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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.
Do you have an account on X? Do you participate with it in any way? If you do you are supporting a man who describes himself as a “dark MAGA”. You are participating in a project Elon Musk has created to destroy American democracy.
Elon Musk and former President Trump during a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024. Credit: Justin Merriman/Bloomberg
In the middle of his Butler, Pennsylvania rally Saturday,former President Trump called up one of his most powerful allies — Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of X.
Why it matters: This was Musk’s first time at a Trump rally since the night of the shooting, when Musk posted that he “fully” endorses Trump.
Musk literally jumped onstagewith his arms held high,Reuters reports.
“Thetrue test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire,” Musk said, calling the election a “must-win situation” for Trump that could be “the last election.”
Wearing a black “Make America Great Again” cap, Musk said at Trump’s side: “As you can see, I’m not just MAGA — I’m dark MAGA.”
Musk urged the crowd to register to vote: “Be a pest to everyone you know.”
Invoking Trump’s words just after he was shot, Musk finished by saying: “Fight, fight, fight! Vote, […]
Carey Gillam, Margot Gibbs and Elena DeBre, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
It is impossible to exaggerate the greed of American pesticide corporations. They don’t give a damn if tens of thousands of us die of painful illnesses. All they care about is maintaining and increasing their profits. They are aided in this by an evil corporation, v-Fluence in Missouri. These group of scum, as this report describes, is paid huge sums of money, some of it coming from the tax dollars you and I pay, to weaponize and distribute misinformation to confuse and corrupt government officials and the public into accepting the corporate lies about agricultural pesticides. Here are the facts about what is happening and the effects it is having on your life.
Pesticides being sprayed on a cotton field in Arizona. Credit: mvp64 / Getty
In 2017, two United Nations experts called for a treaty to strictly regulate dangerous pesticides, which they said were a “global human rights concern”, citing scientific research showing pesticides can cause cancers, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and other health problems.
Publicly, the pesticide industry’s lead trade association dubbed the recommendations “unfounded and sensational assertions”. In private, industry advocates have gone further.
Derogatory profiles of the two UN experts, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak, are hosted on an online private portal for pesticide company employees and a range of influential allies.
Members can access a wide range of personal information about hundreds of individuals from around the world deemed a threat to industry interests, including the US food writers Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva and the Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey. Many profiles include personal details such as the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses and even house values.
The profiling is part of an effort – that was financed, in part, by US […]
Marjorie Hecht, Contributing Writer - Big News Netwwork
Stephan:
Here is yet another confirmation of what I have been telling you for years about the existence of the Matrix of Consciousness. What is important is that once one realizes the Matrix it changes one’s entire thinking about why fostering wellbeing at every level is to vitally important to our own wellbeing. This is one of the reasons pesticide agriculture is not just wrong, it is evil.
Humans have had relationships with their pets for thousands of years, talking to them, coddling them, and imbuing them with human attributes. But are these animals “thinking,” and do nonhuman animals have the same sorts of feelings that humans have? Most people with pets would say “yes.”
What does the science say? In recent decades, researchers have begun to find scientific answers to questions of consciousness for a variety of species. The broad consensus is that many animals are sentient (have conscious thought), that there are different types of cognition, and that a larger number of animals require protection and more research is needed for a wider range of species.
At an April 2024 meeting at New York University, 39 prominent scientists from different disciplines issued “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” emphasizing “strong scientific support for the attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds” and “at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”
Adame Server, Staff Writer - Microsoft Start | The Atlantic
Stephan:
This is what MAGAts are doing to reduce women to handmaiden status. by legalizing and rewarding tattletales for turning women in who get abortions, either through medications or doctors. As I read this it left me with the feeling that Republicans are turning us into the communist Soviet Union or Nazis Germany. This has nothing to do with fetuses, if it was the same people would be big sponsors of infant care. But they are not, quite the contrary. They are also sexual perverts obsessed with controlling LGBTQ people. And yet, I know that in less than a month millions will vote for MAGAt Republicans at both the federal and state levels. This is how sick the United States culture has become.
Photo-illustration by Vanessa Saba. Credit: Bernd Eberle / Getty
Last year, in Texas, a deteriorating marriage became the testing ground for a novel legal strategy favored by some of the country’s most prominent right-wing lawyers and politicians.
Marcus and Brittni Silva’s divorce had just been finalized when Marcus filed a lawsuit against two of Brittni’s friends. According to his complaint, Brittni had discovered that she was pregnant with their baby in July 2022, and ended the pregnancy by taking abortion medication. Marcus alleges that her friends Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter “assisted Brittni Silva in murdering Ms. Silva’s unborn child.” He is suing for wrongful death and asking for at least $1 million in damages from each defendant.
Noyola and Carpenter tell their own version of what happened in a countersuit they filed. Marcus drank often, they allege, and when he did, he was prone to verbally abusing Brittni. He got so drunk at one of her work events that he had to be escorted off the premises—but not before he called her […]
Texas, as this well-researched article lays out, has become essentially a christofascist state bearing little resemblance to the governance of a Blue state like Washington. It is a demonstration of how we have become two countries uncomfortably linked in a single nation.
Credit: ProPublica
Reporting Highlights
Statehouse Influence: Oil tycoons Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks have pushed the Texas statehouse to the far right by funding relentless primary campaigns against other Republicans.
Christian Nationalist Beliefs: The Texas statehouse is advancing policies that threaten the separation between church and state.
Trump Ties: Dunn is now linked to think tanks that are jockeying to influence a second Trump administration.
Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a duel.”
If you read SR regularly you know I have written papers in peer-reviewed journals, and published multiple articles in SR describing how about a third of the emergency rooms in the United States are not owned by the hospitals in which they are located. They are owned by non-medical equity funds, and the doctors and nurses are employees of those financial entities. This article describes just how evil this is, and how it is destroying the already inferior healthcare Americans get.
John didn’t start his career mad.
He trained as an emergency medicine doctor in a tidily run Midwestern emergency room about a decade ago. He loved the place, especially the way its management was so responsive to the doctors’ needs, offering extra staffing when things got busy and paid administrative time for teaching other trainees. Doctors provided most of the care, occasionally overseeing the work of nurse practitioners and physician associates. He signed on to start there full-time shortly after finishing his residency.
A month before his start date, a private equity firm bought the practice. “I can’t even tell you how quickly it changed,” John says. The ratio of doctors to other clinicians flipped, shrinking doctor hours to a minimum as the firm moved to save on salaries.
John — who is being referred to by a pseudonym due to concerns over professional repercussions — quit and found a job at another emergency room in a different state. It too soon sold out to the same private equity firm. Then it […]
David Blumenthal, Evan D. Gumas, Arnav Shah, Munira Z. Gunja, Reginald D. Williams II, - The Commonwealth Fund
Stephan:
You and I are enmeshed in the worst healthcare in the developed world, and the MAGAt Republicans are making it clear that if they get majorities in Congress they will get rid of Obamacare. If you vote Republican for any Congressional candidate you are condemning yourself and your family to healthcare that is worse than some developing countries. It has gotten so bad that we already have what researchers are calling “medical deserts,” regions in the U.S. that have little or no medical care available.
Abstract
Goal: Compare health system performance in 10 countries, including the United States, to glean insights for U.S. improvement.
Methods: Analysis of 70 health system performance measures in five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.
Key Findings: The top three countries are Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, although differences in overall performance between most countries are relatively small. The only clear outlier is the U.S., where health system performance is dramatically lower.
Conclusion: The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.
Introduction
Mirror, Mirror 2024 is the Commonwealth Fund’s eighth report comparing the performance of health systems in selected countries. Since the first edition in 2004, our goal has remained the same: to highlight lessons from the experiences of these nations, with special attention to how they […]
Traitor Trump is lying at a level of evilness never before seen in American history. He is claiming that Biden and the Democrats are sending FEMA money to immigrant murderers instead of sending it to the states damaged by hurricane Helene. And he is just one of the many MAGAt Republicans lying at a level of evil fantasy I have never seen before. Here is reality, showing Trump did, indeed, attempt to stop aid from going to Democratic areas damaged by climate events.
Traitor Trump prepares to give remarks during a visit on Monday to Valdosta, Georgia, which was damaged by Hurricane Helene, where he lied endlessly. Credit: Michael M. Santiago / Getty
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, former President Donald Trump has blasted the Biden administration for its handling of the disaster — going so far as to accuse Democratic leaders of ignoring the needs of Republican storm victims.
But a review of Trump’s record by POLITICO’s E&E News and interviews with two former Trump White House officials show that the former president was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.
Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News on Wednesday that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings.
But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results […]
