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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 wouldn’t hire Trump to cut my grass, let alone consider him a viable candidate for the Presidency. I don’t see how anyone can vote for him, though I know millions will. It’s not just that he is a scammer, a rapist, a felon, and a traitor; he is clearly mentally deranged.
Credit: Fox Nation
Former President Donald Trump asserted that the current U.S. education system was “mostly transgender” instead of “reading, writing, arithmetic.”
During an interview on Fox Nation with host Kellyanne Conway, Trump defended his plan to disband the U.S. Department of Education.
“We’re going to move education back to the states where they can run their educational programs, and they’ll do great,” he promised. “And you take states like Iowa and Idaho and so many, they’ll have great education.”
“But we have to get out of this Washington thing. Half the buildings in Washington are occupied by education,” he continued. “And you’ll have to get through it. But we’re going to move it back to the states so that all these states, Indiana, you know, the states that are really well run, they’re going to have phenomenal education.”
“We’ll have like one person and a secretary sitting there to make sure they have English.”
Trump then complained about the current school curriculum.
Daniela Bleil, Contributing Writer - The New Republic
Stephan:
If you are like Ronlyn and myself you recycle everything that can be recycled but, as I have just recentkly learned, what is actually happening with the stuff we recycle, and that you recycle. There is new research showing the whole thing is another corporate scam. To quote this report, which cites two books that report deep research on the subject, “Rather than being a virtuous act or an effective practice, recycling has been a feature of destructive systems that exploit labor and natural resources. We need a better way to think about our trash, and even more so, our consumption.” I am going to see if I can find an ethical legitimate approach to recycling
A ragpicker collects recyclable materials at a landfill in Sidoarjo, Indonesia, in 2022. Credit: Juni Kriswanto / AFP
“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, invoking the ragpicker, a new type on the streets of his native nineteenth-century Paris. “Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot, he catalogs and collects.”
Buried in Baudelaire’s descriptions of ragpickers are processes that historians have recently laid bare. With industrialization came the rise of consumer culture, and with consumer culture came the rise of disposal culture. Add unfettered fossil fuel use and the invention of single-use plastics and we arrive at the ragpickers of today: people in Indonesia climbing mountains of trash, or children scavenging for survival in the slums of Delhi or Manila or northeastern Brazil. Consumer lifestyles in high-income […]
Here is an interesting bit of good news, I doubt many anticipated. Good news that will help the transition out of the carbon era.
The power connections at the Sherco Coal Power Plant in Becker, MN. Credit: MPCA.
Researchers at the Berkeley National Labs have determined that oil, coal, and gas power plants still have a major role to play in America’s energy economy—as electrical sockets.
There are years of red tape needed for renewable energy projects to connect fully with the grid, but because coal and gas plants already negotiated that process long ago, one of their best uses for Americans in the future will be to act like a home electrical socket that the renewables could “plug” into.
In a feature piece on CNN, “experts” say that there are more clean energy projects waiting to be connected to the grid than there is power—from all sources—circulating in the grid right now; a startling statement considering the billions in borrowed money being spent to transition the US electrical grid to renewable sources.
Described by CNN as “seven years of bureaucracy and red tape,” attaching new solar and wind […]
The whole insurance industry is in a kind of self-created crisis that is going to change the lives of tens of millions of home owners and building owners. Here is the reality that most of the media isn’t even paying any attention to.
In this aerial view, vehicles drive through a flooded street as Hurricane Helene churns offshore on September 26, 2024, in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty
Hurricane Helene slammed into the Florida coast on Thursday night, bringing pounding rains and “fierce, whipping winds that sounded like jet engines revving,” according to the New York Times. As it ripped through Florida and moved into Georgia, more than 2 million people lost power. While hurricanes are no stranger to the Gulf Coast, climate change has intensified their destructive impacts, and Hurricane Helene is the just the latest case of the extreme weather events that are rising in their frequency and ferocity.
Over the past year, the corporate media, from The Washington Post to theFinancial Times, have covered a rising crisis for the insurance industry that’s being caused by extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene: the growing risks and skyrocketing costs of insuring homes and other properties across wide swaths of the U.S.. The popular New York Times podcast “
Here is some excellent good news about what seems to be the emerging next generation of solar technology.
Credit: Teerapong Kungaed / Getty
The sight of solar panels installed on rooftops and large energy farms has become commonplace in many regions around the world. Even in the gray and rainy UK, solar power is becoming a major player in electricity generation.
This surge in solar is fueled by two key developments. First, scientists, engineers, and those in industry are learning how to make solar panels by the billions. Every fabrication step is meticulously optimized to produce them very cheaply. The second and most significant is the relentless increase in the panels’ power conversion efficiency—a measure of how much sunlight can be transformed into electricity.
The higher the efficiency of solar panels, the cheaper the electricity. This might make you wonder: Just how efficient can we expect solar energy to become? And will it make a dent in our energy bills?
Commercially available solar panels today convert about 20 to 22 percent of sunlight into electrical power. However,
This is sort of semi-good news because it reports that corporations are slowly beginning to accept and operate on the need to exit the carbon power era. Not fast enough, but at least in the right direction.
In an aerial view, solar panels are seen at MCE Solar One solar farm in Richmond, California. Getty
This Climate Week, I did something crazy. In the middle of a packed week of panels, roundtables, and interviews in New York, I hopped on a plane across the country and spent a day at the MINExpo conference in Las Vegas for a forthcoming story. In the giant halls, alongside trucks the size of jet planes, companies gathered at the mining equipment conference promised to decrease their customers’ carbon footprints and allow them to operate their mines more sustainably.
The public narrative around private sector climate action is one of deep skepticism. Many advocates have decried it as greenwashing, claiming that companies are using climate goals as a branding exercise. Many companies have pulled back their commitments, saying they no longer feel they are feasible. And businesses have grown reluctant to talk about their environmental work—fearful that it might cause backlash in conservative states and with a potential future Republican […]
Further insights into how pseudo-Christians, aided by oligarchs, are trying to turn public education into a profit making indoctrination system. Americans are already amongst the least literate, least numerate populations in the developed world, and many have no idea how the government works, and 23% can’t even name the three branches of government.
Students in class Credit: Shutterstock
The effort to get school vouchers approved nationwide has a long and varied history, but Cowen’s book posits that it is essentially a Christian Nationalist attempt at undermining public education as we know it.
Cowen, whose career as an education researcher in the early 2000s began with the expectation that vouchers, which allow public tax dollars for education to be spent for private school tuition, would ultimately benefit students. However, the reality that Cowen documents in the book turned out to be almost the exact opposite.
Starting in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ordered an end to segregated public education, and ending with the rise of the conservative Moms for Liberty – a vocal opponent of LGBTQ+ rights – and Project 2025, an authoritarian blueprint offering detailed plans to broadly enhance executive authority during a second Trump term, Cowen describes the arc […]
Eleanor Klibanoff, Women's Health Reporter | Investigative Reporter - The Texas Tribune
Stephan:
Christofascists control Texas, and they clearly don’t give a damn about the health and wellbeing of the people of Texas as this article describes. One has to ask: Why did the voters of Texas elect such unfeeling politicians who care so little for the wellbeing of the people of their state? It is clearly a cause and effect situation. What makes it nationally significant is that if traitor Trump wins, and MAGAt Republicans control the Senate and House this is the kind of healthcare we may see nationally.
Micaela Hoops with her children at their home in Sherman. Hoops’ three sons lost insurance after she misunderstood the state’s deadline and failed to submit their renewal for the first time in three years. When the North Texas mother discovered her error, she frantically reapplied, putting her children at the back of an ever-lengthening waitlist. Credit: Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and the Texas Tribune
For three years during the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government gave Texas and other states billions of dollars in exchange for their promise not to exacerbate the public health crisis by kicking people off Medicaid.
When that agreement ended last year, Texas moved swiftly, kicking off more people faster than any other state.
Officials acknowledged some errors after they stripped Medicaid coverage from more than 2 million people, most of them children. Some people who believe they were wrongly removed are desperately trying to get back on the state and federally funded health care program, adding to a backlog of more than 200,000 applicants. A ProPublica and Texas Tribune review of dozens of public […]
