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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
The Republican Party is putting forward as their probable candidate a man who was the worst President in 240 years, has been found guilty of multiple crimes, owes hundreds of millions of dollars to multiple recipients as a result of court judgments against him, and still has multiple court cases to go, including criminal ones. And now he has begun his latest most vulgar grift yet, golden sneakers for $399. Donald Trump is a cartoon character. The fact that millions of Americans still think him their choice for President and his sneakers are selling quickly, in my view, is the most alarming thing about the Trump comic book.
Trump sneakers with Donald Trump Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Former President Donald Trump received a decidedly mixed response when he debuted shiny gold Trump-branded sneakers at Sneaker Con in Pennsylvania. The launch of the $399 shoes comes after a week in which a judge ordered him to pay $355 million for fraud, but despite that nine-figure setback, he had some good news Saturday: Trump’s sneakers quickly sold out.
“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” Trump said as he talked about the gold shoes. “I have some incredible people that work with me on things, and they came up with this. And this is something I’ve been talking about for 12 years, 13 years, and I think it’s going to be a big success.”
The shoes are gold with an American flag design around the ankle, with red soles and a Trump T emblazoned in gold on the sides, with another T on the shoes’ tongue.
The Biden campaign used the opportunity to take a shot at Trump, with communications director Michael Tyler mocking the obvious Nike-inspired styling.
Johnathan Hettinger and Carey Gillam, - The New Lede
Stephan:
I have been following and warning you about the pollution of the bodies of Americans, particularly pregnant women, by chemicals used in both industrial chemical monoculture agriculture and home landscaping. It gets very little coverage in television media, and not much more in newspapers. Well, here is yet another study warning Americans to avoid exposure to chemicals like 2,4-D, or Glyphosate. This is particularly true if you are pregnant. Because of the corruption of the U.S. government, however, the EPA has not banned these chemicals, which are outlawed in most other developed nations. So let me advise you again, do not use anything that contains these chemicals, and it you live in a farm state, or near a commercial farm get tested frequently. Frankly, I wouldn’t continue to live near such a farm. As this article describes if you do so you put yourself and your family are risk. And don’t buy anything made by Bayer or Monsanto.
Credit: The New Lede
Pregnant women in a key US farm state are showing increasing amounts of a toxic weedkiller in their urine, a rise that comes alongside climbing use of the chemicals in agriculture, according to a study published on Friday.
The study, led by the Indiana University School of Medicine, showed that 70% of pregnant women tested in Indiana between 2020 and 2022 had a herbicide called dicamba in their urine, up from 28% from a similar analysis for the period 2010-12. The earlier study included women in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.
Notably, the study also found that along with a larger percentage of women showing the presence of dicamba in their bodies, the concentrations of the weed-killing chemical increased more than fourfold.
Both studies found that 100% of the women tested had 2,4-dichloroacetic acid, better known as 2,4-D, in their urine; the more recent study showed detectable, but not significant, increases in concentration levels.
The findings add to a growing body of literature documenting human exposure to chemicals used in agriculture, and various known and potential health impacts. […]
Greenland is becoming green and it should alarm all of us because it is another alarm warning us what climate change is doing. For one thing it tells us sealevels are going to rise, so if you live near a seacoast get yourself prepared, or move. Climate change is happening whether 15% of MAGAts believe it or not.
The Russell Glacier near Kangerlussuaq in west Greenland. Wetlands and shrub areas are growing In places where there was once ice and snow. Credit: Jonathan Carrivick / University of Leeds
The area of Greenland’s ice loss in the past three decades is roughly 36 times the size of New York City — land that is rapidly giving way to wetlands and shrubs, a study published Tuesday shows.
The amount of vegetation in Greenland doubled between the mid-1980s and mid-2010s, as swaths of the country that were once covered in ice and snow were transformed into barren rock, wetlands or shrub area. Wetlands alone quadrupled in that time.
By analyzing satellite imagery, the scientists found that Greenland had lost 28,707 square-kilometers (around 11,000 square-miles) of ice in the three-decade period, and warned of a cascade of impacts that could have serious consequences for climate change and sea level rise.
Warmer air temperatures have driven ice loss, which has in turn raised land temperatures. That has caused the melting of permafrost, a frozen layer just beneath the Earth’s surface and found […]
As White supremacy increases and democracy declines in the United States an increasing number of Black people are moving to Africa, Blaxit it is being called. I see it as yet another sign of what is happening in America in response to criminal Trump and the rise of MAGAtdom, and the Great Schism Trend they are causing.
Since moving to Zanzibar in 2022, Mark and Marlene Bradley have been embracing island life by taking it slow. Credit: Khadija Farah for The New York Times
Jes’ka Washington lives in a six-bedroom house on a hill with avocado trees and a spectacular view, not far from the rabbit farm she runs. For less than $50,000, Shoshana Kirya-Ziraba and her husband built a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house on family farmland with goats, turkeys and about a thousand chickens. Mark and Marlene Bradley now call themselves islanders and the owners of three homes cooled by ocean breezes.
All of them are Black Americans who found their new homes in Africa. They are enjoying the substantially lower cost of living and, more important, they said, the absence of the racism and discrimination they experienced in the United States.
The Covid pandemic and the racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd led some Black Americans to seek a different way of life abroad, in a movement that some are calling Blaxit.
They watch more porn, they have more out-of-wedlock children and a higher divorce rate, and they are in the top 10 states where women and girls are raped and Oklahoma MAGAt Republicans are clear about one thing: women should not have control of their own bodies, and the state should keep a database on those who try.
People gather to protest the first anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization case in Columbus Circle in Washington D.C. Credit: Celal Gunes / Anadolu Agency / Getty
GOP-sponsored bill in Oklahoma, HB 3216, passed a legislative hurdle on Wednesday when it passed out of committee. HB 3216 would ban emergency contraception in the state and create a state database of people who have had an abortion.
“If the bill doesn’t get changed with the current wording then IUDs and Plan B could be inaccessible to women,” said State Rep. Trish Ranson (D).
Ranson also noted that she found it “highly concerning” that the legislation would seemingly allow the state to “track” people who have abortions. “I believe that there is an opportunity for tracking women. I believe that there is a major privacy issue that we should be concerned about,” she said.
Oklahoma currently has a near-total ban on abortion, permitting the procedure only under exceptionally restricted circumstances. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the state’s abortion policies are currently classified as “most restrictive.”
Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, Assistant Professor of Sociology - University of Oklahoma | Associate Professor of Sociology - Clemson University - American Sociological Association
Stephan:
An ex-Mormon reader wrote to tell me that I was missing an important trend, the fact that conservative religious groups and Republicans are the biggest consumers of pornography and that Mormons were such big porn consumers that there was even a special channel for Mormon porn. Those are pretty inflammatory statements but if she was correct it was a trend of astonishing hypocrisy going on that I had completely missed. So I did some research and it turns out she was right. The same people who are hysterically nasty to LGBTQ people trying to control their lives are, in fact, the same people who spend hours watching porn. Article after article reported this (do your own Google) but I decided if I were going to report this in SR, it had to be peer-reviewed research so it was as reliable as possible. Well, here it is, and this is the conclusion: “However, interactions between individual-level evangelical identity and state-level political conservatism indicate that evangelicals who live in more politically conservative states report the highest rates of pornography consumption.” So the next time you hear some conservative ranting on about LGBTQ folk, ask them how much porn they watch.
Abstract
Figure 1. Relationship between evangelical Protestantism, recency of pornography viewing, and state-level political conservatism.
Recent studies have found that state-level religious and political conservatism is positively associated with various aggregate indicators of interest in pornography. Such studies have been limited, however, in that they either did not include data measuring actual consumption patterns and/or did not include data on individuals (risking the ecological fallacy). This study overcomes both limitations by incorporating state-level data with individual-level data and a measure of pornography consumption from a large nationally representative survey. Hierarchical linear regression analyses show that, in the main, state-level religious and political characteristics do not predict individual-level pornography consumption, and individual-level religiosity and political conservatism predict less recent pornography consumption. However, interactions between individual-level evangelical identity and state-level political conservatism indicate that evangelicals who live in more politically conservative states report the highest rates of pornography consumption. These findings thus provide more nuanced support for previous research linking religious and political conservatism with greater pornography consumption.
Within the past few decades scholars have sought to understand how broader community norms and cultures, generally measured at the state level, might correlate with the presence of pornography in those […]
The Republican attack on President Biden, claiming he had accepted a bribe was centered on the testimony to the FBI of Alexander Smirnov who has just been indicted for lying in his testimony. As a result, the whole Republican case against Biden falls apart, not that I think that will make any difference to the MAGAts.
FBI informant Alexander Smirnov indicted for lying under oath
The confidential source at the center of allegations being promoted by House Republicans that President Biden accepted a bribe has been arrested and charged with making false statements to the FBI.
The allegations risk unwinding the House GOP probe into President Biden. In making their case, GOP lawmakers have frequently pointed to conversations the confidential source, Alexander Smirnov, had with the FBI relaying that the head of Ukrainian energy company Burisma told him he had paid both President Biden and his son Hunter Biden $5 million.
The indictment alleges Smirnov made up the allegations given his opposition to President Biden’s candidacy.
“As alleged in the indictment, the events that Smirnov first reported to the FBI Agent in June 2020 were fabrications,” the Justice Department wrote in a press release announcing the grand jury indictment.
“The indictment alleges that the defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1 after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his […]
Mike Colias, Nora Eckert, and Sean McLain, Reporters - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
The EV vehicle market is crashing, and this article gives the details. Why is this happening? In my opinion, because people who buy EVs discover that there is no nationwide system for charging them. Why does this not exist? Because under criminal Trump, in contrast to Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s administration where there was a national program to build the interstate highway system, Trump made no effort to create a national program to replace gas stations. What should have happened was a national program to restructure major roads so that they would charge the vehicles driving on them. The truth is Americans who support MAGAt politicians don’t seem to understand that the Republican Party no longer exists as it once did. It has been replaced a cult that worships Donald Trump, and he has no interest in fostering wellbeing.
Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickups being assembled in Dearborn, Mich. Credit: Andia / Universal / Getty
The Michigan plant where the F-150 Lightning electric truck is built used to vibrate with excitement.
President Biden visited in 2021 and test drove the blazing-fast pickup. Before the first ones even started rolling off the assembly line in the spring of 2022, Ford said it would expand the factory to quadruple the number it could build.
That energy is rapidly fading. Ford is cutting the plant’s output by half, and workers are relocating to other facilities, mostly those making gas-powered pickups and SUVs.
The sudden change “was a little bit of a shocker,” said Matthew Schulte, who inspects trucks at the factory in suburban Detroit. “Reality has set in.”
As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles. In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.
A confluence of factors had led many auto executives to see the potential for […]
