America Party

Well, if Democrats were worried how they were going to get back in power, Musk forming a new party likely has them relieved. They wouldn't even have to pivot to the center or learn how to talk to young men.

Climate Emotions

Via Instapundit and Just the News*, a study in The Lancet about how worried young people are about climate. This came up in relation to a discussion of Greta Thunberg and her mental health issues. She had a sense of foreboding before she became involved in climate affairs.  She and her parents discovered that her symptoms were reduced when she was allowed to dramatically tell others what to do about climate. As she adopts other limelight causes this becomes more apparent.  If it were not climate, it would be something else.

Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events 

I suggest that The Lancet has the arrow of causality reversed.  As with paranoia and depression, anxiety usually precedes its eventual focus.  Feelings of anxiety in response to events is more properly thought of as nervousness. You can see that the once-respected British medical publication has begged the question right at the outset in the abstract.

 Climate change has adverse effects on youth mental health and wellbeing, but limited large-scale data exist globally or in the USA. Understanding the patterns and consequences of climate-related distress among US youth can inform necessary responses at the individual, community, and policy level.

The possibility that they were going to be nervous anyway apparently did not occur to the authors.  It might be an interesting question to ask why young people settled on climate as the thing to be unsettled about. That question would lead us to examining what young people had "emotions" about before. Whether adolescents are more anxious now than they were in 1825 we do not know.  We develop a sense of that from correspondence, diaries, and the arts, but we do not know. My belief is that young people are about equally anxious in all eras.  They quite naturally become more nervous in the face of war, famine, disease, or being orphaned. We are evolutionarily wired for a certain level of anxiety, likely modified by the environment activating programs we already have on disk.

 *As predicted by one of my rules of naming, a site called "Just the News" is going to in fact be highly slanted. I am wary of the word "truth" in a title, or many uses of the word "just" as in We were just trying to educate the public about their right to photograph the police. We were just hanging out near the girls' locker room. The site is indeed slanted rightward.