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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 predicted that roads that charged EV batteries were the future, and wrote it up in my novel Awakening. I have done several earlier stories on this (see SR archive) but this is the one that will, I think, become the norm if it tests out as well as is claimed.
Credit: Kalocsai Tamás / EyeEm/Getty
Roads that can charge electric cars or buses while you drive aren’t a new concept, but so far the technology has been relatively expensive and inefficient. However, Indiana’s Department of Transport (INDOT) has announced that it’s testing a new type of cement with embedded magnetized particles that could one day provide efficient, high-speed charging at “standard roadbuilding costs,” Autoblog has reported.
With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), INDOT has teamed with Purdue University and German company Magment on the project. They’ll carry out the research in three phases, first testing if the magnetized cement (called “magment,” naturally) will work in the lab, then trying it out on a quarter-mile section of road.
In a brochure, Magment said its product delivers “record-breaking wireless transmission efficiency [at] up to 95 percent,” adding that it can be built at “standard road-building installation costs” and that it’s “robust and vandalism-proof.” The company also notes that slabs with the embedded ferrite particles could be built locally, presumably under license.
Eloise Marais, Associate Professor in Physical Geography at UCL - IDEAS.TED.COM
Stephan: Jeff Bezos probably pays less in taxes than you do. And where his ex-wife is giving billions to foster wellbeing. He is creating a uber-rich person's fantasy space ride costing millions. This is a manifestation of the wealth inequality cancer that is consuming America. And it is an environmental disaster.
The commercial race to get tourists to space is heating up between Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. On July 11, Branson ascended 80 km (49 miles) to reach the edge of space in his piloted Virgin Galactic VSS Unity spaceplane, while Bezos’ autonomous Blue Origin rocket launched today on July 20, coinciding with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Although Bezos launched later than Branson, he set out to reach higher altitudes — about 120 km, or 74 miles.
Blue Origin Launch Credit: Alamy
The launch demonstrates a new type of offering to very wealthy tourists: The opportunity to truly reach outer space. Tour packages will provide passengers with a brief 10-minute frolic in zero gravity and glimpses of Earth from space. Not to be outdone, later in 2021, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will provide four to five days of orbital travel with its Crew Dragon capsule.
What are the environmental consequences of a space tourism industry likely to be? Bezos boasts that his Blue Origin rockets […]
Paul Lewis, Head of Investigation - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: You have probably heard about the Pegasus spyware scandal. Here is the best story I have found that lays this complicated tale out in detail.
Companies such as NSO operate in a market that is almost entirely unregulated. Illustration: Guardian Design
Our investigation shows how repressive regimes can buy and use the kind of spying tools Edward Snowden warned us.
Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.
Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.
Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance.
NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”.
Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of […]
Stephan: This is very alarming news and it is based on a large enough test population that, I think it should be taken very seriously. It suggests that the anti-vaxxers now contracting Covid-19 have done themselves double the harm -- all because of their low cognitive ability which, now it appears, will become even lower. Nationally, the impact is unknown but likely to be very dramatic. As of today, 26 July 2021,34.4 million Americans have contracted this disease. What do you think will be the effect of lowering the cognitive abilities of 10% of our population? As the resport say,"Previous research has also found that a large proportion of COVID-19 survivors are affected by neuropsychiatric and cognitive complications."
What this tells me is that we are going to be living with the effects of Covid-19 for a generation. It will fade from the news, but it will still be active in our lives. This also tells us that there has been, and continues to be, a previously unrecognized social impact on America as a result of the disinformation, and anti-vaxxer nonsense promulgated by Republican officials.
I am going to look for additional papers, this is a major trend, a kind of cultural wound.
People who have recovered from COVID-19 tend to score significantly lower on an intelligence test compared to those who have not contracted the virus, according to new research published in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine. The findings suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 can produce substantial reductions in cognitive ability, especially among those with more severe illness.
“By coincidence, the pandemic escalated in the United Kingdom in the middle of when I was collecting cognitive and mental health data at very large scale as part of the BBC2 Horizon collaboration the Great British Intelligence Test,” said lead researcher Adam Hampshire (@HampshireHub), an associate professor in the Computational, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory at Imperial College London.
People who have recovered from COVID-19 tend to score significantly lower on an intelligence test compared to those who have not contracted the virus, according to new research published in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine. The findings suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 can produce substantial reductions […]
Stephan: Here is some good news which, since I come Virginia, I particularly appreciate. As Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and other former slave states have militantly sought to destroy democracy, Virginia went in the opposite direction as this report describes. Bravo Virginia.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, one of the Freedom Riders who was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961, speaks to voting rights activists during a stop of Black Voters Matter’s “Freedom Ride for Voting Rights” bus tour at Monroe Park on June 25, 2021, in Richmond, Virginia. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty
On July 1, the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the only major section of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 still in force with its ruling in the Arizona case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Virginia Voting Rights Act went into effect, providing broad protections against voter suppression, discrimination, and intimidation. As Republican-controlled states across the South raced to establish new voting restrictions in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, Democratic-controlled Virginia ultimately moved in the opposite direction by passing legislation that will protect the state’s marginalized voters and expand ballot access.
Facing South recently spoke with Tram Nguyen, co-executive director of the voting rights group New Virginia Majority, who helped craft the Virginia law. Modeled after […]
Stephan: I committed myself to foster racial equality when I was a boy of nine and witnessed an act of racial prejudice that I found inexplicable, offensive, and very unfair. When I stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and heard Dr. King give the "I Have a Dream" speech, then-President Johnson sign the Voting Rights Acts, and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 65, then watched Colin Powell, a Black man become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, the highest military office in the country, I thought that although there were surely still racist in the country that as a whole the culture had entered a new phase. Boy was I wrong. About a third of American whites, egged on by the racist in chief Donald Trump, I now realize are as deeply racist as their grandparents were. White supremacy I now understand, amongst that cohort, is as alive and well as it has been since America's colonial days. The only good news I see is that younger people do seem to be healing this cancer and that Hispanics clearly are doing better.
Credit: The New York Times
One question lingers amid all the debates about critical race theory: How racist is this land? Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knows about the oppression of the Native Americans, about slavery and Jim Crow. But does that mean that America is even now a white supremacist nation, that whiteness is a cancer that leads to oppression for other groups? Or is racism mostly a part of America’s past, something we’ve largely overcome?
There are many ways to answer these questions. The most important is by having honest conversations with the people directly affected. But another is by asking: How high are the barriers to opportunity for different groups? Do different groups have a fair shot at the American dream? This approach isn’t perfect, but at least it points us to empirical data rather than just theory and supposition.
When we apply this lens to the African American experience we see that barriers to opportunity are still very high. The income gap separating white and Black families was basically Read the Full Article
Stephan: This is an early example of what I see as a growing trend, and I think we are going to see much more of this. Water is destiny, and it is going to internationally shape geopolitics and inner-nationally social stability.
Iran’s former deputy environment minister Kaveh Madani being interviewed on CNN about the Iranian water shortage. Video screengrab
Mismanagement is to blame and much of the damage is irreversible, according to exiled minister Kaveh Madani
Days of protests over water shortages have rapidly evolved into anti-regime demonstrations across the country
LONDON: Iran is “water bankrupt” due to years of mismanagement by the regime, according to an exiled member of Tehran’s environmental ministry. The result is the severe water shortages that have triggered days of unrest and violence.
Scientist Kaveh Madani, Iran’s former deputy environment minister, told The Times newspaper that all sources of water are running dry, including rivers, reservoirs and groundwater.
The collapse of these essential systems even prompted Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to admit that the protesters might have a point. “We cannot really blame the people,” he said of the thousands of Iranians who have taken to the streets in Khuzestan Province in recent days to protest against the shortage of clean drinking water. At least eight protesters have been killed in the regime’s crackdown on the demonstrations. It has been […]
Stephan: The American illness profit system is an abomination and a disgrace. Overall it is mediocre at best -- 37th in the world according to the WHO -- and obscenely expensive. So expensive that when you tell people in other nations what it costs for say an uncomplicated vaginal birth, they look at you as if you are mad, and then tell you how sorry they are. Here is the American reality. How is it that Americans tolerate this?
Baby got bills
For the last couple of months my wife and I have been playing a quintessentially American game of Guess the Baby Bill. The rules are simple: try to guess exactly how much we would be charged for the birth of our daughter earlier this year. Last week the hospital bill finally came, putting an end to the guessing game. The cost of an uncomplicated vaginal birth? $37,617.69.
Anyway, the good news is that we don’t have to pay the entire bill: our health insurance covers about $31,000 – leaving us with a balance of around $6,000. Although, of course, that doesn’t make the ridiculously high prices OK. We’re still covering the costs indirectly via our enormous insurance premiums. Which, we were recently informed by Oxford Health, part of UnitedHealth Group, are going to go up by 16% next year. But it’s understandable, I guess. They need that money to do the things health companies are supposed to do: maximise profits, boost the share price and pay their executives huge amounts of money. The UnitedHealth Group’s chief executive […]
