“Political polarization shapes how people interpret risk and who they trust and listen to, which shapes what health services they access and what behaviors they partake in or don’t. This dynamic was a big reason Covid death rates so dramatically diverged between Republicans and Democrats: Party affiliation determined people’s willingness to get vaccinated, wear masks, social distance, and take other preventive measures, says Oberlander. Republicans were less likely to take these measures, and more likely to die of Covid as a consequence.”
…
“Although left-wing Americans were more likely to take Covid’s risks seriously, Van Bavel notes Republicans outpaced Democrats on Ebola fears throughout the 2014 outbreak, during Barack Obama’s presidency. “It’s not that Democrats in America have a unique capacity to be attuned to the science and the risks of epidemics and pandemics,” he says; it’s that polarized people on the left and the right distrust the other party’s ability to handle any health threat.
Polarization is also creeping into our relationships with health care providers. A recent survey by communications firm Edelman found people feared the politicization of medical science as much as they feared the cost of medical care; 41 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they wouldn’t trust medical advice from a provider who had a different political persuasion than they did, or would stop seeing them entirely.”
https://www.vox.com/even-better/388130/polarization-political-partisan-health-rfk-jr
“We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.
“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”
So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.
Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.”
…
“Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.
Besides, we don’t even like turkey.”
…
“In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.
From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”
On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/388106/thanksgiving-turkey-food-waste-sides-dry-bland
China is spending WAY more on its military than it pretends to be!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8JrW6fatpU
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkkVATgetNU