News bits: Halting species extinction, etc.

Global meeting to halt species extinctions:

Republicans oppose the effort

As usual, the corrupt, pro-pollution, anti-species, fascist Republican Party is acting in usual form as a gigantic albatross on planet Earth. The NYT writes:

Crucial Talks on Preserving Nature Are on Now.

Negotiators from around the world are meeting in Canada in an effort to halt, and reverse, staggering declines in wildlife.

There’s another hugely important environmental summit happening right now in Canada. It’s also about a global crisis that threatens life on earth, but one that’s gotten far less attention: Rampant, human-induced biodiversity loss. That means not only species extinctions, but also staggering declines in the variety of life on the planet.

The meeting is known as COP15, because it’s the 15th conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Ultimately, its goal is a new 10-year agreement that would enable the world to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

Managing lands and oceans more sustainably. Restoring degraded areas. Creating new protected areas while recognizing the rights of Indigenous people. Helping depleted species recover. Ensuring that the harvest and trade of wild species is sustainable, safe and legal.

The United States plays an odd role. Republicans have refused to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, the global pact that provides for the meeting, so the United States is one of only two countries that are not a party to the talks. (The other is the Holy See.)

The Republican Party: 

pro-corruption

pro-pollution

pro-species extinction

pro-White Christian Sharia law

pro-wealthy White Christian male Taliban

pro-gun violence 

anti-democracy 

anti-abortion

anti-inconvenient fact, truth and science

anti-civil liberties

anti-secularism and secular law

bigoted

intolerant

fascist

mendacious

cynical

cruel

Anti-vaxx crackpottery spreads

and becomes mainstream

The NYT writes:

A third of parents now feel they should be the ones to decide whether to get their children immunized against measles, mumps and other childhood diseases.

For generations of most American families, getting children vaccinated was just something to check off on the list of back-to-school chores. But after the ferocious battles over Covid shots of the past two years, simmering resistance to general school vaccine mandates has grown significantly. Now, 35 percent of parents oppose requirements that children receive routine immunizations in order to attend school, according to a new survey released Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  

Forty-four percent of adults who either identify as Republicans or lean that way said in the latest survey that parents should have the right to opt out of school vaccine mandates, up from 20 percent in a prepandemic poll conducted in 2019 by the Pew Research Center. In contrast, 88 percent of adults who identify as or lean Democratic endorsed childhood vaccine requirements, a slight increase from 86 percent in 2019.

This shows, yet again, the stunning power of demagoguery, crackpottery, lies, slanders and other forms of dark free speech on the internet. It also shows the basis in lies and crackpottery that underpins the fascist Republican Party. Dark free speech makes tens of millions of adult Americans think and act stupidly and sometimes self-destructively. Even effective public health measures are under irrational attack. This poison effort is driven by morally rotted, lying, hateful cranks endlessly spewing free speech lies and crackpottery. Why morally rotted? Because:

The social incentives to deceit are at present very powerful; the controls often weak. Many individuals feel caught up in practices they cannot change. It would be wishful thinking, therefore, to expect individuals to bring about major changes in the collective practices of deceit by themselves. Public and private institutions, with their enormous power to affect personal choice, must help alter the existing pressures and incentives. ..... Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

“[Johnson repeatedly told the American people] ‘the first responsibility, the only real issue in this campaign, the only thing you ought to be concerned about at all, is: Who can best keep the peace?’ The stratagem succeeded; the election was won; the war escalated. .... President Johnson thus denied the electorate of any chance to give or refuse consent to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Believing they had voted for the candidate of peace, American citizens were, within months, deeply embroiled in one of the cruelest wars in their history. Deception of this kind strikes at the very essence of democratic government.” 

When people are deceived, they sometimes act on the basis of lies and false information. Sometimes those actions kill themselves, their own children or others who are innocent. If that’s not moral rot, what is it?

From the Capitalist Profit Motive and Public Health Don’t Mix files:

Government has to step in when there’s not enough profit

The NYT writes:

Recent shortages of amoxicillin, an effective antibiotic that pediatricians have long relied upon to treat strep throat and ear infections in children, have put a spotlight on an urgent global threat: the world’s shrinking arsenal of potent antibiotics and the lack of incentives to develop them.

The broken marketplace for new antimicrobial drugs has stirred debate over a bill, languishing in Congress, that would dramatically reconfigure the way antibiotics are discovered and sold in the United States.

The $6 billion measure, the Pasteur Act, would upend the conventional model that ties antibiotic profits to sales volume by creating a subscription-like system that would provide pharmaceutical companies an upfront payment in exchange for unlimited access to a drug once it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

By separating profits from sales volume, supporters of the bill hope that prescribers will save new drugs for patients whose infections are resistant to existing medications. Limiting their use, experts say, can help extend the life of a new antibiotic before evolutionary pressure creates a “superbug” all but impervious to available antimicrobials.

Surprisingly, even shockingly, most congressional Republicans do not oppose this bill. After all, it's evil socialism or communism or whatever they BS usually call any government action. Instead, resistance to this bill is coming from critics of big pharma who argue that (i) it is a taxpayer give-away, and (ii) in their opinion it will not work in slowing the evolution of resistance of pathogenic bacteria to new antibiotics.  

What this does show is that capitalism doesn’t do something if there is not enough profit in it. Even if people die. Even if millions of people die. It’s just business, not personal. And that’s the problem with business.