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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: When I left university I was offered a position with National Geographic, and the first story I was assigned was about the migration of Monarch butterflies, It is an astonishing story I have never forgotten. The butterflies fly for thousands of miles stopping in the same trees their parents stopped in. When a tree is cut down the next generation picks a new tree and every generation thereafter of that genetic line stops in that same tree, on their migration. How can they possibly know? That story of the monarchs and their migration was what aw2akened me to the reality there was some kind of connection amongst the monarchs that had nothing to do with their tiny brains, and that realization grew ultimately to the realization that all life is nonlocally connected and interdependent. Now because of human stupidity and greed, the monarchs have been pushed to the edge of extinction. However, there is some good news. At the last-minute California under Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom aided by a collection of conservation groups, and Californians is taking responsibility for what humans have done and is trying to rectify it.
In one of the biggest mobilizationsof resources and talent ever organized to save an insect, the state of California is teaming with conservation groups, biologists and scores of citizen scientists to rescue the western monarch butterfly from the brink of extinction.
To do this, they are placing their hopes on an unassuming, poisonous plant called milkweed.
Monarch butterflies, known for their distinctive orange and black pattern, once flocked to California in the millions, spending the winter clumped on trees as they migrated to and from the state’s central coast.
But the population has sharply declined from 4.5 million in the 1980s, dropping to nearly 200,000 in recent decades before taking a precipitous dive in 2018. That year, the population fell to nearly 30,000, and when volunteers counted again in November, it had dropped to fewer than 2,000 – representing a 99% collapse in the last three decades.
“It was really grim,” saysAngela Laws, an endangered species conservation biologist with the Xerces Society, which conducts the November population counts using an army of volunteer naturalists.
“It’s alarming that the numbers are so low. But we […]
Stephan: When I started meditating seriously in 1965 I quit drinking hard spirits because it interfered with my practice, and many of my friends did likewise. Over the space of just a few years it seemed an entire generation turned from hard alcohol to marijuana and wine. But over the following decades I have watched the rise and fall of alcohol, and noticed recently that whiskey is now back amongst the television ads. This interesting essay tracks America's use of hard alcohol. Like smoking for me it has more negatives than positives, but that is not the general view.
Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them.
The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home, and threatened mutiny. And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore, short of their intended destination and beerless. William Bradford complained bitterly about the latter in his diary that winter, which is really saying something when you consider what trouble the group was in. (Barely half would survive until spring.) Before long, they were not only making their own beer but also importing wine and liquor. Still, within a couple of generations, Puritans like Cotton Mather were warning that a “flood of RUM” could “overwhelm all good Order among us.”
George Washington first won elected office, in 1758, by getting voters soused. (He is […]
Stephan: I don't think most people have any concept of what climate change is going to be like, no one has ever lived under the conditions that are coming. What should be happening is that all the world's governments should be cooperating, instead, they are jockeying with one another, and in the United States one party, the Republicans, isn't even sure climate change is real.
Oxygen levels in the world’s temperate freshwater lakes are declining faster than in the oceans. Credit: Gretchen Hansen, University of Minnesota
TROY, N.Y. — Oxygen levels in the world’s temperate freshwater lakes are declining rapidly — faster than in the oceans — a trend driven largely by climate change that threatens freshwater biodiversity and drinking water quality.
Research published today in Nature found that oxygen levels in surveyed lakes across the temperate zone have declined 5.5% at the surface and 18.6% in deep waters since 1980. Meanwhile, in a large subset of mostly nutrient-polluted lakes, surface oxygen levels increased as water temperatures crossed a threshold favoring cyanobacteria, which can create toxins when they flourish in the form of harmful algal blooms.
“All complex life depends on oxygen. It’s the support system for aquatic food webs. And when you start losing oxygen, you have the potential to lose species,” said Kevin Rose, author and professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Lakes are losing oxygen 2.75-9.3 times faster than the oceans, a decline that will have impacts throughout the ecosystem.”
Stephan: What stands out for me about many of the Republican governors in office today is not only their incompetence as governors but their sheer nastiness. Here is a story explaining why I think as I do. This is a really ugly trend, but they consistently act in this way.
White supremacist Republican Governor of Texas Greg Abbott. Credit Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Wire
In addition to stripping a key lifeline from millions of jobless workers across the country, Republican governors’ plans to prematurely cut off emergency unemployment benefits could cost local economies an estimated $12 billion as previously covered individuals and families lose the extra $300 in weekly federal aid they were using to buy groceries and other necessities.
According to a report (pdf) released Wednesday by the Joint Economic Committee, a congressional panel chaired by Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), the decision by dozens of Republican governors to cut off the $300-per-week boost to unemployment insurance “will take over $755 million from UI beneficiaries and their families on average.”
“These numbers, while rough estimates, nonetheless probably understate the extent of the economic loss caused by this decision,” the report reads. “By ending these programs early, states are refusing billions of already appropriated federal dollars that could be spent in local groceries, restaurants, and retail shops.”
The JEC’s cost estimate does not include Maryland, which earlier this […]
Neil MacFarquhar, National Correspondent - The New York Times
Stephan: In gun-crazed America, it is business as usual to have weekly, even daily mass gun murders, augmented by random routine murders of a shooter's family, friends, or strangers and, of course, thousands of suicides by gun. No other democratic nation in the world has anything like this problem, and as this story describes it is getting worse.
I am beginning to get emails from readers telling me that they had planned to visit the United States but have come to believe the country is too dangerous to visit. In Texas, a state governed about as badly as any state in the union, the Republicans have just passed a law, and the state's moronic governor has just signed it, that allows any Texan (with a few narrow exceptions) to carry a gun concealed or displayed with no license or training where they like when they like. Now, what do you think is going to happen? The answer is simple. More gun deaths. More murders, more violence, more families destroyed. Aren't you proud to be an American?
Law enforcement at the scene of a shooting outside a banquet hall near Miami on Sunday. Credit: Lynne Sladky/Associated Press
The upbeat mood at an album release party at El Mula Banquet Hall in Miami-Dade County was shattered when three men in ski masks jumped out of a stolen white Nissan S.U.V. and fired randomly into the crowd early Sunday.
Some revelers fired back. The whole encounter unrolled in about 10 seconds, leaving two people dead and 21 others injured. It was one of the worst shootings in the Miami area in recent memory, and came just a day after one person died and six were wounded in a drive-by shooting in another part of the city.
Memorial Day weekend typically kicks off a three-month summer season for violent crime, and in the past few days there were also homicides at a nightclub in Dallas, on a freeway in Detroit and in an apartment building in Baton Rouge, La., where a 1-year-old was among the three people killed.
With the pandemic precautions that kept people at home receding, officials and police departments are […]
Stephan: On the basis of facts not partisanship, Republican governor and Trumper Greg Abbott is a notably stupid, nasty man, and an incompetent governor. Here is a story that demonstrates yet again his sheer nastiness and lack of humanity.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during a press conference at the Texas State Capitol. Credit: Lynda M. Gonzalez-Pool/Getty
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a disaster declaration that directs state child-care regulators to “take all necessary steps” to deny or discontinue within 90 days state licenses for any facilities that house migrant children.
Why it matters: The directive could force the relocation of 4,223 migrant children currently residing in state-licensed facilities in Texas, according to the Dallas Morning News reports.
There are roughly 17,000 unaccompanied children in the United States.
Texas currently has 52 state-licensed general residential operations and child-placing agencies, which partner with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement to care for undocumented children, per the Dallas Morning News.
What they’re saying: “The Biden administration’s immigration policies are failing Texans, causing a humanitarian crisis in many Texas communities along the border,” Abbot said in the order, which was dated May 31.
Stephan: I am seriously concerned that we are in a cold civil war, one that could become violent. What happens to Trumper world when Trump is not reinstated as president? What happens if he is indicted and convicted for any one of a dozen of his many crimes. We are in the most dangerous period of our history since 1860.
America’s former president and leading psychopath.
Hundreds of people gathered in Texas for a QAnon-sponsored conference over Memorial Day weekend to hear the biggest boosters of Donald Trump’s Big Lie downplay the Capitol riot and bandy about new threats of a coming coup.
Key Trump allies, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Allen West; and perhaps most notably Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., attended the three-day event, dubbed “For God & Country Patriot Roundup,” at the Omni Hotel in Dallas.
The QAnon conference came amid reports that Trump is attempting to orchestrate another election coup from his far-off kingdom at Mar-a-Lago. According to a Tuesday tweet from the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, the former President has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” Trump’s reported thinking echoes that of his former lawyer’s, Sidney Powell. On Saturday, Powell told attendees to the QAnon conference that Trump “can simply be reinstated.”Read the Full Article
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for years now that the Republican Party is actively and explicitly working to sabotage democracy in America. Now here are 100 other scholars who agree. What I find particularly threatening to the nation's wellbeing, is that about a third of Americans believe they would be happy in a White supremacy authoritarian, fascist state.
How can this possibly be true? 1) 63% of Americans have never been outside the borders of the United States. They have no real conception of what such a state would be like. 2) The average IQ in the U.S. is 98, and in the Red value states particularly it is even lower, they just aren't smart enough to understand what such a system of governance would do to their lives. 3) 27% of the population have overactive right amygdalas and those people are motived more by fear, anger, and resentment than they are by facts. 4) We are becoming a majority-minority nation, and about a third of Whites are completely freaked out by that.
The election of 2022 is going to tell us how this is going to play out. It's up to you and me to preserve democracy. Are you prepared to do what it will take?
More than 100 scholars have issued a dire warning that Republicans are putting the nation’s democracy in danger by restricting access to voting and perpetuating the fiction that the 2020 presidential election was not secure.
“We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have watched the recent deterioration of U.S. elections and liberal democracy with growing alarm,” said a statement released Tuesday by the New America think tank. “Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election.”
The statement was signed by more than 100 academics with expertise in politics, government, international affairs, public policy and other areas.
In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s election loss and subsequent lies about the integrity of the voting process, Republican state lawmakers across the country have introduced legislation that would make it harder for people to vote, citing concerns about […]
