By YALE UNIVERSITY Futurity — NOVEMBER 30, 2022
The sharp divergence in excess death rates that emerged in the post-vaccine period “is pretty striking… and the magnitudes are quite large.”
CORONAVIRUS PUBLIC HEALTH
A new study looks at excess deaths by partisan affiliation in two states during the pandemic. Continue reading O.M.G. – What Goes Around Really DOES . . .
[NOTE: Last weekend we posted a report on the deeply conservative Polish Catholic church, which is locked in a mutually vampiric embrace with the very rightwing Polish government, and losing young Poles as one result. In the country next door, Germany has another large cohort of bishops, but of a very different stripe: in Catholic terms, they’re the “woke” liberals.
Continue reading German Catholic Bishops vs. Pope Francis: The “Liberal” Opposition
The number of state legislative districts where racial or ethnic minorities make up a majority or a near majority of the population dropped substantially after the latest round of redistricting, even as those minority groups accounted for virtually all of the population growth the nation experienced over the last decade.
An analysis of the demographics of thousands of state legislative districts redrawn in the wake of the 2020 Census conducted exclusively for Pluribus News finds there are 368 districts around the country where Black Americans make up a majority of the population, down from 390 Black-majority districts before new political boundaries were drawn.
BYDGOSZCZ, Poland — A committed Catholic who served from childhood as an altar boy, Karol dreamed as a teenager of entering the seminary in his hometown in northern Poland and becoming a priest.
“I had a deep faith and wanted to serve the church,” said Karol, now 26, recalling how he had discussed his hopes of one day becoming a bishop with his spiritual mentor, a priest at the Church of Divine Providence in the city of Bydgoszcz.
But that was before the priest raped him. Continue reading The Polish Catholic Church: Clinging to its rigid homophobia, pedophile priest protection & rightwing government ties, but losing young Poles is the price it’s paying
When the Yale historian Timothy Snyder was asked by Ukraine’s government to fundraise for the war effort, he considered a project to restore Chernihiv library. It would have been an obvious choice for the bestselling author, who has visited the ruined library – a gracious gothic terracotta structure that survived two world wars but was smashed to rubble in March by Russia’s 500kg bombs.
Yet he soon decided that a fundraiser for a library would be “kind of morally self indulgent”. When he asked his friends in Kyiv what was most urgently needed, nobody hesitated: anti-drone defence. “I thought I should do the thing which is most urgent now,” Snyder told the Guardian in a phone interview from the Yale campus. “The ruins of the library are going to be there. I can raise money for that later. But right now, what’s happening is that the Russians are trying to freeze millions of people out by destroying the power grid. And so what I should be trying to do is try to stop that.”
Continue reading Timothy Snyder on Strategic Fundraising for Ukraine
