Dr. Stephen Playe, a retired ER physician living in the Hammock, questions the motives behind Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s announcement that he would recommend against administering the Covid vaccine to young, healthy children .
Commentary
Support for Democracy Is Waning Across the Americas
People are losing faith in democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere. Across North, Central and South America, and parts of the Caribbean, only 63% of the public expressed support for democracy in 2021, possibly explaining the growth of support for authoritarian leadership in places like the United States, Peru and El Salvador.
Battles Over Book Bans Reflect Conflicts from the 1980s
The attacks on books in the 1980s bear similarities to the current attacks. Both object to the critical teaching about race and racism, historical as well as contemporary. Both accuse schools of tearing down America and weakening patriotism. Both object to teaching about gender roles, sexual orientation and alternative models of the family. Conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation have been involved in both periods.
Conservatives Profit from Anti-Transgender Agendas to Rally Their Base
Anti-transgender health care bills and legal interpretations are part of a package of initiatives that mark 2021 as a “record-breaking year” for anti-LGBTQ policies introduced in state legislatures across the country. And 2022 is already on track to surpass this record.
Ukraine and the Fallacy of ‘All Lives Matter’
Every war brings out the best and the worst in human beings. Ukrainian resistance has been heroic and inspiring as Russia carries out its war crimes. But there’s also a strong element of bias at work in the public reaction. You know, the way a blue-eyed blond child gone missing will get page one sympathy while a missing Black child will be ignored.
‘We the People’ Are In Dangerous Territory
The state of the union is precarious because some of us have lost faith in democracy and have begun to flirt with other means to achieve political goals, other means to obtain and keep power, means based more on brute force and intimidation than on persuasion and compromise.
Death: How Long Are We Conscious For, and Does Life Really Flash Before Our Eyes?
Experiments have been conducted in an attempt to better understand reports from people who have had a near death experience. Such an event has been associated with out-of-body experiences, a sense profound bliss, a calling, a seeing of a light shining above, but also profound bursts of anxiety or complete emptiness and silence.
Zelenskyy’s Putin Antithesis: Grit and Grace of Leadership
Putin demonstrates a tendency toward authoritarianism in both political action and in political style. Zelenskyy, in contrast, presents a more modest and understated vision of political leadership – one more appropriate for democratic institutions, in which the leader is not thought to be morally superior to the governed.
Stripping Bare the Illusion That Sports Are Apolitical
FIFA has suspended Russia from international competition, potentially excluding Russia from the World Cup in Qatar later this year. There are several reasons why the Ukraine invasion has served to break FIFA’s policy of viewing national teams apolitically. The brutality of the Russian aggression is one, the self-evident innocence of Ukraine is another.
A Parent’s Counsel to FPC Principal Greg Schwartz: Accommodate LGBTQ Students, Don’t Suspend Them
Randall Bertrand, the parent of an LGBTQ student who was at the forefront of the effort to protect gender-identity rights in the district, recommends to Flagler Palm Coast High School Principal Greg Schwartz how to diffuse the situation at FPC after the principal opted to suspend student-protest organizer Jack Petocz following today’s walkout protesting anti-LGBTQ legislation.
Sanctions Won’t Topple Putin
Putin’s support was not so big anyway: why else would the administration indulge in massive election fraud? Sanctions that make Russians poorer are therefore unlikely to motivate them to vote differently.
Can Rich Nations Stop Buying Russian Oil?
Sanctions against Russia’s oil industry would have a greater impact than limiting natural gas flows because Russia’s oil receipts are higher and more critical to its state budget. Russia earned over US$110 billion in 2021 from oil exports, twice as much as its earnings from natural gas sales abroad.
Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis Are in a Race Back to the 1950s
Sen. Rick Scott proposes to take us back to the 1950s, that glorious era when Black people were beaten and arrested for trying to vote, when women of all colors were expected to stay home and raise the children, when Christianity dominated the culture, when gay people had to stay in the closet, and we lived in mortal terror of socialism.
Putin’s ‘Denazification’ Slur on Ukraine
The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin’s authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent.
Who Is Ketanji Brown Jackson?
Ketanji Brown Jackson is supremely qualified. She has not just an elite education – she went to Harvard for both college and law school – she clerked for the retiring justice whose place she will take, Stephen Breyer.
Setting the Record Straight on Ukrainian and Russian History
Much of the history of Ukraine and Russia the public is hearing is incomplete, some of it is wrong, and some of it is obscured or refracted by the self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it. Here’s a corrective.
Taxpayers: Expect Serious Delays from IRS This Year
Over 15 million returns and 5 million pieces of taxpayer correspondence from 2021 sit untouched – including 6 million original 1040s. Amended 2021 returns are taking more than 20 weeks to process. It’s not just complicated returns that are getting delayed. Even simple individual returns are caught in the backlog.
At Least 650 Migrants, a Record, Died on the US-Mexico Border in 2021
A majority of people crossing the border are not from Mexico, having traveled instead from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. People migrate and attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexico border for complicated reasons, including violence and lack of work opportunities in their home countries.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukrainian Nationalism and Separatism
“Russia and the Ukraine are united in my blood, my heart, my thoughts,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago half a century ago. “But from friendly contact with Ukrainians in the camps over a long period I have learned how sore they feel. Our generation cannot avoid paying for the mistakes of generations before it.”
Putin Orders Troops Into Ukraine: 5 Essential Reads
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a provocative address that could be construed as a pretext to war, claimed today that all of Ukraine belongs to Russia and formally recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in Ukraine that are controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. His government then ordered troops to those regions.
The GOP Is Using ‘Parental Rights’ to End Public Education as We Know It
The Florida GOP is using the Parents’ Bill of Rights to weaponize a minority of insurrectionist parents against schools, giving parents the right to violate privacy and autonomy where it counts most at school: between students and teacher. No wonder there’s a teacher exodus. It’s just what the GOP wants. Destruction from within.
How the Loudest Voices in the Room Distort Democracy
Not all voices are pitched the same. Amplified by technology, it’s easy for a loud and relentless minority to dominate the soundscape and drown out all other points of view. That’s not democracy. It’s a form of repression.
Why Calling Covid the ‘Chinese Virus’ Encourages Racist Violence
The way media frame, depict and describe events can have a profound influence on the public’s perception of those events. Researchers have found that audiences are prone to interpret media stories in the context of their biases, especially in relation to racial groups.
The GOP Is Now Openly Aligned Against Democracy
Majorities of Republicans report believing the ridiculous lie that the 2020 election was stolen — something not even GOP-led investigations have found a shred of evidence for. And an alarming 40 percent of Republicans now say violence against the government is justified.
On False Flag Attacks
In the past few weeks, U.S. officials have warned several times that Russia plans to create the appearance of an attack on its own forces and broadcast those images to the world. Such a “false flag” operation, they alleged, would give Russia the pretext to invade Ukraine by provoking shock and outrage.
Blue-State Cities Led the Wave of Anti-Asian Violence in Pandemic
Before 2020, the average number of Asian Americans killed or injured in anti-Asian attacks was just over eight per year. In 2020 and 2021, however, 49 were physically harmed, an average of almost 25 per year. Almost half of the anti-Asian attacks in 2020 and 2021 were motivated, at least partially, by anger and animosity associated with COVID-19, a disease first identified in Asia.
A Flagler Palm Coast High School Student’s Message to Lawmakers: Stop Policing My Education
A spate of GOP bills in the Florida Legislature seek to sever the trust and safety inherent in the confidentiality of student-teacher discussions, putting the safety of students at risk and further accelerating an exodus of teachers and other education professionals from the profession at a time of critical teacher shortages in Florida.
Women’s Freedom and Autonomy? Not in Florida.
These magnanimous Republicans will allow women and girls to have control over their own bodies until the fetus inside them gets to be about the size of an apple. After that, ladies, you’re nothing but a “host body,” as former Florida House Speaker Jose Oliva famously said.
When Presidents Lie. And Why.
Presidents who lie to save their own public image or career are unlikely to be forgiven. However, those who appear to lie in the service of the public are often celebrated.
Sarah Palin’s Appeal of Libel Loss Could Set up Supreme Court Test of Decades-Old Press Freedom Rule
Before the 1964 Sullivan standard Sara Palin’s appeal could potentially overturn, the libel landscape in the U.S. consisted of a patchwork of state laws that made it easy for political figures to selectively persecute newspapers and public speakers who espoused opposing or unpopular views.
Canada Should Be Preparing for the End of American Democracy
As Canada’s closest neighbor fractures at the seams and slides toward dangerous forms of authoritarianism, we should be deeply worried. The worst-case scenario in the U.S. — blood in the streets — isn’t necessarily the most likely, but we ought to resist the tendency to assign too low a probability to events that could have serious, catastrophic consequences.
The Black Death Was Not as Widespread or Catastrophic as Long Thought
In popular imagination, the Black Death is the most devastating pandemic to have ever hit Europe. A new study of 1,634 samples of fossil pollen from 261 lakes and wetlands in 19 European countries suggests the pandemic’s toll was not as universal as currently claimed, nor was it always catastrophic.
Patriotism, Dissent, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and the NFL
Playing the national anthem at every game became a flashpoint in the 1960s. Today, the NFL’s promise to play the anthem at every game cuts both ways. For Super Bowl LVI, three songs performed by four Black American female vocalists will offer a musical suite of unity in the face of division.
What I learned From Watching More than 500 Jan. 6 Videos
The Jan. 6 insurrection was brutal, and no amount of spin and obfuscation will alter that truth. Hundreds of videos prove that violence did not just occur sporadically as an extreme expression of the crowd’s displeasure but rather dominated the mob’s collective energy. The full weight of the crime that occurred on Jan. 6 is hard for Americans to measure because it is hard to imagine it could have occurred in America.
Life After the Covid Pandemic
There will not be a single moment when social life suddenly goes back to normal. Instead, gradually, over time, most people will view Covid-19 as a background risk and abandon the trappings of pandemic caution. There are major caveats to when the pandemic will wane, and trust in public health agencies has declined significantly.
Trump and the Vaporization of Presidential Records
Boxes of documents and other items that should have been handed over to the National Archives were found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Among the records reportedly incomplete or missing from Trump’s tenure in the White House are phone logs from Jan. 6, 2021.
How Joe Rogan Became Podcasting’s Goliath
Joe Rogan is not just a purveyor of right-wing ideologies. He is also someone who has built an empire by introducing these ideas – and a wide range of others – to listeners from across the political spectrum. His truly unique skill is drawing in from that spectrum a massive, young, largely male audience that advertisers highly covet.
The Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol Was Not ‘Legitimate Political Discourse’
When Trump urged the Ellipse crowd to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” his words transformed an occasion of legitimate political discourse into an anti-democratic violent insurrection. The result was real physical violence.” Several people died and many were injured.
Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust Muddle
Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of ABC’s “The View,” set off a firestorm when she insisted on Jan. 31, 2022 that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Hands outstretched, she went on to describe the genocide as a conflict between “two white groups of people.” Her apology tour raised more questions about her views on race, antisemitism and the Holocaust.
How Republicans Take Biden Relief Bill Money and Run, After Unanimously Opposing It
The Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan package was opposed by every Republican in Congress and criticized by Republican governors, most of whom are now grabbing the money.
How Truckers’ ‘Freedom Convoy’ Was Overtaken by Radical Fringe in Canada
The protest of commercial truckers swarming Canada’s capital in Ottawa shows how an issue can quickly be hijacked by extremist groups spouting themes of racism, hatred and violence.
The Biggest Censor: Olympic Committee Silences Athletes’ Freedom of Speech
Beyond the Olympic’s facade of glitz, glamour and gold there’s a glaring and controversial regulation — the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Rule 50. Rule 50 prohibits athletes from demonstrating during competition or on the podium.
New Forms of Advertising Raise Questions About Journalism Integrity
Mainstream news media outlets have, in recent years, begun to create advertisements that look like news articles on their websites and on social media. Research raises questions about whether this modern form of advertising might influence those outlets’ real journalism.
No, You’re Not Born Either Male or Female
Sex designation is not as simple as a glance and then a check of one box or another. Instead, the overwhelming evidence shows that sex is not binary. To put it another way, the terms “male” and “female” don’t fully capture the complex biological, anatomical and chromosomal variations that occur in the human body.
ISIS’ Leader Is Dead. What Next for the Terrorist Group?
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was killed as he exploded a bomb at his compound in the country’s northwestern Idlib province. The blast also caused the death of members of his family, including children. Here’s how this raid fits the U.S.‘s counterterrorism strategy, and where it leaves the Islamic State.
11 Reasons Why Community College Students Quit Despite Being Almost Finished
Community colleges are designed to make college more accessible, yet 6 out of every 10 community college students cannot reap the full rewards of higher education because they do not earn their degree. For graduates, rewards often include making more money. For society, the reward is citizens who are more likely to vote, volunteer and pay more in taxes.
Facial-Recognition Technology’s Worrisome Government Uses
The U.S. stands at the edge of a slippery slope, and while that doesn’t mean facial recognition technology shouldn’t be used at all, it does mean that the government should put a lot more care and due diligence into exploring the terrain ahead before taking those critical first steps.
Dear Chairman Tucker: Don’t Appease School Board’s Crackpots
School Board members Janet McDonald and Jill Woolbright are directly and exclusively responsible for the board’s degradation into binges of deceit and zealotry. Until they have their third vote, it’s in Chairman Trevor Tucker’s power to re-assert the reality-based majority he speaks for. Anything less is appeasement–or complicity.
New Flood Maps Show US Damage Rising 26% in Next 30 Years
Despite recent devastating floods, people are still building in high-risk areas. With population growth factored in, the increase in U.S. flood losses will be four times higher than the climate-only effect. Deep inequities define who has to endure America’s crippling flood problem.
Pope Benedict’s Betrayal
An in-depth report released last week alleges that former Pope Benedict XVI allowed four abusive priests in Munich to remain in ministry. The pope, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, led the German archdiocese from 1977 to 1982.