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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: Here is some wonderful good news about the plastic crisis which plagues the earth and does such damage.
A research team has found a way to make biodegradable plastics actually disappear, unlike ones that only claim to break down. Credit: Agricultural Research Service
A research team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley has found a way to make biodegradable plastics actually disappear.
While biodegradable plastics have been touted as a solution to plastic pollution, in practice they don’t work as advertised.
“Biodegradability does not equal compostability,” Ting Xu, study coauthor and UC Berkeley polymer scientist, told Science News.
But by studying nature, Xu and her team have developed a process that actually breaks down biodegradable plastics with just heat and water in a period of weeks. The results, published in Nature on Wednesday, could be game-changing for the plastic pollution problem.
“We want this to be in every grocery store,” Xu told Science News.
What’s the Problem?
Humans have tossed 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic since the 1950s and only recycled 600 million metric tons, leaving 4.9 billion metric tons sitting in landfills or otherwise polluting the […]
Stephan: This is appalling but not surprising. The truth is if I were a Black man I would never call the police about anything fearing that getting them involved would result in my death.
Baylor College of Medicine Director Richina Bicette on Sunday pointed out that receiving Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine is safer than living as a Black man in America.
Bicette made the remarks to CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield after she was asked if people should be worried about getting a blood clot from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
“I have a lot of things in this world that I worry about and the safety of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is quite low on that list,” Bicette explained.
The doctor went on to make a comparison between the risk of getting a blood clot from the vaccine to other more deadly things.
“The rate of developing blood clots from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine from what we’re seeing so far is about 2 in 1 million,” Bicette noted. “If you take your chances with COVID, the rate of developing a blood clot from having COVID infection is actually 147,000 in a million.”
“And that’s just talking about blood clots,” she added. “There are other things that we should be more worried about. In the month of April [of] this year in the United States alone, 50 Americans have been […]
Allyson Waller and Michael Levenson, - The New York Times
Stephan: Just since the Chauvin trial there have been multiple murders of Black men, and one Black teenage girl. There are so many of these it is hard to keep up. What does stand out for me is that all the other developed nations in the world somehow don't have police murders like this, or even shootings, so what is it about Americans? Training may part of the reason these murders occur, but I think it is deeper than that, and centers on the kind of people, particularly the men, that Law Enforcement agencies recruit and hire. Too many are just thugs and bullies drawn to the job because of the power it confers.
Isaiah Brown
A Virginia sheriff’s deputy shot and seriously wounded an unarmed man early on Wednesday morning, less than an hour after the deputy had given the man a ride after his car broke down, the authorities said.
The Spotsylvania County deputy had initially given the man, Isaiah L. Brown, 32, a lift to a house after responding to a 911 call for a driver whose car was not working at a gas station, the Virginia State Police said.
About 45 minutes later, the deputy responded to another 911 call for a “domestic incident” involving Mr. Brown and his brother, according to the State Police and a recording of the 911 call and body-camera footage.
After finding Mr. Brown walking in a road and talking to a 911 dispatcher, the deputy said, “He’s got a gun to his head.”
“Drop the gun now!” the deputy shouted. “Stop walking towards me! Stop walking towards me! Stop! Stop!”
Refer someone to The Times.
At least seven gunshots can be heard on the body-camera footage.
“The officer mistook a cordless house phone for a gun,” Mr. Brown’s lawyer, […]
Brian Todd, Devon M. Sayers, Madeline Holcombe, Nick Valencia and Jason Hanna, - CNN
Stephan: Here is yet another police murder. This routine murdering of men, women, and children, particularly Black and Brown people, is outrageous and unacceptable and has to stop. It is a national humiliation, and a moral evil.
Andrew Brown, Jr.
Elizabeth City, North Carolina (CNN)In the moments following the shooting of Andrew Brown Jr., first responders can be heard on dispatch audio saying a man has been hit and has gunshot wounds to the back.Audio of the call, posted to the archives of the website Broadcastify, includes a dispatcher saying crews are responding to a call of “shots fired” and an individual can then be heard saying “we do have a subject who was hit.”
Later a first responder says, “Be advised EMS has one male, 42 years of age, gunshot to the back.”Another person says the man has “gunshot wounds.”Brown, who was Black, was shot and killed Wednesday morning by deputies in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, when they attempted to serve him with an arrest warrant, the Pasquotank County Sheriff’s Office said.The shooting occurred as protests are held across the nation over the deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement officers.Seven deputies have been placed on administrative leave, two have resigned and one retired in the […]
Stephan: The massive and historically significant death rate of the Covid-19 pandemic is in large measure due to the politicization of this illness and the utterly incompetent way in which it was managed by Donald Trump and Republican governors. I personally think it has been a form of mass murder, as evil as a genocide, and that Trump, key people in his administration, and the Republica governors should be indicted and tried for crimes against humanity. It won't happen, but it should.
The U.S. death rate in 2020 was the highest above normal since the early 1900s — even surpassing the calamity of the 1918 flu pandemic.
A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.
Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise. Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic.
A New York Times analysis of U.S. death patterns for the past century shows how much 2020 deviated from the norm.
A shift in a downward trend
Since the 1918 pandemic, the country’s death rate has fallen steadily. But last year, the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted that trend, in spite of a century of improvements in medicine and public health.
Death rate in the U.S. over time
1,0002,0003,000 deaths per 100,000191019181933195020002020
Stephan: When I was a boy, polio was the epidemic of the moment. In 1952 alone almost 60,000 boys and girls became infected with it, thousands died and even many of those who lived were condemned to the hell of being trapped in an iron lung with only your head poking out of the metal cylinder. When the vaccines to protect from polio came in there was none of the anti-vaxxer nonsense that we see today. We were just glad to get the protection. When I was in the fourth grade a boy in my neighborhood contracted polio, and suddenly dropped out of our lives, we the kids on the street. I still see him in my mind as I saw him for the last time. A 9 year old boy with whom I used to run through the woods, now living in a hospital ward basically encased in a coffin that breathed for him.
I get emails from anti-vaxxers all the time, particularly one woman who writes me several times a week with some anti-vaxxer nonsense attached. Anti-vaxxerism I have come to see it as a form of mental illness: the inability to correctly assess facts because of a syndrome. And it is dangerous because it negatively affects our ability to achieve national herd immunity.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/Brandon Laufenberg
As soon as the United States authorized the use of the first COVID-19 vaccine in mid-December, a small but vocal group of skeptics and conspiracy theorists, baselessly convinced that the jabs were lethal, started hunting for dead people. At first their efforts were relatively small-bore and haphazard—although far from innocuous. But as the scale and sophistication of America’s vaccine rollout have exponentially ramped up over the last three months, so have efforts to hunt down alleged vaccine fatalities.
Starting in mid-January, several social media channels and websites emerged as hubs for stories, generated by admins and users pulling together snippets from across the internet and crafting them into cohesive narratives and brief posts, linking reported deaths to COVID vaccinations. Several of these platforms have grown notably, and become more formalized, in recent weeks. Unsurprisingly, given the robust safety profile of the vaccines in use in the United States, they rarely detail how a vaccination supposedly caused a given death.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not found a causal connection between COVID vaccines […]
Kenny Stancil, Staff Writer - Common Dreams - Truthout/Common Dreams
Stephan: I think this is good news in several ways. First, it will sustain the lives of thousands of families. Second, it will save the state of West Virginia, from more extreme poverty and social unrest. Third, it will have an effect on Senator Mnuchin, and make him more oriented to a non-carbon energy future.
Men pause while working at a coal prep plant outside the city of Welch in rural West Virginia on May 19, 2017. Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty
The largest union of coal miners in the U.S. announced Monday that it would accept a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy as long as the federal government takes care of coal workers through the provision of green jobs and income support for those who become unemployed.
“There needs to be a tremendous investment here,” said Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International. “We always end up dealing with climate change, closing down coal mines. We never get to the second piece of it.”
Ahead of a press conference outlining the UMWA’s approach to addressing the climate emergency in a way that improves rather than diminishes the well-being of workers in the dirty energy sector, Roberts said in a statement that “energy transition and labor policies must be based on more than just promises down the road. We want to discuss how miners, their families, and their communities […]
Stephan: Am I the only one struck by the contrast between Trump and Biden? As I have said here several times, Biden is nearly 100 days in and there has not been a single scandal. Trump is nearly 100 days out of office and new scandals are still emerging. It will be interesting to see how the courts rule on this.
Trump at one of his rallies.
The city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has referred the Trump campaign’s unpaid rally debt to a collections agency, according to Mayor Tim Keller.
Trump left office with nearly $2 million in unpaid bills from cities that hosted his campaign rallies, including a $211,175 invoice from Albuquerque, stemming from his 2019 event in Rio Rancho.
“We decided to bill him because the costs to the city were tremendous,” Keller told The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper this week. “They made us shut down downtown. We had to close City Hall. … In my mind, he owes us a lot more because there were about a day and a half where we couldn’t even function as a city.”
The bill includes costs for extra police protection, security measures and paid leave for city employees who were forced to stay home. But as of roughly 18 months later, Keller said that “no phone calls have been returned, so we hired a collection agency.”
“He should be getting these annoying voicemails that we get, usually from scam companies where it’s […]
