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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: Climate change is radically changing the environment, and it is having a major impact on the fields where your food is grown. As a result expect to see a significant increase in food prices, as whole formerly fecund and productive areas are rendered unproductive.
Farmworkers stack boxes of melons on a mobile platform in Firebaugh, California, where temperatures are expected to surpass 110F. Credit: Terry Chea/AP
FRESNO, CALIFORNIA – Soaring temperatures are a way of life in the Central Valley, but racial disparities mean many have no access to relief.
n Cantua, a small town deep within California’s farming heartland, the heat had always been a part of life. “We can do nothing against it,” said Julia Mendoza, who’s lived in this town for 27 years. But lately, she says, the searing temperatures are almost unlivable.
By midday on Thursday, the first day of a protracted, extreme heatwave in California’s Central Valley, the country roads were sizzling with heat. A young volunteer with a local environmental justice non-profit who had come to check in on the neighborhood collapsed on the sidewalk, her face bright red and damp. Construction crews working nearby quickly swept her into an air-conditioned car and handed her a cold bottle of water.
“¡Mira, el calor!” gasped Mendoza as she rushed over from her front porch. Arcelia Luna, her friend and neighbor shook her head as […]
Stephan: Another bogus claim of Republicans: people aren't going back to work because they are living the easy life on federal benefits, so they should be cut off to force workers back to work, is proven to be the same crap as most other Republican economic claims. Here is the proof of what I am saying. Nothing Republicans say about economics and social policy should be taken as valid. Those of Earth 2 are playing a very different game, and it has nothing to do with fostering wellbeing.
Demonstrators protest outside the offices of Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson in St. Louis on May 30, 2019. Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
The Republican narrative that enhanced unemployment benefits are dissuading people from returning to work—and that cutting off the aid is necessary to boost hiring—is running up against reality in the GOP-led state of Missouri, where officials have yet to see any significant increase in job applicants since the governor cut off pandemic-related federal programs last month.
“There may be areas where some employers are struggling to staff positions, but the likely obstacle is not overly generous UI benefits—instead it is wage offerings that are too low to make these jobs attractive.” —David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute
The New York Timesreported Sunday that Missouri workforce development personnel “said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants since the governor’s announcement, which ended a $300 weekly supplement to other benefits.”
“And the online job site Indeed found that in states that have abandoned the federal benefits, clicks on job postings were below the national average,” the Times noted.
On May 11, Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson announced that […]
Stephan: I have begun seeing papers in the relevant journals showing changes in the sizes of insects and animals modulated by climate. Now, this. From my perspective, this is a rather elegant study about the Homo genus and climate, that is based on objectively verifiable data. I's implication is we are going to see a shift in the physical bodies of homo sapiens -- us. Climate change is going to be so much more nuanced than expected; it is going to affect everything. This is existential change.
Researchers found that climate — particularly temperature — has been the main driver of changes in body size for the past million years. Credit: CNN
The average body size of humans has fluctuated significantly over the last million years and is linked to a changing climate, according to research published Thursday. A team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the University of Tübingen in Germany gathered measurements of brain and body size for more than 300 fossils from the Homo genus or family, to which modern-day humans — Homo sapiens — belong. The team used this data, combined with a reconstruction of the Earth’s regional climates from the last million years, and calculated the climate that would have been experienced by each fossil when it was a living human. Researchers found that climate — particularly temperature — has been the main driver of changes in body size for the past million years. Colder, harsher climates were linked to larger bodies, while warmer climates were linked to smaller […]
Stephanie McCrummen, National Eenterprise Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is the best article I have read about what christofascists want and how they think. This article and the one that follows will, I hope, give my readers a sense of what has happened to Christianity in the United States.
Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth. Credit: Dylan Hollingsworth/The Washington Post
FORT WORTH, TEXAS — The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.
Greed, the map read over the west side. Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south.
It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.”
Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of […]
Stephan: This is a very interesting insight into American Christianity and, in my opinion, good news. First, it tells us that Christianity that is not racist, or fascist still exists and, second, that christofascism is a shrinking demographic.
Some non-evangelical Christians — from Mainline Protestants to moderate Catholics to the African Methodist Episcopal Church — absolutely cringe whenever the Christian Right says or does something racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic or homophobic, as they realize that it turns young Americans off to religion. Countless Millennials and members of Generation Z have said that if far-right White evangelicals are the face of Christianity, please count them out. Liberal New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg, in a column published on July 9, emphasizes that the Christian Right has lost a lot of ground since George W. Bush’s presidency during the 2000s.
Goldberg explains, “The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country…. But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment.”
The Times columnist illustrates her point by citing […]
Mark R Reiff, Political Philosopher at the University of California, Davis - aeon
Stephan: This is a very interesting view of what is going on in the White demographic. I am running it because the author makes points that are not being discussed enough and should be because the White supremacy issue is tearing the country apart.
Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in turn, is understood as meaning that the days of white privilege and political dominance in liberal democratic societies are now numbered.
An alarming number of whites, however, are not prepared to allow a commitment to liberalism to stand in the way of resisting the threat that the demographic shift seems to pose to their self-interest. They are accordingly embracing nationalist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and other anti-liberal attitudes, and the parties and politicians that express them, in an effort to retain their social, political, economic and cultural dominance.
This view of what is driving whites to the Right has lots of adherents. The demographic […]
Stephan: I found this article very interesting because I see it as a first example of what I think is going to be a major restructuring of the economies and cultures of states all over the country. The end of the carbon power era is a particular consideration in West Virginia, but climate change, for instance, will be a major factor in changing California as chemical industrial monoculture agriculture becomes unsustainable.
Center, right: Gov. Jim Justice’s car parked outside the state capitol with the license plate “COAL 3.” Bottom: A view of the soon-to-close Mylan Pharmaceuticals plant. | Credit: Raymond Thompson, Jr./POLITICO
MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—In a hotel just off of West Virginia University’s campus in early June, drowsy night shift workers from the local pharmaceutical plant filed through a poorly lit suite, filling out unemployment paperwork, applying for supplemental health insurance and cracking jokes about the breathtaking advertisements for a new state program that will pay you to move to a place many of them are considering leaving.
Six months before, officials at Viatris announced that the plant, which has been a fixture in Morgantown since 1965, would close at the end of July, shipping more than 1,500 jobs overseas. In a state already suffering from the freefall of its signature coal mining industry, the loss of jobs that paid as much as $80,000 sent alarms through the capital.
This spring, the state legislature passed a resolution calling on the governor, Congress and union-friendly President Joe Biden to save the […]
Stephan: We are going to see, as this article describes, massive change in the trees and bushes that in large measure create what we call our environment. This is going to impact all life, from insects to birds, to humans. Who but the science community do you think is even considering what this means. If you live in a Red value state does your governor and legislature even believe climate change is real?
Giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park, California Credit: Vladimir Kudinov / Unsplash
Some 56 million years ago, just after the Paleocene epoch gave way to the Eocene, the world suddenly warmed. Scientists continue to debate the ultimate cause of the warming, but they agree on its proximate cause: A huge burst of carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere, raising Earth’s average temperature by 7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), as this event is known, is “the best geologic analog” for modern anthropogenic climate change, said University of Wyoming paleobotanist Ellen Currano.
She studies how the PETM’s sudden warmth affected plants. Darwin famously compared the fossil record to a tattered book missing most of its pages and with all but a few lines obscured. The PETM, which lasted roughly 200,000 years, bears out the analogy. Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin is the only place on Earth where scientists have found plant macrofossils (visible to the naked eye, that is) that date to the PETM. The fossil leaves that Currano and her colleagues have found there paint a vivid portrait.
