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.
Richard Fry, Senior Researcher - Pew Research Center
Stephan:
In the 1970s when I was a part of several academic futurist research groups the big issue on all of them was over-population and lack of resources. So much for academic futurism. The reality is we do not have a sustainable birthrate. That is more people die than are born. Women are also having children later than their mothers did, and fewer children. More than that as this report describes, men are marrying later, and a quarter of them haven’t married at all by the time they are 40. White evangelicals are hysterical about immigrants replacing them when, in fact, there are millions more open jobs than there are workers. We need immigrants to maintain our economic system. And did you know that 44.8% of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or their children. You probably work for an immigrant or their child and your wellbeing depends on their creativity and ingenuity.
Marriage has long been a central institution in the lives of Americans. In 1980, just 6% of 40-year-olds had never been married. But people born from the 1960s onward have been increasingly delaying marriage, and a growing share are forgoing it altogether.
While many unmarried 40-year-olds are living with a romantic partner, most are not. In 2022, 22% of never-married adults ages 40 to 44 were cohabiting.
The share of 40-year-olds in 2021 who had never married varied by the following demographic characteristics:
Gender: A higher share of men than women had never married.
Race and ethnicity: Black 40-year-olds were much more likely to have never married than Hispanic, White and Asian 40-year-olds.
Education level: 40-year-olds without a four-year college degree were more likely to have never married than those who had completed at least a bachelor’s degree. One-third of those with a high school diploma or less had never married, compared with 26% of those with some college education and 18% of those with a bachelor’s degree or more education.
Paul Sonne and Rebecca R. Ruiz, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan:
Here is the first fact-based assessment of what has actually happened in Russia as a result of Western Companies leaving. It looks like Putin outplayed the West, at least in the short term. But I must say, those Western corporations did the right thing morally. In the interest of full disclosure when Putin came to power I sold, I believe to KGB operatives, probably Putin-connected, the two companies I had created during the Soviet era, and have never regretted that. What saddens me is that thanks to the morons in the Republican Party who oppose aid to Ukraine, it looks like all this will have been for naught. The MAGAt Republicans in the House just don’t seem to understand what happens if Ukraine loses this war because they did not get the needed assistance from the U.S. and the other Western countries. It will change the course of history in a very sad way if that happens. Hopefully, Biden will find a way to get the aid to Ukraine.
Businesses seized by Putin’s government to their benefit. Credit: The New York Times
Soon after Russian troops invaded his country, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, made a plea to Western companies: “Leave Russia,” he said. “Make sure that the Russians do not receive a single penny.”
Hundreds of companies answered the call. Politicians and activists predicted that it would help strangle the Russian economy and undermine the Kremlin’s war effort.
President Vladimir V. Putin had other plans.
Mr. Putin has turned the exits of major Western companies into a windfall for Russia’s loyal elite and the state itself. He has forced companies wishing to sell to do so at fire-sale prices. He has limited sales to buyers anointed by Moscow. Sometimes he has seized firms outright.
A New York Times investigation traced how Mr. Putin has turned an expected misfortune into an enrichment scheme. Western companies that have announced departures have declared more than $103 billion in losses since the start of the war, according to a Times analysis of financial reports. Mr. Putin has squeezed companies for as much […]
Florida is a state with all kinds of problems that are not being properly addressed, including it is almost impossible in many areas to buy home insurance. None of that seems to matter to MAGAt De Santis and his colleagues. What they are focused on, obsessed with one could say, are pronouns. This is what is going on in the state.
The lawsuit challenging Florida’s law restricting pronouns in schools is the latest legal pushback against several key polices created by state GOP leaders recently to strengthen parental rights and remove “wokeness” from classrooms, moves criticized by opponents as unfairly targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/ AP
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Three Florida teachers sued state and local officials in federal court Wednesday seeking to overturn a new law forbidding employees from using pronouns in schools that differ from their sex at birth.
The group, represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, contend that the law passed by state Republicans and lauded by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year amounts to sex discrimination and violates their constitutional rights, putting them at risk of losing their educator credentials — or jobs — for being “who they are.”
Filed in Tallahassee, the lawsuit is the latest legal pushback against several key polices created by state GOP leaders recently to strengthen parental rights and remove “wokeness” from classrooms, moves criticized by opponents as unfairly targeting the LGBTQ+ community.
The level of corruption in the United States is mind-boggling, not just the Congress and state legislatures, but all levels of the judiciary. Corporate media, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox propaganda, NewsMax propaganda, barely cover any of this. What I find particularly offensive is the corruption of George Mason University. As it happens I am a Mason scholar (see the Smithsonian website and search on Forgotten Founder) and Mason would be appalled at what is being done under his name. He was the founder who came up with the ideal of inalienable rights, wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights, and guided James Madison, in a sense his protege, in the writing of the Constitutional Bill of Rights. Mason was one of the main authors of the Constitution, but did not sign it because it did not end the slave trade. He predicted the civil war. That the name of such a man of honor would be involved in the corruption of the courts is one of the nastiest chapters in U.S. history.
In 2021 and 2022, two conservative, billionaire-funded legal interests sent more than 100 federal judges on 251 trips to conferences and seminars in cushy locations around the country and overseas, according to a Lever review of hundreds of federal financial disclosure forms.
In all, George Mason University (GMU) and The Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers network, funded more than 40 percent of travel-related payments reported by federal judges in those years, far more than any other group.
The staggering number of junkets indicate that, as conservative Supreme Court justices face scrutiny for failing todisclose private luxury travel supplied by billionaire donors, right-wing legal interests funded by the mega-wealthy are routinely feting lower-court judges and treating them to all-expenses-paid trips to far-flung locales. As with the gifts to Supreme Court justices, the trips effectively function as a reward system for judges who espouse and maintain hardline conservative legal views.
GMU — a Virginia-based public research university that’s home to the conservative Antonin Scalia Law School and its pro-business, anti-regulation Law and Economics program […]
Because wellbeing is not a national priority except to make the rich richer, less regulated, and more powerful, homelessness is another one of the growing negative trends that define the United States. Here are the actual facts as to how bad homelessness has become in America. I think we should be ashamed of what is happening.
U.S. homelessness reached a record high in 2023, according to data the federal government released Friday.
The big picture: Homelessness increased by about 12% nationwide since last year, and it rose across all household types, the Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a new report.
About 653,100 people experienced homelessness on a single night in 2023, according to an annual count done in January.
This year’s result “is the highest number of people reported as experiencing homelessness on a single night since reporting began in 2007,” the report says.
By the numbers: Black, African and Indigenous people were overrepresented among the population experiencing homelessness, as has been the case in previous years, the HUD found.
Black people made up 13% of the U.S. population in 2023, but they made up 21% of the U.S. population living in poverty, 37% of all people experiencing homelessness and 50% of homeless people in families with children.
Asian and Asian American people had the largest percentage increase in homelessness, up 40% from 2022, to a total of 11,574.
Hispanic and Latino people saw the largest numerical […]
Edward Wong and Michael Crowley, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan:
The Republican Party is more interested in its members power than it is the wellbeing or even the status of the United States. Tuberville damaged the military for months, and continues to be the cause of serious problems. Now other Republican senators are following the Tuberville model and severely damaging the State Department and the Foreign Service who are the diplomatic equivalents of the military officer corps. The story of this Republican damage is not getting much media attention but I was abe to find one report that laid out the story of the damage the Republicans are doing.
Kurt M. Campbell, right, the nominee for the No. 2 position in the State Department, is among those awaiting confirmation. Credit: Doug Mills / The New York Times
The Biden administration has 43 presidential nominees still awaiting confirmation in the Senate as Congress prepares to break for the holidays, a delay that is putting American national security and foreign policy interests in jeopardy around the world, the State Department said on Friday.
Any nominee not confirmed before the Senate ends its session, which is expected as soon as next week, will have to be renominated by the White House next year, leading to further delays. Those awaiting confirmation include Kurt M. Campbell, whom President Biden is trying to appoint as the deputy to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
The blockade of diplomatic nominees has continued as many Republicans in Congress have sought to condition support for Mr. Biden’s foreign policy priorities on winning right-wing policy concessions. Some have shown a willingness to leave holes in the national security and diplomatic staff, even as the Biden administration […]
Texas MAGAt Republicans want Texas to secede and become a separate country again, and they think they have enough voter support to do it. Personally, if the voters of Texas vote to pass this referendum, I think they should be allowed to do secede. Within five years Texas will become a third world country. One-third of the Texas state budget presently comes from federal dollars. Without the billions of dollars your taxes and mine pay to Texas, a state that currently has very poor healthcare, very poor education, women’s rights, child care, and elder care, with secession it will deteriorate further very quickly. People will pour out of Texas and it will revert to being something from Central America. Texas isn’t the only state promoting this idiocy, Idaho is another. Republican voters are the cause of this problem and I think it would be appropriate to let them live their dreams. They will regret it, and when they ask to be readmitted to the United States, a different set of rules can be set up.
The Welcome To Texas sign, taken from the south (Texas) side of the New Mexico/Texas state line, halfway between Las Cruces (NM) and El Paso (TX). Credit: David Herrera / Creative Commons
Leaders of the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) — which openly calls for the Lone Star State to secede from the United States and become an independent nation again — appear to have surpassed the threshold to put a secession ballot initiative on the 2024 Republican primary ballot this March.
Newsweek reported Friday that TNM president Daniel Miller delivered 139,456 signatures to the Republican Party of Texas’ (RPT) headquarters in favor of a March 2024 ballot referendum dubbed “Texit” (named after the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016). Texas law only requires “five percent of the total vote received by all candidates for governor in the party’s most recent gubernatorial general primary election.” And in 2022, there were 1,954,172 ballots cast in Texas’ Republican gubernatorial primary. By this standard, TNM only needed 97,709 signatures to get its referendum on the ballot.
This is potentially very big news and a medical game changer. It takes genetic engineering to a new level and begins a trend in medicine whose implications provide a new approach. Sean Ainsworth, CEO, Immusoft the research company that did this said, “This is the first patient in the world to receive an engineered B cell therapy – a major accomplishment for Immusoft and a major advancement in cell and gene therapy.”
B-cell
Immusoft of CA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Immusoft Corporation (“Immusoft”), a clinical-stage cell therapy company dedicated to improving the lives of patients with rare diseases, today announced the first patient dosed with engineered B cell therapy ISP-001 in a Phase 1 trial in MPS I, at M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center. MPS I is a rare, genetic disease that affects the body’s ability to produce the enzyme alpha-L-iduronidase (IDUA), which is an essential enzyme that helps to break down long-chain sugars inside cells. Without the IDUA enzyme these sugars accumulate in the body, affecting the eyes, heart, bones, etc.
The patient was dosed without the need for a preconditioning regimen (required for gene modified stem cells) or immunosuppression (required for systemic virus-delivered gene therapy). Preconditioning, consisting of myeloablative chemotherapy, can cause hair loss, infertility, severe nausea, the requirement for an extended hospital stay, and may lead to life-threatening infections. Immunosuppression is also associated with substantial morbidity, and can increase the risk of infection. Neither chemotherapy nor immunosuppression is required […]
