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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.
Stephan: I confess I simply do not understand how anyone could support Donald Trump or the Trumplican Party (the Republican Party as any number of Republicans will tell you has ceased to exist). The endless criminality, the vulgarity, the heartlessness, the racism, the sexism. Collectively it is the dark Id of America come to life. And yet I know millions do believe anything Trump tells them. I actually have Trumpers who read SR daily, and they write me the most amazingly ignorant and hateful things. Talk about how Joe Biden, about as centrist a politician as is alive today is a Marxist, how people who seek racial and gender equality are destroying the country. It is obvious from what they say they haven't a clue what a Marxist actually believes or supports, for them it is just a damning label, and that what motivates them is fear, resentment, and hatred. At one level I pity them. But at another, I realize they constitute an evil force in the United States.
Des Moines, Iowa / USA – January 14, 2020: Donald Trump supporter at Drake University in Des Moines outside the Democratic Debate
I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by the group of rabid online Donald Trump supporters known as “QAnon.” According to my friend, initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by Trump’s mortal enemies. Not surprisingly, none of the so-called “evidence” provided by my friend proved any such thing. Onward from there we go …
Fun with Adrenochrome!
The second link my friend sent me, entitled “ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep,” was posted by a QAnon advocate who calls himself Vinctum. On Twitter, Vinctum describes himself as a “Red Pilled Armenian bloke from the Netherlands that’s into Personal Growth, Spirituality, Psychology, and Conspiracy facts.” Though he joined Twitter as recently as January of 2020, he already has more than 3,000 followers. His YouTube channel has considerably […]
Dean Russell, Veronica Penney, Bridget Hickey, Elizabeth Gawthrop, and Ali Raj, Reporters - The Center for Pubic Integrity
Stephan: To anyone capable of rational thought the Covid-19 pandemic is a wake-up call as to how unprepared and insufficient the American illness Profit System is at handling mass health crises. One would think that at every level of government there would now be planning to prepare for any such future events. But there isn't. In fact, one political party, The Republican Party, doesn't even seem interested or capable of such thinking and planning.
Well, get ready for a lot of suffering and mass death, not only from future pandemics but from climate change. As this well-researched report lays out it has already started.
A sign in direct sunlight indicates 120 degrees in Phoenix on June 20, 2016. Credit: AP Photo/Matt York
Introduction
PHOENIX — Charlie Rhodes lived alone on a tree-sparse street with sunburned lawns just outside this Arizona city. At 61, the Army veteran’s main connection to the world was Facebook; often, he posted several times a day. But as a heat wave blanketed the region in June 2016 — raising temperatures among the highest ever recorded — his posts stopped. Three weeks later, a pile of unopened mail outside his door prompted a call to police.
When officers arrived, they were overcome by the odor of rotting garbage, worsened by the still-searing heat. Inside the home, they found the air conditioner broken and its thermometer reading 99 degrees. Rhodes lay dead in the bedroom, his body decomposing. The cause, his autopsy shows: “complications of environmental heat exposure.”
Yearly heat-related deaths have more than doubled in Arizona in the last decade to 283. Across the country, heat caused at least 10,000 deaths between 1999 and 2016 — more than hurricanes, tornadoes or floods in […]
Stephan: The truth that few will acknowledge is that there is a very large percentage of Americans who are White supremacists, male dominance obsessives, not very bright, sexually screwed up, and easily manipulated through disinformation that plays on these tropes. Look at these numbers for cable news viewership and you can see it clearly. These people watch Fox read, infowar, Breitbart, and Daily Caller. They listen to Limbaugh and Alex Jones. Which is to say they live in a world of fakery that panders to their biases and fears.
Tom Steyer is correct. This election is not about changing the minds of Trumplicans; that isn't going to happen. This election is about getting the non-Trumpers to get up off their asses to vote for whomever isn't Trump, and not to vote for third-party candidates. If you don't vote, or you vote for a third-party candidate, you are voting for Trump, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Credit: Mishko
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.
The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums […]
Stephan: This is the best and most thorough article I have read on the prevalence of homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church. The figures quoted here are mind-boggling. But it is not that such a large percentage of priests are homosexuals; it is the self-loathing, the self-condemnation, the official hypocrisy that is the real issue.
I want to be clear here. I am not linking homosexuality with all the child sexual molestation, nor with the almost unknown to the general public sexual molestation of nuns, a story I ran a few weeks ago. Nor with the church's absolute commitment to the subordination of women. What I am saying is that all of this arises from the central and foundational disorder baked into the very fabric of this denomination -- its failure to deal with human sexuality in a healthy functional manner.
We have no reliable figures on just how many priests in the Catholic Church are gay. The Vatican has conducted many studies on its own clergy but never on this subject. In the United States, however, where there are 37,000 priests, no independent study has found fewer than 15 percent to be gay, and some have found as many as 60 percent. The consensus in my own research over the past few months converged on around 30 to 40 percent among parish priests and considerably more than that — as many as 60 percent or higher — among religious orders like the Franciscans or the Jesuits.
This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox. A church that, since 2005, bans priests with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” and officially teaches that gay men are “objectively disordered” and inherently disposed toward “intrinsic moral evil” is actually composed, in ways very few other institutions are, of gay men.
The massive cognitive dissonance this requires is becoming harder to sustain. The collapse […]
Stephan: I have never in my life heard a senior curia official, an archbishop no less, publicly charge the Pope with dishonesty and propose he resign. The Roman Catholic Church, I think, is in very serious trouble. Chile, Pennsylvania, Ireland, the horror stories just keep piling up. The sexual dysfunctionality of the clergy is so pervasive it is an institutional crisis from which the church may never recover.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Credit: Edward Pentin
In an extraordinary 11-page written testament, a former apostolic nuncio to the United States has accused several senior prelates of complicity in covering up Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s allegations of sexual abuse, and has claimed that Pope Francis knew about sanctions imposed on then-Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI but chose to repeal them.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who served as apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2016, said that in the late 2000s, Benedict had “imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis” and that Viganò personally told Pope Francis about those sanctions in 2013.
Archbishop Viganò said in his written statement, simultaneously released to the Register and other media, (see full text below) that Pope Francis “continued to cover” for McCarrick and not only did he “not take into account the sanctions that Pope Benedict had imposed on him” but also made McCarrick “his trusted counselor.” Viganò said that the former archbishop of Washington advised the Pope to appoint […]
The truth that few will acknowledge is that there is a very large percentage of Americans who are White supremacists, male dominance obsessives, not very bright, sexually screwed up, and easily manipulated through disinformation that plays on these tropes. Look at these numbers for cable news viewership and you can see it clearly. These people watch Fox read, infowar, Breitbart, and Daily Caller. They listen to Limbaugh and Alex Jones. Which is to say they live in a world of fakery that panders to their biases and fears.
Tom Steyer is correct. This election is not about changing the minds of Trumplicans; that isn't going to happen. This election is about getting the non-Trumpers to get up off their asses to vote for whomever isn't Trump, and not to vote for third-party candidates. If you don't vote, or you vote for a third-party candidate, you are voting for Trump, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. 
We have no reliable figures on just how many priests in the Catholic Church are gay. The Vatican has conducted many studies on its own clergy but never on this subject. In the United States, however, where there are 37,000 priests, no independent study has found fewer than 15 percent to be gay, and some have found as many as 60 percent. The consensus in my own research over the past few months converged on around 30 to 40 percent among parish priests and considerably more than that — as many as 60 percent or higher — among religious orders like the Franciscans or the Jesuits.
