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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 closer we get to election day the more explicit traitor Trump’s fascist statements become. It is something we have never seen in the United States before, something straight out of the playbook of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Yet every day American voters are voting for a man who will destroy the country’s democracy, and ruin their lives, just as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin destroyed the social wellbeing of Germany, Italy, and Russia.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appears on “Fox & Friends” on October 18, 2024. Credit: Fox News / screenshot
Education advocates implored voters to take Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s latest comments on public schools on Friday after his appearance on the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends,” where he explained how he would punish schools that teach students accurate U.S. history, including about slavery and racism in the country.
Trump was asked by a viewer who called into the show how he would help students who don’t want to attend their local public schools, and said he plans to “let the states run the schools” to allow for more “school choice.”
“We’re gonna take the Department of Education, we’re gonna close it,” said the former president, explaining that each state would govern educational policy without federal input—a promise of the right-wing policy agenda, Project 2025, that was co-authored by hundreds of former Trump administration staffers.
“Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said the plan was concerning only because […]
Sarah K. Burris, Senior Digital Editor - Raw Story
Stephan:
MAGAt politicians and MAGAt media are constantly screaming about thousands of non-citizens voting. Well, they aren’t, and here is the latest proof. Do you think that will matter to the MAGAts, shut them down about this? I doubt it will have any effect.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger Credit: Official photo
An internal audit of the Georgia voter rolls uncovered that the number of noncitizens voting in the state is minimal.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the audit from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also said that the registrations were canceled and any possible illegal activity was referred to law enforcement.
Out of the 20 noncitizens found, only nine cast ballots years ago before voter ID checks were in place. The audit said 11 others registered, but they never voted.
“We are committed to ensuring the only U.S. citizens can vote in our elections through rigorous citizenship verification at the front end, and in maintaining the cleanest voter rolls in the nation through continuous list maintenance,” said the Republican secretary of state.
An audit done two years ago found no noncitizens had voted in Georgia.
“Although Georgia is well into the early voting period, we hope that his findings and transparency will help bolster voter confidence,” said former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who lost after Trump lost the state in 2020.
Here is some good news about kids smoking. They are not doing it. This will mean less lung cancer later in their lives.
Patrick Sison / AP
Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the use of tobacco among youths overall, the CDC reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches, and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the CDC’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, PhD, MPH, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes […]
It is my view that a small group of tech-billionaires who control much of the social media are paying big sums to MAGAt Republicans in Congress, and funding traitor Trump’s campaign to make sure no regulations are passed to clean up social media, which I see as an open sewer running through societies all over the world. There is a difference between free speech and the weaponization of lies and misinformation. It is long past time that the internet become a river, not a sewer.
A former researcher at the OpenAI has come out against the company’s business model, writing, in a personal blog, that he believes the company is not complying with U.S. copyright law. That makes him one of a growing chorus of voices that sees the tech giant’s data-hoovering business as based on shaky (if not plainly illegitimate) legal ground.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Suchir Balaji recently told the New York Times. Balaji, a 25-year-old UC Berkeley graduate who joined OpenAI in 2020 and went on to work on GPT-4, said he originally became interested in pursuing a career in the AI industry because he felt the technology could “be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping aging.” Balaji worked for OpenAI for four years before leaving the company this summer. Now, Balaji says he sees the technology being used for things he doesn’t agree with, and believes that AI companies are “destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train these A.I. systems,” the Times writes.
If I wrote a character like Trump in one of my novels no publisher would publish it deeming the character too repellent to be believable. And yet. It tells everyone a lot about a large segment of American voters that they will vote for this cartoon horror show. There has been no other political figure in American history as vile, dishonest, and vulgar as Donald Trump.
Credit: Salon.com
In April 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search.
Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers, and members of Congress took up the cause of reform. Shortly after her remains were discovered, President Donald Trump himself invited the Guillén family to the White House. With Guillén’s mother seated beside him, Trump spent 25 minutes with the family as television cameras recorded the scene.
In the meeting, Trump maintained a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother. “I saw what happened to your daughter Vanessa, who was a spectacular person, and respected and loved by everybody, including in the military,” Trump said. Later in the conversation, he made a promise: “If I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help—I’ll help you with […]
Chemical industrial monoculture agriculture has dominated farming in the United States for several decades, and it turns out it is a disaster for the soil, Earth and you. And finally that is becoming clear. Organic farming and gardening, in contrast, fosters wellbeing at every level from the bacteria in the soil, to Earth’s matrix of life, including your body. So this report about the latest research showing the superiority of organic agriculture is excellent good news. My wife grows all our plant diet except citrus, which won’t grow this far North, in a wonderful biodynamic organic garden, and as I think back across the years I see, as I look at contemporaries and listen to them talk about their health, what a positive difference it as made in our lives.
Sustainable farming is making headlines after researchers discovered a unique connection between organic farming and carbon storage in soil, according to an article posted on Phys.org.
As more polluting carbon ends up in the atmosphere and global temperatures continue to rise, scientists are trying to find ways to increase carbon absorption. This will help decrease the carbon in the atmosphere, creating a healthier planet for everyone.
Researchers at Kansas State University have been studying how different farming practices impact the amount of carbon stored in the soil. After comparing their results, the researchers concluded that soil treated with manure or compost fertilizer stores more carbon than soil treated with chemical fertilizers or no fertilizer.
While previous studies on soil carbon capture have also found organic farming techniques increase carbon capture in soil, the researchers at KSU discovered something else: how the carbon gets stored in the soil.
According to their findings, the carbon is preserved in pores, and some of that carbon attaches to minerals in the soil. Ultrabright synchrotron light — a type of light that is more intense and brighter than […]
Melissa Segura, Staff Writer - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
If you, or anyone you know, is planning or has voted for Republicans, I hope you or they realize that the christofascists have been working for years to reduce women to second class status, and they are looking forward to Trump winning so they can finally achieve this goal.
Leonard Leo, who has been working for years to turn the United States into a fascist nation. Credit: Carolyn Kaster / AP
In the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency, a young lawyer with crisply shorn blond hair approached the podium at a gathering for Texas members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that wields immense power in the US judicial system. As vice-president of the group’s Fort Worth chapter, Matthew Kacsmaryk had the honor of presenting the first speaker.
“We are blessed to have Judge Edith Jones,” Kacsmaryk announced. Jones, a longtime judge on the US fifth circuit court of appeals, stepped on stage to introduce the evening’s guest, her friend, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. In her introduction, Jones also hailed the four new conservative judges Trump had appointed to join her on the appeals court.
“They’ve raised the bar for the fifth circuit since I got on,” she said. “And that’s thanks to the Federalist Society, to Leonard.”
Leonard Leo needed no last name in his introduction to this crowd as he took his seat in […]
Yet another global warning you probably haven’t heard anything about. Earth’s matrix of life is being distorted in ways never before seen in human history and instead of an international effort to save ourselves by saving that matrix we, in the United States, have a fascist talking about how he wants to be a dictator, and millions of people cheering him on and voting for him.
Decades of mismanagement of water resources, deforestation, and the fossil fuel-driven crisis of global warming have put “unprecedented stress” on the Earth’s water systems, according to a new report, and have thrown the world’s hydrological cycle out of balance “for the first time in human history.”
The Global Commission on the Economics of Water, affiliated with the Dutch government and comprised of global experts, published the study on Thursday, warning that policymakers must urgently “reframe the hydrological cycle as a global common good,” recognizing that it is “deeply interlinked with the climate and biodiversity crises.”
The hydrological cycle, or water cycle, is the continuous circulation of water between the planet’s oceans, land, and atmosphere. The experts involved in the new report warn that rising temperatures and pollution—driven by continued fossil fuel emissions and other industrial impacts—are among the factors that are “undermining an equitable and sustainable future for all” in terms of water access.
The commission said a “new economics of water” is needed, recognizing that water connects countries and regions through atmospheric water flows as well as bodies of water.
