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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.
Evangelical religiosity in the United States has nothing to do with Christianity except the forms of the meetings, and the words they use. It is a racist fascist political cult that sees, criminal Trump as a new King David. It has nothing to do with Jesus, indeed, it violates almost every one of his teachings. The hypocrisy is so overwhelming that should make an actual Christian nauseous. As this article describes this is the most dangerous threat to democracy today.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson / The Daily Beast / Getty
I have watched every Donald Trump rally, interview, and speech since he left the White House in Jan. 2021.
It’s certainly been interesting to observe the evolution of his political messaging over that time—as he went from desperately trying to resuscitate his political image and career in 2021 following the Jan. 6 attack, to reclaiming his role of Republican kingmaker through his use of primary endorsements in 2022, to crafting his rally speeches and policy positions in 2023 in preparation for another presidential run while fending off indictments and financially crippling civil lawsuits.
Perhaps most interesting to me, though, is how his messaging with evangelical voters has changed so dramatically from his first campaign in 2016.
Trump’s rallies over the past year have followed a familiar pattern. After flying into the area on his 757, he makes a prearranged stop at a local diner, fast food restaurant, or pizza joint where a group of rabid Trump supporters arranged by his advance […]
Because of the Republican Party healthcare for women in the United States is third rate. We have the worst maternal mortality, the worst infant mortality in the developed world. If you are a woman in a Republican-controlled state just standard gynecological care can get tricky, and if you are pregnant your life may be at risk. What I don’t understand, and there is very little discussion about it in media, is how any woman can vote for Republicans, knowing she is potentially putting her life in danger. And yet they do by the millions.
Abortion rights activist Rachel Bailey (C) chants during an International Women’s Day abortion rights demonstration at the Texas State Capitol on March 08, 2023, in Austin, Texas. Credit: Brandon Bell / Getty
In 2023, a woman walked into a health centre in Houston trailing an IV pole. She was suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum — essentially, an extreme form of morning sickness. The woman was vomiting constantly, could not retain food or fluids, and was being kept alive by being fed through a drip.
“She had been to the ER so many times,” family medicine provider and physician Bhavik Kumar told openDemocracy, “and she was so frail and thin that the ER sent her home with an IV pole. I’d never seen that before.”
The patient asked for an abortion, which affords rapid relief from hyperemesis gravidarum. Before the fall of Roe v Wade, which constitutionally protected the right to abortion, in 2022, Kumar could have provided that care in his outpatient clinic. But because Texas’s new near-total ban, he couldn’t help.
ADAM KOTSKO, Professosr Shimer Great Books School at North Central College - Slate
Stephan:
For the past week after several weeks of research, I have been writing a research paper on the growing illiteracy of Americans. Here is some data from my paper:
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022
54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level
45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
44% of the American adults do not read a book in a year
This is also the core of MAGAt world. America is becoming a shockingly ill-educated, illiterate, innumerate nation. Am I exaggerating? Here is what a college professor has to say on the subject.
Credit: Yuri Arcurs / iStock / Getty
Recent years have seen successive waves of book bans in Republican-controlled states, aimed at pulling any text with “woke” themes from classrooms and library shelves. Though the results sometimes seem farcical, as with the banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus due to its inclusion of “cuss words” and explicit rodent nudity, the book-banning agenda is no laughing matter. Motivated by bigotry, it has already done demonstrable harm and promises to do more. But at the same time, the appropriate response is, in principle, simple. Named individuals have advanced explicit policies with clear goals and outcomes, and we can replace those individuals with people who want to reverse those policies. That is already beginning to happen in many places, and I hope those successes will continue until every banned book is restored.
If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are […]
Brett Wilkins , Staff Writer - truthout / Common Dreams
Stephan:
As the world centers on genocide in Gaza, and criminal invasion in Ukraine, climate change is gaining momentum and we are about to see major changes like the collapse of the Atlantic Current System, as this article describes. The United States, particularly, has been derelict in its response to the danger.
This image shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through December 2007. Credit: NASA
A study published Friday warned that a systemic collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents driving warm water from the tropics toward Europe could be more likely than researchers previously estimated — an event that would send temperatures plummeting in much of the continent.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, could be headed for a relatively sudden shutdown that René Van Western, who led the Dutch study published in Science Advances, called “cliff-like.”
For many millennia, the Gulf Stream has carried warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico northward along the eastern North American seaboard and across the Atlantic to Europe. As human-caused global heating melts the Greenland ice sheet, massive quantities of fresh water are released into the North Atlantic, cooling the AMOC — which delivers the bulk of the Gulf Stream’s heat — toward a “tipping point” that could stop the current in its tracks.
An AMOC shutdown would cause temperatures to rise in the […]
Here is a very complex warning, that I had not previously read about. It makes the fact-based assertion that just making the earth greener in color is not going to solve our problems; it may make some of them worse. This shows how complex it is to effectively deal with climate change, and how poorly humans seem to understand what needs to be done. This is what our politicians ought to be working on, not whether Joe Biden misspoke.
Despite this destruction, scientists keep coming to an odd conclusion: The Earth is growing greener. Not green in the metaphorical “sustainable” sense, but in the literal color green.
In the last four decades, the extent of green vegetation — i.e., the amount of leaves in a given area — has substantially increased across the planet, according to a number of recent scientific studies based on satellite data. There’s actually more green space today, not less. And this “global greening” phenomenon is not just occurring on land. Large parts of the oceans are getting greener, too, research shows. Our blue planet, it seems, is increasingly a green planet.
Understanding Earth’s color is key to understanding Earth and our future on it. “Greenness” often corresponds to the planet’s ability to absorb carbon […]
Here, amongst all the bad climate news, is some good news. A federal judge, as described in this report, has reversed a decision by criminal Trump and banned a weedkiller that has done terrible damage all over the United States. Never, ever buy a product manufactured by Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta, the makers of these weedkillers. These three companies knew very well how harmful their products were, but they put profit above wellbeing and made and sold them anyway.
A worker mixes herbicides, which will be sprayed on a field. Credit: David Bacon / Report Digital-REA / Redux)
Dealing a blow to three of the world’s biggest agrochemical companies, a US court this week banned three weedkillers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market.
The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the midwest and south.
This is the second time a federal court has banned these weedkillers since they were introduced for the 2017 growing season. In 2020, the ninth circuit court of appeals issued its own ban, but months later the Trump administration reapproved the weedkilling products, just one week before the presidential election at a press conference in the swing state of Georgia.
But a federal judge in Arizona ruled on Monday that the EPA made a crucial error in […]
This is very alarming bad news, telling us, yet again, that our form of chemical industrial monoculture agriculture, augmented by climate change and the destruction of milkweed, their food source is destroying America’s ecosystem. The Monarch annual migration may seem a small thing, but it is not.
Monarch butterflies during overwintering season at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán, Mexico Crsedit: Sylvain Cordier / Gamma-Rapho / Getty
The estimated number of monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico for winter has reached its second-lowest level ever for the 2023 to 2024 overwintering season. The estimate, based on the size of the butterflies’ hibernating forest area, has dropped by about 59% from the previous year, according to officials.
Experts are pointing to extensive heat and drought as well as climate change for the major decline.
Recent years have seen some hope for the migrating monarch butterflies, with a 35% increase in the number of butterflies observed overwintering in Mexico during the 2021 to 2022 season compared to the previous year.
But monarch butterflies face three primary threats, including habitat loss for their breeding and overwintering; the use of pesticides, which can be toxic to the butterflies or can kill their food source, milkweed; and climate change, which can shift their migratory patterns. By the 2022 to 2023 overwintering season, World Wildlife Fund reported a 22% drop in the amount […]
JENNIFER C. BERKSHIRE and JACK SCHNEIDER, Education Podcast Host | Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst - The Nation
Stephan:
The MAGAt Community, working through the Republican Party which they control, is trying to restructure or even eliminate public schools that students can attend without fees. Why? Because they don’t want fact-based education of children. They want right-wing indoctrination, and some of those advocating this want to make a profit from such a transition. That’s what many charter schools and private schools are about. Americans are already the least literate population amongst the developed democratic states. Nationwide, on average, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 79% of U.S. adults were literate to some degree, while 21% were illiterate in 2022. Sadly, the majority, 54% of those who had some measure of literacy only had it to below sixth-grade level. We are a country on a downward education spiral, particularly in Red states, as this article lays out.
Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, speaks out against income tax cuts and election law changes passed by the Arizona Legislature in Phoenix on September 28, 2017. Credit: Matt York / AP
Bait-and-switch is an old retail tactic. You lure customers in with promises of a deep discount, only to inform them that the deal has a catch. The real price tag, it turns out, is quite a bit more.
Though it took supporters of school vouchers a while to catch on, they’ve learned quickly that the trick works just as well in education policy as it does in retail sales. Pick a price that will get people in the door, and then break the news once you’ve got them where you want them.
In Arizona, taxpayers are now staring down a $400 million shortfall, with an even bigger bill coming due next year. How did the Grand Canyon State go from sitting on a huge cash reserve to facing a rising tide of red ink? Simple. Voucher proponents suggested that paying for […]
