The decline of rural America

I have posted several times about the decline of the rural economy (here and here). The phenomenon is not unique to the US. For example, in the 1970s, the Soviet Union government decided to abandon support for rural areas as they go from sustainable economic independence to dependence. Abandoned Russian villages are reverting to primordial forests with packs of wolves freely roaming the land. In Russia, that was a decision driven by economic reality coupled with an incompetent, deeply corrupt, authoritarian government. 

By contrast, the US has pumped vast amounts of money into rural areas that can no longer self-sustain. This topic is important because it is political and has been highly weaponized by America's authoritarian radical right wealth and power political-social movement. This will probably be a significant issue, maybe major, in the 2024 election.

A recent NYT article discusses this again: 

‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss

There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.

May 31, 2024, Main Street in Sheffield, Pa.

Deaths outpace births

SHEFFIELD, Pa. — Lee Goldthwaite might have the most stable job in this remote corner of northwestern Pennsylvania.

The caretaker of Sheffield Cemetery is busier than ever directing crews clearing trees to make space for more graves as deaths dramatically outpace births here and in other vast stretches of rural America. Each time he buries a newly deceased resident he wonders how the town that once drew scores of young families will survive.

“We already lost our bank,” Goldthwaite said as he took a break from trimming the grass around headstones. “We lost our liquor store, and we may be about to lose our high school.”

Across rural Pennsylvania, there is a deepening sense of fear about the future as population loss accelerates. The sharp decline has put the state at the forefront of a national discussion on the viability of the small towns that have long been a pillar of American culture.

America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.

A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend. 

The Center for Rural Pennsylvania, an agency overseen by the state legislature, estimates that Pennsylvania will lose another 6 percent of its rural population by 2050. Some counties, including Warren County, where Sheffield is located, will experience double-digit population declines.

State lawmakers and other leaders now consider the population loss a crisis and are drawing up plans to try to reverse the trend. They say neither Pennsylvania nor the nation can afford to lose small towns and the institutions that power them. Not only are they a touchstone of American life, but they are also key to driving certain sectors of the economy, like agriculture.

Sheffield’s only ambulance was taken out of service about two years ago, around the same time the community’s only day care closed due to low enrollment. Starting this school year, teens are being bused to a distant high school because there are not enough teachers to staff the local one.

Residents are peeved that the local bank branch and liquor store have closed. The organizers of the town’s beloved Johnny Appleseed Festival recently announced they don’t have enough volunteers or money to continue. And many of Sheffield’s churches no longer have full-time priests or pastors, deepening residents’ sense of malaise.

“I wish I had an idea to say, ‘If you do this,’ this place can be turned around,” said Jack Cashmere, 86, a lifelong Sheffield resident. “But I guess you just have too many old people like myself.”

In 1980, Sheffield Area Middle-Senior High School had about 600 students. The current enrollment is just 224. The broader Warren County School District — encompassing most of the county — also saw its school enrollment decline by more than half since 1980.

As the presidential election approaches, many residents in this deeply Republican town say they view Trump as having a better vision for salvaging rural America, even though Biden has steered billions of dollars to initiatives that support rural America.

But at the Lee House, one of two remaining bars in Sheffield Township, many patrons were not optimistic that either Trump or Biden has the answers needed to save the community. The bar, which dates back 150 years and advertises on its front door that smoking is still allowed indoors, now routinely closes at 9 p.m. due to “fewer and fewer people,” said Carla Allen, the bar’s owner.

“I don’t want either of them for president,” said Barb Strike, 54, as she puffed on a Parliament cigarette and sipped a Bud Light. “They don’t care about us because no one in this town is rich enough for them to care.”

Kenneth M. Johnson, the demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said the deck remains stacked against most rural communities, except for those within proximity to larger metropolitan regions or those with industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor. “Barring some outside occurrence, it’s very unusual for counties to recover,” Johnson said.

The political implications of this are easy to see. America's authoritarian demagogues will demagogue this issue and blame Biden and liberals for something that they themselves have been and still are powerless to stop. In modern American radical right politics, inconvenient reality does not exist. Fake reality based on irrational attacks and demagoguery is what authoritarianism must have to thrive on and grow powerful.

People like Barb Strike will not hear or believe much or anything about the failing efforts of America's political center and left to protect rural people and their communities. What they will hear plenty of is authoritarian Faux News, the authoritarian radical GOP and the dictator DJT lying, slandering and demagoguing the issue. Despite their great noise and smoke, cynical authoritarian demagogues will not provide plausible solutions to the problem of rural decline.

Spotting deepfakes; Research about the origin of life on Earth

An interactive NYT article (not paywalled) tests your ability to spot deepfakes generated by AI. I got 7/10 right. This is a useful little exercise because it gives tips about what to look for. It is getting harder to spot deepfakes, but it helps to know what to look for.

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Experts are still intensely interested in how life arose on Earth. If it happened here, it could be a model for the origin of life anywhere in the universe where life might be. A NYT article (not paywalled) discusses some current thinking about this interesting little question:

The rail cars stopped [in the abandoned gold mine shaft]. We stepped out and walked a short distance to a large plastic spigot protruding from the rock. A pearly stream of water trickled from the wall near the faucet’s base, forming rivulets and pools. Wafting from the water was hydrogen sulfide — the source of the chamber’s odor. Kneeling, I realized that the water was teeming with a stringy white material similar to the skin of a poached egg. Caitlin Casar, a geobiologist, explained that the white fibers were microbes in the genus Thiothrix, which join together in long filaments and store sulfur in their cells, giving them a ghostly hue. Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust — a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen — yet life was literally gush­ing from rock. This particular ecological hot spot had earned the nick­name Thiothrix Falls.

Scientists like [Magdalena Osburn, a professor at Northwestern University and a prominent member of the relatively new field known as geomicrobiology] have shown that, contrary to long-held assumptions, Earth’s interior is not barren. In fact, a majority of the planet’s microbes, perhaps more than 90 percent, may live deep un­derground. These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, re­producing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxy­gen. And they seem capable of weathering geological cataclysms that would annihilate most creatures. Like the many tiny organisms in the ocean and atmosphere, the unique microbes within Earth’s crust do not simply inhabit their surroundings; they transform them. Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the ground­work for all other terrestrial life.

Like so much about Earth’s earliest history, exactly where and when life first emerged is not definitively known. At some point not long after our planet’s genesis, in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy — a hot spring, an impact crater, a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor — bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells. Evidence from the fossil record and chemical analysis of the oldest rocks ever discovered indicate that mi­crobial life existed at least 3.5 billion years ago and possibly as far back as 4.2 billion years ago.

Among all living creatures, the peculiar microbes that dwell deep within the planet’s crust today may most closely resemble some of the earliest single-celled organisms that ever existed. Collectively, these subsurface microbes make up an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the biomass — that is, all the living matter — on Earth. Yet until the mid-20th century, most scientists did not think subterranean life of any kind was plausible below a few meters.

Although these early studies were tantalizing, many scientists remained skeptical because of the possibility that surface microbes had contaminated the samples. In subsequent decades, however, researchers continued to find microbes in rock and water obtained from mines and drill sites all over the world. By the 1980s, attitudes had started to shift. Studies of aquifers clearly indicated that bacteria populated ground­water, even thousands of feet below the surface. And scientists developed more rigorous methods for preventing the accidental introduction of surface mi­crobes, such as disinfecting drill bits and tracking the movement of fluids through the crust to make sure surface water was not mingling with their samples.  

“This research really is a form of exploration,” [University of Toronto geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar] says. “Some of the findings are causing us to rewrite the textbooks about how this planet works. They are changing our understanding of Earth’s habitability. We don’t know where life originated. We don’t know if life arose on the surface and went down or whether life emerged below and went up. There’s a tendency to think about Dar­win’s warm little pond, but, as my colleague T. C. Onstott likes to say, it could just as easily have been some warm little fracture.”

The life came from 

below hypothesis

Some of the scientists described here work about 4,850 feet underground in an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota. It stinks of brimstone (hydrogen sulfide gas) and is hot and humid (90ᵒ, 100% humidity) down there, even though it is below freezing winter temperature on the surface.

Microbes growing in hot water

near the Old Faithful geyser in Wyoming 

One argument I am aware of against life evolving first on the seafloor at thermal vents is that even thought there is plenty of free energy at those vents, the ocean is simply too big. Biomolecules would be too diluted in an ocean for abiogenesis, i.e., creation of life from non-life. Instead, warm, moist underground pockets or geothermal surface pools with plenty of free energy are plausibly small enough to allow pre-biotic molecules to concentrate in the water there sufficiently to spark non-life into life.

How faithful are you?

Got something on the heavy side to start off the week.  I’ve brought this subject up before, but it has been a while.  We may have some new people here who might want to chime in.  Or, maybe you have changed your mind on your previous answer.

Do you ever think about the Pledge of Allegiance?  We have one here in the states, and maybe your country has one too, if you live in another country.  Here is what ours looks like:

Using Mirriam-Webster's definitions, let’s also look up two of the Pledge’s key words:

Pledge : a binding promise or agreement to do or forbear.

Allegiance : loyalty and obedience owed to one's country or government. 

 

Now for the questions:

1. When was the last time you were asked to (or expected to) pledge your allegiance to a flag?  (E.g., at jury duty, at a Rotary or other club meetings, at a church or other community organization, etc.)
2. What does the Pledge of Allegiance mean to you?  Just what it literally says?
3. What do you think the Pledge of Allegiance means to others (newly minted citizens, the military, the “man on the street,” other)?
4. Is pledging allegiance more of a sentiment than a real obligation?  (I.e., it’s the thought that counts?)
5. As one who pledges such allegiance, what do you think is expected of you?  (E.g., to follow all civil laws, to never criticize your country, to die for your country, other?)
6. If/When you recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and if you are an atheist (we have plenty here), do you skip over saying the “under God” part?
7. Is the Pledge out of date? Is our "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" a lie?
8. Are we becoming more perfect or less perfect as a union?  Explain your answer in detail?

(by PrimalSoup)

House Republicans cancel inconvenient free speech; Regarding the history and traditions test

The NYT reports (not paywalled):

The Republicans who now hold the majority have used the House’s rules of decorum to impose what is essentially a gag order against talking about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments to a porn actress or about the fact that he is a felon at all, notwithstanding that those assertions are no longer merely allegations but the basis of a jury’s guilty verdict. Doing so, they have declared, is a violation of House rules.

“When they censor any mention of Donald Trump’s criminal convictions, they are essentially trying to ban a fact,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in an interview. “I am not aware of any precedent where factual statements have been banned in our lifetime.”

The American radical right authoritarian wealth & power movement simply does not tolerate inconvenient truth. This is an example of the intolerant, closed-minded, reality-detached threat.

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Yesterday, NPR broadcast a segment about the new law in Louisiana that forces all public education classrooms to post the 10 Commandments. A question was asked about why all other religions could not also demand that their iconography also be posted in view of the equal protection clause. The response was simple: Other religions would not pass the history and traditions (HAT) test. Non-Christian iconography could be excluded without violating the equal protection clause because those religions do not pas the HAT test.

That makes no sense at all. But the current USSC could easily find sense in it. The USSC used the HAT test to obliterate abortion rights and most gun safety laws. The reason the HAT test is so poisonous is that it makes no sense and can be easily used to arrive at nearly any decision a partisan judge wants to arrive at. Why is this the case? Several reasons.

• First, the application of the HAT test in abortion and gun safety law cases was clearly irrational. The judges cherry picked bit and pieces of history they liked and ignored what was inconvenient. They also could not define what a "tradition" was. That depended various subjective things, e.g., how the issue was framed. Framing was convenient, ignoring inconvenient traditions.

• Second, Judges lack historical training and expertise. The HAT test converts legal reasoning into historical analysis. Judges are trained in law, not history. With a bit of garden variety partisan human bias that leads to flawed or selective interpretations of historical evidence. Historians have already heavily criticized both the abortion-killer and the gun safety law killer cases as partisan historical bullshit.

• Third, the HAT test ignores changing societal norms and values over time. What was historically accepted may no longer align with modern understandings or acceptance of rights and acceptable behaviors. In essence, the HAT test was intentionally invented by radical right authoritarians to ignore evolving standards that are inconvenient to radical right kleptocratic, democratic, plutocratic and Christian theocratic dogmas, e.g., the establishment clause for religion. The HAT test gives the USSC enormous power to completely reshape most or nearly all of the law and society in the name of a single, deeply flawed, hyper-partisan "historical/traditional" analysis. 

• The USSC has not laid out any clear methodology to apply the HAT test. There are no established guidelines for how to conduct proper historical analysis or what counts as sufficient historical evidence of a "tradition." The HAT test is well-suited to disguise subjective partisan "reasoning." The HAT test easily leads to covert, unguided, or ad hoc partisan analysis. For example, when there are no clear historical precedents or traditions, there is nothing to base an unbiased analysis on.

• Finally, the HAT test uses history to describe what ought to be. History has always been used to describe what happened in the past, not what should be. The test uses descriptive historical facts to find normative constitutional questions. That makes no sense because a lot of what happened in history is contested, ambiguous and/or now obsolete in view of social and technological change. Even worse, the test means that a controlling "tradition" is constitutional.  

The point of the HAT test is clear. It is a fig leaf the authoritarian American radical right wealth and power movement plans to use to kill inconvenient aspects of democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. Those inconvenient aspects include voting rights, transparency in government (a necessity for unlimited corruption), minority protections and church-state separation, especially in public education.

To drive home the point here, the NYT reports about the new Christian nationalist 10 Commandments law in Louisiana:

The crowd at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette, La., applauded Gov. Jeff Landry as he signed bill after bill this week on public education in the state, making it clear he believed God was guiding his hand.

One new law requires that transgender students be addressed by the pronouns for the gender on their birth certificates (“God gives us our mark,” he said). Another allows public schools to employ chaplains (“a great step for expanding faith in public schools”).

Then he signed into law a mandate that the Ten Commandments be hung in every public classroom, demonstrating a new willingness for Louisiana to go where other states have not. Last month, Louisiana also became the first state to classify abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances.

Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed bills this week to expand the presence of religion in the state’s public schools, which will be allowed to hire chaplains and required to post Ten Commandments in classrooms

“We don’t quit,” Mr. Landry, a Republican, said at the signing ceremony.

Taken together, the measures have signaled the ambition of the governor and the Republican-led Legislature to be at the forefront of a growing national movement to create and interpret laws according to a particular conservative Christian worldview. And Mr. Landry, a Catholic who has been vocal about his faith’s influence in shaping his politics, wants to lead the charge. 

“Christian conservatives in this state have been a force for a very long time,” said Robert Hogan, a political science professor at Louisiana State University. “They view him as a champion of their cause, and this consolidates that.”

Dodie Horton, the state representative who sponsored the Louisiana bill, said that having the commandments posted would allow students to “look up and see what God says is right and what he says is wrong.” 

Ms. Horton, a Republican, is a member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group formed in 2020 to advance explicitly Christian values and legislation among elected officials. The group is working to adopt her bill as one of its pieces of model legislation, so that members in other states can push through similar laws.

The Christian political movement has been evident in debates across the country over transgender rights, school curriculums, in vitro fertilization and abortion. In Arizona, during the fight over an abortion ban from 1864, the speaker of the House, Ben Toma, told The New York Times in April that “all of our laws are actually based on, what, the Ten Commandments and the Book of Genesis, which are thousands of years ago.”

It is an argument that has been repeated by supporters of the Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, who contend that the commandments are a historical document as well as a religious text.

“This is all born of the leftist culture war tearing down the fabric of the country, and we are saying, ‘Enough,’” said Jason Rapert, founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and a former state senator in Arkansas. “We are going to try to rebuild the foundation of this country.”

Like it or not, and believe it or not, we are in an all-out war against an aggressive, bigoted, corrupt Christian fundamentalist theocracy. It aims to kill democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. These authoritarian radical bigots do not want to just turn the clock back to Jim Crow or even the 1800s. They want to go back in time over 2,000 years. They are dead serious about that and about controlling your lives as they see fit, whether you believe it or not.

Q: Is this is all born of the leftist culture war tearing down the fabric and foundation of the country, or is it significantly or mostly born of the bigoted, authoritarian Christian theocratic culture war tearing down the fabric and foundation of the country? 

HOW DID I MISS THIS?

 Just saw this online:

Ancestry.com entry proves Biden died in 2018 at Guantanamo Bay

A June 13 Instagram post  shows a woman navigating through the Ancestry.com website to a death notice for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. with the same birthdate as President Joe Biden. The notice says Biden died in 2018 at Guantanamo, Cuba.

“This is it y’all,” the woman in the video says. “In living color. This is proof that indeed there are actors playing parts on the world stage.”

The claim stems from a record posted March 14 to FindAGrave.com, a site related to Ancestry.com. The original post contained Biden’s correct date and place of birth but claimed he was executed for treason. The record said he died in either 2018 or 2020, depending on which archived version is examined.

The listing also claimed Biden was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but a search of the Army Cemeteries Explorer shows no entries for Biden.

(Well, of course NOT, they, whoever they are, don't want people to know Biden is buried there, otherwise the jig us up) 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/06/20/biden-death-notice-ancestry-com-fact-check/74144955007/

From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: US drug prices

A NYT article (not paywalled) discusses how American pharmaceutical drug prices are jacked up by middlemen who operate in secrecy:

The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugs

Americans are paying too much for prescription drugs.

It is a common, longstanding complaint. And the culprits seem obvious: Drug companies. Insurers. A dysfunctional federal government.

But there is another collection of powerful forces that often escape attention, because they operate in the bowels of the health care system and cloak themselves in such opacity and complexity that many people don’t even realize they exist.

They are called pharmacy benefit managers. And they are driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government.

The three largest pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, act as middlemen overseeing prescriptions for more than 200 million Americans. They are owned by huge health care conglomerates — CVS Health, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group — and are hired by employers and governments.

The job of the P.B.M.s is to reduce drug costs. Instead, they frequently do the opposite. They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees, a New York Times investigation found.

Most Americans get their health insurance through a government program like Medicare or through an employer, which pay for two different types of insurance for each person. One type covers visits to doctors and hospitals, and it is handled by an insurance company. The other pays for prescriptions. That is overseen by a P.B.M.

“We’re really, really good at what we do,” Jon Mahrt, president of UnitedHealth’s P.B.M., Optum Rx, said in an interview. The main lobbying group for the P.B.M.s says that in 2022 they saved their clients and patients $286 billion.

But those savings appear to be largely a mirage, a product of a system where prices have been artificially inflated so that major P.B.M.s and drug companies can boost their profits while taking credit for reducing prices.

• P.B.M.s sometimes push patients toward drugs with higher out-of-pocket costs, shunning cheaper alternatives.

• They often charge employers and government programs like Medicare multiple times the wholesale price of a drug, keeping most of the difference for themselves. That overcharging goes far beyond the markups that pharmacies, like other retailers, typically tack on when they sell products.

• The largest P.B.M.s recently established subsidiaries that harvest billions of dollars in fees from drug companies, money that flows straight to their bottom line and does nothing to reduce health care costs.

• The P.B.M.s, which are responsible for paying pharmacies on behalf of employers, are driving independent drugstores out of business by not paying them enough to cover their costs. Small pharmacies have little choice but to accept these lowball rates because the largest P.B.M.s control an overwhelming majority of prescriptions. The disappearance of local pharmacies limits health care access for poorer communities but ultimately enriches the P.B.M.s’ parent companies, which own drugstores or mail-order pharmacies.

• P.B.M.s sometimes delay or even prevent patients from getting their prescriptions. In the worst cases, patients suffer serious health consequences.

Many patients learn about the existence of P.B.M.s only when they have a problem getting medications and spend hours navigating a byzantine system of approvals and restrictions.

So when PBM spokesman Jon Mahr says, “We’re really, really good at what we do,” he is spot on correct. That is absolutely true. His job is to help screw the American people out of every last penny to squeeze every last penny of profit out of health care. He is really good at what he does, i.e., he lies to us in pursuit of profit.

The radical, authoritarian Republican Project 2025 wants to reduce regulations on all businesses, including PBMs. Why? Because there is so damn much money to be made for the giant "human" corporations and the Republicans who open the floodgates of profit for those "people." 

It is all about the Benjamins, not human health or the public interest.