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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.
Elizabeth Cerceo, MD, Associate Professor and Director of Climate Health - MedPage Today
Stephan:
What the media have not understood is that the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision transfers absolute power from scientific experts in regulatory agencies to non-scientist judges and will have no competence is assessing a measure. The corrupt christofascist majority on the Supreme Court has destroyed a significant portion of our democracy, particularly the part that affects the health and wellbeing of the American population. My questions are: why is the media not discussing this so people know what happened, and why is no one in the Congress doing anything about this? You and I are losing our democracy with every decision of these corrupt facist political agents.
The irony of a jubilant Fourth of July parade I attended with my kids last week — with marching bands, people in costume, and colorful floats — is that the U.S. government has never been more chaotic. The fragility of our democracy has been thrown into sharp relief over the past few months with a partisan Supreme Court placing a heavy finger on rightward leaning scales and the great unknown of November elections. The legislative branch of government, with all its foibles, then becomes the most secure path forward for those of us who like to breathe air, drink water, and not overheat.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo on June 27 overturning what’s known as “Chevron deference ” prioritizes business interests over public health in a decision that weakens the ability of agencies to enforce regulations, such as restricting power plant pollution. It says that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are actually not the experts in environmental […]
Here is an insight into one of the major dynamics driving White Nationalism. White men so unattractive in their attitudes and behavior that they can’t find a woman willing to have sex with them. The Incel movement and White Nationalism have merged, and become a major part of the MAGAt Party that seeks to put rapist and felon Trump back into office. And the polls say they are going to succeed unless some very significant changes occur and produce a majority of American voters who want to preserve democracy and treat women as equals.
“Aryan Nations (AN) was once a powerful organizing force for white supremacists that cultivated a wide spectrum of racist and anti-Semitic ideas,” according to the SPLC. Credit: SPLC
Lonely, sexless straight men have become a larger force in the White nationalist movement.
That’s according to Ellee Reeve, author of the book “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.”
Reeve talked with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday to discuss her findings, saying straight men who struggle to find a romantic partner can be drawn to alt-right communities.
“That’s a big entryway into this,” she said. “A big entry point is, ‘Why won’t women be with me?’”
The so-called “new white nationalist movement” is highly influenced by “incel” culture, she said, referring to men who are involuntarily celibate.
“It means that feminism has doomed them to be virgins forever because in the natural order of things, less attractive women would marry them,” […]
Alaina Demopoulos, Feature Writer - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Child marriage, which really means young girl marriage, even barely pubescent girls, is an issue that, in my view is not getting anywhere near the attention it should be getting. Look at the number of such marriages in the U.S. As this article explains, this practice is supported by a very strange consortium who have some very ill-conceived ideas why it should be legal. It shouldn’t be.
Nine-year-old Eunice Winstead Johns and her husband, Charlie Johns, 22, at their home in Sneedville, Tennessee, in 1937. Credit: AP
Courtney Kosnik was 16 when she met the man who would become her husband in a Detroit coffee shop. She thought she’d met her savior. She was living in poverty, under the care of an alcoholic mother who struggled to hold down jobs. He promised her stability. Two months later, he proposed.
No one in Kosnik’s life seemed bothered by the fact that the man was 28, more than a decade older than his bride-to-be, and he had a plan to get around her status as a legal minor: They just needed her mother’s permission to wed, and if she didn’t give it, they could always drive down to Ohio, where the rules around marriage were less strict.
Kosnik’s mother didn’t need much convincing. The man seemed polished and friendly, and he said that he could provide a “better moral upbringing” for her daughter. “Isn’t it crazy that someone wanted to give their wife a ‘moral upbringing’?” Kosnik, now 47, said. […]
Clarence Thomas is the most corrupt Justice of the Supreme Court in two centuries. And yet there he sits, untouched and held to no accountability for his corruption, one of the six christofacists who are taking our democracy apart and affecting the lives of over 300 million Americans in a negative way.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. Credit: Drew Angerer / Getty
Two Senate Democrats have published a list of roughly three dozen lavish gifts Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas received from right-wing billionaires during his time on the Court.
On the eve of the Independence Day holiday, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Thomas for “possible violations of ethics and tax laws” in his “repeated and willful omissions” of gifts from wealthy benefactors.
“The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations,” Whitehouse and Wyden wrote. “The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas […]
David Ake, - International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Stephan:
Yet another story about the vast corruption of the U.S. government, this story one about how the rich and big corporations get special treatment from the IRS. What this country needs is a revolution. It is a disgusting tale of the real facts. The revolution we need is not the kind criminal Trump and the MAGAts have in mind. We need a revolution in which all government policies and agency actions have the fostering of wellbeing as their first priority. We aren’t going to get it with this election even if Biden wins, but over the next four years if enough of us are committed to it, and work to make it clear that is what we want perhaps in the 2028 election a new generation of leadership may make it happen.
The Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, D.C. Credit: Tada Images / Shutterstock
Michael Welu worked at the IRS for decades as a specialist in helping agents identify and investigate possible tax crimes. In an agency known for offices working in their own silos, Welu had the rare ability to move between divisions, dissecting and learning each office’s particular customs and procedures. But that experience had its own consequence for Welu: Seeing disparities in how the separate divisions treated different tiers of taxpayers left him exasperated and helped drive him into early retirement.
For more than 30 years, Welu watched the agency struggle with budget cuts and dwindling staff. What troubled Welu, he says, went deeper than just resource constraints.
During his time at the IRS, he says, upper management in the division tasked with auditing large corporations and ultrawealthy people — the Large Business and International Division — was quick to dismiss any suggestion that a powerful taxpayer may have […]
The more I learn about AI the more it seems to me to be a very mixed bag. For one thing, I think bots may be one of the reasons SR gets so many hacks. What really concerns me is the amount of misinformation being spewed out by bots that influence human perceptions and thinking. I believe it is affecting governments all over the world, particularly democracies because they are based on human consensus.
Illustration by: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios
A new kind of turf war is breaking out on the web, with AI bots battling other AI bots to seize or defend stockpiles of the AI era’s most valuable commodity: data.
The big picture: AI makers hungry for more data to train their language models are grabbing everything they can, while information owners are increasingly fighting fire with fire by turning to AI-powered tools to protect their intellectual property.
Driving the news: Cloudflare, the infrastructure and security firm used by 1 in 5 websites, introduced a new service last week that protects clients’ content from poaching by data-harvesting bots.
“We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots,” Cloudflare said in a blog post.
Catch up quick: Since the ’90s, websites have used a simple file on their sites —called “robots.txt” […]
I am surprised the media has not seemed to comprehend that everyone criminal Trump apooints to anything, from staff to agencies, to courts are corrupt. Look at how many are in prison. I think you have to be corrupt and willing to be subservient to Trump in order for him to appoint or hire you.
Judge with Gavel Credit:Shutterstock
A Trump-appointed federal judge was forced to resign this month after just four years on the bench and a blistering ethics complaint detailed his hostile work environment and sexual misconduct with a law clerk and federal prosecutor.
Judge Joshua Kindred, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, abruptly moved to step down last week. At the time, he did not give a reason.
On Monday, however, the Judicial Council of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit released a report going into extensive detail on the allegations against Kindred, and announced that he was pressured into resigning under referral to the Judicial Conference to consider impeachment.
According to the report, Kindred created a hostile work environment by incessantly “discuss[ing] his past dating life, his romantic preferences, his sex life, the law clerks’ boyfriends and dating lives, his divorce, his interest in and communications with […]
I have many issues with the cost of colleges and universities, but this sad decline in confidence about higher education I see as the result of misinformation and MAGAtism. Note that there is a correlation between the drop in confidence and affiliation with the MAGAt Party. Consider this: 54% of the American public can only read to 6th grade level — so they are unable to fully comprehend a newspaper or magazine article — and now because of specious political reasons there is a decline in confidence in higher education. Combine this with our poor healthcare, shorter lifespans, and growing obesity, and what one sees is a nation in serious decline.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — An increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education. As a result, Americans are now nearly equally divided among those who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence (36%), some confidence (32%), or little or no confidence (32%) in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and 10% had little or none.
The latest results are based on a June 3-23 Gallup survey that gauged Americans’ confidence in various institutions. A follow-up story reporting on the remainder of institutions will be published in the coming days.
This year, Gallup and Lumina Foundation partnered to better understand the nature of confidence in higher education. The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members.
A review of the historical trends shows that confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the U.S. population […]
