DAN WITTERS and SANGEETA AGRAWAL, Research Director | Research Staff - The Gallup Organization
Stephan:
This is why Americans hold their government is such low esteem. The entire system in this country has been rigged to produce profit for the few at the cost of the wellbeing of the many. This has arisen because of the Republican Party, and its creating the passage of Citizens United that legalized the bribery of public officials and the restructuring of American society to benefit the rich. The rise of social media has given the rich the ability to maneuver the peasants through their fears, resentments, and racism.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Lower wellbeing linked to 159 extra new conditions per 1,000 people
Analysis tracks 3,654 working adults over three-year period
$101.5 billion in new annual healthcare costs linked to extra conditions
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. adult workers who have poor wellbeing across most or all of the five essential elements of wellbeing are about twice as likely to report a major new chronic condition over a 36-month period of successive surveys than are their counterparts who have high wellbeing in no more than one element. Overall:
Those workers with poor wellbeing (defined as having high wellbeing in one or none of the five elements) developed 450 new chronic conditions per 1,000 persons three years after being initially interviewed.
Those workers with inconsistent wellbeing (i.e., high wellbeing in two to four of the elements) added 330 new chronic conditions per 1,000 persons over the three-year period.
Those workers with holistic wellbeing (i.e., high wellbeing in all five elements) added 230 new chronic conditions per 1,000 persons over three years.
As such, out of every 1,000 full-time working adults with either poor or […]
Greed, stupidity, and more greed. That’s the nuclear power industry. California, as this article describes, could have a nuclear event that could kill tens of thousands of people and render a large part of southern California, just like Chernobyl, uninhabitable. Does Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) give a damn? They do not.
A dome on one of two containment buildings housing a nuclear reactor at Pacific Gas and Electric’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the only operating nuclear powered plant in California on June 26, 2023, in Avila Beach, California. Credit: Brian Van Der Brug / Los Angeles Times / Getty
The nuclear industry’s war against renewable energy has taken center stage in California under Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, with a terrifying new development now threatening the state and nation with increased risk of intense radioactive fallout.
This week on October 24 — despite earlier assurances — Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) revealed that it will not test its 38-year-old atomic reactor in California’s Diablo Canyon for embrittlement during the current refueling outage, but instead plans to wait until the next outage in 2025 before conducting the crucial safety tests.
Embrittlement transforms a metallic reactor pressure vessel (RPV) as heat, pressure and radiation rob it of resilience. An embrittled reactor pressure vessel can shatter when coolant water is poured in during an emergency, causing massive steam, hydrogen and fission explosions.
Wyoming, a deeply Red state gives us an example of how Republicans either don’t or won’t understand the crisis of climate change and oppose the policies Biden’s administration is trying to activate to deal with it. This is becoming a chronic problem and has become part of The Great Schism Trend. Within a decade I predict as the quality of life in Red states deteriorates compared with Blue states enormous grievances are going to emerge in the Red states as they accept no responsibility for their inferior life quality but fill with resentments about it.
Pronghorn antelope in the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Wyoming, one of the areas that would be covered by new protections. Credit: Tom Koerner / USFWS / Mountain-Prairie
Of all of the efforts by the Biden administration to protect environmentally fragile lands, few have generated as much vitriol as a proposal that would block oil and gas drilling on 1.6 million acres of high desert sagebrush steppe in Wyoming.
One lawmaker in the Republican-led Wyoming Legislature called President Biden’s plan an attempt at “total government control.” Another declared it the worst disaster in American history, affecting “more people than the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.” Some spread fears that China would influence the government’s decision-making. A federal lands manager said she had received violent threats, prompting an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The 1,350-page proposal for managing 3.6 million of acres of federal land in Southwest Wyoming was years in the making but still took many Wyoming residents by surprise when the Bureau of Land Management made it […]
NAOMI FORMAN-KATZ, Research Analyst - Pew Research Center
Stephan:
Americans as a whole are very poorly informed about how their government operates. The figures are breathtaking. The Annenberg Public Policy Center extensively polled the population and discovered a third of the country can’t name a single branch of government, 21 percent can only name one branch, and only 13 percent can name all three. Most Americans now get their knowledge of the news from social media, and a high percentage of people believe all kinds of conspiracy nonsense. And now Pew Research Center reports a declining percentage even pay attention to the news. I think the truth is we don’t deserve to live in a democracy because we make little or no effort to understand how a democracy works, and we mostly vote our fears and resentments with little or no understanding of who we are voting for.
In 2016, 51% of U.S. adults said they followed the news all or most of the time. But that share fell to 38% in 2022, the most recent time we asked this question.
In turn, a rising share of Americans say they follow the news only now and then. While 12% of adults said this in 2016, that figure increased to 19% by 2022. And while 5% of adults said in 2016 that they hardly ever follow the news, 9% said the same last year.
Older adults are more likely to say they follow the news all or most of the time, while younger adults are less likely. However, Americans in all age groups have become less likely to say they follow the news all or most of the time since 2016.
MAGAt world wants violence. They want to create a White supremacy anti-LGBTQ, female inequality anocracy and are prepared to bring out their guns and kill people to achieve those goals. You can pretty much bet that Congress is not going to do anything about White nationalist violence, so get ready for lots of mass murders.
A man calls on people to raid the building during the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021. Credit: Joseph Prezioso / AFP / Getty
Nearly one in four Americans believe that political violence may be justified to “save” the country, a national opinion poll has found.
The 14th annual American Values Survey, carried out by the non-profit Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution thinktank, offers a snapshot of America’s deepening polarisation and willingness to contemplate taking up arms.
Even as Joe Biden has sought to lower the temperature, support for political violence has increased over the past two years, the survey shows. Today about 23% of Americans agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” – up from 15% in 2021.
The PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021 but this is the first time that support for political violence has risen above 20% in the general population.
