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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: Forests are an essential part of earth's matrix of life, and the destruction by humans, either through exploitation as with the Amazon Rain Forest, or brought on by human-mediated climate change is seriously imperilling the balance of that matrix. The consequences to all life forms, including humans, will be dire.
Google Earth image of a healthy forest on the lower right and a ghost forest full of dead trees on the left. Credit: Emily Ury
For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call “ghost forests.” Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.
Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.
“I found so many dead forests,” says Ury, an ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a paper on the rapid deforestation of the North Carolina coast published last month in the journal Ecological Applications. “They were everywhere.”
As the ocean intrudes and saltwater rises, it kills trees and creates these ghost forests—bare trunks, and stumps, ashen tombstones marking a once-thriving coastal ecosystem. In North Carolina, pine, red maple, sweetgum and bald cypress forests are being replaced by saltmarsh. Eventually, that saltmarsh will be replaced by open water, a shift […]
Stephan: I do not agree with President Biden about this. In my opinion, the current Gaza crisis is happening because Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, under criminal investigation, and about to lose his grip on power, created this disaster so he could retain control. It is absolutely despicable, and the United States should not become involved. except to press for a cease-fire. It is to our shame that all this destruction is being carried out using American weapons.
Flames and smoke rise during Israeli air strikes amid a flare-up of Israel-Palestinian violence, in the southern Gaza Strip May 11, 2021. Credit: Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Human rights advocates warned Monday that the Biden administration is deepening U.S. complicity in the Netanyahu regime’s ongoing massacre of civilians in Gaza by attempting to push through a $735 million sale of so-called “precision-guided weapons” to Israel.
“[The] Biden administration must be held accountable for being complicit in escalating the violence and failing to prevent civilian deaths and suffering.” —Jamil Dakwar, ACLU
The Washington Postreported Monday that the Biden administration officially notified Congress of the sale on May 5, just days before Israeli forces began their latest bombardment of Gaza last week—an assault that has killed nearly 200 Palestinians, wounded more than 1,200, and displaced tens of thousands.
Since last Monday, the Israeli military has used bombs and missiles made by major U.S. military contractors such as Boeing and General Dynamics to obliterate major buildings in Gaza, including one over the weekend that housed offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.
“Criminal complicity,” Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian-American writer […]
Stephan: When you have a death penalty, the issue becomes how should we murder this person? How can we make it happen as quickly as possible? From that perspective, on the basis of witnesses to such killings a firing squad is more compassionate than the lethal use of drugs. But that avoids the real issue.
Should there be a death penalty? The emerging trend is there should not be. According to Amnesty International, "As of April 2021, 108 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes and 144 countries have abolished it in law or practice – a trend that must continue. Despite the continued pursuit of the death penalty by some governments, the overall picture in 2020 was positive."
My personal view is that it should be an elective, and I think it should be an option extending to natural death. If I were 30 years old, and the rest of my life of 30 to 50 years was going to be lived 22.5 to 24 hours each day in solitary confinement in a cell 7 by 10 feet, about the size toilet water closet, I can see how one could get to a point of just wanting to check out.
South Carolina is not alone. In Utah, Lt. Jeff Meyers points to restraints used on prisoners for securing them to to firing squad chair during a tour of the Utah State Prison at Draper, Monday, May 5, 2003. Credit: Douglas C. Pizac
The governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, has quietly signed into law a bill that requires inmates on death row to choose between a firing squad or the electric chair if lethal injection is not available.
The law, signed without ceremony on Friday, comes amid a shortage of lethal injection drugs that has affected the state’s ability to implement capital punishment. South Carolina has not executed any prisoners since 2011.
Prisoners have chosen death by legal injection, leading to the halt in executions. The new law will put prisoners back in line to be killed by the state.
There are 37 people on death row in South Carolina who have exhausted the appeals process.
The state Senate approved the bill to add firing squads on 6 May, by a 66-43 vote.
South Carolina becomes the fourth state to allow death by firing squad. Mississippi, […]
Stephan: In spite of all the media coverage in 2019, the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania surveyed more than 7,000 people on their belief in the reality of human-mediated climate change. The researchers found that the proportion of Americans who believe that climate change is human-caused ranged from 50 percent to 71 percent, depending on the question format. And the number of self-identified Republicans who say they accept climate change as human-caused varied even more dramatically, from 29 percent to 61 percent. In an age defined by disinformation, you just can't fix willful ignorance.
But willful ignorance or not the planet is changing very quickly and the United States, particularly, has fallen woefully behind in preparing for what is happening. What that means is that the future for our children is going to be far more difficult, there will be massive migrations, and a lot of misery and death.
Earth from space Credit: NASA
New research shows that the stratosphere is nearly a quarter of a mile smaller than it was in 1980.
The stratosphere is the second layer in Earth’s atmosphere.
It keeps storms from rising too high into the air, where they can become stronger.
Earth’s stratosphere – the layer where commercial airlines cruise and the ozone layer lives – is shrinking because of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.
The research, published May 5 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that the stratosphere is nearly a quarter of a mile smaller than it was in 1980.
The second layer of our atmosphere, the stratosphere extends from about 6 miles to 30 miles above Earth. It lies on top of the troposphere, which has already been shown to be heating and expanding because of climate change.
That causes the troposphere to push the lower part of the stratosphere outward. At the same time, more carbon dioxide is entering the stratosphere, where it actually cools down and causes the layer to contract, the […]
Ari Drennen and Sally Hardin, - Center for American Progress
Stephan: I did two tours in Washington 1961-1964 as a National Geographic staffer and 1969-1975 as editor of Seapower Magazine and then Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations. In both periods I had considerable interaction with members of Congress. My takeaway was how pedestrian and unimaginative they were as personalities, and how incompetent most of them were as legislators. There were exceptions to be sure, but not many. Mediocrity was the defining characteristic. And that sorry tradition seems to have continued, actually it has gotten worse. Greene, Jordan, Gaetz, Gohmert, Johnson stand out in that regard. Some years, particularly when there is a bright competent president, who appoints bright competent people the mediocrity of Congress is less important But other times, when major trends all point to crisis, this matters a lot. Today is such a time. At every turn we are seeing alarms go off about climate change and yet, 139 out of 535 United States members of Congress are climate deniers. Worse, they are political whores collecting $61,478,689 in dirty money.
According to new analysis from the Center for American Progress, there are still 139 elected officials in the 117th Congress, including 109 representatives and 30 senators, who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. All 139 of these climate-denying elected officials have made recent statements casting doubt on the clear, established scientific consensus that the world is warming—and that human activity is to blame. These same 139 climate-denying members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coal, oil, and gas industries.
While the number of climate deniers has shrunk by 11 members (from 150 to 139) since the CAP Action Fund’s analysis of the 116th Congress—largely in the face of growing and overwhelming public support for action on climate—their numbers still include the majority of the congressional Republican caucus.* These climate deniers comprise 52 percent of House Republicans; 60 percent of Senate Republicans; and more than one-quarter of the total number of elected officials in Congress. Furthermore, despite the decline in total overall deniers in Congress, a new concerning trend has emerged: Of […]
Stephan: As someone who has spent his life as an experimentalist scientifically studying the nature of consciousness when the dominant view in science is materialism -- the idea that consciousness is entire physiological, dead meat no consciousness -- I can readily identify with the scientists mentioned in this article. The truth about science is that while first-tier scientists are willing to think outside the box, as they say, second and third-tier scientists are not. For them how they are viewed by their peers is the most important thing. This important account of how research on covid was distorted by this kind of group consensus is something every scientist should think about and take very seriously.
Coronavirus Credit: Naila Ruechel
Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.
Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were […]
Stephan: More good news about the transition out of the carbon-energy era. You can see the trend picking up momentum in dozens of ways, batteries, streets that charge your batteries as you drive, thousands of new charging stations, and new battery technologies. It is happening around the world, as a new dominant trend emerges.
A breakthrough graphene aluminum-ion battery technology could blow lithium-ion away for power. Credit: Graphene Manufacturing Group
Range anxiety, recycling and fast-charging fears could all be consigned to electric-vehicle history with a nanotech-driven Australian battery invention.
The graphene aluminum-ion battery cells from the Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells.
They are also safer, with no upper Ampere limit to cause spontaneous overheating, more sustainable and easier to recycle, thanks to their stable base materials. Testing also shows the coin-cell validation batteries also last three times longer than lithium-ion versions.
GMG plans to bring graphene aluminum-ion coin cells to market late this year or early next year, with automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024.
Based on breakthrough technology from the University of Queensland’s (UQ) Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the battery cells use nanotechnology to insert aluminum atoms inside tiny perforations in graphene planes.
Stephan: Next to climate change, but closely intertwined with it, my greatest concern, in the trends I see, is the possible collapse of American democracy. I think this is occurring for two reasons, two major trends that are shaping everything going on in the country. One is that we are well on the way to becoming a majority-minority nation and about a third of the Whites in the country find this unacceptable, even though it is inevitable. They are in a complete freakout. Second, Americans have lived in a democracy for so long most don't really recognize that the nation could be run on any other basis. And yet we have one political party, the former Republican Party, now the Trump Cult which, drawing energy from, and in service to the White fear trend, is actively trying to change America to a White christofascist authoritarian system which maintains the appearance and form of democracy while the substance is sabotaged and gone. This essay lays out the issues. If you live in a Red value state you can see it plainly happening in the gerrymandering and voter suppression all of which is designed to keep White christofascists in power
A protestor holds a sign reading “Stop the Steal” during a demonstration at the Nevada State Capitol on February 1, 2021, in Carson, Nevada. Credit: O’Neil/SOPA/Getty
Liz Cheney is not on my short list of politicians I admire or wish to see in Congress. But she has done the right thing in calling out the “big lie” and promising to do all she can to keep Donald Trump away from the White House, literally or in terms of his influence over a terribly broken party. She is a canary in the coal mine. Would that others had the courage to follow suit.
Most sentient beings on the planet breathed a huge sigh of relief last November when Joe Biden won the presidential election. We were even happier when he and his administration immediately began acting robustly on myriad issues. First came the well-chosen appointments, the flurry of executive orders reversing Trump’s perversities, then the big bills aimed at health care, infrastructure, economic recovery, climate change, income inequality, childcare and more — all of which made Republicans in Congress and their […]
![The GMG technology drops aluminum atoms into perforations in [...]
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