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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.
As I have warned you the weaponization of misinformation aided by AI is threatening democracies all over the world. It is getting harder and harder to get accurate information about anything. It isn’t just China, although this report focuses on that. It is also and particularly, for me, the christofascists. I am spending more hours each day than I used to because I have to be sure that what I am posting for you is accurate and reliable. Also, SR is under daily attack, to a point where Beth, my wonderful webmaster of many years and I, spent an hour today on the phone trying to work out what we can do to make SR more secure. It is just getting very difficult and more expensive, and SR is just one information site out of the many. It is going to change our culture and Congress is doing nothing to help.
Credit: Getty / iStock
Faking a political endorsement in Taiwan ahead of its crucial January election, sharing memes to amplify outrage over Japan’s disposal of nuclear wastewater, and spreading conspiracy theories that claim the U.S. government was behind Hawaii’s wildfire and Kentucky’s train derailment last year. These are just some of the ways that China’s influence operations have ramped up their use of artificial intelligence to sow disinformation and stoke discord worldwide over the last seven months, according to a new report released Friday by Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
Microsoft has observed notable trends from state-backed actors, the report said, “that demonstrate not only doubling down on familiar targets, but also attempts to use more sophisticated influence techniques to achieve their goals.” In particular, Chinese influence actors “experimented with new media” and “continued to refine AI-generated or AI-enhanced content.”
Among the operations highlighted in the report was a “a notable uptick in content featuring Taiwanese political figures ahead of the January 13 presidential and […]
Ron Lieber, Contributing Writer - The New York Times
Stephan:
If you lived in Norway as one of a number of possible examples your healthcare would cost you nothing, being covered by federal taxes, and your college would also be without out of pocket costs. Why because in Norway the policies of the government are designed to foster wellbeing for every Norweigan, whereas in the U.S. both healthcare and colleges are structured for maximum profit. One hundred thousand dollars for a year of college, to be honest, I don’t know how an average middle-class family could do it. Even the average price seems unbelievable to me. As this report notes, “According to the College Board, the average 2023-24 list price for tuition, fees, housing and food was $56,190 at private, nonprofit four-year schools. At four-year public colleges, in-state students saw an average $24,030 sticker price.”
Illustration by Robert Neubecker / The New York Times
It was only a matter of time before a college would have the nerve to quote its cost of attendance at nearly $100,000 a year. This spring, we’re catching our first glimpse of it.
One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student showed an all-in price — room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop — of $98,426. A student making three trips home to Los Angeles or London from the Nashville campus during the year could hit six figures.
This eye-popping sum is an anomaly. Only a tiny fraction of college-going students will pay anything close to this anytime soon, and about 35 percent of Vanderbilt students — those who get neither need-based nor merit aid — pay the full list price.
But a few dozen other colleges and universities that reject the vast majority of applicants will probably arrive at this threshold within a few years. Their willingness to […]
Israel under Netanyahu is turning itself into an international pariah for the genocide it is perpetrating. Its response is social media misinformation and sending undercover agents to American universities. Read this account and be appalled. The stupidity of these policies, I think, is going to create an anti-Israeli pushback, particularly amongst the young. It will affect Jews all over the world because most people will not be able to distinguish between Jews and Zionism as this report describes. I think Biden is also making a major miscalculation.
Demonstrators march in solidarity with two Columbia University student groups which were recently banned from campus for their support of Palestine, on November 15, 2023, outside of Columbia University in New York City. Credit: Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty
As worldwide protest escalates over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, academic freedom and free speech are under all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from university administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but now directly from the highest levels of the Israeli state. In a story that has been largely ignored in the Western press, the Israeli news website Ynetnews, one of the largest media outlets in the country, reported that the Israeli government has launched what appears to be a wide-ranging covert campaign to harass and intimidate students, faculty, and administrators into silence.
According to the report, the Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora Affairs ministries have established a task force to carry out “shaming and pressuring” operations at U.S. universities. The task force, chaired […]
Humanity just doesn’t get it. We do not recognize the Matrix of Consciousness and that all life is interconnected and interdependent and our first priority must be to foster wellbeing at every level. As a result of our ignorance, we are cutting down the forests and destroying the ecosystem of the oceans. We need an awakening to the truth of our reality, and it has to start with each of us.
A quarry in the Cerro Blanco Forest the outskirts of Guayaquil, Ecuador, in April 2023. Credit: Marcos Pin / AFP / Getty
The tropics lost the equivalent of 10 soccer (football) fields of forest per minute last year due to logging, human-set fires and climate change, according to a new report from the World Resources Institute (WRI).
Why it matters: Declines in rainforest deforestation rates in Brazil and Colombia were counteracted by increases in other countries, which set the world further off track from meeting forest loss goals critical to curbing climate change.
Everything about the American tax system is rigged to favor the rich in everyway. Here are the actual facts, and the true story.
IRS commissioner Charles Rettig. Credit: Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Newscom
Liar, liar: Back in August 2022, when some of us were fresh-faced and naive, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assured us that their $80 billion infusion of cash (over the course of a decade, so they could hire some 87,000 new workers, including but not limited to men with guns) would actually be a means of targeting millionaire and billionaire scofflaws, not ordinary middle-class earners.
At the time, I voiced skepticism: Correspondence audits and other audits on low- and middle-income earners are simply the easiest to conduct. The IRS has historically spent an awful lot of time targeting these groups, not monied tax dodgers who can hire teams of accountants, so why would this time be different?
I have been telling readers since I started SR 33 years ago that we should stop any development of civilian nuclear energy. After serious research at both a classified and unclassified level I became convinced that the network of nuclear waste sites was going to become a major crisis at some point because of the level of maintenance required. Not only are the reactors dangerous, as Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown, but that nuclear waste issue was, and is, a constant danger. Well, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has now issued its warning, and I think we should take what these scientists are saying very seriously. These are the men and women who have specialized in this area of research and understand it best.
A spent fuel pool at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on December 1, 2014. Credit: US NRC / Flickr
Irradiated fuel assemblies—essentially bundles of fuel rods with zirconium alloy cladding sheathing uranium dioxide fuel pellets—that have been removed from a nuclear reactor (spent fuel) generate a great deal of heat from the radioactive decay of the nuclear fuel’s unstable fission products. This heat source is termed decay heat. Spent fuel is so thermally hot and radioactive that it must be submerged in circulating water and cooled in a storage pool (spent fuel pool) for several years before it can be moved to dry storage.
The dangers of reactor meltdowns are well known. But spent fuel can also overheat and burn in a storage pool if its coolant water is lost, thereby potentially releasing large amounts of radioactive material into the air. This type of accident is known as a spent fuel pool fire or zirconium fire, named after the fuel cladding. All commercial nuclear power plants in the United States—and nearly all in the world—have at least one spent fuel pool on site. A fire at an overloaded […]
Sasha Chavkin, Caitlin Gilbert, Anjali Tsui and Anahad O’Connor, Reporters - The Washingtdon Post
Stephan:
I went to the pharmacy today and had to stand in a line for over 30 minutes. While there I noticed something that has become ever more prevalent: the number of obese people, particularly women. I counted 27 people, a lot for the rural area in which I live, and 19 of them were obese. Most alarming to me were two girls about 15 or 16, maybe 5’4″, each weighing I would guess over 200 pounds, thighs nearly as big as my wife’s waist. When you travel to Europe or Asia you can always spot the Americans because of their obesity. When you look at the data you also see that Americans have a life span about five years shorter than people in other developed countries. We have the highest obesity percentage of any developed nation, and more people proportionally die from obesity than any other developed country. As this report describes, the food companies love this obesity and spend millions of dollars promoting anti-diet schemes through “nutritionists” and social apps.
At the Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo in Denver last fall, dietitians waited in line to climb a giant yellow General Mills cereal box and slide into a bowl of plushie Cheerios. Credit: Joanna Kulesza / The Washington Post / The Examination
Jaye Rochon struggled to lose weight for years. But she felt as if a burden had lifted when she discovered YouTube influencers advocating “health at every size” — urging her to stop dieting and start listening to her “mental hunger.”
She stopped avoiding favorite foods such as cupcakes and Nutella. “They made me feel like I was safe eating whatever the hell I wanted,” said Rochon, 51, a video editor in Wausau, Wisc. In two months, she regained 50 pounds. As her weight neared 300 pounds, she began to worry about her health.
The videos that Rochon encountered are part of the “anti-diet” movement, a social media juggernaut that began as an effort to combat […]
Here is some good news. We are making real progress in converting to renewable energy sources. The problem I see is that the national energy grid is aging and increasingly vulnerable to failure. My hope is that in the U.S. we develop regional and local grids.
Credit: Adobe
When you live far from the sprawling fields befitting utility-scale solar and wind farms, it’s easy to feel like clean energy isn’t coming online fast enough. But renewables have grown at a staggering rate since 2014 and now account for 22 percent of the nation’s electricity. Solar alone has grown an impressive eightfold in 10 years.
The sun and the wind have been the country’s fastest growing sources of energy over the past decade, according to a report released by the nonprofit Climate Central on Wednesday. Meanwhile, coal power has declined sharply, and methane use all but leveled off. With the Inflation Reduction Act poised to kick that growth curve higher with expanded tax credits for manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, the most optimistic projections suggest that the country is getting ever closer to achieving its 2030 and 2035 clean energy goals.
“I think the rate at which renewables have been able to grow is just something that most people don’t recognize,” said […]
