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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.
This is very alarming bad news, telling us, yet again, that our form of chemical industrial monoculture agriculture, augmented by climate change and the destruction of milkweed, their food source is destroying America’s ecosystem. The Monarch annual migration may seem a small thing, but it is not.
Monarch butterflies during overwintering season at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán, Mexico Crsedit: Sylvain Cordier / Gamma-Rapho / Getty
The estimated number of monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico for winter has reached its second-lowest level ever for the 2023 to 2024 overwintering season. The estimate, based on the size of the butterflies’ hibernating forest area, has dropped by about 59% from the previous year, according to officials.
Experts are pointing to extensive heat and drought as well as climate change for the major decline.
Recent years have seen some hope for the migrating monarch butterflies, with a 35% increase in the number of butterflies observed overwintering in Mexico during the 2021 to 2022 season compared to the previous year.
But monarch butterflies face three primary threats, including habitat loss for their breeding and overwintering; the use of pesticides, which can be toxic to the butterflies or can kill their food source, milkweed; and climate change, which can shift their migratory patterns. By the 2022 to 2023 overwintering season, World Wildlife Fund reported a 22% drop in the amount of overwintering […]
JENNIFER C. BERKSHIRE and JACK SCHNEIDER, Education Podcast Host | Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst - The Nation
Stephan:
The MAGAt Community, working through the Republican Party which they control, is trying to restructure or even eliminate public schools that students can attend without fees. Why? Because they don’t want fact-based education of children. They want right-wing indoctrination, and some of those advocating this want to make a profit from such a transition. That’s what many charter schools and private schools are about. Americans are already the least literate population amongst the developed democratic states. Nationwide, on average, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 79% of U.S. adults were literate to some degree, while 21% were illiterate in 2022. Sadly, the majority, 54% of those who had some measure of literacy only had it to below sixth-grade level. We are a country on a downward education spiral, particularly in Red states, as this article lays out.
Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, speaks out against income tax cuts and election law changes passed by the Arizona Legislature in Phoenix on September 28, 2017. Credit: Matt York / AP
Bait-and-switch is an old retail tactic. You lure customers in with promises of a deep discount, only to inform them that the deal has a catch. The real price tag, it turns out, is quite a bit more.
Though it took supporters of school vouchers a while to catch on, they’ve learned quickly that the trick works just as well in education policy as it does in retail sales. Pick a price that will get people in the door, and then break the news once you’ve got them where you want them.
In Arizona, taxpayers are now staring down a $400 million shortfall, with an even bigger bill coming due next year. How did the Grand Canyon State go from sitting on a huge cash reserve to facing a rising tide of red ink? Simple. Voucher proponents suggested that paying for private […]
This is the kind of thing that is going on in school districts around the country, and it is not a story that makes America look good. What all this says to me is that unless people who want education to be based on facts not indoctrination in falsehoods, and who support democracy get out and work for those values at their local level, we are not going to be a world leader in the future. We are not going to be a well-educated population, and we will probably not be a democracy. If you want your children and grandchildren to grow up in a country that resembles the country you knew, you better get involved at your local level and see that there is real fact-based education in your schools and that democracy survives.
School board meeting Credit: Steven M. Fale
Last spring, when the odds seemed far longer, Bob Cousineau, a social studies teacher at Pennridge High School, predicted that whatever happened in his embattled district would become a national “case study” one way or another. It would either create “the blueprint” for outside political interests to enact a complete takeover of local public schools, he said, or “the blueprint for how to stand up to it.”
For much of the past two years, Pennridge School District, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—one of Philadelphia’s suburban swing counties—has served as an experiment in how far conservatives can pull public schools right.
Until this past November, its nine school board members had all been elected as Republicans, including a five-member majority reportedly affiliated with the activist group Moms for Liberty. Policies introduced by the board and district administrators in recent years have been sweeping: Two separate groups focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues were shut down; LGBTQ+ “Pride” rainbows were banned alongside other “advocacy” symbols; curriculum was repeatedly changed […]
Here, in my opinion, is a very insightful article by a Boomer generation writer about his generation. I am not a Boomer being older, but I lived through and remember the history of that generation, and consider it a tragic one for the reasons James Risen lays out in his exegetic essay. History is not going to treat the Boomers well.
Criminal Trump drives a golf cart at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, N.J. Credit: Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty
When the obituary of the baby-boom generation is finally written, they’ll have to mention Donald Trump in the very first paragraph to explain how a cohort that began with such idealism and promise turned so toxic.
The generation that took to the streets in anti-war protests and civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s and championed the environmental and women’s movements in the 1970s has now retreated to right-wing retirement enclaves in Florida, where Fox News is always on in the background. Boomers drove jam-packed VW vans in a haze of drugs to Woodstock; now they scoot around The Villages in golf carts festooned with Trump flags.
The boomer rallying cry of the 1960s was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Boomers today can’t stop whining about how young people are too “woke.”
I’m a baby boomer myself, and I no longer recognize my own generation. A big slice of white boomers are now living on hate. They hate nearly everything and […]
Michael Sasso, - Bloomberg. News / Microsoft Start
Stephan:
Here is an interesting report on what has been happening to population movements over the last few years largely as a result of housing prices and mortgage rates going dramatically up. People are moving into the South, particularly Texas and Florida, two of the most poorly governed states in the Union. I am going to pay close attention to what effect these movementa have on politics in the states where people are moving. I am also going to watch for people moving out of those states as climate change more dramatically alters our environment and states like Florida begin to have large sections of the state go underwater.
Americans’ decades-long love affair with the US West appears to be souring as high housing costs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle encourage migration to the South, a new analysis shows.
The share of the US population living in the West grew steadily over the decades before peaking at about 23.8% in 2019. Since then it flattened and began to decline, reaching 23.6% last year, according to a Bank of America Institute report citing US Census Bureau data.
The South, despite a slight dip in 2020, has continued to grow to its current 38.9% share of the nation’s population. The shares of Americans living in the Northeast and Midwest continued their decades-long slides.
The bank attributes much of the West’s migration woes to unaffordable housing. There’s a close relationship between a metropolitan area’s median mortgage payment and that area’s change of population last year, the bank’s research shows. Mortgage payments in Pacific Coast metropolitan areas all exceed payments in other regions.
Generally, the loss of population “is more of a Pacific story,” since more inland metro […]
OLIVIA OLANDER, MACKENZIE WILKES, KATY O'DONNELL, DANIEL PAYNE and RUTH READER, - Politico
Stephan:
Here is a good overview of what AI is doing to U.S. society. It is much more extensive and pervasive than I think most Americans realize, and we are just at the beginning of this transition.
Illustrations by Anna Kim / Politico
Artificial intelligence isn’t just a niche tool for cheating on homework or generating bizarre and deceptive images. It’s already humming along in unseen and unregulated ways that are touching millions of Americans who may never have heard of ChatGPT, Bard or other buzzwords.
A growing share of businesses, schools, and medical professionals have quietly embraced generative AI, and there’s really no going back. It is being used to screen job candidates, tutor kids, buy a home and dole out medical advice.
The Biden administration is trying to marshal federal agencies to assess what kind of rules make sense for the technology. But lawmakers in Washington, state capitals and city halls have been slow to figure out how to protect people’s privacy and guard against echoing the human biases baked into much of the data AIs are trained on.
“There are things that we can use AI for that will really benefit people, but there are lots of ways that AI can harm people and perpetuate inequalities and discrimination that we’ve […]
Silja J.A. Talvi , Investigative Journalist - truthout
Stephan:
The United States has and has had for decades the largest number of people incarcerated in the world — roughly 1.8 million men and women at the end of 2023. And the conditions in American prisons are amongst the worst in the developed world and getting worse. Here is a major trend that is going on in U.S. prisons. I find it humiliating for the country and yet another example of how poorly the U.S. government federally and at the state level functions.
Illustration by Ayo Walker for truthout
Every morning, Mary Frances Barbee wakes up and experiences a “microsecond of happiness before the terror sets in.”
Barbee had a heart attack, transient ischemic attack and then a stroke after her sons were incarcerated. She puts on a brave front when they call.
“I wonder what they are going through, will they be able to call today, and how long until they are out of lockdown again,” Barbee, 71, says as she chokes back tears. “Will it be for just three hours after many days or weeks locked inside? They have no exercise. Four, six or 12 days without a shower. It is inhumane treatment on a daily basis.”
What Barbee is living through is something that millions of people inside and outside razor wire are also experiencing: The purgatory of endless prison “lockdowns” where prisoners are forced to live in isolation that typically exceeds punitive segregation conditions.
An exclusive, eight-month investigation for Truthout has revealed that at least 33 U.S. state prison systems and the majority of federal medium-, high- and maximum-security prisons […]
Here is some more good news about what is becoming a growing trend in American agriculture. With all the bad news we all see every day this trend is one of the positive wellbeing fostering developments.
A purple daikon radish grown at Ollin Farms in Longmont, Colo., and other vegetables are prepared to be served at a meeting to discuss support for small Colorado farmers Credit: Rachel Woolf for NPR
In a chilly storeroom piled high with fall produce, Jimena Cordero is chopping up vegetables and fanning them out onto trays.
Cordero is the farm manager at Ollin Farms, not far from Boulder, Colo. — she’s put together bright pink and purple radishes, apple, fresh turnips.
“This is a green luobo,” she explains, as she expertly cuts the oblong radish into rounds.
These locally grown vegetables aren’t just pretty. They’re being prepared to make a case to state lawmakers at a meeting later that afternoon.
“You can have a super colorful veggie tray for a meeting, and everybody can get on the same vibration, eating the same good, healthy food,” says Cordero’s dad, Mark Guttridge, who started this farm with his wife, Kena, 17 years ago.
That vibration and the good, healthy food are part of the case Guttridge wants to make that farmers can play an […]
