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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.
Criminal Trump and his corrupt partner Vance would gut the U.S. federal government effort to prepare for the climate change that is occuring. What would Kamala Harris do? This seems to me a very important question, indeed a question whose answer should determine for whom you vote. Here is the answer.
After weeks of intense media speculation and sustained pressure from Democratic lawmakers, major donors and senior advisors, President Joe Biden has announced that he is bowing out of the presidential race. He is the first sitting president to step aside so close to Election Day. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus entirely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden said in a letter on Sunday.
He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” he said in another statement. Not long after, Harris announced via the Biden campaign that she intends to run for president. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said.
In contrast to the previous article on what Harris and the Democrats have in mind about the climate, this is what the Trump-Vance Party has in mind, which is to say nothing helpful. This is a big deal which is not getting enough attention in the media. It is something that should shape the thinking of any American who means the country well.
Visitors walk past a sign reading “Stop Extreme Heat Danger” at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park, near Furnace Creek, during a heatwave impacting southern California on July 7, 2024. Credit: Etienne Laurent / AFP / Getty
2023 WAS THE hottest global year on record; data so far suggests that 2024 will match the trend. This week, more than 130 million Americans are under heat alerts, with numerous cases of death and illness being attributed to the sweltering heat. And amid it all, the 2024 Republican platform does not mention the word “climate” once.
The basic inanity underscores the malign interest driving one of two major American political parties: $300 million of donations to lawmakers from energy and natural resource interest groups (namely, fossil fuel companies) since 1990 — more than double the amount directed to Democrats during that same period.
On Monday, the Republican National Convention announced its platform, which affirmed that the party is wholly Donald Trump’s. “MAKE […]
Over half of the American population cannot read past 6th grade level. That’s right they can’t beyond what an 11 year old can read. And one in five adults can’t do fractions or percentage calculations. And thanks to what the MAGAt Republicans are trying to do American history it is being so debased it is about indoctrination not education. What the moneyed class and the uber-rich want is what all fascists want. Docile easily frightened and manipulated peasants. They have only two social priorities, profit and power, and if criminal Trump and his his minion J.D. Vance are elected that is what is going to happen to American education.
Illustration: Shoshana Gordon / Axios
In its political platformadopted earlier this month, the Republican Party pledged to implement universal school choice, boost parental rights and promote “patriotic” standards for civics education.
In other words, under former President Donald Trump, education across the country would look a lot like it does in Florida.
Why it matters: Florida in recent years has been thrust into the national spotlight for its hyper-conservative approach to education, serving as a test kitchen for policies that public education advocates say undermine students’ and teachers’ rights.
Between the lines: The agenda parallels Project 2025, a roadmap for a second Trump presidency written by the Heritage Foundation, a top conservative think tank.
The big picture: If implemented, some education policy experts fear the fallout […]
This is the other thing the christofascists who control the MAGAt Republican Party seek to do with American public education: breach the firewall between church and state and make American education a vehicle for indoctrinating children into their perversion of Christianity. This is why public school teachers are walking away from their profession by the thousands.
A monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Capitol in Austin on June 24, 2024. Credit: Olivia Anderson / The Texas Tribune
Andy Wine thinks most children can understand the Golden Rule. Talking over your peers is rude. Insulting others is mean. Don’t hurt people. In short, it’s common sense, Wine said.
That’s why the 43-year-old parent of two, who is an atheist, finds it appalling that the Texas Education Agency wants to incentivize public schools to teach the Golden Rule as a core value in the Bible.
“We teach kids to be nice to each other and to share,” said Wine, a member of the Freethinkers Association of Central Texas, a social organization of religiously unaffiliated people. “You don’t need to bring up any religion in order to do it.”
Religious and nonreligious groups have raised concerns like this since the TEA proposed a curriculum that would insert Bible teachings into K–5 reading and language arts lessons. They worry the increased emphasis on Christianity could lead non-Christian […]
The illness profit system in the United States continues to deteriorate. In Republican controlled Red States the anti-woman laws passed by the state legislatures are causing are causing physicians, particularly OB/GYN specialists to abandon the state a move elsewhere, and causing college graduates who wish to become physicians to choose medical schools in Democrat controlled Blue states. Republican immigration state policies are causing fewer physicians to chooses those states. As a result what are called “medical deserts” are cropping up particularly in Red States, and in rural areas. This coupled with America’s insane greed driven health insurance system is causing tens of millions of people in the country to be unable to get the care they need. This is reflected in all the social outcome research. The sum of this is that the United States has the worst and yet most expensive healthcare in the developed world.
To read the full report https://www.aamc.org/media/75236/download or the shorter summary report: https://www.aamc.org/media/75231/download
According to new projections published today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges), the United States will face a physician shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.
“Given the new findings, it is clear that both sustained and increased investments in training new physicians are critical to mitigating projected shortfalls of doctors needed to meet the health care needs of our country,” said AAMC President and CEO David J. Skorton, MD. “Most importantly, if additional investments critical to increasing the supply of physicians fail to materialize, projected shortfalls of doctors will be larger than presented in this latest report.”
The new study, The Complexities of Physician Supply and Demand: Projections From 2021 to 2036, was conducted for the AAMC by GlobalData Plc. This analysis was conducted in 2023 and includes multiple supply and demand scenarios. It was updated with the latest information on trends in health care delivery and the state of the health care workforce, such as data on physician work hours and retirement trends.
By comparison, the shortage projected in the new report is smaller than the findings […]
Michael Bloomberg like Ruth Gottesman before him has just donated $1 billion to John Hopkins Medical School to allow students to train as physicians without incurring the usual quarter of a million dollar debt, the price of getting a medical degree and training. But, as this article points out, while thesse are wonderful gifts from the uber-rich, this is not, or itself, a solution to the dreadful health proposterously expensive healthcare in this country. What we need is a system of universal birthright single payer healthcare. If you go to Stewart, British Columbia in Canada the northernmost and very remote border between Canada and the U.S. you will find excellent quality healthcare. If you cross the border to Hyder, Alaska you are in a medical desert. Why is it that rural Canada can do what the United States seems incapable of? Because the Canadian system is based on universal decent healthcare, where the U.S. system is based entirely on profit.
Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $1 billion to the Johns Hopkins medical school to provide free tuition to most students. Credit: Steve Zak / WireImage / Getty
Michael Bloomberg last week gave $1 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to make medical school free for most students there.
It’s a well-meaning gesture, aiming to remedy America’s doctor shortages that have left more than 100 million Americans without access to regular primary care, particularly in rural and low-income communities. “By reducing the financial barriers to these essential fields, we can free more students to pursue careers they’re passionate about — and enable them to serve more of the families and communities who need them the most,” Bloomberg said in a statement.
But a donation to an elite, big-city medical school is unlikely to be much help, experts told me.
“If you have this pot of money and you could bestow it on health professional schools with the goal of improving geographic distribution, with […]
J.D. Vance is the very personification of the corruption that pervades American politics. Am I exaggerating? Am I unfairly representing him? You have probably heard him since he became criminal Trump’s Vice Presidential partner saying saying that women should not be able to leave a violent marriage. That abortion should be made illegal with no exceptions by national law. That he thinks Project 2025 is filled with “good ideas. How did Vance go from being explicitly and passionately the anti-Trumper of these quotes to the man he claims to be today? The answer, I think, is billionaire Peter Thiel, who personally is on record saying that he does not believe the United States should not be a democracy, and similar christofascist comments. Why did Vance change his views so radically? I think it is obvious, because Thiel bought him his Senate seat with the largest single contribution to any senatorial candidate and Trump has now turned him from a self-admitted hillbilly into potentially the second most powerful man in the country, should they win. Trump and Vance cannot be allowed to win if the United States is to continue as a democracy and republic.
Sen. J.D. Vance said he regrets his past criticism of Donald Trump. Credit: Tom E. Puskar / AP
Sen. J.D. Vance will officially be joining Donald Trump on the Republican ticket this fall — but he didn’t always have kind words for his running mate.
In the year before Trump took the Oval Office, Vance, who once described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” was quick to criticize the former president, using words like “idiot” and even “Hitler” to describe Trump.
Since then, Vance said he regrets his past criticism of Trump — especially during his contentious Republican Senate primary in 2021. The Ohio senator, who got Trump’s endorsement in the primary, has also since called Trump a great president.
But before the endorsement that helped him grab a Senate seat, here are five things the vice presidential pick said about Trump:
“I’m a Never Trump guy.”
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, while publicizing his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” “I never liked him.”
AI is going to complicate our world in hundreds of ways, many of them negative. Misinformation, Fake porn, political manipulation, and the stress it is creating on the country’s capacity to generate electricity. What worries me about this last consideration is this as quoted from this report by Microsoft, “While nuclear fusion seems like the perfect solution for AI’s power needs due to its non-existent impact on the environment, scientists and researchers say it’s ‘too late to deal with the climate crisis’ and view fission and renewable energy as better options.” Nuclear fission is a catastrophe as Chernobyl and Fukushima have already demonstrated. Even worse is the issue of nuclear waste which lasts thousands of years and is incredibly lethal. So as this Microsoft report openly implies the billionaires who control these companies are going to use the bribery of politicians to increase nuclear fission. There is no such thing as “too late to deal with the climate crisis.”
What you need to know
Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh of electricity in 2023.
They are among the top tech firms championing renewable energy as a plausible alternative power source for their sophisticated advances.
Both companies have data centers that consume power to keep their cloud services running, including their AI efforts.
Generative AI is taking the world by storm, and its impact is evident across all sectors, including medicine, education, music, computing, and more. Debatably, we’re well past the AI-powered chatbots and image generation tools phase, and this is where things are about to get interesting.
In 2023, Microsoft and Google consumed 48 TWh of electricity (24 TWh each). According to a detailed analysis by Michael Thomas, this surpasses the power consumption of over 100 nations, including Ghana, Tunisia, and more (via Tom’s […]
