Trevor Noah Exposes ‘MAGA Alien’ Kari Lake For 1 ‘Particularly S**tty’ Betrayal
Ed Mazza – October 25, 2022
Trevor Noah Exposes ‘MAGA Alien’ Kari Lake For 1 ‘Particularly S**tty’ Betrayal
“Daily Show” host Trevor Noah said Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, is “almost not the same person” she was just a few years ago.
“I wouldn’t be shocked if we found out that the real Kari Lake is locked up in a basement somewhere while this MAGA alien pretends to be her,” Noah said, adding:
“This is a bigger transformation than the drag queens that she suddenly hates. Which, by the way, is particularly shitty. It’s already horrible to turn on any friend, but betraying the one who taught you how to get your contouring on point? That is unforgivable!”
Doctors say ‘fossil fuel addiction’ kills, starves millions
Seth Borenstein – October 25, 2022
The sun sets behind a coal-fired power plant in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Oct. 22, 2022. A new report from doctors and other health experts says the world’s fossil fuel addiction is making the world sicker and is killing people. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, File)A child is weighed at a camp for displaced people amid drought on the outskirts of Dollow, Somalia, Sept. 19, 2022. Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in vulnerable populations worldwide as the world’s “fossil fuel addiction” degrades public health each year, doctors reported in a new study. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)Climate activists from Extinction Rebellion hold a placard as they protest at the Africa Energy Week conference, foreground, in Cape Town, South Africa, Oct. 20, 2022. A new report from doctors and other health experts says the world’s fossil fuel addiction is making the world sicker and is killing people. (AP Photo/Nardus Engelbrecht, File)
Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in nearly 100 million people and increased heat deaths by 68% in vulnerable populations worldwide as the world’s “fossil fuel addiction” degrades public health each year, doctors reported in a new study.
Worldwide the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and biomass forms air pollution that kills 1.2 million people a year, including 11,800 in the United States, according to a report Tuesday in the prestigious medical journal Lancet.
“Our health is at the mercy of fossil fuels,” said University College of London health and climate researcher Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown. “We’re seeing a persistent addiction to fossil fuels that is not only amplifying the health impacts of climate change, but which is also now at this point compounding with other concurrent crises that we’re globally facing, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis and food crisis that were triggered after the war in Ukraine.”
In the annual Lancet Countdown, which looks at climate change and health, nearly 100 researchers across the globe highlighted 43 indicators where climate change is making people sicker or weaker, with a new look at hunger added this year.
“And the health impacts of climate change are rapidly increasing,” Romanello said.
In praising the report, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it even more bluntly than the doctors: “The climate crisis is killing us.”
New analysis in the report blamed 98 million more cases of self-reported hunger around the world in 2020, compared to 1981-2010, on “days of extreme heat increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change.”
Researchers looked at 103 countries and found that 26.4% of the population experienced what scientists call “food insecurity” and in a simulated world without climate change’s effects that would have only been 22.7%, Romanello said.
“Can I say that every bit of food insecurity is due to climate change? Of course not. But we think that in this complex web of causes, it is a very significant contributor and it’s only going to get worse,” said pediatrician Dr. Anthony Costello, Lancet Countdown co-chair and head of the University College of London’s Global Health Institute.
Computerized epidemiology models also show an increase in annual heat related deaths from 187,000 a year from 2000 to 2004 to an annual average of 312,000 a year the last five years, Romanello said.
When there’s a heat wave, like the record-shattering 2020 one in the Pacific Northwest or this summer’s English heat wave, emergency room doctors know when they go to the hospital “we’re in for a challenging shift,” said study co-author Dr. Renee Salas, a Boston emergency room physician and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The air pollution from burning coal, oil and gas also pollutes the air, causing about 1.2 million deaths a year worldwide from small particles in the air, the scientists and report said. The 1.2 million figure is based on “immense scientific evidence,” Harvard’s Salas said.
“Burning gas in cars or coal in electricity plants have been found to cause asthma in children and cause heart problems,” Salas said.
“Prescribing an inhaler isn’t going to fix the cause of an asthma attack for a young boy living next to a highway where cars are producing dangerous pollutants and climate change is driving increases in wildfire smoke, pollen and ozone pollution,” Salas said.
Both air pollution and heat deaths are bigger problems for the elderly and the very young and especially the poor, said University of Louisville environmental health professor Natasha DeJarnett, a study co-author.
Sacoby Wilson, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland who wasn’t part of the report, said the Lancet study makes sense and frames climate change’s effects on health in a powerful way.
“People are dying now as we speak. Droughts, desertification, not having food, flooding, tsunamis,” Wilson said. “We’re seeing what happened in Pakistan. What you see happening in Nigeria. ”
Both Wilson and emergency room physician and professor of medicine at the University of Calgary Dr. Courtney Howard, who wasn’t part of the study, said report authors are correct to call the problem an addiction to fossil fuels, similar to being addicted to harmful drugs.
The Lancet report shows the increasing deaths from air pollution and heat yet people are “continuing in habitual behavior despite known harms,” which is the definition of addiction, Howard said. “Thus far our treatment of our fossil fuel addiction has been ineffective.”
“This isn’t a rare cancer that we don’t have a treatment for,” Salas said. “We know the treatment we need. We just need the willpower from all of us and our leaders to make it happen.”
Most in US want more action on climate change: AP-NORC poll
Daly and Nuha Dolby – October 24, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the federal government is not doing enough to fight climate change, according to a new poll that shows limited public awareness about a sweeping new law that commits the U.S. to its largest ever investment to combat global warming.
Democrats in Congress approved the Inflation Reduction Act in August, handing President Joe Biden a hard-fought triumph on priorities that his party hopes will bolster prospects for keeping their House and Senate majorities in November’s elections.
Biden and Democratic lawmakers have touted the new law as a milestone achievement leading into the midterm elections, and environmental groups have spent millions to boost the measure in battleground states. Yet the poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 61% of U.S. adults say they know little to nothing about it.
While the law was widely heralded as the largest investment in climate spending in history, 49% of Americans say it won’t make much of a difference on climate change, 33% say it will help and 14% think it will do more to hurt it.
The measure, which passed without a single Republican vote in either chamber, offers nearly $375 billion in incentives to accelerate expansion of clean energy such as wind and solar power, speeding the transition away from fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas that largely cause climate change.
Combined with spending by states and the private sector, the law could help shrink U.S. carbon emissions by about two-fifths by 2030 and chop emissions from electricity by as much as 80%, advocates say.
Michael Katz, 84, of Temple, New Hampshire, said he thinks Biden has “done an amazing amount of work” as president. “I’m sort of in awe of what he’s done,” said Katz, a Democrat and retired photographer. Still, asked his opinion of the Inflation Reduction Act, Katz said, “I’m not acquainted with” it.
After learning about the law’s provisions, Katz said he supports increased spending for wind and solar power, along with incentives to purchase electric vehicles.
Katz said he supports even stronger measures — such as restrictions on rebuilding in coastal areas damaged by Hurricane Ian or other storms — but doubts they will ever be approved.
“People want their dreams to come true: to live near the ocean in a big house,” he said.
Leah Stokes, an environmental policy professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said she was not surprised the climate law is so little known, despite massive media coverage when it was debated in Congress, approved and signed by Biden.
The law was passed during the summer, when people traditionally pay less attention to news, “and it takes time to explain it,” especially since many of the law’s provisions have not yet kicked in, Stokes said.
Biden and congressional Democrats “delivered in a big way on climate,” she said, but now must focus on helping the public understand the law and “winning the win.”
Meredith McGroarty, a waitress from Pontiac, Michigan, said she knew little about the new law but supports increased climate action. “I have children I’m leaving behind to this world,” she said.
McGroarty, 40, a Democrat, urged Biden and other leaders to talk more about the climate law’s “effects on normal, everyday people. Let us know what’s going on a little more.”
Americans are generally more likely to support than oppose many of the government actions on climate change included in the law, the poll shows. That includes incentives for electric vehicles and solar panels, though relatively few say they are inclined to pursue either in the next three years.
About half of Americans think government action that targets companies with restrictions is very important, the poll shows, while about a third say that about restrictions on individuals. A majority of Americans, 62%, say companies’ refusal to reduce energy use is a major problem for efforts to reduce climate change, while just about half say people not willing to reduce their energy use is a major problem.
Slightly more than half also say it’s a major problem that the energy industry is not doing enough to supply power from renewable sources such as wind and solar, and about half say the government is not investing enough in renewable energy.
Overall, 62% of U.S. adults say the government is doing too little to reduce climate change, while 19% say it’s doing too much and 18% think it’s doing the right amount.
Democrats are more likely than others to think the federal government is doing too little on climate: 79% say that, compared to 67% of independents and 39% of Republicans. About three-quarters of Black and Hispanic Americans think there’s too little action, compared to about half of white Americans.
And about three-quarters of adults under 45 think there’s too little action on climate, significantly higher than the roughly half of those older who think that.
Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at the Harvard Kennedy School, said it makes sense for the government to step in to promote renewable energy on a large scale.
“Individual action is not going to be sufficient in 10 or even 20 years,” he said. “You need government policies to create incentives for industry and individuals to move in a carbon-friendly direction.”
Americans want to own a car, “and they are not going to buy one that’s expensive,” Stavins said, so government needs to lower costs for electric vehicles and encourage automakers to produce more EVs, including widespread availability of charging stations. Biden has set a goal to install 500,000 charging stations across America as part of the 2021 infrastructure law.
On renewable energy, nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults say offshore wind farms should be expanded, and about 6 in 10 say solar panel farms should be expanded. Biden has moved to expand offshore wind and solar power as president.
Americans are divided on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas. Around a third say such drilling should be expanded, while about as many say it should be reduced; another third say neither.
Republicans were more likely than Democrats to be in favor of expanding offshore drilling, 54% to 20%.
The poll of 1,003 adults was conducted Sep. 9-12 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.
US military to begin draining Pearl Harbor pipelines
Audrey McAvoy – October 24, 2022
JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii (AP) — The U.S. military said Monday it’s ready to begin draining 1 million gallons (3.79 million liters) of fuel from three pipelines as part of an initial step toward closing a World War II-era fuel storage facility that leaked petroleum into Pearl Harbor’s tap water last year.
The pipelines run about 3 miles (4.83 kilometers) from the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in the mountains above Pearl Harbor down to the military base.
Starting Tuesday, the military will spend six days draining the pipelines one by one. Fuel is expected to move through the pipes for a total of 12 hours during the six days.
The fuel has been sitting in the pipes since the military suspended use of the Red Hill facility last year after it leaked petroleum into a drinking water well serving 93,000 people in and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Shortly after, the state Department of Health ordered the military to drain fuel from Red Hill and shut the facility down. The military says 104 million gallons remain in the tanks themselves. It aims to remove this fuel by July 2024 after it makes necessary repairs to be able to drain the tanks safely.
Navy Rear Adm. John Wade, the commander of Joint Task Force Red Hill, said the state Department of Health and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reviewed and approved the military’s plan to drain the pipelines. A third-party contractor also checked the plans, he said.
The most dangerous aspect of draining the pipelines is the potential for fuel to spill and enter the aquifer, Wade told reporters as a news conference.
“So everything that we’ve done, every focus of effort for the planning and the rehearsals has been focused on mitigating any chance of a spill,” he said.
The Red Hill facility sits just 100 feet (30 meters) above one of Honolulu’s most important drinking water aquifers.
Hawaii officials are concerned that last year’s spill contaminated the aquifer and are worried that any future spills would also pollute the aquifer, which normally supplies more than 20% of the water consumed in Honolulu.
Wade said representatives from the Department of Health and the EPA will be on hand while military drains the pipelines.
Task force members trained individually and as groups on how to respond if fuel spills while the pipelines are being drained, he said.
It found operator error caused a pipe to rupture on May 6, 2021 when fuel was being transferred between tanks. This caused 21,000 gallons (80,000 liters) of fuel to spill. Most of it flowed into a fire suppression line and sat there for six months, causing the line to sag.
Then on Nov. 20, a cart rammed into the sagging line, releasing 20,000 gallons (75,700 liters) of fuel. A team thought they recovered all of this fuel, but they missed about 5,000 gallons (19,000 liters). Fuel they missed flowed into a French drain and from there into the drinking water well.
Fuel from the three pipelines will go to above-ground storage tanks and fuel barges which will then supply Air Force jets and Navy ships at the base, officials said.
Pediatric hospital beds are filling up as RSV spreads across the US. Here are the symptoms to look out for and who’s most at risk of getting seriously ill.
Catherine Schuster-Bruce – October 24, 2022
In severe cases, a patient with RSV may need to be given oxygen, a breathing tube, or be put on a ventilator to help them breathe.Marijan Murat/picture alliance
Difficulty breathing and dehydration could be signs that a child is sick with RSV.
Confirmed RSV cases in the US have increased in recent weeks.
RSV usually causes a mild illness, but can be serious, particularly in infants and older people.
Difficulty breathing and dehydration are among the signs of respiratory syncytial virus that parents should look out for, doctors say, as pediatric hospital beds fill up across the country amid an unusual outbreak of the illness.
RSV typically causes mild, flu-like symptoms that get better within weeks without treatment, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, it can be serious, especially for infants and older people, with the potential to cause pneumonia and inflammation of the small airways called bronchiolitis, which can lead to respiratory failure and death.
The CDC estimates that around 58,000 children younger than 5 years are hospitalized with the virus each year.
“RSV can be super dangerous for some young infants and younger kids, particularly those that are less than 2 years of age,” Dr. Priya Soni, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, told CNN.
CDC data shows that confirmed cases in the US have increased in recent weeks, and doctors across the country have reported high numbers of kids sick with RSV, as well as other illnesses.
Dr. Jesse Hackell, chair on the committee on practice and ambulatory medicine for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told The Washington Post that it was “very hard to find a bed in a children’s hospital — specifically an intensive care unit bed for a kid with bad pneumonia or bad RSV because they are so full.”
Dr. Juan Salazar, physician in chief of Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, told The Hill RSV cases are expected to rise in fall, but they started spiking in early September and have risen exponentially since, which he hadn’t seen before.
Hospitals in more than 24 states around the country, including Rhode Island, Washington, Colorado, Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, New Jersey, Massachusetts as well as the District of Columbia, told ABC News they are struggling with more pediatric cases than normal of infections other than COVID.
“We’re seeing RSV infections going rampant all throughout the country,” Mora, a volunteer medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association, told CNN.
Seek medical help if your child is having difficulty breathing or seems dehydrated
According to the CDC, early symptoms of RSV include: a runny nose, a cough, which may progress to wheezing, and decreased appetite.
Infants younger than 6 months may have one symptom like: irritability, decreased activity, decreased appetite, or pauses while breathing. RSV may not always cause a fever, according to the CDC.
Doctors told CNN that parents should seek medical attention if a child has any signs of labored breathing or dehydration including: breathing harder or faster, the belly moving up and down, nasal flaring, and diapers that are less wet than usual.
Infants who are premature, aged six months and younger, have birth lung or heart defects, or neuromuscular disorders that make it difficult to clear secretions are most at risk of getting sick, according to the CDC. Most kids younger than 2 years of age will catch it without getting seriously unwell.
Adults with compromised immune systems and older adults, particularly those with underlying heart or lung diseases, are also at higher risk of getting seriously ill from RSV.
RSV can spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes
A person can catch RSV when virus droplets from an infected person’s cough or sneeze gets into their eyes, nose, or mouth.
Dr. Elizabeth Mack, division chief of Pediatric Critical Care at the MUSC Children’s Health, said in a press release that babies often get RSV from someone in the household: “It’s common that the older sibling goes to day care, went to the store, went to a party, came home, had a runny nose and then the infant got really sick.”
Covering your nose and mouth when you sneeze can help prevent RSV from spreading
People can help to prevent RSV by: covering coughs and sneezes with a tissue or a sleeve, and regularly washing hands for at least 20 seconds.
Mack said that it was a “good idea” to wash your hands before interacting with a newborn, “regardless of whether you’re symptomatic or have been around anybody who’s sick.”
“If somebody’s sick, avoid close contact, avoid sharing utensils or food. Frequently touched surfaces should be cleaned if somebody in the household is sick,” she said.
Parents can treat RSV at home with pain killers
There is no specific treatment for RSV. For many, it is a mild illness that can be treated at home. Parents can give their kids non-aspirin pain killers, like ibuprofen, ensure they drink enough, and speak with a healthcare provider before using non-prescription cold remedies, according to the CDC.
Babies under the age of 6 months or older people may need hospital treatment if they become dehydrated or have trouble breathing.
In severe cases, a patient may need to be given oxygen, a breathing tube, or be put on a ventilator to help them breathe, which usually lasts a few days, the CDC website states.
There isn’t yet a widely available vaccine for RSV, but scientists are working on it.
“The unfortunate thing is that there is a vaccine against RSV, but it’s only available to babies with high-risk conditions. Vaccinations begin in October, but the surge hit early,” Mack said.
“The Methodist Health System Family is heartbroken at the loss of two of our beloved team members,” Methodist Hospital executives said in a statement. “Our entire organization is grieving this unimaginable tragedy. During this devastating time, we want to ensure our patients and employees that Methodist Dallas Medical Center is safe, and there is no ongoing threat. Our prayers are with our lost co-workers and their families, as well as our entire Methodist family. We appreciate the community’s support during this difficult time.”
In the aftermath, as loved ones and community members mourn the losses, nurses unions are demanding better protection for health care workers.
“It is devastating to learn about the loss of our fellow nurses’ lives in Dallas, Texas,” said R.N. Jean Ross, president of National Nurses United, the country’s largest union and professional association of registered nurses with almost 225,000 members nationwide. “Our hearts go out to the families and colleagues of the nurses who died. No one should lose their life because they went to work.”
Texas Nurses Association CEO Serena Bumpus says the state’s nursing community is overcome with “sadness, disbelief and anger.”
“We mourn for the victim’s families, but also for the staff at Dallas Methodist,” Bumpus told the Star-Telegram. “The loss of their co-workers in this senseless tragedy is difficult to understand. There were still patients who had to be cared for, babies to be delivered etc. So, many went right back work. It’s difficult to process a loss when you don’t have an opportunity to stop and reflect.”
Health care workers face increased threats
Concern about violence against health care workers has been renewed with recent incidents like the one in Dallas. Over the summer, a shooting at a Tulsa medical facility on June 1 left four people dead.
“There is an epidemic of violence against nurses and other health care workers,” Ross told the Star-Telegram.
Health care and social service workers are five times as likely to be injured from violence in their workplace than other workers, TIME magazine reported. Over the last decade, the number of such injuries has risen dramatically —from 6.4 incidents per 10,000 workers annually in 2011 to 10.3 per 10,000 in 2020.
It’s become even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic, health care workers say. In September, nearly a third of respondents to a National Nurses United survey said they’d experienced an increase in workplace violence.
“It was only a matter of time before we experienced a tragedy like this,” Bumpus says. “Nurses deal with violence from patients and their families regularly.”
Nurses are often the targets of physical assault. The violence-related injury rate for registered nurses is more than three times higher than for workers overall, according to NNU. A September Press Ganey study found that an average of two nurses were assaulted every hour at work. Nurses often experience workplace violence from patients and family members/visitors due to several reasons — illness, medications, high-trauma situations, altered states caused by memory loss, dementia, mental illness, and delays in needed care. Because there’s a nursing shortage, nurses often have no choice but to go back to work right away.
These high rates of workplace violence contribute significantly to high rates of stress, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, burnout, moral distress, and turnover among nurses.
Underreporting of workplace violence incidents is a significant issue, according to NNU, so the actual statistics may be even higher. Underreporting can be due to pressure from employers not to report, fear of retaliation or to lack of employer response when reports have been made.
“Nurses need a safe place to work so that patients have a safe place to heal. When nurses aren’t safe, patients aren’t safe,” Ross said. “Health care workplace violence can impact everyone in the vicinity—including patients and their families. Everyone is a patient at some time in their lives, so we need to make sure our hospitals are safe.”
A safer work environment
It’s the hospital’s responsibility to provide a safe work environment, NNU says.
“Management needs to protect the spaces where people come to be healed by stopping physical violence and threats from ever occurring in the first place,” Ross said. “Because many hospitals fail to implement workplace violence prevention plans, we need a national, enforceable standard to hold health care employers accountable to keeping nurses, other health care workers, and our patients safe from violence in the workplace.”
The unions want the U.S. Senate to pass the Workplace Violence for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act (HR 1195/S 4182). The bill passed the House last year and was introduced in the Senate this year. It would create national minimum requirements for health care employers to implement research-proven measures to prevent workplace violence, including safe staffing, and improve reporting and tracking.
Hospitals need to ensure that units are staffed appropriately, NNU says. Safe staffing gives more time to recognize and deescalate potentially violent behavior, and ensures that patients get the care they need when they need it.
“Health care employers could prevent workplace violence, through unit-specific prevention plans, environmental and administrative controls like safer staffing levels, hands-on training, and reporting and tracking systems, but many employers fail to put necessary measures in place,” Ross said.
Listen to the audio of Bob Woodward’s interviews with Trump that made him think of the former president as an ‘unparalleled danger’ rather than simply incompetent
Hannah Getahun – October 23, 2022
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and former President Donald Trump.William B. Plowman/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images and Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images
Bob Woodward said he changed his mind about Trump after re-listening to his own interviews.
Woodward previously described the former president as the “wrong man” for the presidency.
But “Trump is an unparalleled danger,” Woodward wrote on Sunday in the Washington Post.
Ahead of the release of his never-before-heard audio interviews with former President Donald Trump, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward wrote that after listening to the unreleased tapes again, he concluded that Trump was an “unparalleled danger” rather than just the “wrong man” to be president.
“The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Trump,” set to be released Oct. 25, is an audiobook of previously unreleased conversations between the veteran journalist and the businessman-turned-politician.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post released Sunday, which includes previously unreleased snippets of “The Trump Tapes,” Woodward wrote that he had concluded his 2020 book on Trump by calling him “the wrong man for the job.”
Woodward now says his assessment of Trump did not accurately describe the former president.
“Two years later, I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger,” Woodward wrote.
He continued: “When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the virus to racial injustice, it’s clear he did not know what to do. Trump was overwhelmed by the job. He was largely disconnected from the needs and leadership expectations of the public and his absolute self-focus became the presidency.”
Woodward explains in his piece for the Post that he decided to release the tapes to capture Trump’s personality in a way that the written word couldn’t. “Trump’s voice magnifies his presence,” Woodward said.
The tapes allow listeners to hear Trump repeatedly interrupting and at times mocking Woodward as they speak about the most pressing policy issues of his presidency, including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Woodward described as Trump’s “greatest failure.”
In clips of the Trump Tapes previously released by CNN, Trump can be heard talking about his admiration for strongmen leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean President Kim Jong Un. In another clip, Trump also bragged to Woodward that no other president was “tougher” than him when faced with impeachment.
A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Exposure to environmental toxins may be root of rise in neurological disorders
Nina Lakhani in New York – October 23, 2022
The mystery behind the astronomical rise in neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s could be caused by exposure to environmental toxins that are omnipresent yet poorly understood, leading doctors warn.
At a conference on Sunday, the country’s leading neurologists and neuroscientists will highlight recent research efforts to fill the gaping scientific hole in understanding of the role environmental toxins – air pollution, pesticides, microplastics, forever chemicals and more – play in increasingly common diseases like dementias and childhood developmental disorders.
Humans may encounter a staggering 80,000 or more toxic chemicals as they work, play, sleep and learn – so many that it is almost impossible to determine their individual effects on a person, let alone how they may interact or the cumulative impacts on the nervous system over a lifespan.
Some contact with environmental toxins is inevitable given the proliferation of plastics and chemical pollutants, as well as America’s hands off regulatory approach, but exposure is unequal.
In the US, communities of color, Indigenous people and low income families are far more likely to be exposed to a myriad of pollutants through unsafe housing and water, manufacturing and agricultural jobs, and proximity to roads and polluting industrial plants, among other hazards.
It’s likely genetic makeup plays a role in how susceptible people are to the pathological effects of different chemicals, but research has shown higher rates of cancers and respiratory disease in environmentally burdened communities.
Very little is known about impact on brain and nervous system disorder, but there is growing consensus that genetics and ageing do not fully account for the sharp rise in previously rare diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) – a degenerative disease more likely in army veterans and neighborhoods with heavy industry.
“Neurology is about 15 years behind cancer so we need to sound the alarm on this and get more people doing research because the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is absolutely not protecting us,” said Frances Jensen, the ANA president and chair of the Department of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Scores of well-known dangerous toxins such as asbestos, glyphosates, and formaldehyde continue to be used widely in agriculture, construction, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics in the US, despite being banned elsewhere. Earlier this week, the Guardian reported on corporate efforts to influence the EPA and conceal a possible link between the popular weed killer Paraquat and Parkinson’s.
Jensen added: “It’s like dark matter, there are so many unknowns … it’s truly going to be an epic exploration using the most cutting edge science we have.”
Neurology is the branch of medicine focused on disorders of the nervous system – the brain, spinal cord and sensory neural elements like the ears, eyes and skin. Neurologists treat stroke, multiple sclerosis, migraines, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s, as well as children with neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, autism and learning disabilities.
The brain is the most complex and important organ in the body – and likely the most sensitive to environmental toxins, but was largely inaccessible to researchers until sophisticated imaging, genetic and molecular techniques were developed in the past 20 years.
Going forward, research could help explain why people living in neighborhoods with high levels of air pollution have a higher risk of stroke, as well as examine links between fetal exposure and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Rick Woychik, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said: “It’s not just about pesticides. PFAS chemicals are ubiquitous in the environment, as are nanoplastics. And there are trillions of dollars’ worth of demand for nanomaterials, but it’s sobering how little we know about their toxicology.”
US politics’ post-shame era: how Republicans became the party of hate
David Smith in Washington – October 23, 2022
Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
Republicans were in trouble. Mitt Romney, their US presidential nominee, had been crushed by Barack Obama. The party commissioned an “autopsy” report that proposed a radical rethink. “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans,” it said, “we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”
Ten years after Romney’s loss, Republicans are fighting their first election since the presidency of Donald Trump. But far from entering next month’s midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, they have shown itself to be unapologetically the party of hate.
Perhaps nothing captures the charge more eloquently than a three-word post that appeared on the official Twitter account for Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee – ranking member Jim Jordan – on 6 October. It said, simply and strangely: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
The first of this unholy trinity referred to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has recently drawn fierce criticism for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at Paris fashion week and for antisemitic messages on social media, including one that said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”.
The second was billionaire Elon Musk, who published a pro-Russian peace plan for Ukraine and denied reports that he had been speaking to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.
The third was former president Donald Trump, who wrote last weekend that American Jews have offered insufficient praise of his policies toward Israel, warning that they need to “get their act together” before “it is too late!” The comment played into the antisemitic prejudice that American Jews have dual loyalties to the US and Israel.
It was condemned by the White House as “insulting” and “antisemitic”. But when historian Michael Beschloss tweeted: “Do any Republican Party leaders have any comment at all on Trump’s admonition to American Jews?”, the silence was deafening.
Jim Jordan, who recently tweeted ‘Kanye. Elon. Trump’, speaks at a rally held by Trump in Youngstown, Ohio, in September. Photograph: Gaelen Morse/Reuters
Republicans have long been accused of coded bigotry and nodding and winking to their base. There was an assumption of rules of political etiquette and taboos that could not be broken. Now, it seems, politics has entered a post-shame era where anything goes.
Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank, said: “The type of things they would say in closed rooms full of donors they’re just saying out in the open now. It’s a cliche but I always remember what I heard growing up which is, when people tell you who they are, you should believe them.”
The examples are becoming increasingly difficult to downplay or ignore. Earlier this month Tommy Tuberville, a Republican senator for Alabama, told an election rally in Nevada that Democrats support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people because “they think the people that do the crime are owed that”. The remark was widely condemned for stereotyping African Americans as people committing crimes.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, echoed the rightwing “great replacement” theory when she told a rally in Arizona: “Joe Biden’s 5 million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school and, coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture.”
Such comments have handed ammunition to Democrats as they battle to preserve wafer thin majorities in the House and Senate. Although the party is facing electoral headwinds from inflation, crime and border security, it has plenty of evidence that Trump remains dominant among Republicans – a huge motivator for Democratic turnout.
Indeed, Trump did more than anyone to turn the 2013 autopsy on its head. In his first run for president, he referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and pledged to build a border wall and impose a Muslim ban. Opponents suggest that he liberated Republicans to say the unsayable, rail against so-called political correctness and give supporters the thrill of transgression.
Antjuan Seawright, a senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said: “He has been the creator of the permission slip and the validator of the permission slip. For many of them, he is their trampoline to jump even further with their right wing red meat racial rhetoric.”
Beyond Republicans’ headline-grabbing stars, the trend is also manifest at the grassroots. In schools, the party has launched a sweeping assault on what teachers can say or teach about race, gender identity, LGBTQ+ issues and American history. An analysis by the Washington Post newspaper found that 25 states have passed 64 laws reshaping what students can learn and do at school over the past three academic years.
There are examples of the new extremism all over the country. The New York Republican Club will on Monday host an event with Katie Hopkins, a British far-right political commentator who has compared migrants to cockroaches and was repeatedly retweeted by Trump before both were banned by the social media platform.
In Idaho, long a deeply conservative state, Dorothy Moon, the new chairwoman of the state Republican party, is accused of close associations with militia groups and white nationalists. Last month she appeared on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to accuse the state’s Pride festival and parade of sexualising children.
A recent headline in the Idaho Capital Sun newspaper stated: “Hate makes a comeback in Idaho, this time with political support.”
Michelle Vincent, a senior adviser to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stephen Heidt, noted the such currents have long been a problem in Idaho but said: “Trump made hate OK. He made bad behavior seem OK because of the extremes of what he was doing. They started emulating him. People were were abused here during Black Lives Matter protests. We have so much militia here and they are out of control.”
In many cases, the naked bigotry goes hand in hand with Trump’s “big lie” that the last election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud. A New York Times investigation found that about 70% of Republican midterm candidates running for Congress in next month’s midterm elections have either questioned or flat-out denied the results of the 2020 election.
They can now count on support from Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who in 2017 met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and dismissed his entire opposition as “terrorists” Gabbard this week defected to the Republicans and campaigned for Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona and an unabashed defender of the big lie.
Another election denier is Doug Mastriano, a political novice running for governor of Pennsylvania with the help of far-right figures. He was outside the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and photographed watching demonstrators attacking police before he supposedly walked away.
Mastriano has repeatedly criticised his opponent, attorney general Josh Shapiro, for attending and sending his children to what he brands a “privileged, exclusive, elite” school, suggesting that this demonstrates Shapiro’s “disdain for people like us”. It is a Jewish day school where students receive both secular and religious instruction.
After a long courtship, Trump himself has in recent months begun embracing the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon in earnest. In September, using his Truth Social platform, the former president reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming”. A QAnon song has been played at the end of several his campaign rallies.
Ron Klein, chair of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said: “It’s very unfortunate that the Republican party is either silent and complicit in this antisemitic language that’s being put forward by Donald Trump and others that align with him. But it’s very indicative of a Republican party that does not want to take on rightwing extremists.”
Klein, a former congressman, added: “Some members of Republican party did use dog whistles and symbolic language to make their points about minorities, including the Jewish community, and that was very troubling. But the era of Donald Trump has just lifted the rock under which these people now feel it’s OK and even helpful for them to make these kinds of statements and use these kinds of words to gain political power and political stature, which is very troubling in our American political system.”
The 2013 autopsy now looks like a blip, an outlier, in half a century of Republican politics. Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” message stoked racial fear and resentment in the south. Ronald Reagan demonised “welfare queens” in 1976 and, four years later, launched his election campaign with a speech lauding “states’ rights” near the site of the “Mississippi Burning” murders – seen by many as a nod to southern states that resented the federal government enforcing civil rights.
A political action committee linked to George HW Bush’s campaign in 1988 paid for an attack advert blaming Democratic rival Michael Dukakis for the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed rape during a furlough from prison. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, bragged that he would turn Horton into “Dukakis’s running mate”.
I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it
Stuart Stevens, veteran Republican campaign strategist
The Atwater playbook is being deployed again in Senate midterm races as Republicans Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania run attack ads accusing their Democratic opponents, Mandela Barnes and John Fetterman, of being soft on crime, often with images of Black prison inmates.
Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican campaign strategist who wrote a withering indictment of the party’s trajectory, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it.”
Stevens, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, continued: “It’s a party of white grievance and anger and hate is an element of that.”
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, agreed: “The real consequence of Donald Trump’s presidency is it did give permission to so many people within the party who used to try to mask or hide their racism. They now feel like they can proudly wear it and they do.”
With hate crimes on the rise across America, there are fears that comments by Trump, Tuberville, Greene and others will lead to threats and violence that put lives in danger. Bardella added: “We learned after January 6 that, to the Republican party faithful, these aren’t just words, they are instructions. It’s a very dangerous development that one of the major political parties in America has made the conscious decision to wrap itself in the embrace of white nationalism.”
How long does it take for a great power to develop military amnesia?
Russia and America, the two former Cold War superpowers, should be better positioned than any other nation to understand the high costs – in money, equipment, reputation and worst of all lives – of fighting an extended war in which too many locals see you as murderous occupiers.
Lessons Russia should have learned
Among all nations, Russia should understand the danger of unpopular foreign intervention: For almost three years, from June 1941 to December 1944, Hitler’s Nazi army laid waste to large swaths of the Soviet Union during what Russians still call the Great Patriot War. The 872-day siege of Leningrad, Russia’s second-largest city now named St. Petersburg, was especially brutal. A million people died, most of them civilians, many from starvation.
Historians’ analyses of why Hitler’s Russia invasion failed carry eerie echoes of current experts’ analyses of the mistakes Vladimir Putin has made in invading Ukraine: There was poor strategic planning.
The Germans had no long-range plans for the invasion’s aftermath. Hitler believed that the Russians would capitulate quickly after the shock of initial losses. Most important, he failed to understand the primordial power of one word – “Родина” – for Russians: They were determined to defend their Motherland at all costs.
Americans can go back further in history for what might be called our collective military memory: British troops fought George Washington’s army for nearly a decade before withdrawing in disgrace.
The British failure taught the American colonialists important lessons, lessons their descendants, unfortunately, would forget over time.
It’s why Washington, in his famous 1796 farewell address, prepared after decades of public service in the military and as our first president, warned against foreign entanglements leading to unnecessary wars.
Now, for Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, the deterioration MacArthur predicted began from the moment it invaded its neighbor this Feb. 24. Eight months later, Ukrainian soldiers are encircling Russian troops as they withdraw from key strategic positions.
As of late August, the Kremlin had lost an astounding 12,000-plus planes, tanks, armored vehicles, guns and other pieces of military equipment worth almost $17 billion, according to one estimate.
The forced mobilization of new recruits Putin announced last month and the protests they sparked across Russia recall the Vietnam War draft that sent young Americans into the streets more than a half-century ago.
A protest in front of the Russian Embassy in Bucharest on May 16, 2022.
Russia’s new annexation of four Ukrainian provinces making up 15% of the country, following sham referendums enforced at gunpoint and celebrated by Putin in a darkly comical rally at Moscow’s Red Square, is a sign not of his war’s success but rather of its desperation, one that makes even more certain the failure of his occupation.
No nation more than Russia should have foreseen all of this. The Ukraine invasion started almost 33 years to the day when the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan to end a disastrous decade-long war and occupation there.
A quick history lesson in Iraq
On the day that the first American soldiers entered Iraq in March 2003, I landed in Moscow to see whether I could learn lessons for U.S. civilian and military leaders. In interviews with a dozen veterans of Russia’s Afghanistan debacle, I heard the same certain prediction captured in one vet’s memorable words: If America stayed long in Iraq, it would come home “like a whimpering dog with its tail between its legs.”
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More than eight years later, after losing nearly 4,500 troops, the U.S. occupation of Iraq ended in failure, just as the Russian vets had told me it would days after it began.
Military scholars can see clearly what sometimes blinds the civilian leaders of great powers. In his book “Occupational Hazards,” Georgetown University international affairs professor David Edelstein wrote: “Despite the relatively successful military occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II, careful examination indicates that unusual geopolitical circumstances were the keys to success in those two cases, and historically military occupations fail more often than they succeed.”
Putin appeared to have gotten away with his 2014 occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region, which came during corrupt leadership in the neighboring country and prompted Western sanctions along with expulsion from the Group of Eight major economies.
Now Putin faces a united nation headed by a heroic leader in Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bolstered by billions in aid from the United States and other allies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends a national flag-raising ceremony in Izium on Sept. 14, 2022.
No one knows when it will happen, but the history of great powers’ military occupations suggests that Russian troops will eventually leave Ukraine in defeat. There are different scenarios of what will happen on the road to defeat, from Putin dying or being overthrown to him declaring a false victory and withdrawing to still more months of bombing and killing.
Following his nation’s monumental sacrifices, there is no chance that Zelenskyy will accept a negotiated peace that leaves the Kremlin in control of the territories it has seized. Putin’s veiled threat of using tactical nuclear weapons is the empty bluff of a poker player holding a weak hand.
The Kremlin’s final failure is in the cards for one simple but powerful reason: Russia’s will to conquer is weaker than Ukraine’s will to save its homeland.
James Rosen is a former Pentagon reporter for McClatchy who earlier covered the collapse of the Soviet Union as a Moscow correspondent. He received awards from the National Press Club, Military Reporters and Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists, which last year named him top opinion columnist.
