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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.
Here is some good news about how, in spite of the Congressional bribery and all the rest of it, we are still slowly making our way out of the carbon era. Here is the evidence.
Edwards Sanborn Solar Storage project. Credit, Mortenson
The nation’s largest solar energy and storage project came online in California last week, offering 875 megawatt-hours of solar capacity, and 3 gigawatt-hours of storage.
Partially located on Edwards Air Force Base grounds in Kern County, California, the Edwards & Sanborn Solar + Energy Storage project is expected to provide the California grid with enough renewable energy to power 233,000 homes.
A half-dozen companies teamed up with the Department of Defense for the project, including LG, Samsung, Terra-Gen, Mortenson, and others, and it consists of 1.9 million US-made solar panels.
“Now fully operational, this facility is a transformational project in the industry and is providing resiliency to the grid,” said Brian Gorda, vice president of engineering at Terra-Gen. “The Mortenson team was tasked with an extremely difficult goal to build this project, and they proved to be the right partner for the job.”
The farm spans 4,600 acres of sunny desert flatland. Edwards & Sanborn will send its electricity to the city of San Jose, Southern California Edison, the utility companies of Pacific […]
This article describes the most perverse greed in modern history. It illustrates exactly what is wrong with American capitalism which places profit above all other considerations. Let me be clear. I am not against capitalism and profit-making. I simply think that the facts are clear. Fostering wellbeing must always be the first priority, it is always the better choice. A company or a person can make a profit as long as they make fostering wellbeing their first priority. The historical proof of this is clear and unequivocal.
Charles David Keeling worked with scientists from the U.S. Weather Bureau and NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory to measure CO2 levels in the atmosphere beginning in 1958, leading to the widely known Keeling Curve. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Newly discovered documents confirm that the petroleum and automobile industries funded the early climate science of Charles David Keeling at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1954 to 1956. Keeling became known for the “Keeling Curve,” which demonstrated the upward trajectory of the planet’s carbon dioxide levels.
The documents show that industry leaders were aware of the potential impacts of fossil fuels on the environment from early on.
Keeling traveled throughout the coastal areas, desert, forests and grasslands of the western United States measuring background levels of carbon, DeSmog said in a detailed report.
A series of experiments atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii led to his famous curve — the foundation of today’s conception of human-caused climate change.
I don’t think Nikki Haley has any chance of becoming the Republican nominee unless one of the slower-than-slugs courts convicts criminal Trump, and the issue suddenly becomes: will he serve prison time or will it be house arrest, and in either case he is rendered unable to campaign. But that apart Haley makes it clear, as this article describes, that she is just another MAGAt cultist who does not support democracy.
Nikki Haley discussed Donald Trump purposefully butchering her given first name during her appearance on “The Breakfast Club.” Credit: Nick Ciofalo
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley defended the rights of states to secede from the country if they chose to do so, though stressed it was unlikely to happen.
In an interview with the influential hip hop morning show The Breakfast Club that aired on Wednesday, the former U.N. Ambassador made the case that the Constitution allows for secession — a declaration that is, at best, hotly debated by legal scholars but also previouslyrejected by the Supreme Court. She framed the concept as a logical end point for politicians who believe in state’s rights.
They can do that. But I don’t think that — if that whole state says we don’t want to be part of America anymore. I mean, that’s their decision to make.”
Haley is not the first politician to embrace the right — or concept— of secession. Then Texas Gov. Rick Perry jokingly suggested that Texas […]
Here is the factual future of the pandemic generation, and the United States as a nation. We are becoming the least educated, least literate, least numerate, least employable, and least competent country in the developed world. We have a crisis that, as this article describes in detail, almost no one in politics is even thinking about, let alone doing anything about: Large numbers of children are even bothering to go to school.
“This is not anything like truancy. We come from a place of support,” said Shepria Johnson, seen waiting outside an apartment to check on a student. Credit: Brittany Greeson / ProPublica
On a cold, clear weekday morning in early December, Shepria Johnson pulled up to a small house in Ecorse, Michigan, in an SUV with a decal on the driver’s door that read “Student Wholeness Team.” She looked at an app on her phone. It was her third of 10 visits that morning, and she was there to check on a girl and a boy, 11 and 9, who had missed enough days of school to put them on a list of “chronically absent” students at Grandport Academy, in Ecorse, an industrial suburb of Detroit.
In case there was no one home, Johnson wrote the students’ names on a form letter and addressed the envelope to “the parent of Jisaiah and King.” She wrote “parent,” avoiding the plural as she had seen schools do. “If it’s a one-parent household, that might get touchy.”
About a week ago I got an email from a reader who had a friend whose daughter had someone create and post to social media a series of fake porn images of the girl, in which her face had been transferred onto the body of a woman whose body shape and hair color were similar. She said her friend thought it was done by a boy in the girl’s school when she turned him down for a date, but no one could prove it, and he denied it. The woman asked me to do something about this trend. Then I read about some MAGAt doing the same thing to Taylor Swift. I have done several hours of research now on this trend, and am appalled at how large an issue this is. Particularly, when considered with another crisis trend, children not even going to school, just staying home or with a friend and spending their days on social media.
Illustration by James Marshall / Getty
Google’s and Microsoft’s search engines have a problem with deepfake porn videos. Since deepfakes emerged half a decade ago, the technology has consistently been used to abuse and harass women—using machine learning to morph someone’s head into pornography without their permission. Now the number of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos is growing at an exponential rate, fueled by the advancement of AI technologies and an expanding deepfake ecosystem.
A new analysis of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos, conducted by an independent researcher and shared with WIRED, shows how pervasive the videos have become. At least 244,625 videos have been uploaded to the top 35 websites set up either exclusively or partially to host deepfake porn videos in the past seven years, according to the researcher, who requested anonymity to avoid being targeted online.
Over the first nine months of this year, 113,000 videos were uploaded to the websites—a 54 percent increase on the 73,000 videos uploaded in all of 2022. By the end of this year, the analysis forecasts, more videos will have been produced in […]
Henry A. Giroux , McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. - truthout
Stephan:
I listened to interviews with a number of Trumpers over the past few days, from teenagers to older men and women, and was very saddened by what I heard. Unless criminal Trump and the other Republicans are defeated I am not sure the United States is going to survive in any condition I would care to live in. We are very close to the end unless all of us who support democracy vote and get everyone we know to vote — and only for Democrats. The Republican Party has become a very nasty cult. Henry Giroux lays it out very well.
Fascist racist Trump speaks to the media outside a polling location at Londonderry High School in Londonderry, New Hampshire, on January 23, 2024. Credit: Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty
This week’s revelation that Donald Trump is already plotting new ways to try to put himself permanently above the law is just the latest reminder of the looming threat of lawless and emboldened right-wing forces in the United States. Trump’s new scheme to expand a Nixon-era policy memo to prohibit the Justice Department from prosecuting presidents, even after they leave office, is just a tiny hint of the greater threat. In recent months, several scholars have sounded the alarm that the United States is “sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.” The concern is not unfounded given that in his run for the presidency in 2024, Trump has boldly telegraphed his aspirations to impose an authoritarian future on the United States. He has repeatedly injected authoritarian language, extremist ideas and threats of violence into the mainstream. Moreover, he has done so to “create a climate of trepidation and powerlessness […]
I have been warning you for years about the death and misery that would arise caused by climate change. The Republican Party has been blocking significant policies to prepare for climate change, and about a third of MAGAt world still doesn’t really accept the implications of climate change. Well, here is a first report. And this is just the very beginning.
A Somali woman and child wait to be given a spot to settle at a camp for displaced people amid a drought on the outskirts of Dollow, Somalia on Sept. 20, 2022. Credit: Jerome Delay / AP
In the early 2000s, as climate denialism was infecting political institutions around the world like a malevolent plague, an Australian epidemiologist named Anthony McMichael took on a peculiar and morbid scientific question: How many people were being killed by climate change? McMichael’s research team tallied up how many lives had been lost to diarrheal disease, malnutrition, malaria, cardiovascular disease (a proxy for heat-related illness), and flooding, worldwide, in the year 2000. The researchers then used computer modeling to parse out the percentage of those deaths that were attributable to climate change. Climate change, they estimated, was responsible for 166,000 lives lost that year.
The world has changed a great deal since. Climate denialism is no longer the world’s de facto climate policy, in large part because the impacts of rising temperatures have become impossible […]
There is so much bad news, that I thought readers might be interested in these new archaeological discoveries that rewrite the history of our ancient past. We think we have it all worked out, only to have new discoveries rewrite the book.
Credit: Baker, Rigaud, et al.
Your choice in jewelry can say a lot about you: That you follow a particular religion, graduated with an engineering degree, or you’re just a fan of the latest viral aesthetic.
Now, new research shows that jewelry was just as important for distinguishing different cultures in ancient Europe as it is for signaling your allegiance to a particular group today.
The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, reveals the existence of nine distinct groups that were lost to time and haven’t conclusively shown up in genetic data. Through the study of ancient artifacts, researchers were able to identify previously-unknown cultures living across Europe between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago, showing the power of these artifacts in writing our complex human histories.
The research focused on people who archeologists had previously thought all belonged to a single group called the Gravettians—Ice Age hunter-gatherers who braved the bitter cold and created some of the most iconic artifacts we know about today, including voluptuous sculptures like the
