[Polyanna]

Ingen har jo stort sett bare rett eller bare feil.

Jeg tror det finnes mye drit i det amerikanske demokratiet som folk har god grunn til å være skeptiske til og forbanna på. Det viktigste er at det så til de grader er helt nødvendig med enorme donasjoner for å bli valgt, at det gir lobbyister nærmest fritt spillerom og enorm innflytelse på politikken. Man kan godt kalle det korrupsjon. Og korrupsjon råtner en stat innenfra.

NRKs korrespondent refererte også til et tall på hvor mye dokumenterte feilutbetalinger det var fra byråkratiet i USA, og det var helt sjukt. Så det er klart at når de setter bulldogene på saken, så finner de ting.

Det er også god grunn til å være negativ til USAs enorme innblanding i alle mulige greier i alle mulige land (både krigføring og annet). Og "haukene" (de mest aggressive militærlobbyen og administrasjonen) har virkelig ingen skrupler når det gjelder løgn og bedrag for å få det som de vil. Inkludert å ljuge for presidenten (som de skrøt av at de hadde gjort overfor Trump for å få beholde soldatene i Syria forrige periode). Engasjementet i Afghanistan var en katastrofe, uttrekningen enda verre.

Jeg kan i og for seg ha sympati med at man i USA ser litt på "systemet sitt" slik man gjerne kan stå hjemme hos seg selv og se ut over den herpa parketten og det medtatte kjøkkenet og alt annet som står på skeive og ha en liten del inni seg som rett og slett ønsker seg en vannskade eller noe, sånn at alt bare blir ødelagt om man må begynne på nytt. At det føles som en uoverkommelig oppgave å skulle fikse og ordne på noe som virker så grunnleggende herpa.


Men så vet vi også hva som er prisen for denne "vannlekkasjen", og det er helt uoverstigelig forferdelig.Bare det at de nå slutter å følge med på fugleinfluensa, for å si noe. Forskning på kvinnehelse.

Her er en liste jeg tror er godt dokumentert:

Sitat:

--The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (the MMWR, the weekly free online publication that alerts public health professionals around the world about outbreaks or new critical developments in science knowledge that have big implications for people's health or life) was blocked from publication starting 1/23, for the first time in 70 years. One of the studies slated to appear in the publication on 1/23 was about the risk of bird flu infection among veterinarians who treat cattle, so please let your big animal vet friends know the feds have information that could save their life, and they need to start asking around to find out what it is.
--The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has been abruptly paused. This $6.5 billion program is one of the most consequential aid programs in Africa. As a result of this pause, many clinics around the world have closed their doors, and others have remained open but have been instructed they cannot provide any HIV medications, even to patients who have been waiting weeks for appointments and have no other sources of medication to keep their HIV at bay. People will die from this. This is not an exaggeration. A lot of people are going to die, and many more will become infected with HIV because of people who can no longer suppress their HIV viral load, even if the pause is lifted tomorrow (and that is definitely not expected to happen).
--2/3 of the staff of the President’s Malaria Initiative, an org founded by George W. Bush that is the largest donor to anti-malaria programs and research worldwide, have been fired. Those employees included some of the most senior and respected scientists working on malaria control in the world. Malaria interventions are carefully planned around rainy seasons, which vary by region. Houses are sprayed with insecticide and >50 million children children receive antimalarial medication each year during peak malaria transmission times. As one scientist was quoted in the NYT: “You could open the funding floodgates again tomorrow and you will still have children dying months from now because of this pause.” There are confirmed reports of medications and bed nets being stuck at border customs offices or otherwise frozen and unable to be administered, either because of outright stop work orders or drastic understaffing due to the firings.
--More than 8,000 federal websites have been taken down, including pages from CDC and other government entities about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research--including hugely important public datasets, paid for through taxpayer dollars and painstakingly collected over decades in some cases. Here is just a sample of what is gone: >1000 research articles from CDC about preventing chronic disease, STD treatment guidelines, information about Alzheimer’s warning signs, overdose prevention training and vaccine guidelines for people who are pregnant; >1000 pages from the Office of Justice Programs, including a feature on teenage dating violence and a blog post about grants that have gone toward combating hate crimes; >200 pages from Head Start, a program for low-income children, including advice on helping families establish routines and videos about preventing postpartum depression; >180 pages from the Department of Justice, including all state-level hate crime data and seven pages discussing anti-LGBTQ hate crimes; more than 50 press announcements about the use of the National Disaster Distress Helpline in the aftermath of shootings or natural disasters; >100 pages from the Food and Drug Administration, including more than 60 regulatory guidelines on topics such as increasing diversity in clinical trials and the potential for addiction and abuse in drug trials; and >25 pages from the Internal Revenue Service, including the form private schools must submit annually to certify that they have not engaged in racially discriminatory behavior. (I have citations for all of this.) On Friday the Harvard school of public health scrambled and put together an all-day datathon of students and researchers who scraped the web and salvaged what they could so it could be archived before its removal. They are now asking people outside the US to save copies to ensure they will be preserved. As of Sunday they had currently collected more than 300,000 datasets, many of which are indeed already gone from the original sites. I truly cannot overestimate for you the scope and impact of this data removal (reportedly to scrub datasets of LGBTQ variables and similar before returning them to public use, but that piece I cannot verify as of now).
--Several meetings of National Institutes of Health study sections, which review applications for the vast majority of health-related fellowships and grants in the US, were canceled on 1/22 without being rescheduled. As far as I know all grant review is in limbo. Since peer review of grant proposals via study sections is required by law before NIH can disburse funds from its $40 billion annual extramural budget, this has drastic implications for US biomedical research and basically any academic in the US doing health-related research of any kind.
And these are just my top 5. There's SO much more happening every day, and this is before RFK Jr's likely confirmation. This is going to affect all of you, even if bird flu doesn't turn into a massive global pandemic, and above and beyond anything that's about to happen to you economically. Please take notice and educate yourself about how THESE DECISIONS DO MATTER. Call your representatives. Spread the word. Take action.