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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.
I have been thinking a lot, as the media announces Trump’s appointment of one criminal after another to cabinet posts, how it is possible that a blatantly criminal convicted rapist, multiple felon, and multiple bankrupt racist huckster could possibly have been elected President of the United States? And then follow his election win by appointing a cast of fellow creeps and criminals. Culture is created by a consensus of individual choices. It is an expression of mass consciousness. I chose this report because it accurately illustrates very well what we have become.
Singers Post Malone and Morgan Wallen performing at the 57th Annual CMA Music Awards on November 8, 2023 Credit: Frank Micelotta / Disney / Getty
Earlier this year, conservatives on social media claimed an unlikely new icon. It wasn’t a podcaster with questionable views or a libertarian businessman selling a course or any particular ideology. It was actress Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria star and the recent lead of the rom-com Anyone but You.
Following her Saturday Night Live hosting gig in March, two conservative outlets publishedcolumns heralding Sweeney as a return to conventional beauty standards of the ’90s and early 2000s — or as, Bridget Phetasy for the Spectator put it, “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack.” Both pieces postulate that, by wearing low-cut dresses and playing up her sexuality, Sweeney was inviting men to gawk at her, therefore raising a middle finger to “woke culture” and the Me Too movement.
Sweeney hasn’t publicly aligned herself with the right in any way. (Her family’s politics, though, were the subject of controversy in 2022, which may have […]
Noah Hurowitz, Contributing Writer - The Intercept
Stephan:
This is truly horrifying. Although this report centers around the Israeli/Palestinian war its implications are much much broader than that. Almost every nongovernmental organization that fosters wellbeing in the United States is a nonprofit entity. Think about the organizations you have received help from or someone you know has received help from, or that you support because they do something to foster wellbeing. Every one of them simply by saying or putting on their website something that Trump doesn’t like can, if he tells his Secretary of the Treasury to do so, lose their nonprofit status. Please contact your Congressional Representative, whether they are Democrat or Republican, and tell them to vote against H.R. 9495. If this bill becomes law we are going to see a major, and very negative, change in American society.
Donald Trump at the America First Policy Institute Gala on Nov. 14, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty
A controversial “nonprofit killer” bill is back on track after it was blocked earlier this week.
A majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives rejected the bill on Tuesday out of fear that it could grant President-elect Donald Trump the legal tools with which to target his ideological foes, but Republicans are swiftly pressing ahead.
The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which would empower the secretary of the Treasury to designate any nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and revoke its tax-exempt status, is set to go before the Committee on Rules on Monday for a hearing that could tee up the bill for a new floor vote.
The hearing was announced Thursday evening, just two days after 144 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill as part of a fast-track parliamentary procedure that required a two-thirds majority.
The bill, also known as H.R. 9495, has come under withering criticism from a broad coalition of organizations that say its sponsors are pushing it as a means of cracking down on free speech — particularly […]
ANDREA GRIMES, Vice President of Research at Reproaction. - Texas Observer
Stephan:
This is a trend that I don’t think many Americans are even aware is happening. Although almost every time it comes up for a vote the majority support a woman’s right to control her own body, the movement against women having that right has created a network, of what amount to pseudo-assistance centers. That’s not the news. As this report describes the news is that even though the majority vote for a woman’s rights, the Republicans are working to use your tax dollars to fund these anti-choice centers.
Credit: Shutterstock
If you had the means to provide diapers to a struggling new parent, what would you demand from them in return?
Would you require that they listen to your parenting advice for an hour before they could take their Huggies home? Would you subject them to a proselytizing lecture on your preferred interpretation of Christianity, or force them to sign up for a group counseling session with strangers? All so they could prove themselves worthy of receiving a few days’ worth of the most essential baby care products?
This is the service model favored by thousands of the anti-abortion pregnancy centers across the country that operate as the public-facing front of the movement to ban abortion both at the state and federal levels. These centers, which bill themselves as judgment-free resources for “vulnerable women and youth,” often present a warm, fuzzy facade that belies a darker mission: using fear, spiritual coercion, and shame tactics to spread lies and disinformation about […]
Here is some very interesting good medical news which, I think, should also be seen as the first stage of an emerging trend that has profound implications for fostering wellbeing.
Called Casgevy, the gene-editing treatment is for people with sickle cell disease and a related blood disorder called beta thalassemia. UK regulators approved the treatment in November 2023, followed by the US and Europe in December. Vertex, the pharmaceutical company that markets Casgevy, announced in a November 5 earnings call that the first person to receive Casgevy outside of a clinical trial was dosed in the third quarter of this year. The company reported $2 million in revenue from that patient. (Casgevy debuted with a price tag of $2.2 million in the US.)
“Cagevy has been enthusiastically received by patients, physicians, and policymakers, and the launch is gathering momentum across all regions,” Stuart Arbuckle, Vertex’s chief operating officer, said on the earnings call. He added that additional patients are accessing the […]
Authoritarian fascists for obvious reasons do not like or want a free independent press. So one of the first things they do is try to gut the press. And quite predictably Trump and his fascists have started doing that. I had someone ask me the other day, “How much longer do you think you will be able to do SR? Have you thought it might become dangerous to do it” I had never thought about that. Some readers help with the costs although I still spend $22,000 a year to do SR; it is my way of fostering wellbeing, but the question has stuck in my mind. SR has been attacked by hackers since Trump entered politics. It happens thousands of times each year, and it has become increasingly expensive to protect it. But I had never really thought of it as being personally dangerous to do SR. Have we really become that kind of country? I guess we are going to find out.
Kash Patel, former chief of staff to the defense secretary speaks on the day Republican presidential candidate and Donald Trump holds a campaign rally, in Prescott Valley, Arizona, U.S., October 13, 2024. Credit: Go Nakamura / Reuters
Is changing the Democratic Party the way to remake our Democracy? Donald Trump only got about a million more votes than he did in 2020, but Kamala Harris appears to have received somewhere between 6 and 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did that year. For the over two decades that I’ve been writing and on the radio and TV, I’ve argued that when Bill Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 (and Obama maintained that position) the Democratic Party had taken a fatal turn to the right. I’ve written two books that cover it, in part, as well: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream. It appears that millions of voters essentially said, “I’m not […]
John B. Alexander, Contributing Writer - Daily Kos
Stephan:
John Alexander, I think, has it correct, and he has stated it well. The situation we are in is the result of how Americans chose to vote. It is that simple and accurate. And the effects of those votes is going to be devastating, particularly to the low income, low education Whites, Hispanics and Black voters. As but one example, based on what I have been seeing in the food industry publications, those MAGAt voters who were complaining about food costs are going to face a major nightmare. As of today, I think by this Spring food costs will be at least 20% higher.
Voters voting Credit: Intercept
(No, it’s the ignorant voters) There is no Trump Mandate!
Any politician that states they “believe in the wisdom of the people” is either lying, or too ignorant to hold office.
Who are we? In 2004 Samuel Huntington wrote a book by that title Who are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, noting the dramatic demographic and ideological shifts that had taken place in the country. The time has come to reexamine our basic principles and values. The mirror will not be kind. As with Huntington, the bottom line is we are not who we were. Many of the issues we thought the country had overcome, have again surfaced. Many people thought that the election of President Obama signaled the official end of racism. Clearly that was not the case. Additionally, antisemitism is on a significant rise in the country.
As Rep Jim Clyburn stated, he fears the election of Trump and the implementation […]
Yet another medical report demonstrating that the American illness profit system has only one purpose: greed to produce profits.
Spinal surgery Credit: MedPage Today
More than 200,000 Medicare patients with back pain underwent $2 billion worth of unnecessary surgeries, including spinal fusion and/or laminectomy or vertebroplasty, over a recent 3-year period, according to an analysisopens in a new tab or window of Medicare claims data from the Lown Institute.
If unnecessary, such procedures put patients at risk of blood clots, pneumonia, heart and lung issues, infections, paralysis, and death. After surgery, 10% to 40% of patients experience “failed back surgery syndrome,” in which the vertebrae do not fuse back together, the report said.
“The times in which spinal fusion and laminectomy work for spinal stenosis is when the stenosis is causing neurogenic claudication, or radicular symptoms, meaning you’re getting pain shooting down the leg; the nerve is pinched,” Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, told MedPage Today. “But if you don’t have that … and you just have spinal stenosis without that pain, then those surgeries have not been shown to be effective.”
TARA HAELLE, Science Journalist - Scientific American
Stephan:
I have recently had a lengthy email exchange with a professor, whom I had thought an insightful and knowledgeable scholar. He wrote me to tell me I was wrong about requiring vaccines for children. To my great surprise, it turns out he is an anti-vaxxer conspiracy advocate, much like Robert Kennedy Jr.. The entire time our exchange went on I could not get a childhood image out of my mind. When I was 9 years old a close friend of the same age, Murr Ottinger, who lived down the street from me whose father, like mine, was also a doctor contracted polio. This was before the polio vaccine had been invented when polio was a major health threat. I will never forget going to visit him the last time I saw him. His bed had been taken out of his room, and he lay in an iron lung with only his head sticking out and lying on a pillow. He lay there looking up about 18 inches into a mirror slanted so he could see me. I doubt many Americans today even know what an iron lung is. It was a metal tube about six feet long and three feet wide with a glass window built into the tube side so nurses, doctors, and his parents could look in and see his body. It had a bellows on one end and its purpose was to pump air in and out to help Murr breathe. The iron lung created a vacuum inside the cylinder, which was called negative pressure. This negative pressure rhythmically sucked his chest open, forcing air into his lungs. When the pressure returned to normal, his lungs recoiled naturally, which helped him to exhale. Looking at my friend with whom just weeks earlier I had run in games and hiked with was a horrible image I have never forgotten. I never saw him again because he was moved to some kind of long term care facility. Then, first Albert Sabin, and next Jonas Salk created vaccines and today polio in the U.S. has essentially disappeared. The same is true of mumps, measles, small pox, and a host of other diseases. All because of vaccines.
nce a week, early in the morning, community health worker Kiden Josephine Francis Laja mounts her bicycle and pedals as far as 10 miles away from her small village in South Sudan. Some weeks Laja is doing outreach, spending her day educating a community about which vaccines she can provide and what diseases they prevent. “It’s my responsibility to tell the mothers to bring the children for vaccination,” she says. She answers their questions and lets them know she’ll be back, usually the following week, to vaccinate their children. Late in the evening she mounts her bike and heads home.
When Laja returns with the vaccines, kept in a cooler with ice packs, she will spend the day immunizing anywhere from a few to 200 children against a range of diseases: polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, influenza, bacterial meningitis, tuberculosis and, more recently, COVID. Most people in high-income countries haven’t seen these diseases in decades, but the people of South Sudan know them well. Many have seen family and friends die from them.
