IF YOU ENJOY SR AND FIND IT USEFUL WOULD YOU PLEASE DONATE
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.
Another story about the depth of corruption in the United States. America is perhaps the most corrupt democracy if one can still call us a democracy, in the world. Were is not for our military power we would be considered a failing state, and if the election goes to the Trump christofascist Party (TCP) (former Republican Party) it will be game over. This is all coming down to the American voters. So how are you planning to vote.
Leonard Leo (left) shakes hands with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Leo has been called former President Donald Trump’s “court whisperer” for helping to choose and advocate for his Supreme Court nominees. Credit: Sait Serkan Gurbuz / AP
Allies of Leonard Leo have mounted a monthslong offensive against the man investigating the judicial activist’s network: Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb.
Since news of the probe broke last August, the GOP chairs of powerful congressional committees launched their own investigation of Schwalb’s investigation; conservative media wrote articles criticizing Schwalb on unrelated crime issues — based on a social media post from a top Leo lieutenant; and a group of his Republican law enforcement peers sent letters warning Schwalb to stand down.
Leo is the Federalist Society co-chair who has been called former President Donald Trump’s “court whisperer” for helping to choose and advocate for his Supreme Court nominees. His aligned network of tax-exempt nonprofits is also a major contributor to Project 2025, an initiative seeking to create a “government in waiting” for another Trump term.
The white-hot pressure campaign targeting Schwalb attests to the growing range of Leo’s influence. Beyond its work in promoting […]
Lauren Weber and Sabrina Malhi, Accountability Reporter | Infant and Maternal Health Issues Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
The weaponization of misinformation, and the drive to control women and girls has entered a new phase, attacking birth control. The result is going to be an increase in unplanned pregnancies which, in blue states is going to mean an increase in abortions and, in Red states, increased anxiety, stress, and maternal deaths. This is yet another manifestation of The Great Schism Trend. We are becoming an increasingly dysfunctional nation in which fostering wellbeing is hardly a consideration, let alone a priority.
Illustration by Miki Kim / The Washington Post
Search for“birth control” on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety.
Instead, many social media influencers recommend “natural” alternatives, such as timing sex to menstrual cycles — a less effective birth-control method that doctors warn could result in unwanted pregnancies in a country where abortion is now banned or restricted in nearly half the states.
Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence. While doctors say hormonal contraception — which includes birth-control pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) —is safe and effective, they worry the profession’s long-standing lack of transparency about some of the serious but rare side effects has left many patients seeking information from unqualified online communities.
Criminal Trump makes no attempt to hide what he is planning, or who he brings into his administration if he is re-elected. If American actually do vote this monster back into the presidency then it will be the end of America as a country with any honorable ethical standards or a democracy, and maybe that is what is going to happen. The Roman empire came to an end, the Russian Tsarist system came to an end, the French monarchy and the Chinese emperors came to an end. History makes it clear that when the consciousness of a people changes so does their culture. I actually think what will happen is we will retain a symbolic federal government but that we will actually break into two countries with real power devolving to the states, and internationally America will become another failed state like Russia or North Korea.
Paul Manafort, Christina Bobb, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer. Photo illustration: Shoshana Gordon / Axios. Photos: Yana Paskova, John Lamparski, Gabby Jones / Bloomberg, Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty
Sidelined characters from former President Trump’s past campaigns — “crazies,” some of his top advisers call them — are reattaching themselves to his inner circle now that he’s locked up the Republican nomination.
Why it matters:Trump’s 2024 campaign has been notable for its rigor: Top advisers have largely steered clear of the most controversial far-righters who surrounded Trump in the past. But ex-advisers, conspiracy theorists and convicted felons are now knocking on the campaign’s door — and some are getting in.
They’re returning as Trump more aggressively touts Jan. 6 rioters as “patriots,” ramps up his racist, incendiary rhetoric — and embraces some of his most provocative loyalists.
Zoom in: In recent weeks, several of these loyalists have moved to rejoin his team or have had a bigger presence at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s team is in talks to hire 2016 campaign advisers Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, The Washington Post and The New York Times first reported.
Manafort spent two years in prison on a 7½-year […]
The good news part of this story is that Governor Newsom and the Democrats in California are trying to make decent eyecare available to more low-income people. They are trying to foster wellbeing within America’s appallingly bad illness profit system. The bad news, of course, is this is another example of how awful our healthcare system is.
Credit: Gregory Bull / AP
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA — When Hunter Morgan, OD, bought an optometry practice in Southern California 3 years ago, one of the first things he did was start seeing patients who use Medicaid — the government-funded health insurance program for low-income people.
The previous owners had not accepted patients on Medicaid, which covers roughly a third of California’s 39 million residents. But Morgan felt he had a responsibility to serve people in need.
Just 5 months later, Morgan said, he had to stop treating Medicaid patients because of the paltry pay. He charges $175 for eye exams, but the most he could get from Medicaid was about $40. That made it difficult to pay his staff and pricey rent in the upscale beach community of Encinitas, 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of San Diego.
“We couldn’t function that way,” he said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and his Democratic allies in the state Legislature have greatly increased the number of people on Medicaid, including all eligible adults in the state who are in the country without legal permission opens in a new tab or window. But while California’s […]
Here we have another good news story arising from work being done by Democrats. It amazes me that working-class TCPers seem so willfully ignorant that they don’t even recognize work being done to foster their wellbeing. But they don’t. They still support criminal Trump and the Trump Christofascist Party (TCP).
Peak bloom cherry blossoms frame the U.S. Capitol dome on the first full day of spring on March 20, 2024. Credit: Bill Clark / CQ-ROLL CALL / Getty
The US is the only wealthy country in the world that doesn’t guarantee time off for workers.
A group of congressional Democrats has introduced a bicameral bill this week that would establish a federal guarantee for paid time off for workers across the U.S. and end the U.S.’s status as the only wealthy country in the world that doesn’t guarantee the benefit to its workforce.
On Wednesday, a group of House Democrats led by Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-Rhode Island) introduced the Protected Time Off Act, which would guarantee full-time workers no less than two weeks of paid leave annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is also introducing the proposal in the Senate.
Under the bill, workers would earn at least one hour of paid time off for every 25 hours worked, up to 80 hours guaranteed by federal law. This time off would come on top of leave that could be guaranteed by other laws, like family or sick time.
“Americans who put in an honest day’s work deserve to take time […]
Madalina Vlasceanu, Kimberly C. Doell, and Joseph B. Bak-Coleman et al., Research Scientists - Science Advances
Stephan:
One would think that the leadership of all the nations of the world understood by now that the only way to successfully address the challenge of climate change would be for all governments to agree to a plan and each pass national policies to implement that plan. Obviously, this is not happening in any effective way. Why not? Here is an. enormous international study by several hundred scientists involving 59,440 participants from 63 countries. What that means is that this study should be taken very seriously. Unfortunately, it is not a happy report. What that tells us is we each need to begin thinking about what is going to happen to our local area, and what can we do to prepare ourselves. I am setting it up for you to click through and read the entire scientific article because I think this issue is so important. Once again the November election makes the choice very clear: the Democrats are far from perfect but they are planning to take serious steps to prepare for climate change, The TCPs (formerly the Republican Party, as a party doesn’t even accept the reality of climate change.) If you are planning for you and your children, and their children to survive in anything like the present quality of life you better vote only for Democrats.
Figure 1 Credit: Science Advances
Abstract
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.
INTRODUCTION
The climate crisis is one of humanity’s most consequential and challenging problems (1). Successfully rising to the challenge depends on both “top-down” structural changes (e.g., regulation and investment) and “bottom-up” changes (e.g., individuals’ and collectives’ beliefs and behaviors). These bottom-up processes require widespread belief in climate change, […]
This report, in my view, is important for three reasons: First, the livestock industry has been proven to be a major reason climate change is occurring, and nothing is being done. Second, this report shows how vulnerable to corruption the science community has become, and how weak its ethical standards now are. Third, it confirms once again, if yet another confirmation was required, that the United States is a deeply corrupt country, where you can corrupt any institution in our society if you have enough money because greed and profit are the only things that matter in American culture.
Credit: Adobe
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
When researchers at the United Nations published a bombshell report in 2006 called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the livestock industry soon realized it had a major public relations challenge on its hands.
Media outlets around the world covered the report and its main findings: Livestock are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that need to be reined in, and cutting emissions from the industry should become a focus of public policy, on par with cutting emissions from fossil fuels. It was the first time such a high-level report had come to this conclusion.
In the following 17 years, the report has been scrutinized by researchers, attacked from every angle, and referenced again and again, held up as a clarion call for worldwide veganism on one side, and on the other, a symbol of the climate-hysterical global nanny state bent on stealing everyone’s cheeseburgers.
But as the public has been whipsawed over its findings, new research says it […]
I think Max Tani makes some very good points about what is happening in journalism in the U.S. and I thought it notable that he also cites people who don’t agree with him. Personally, I think his assessments are quite accurate.
There’s too much to read and watch, too many places to read and watch it. It’s enough to distract you from the biggest news in journalism right now: In 2024, it’s harder than ever to get a tough story out in the United States of America.
A landscape of gleefully revelatory magazine exposés, aggressive newspaper investigations, feral online confrontations, and painstaking television investigations has been eroded by a confluence of factors — from rising risks of litigation and costs of insurance, which strapped media companies can hardly afford, to social media, which has given public figures growing leverage over the journalists who now increasingly carry their water.
The result is a thousand stories you’ll never read, and a shrinking number of publications with the resources and guts to confront power.
One recent example illustrates the difficulty of getting even a modestly negative revelation about a popular public figure into print. Last year, freelance reporter John McDermott discovered that Jay Shetty, a massively popular lifestyle podcaster who recently interviewed President Joe Biden, had fudged biographical details about his life. But months after he began his reporting for Esquire, he wondered: Would any outlet publish it?
Esquire lost interest as the piece took on a critical […]
