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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.
The American wealth inequality, which is the direct result of the Republicans rigging the tax system, after a Republican majority of the Supreme Court legalized the bribery of Congress members with the Citizens United decision, is the worst amongst all the developed nations. There is no other country in which the wealth of just 4 people is as great as the collective wealth of 48% of the rest of the country. If you vote for Republicans you are literally stealing money out of your own pockets. It is a tragedy that most Republican voters can’t seem to grasp.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse attends a hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington D.C. on December 5, 2023. Credit: Celal Gunes / Anadolu / Getty
The Democratic chair of the Senate Budget Committee rebuked his Republican colleagues on Thursday for demanding action to reduce the U.S. debt after adding roughly $10 trillion to it with tax cuts for the rich and large corporations.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) was responding to a letter he received earlier this week from Republican members of the budget committee, who criticized the chair for dedicating “significant time and attention to climate issues” while purportedly neglecting “the impending budgetary and fiscal crisis facing our nation.”
In a written reply, Whitehouse noted that “if not for the Bush tax cuts, their extensions, and then the Trump tax cuts, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio would be declining indefinitely.”
The Bush administration’s decision to launch the so-called “war on terror”—which received bipartisan support in Congress—also cost the U.S. upwards of $8 trillion, Brown […]
If you have ever travelled in another country, like Japan or Italy, you know that you can always tell who are Americans because of their obesity. It is just a strong characteristic of the American population. It is part of the reason Americans live five years less than the people of other nations. It is the result of inadequate exercise, and terrible diet. Almost all the food you see advertised on cable television is bad for you.
Plus-sized model Tess Holliday (pictured during Beautycon in LA) has been outspoken about body image
Sitting picturesquely in the foothills of the hiking and skiing mecca of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder isn’t known as America’s fittest city for nothing.
Intimidatingly hale and hearty, it’s a place where bars and restaurants are dead by 9pm so locals can fit in an early morning ski or mountain-bike climb before work.
It sits at 5,430ft above sea level so endurance athletes from all over the world come to train here. Boulder’s social calendar is packed with a daunting series of strenuous events including an annual 10km road race that attracts 50,000 runners, a plunge into an iced-over lake and a ‘Tube To Work Day’ in which commuters hurtle down the rapids of a river clinging to car tyre inner tubes.
And then there’s the annual Halloween Dash, when residents run naked down the city’s main street in front of cheering crowds wearing nothing but a hollowed-out pumpkin on their head. Anywhere else the locals might be just a little self-conscious but not Boulder, where many people are only too happy to […]
This report, I think is just an early account of an emerging trend that is going to notably transform American media. Newspapers are dying, misinformation has taken over social media, and television channels are owned by a handful of corporations. AI is going to be an irresistible temptation because of the money it will save publications. Getting the actual facts about something is going to become terribly difficult, and the influence of AI-created misinformation is going to come to dominate people’s thinking. America is a very sick country if your calibration is egalitarian democracy.
One of the most highly-trafficked financial news websites in the world is creating AI-generated stories that bear an uncanny resemblance to stories published just hours early by other competitors.
Investing.com, a Tel Aviv-based site owned by Joffre Capital, is a financial news and information hub that provides a mix of markets data and investing tips and trends. But increasingly, the site has been relying on AI to create its stories, which often appear to be thinly-veiled copies of human-written stories written elsewhere.
In early November, the blog CryptoNewsLand wrote a short item noting that the token XRP had “witnessed a resurgence in both its price and investor activity” in recent days. Just a few hours later, Investing published a similar article citing nine of the same statistics as those in the CryptoNewsLand story, as well as the same dataset from Santiment. Both articles were four paragraphs.
On the same day, longrunning financial news site The Motley Fool published a story comparing Microsoft’s stock performance to Google’s. In its piece, Motley Fool noted that Microsoft seemed poised for […]
COP28, headed by an oil executive from a country that has no other income source but oil and gas to keep the rich, rich, 2,400 petroleum lobbyists hovering over every day’s meeting. What could possibly go wrong. George Monbiot spells it out.
Protesters at Cop28 call for an end to fossil fuels, 8 December 2023. Credit: Dominika Zarzycka/ NurPhoto / Shutterstock
Let’s face it: climate summits are broken. The delegates talk and talk, while Earth systems slide towards deadly tipping points. Since the climate negotiations began in 1992 more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels has been released worldwide than in all preceding human history. This year is likely to set a new emissions record. They are talking us to oblivion.
Throughout these Conference of the Parties (Cop) summits, fossil fuel lobbyists have swarmed the corridors and meeting rooms. It’s like allowing weapons manufacturers to dominate a peace conference. This year, the lobbyists outnumber all but one of the national delegations. And they’re not the only ones: Cop28 is also heaving with meat and livestock lobbyists and reps from other planet-trashing industries. What should be the most important summit on Earth is treated like a trade fair.
It’s not surprising that the two decisive measures these negotiations should have delivered at the outset – agreements to leave […]
Paige Bennett and Chris McDermott, Contributing Writer | Editor - EcoWatch
Stephan:
While the COP28 nonsense goes on, scientists are issuing drastic warnings and temperatures and the destruction of ocean ecosystems through coral bleaching. Here is the coral warning; it is getting essentially no attention in cable media or most newspapers, and yet its impact on your life may be dramatic.
A coral reef in Sipadan Island, Malaysia. Credit: Andre Seale / VW PICS / Universal Images Group/ Getty
Following what is expected to be the warmest year on record, next year could bring massive coral bleaching events that disrupt marine ecosystems.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine studies professor at the University of Queensland, Australia, is predicting that coral reefs will experience dramatic bleaching. Hoegh-Guldberg and colleagues shared their predictions in a “Perspectives” piece for Science.org.
Bleaching events can occur as a stress response to things such as increasing ocean temperatures and pollution, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Currently, the world is experiencing an El Niño event, which is likely to last through March 2024, which can influence warmer ocean temperatures. The current El Niño phenomenon could then be followed by a second El Niño year. As The Guardian reported, every instance where there has been a pair of El Niño years since 1997 has been followed by mass coral bleaching around the world.
“The probability is that somewhere in the next […]
Here is some good news about rail. For many years American passenger rail travel has been notably inferior to rail travel in other developed nations. Like so many things we used to be a world leader, now we are a poor catch-up. But the Biden Administration is making long needed investments that will significantly improve rail travel, and reduce air travel pollution. It is another positive move on the part of the Biden Administration that is getting almost no media attention, or public awareness.
Illustration: Allie Carl / Axios
The Biden administration announced Friday the largest federal investment in passenger trains in decades, with $8.2 billion in new funding for high-speed rail and other projects nationwide.
Why it matters: Rail travel is considered a relatively clean way to get lots of people from point A to B, especially compared with aviation — but the U.S. rail network is sorely lagging behind that of peer nations in Europe and Asia.
Driving the news: The big highlight is two multibillion-dollar packages for planned high-speed rail projects.
One would connect Las Vegas, Nevada, and Rancho Cucamonga, California (just east of Los Angeles) using electrified trains.
It’s expected to carry more than 11 million passengers annually, the White House said, with roughly two-hour trips — half the typical drive time.
It’s being built by Brightline, a private train operator that’s been expanding across Florida and is now setting its eyes westward.
The other package would provide for high-speed rail travel between Bakersfield and Merced, California.
The new all-electric trains “will produce zero […]
For several decades now the Republican party has sought to undermine fact based public school education and inject into curricula far-right fundamentalist christian fantasies. Now they have their hero in an office where he can do real damage to education. Christofascist White supremacist Mike Johnson, now Speaker of the House, is also a creationist, and actively working in Louisiana, which is less a state and more a third world developing christofascist country, to see that the children of Louisiana are indoctrinated in creationism and taught to question evolution.
Children look into a cage containing model baby dinosaurs inside a replica Noah’s Ark at the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. Credit: John Mincchillo / AP
Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) elevation to the heights of the U.S. House of Representatives marked one of the most significant achievements of the religious right since its splash onto the political scene in the late 20th century. It had successfully placed a true believer who worked inside its movement into one of the most important political offices in the country.
And with him, he brought the bona fides of a record of advancing one of the movement’s most important goals: putting Christianity back into every facet of public life.
Johnson has a long history of supporting and promoting creationist causes, acting as a lawyer for the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in Kentucky where dinosaurs are seen as passengers on a re-creation of Noah’s Ark, as previously reported by HuffPost. But perhaps most important is his key role as a lawyer for the religious-right forces […]
Olivia Rosane , Staff Writer - truthout / Common Dreams
Stephan:
As the petroleum industry pours millions of dollars of bribe money into the U.S. Congress to assure their subsidies and tax breaks remain assured, and no regulations are passed to slow down their profits the science community runs around with their hair on fire because of what they see happening to the earth’s environment. You would think the latest report described in this article would focus people’s attention, but it isn’t. And look at the reports from COP 28, run by an oil executive, and with 2,400 petroleum lobbyists crawling around its meetings like roaches. Greed has simply overwhelmed all other considerations.
Brown sediment is seen on the ice sheet, created by rapid melting, in February, 2023, near Kangerlussuaq, in Greenland. Credit: Martin Zwick / REDA&CO / Universal Images Group / Getty
The last time that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were as high as they are today, Greenland was free of ice and the savanna and grassland ecosystems where humans evolved didn’t exist yet.
That’s the conclusion of a study published in Science Friday, which researchers say compiles “the most reliable data available to date” on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the last 66 million years.
“It really brings it home to us that what we are doing is very, very unusual in Earth’s history,” lead author Baerbel Hoenisch of the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told Agence France-Presse.
By burning fossil fuels and clearing natural carbon sinks like forests, industrial capitalism has raised global carbon dioxide levels to 419 parts per million (ppm) today from around 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
“Rising atmospheric CO2 is the most obvious and startling expressions of our […]
