amounts to the largest area of America. It is going to be a long hard path, but I see this as excellent good news.
Credit: Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty
In what has become a post-election. tradition, there has been no shortage of analysis the past several weeks about rural voters and their role in determining the outcome of the midterms.
Yet during a visit to Shamokin, Pa., I asked a former mayor and the current one, both Republicans, whether differences between Republicans and Democrats were affecting local efforts to revive their town. They both agreed: not really. They don’t think about it.
This does not fit the conventional narrative about a former coal mining town of some 7,000, where nearly 70 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The town’s decline was already bad enough 30 years ago to warrant a New York Times article with the headline “In a Gritty Town, Hope Outlives the Prosperity.”
The question then was whether the construction of a prison there would help. It didn’t. The town has lost almost 25 percent of its population since, and the poverty rate now hovers above 30 percent.
